The

Physiology of Love and Other Writings

 THE LORENZO DA PONTE ITALIAN LIBRARY

General Editors

Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella,

University of California at Los Angeles

Honorary Chairs

†Professor Vittore Branca

Honorable Dino De Poli
Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti
Honorable Anthony J. Scirica

Advisory Board

Remo Bodei, Università di Pisa

Lina Bolzoni, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
Francesco Bruni, Università di Venezia
Giorgio Ficara, Università di Torino
Michael Heim, University of California at Los Angeles
†Amilcare A. Iannucci, University of Toronto
Rachel Jacoff, Wellesley College
Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Università di Venezia
Margaret Rosenthal, University of Southern California
John Scott, University of Western Australia
Elissa Weaver, University of Chicago
 The Physiology of Love
and Other Writings

PAOLO MANTEGAZZA

Edited, with an introduction and notes,

by Nicoletta Pireddu

Translated by David Jacobson

 ©University of Toronto Press 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada

ISBN978-0-8020-9289-2

The Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library

Printed on acid-free paper

Libraries and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Mantegazza, Paolo, 1831–1910

The physiology of love and other writings / Paolo Mantegazza; translated by
David Jacobson; introduction and notes by Nicoletta Pireddu.

(Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian library series)

ISBN 978-0-8020-9289-2

1. Ethnology. I. Jacobson, David (David J.) II. Title III. Series.

GN308.3.I8M36 2007 306 C2007-904018-7

This volume is published under the aegis and with the financial assistance of:
Fondazione Cassamarca, Treviso; Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Direzione
Generale per la Promozione e la Cooperazione Culturale; Ministero per i Beni e
le Attività Culturali, Direzione Generale per i Beni Librari e gli Istituti Culturali,
Servizio per la promozione del libro e della lettura.

Publication of this volume is assisted by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Toronto.

 University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its

publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
 Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS AND THEIR TRANSLATIONS

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

PART ONE

The Physiology of Love

PART TWO

From On the Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine
Nourishment in General

From One Day in Madeira: A Page in the Hygiene of Love

From A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier

From India

From Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful

 From The Neurosic Century

From The Tartuffe Century

From Head: or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds

From Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament

From The Year 3000: A Dream

From ‘The Psychology of Translations’

INDEX
 Acknowledgments

Grazie to Professors Luigi Ballerini and Massimo Ciavolella for thinking my

enthralment with Mantegazza’s works could turn into a volume of the Da Ponte
Italian Library, and for giving me the chance to share this journey into the
kaleidoscopic world of Mantegazza with a splendid translator like David
Jacobson. From him I learned a great deal about the craft of writing and the
subtle art of le mot juste. I deeply appreciate Ron Schoeffel’s encouraging
comments on the manuscript, and the anonymous readers’ favourable responses
and wise suggestions. I wish to thank Professor Kumaraswamy Velupillai for his
generous input on things Indian, Professor Axel Leijonhufvud and Dr Earlene
Craver for their valuable information about Scandinavian culture, Professor
Charlotte Bruun for her prompt feedback on Danish spelling, Professor Mak
Paranjape for his enlightening explanation of Mantegazza’s physical and
pataphysical terms, and Dr Esteban Vesperoni for sharing his expertise on
Argentinian flora and fauna. A special recognition of all those colleagues and
friends who patiently endured questions on ‘rivellenti,’ in particular Drs Laura
Luna, Francesco Luna, Marina Natale, Andrea Natale, and Domenico Natale.
My thanks to the staff of Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, for their
help with my endless requests for interlibrary loans, as well as to the librarians
of the Anthropology Section of the Biblioteca di Scienze and of the Museum of
Natural History at the University of Florence, in particular Drs Maria Emanuela
Frati and Maria Gloria Roselli. I wish to dedicate this work to little Ilaria
Michelle, who, with her liveliness and cheerfulness, seems to have already
learned the Mantegazzian arte di essere felici.
NICOLETTA PIREDDU
The Physiology of Love and Other Writings
 Introduction Paolo Mantegazz: A Scientist and His
Ecstasies

‘An optimist has died, a great and unrelenting optimist who had his glory days,
and who, many many years ago, inaugurated in Italy a form of literature that
wanted to make science popular. A physician has died, a physiologist, a writer
who believed in happiness.’1 For both novice readers and connoisseurs of Paolo
Mantegazza, this eulogy – one of the many commemorating the decease of the
father of Italian anthropology – captures the professional and personal qualities
that make this intellectual unique and memorable.
Curiously, whether written in 1910 on the occasion of Mantegazza’s death or
throughout his long, productive, and exciting life, the numerous portraits of this
singular figure of late nineteenth-century Italian culture could not help
incorporating in their own tone the exuberance and magniloquence that are the
hallmarks of their subject. Angelo De Gubernatis, for instance, praised the
‘liveliness’2 of Mantegazza’s imagination, his ‘generous ardour,’ and his
enthusiasm, as qualities inflaming his language and accomplishments. Envied
and targeted for his fame in Italy and abroad, but certainly superior to all his
rivals, Mantegazza, for De Gubernatis, was distinguished for his impetuous and
boundless love of beauty. This characteristic emerges with equal clarity from
Paolo Riccardi’s profile of his mentor: for Riccardi, Mantegazza had a multi-
faceted ingenuity, and was able to speak to the mind and to the heart, to persuade
through scientific facts and simultaneously to shake souls with his feelings and
aesthetic sense.3
Likewise, an 1893 article by Frederick Starr in Popular Science Monthly,
written to prepare the ground for Mantegazza’s visit to the United States, offered
a sketch of a pioneering scholar distinguished for something more than the
attractive subjects of his investigations and books. For Starr, to read
Mantegazza’s work was ‘to gain a wonderful insight into the Italian mind and
into the Italian mode of thought and expression.’4 Praising Physiognomy and
Expression, the only major volume by Mantegazza published in America at that
time, Starr claimed that ‘no one but an Italian could have written it. Expression
is at its best where the blood is hot and vigorous, and where people feel as they
live; in such a country as Italy, and among a people like the Italians, only could
such a study be so well made.’5 And hot and vigorous Mantegazza’s blood
indeed was. He felt as he lived, and he lived to accumulate an amazing number
of achievements, as another American admirer of his, Victor Robinson,
proclaimed in his introduction to a 1935 edition of Gli amori degli uomini: ‘Few
writers of the Age of Innocence are now read so widely and reprinted as often as
Mantegazza. A biographer in search of six characters could find them all in the
versatile Italian: physician-surgeon, laboratory-worker, author-editor, traveller-
anthropologist, sanitarian and senator.’6 And as ‘a delineator of love’
Mantegazza had ‘never been surpassed and rarely equalled,’ wrote Robinson; if
there were flaws in his writing, they ‘were invariably the faults of
superabundance – from the depths of his nature there poured a thousand pages
surcharged with passion – and never of emotional poverty.’7
Not even Mantegazza’s detractors seemed immune to his ardour in their
critiques. If Ardengo Soffici considered him the epitome of late nineteenth-
century overflowing stupidity,8 Giovanni Papini coined for him the insulting
label of ‘erotic senator’9 to highlight the ‘lewd malice’ with which that
‘tyrannical and bizarre’ figure –the ‘Eternal Father’ of all disciplines – covered
up his inability to generate original scientific theories by resorting to sexuality
and to literary touches between the materialist and the romantic. Benedetto
Croce would not be more restrained in his portrait of the once very popular and
later totally forgotten pseudo-scientist, who in fact, according to Croce, abused
science so as to satisfy unscientific curiosities, in speaking of sexual matters as
both a priest of voluptuousness and a wise scientific moderator.10
But granted that Mantegazza was not a half-tone figure, what still makes him
stimulating a century after his own death, despite the slatings and the oblivion
that followed his triumph? His very eclecticism, one could venture to claim. The
spices in his texts are ‘his word and his pen’ – to quote his fellow anthropologist
Giuseppe Sergi11 – together with that lack of specialization that made him a
much extolled and equally vituperated ‘Renaissance man,’ not always
methodologically rigorous but certainly always brave and brilliant in his
contributions to a surprising variety of scientific and humanistic fields.
Mantegazza’s extraordinary blend of pioneering intuitions and absurdly dated
viewpoints effectively maps the circulation of ideas and the cross-fertilization of
disciplines in a complex and contradictory period of Italian and European
cultural life, in which the positivist cult of the true merges with the irrational and
emotional impulses of the fin de siècle.
Mantegazza marked the cultural history of the newly unified Italy not only
with more than a hundred works ranging from treatises on craniology and
physiognomy to handbooks on the hygiene of love, personal journals, and
science fiction (some of which were put on the Index of Forbidden Books for the
controversial physiological and moral issues they broached),12 but also with a
remarkable series of public roles and institutional and social accomplishments
aimed at promoting the physical, civic, and cultural development of the Italian
people. Born in 1831, a physician by training, in 1860 he founded the first
laboratory of experimental pathology at the University of Pavia.13 Ten years later
he set up and occupied the first chair of anthropology in Florence (also the first
in Europe), and created the National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology,
the Italian Society of Anthropology, and the journal Archivio per l’antropologia
e l’etnologia, which has remained the official publication of the Society ever
since. The first president of the Italian Photographic Society, Mantegazza was
one of the first in the world to utilize and promote photography for
anthropological research. And if his strictly scientific works addressed only a
selected circle of scholars, the Hygienic Almanacs – serial publications he
founded and edited for almost thirty years – were meant to reach out specifically
to common people in order to improve their sanitary conditions and to draw
attention to health as a collective rather than an individual concern. As director
of the Marine Hydrotherapy Institute of Rimini on the Adriatic Sea from 1869 to
1879 and a consultant for the bathing establishment, he initiated Italy to the
therapeutic and leisure potentialities of the beach resort, thereby inaugurating the
fashion for seaside holidays.
It is evident, therefore, that Mantegazza’reputation evokes much more than an
obsessive sexologist. In Mantegazza’s own words, ‘A great author of antiquity
said he feared men who had just one book, but I fear men with just one
passion.’14 And he certainly never made a mystery of his penchant for
intellectual ‘polygamy,’15 but portrayed himself as a proud lover of many
cognitive fields, ‘which he would have liked to turn into a harem of as many
lovers.’16 His professional versatility and volcanic personality won him the
recognition of leading European intellectuals, among them Charles Darwin, of
whom Mantegazza became an enthusiastic follower, and by whom he was
rewarded in his turn by citations in The Origin of Species and The Descent of
Man. Regarded as the Italian equivalent of the French anthropologist Paul Broca,
he endorsed the notion of culture in the wide ethnographic sense introduced by
the British anthropologist Edward B. Tylor, as ‘that complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities
and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’17
Mantegazza could legitimately be considered a forerunner of what has now
come to be known as ‘cultural studies’ precisely for his interdisciplinary
approach, the passionate blend of scientific and literary elements in his writings,
and his ability to transcend the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture in
his scholarly production.18
Of this great provocateur and popularizer of knowledge, compulsive writer
and success addict, the present volume collects representative examples, most of
which are translated into English for the first time.

The Body, the Mind, the Heart: A Physiologist for All Reasons

When, in 1854, soon after graduation, Mantegazza began to practise medicine in

Argentina, he not only exported his expertise to South America but also
developed an interest in indigenous healing procedures. Out of that interest he
introduced the digestive and stimulating properties of coca to the European
scientific community. Further substantiated by his direct experience as a coca
consumer, initially recorded in numerous entries of his personal journals, the
essay On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca and on Nervine
Nourishment in General, published in 1859 on his return to Italy, was the first
official scientific recognition of the action of erithroxylon on the human body
and of its pharmacological applications. Awarded the Dall’Acqua prize for its
pioneering value, Mantegazza’s study achieved sensational success both in Italy
and abroad, and has remained a landmark in the history of cocaine.
It is enough to open Sigmund Freud’s later writings on cocaine to appreciate
the relevance of Mantegazza’s essay for subsequent psychopharmacological
investigations. Indeed, Freud’s ‘Cocaine Papers’ acknowledge the Italian
anthropologist’s ground-breaking contribution to the exploration of the powers
of the coca plant and substantiate much of its conclusions: coca’s ability to
increase mental and physical energy supposedly with no detectable harmful
consequences; its effectiveness as a euphoriant and stimulant of the central
nervous system, and its simultaneous numbing effect on the stomach; and, last
but not least, its aphrodisiac action, not always corroborated by science but
emphasized by both scholars.19 One would even be tempted to detect
Mantegazza’s ardour and enthusiasm in Freud’s preliminary work for his own
study on coca: ‘I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to
this magical substance,’20 almost an echo of the notion of virtue as both property
and magical element conveyed in the original title of Mantegazza’s essay –‘Sulle
virtù igieniche e medicinali della coca.’ Freud’s essay itself is written with a
degree of emotional involvement and exuberance that, in the best Mantegazzian
tradition, often seems to prevail over the objectivity expected of a scientific
publication.
Indeed, Mantegazza’s essay on coca, one of his earliest writings, exhibits the
combination of scientific claim to rigour and resistance to classificatory
constraints that would come to characterize his overall approach to his objects of
study. The very coca that offers the scholar the opportunity for a painstaking
categorization of substances is also the substance that will reveal to him a world
beyond the boundaries of rationality and control. On the one hand, in the
introduction to his essay, Mantegazza places foods in three different groups –
‘plastic, respiratory, or nervine’ – and quite creatively distributes nervine foods
in different ‘families’ and ‘tribes.’ On the other hand, with the colourful rhetoric
that would become his seal, he invites readers not to confuse artificial
distinctions and facts of nature. He wishes he could ban the notions of classes,
species, and genera altogether, since in his main fields of investigation –
physiology and pathology – phenomena and elements constantly intersect and
blend, showing that the truth of life can be grasped only if life is appraised in its
entirety: ‘The analyst’s scalpel, however skilfully and penetratingly it moves
over the fabric of life, cannot help but leave some droplet of blood as proof that
what was cut into formed a whole’ (p. 320).21 This metaphor, which recurs with
slight variations in subsequent texts, already shows Mantegazza as the servant of
two masters, namely, the objectivity and impersonality proper to scientific
analysis and the emotional appeal of sensations. The essay as a whole
synthesizes Mantegazza’s methodological hybridity, occupying the space
between the sensorially deranged confessions of a Romantic opium eater and the
systematic twentieth-century medical treatise.
Mantegazza’s pride in being the first European scholar to have accomplished
a chemical and physiological study of the effects of coca goes hand in hand with
his excitement at the results of his ingestion of the substance. After introducing
his Italian readers to the practice of coca consumption in South America (a
practice that, in addition to being presented as a sort of panacea among
indigenous populations, even seems to provide cohesion among all the races and
nations in that area), he describes the physiological action of coca and its
applications in the area of public health, thereby challenging what for him is the
ludicrous Western and white bias against coca, and giving more credit to local
popular traditions than to the findings of medical science for the exploitation of
this precious pharmacological treasure.
And it is certainly less with the rational spirit of a scientist than with the
imagination of a literary writer that Mantegazza lingers over the repercussions of
coca upon the body, as announced by the essay’s opening quotation from
Camoëns’s The Lusiads, a solemn introduction to the prodigious substance under
the auspices of the epic. Sensitive to its difference from alcohol-induced
intoxication, which for him violently disrupts muscular and mental activities,
Mantegazza extols the inebriation caused by coca as a delightful gradual process
of sensory infusion that enhances the vital functions and allows enjoyment of a
surplus of energy without the urge to apply it to profitable purposes. In a sort of
aestheticizing process exalting sensations for their own sake, coca is celebrated
for its ‘very rare quality of … letting us enjoy, through its phantasmagoria, one
of the greatest pleasures in life,’ an experience of ‘true happiness’ that does not
‘offend the most scrupulous morals’ (pp. 343–4). We can already see
Mantegazza’s penchant for those experiences of enjoyment and excess that help
the individual transcend physical, rational, moral, and social constraints and that
are the subject of various other works (such as Quadri della natura umana and
Le estasi umane) in which coca will reappear.
As it overcomes the reality principle, the fullness of life that Mantegazza
celebrates in his essay after his most substantial ingestion of coca also provides
insights into the mechanisms of the creative process, with implications that,
beyond Mantegazza’s own awareness, would turn out to be very relevant to the
working of the psyche according to the emerging Freudian psychoanalysis as
well as to the connection between literary activity and the irrational and
unconscious mechanisms in avant-garde aesthetic movements like Futurism and
Surrealism. The kaleidoscopic visions that Mantegazza experiences, and the
language he adopts to describe them, may be seen as intimations of the Freudian
dynamics of the dreamwork as a model for aesthetic activity: ‘those splendid
apparitions, which straddled one another in the most disconnected fashion,’
juxtaposed as in a dream ‘at the whims of the most unbridled fantasy,’(p. 341),
recall the very principles of condensation and displacement that also govern the
creative process as an expression of wish fulfilment.22 Significantly, Mantegazza
himself explicitly relates the crescendo of those ‘phantasmagoric images’ to ‘the
most aesthetic ideal of art and imagination’ (pp. 341–2) when he ultimately
lingers over a rapid sequence of bizarre visions parading before his eyes. From a
‘battalion of steel pens battling an armada of corkscrews’ to a ‘glint of glass
shards perforating a wheel of Parmesan cheese crowned with ivy and mulberry
leaves’ or a ‘ladder of blotting paper lined with rattlesnakes, down from which
are leaping red rabbits with green ears’ (p. 343), the juxtaposition of apparently
unrelated and highly elaborate images suggests the process of association of
ideas beyond logic and causality that would soon govern Marinetti’s imagination
without strings or André Bréton’s principle of automatic writing.
It is therefore not surprising that for this veritable ‘treasure of the New World’
(pp. 343–4) Mantegazza sees a variety of therapeutic applications in the
treatment of digestive problems, depression, and sexual apathy23 that he hopes
will become the subject of experiments by European scientists. And with equal
optimism he looks at the future uses of coca, foreseeing that it will thrive across
nations as one of the most valuable medicinal resources. Time would
substantiate only in part his rosy forecast: the twentieth-century discovery of the
disastrous effects of addiction would reduce the enthusiasm that animated the
studies on coca until Freud. Mantegazza’s research, however, retains not only a
medical but also an ethnographic significance, in that it draws attention to
indigenous popular practices.24 For its remarkable intuitions and the deep
analysis of its object of study, this essay can be considered a seminal
contribution to the history of medicine despite its questionable approach and
standpoints – not least, the racial prejudices in Mantegazza’s hierarchical ladder
of coca consumers, with the commendable strength of the pure Indian at the top
and the African’s easy predisposition to delirium and mental alienation at the
bottom.25
Yet this essay also offers an intriguing preview of many attitudes and issues
that Mantegazza develops in subsequent works – from experiences of pleasure,
ecstasy, and beauty to the pursuit of the ideal, acquaintance with cultural
otherness, and displacement in a geographical elsewhere – always within the
supposedly scientific framework of physiology, which, as he claims in The
Physiology of Love, ‘is, or should be, the legitimate mother of every human
legislation’ (p. 221).

Precisely the passion for life in all its aspects and the need for a global approach
to his research object led Mantegazza to a holistic examination of human
behaviour, which he undertook in a sequence of four physiological studies –
Fisiologia del piacere, Fisiologia del dolore, Fisiologia dell’amore, and
Fisiologia dell’odio. Those works aimed at mapping what for Mantegazza were
the four basic principles of human existence, and simultaneously they drew
inspiration from social questions and from the desire to improve the condition of
the Italian people by attacking and overcoming certain anachronistic practices.
Completed in 1854, when Mantegazza was barely twenty-three years old,
Fisiologia del piacere contains in a nutshell the scientific objectives and the
ethical tenets that inform its author’s overall vision. Mantegazza introduces this
volume as a sample of the methodological approach he intends to adopt in his
lifelong ‘physiological study of moral man.’26 Similarly, with respect to content,
the young Mantegazza here exhibits his enduring conviction that, although
pleasure is nothing less than ‘the polar star of the whole mankind,’27 people in
fact disavow its appeal and influence in their hypocritical lives.
For the sake of truth, which he feels should never be neglected in science,
Mantegazza hence undertakes what in his view is a brave but systematic analysis
of an extremely controversial yet omnipresent object of study, one that can be
pinned down only in an examination of the whole spectrum of hedonistic
experiences, from the materiality of senses to the sphere of emotions and
feelings, culminating with the sublimation of sensuality into the ascetic pleasures
of the intellect. The ultimate objective of the book’s data collections and detailed
classifications is to lay the foundations of nothing less than a veritable science of
pleasure, namely, hedonology. Mantegazza’s ambitious anatomy of such an
elusive and subjective experience as pleasure seems to be effectively supported
by the systematization of his findings in such tables as the ones on the
distribution of pleasures across professions and races. These certainly belong
among the many and quite grotesque taxonomic operations that dot
Mantegazza’s subsequent tests, revealing not only the often questionable
premises of his mathematical formalizations but also the idiosyncracies and
biases in his deductions. Anything but neutral, the hierarchy of different
approaches to pleasures recorded by Mantegazza constructs quite stereotypical
(and often offensive) portraits of social classes and ethnic groups drawn from
individual and cultural clichés of the age – from the European banker’s
gratification with material possession or the enjoyable benevolence prevailing in
those of the noble professions such as the physician, the teacher, and the priest,
to the inscrutability of members of the American races, or, at the opposite
extreme, the excessive enjoyment manifested by blacks, which Mantegazza
considers inversely proportional to their degree of intelligence.
Nevertheless, what makes Fisiologia del piacere so unmistakably
‘Mantegazzian’ is the double status of pleasure, namely, its being not simply the
volume’s object of study but also (or above all) its expressive medium. Where
the scientific rigour of taxonomies and definitions vacillates (a tendency already
exhibited in the essay on coca), the author’s flamboyant stylistic formulas
succeed in manifesting pleasure as the author’s own unrestrained joie de vivre
(‘Pleasure is the kiss that nature gives to being alive’)28 or the mystical
underpinnings of his materialism and hedonism (‘Pleasure is the undulatory
vibration that God imparts to living matter as it emanates from his hands’).29
The skilful and passionate rhetoric that informs Mantegazza’s scientific
discourse suggests that, as has been observed,30 his idea of physiology is
primarily literary and aesthetic, owing much more to Honoré de Balzac’s
Physiologie du mariage and Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du
goût than to the medical realm. If, in the case of Fisiologia del piacere, we can
justify this ‘soft’ interpretation of physiology by thinking that the text was
composed before the advent of positivism, it is worth noting that the verve and
hybridity of Mantegazza’s writing do not diminish in the later volumes of his
series of studies, produced in an apparently more solid scientific milieu and
dealing with more negative sensory and psychological phenomena such as pain
and hate – he deemed these, however, to be as pervasive in the lives of human
beings as hedonistic experiences.
Fisiologia del dolore (1880), indeed, is no less difficult to accommodate
within the disciplinary specializations to which more recent epochs are
accustomed. What is intriguing in this volume is neither the accuracy of the
medical or psychological findings (in its pages, experiments on the influence of
pain on the chemistry of animal breathing or discussions on different typologies
of neuralgia are followed by an aesthetic critique of Laocoon or of moral forms
of pain) nor the final condemnation of pain as ‘the cancerous wound corroding
the happiness of living beings,’31 a quite predictable conclusion in the
framework of Mantegazza’s vision. Rather, Fisiologia del dolore is most
significant for what we could describe as a semiotic interpretation of human
bodies and behaviours. Expanding on observations he had already presented in
Physiognomy and Expression, Mantegazza here reads expressions and
experiences as signs, and renders his methodology even more insightful by
frequently integrating in his explanations the visual support of sketches and
photographs of expressions of different kinds of pain that he had collected earlier
in an atlas.32 Mantegazza is here fully aware of the communicative value of
iconic representations, in that he uses attitudes and images as languages, as
signifying, and hence interpretable, systems. Fisiologia del dolore, therefore,
confirms its author’s status as a proto–cultural anthropologist, not simply
because he studies culture globally by tackling its manifestations across different
epochs, social levels, and races, but, more radically, because, beyond the verbal
realm, he juggles with multiple communication systems, extracting messages
from all examples of human behaviour and forms of living matter at large. But,
also at the level of content, Mantegazza’s experimental science often transcends
the bizarre, to highlight topics that still retain their significance. For instance, the
chapter on the physical and psychological ailments of hypochondria – an illness
from which Mantegazza himself suffered for some time – foregrounds the
complex cognitive and behavioural disturbances caused by that emotional and
psychic disorder, thereby anticipating more recent awareness of and concern
with depression and psychosomatic illnesses.
Likewise, Mantegazza’s investigation of hate in Fisiologia dell’odio (1889),
the last component of his ‘sensory and affective cosmogony,’33 lays bare
individual and collective mechanisms that are as pertinent to the world of
antiquity as to the society of our own century. Once again relying on his
enduring interest in both verbal and non-verbal communication, Mantegazza
attempts to map the expressive, psychological, and physical instances of hate
across gender, age, personality, and ethnic boundaries. Introduced as an
empirical and ethical concept, hate prompts him to analyse such diverse
reactions as rage, revenge, cruelty, and swearing (he even compiles notes for
nothing less than a ‘bestemmiologia comparata,’34 a comparative study of
profanities, from classical Greek and Latin cultures to those of China, Japan, and
contemporary Europe, and, on a smaller scale, in the dialects of several Italian
regions). Many of his observations on the psychology of war are also quite
insightful, as, for instance, his emphasis on the crucial role of the people and of
public opinion in matters of conflict, independent of a sovereign’s personal
decision. The acknowledgment of the universal and everlasting presence of hate
in human life, however, does not prevent Mantegazza from concluding his work
on a note of hope, emphasizing the progress from the brutality of a past plagued
by murders and the death penalty to the sublimating power of contemporary
justice, and even envisaging a future in which politics and education will
succeed in abolishing war and violence.
But if, as Mantegazza reiterates time and again, the individual is born to enjoy
and to love, not surprisingly the most popular of his four-volume series was
Fisiologia dell’ amore (1873) (The Physiology of Love), which tackled ‘the most
powerful and the least studied of the human affections.’ Convinced that love for
too long had been ‘surrounded by a triple selvedge of prejudice, of mystery, and
of hypocrisy,’ Mantegazza set out to ‘study it as a phenomenon of life and as a
gigantic force,’ ‘an element of the health of the individual and of the generations’
(p. 77).
With this undertaking – which he himself, with his unmistakable boldness and
self-complacency considered ‘laudable’ (p. 77), and which would be followed by
two subsequent works on the same topic, Gli amori degli uomini and Igiene
dell’amore – Mantegazza secured his place in history as the controversial
initiator of sexology35 in an Italy where the psychological and sexual
underpinnings of love, and the role of gender difference in that context, had
never been discussed, if we exclude the Church’s interventions on sentimental
and sexual matters, inevitably dictated not so much by scientific motivations as
by ideological moral purposes. When we take into account that, until the 1983
reform, canon law presented marriage as exclusively in the service of
procreation, and hence projected the notion of sin onto all other instances of love
and sexuality as sources of gratification, it is not difficult to imagine why The
Physiology of Love quickly became a best-seller, despite (or because of) the
controversy over its alleged scandalous contents: it seems that a copy of The
Physiology of Love was present (although out of sight) in most of those very
bourgeois households that apparently endorsed the prudery the book was
bashing. The twelve reprints and various translations in subsequent years36
corroborate the astonishing resonance and enduring appeal of this work.
The originality and audacity of Mantegazza’s volume in the Italian context
appear all the more significant if we examine the status of the debates on sexual
matters within the wider European framework. The very term sexology was still
recent, having been introduced by Auguste Comte a couple of decades earlier,
and was infrequent in the literature of the late nineteenth century, at least until
Freud. But Mantegazza’s work quickly became recognized as an authoritative
source by such figures as the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the
author of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and the English physician Havelock
Ellis, the author of Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928), both of whom
often quoted from The Physiology of Love. And when, in 1908, Magnus
Hirschfeld published the first German journal of sexology, Zeitschrift für
Sexualwissenschaft, he solicited contributions from Mantegazza.37 By then, to be
sure, The Physiology of Love had been under even the Freudian spotlight: Ida
Bauer, the ‘Dora’ of ‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,’ had
purportedly developed her sexual fantasies from a reading of Mantegazza’s
book.
The evolution of the concept of sexuality and of its relation to social morality
at the turn of the century also owed a great deal to the growing scholarly interest
in the female figure thanks to the spreading feminist movements, although what
continued to prevail in the European discourse of the time was the idea of
woman’s inferiority and, especially in Italy, the cliché that woman constituted a
moral danger for man.
Despite the limitations of his position, therefore, Mantegazza has rightly been
acknowledged for his treatment of love and sexuality as complex issues, to be
examined globally, as much from the psychological and sociological point of
view as from an anthropological, medical, political, and – last but not least –
rigorously lay perspective. And, to be sure, in this demanding operation,
attention to the status and the role of women was paramount, as we can see also
in other volumes that Mantegazza devotes to the fair sex, from Fisiologia della
donna, to L’arte di prender moglie and L’arte di prender marito, Le donne del
mio tempo, and even his profile of a woman who exerted a strong influence on
him, his mother Laura Solera, featured in La mia mamma.38 The chapters of The
Physiology of Love, with their emphasis on such topics as seduction, modesty,
and chastity or virginity, turn out to be mainly investigations into the feminine
world that owe as much to psychological, physiological, and pathological
expertise as to the charm the other sex had always held for Mantegazza. The
underlying idea of the volume – colourfully synthesized in the front-page
dedication to ‘the daughters of Eve’ –is that sexuality is a culture that looks at
and talks about the whole individual; that love is not just feelings but also
physicality; and that physicality is a source of pleasure that is neither shameful
nor necessarily finalized to procreation.
As for his particularly intense involvement in the theme of love, which
Mantegazza himself recognizes in his apostrophe to his readers in the first Italian
edition of the book,39 the reason for his warm and colourful style is the nature of
the topic, which has possessed, invaded, and shaken its author even though he
has tried to handle and tame it. We recognize, however, that, as his
contemporaries had already remarked, rather than being a contingent exception,
the attitude informing this style is a feature of most of Mantegazza’s writings.
And if style is the man himself, as Buffon claimed, there surely are many
captivating discoveries about Mantegazza that can be made by reading The
Physiology of Love.
From the first chapter, devoted to the general physiology of love, Mantegazza
insists on the material foundation of life – a leading idea in the scientific
discourse of his time – as he illustrates an alternating dynamics of birth and
death within which the energy of love acts as a regenerating factor. Yet
Mantegazza soon adds that the combination of those two molecules called man
and woman – apparently explainable according to the physical principles of
‘dissimilar atoms which seek each other and unite’(p. 89) and to be studied in
the physiologist’s laboratory – in fact cannot be separated from the more
complex and ideal findings of the psychologist, the philosopher, and the poet.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of science, ‘which understands and directs all
things’ (p. 94), is to offer the most comprehensive image of what for Mantegazza
is ‘the most intense … human [and] … richest’ (p. 93) of passions, a passion
that, however, is almost completely unexplored and is simultaneously distorted
by inadequate social and legal norms. The Physiology of Love, indeed, is as
much a journey into the female world as a denunciation of the pretences of
modern life, from a standpoint that surprisingly combines what remain
extremely progressive ideas today with claims that now seem quite outdated but
were daring within their own context.
One of the innovative underlying ideas in the volume, for instance, is what
could be called the excessive and not simply utilitarian quality of love.
Mantegazza claims that, unlike other biological phenomena, in which nature acts
according to the principles of economy, simplicity, and usefulness, the impulse
of love at the root of the reproductive process renders the notions of both the true
and the good inadequate. In all organisms from the simplest to human beings, a
‘profusion of aesthetic elements’ (p. 96) accompanies attraction and generation.
The beautiful, which emerges as the principle of love, is hence presented as a
form of unconditional, sumptuous expenditure beyond economic restraint: nature
squanders all its resources with ‘the most pompous luxury’ (p. 96) to celebrate
love and life. The sublime lavishness of these treasures in the intensity of a
moment is what brings together the fertilization of a flower and the effusions of
a man and a woman. This idea of love and beauty as physical and emotional
squandering, a leitmotif in Mantegazza,40 can be interpreted as an attack against
the obsession with functionality typical not only of a bourgeois mentality but
also of the positivistic framework that was gaining ground in the scientific
milieu, upholding the real, the useful, and the certain.
At the same time, this anticonformist and intriguing position, which invites us
to see in Mantegazza an intellectual able to project himself beyond the culture of
productivity and possession by endorsing a sort of aestheticizing ethics of
purposelessness, goes hand in hand with quite dated reflections that consolidate
typically bourgeois clichés on gender differences. Not only our twenty-first-
century sensibility and experiences but also the nascent feminism of
Mantegazza’s years41 might have something to say about the rigorous division
between an aggressive male who ‘seeks, conquers, retains the prey’ (p. 98) and a
passive female who waits for him like a seed waiting to be impregnated yet
without fail flaunting the numerous disguises that enable the coquettish feminine
world to conceal a yes under a no. Mantegazza summarizes the dynamics of
seduction as nothing less than ‘the first dogma that governs the religion of love
in the entire animate world’ (p. 99).
Yet if the childlike and idyllic rhetoric with which he describes the courting of
two butterflies reproduces the gendered stock-behaviors of human beings, in
defence of Mantegazza it should be added that, in content and form, his clear-cut
division between male and female roles, whether it makes us laugh or enrages us
in its naivety and anachronism, does present the tug of war between reticence
and provocation as the basic strategy for keeping desire and attraction alive – a
topic with which Mantegazza breaks the silence of a cultural taboo.
And it is always as a Janus-like figure, at once conservative and progressive,
that Mantegazza expands on the non-negotiable, essentialized distinctions
between the male and the female natures, in his psychological and social
observations. He constructs a ‘more modest, more reserved’ (p. 119) woman,
who, in her discovery of passion, is in greater need of love and yet ignores its
nature, and a man with more sordid resources, who often knows voluptuousness
before love. A woman who must be more beautiful than man, since man loves
her looks more than anything else. A woman who, being the embodiment of
beauty, can manage without a good-looking companion and certainly finds
satisfactory compensation in man’s ingenuity and social status, and a man who
needs female beauty as an ever present catalyst for his own desire, which
requires constant renewal. Finally, a man who embodies strength and will power,
and a woman who incarnates patience and sacrifice.
Through the ideology of sacrifice, another recurring theme in Mantegazza’s
works, The Physiology of Love renders woman simultaneously inferior and
superior to man, yet in both characters she remains a creation of and appendix to
the male world. She is ‘the priestess of the ideal’ (p. 179) because society denies
her the opportunity for action. Her style in expressions of love is superior to
man’s because of the different options offered to the two sexes: whereas man has
numerous venues for his creative energies, ‘poor woman’ has only love letters.
Probably inspired by actual reality, these generalizations could be the starting
point for a radical critique of the very social and cultural context that produces
and perpetuates such inequities. Yet Mantegazza does not question the
conventions. Rather, he seems to decree female inferiority even more drastically
where he claims that, since it is always the stronger mind that exerts the greater
charm, woman takes ideas from man, who is more resourceful. For a woman,
who is important only because she is a reward for a man’s good conduct, the
highest available step on the ladder of intellectual and social progress is that of a
spiritual guide like Dante’s Beatrice, whom Mantegazza transfigures into a
veritable icon, a prototype of modesty and self-abnegation for the benefit of her
male counterpart. Woman’s weakness turns into strength and even omnipotence
only if she is desired by man, and thus, once again, she is at the mercy of the
other sex’s emotional and rational choices. Mantegazza tries to re-establish a sort
of equilibrium between the two sexes by justifying female mental frailty in
relation to virile thinking as a sign of greater predisposition toward love, so
much so that, if man ‘is ever right in the eyes of the woman who loves him,’ that
is because ‘in the psychical evolution of the two sexes woman excels us in
aesthetic sentiment as we surpass her in intellectual development’ (p. 214) – a
division of labour that probably does not make everybody happy.
Yet Mantegazza gives himself up to far bolder pronouncements, like those in
chapter 6, on the issue of virginity, where his blatantly sexist position is
conveyed in a lofty language that translates strong emotional transports on the
part of the author. An unbridled literariness runs through anatomical details
about the experience of first love, in passionate remarks (and even an apologue
that retells the same content in a fictional mode) on ‘the apotheosis of delirium
and the shuddering of the flesh’ promoted by the deep mystery of the virgin, who
nourishes not only man’s feelings of love and pride but also his sense of
‘ownership’(p. 150). Indeed, that ‘very fragile veil’ that for Mantegazza
guarantees the difference between an angel and simply a ‘human female’ (p.
151) is also that which fuels Mantegazza’s spirit of exploration and of absolute
conquest, on the basis of the stereotypical equivalence between an
uncontaminated territory and an untouched woman – which equivalence well
symbolizes man’s opportunity to exercise his unconditional power and the
simultaneous feminine sense of sacrifice raised to the nth power.
It is not surprising, therefore, that, among the senses instrumental to love,
sight is for Mantegazza the privileged vehicle for the kindling of desire precisely
because, as the first harbinger of love, it accompanies man in that ‘delicious
excursion’ corresponding to the contemplation of the cherished creature without
leading directly to the ‘delirium of possession’ (p. 192). In other words, unlike
touch, sight never exhausts the discovery and exploration of the ‘unknown
region’ (p. 193) by definitely removing the veils that cover the beautiful. Co-
opted by this mechanism, the woman, in order to be loved, has the task of
keeping her partner’s desire always alive by privileging chastity over an
immediate satisfaction that would lead to the ‘nausea of satiety’ (p. 218).
If in these observations The Physiology of Love explains with surprising
clarity and detail the physical and psychological dynamics of the insatiability of
desire, it also accomplishes a gradual reification of the woman, which
culminates in chapter 12, on jealousy, defined by Mantegazza as ‘the injury done
our property in love’ (p. 201). Here, man’s loved creature is referred to as ‘the
dearest thing to us’ (p. 201), a thing that, if touched by anyone else, justifies
man’s hate against his offender. And it is precisely within this objectifying
framework that many of the apparent praises of the human qualities of the fair
sex with which the author seemingly overturns his masculine perspective in fact
reinforce his paternalism. The glorification of woman, who is the ‘receptacle of
life’(p. 222)42 and who, unlike man who demands love for himself, is shaped by
her vocation of love for her husband and offspring, is not simply a homage to
female unconditional generosity. In the end, it confines the very essence and
function of womanhood to self-effacement through giving. It is the woman’s task
not only to be loyal to man but also to render ‘monogamous, faithful, constantly
tender, and modestly virile’ (p. 280) him who is by nature polygamous,
unreliable, and licentious. Ironically, the woman thus has the duty to safeguard
that very dynamics of conquest of which she herself is the object. And if doubts
still existed about the different rights, responsibilities, and ways of loving
between the descendants of Adam and of Eve, the tables of Mantegazza’s essay
in ‘comparative psychology’ in chapter 15 confirm the complementary nature of
the two sexes on the basis of purportedly unquestionable physiological
assumptions that, if inverted, as Mantegazza highlights, would lead only to
caricatures and monstrosities.
One may begin to wonder where the dividing line is in Mantegazza’s
discourse between description and prescription. It is on the foundation of
scientific evidence that Mantegazza builds his claims about men’s and women’s
physical characteristics and social practices, as well exemplified by the
‘constitutional’ forms of love in chapter 17. Yet it is often even too easy to
perceive that the apparently factual and neutral authorial pronouncements are
also there to reflect and consolidate Mantegazza’s own tastes and expectations
with regard to the other sex. This is quite evident, for instance, in chapter 15,
where, having extolled woman as ‘the true and great priestess of love’ (p. 226),
Mantegazza mentions her confinement to a socially subaltern position, her lack
of adequate intellectual opportunities, and her passivity in matters of love, yet
does so, ultimately, only to present this as the status quo, with no concrete
suggestions for change, apart from his rather demagogical and vague concluding
hope for equal rights in love and in family life. It is thus a clearly masculine
voice that resonates in the collective ‘we’ adopted by the author throughout the
book – not an all-inclusive pronoun, but the sign of a restricted male community
in relation to which woman appears as the ‘other,’ an object of representation
rather than an interlocutor. And this prescriptive, patriarchal perspective
sometimes borders on the grotesque, as in the messianic rhetoric Mantegazza
adopts for the sermon on modest voluptuousness in chapter 7 and on chastity in
chapter 14, where his ‘verily I tell you’ and ‘blessed those who’ assimilate him to
the Christ of the Gospel (passages that suit to perfection Croce’s attacks against
the priestly tones of Mantegazza the alleged sexologist).43
To be sure, if The Physiology of Love contained only the kinds of assertions
we have examined so far, it would probably retain the simply documentary value
of an intriguing yet dated work reflecting the surpassed mindset of a bygone
intellectual period. Mantegazza’s text, however, offers insights that are not only
critical of the mentality of his time but also relevant to the sensitibility of ours.
For instance, he differentiates between real decency and mere hypocrisy, and
questions the notion that jealousy automatically indicate’s intensity of love.
Likewise, he contests society’s tendency to see virginity or the lack thereof as an
indicator of female morality and virtue, and is equally critical of the moral,
religious, and financial concerns that thwart the spontaneous love between
young people. Opposing what for him is a ‘vile and turbid compromise of
conscience’ (p. 233) separating physical and moral love, Mantegazza invites
young people to live the richness of their experience fully and without
compromises, his invitation once again in line with that ethics of expenditure of
sensations for their own sake that recurs in his works.
Indeed, the tension between individual natures and desires, on the one hand,
and institutionalized social practices, on the other, is a crucial point in
Mantegazza’s vision, and in The Physiology of Love it leads to quite progressive
discussions of the contrast between love and marriage, of the necessary remedy
of divorce, and of the veritable ‘martyrdom’ of prostitution, which women often
undergo not simply because of ignorance but also because of perverse moral and
legal norms. Questioning the facile equation of matrimony with the romanticism
of eternal love, The Physiology of Love denounces the degradation of marriage
to a consolidation of capital or a reproductive mechanism that thwarts women’s
free choice and often leads them to unfaithfulness born of despair. Indeed,
Mantegazza outspokenly lays bare what for him is the institutionalization of
adultery in his own society and ascribes to man’s insensitivity and deception its
main causes. He seems aware, therefore, of the social consequences of those
asymmetrical relations between the sexes that, ironically, he himself helps to
perpetuate with his patriarchal clichés. As he eloquently states in chapter 22,
women cannot become really conscious of their choices if they do not receive ‘a
free and wise education’ (p. 292).44 Only if the choice of a prospective husband
is made without influence and without prejudice is there a promise, if not a
guarantee, of reciprocal faithfulness in a marriage.
On the one hand, therefore, while Mantegazza makes utopian forecasts about
the evolution of marriage in a future governed by freedom instead of jealousy (in
one of his last aphorisms he even predicts that women will have ‘the sweet
possibility of living single and happy’),45 on the other hand he tackles from a
more concrete political and social point of view a present for which he supports
the institution of divorce precisely as a recognition of the dignity of marriage
and of the individual. In a nation such as Italy, where divorce would be legally
authorized only in 1974, Mantegazza’s position in favour of the insertion of
divorce in the laws of his government was certainly daring. Dismissing the value
of mere theoretical assumptions of conjugal indissolubility, The Physiology of
Love supports the need for freedom, and presents divorce as a safety valve, one
that in no way weakens solid unions. He goes so far as to associate the morality
of a society with the inclusion of the option of divorce in its legislation precisely
on the ground of the need to face concrete family ordeals with ‘wise pity’ (p.
296). With justifications that may sound particularly timely even today,
Mantegazza maintains that the understandable sorrow over of a family’s
dismemberment should not ignore the children’s suffering caused by the
unbearable daily spectacle of their parents’ reciprocal hate – in his view a no less
horrendous profanity of the sacredness of the family than an actual divorce.
No less explicit and, as a whole, advanced is Mantegazza’s position on the
problem of prostitution, which he tackles more as a physician and sanitarian than
as a moralist in this text, and from an anthropological perspective in subsequent
volumes such as Gli amori degli uomini. Mantegazza is a firm supporter of the
regulation of prostitution, a position in line with the measures adopted by Prime
Minister Cavour in 1860, at the time of Italy’s unification: registration of
prostitutes at police stations, regular medical check-ups, and hospitalization in
specialized centres for treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. During his
political militancy as a deputy in the Italian Parliament from 1865 to 1877, and
afterwards as a senator of the Kingdom, Mantegazza also urged the allocation of
money to such hospitals.46 In The Physiology of Love, for Mantegazza
prostitution is a great but necessary shame, born of the separation of love from
voluptuousness. Taking issue with those who invoke its suppression on moral or
religious grounds without addressing the reasons behind its existence,
Mantegazza acknowledges the social inevitability of this phenomenon (a
generalized trend in civilized societies, as he highlights) despite its degrading
aspect, and recommends approaching the problem with tolerance and concrete
understanding instead of either ignoring it or condemning it in the abstract and
with horror. Opposing what for him is an inquisitor’s morality, and aiming at a
more realistic standpoint, Mantegazza maintains that brothels are not so much
the cause as the consequence of prostitution, and that it is not by suppressing
them that society can put an end to the problem of ‘the simony of love’(p. 267).
As long as the social organism is sick, prostitution has a kind of therapeutic
effect, and it is only when society has fully recovered that brothels can be closed.
Far from treating prostitution as a private and even non-discussable matter in
each individual’s life, Mantegazza wants to draw attention to its public
implications by framing it as a political and cultural question. Government and
intellectuals alike should educate the Italian people to correct conduct by
detaching love from supposed sin, and by presenting it as a pure and
spontaneous experience able to discourage more perverse and degrading sexual
practices. Mantegazza recognizes, however, that in the actual situation of his
time the phenomenon of prostitution is to be accepted and pitied, until modern
civilization implements a morality of sincerity and humaneness and provides
everyone with material conditions adequate for a balanced family life. All this,
however, is accompanied by the discordant note of yet another contradiction: the
need, among the remedies to prostitution, for chastity as an alternative to the
inability to integrate love and sexual drive.
It is unquestionable that, despite his extended criticism of the economic and
productive bourgeois system it represents, the ideological core of Mantegazza’s
physiological and psychological inquiry into love and sexual matters remains the
typical monogamic family.47 It is enough to skim through his writings to realize
that Mantegazza is not very lenient with practices that exceed the limits of what
is acceptable to his own sensibility (which is quite inclusive for his time). Even
without attempting to draw rigorous boundaries ‘between love’s physiology and
its pathology,’48 in his essay ‘The Perversions of Love’ he recognizes the
existence of what for him are ‘very well known forms of sensual aberration,’49
from the moral and physical ‘abjectness’ of ‘solitary lust’ to ‘Lesbian love’ and
‘love between males,’ nothing less than ‘one of the most terrifying facts to be
met with in human psychology.’50 But despite the mixture of embarrassment and
compassion with which he introduces those subjects, Mantegazza seems at least
to rationalize their existence in an attempt to understand them: ‘It is our duty to
study these as rapidly and delicately as possible, touching them as lightly as we
should a painful open wound.’51
To appreciate the original elements of Mantegazza’s perspective and his
sparks of open-mindedness and unconventionality, one can bring into the picture
the other great figure of late nineteenth-century Italian science, Cesare
Lombroso, who, in such works as L’uomo delinquente (1879) (Criminal Man)
and La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale (1893) (Criminal
Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman), also tackles sexological issues.
Mantegazza and Lombroso shared many of the principles of the positivist
school, and crossed paths frequently during their careers. Both were self-
proclaimed apostles of the experimental method and of scientific truth; both
endorsed Darwinian evolutionary theories; both juggled with an amazing
disciplinary potpourri of medicine, anthropology, psychology, physiognomy,
phrenology, hygiene, eugenics, aesthetics and morality; and both were derided
by early twentieth-century avant-garde culture.52 Nonetheless, they started from
a common cultural ground to develop remarkably different approaches and
maintained a highly conflictual professional relationship. Their initial
collaboration and friendship – Lombroso published his first articles in the
periodical Igea, edited by Mantegazza – suddenly turned into fierce rivalry in
1868, when both scientists began to conduct research on human sensitivity to
pain, and further differences emerged in their interpretations of the nature of
genius. Behind the demolition of his competitor’s findings, Mantegazza probably
concealed an attempt to protect himself from what he perceived as a clear
intellectual challenge, although at the time of their divergence Lombroso was
still professionally somewhat unsettled and far from enjoying the same
popularity as our author.53
If Mantegazza was certainly not a unanimously acclaimed figure despite his
being a star of post-unification Italian culture, Lombroso, for his part, would
attract mockery and fierce criticism for a long time before gaining a reputation
as a psychiatrist and ultimately attaining worldwide success with his L’uomo
delinquente. That is because, within the positivism that informs both scientists’
inquiries, a fascination with the abnormal, the horrid, and the degenerate led
Lombroso to an extreme position, namely, to the investigation of the world of
deviance, of which prisons and insane asylums were the most representative sites
(the very sites that would soon appeal to the gothic and decadent taste of the
Italy of the fin de siècle).
In this respect, Mantegazza can be considered somewhat anti-Lombrosian,
unlike his rival not ready to make his physiological approach encroach upon the
pathological mechanisms of insanity and criminality. For the Lombrosian
psychiatric and criminological school, knowledge was in the service of a
categorization of individuals that regarded physical, mental, and behavioural
anomalies as signs of a depravity to be treated. Lombroso’s anthropology of the
subject, in other words, was founded upon a one-to-one deterministic
correspondence between degenerative traits and moral physiognomy that
ultimately led from pathologization to normalization. For his part, while not
immune to deterministic generalizations, Mantegazza recodified the relationship
between universal taxonomies and individual sensations. Whereas he classified
pleasures for the sake of scientific knowledge, he also undertook a cognitive
quest for the sake of pleasure as an expression of freedom and creativity, a quest
that, rather than standardizing, correcting or punishing anomalies without appeal,
left space for the ideal, for singularity, and for the exception. As he claims in the
last aphorism of The Physiology of Love, ‘No matter how science advances, love
will always remain an art’ (p. 316).

The Pleasures of Narrative, More Narratives of Pleasure: The

Novelist, the Traveller, the Cultural Critic

The author of The Physiology of Love had already put himself to the test as a
writer of fiction and transposed many of his convictions and contradictions to his
literary works. In 1868 he had published One Day in Madeira: A Page in the
Hygiene of Love, a novel that brings together physiology, love, and hygiene. It
narrates the grim and sorrowful story of Emma and William, whose romance is
sacrificed on the altar of health concerns, Emma being infected with
tuberculosis. The union of love and disease, a still rather unusual literary topic,
quickly captivated the morbid curiosity of readers. Written almost entirely in one
month and printed at the author’s expense in 1,500 copies, the book was sold out
in less than three months, and the first printing was followed by more than
twenty republications and six translations into various languages during
Mantegazza’s life alone.54
In his preface to the first edition, Mantegazza reiterates the continuity
between his political responsibility as a deputy and senator and his duty as a
writer of fiction by highlighting his unflinching hygienic mission: a better Italy
for him means a nation made not merely of more honest but also of stronger and
healthier individuals.55 And the two main problems on which Mantegazza
intends to raise awareness in the domain of public health are the dangers
inherent in marriages between blood relations –to which he devoted the
monographic study Studj sui matrimonj consanguinei –and those inherent in
marriages involving sick people – whose predicament he tackled both in popular
handbooks such as Elementi di igiene and Igiene dell’amore and in his novel
One Day in Madeira.
Mantegazza defines his novel as ‘a useful and moral book’I56 on the strength
of its contribution to raising awareness on a matter of health. In the nineteenth
century, tuberculosis was considered the most important threat to public health.
Mantegazza’s One Day in Madeira highlighted the serious consequences of the
illness for sexual relationships at a moment when – Robert Koch not yet having
identified the bacterium responsible for its transmission – most physicians did
not believe in its infectious nature.57 The setting in Madeira, in Mantegazza’s
novel, is not accidental. As Mantegazza himself explains in one of the
appendices to the novel’s first edition, thanks to its temperate climate the
Portuguese island was a very popular destination among people suffering from
tuberculosis, some of whom, after settling there, managed to improve or even
recover completely. Emma, the female protagonist in the novel, leaves England
for the Portuguese island in search of such a benefit; there she spends one day in
the company of her beloved William, who has reached her by ship.
The epistolary form of One Day in Madeira reinforces the dramatic
authenticity of the story by allowing readers to participate directly in the
protagonists’ private exchanges. Yet the episodes are also introduced by a first-
person narrator (by means of which device, and without too much artifice,
Mantegazza introduces himself, in keeping with his egocentric tendency always
to place himself under the narrative spotlight) who claims to have met William
during a sea voyage to the Americas, and to have been told by him the story of
his and Emma’s unhappy love. The narrator will ultimately become the
depository of all the letters written by the two unlucky lovers to each other, when
William, shattered by Emma’s tragic death, disappears without a trace. Readers
are thereby acquainted with the most touching details of the lovers’ heart-rending
romance. Emma, the last survivor of a family ravaged by tuberculosis, despite
her deep love for William has sworn to her father that she will never marry so as
to avoid transmitting her illness to an innocent generation. The intense epistolary
exchange between the lovers records the young woman’s lacerating conflict
between reason and moral commitment on the one hand and her powerful
feelings on the other. Emma’s and William’s liaison remains desperate and
unfulfilled owing to the choice of the woman, who, despite consultations with
various renowned English physicians, is unable to find a cure and so be relieved
of the oath made to her father. Her last hope for recovery, entrusted to the mild
climate of Madeira, will also fail.
The novel is imbued with romantic elements, from the physical idealization
of the two protagonists to the almost sublime natural settings that act as
backgrounds for the highly sentimental vicissitudes of the lovers’ story.
Significantly, however, Mantegazza places the novel’s hyperbolic lyrical
situations within a positivistic scientific framework, making the dramatic and
pathetic elements serve his specific medical and pedagogical agenda, namely, to
persuade his audience of the importance of complying with his own hygienic
recommendations. The message of the novel, therefore, is that the pursuit of
happiness should not be dictated by the subjective reasons of the heart but by
objective physiological rules substantiated by rationality and scientific truth.
This tough law of the true, which must prevail as much upon prejudice as upon
individuals’ personal passions and intellectual needs, is also eloquently
promulgated in Studj sui matrimonj consanguinei, where Mantegazza reminds
his readers of the central role of that ‘mysterious crucible in which fathers melt
the blood on which their offspring will live,’ so much so that ‘under the bark of
our skin we weld together … all the good and the bad of previous generations.’58
Yet in One Day in Madeira he also reinforces his warning against unhealthy love
choices in the novel’s appendices, where accurate geographical, meteorological,
and demographic information about the Portuguese island makes Emma’s and
William’s story more verisimilar and its message more incisive.
Critics at various times have attacked Mantegazza’s literary dilettantism and
the blatantly ideological nature of this novel.59 To be sure, the value of One Day
in Madeira is not purely aesthetic but documentary: it effectively shows a
synthesis of ideas and a cross-fertilization of disciplines that reflect the
transitional nature of Mantegazza’s cultural context, with its tensions between
different ethical and cognitive standpoints. With an intriguing mixture of
openness and intolerance, the sanitarian who wants to comply with his civic duty
by facing the problem of hereditary diseases upholds an ethics of sacrifice and a
model of female submission to duty and virtue against the prospect of that
individual freedom and happiness in matters of the heart often acclaimed in The
Physiology of Love and in numerous other texts. Of the two opposing faces of
this intellectual, who embodies and simultaneously criticizes the speculative and
utilitarian bourgeois mentality, it is certainly the champion of middle-class
material productivity and physical efficiency who emerges here, his position
further supported by the exemplary Englishness of Emma and William, who are
veritable models of emotional self-discipline for the sake of a better society.
 Yet its apparent conceptual inconsistencies and stylistic flaws do not seem to
have diminished in any way the triumphant success of the novel at the time of its
first publication. Benedetto Croce remarked that One Day in Madeira was ‘a
puerile yet edifying text,’ ‘a novel that was not a novel and that, however, was
read with emotion and tears.’60 It is enough to read a review of Mantegazza’s
novel written soon after its release to understand the widespread appreciation of
this work despite recognition of the excessively rigorous demands made of the
two protagonists in the name of the enhancement of the human species: ‘The
liveliness and the colour of the descriptions, the warmth of feeling that glows
incessantly on every page, the burning and gentle love so suavely depicted’61
keep the reader’s mind tied to the volume until its end.
Indeed, if One Day in Madeira is a symbol of its cultural era, it is so for yet
another reason: Mantegazza’s effective descriptions of remote places respond to
the growing appeal of exotic settings that would soon culminate in the veritable
literary and cultural fashion of exoticism in the fin de siècle. But the motif and
the rhetoric of the edenic elsewhere are not simply literary topoi tinging this
novel with the strong hues of a decadent sensualism. They also play a crucial
role in helping to develop a new kind of relationship between the Western world
and geographical otherness, namely, the relationship promoted by travel in
connection with the nascent discipline of anthropology. And it is all the more
intriguing to notice that the stylemes we find in this novel also characterize the
travel narratives composed by the author when he donned the garb of the
anthropologist.

While obviously not a new activity, travel acquired new meaning in a recently
unified Italy. Travel results not simply from a desire to become acquainted with
other civilizations but also from a need to confront cultural otherness in order to
assert one’s own ethnic and national identity. The nineteenth-century Italian
traveller, by now a professional figure, can be seen as embodying and exporting
the image of youth, energy, courage, and progress said to underlie the very
political operation that led to the construction of the Italian nation. And, after his
spatial dislocation in remote lands and different populations, the returning
traveller was offered the opportunity to narrate not only the story of the other
worlds to which he had been exposed but also the story of his Italian success and
of the international visibility and power of his own world.62
During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Italian naturalists,
geographers, botanists, and philologists participated in numerous scientific
expeditions to still unexplored lands of South America and the Far East.
Between 1865 and 1868, the Magenta, an Italian warship turned into a research
ship, sailed around the world on a three-year voyage sponsored by the Italian
Royal Navy combining scientific, commercial, and political purposes, with the
naturalist Filippo De Filippi and the ethno-anthropologist and zoologist Enrico
Hillyer Giglioli on board. The monumental account of Giglioli’s adventure
would be published in 1875 as Viaggio intorno al globo della R. pirocorvetta
italiana Magenta, with an introduction by Mantegazza, ‘L’ uomo e gli uomini,’
which effectively synthesizes Mantegazza’s ‘profession of ethnological faith’63
against what for him were the fanaticism and dogmatism affecting the study of
human classification. On the crucial dilemma concerning the unity or the
multiplicity of human species, Mantegazza offers a perspective that, while
preserving the possibility of human brotherhood, upholds the mutability of
species and overcomes the confining notion of race as the unique expression of
the history and nature of the individual. The need to reconcile sameness and
difference is precisely what characterizes Mantegazza’s overall anthropological
vision. Anthropology for Mantegazza is the ‘natural history of man’64 – a man to
be studied with the same ‘experimental criterion’ adopted for ‘plants, animals
and stones’ – yet it does not seek to obliterate any expression of human diversity
and ideality. ‘Infinite tolerance’ and an ‘eclectic orientation’ are thus the
hallmarks of Mantegazza’s contribution to this new science, which, by
definition, can have no cultural or geographical boundaries: ‘wherever there are
human beings, there is our homeland and the field of our studies.’65
And, not surprisingly, the restless Mantegazza was no armchair
anthropologist. It was travel itself that, by taking this adventurous spirit to
distant territories, by bringing him into contact with different ethnicities and
traditions, enabled him to discover his vocation for the science of mankind. As
he observes in the account of his first intercontinental journey, Rio de la Plata e
Tenerife (1867), travel descriptions appeal to both heart and mind, in that they
satisfy the heart’s desire to become acquainted with and love other human beings
who live, die, suffer, and hope under other skies, and at the same time satisfy the
mind’s intense need to move and change its horizons and ideas.66 Allegiance to
what Mantegazza presents as the scrupulous respect for truth expected of an
honest traveller is supposed to lead to a systematic, natural investigation into
ethnicities with a view to a moral classification of human beings. But
Mantegazza’s travel narratives are eclecticism made flesh – as much fascinating
depictions of cultural otherness as colourful representations of the author’s own
personality, which bring to the foreground his pleasure in story-telling. The
hybrid nature of his simultaneously scientific and novelistic accounts, from
which Mantegazza himself emerges as the incontestable protagonist (still very
far from the participant-observer soon to be advocated by early twentieth-
century anthropology), can be perceived in his two subsequent travelogues, A
Voyage to Lapland with My Friend Stephen Sommier (1881) and India (1884).
In the summer of 1879, Mantegazza travelled to Scandinavia together with
the botanist and ethnologist Stephen Sommier to study the people and the
geography of that ultimate frontier of the polar land – Lapland – which at the
time was still relatively unknown to European scholars outside Sweden and
Norway.67 With the intention of providing an exhaustive anthropological account
of the Lapps before their extinction, Mantegazza undertook the first important
scientific expedition of the Florentine school of anthropology and introduced the
use of photography into his field research. The result of his journey would be
two volumes, the more scientific and detailed Studi antropologici sui Lapponi,
containing the actual pictures in support of his anthropometric studies,68 and the
travelogue A Voyage to Lapland, recording a wider range of anthropological
information on the Lapps but also (or above all) his personal impressions and
experiences, which end up merging real cultural sites with the ideal spaces of the
writer’s own emotions and desires.
In the travelogue, for instance, as though trying to satisfy the readers’ taste for
extreme and dangerous situations but also in order to highlight his own heroism,
Mantegazza plays with the conventions of travel literature. He dramatically
emphasizes the challenges he faces in the course of his adventures and the
nostalgia he feels for the reassuring cosiness of his homeland immediately
before his first encounter with a Lapp. But alongside the novelistic clichés, A
Voyage to Lapland reveals its author’s remarkable ability to represent social
situations and to convey thoughts and feelings. The many colourful images and
the lengthy descriptions of the places visited should not be dismissed as
digressions but rather appreciated as pieces with a purpose of their own, that of
giving voice to Mantegazza’s own pleasure in story-telling. Through the filter of
his eclectic gaze, we gather important geographical and social details about
nineteenth-century Scandinavia as well as about the sensibility of its Italian
visitor, who often takes on the role and adopts the tone of a journalist engaged in
intercultural comparisons. By means of specific expressive strategies such as an
intimate style and the use of the present tense and the pronoun ‘we,’ Mantegazza
employs a dialogical technique that not only effectively communicates his
experience and perceptions but also directly involves the audience in his
enterprise.69
 If this hot-blooded Latin traveller used to Mediterranean standards of beauty
seems at first perplexed at an overall absence of the sinuosity symbolizing
classical sensuousness and grace, he comes to see this apparent Scandinavian
aesthetic rigidity as a sign of order and emancipation, substantiated by, among
other things, the more prominent standing of women than in Italy. The tidiness,
organization, and calm, however, be it in major cities like Copenhagen and
Stockholm or in remote villages, at the same time substantiates the opposite idea,
that of a dignity arising from patience and serenity as signs of a simpler life, a
‘blessed naivety’ (p. 380) –which Mantegazza associates, for instance, with
spontaneous manifestations of generosity and ceremonial rituals, from the
bouquet of flowers offered by girls along a canal, to Retzius’s munificent
banquet, ‘redolent of ancient chivalry’ (p. 389), and the exquisite hospitality and
simple but delightful food in a Törmo household. Likewise, nature, which
occupies a major portion of Mantegazza’s travelogue, is almost always depicted
in ecstatic tones not simply as an enthusiastic projection of the traveller’s own
exciting encounter with the last outpost of European civilization before the
Arctic ice but also as an effective term of comparison with the parameters of
Mantegazza’s own cultural landscape.
Indeed, the differences he underlines allow him to raise the issue of progress
and the difficult balance between social and material improvement, on the one
hand, and the destruction of traditional values, cultural memory, and the
environment on the other. A tension between modernity and anti-modernity
culminates in the pages devoted to the Lapps, where the anthropologist’s
attention to numerous manifestations of their material culture (such as food
habits, social practices, the structure of houses, clothes) leads not only to
conclusions about their overall way of life but also to more general
considerations about the meaning of civilization. The Lapps act as a sort of
reversed double of the rational and advanced Europeans in so far as they seem to
ignore all the speculative and materialistic concerns that characterize so-called
higher cultures, yet appear content with their extremely simple living conditions
and their cohesive social rituals. Yet, confronted with this peaceful and non-
alienated people, Mantegazza cannot totally abandon the perspective of the
civilized mind, which judges its cultural ‘other’ from the standpoint of
superiority, and ultimately resorts to the equation of ‘primitive’ and ‘child,’ a
veritable leitmotif in late nineteenth-century European anthropology. The good
and innocent Lapp, therefore, shades off into the ‘heedless,’ ‘inert,’ and
‘whimsical’ individual who, by reason of his immaturity, automatically deserves
to be placed among ‘lower peoples’ in the hierarchical ladder of human
evolution. Likewise, Scandinavian women, with their inebriating ‘fair tresses’ or
savage beauty, for the most part are represented as stimulants to ecstasies in the
European traveller, who consumes ethnographic alterity as a spectacle. We are
only a short step from the blatant Orientalism of Mantegazza’s Indian memories,
entirely founded upon the exteriority of the place, and ready to supplant the
‘real’ Orient with the representation of the author’s impressionistic and visionary
experience.70
A well-defined scientific objective avowedly underlay Mantegazza’s
subsequent travel. In 1882, three years after his expedition to Lapland,
Mantegazza set off for India, where he intended to study the Toda ethnic
minority, a pastoral people living in the Southern Indian Nilgiri hills, whose
Semitic origins he wished to investigate. From the very first pages of his India,
however, we realize that there is much more at issue here, in Mantegazza’s
relationship with the land and the culture concerned. In an epoch marked by
Darwinian evolutionism, a journey to distant and more ‘primitive’ places was a
step backwards in both space and time that connected present civilization to its
origins.71 In this double projection, India was a particularly captivating object of
scholarly desire, since it represented the cradle of the common language and
lineage from which the vast Indo-European civilization derived its own birth. As
Mantegazza eloquently writes, ‘India is the country from which we have come;
India gave us the blood, the language, the religion, and the bread of daily life,
and that other, golden bread, as necessary, nay, more necessary perhaps, than the
first, which is the ideal’ (p. 424). In this search for a primitive or archaic
humankind, philology and comparative mythology shared their ground with
science in Italy no less than in the rest of Europe. It is enough to look at the
numerous references to foreign and domestic works on India in Mantegazza’s
travel narrative to get an idea of the centrality of this topic in the literary,
scientific, and political debates of nineteenth-century Europe. In Italy itself, the
cultural discourse on India began to transcend the pragmatic accounts of
merchants and missionaries. Earlier in the century, Carlo Cattaneo had written on
the history and culture of India as a collector of historical information,72 but the
actual geographical displacement for scientific purposes that characterized the
end of the 1800s tightened the Italian scholar’s bond with his Aryan motherland.
Not accidentally, Mantegazza’s journey to India would soon be followed by that
of the comparative mythologist Angelo De Gubernatis, the author of Storia dei
viaggiatori italiani nelle Indie orientali (1875); two years after the publication of
Mantegazza’s travel narrative, he would also write Peregrinazioni indiane.
Yet in the midst of this widespread cultural vogue for India, whereas
philologists and historians had the option of conducting their research without
actual dislocation, the anthropologist, as Mantegazza states at the beginning of
his travelogue, had to go to India. As well as identifying India as a unique source
of ethnological and anthropological material, this duty to go there indirectly
reinstated the desire to establish a connection between the newly unified Italy
and the most celebrated locus for study of the history of Western culture; it
thereby dignified not only the present and the future of the new Italian nation but
also its roots, by ascribing to it a sort of cultural pedigree. Significantly,
Mantegazza would keep his feet on the ‘solid terrain of positive facts’ (p. 476)
and maintain that the so-called Aryan race did not exist. But if he was ready to
invoke science to contest racial taxonomies founded upon ontological
differences among human groups, he did not at all wish to demolish the
historical myth of India and its ancestral bond with his homeland. To be sure,
behind the anthropologist’s avowed moral obligation to undertake the voyage to
India for noble patriotic causes, there was a burning personal desire, a yearning
for full immersion into a land and culture that were born as a legendary reservoir
of powerful aesthetic stimuli in the author’s individual fantasies as well as in the
Western mind in general, and that would remain such a reservoir even in
Mantegazza’s actual encounter with them.
What the author introduces as a simple travel narrative, therefore, is informed
from its inception by multiple and contradictory perspectives and formal
strategies. India adopts the journal technique for the first portion of the journey,
as far as Bombay; follows with narrative reports of the most remarkable episodes
of the subsequent sections of the journey; and finally shifts to anthropological
descriptions of the costumes, rituals, and social structures of local populations.
Yet even in the chapters in which objective data are supposed to prevail, first-
person authorial interventions abound in a clearly Mantegazzian style, full of
passionate reflections and visceral reactions. It could even be argued that the
tables, statistics, and measurements that often synthesize the anthropologist’s
field research are not so much the core of Mantegazza’s scientific investigation
as tools in the service of the writer’s imagination: the alleged accuracy of the
technical descriptions gives a flavour of plausibility to the most emotional and
phantasmagoric passages of the account.
Of Mantegazza’s three travelogues, India is the one in which the literary
dimension is most prominent and the language most bombastic.73Even more
than in the accounts of the journey to Lapland, style blurs the alleged distinction
between the personal reportage and the more strictly ethnographic work on India
collected in Studii sull’etnologia dell’India,74 where, immediately following a
series of craniometric records, there comes a celebration of the ‘orgy of sweating
skins and well-designed muscles’75 with which India has set itself free from the
tyranny of clothes: ‘If Italian artists could all travel to India, how much new
inspiration they could draw from this ocean of human shapes, dressing, moving,
covering, and colouring themselves by such different laws from those of the arid
and monotonous European world! … How beautiful, how lively, how palpitating
the human flesh is here!’76 No wonder, therefore, that, within the framework of
an unbridled exoticism that soon obfuscates the ‘scrupulous veracity’ we have
been promised, the travelogue on India, too, filters the protagonist’s experience
through thematic oppositions without half-tones: the norm against the excess, the
domestic and familiar against the savage and unknown, the sublime against the
horror.
India appears from the beginning as a place of exhilarating superabundance,
which is inscribed not only in its own people and land but also in Mantegazza’s
sentences: the series of paratactic phrases in the early pages mimics the frantic
sequence of images, sensations, and ideas that have accumulated in the author’s
experience and memory and that the narrative goes on to elaborate. The
confrontation with India’s ‘too much’ provides Mantegazza with a state of
constant intoxication, as in the narrative of his expedition to the majestic Mount
Kanchenjunga, one of the episodes in which the rhetoric reaches its highest level
of pomposity and the traveller’s rapture becomes caricatural. But a full
immersion in this enchanted corner of the Indian wonderland grants only a
temporary oblivion of ‘fixed boundaries’ (p. 446) and cultural distinctions.
Mantegazza’s encounter with India is founded upon comparisons between the
Oriental exotic and the European, or, even more specifically, the Italian,
motherland (two examples among many are the definitions of the town of
Coonoor as ‘the Cutigliano of the Nilgiris’ and of Benares as ‘the Rome of
Hinduism’), showing the anthropologist’s tendency to classify the unknown
according to the parameters of his own civilization. Far from neutral, this
comparative operation coopts the exotic to relativize the aesthetic and moral
values of the West, be it to criticize them (the Bombay Brahman’s ability to live
happily in poverty inspires the European’s envy) or to extol them (despite his
romance with Mount Kanchenjunga, Mantegazza considers the Alps more
beautiful than the Himalaya).
Whenever the Indian reality does not correspond to the expectations of his
Indian dream and hence fails to satisfy his hedonistic quest, Mantegazza gives
voice just as forcefully to a whole range of quite different reactions, from the
hilarity caused by the ‘comic temple’ where sinners are beaten by a wicked
priest, to absolute disgust – with the contamination of the edenic landscape
around Bombay by cholera, leeches, and snakes; with the cult of cow’s urine,
which spoils the poetry of the Parsi rituals; with the dirty and ‘stupid-looking’
lama who, constantly demanding money and mechanically formulating prayers,
destroys the image of abnegation and disinterestedness that Mantegazza had
built of Buddhist practices. The Western mind, no longer annihilated by its
exotic ‘other,’ regains the supremacy of its own knowledge and power – a
supremacy that, not surprisingly, exhibits strong masculine traits. In an India
depicted throughout the travelogue with recognizably feminine hues, this
gendered asymmetry between the European anthropologist and proto-colonialist,
on the one hand, and the object of his desire and ultimate possession, on the
other, is best epitomized in the scene of Mantegazza’s encounter with a Toda
woman. It represents a tug of war between defamiliarization and domesticity, in
which the anthropologist’s fantasy of self-loss in an idealized elsewhere is
fulfilled simultaneously with his yearning for control and ownership: ‘My
anthropologist’s innards were afire with love, desire, frenzy. Here I was, at last,
in wild India, meaning at home!’ (p. 434). And just as to feel at home on the
Todas’ turf means to have the right to rule over their territory and people, so to
come across intriguing objects automatically authorizes Mantegazza to possess
them for the mere sake of collectionism, as the episode of the little brass vessel
in the Darjeeling Buddhist temple demonstrates. Taking literally the claim that
all museum directors and collectors are thieves, Mantegazza unproblematically
escalates from begging and bargaining to stealing, and, recounting his
experience, highlights the triumphant sense of intellectual superiority with which
‘a European from Monza’ could easily outwit ‘a fanatical little priest from
Darjeeling’ (p. 452) and finally bring back to his museum in Florence77 this tiny
but great trophy – an authentic piece of India acquired with a view to celebrating
the anthropologist’s personal heroism and fetishism rather than preserving the
flavour of its original culture so as to substantiate the objectivity of the
anthropologist’s narrative of his encounter with cultural difference.

If, therefore, the Italian traveller was the flag carrier of a new nation trying to
gain a spot on the world map, what kind of values does Mantegazza embody and
uphold? At a moment when diversity at home seems in the process of being
absorbed by the monolithic new Italian reality, Mantegazza not only brings back
exotic memories and objects from his travels. He also develops the idea of
beauty as the experience of an aestheticizing geographical space able to
transcend the frontiers of an ugly Western modernity and its commonplace
experiences in the name of subjective ideals and desires. Travel as actual spatial
displacement hence also offers the possibility of a personal journey toward one’s
own elsewhere, toward the private realm of individual fantasies: ‘we all dream
of a sky that is always higher than our own, a far west more distant than all the
far wests of geographers and astronomers … We all have our excelsior, we all
want to have … a promised land to conquer or hope for.’78
It is precisely in the name of the beautiful that Mantegazza is ready to
question even the faithfulness to truth that seems to act as the sacred principle of
his scientific creed. As he claims in Le estasi umane, ‘The beautiful is and
always will be higher than any human peak, because it encompasses the true and
the good. There is no beauty that is not also true, no beauty that is not also
good,’79 a pronouncement he passionately reiterates in many of his scientific and
literary writings. And it is precisely the desire to systematize all his scattered
reflections on the beautiful (be it natural, physical, or artistic) that inspires
Mantegazza to devote an entire work to it, as he had already announced in The
Physiology of Love: ‘Perhaps one day I will attempt a “Physiology of Beauty,” in
which I intend to point out the general laws that govern the aesthetic world’ (p.
193). This project would become Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the
Beautiful (1891), followed one year later by a second volume, Dizionario delle
cose belle. If we accept Croce’s opinion, this achievement amounts to nothing
more than a ‘superficial compilation.’80 Yet it is significant that more recent
critics acknowledge Epicurus as a seminal work of the pre-Crocean era, a
veritable reference tool for all the supporters of a materialist aesthetics before
idealism relocated art and poetry to the realm of pure intuition.81
Indeed, even if Mantegazza refused to associate the book title with the
thought of the Greek philosopher, an intriguing connection took shape between
his scientific materialism and the rediscovery of Epicureanism in turn-of-the-
century Europe, Italy included. In Florence the philosopher Gaetano Trezza had
published Epicuro e l’epicureismo (1877), which draws inspiration from the
Greek model not only to support a mechanical and atomistic theory of reality,
free of any transcendental or rational design, but also to call for an ethics
founded upon the harmony and freedom deriving from the aesthetic realm. The
appeal of Epicurus to Mantegazza appears evident in the recurrence of allusions
to the Greek philosopher in his works both before and after Trezza’s study, from
the ‘Decalogo di Epicuro’ in Fisiologia del piacere to Igiene di Epicuro, as well
as in the treatises Gli amori degli uomini and L’arte di essere felici and the novel
Il Dio ignoto. Whereas Trezza’s Epicureanism corresponded to scientific
scepticism as a defence against sentiment, however, Mantegazza asserts the
centrality of aesthetic experience founded upon the materialism of sensual
pleasure and having priority over rational and moral issues. Not accidentally, his
physiology of the beautiful explains that ‘the true and wise Epicureanism
consists of the love, adoration and study of the beautiful, the only God that never
sets in mankind’s sky.’82 The apparent adhesion to the experimental method
suggested by the title promises a treatment of beauty as a natural and
quantifiable phenomenon, yet in the very first pages of the volume Mantegazza
claims that in aesthetics it is not possible to find ‘science’s serene contemplation,
the pure and simple description of facts’ (p. 483), but rather enthusiasm and
passion. And indeed the highly scientific terminology soon loses its proper sense
and becomes figurative. Opening up the language of formalization to pathos,
Mantegazza defines man as an ‘aesthetic molecule,’ and thus as an elementary
synthesis of a beauty that, in its turn, is ‘the true plus x’ (p. 496), where the
unknown variable x is the powerful factor that confers value on all things.
For Mantegazza, the beautiful is, in particular, ‘human nature’s luxury’ (p.
500), that is, a superfluous and excessive manifestation, devoid of practical
utility. Precisely owing to the superiority of the beautiful to other human
experiences, Epicurus moves away from an avowedly democratic vision83 and
subjects the aesthetic realm to the laws of a social Darwinism that takes on
uncanny Nietzschean resonances: ‘The common herd of artists and writers (who
are also artists) always follow universal consensus; but the elect among them
follow the immortal criterion of the true and the beautiful, protesting against the
brute right of the majority or imposing their judgment on them, until they have
transformed the minority into the majority. The common herd turn art into an
industry, which prospers only with the consensus of the many; the elect make art
a religion and prefer to be its martyrs rather than its sacristans’ (p. 498). It is
therefore the responsibility of the very few –who, for Mantegazza, embody the
‘essentially and eternally aristocratic’(p. 498) nature of human society – to
reform the aesthetic standards of a nation and generation whenever bad taste
contaminates authentic beauty. Accordingly, if the beautiful itself becomes ‘the
grandest creator of progress’ (p. 499), such progress does not correspond to the
rectilinear and unidirectional movement of biological evolution or economic
advancement but rather to the pattern created by those individuals and peoples
who cultivate disinterested emotional expenditure against crass utilitarianism
and rational speculation. As Mantegazza also claims in Le estasi umane, the
peoples who adored the beautiful ‘more or better than others were ahead of
everybody else along the road to progress, were the precursors of civilization,
and, even when tired, will form the aristocracy of the vast multitude of human
creatures.’84
 The patriotism of the author of Epicurus is founded precisely upon
recognition of the nobility and power that derive from the purposelessness of
beauty. Italy, accounting for its supreme artistic sense, can boast of its enduring
aura as ‘the first and the finest heir of Greek civilization’ and, thanks to ‘the
blood of Phidias and Apelles’ (p. 501) still flowing through its veins, can dictate
law in aesthetic matters. Paradoxically, Epicurus thus ends up challenging the
productive and instrumental underpinnings of its very materialistic foundation,
tinging Mantegazza’s position with the hues of an aestheticist elitism that
weakens merely scientific optimism, as we can see more evidently in several
other works of Mantegazza’s last phase.

Altough it is not possible in the context of this volume to provide an exhaustive

overview of Mantegazza’s many other intellectual loves, we have included
among our selections brief passages from several other representative works that
delineate the complexity and also the evolution of our author’s position as a
science fiction writer, educator, and political and cultural critic. Quite different in
genre and in their objectives, these texts nevertheless offer more instances of
Mantegazza’s ultimate problematization of those typical aspects of modernity
rapidly spreading in an Italy attempting to keep pace with the rest of Europe.
In The Neurosic Century (1887) and The Tartuffe Century (1888),
Mantegazza applies his skills as a pathologist to the social body as a whole in a
colourful discussion of what for him are the collective diseases of his century,
namely, neurosism and hypocrisy. He does so through the creation of two
fictional characters who, as we may gather from their symptomatic names, Tito
Nervosetti and Nervina Convulsi, embody the symptoms of their epoch. The
physiognomy of the nineteenth-century as sketched by Mantegazza in The
Neurosic Century is that of an unstable and chaotic state affecting the most
diverse aspects of life, from the frantic and violent life in cities to the difficult
working conditions in factories, the lethargy of institutions (schools above all),
and the frequent mental alienation of individuals. In the metaphor of
degeneration, a hallmark of intellectual debates in late nineteenth-century
Europe, The Tartuffe Century combines the physical degradation of society with
the moral underpinnings of its hypocrisy, seen as a consequence of the
contradictions and tensions of what for Mantegazza is a transitional period: the
unworthy heir of the ideals of the French Revolution, the nineteenth century is
covering a void without being able to provide certainties.
Mantegazza hence felt a need to promote changes not only by healing bodies,
but also by modifying the mentality of his people, particularly the new
generations. As an educator he had already written Head: or, Sowing Ideas to
Create New Deeds (1877), a curiously hybrid text, at once novel, conduct book,
and essay on practical philosophy for the young, preaching a balance of
emotional, moral, and rational qualities. The title intentionally establishes a
connection with Edmondo De Amicis’s Cuore, arguably the most popular novel
of united Italy: Mantegazza wants to provide an alternative to the blatantly
sentimental and pietistic vision of his predecessor’s best-seller, by inviting his
readers to integrate the impulses of the pure heart with those of the intellect. The
continuity with and differences from Cuore are evident in the plot: the
protagonist is the very Enrico Bottini featured in De Amicis’s novel, who,
infected with a respiratory illness that may indicate the onset of tuberculosis (we
see here the re-emergence of one of Mantegazza’s main public health concerns),
is sent to spend a long period on the Ligurian Riviera at the house of his uncle
Baciccia (or, we should say, his uncle Mantegazza, since it is clearly the author’s
personality and ideas that are embodied by this character), in contact with nature
and far from books and the stress of urban life. Baciccia, an experienced sailor
with rigorous moral and rational principles, undertakes the task of helping his
nephew build a strong personality, through the cultivation of love and generosity
as much as through physical exercise, nutritional hygiene, and observation of
nature and of social reality. The book alternates dialogues between Enrico and
his uncle with long personal recollections by Baciccia that function as moral
parables on such diverse themes as the acquisition of courage, respect for the
natural elements, religious pluralism, patriotic love, and professional choices.
Enrico’s responses to such teachings are translated into a monthly ‘Calendar of
Goodness,’ in which the boy records his own daily resolutions on the basis of the
principles he has learned. With this device Mantegazza turns Head into an
interactive book: after the January pages, the calendar is intentionally left blank
so that readers can fill in their own, individual reactions to the monthly
preachings. Needless to say, Enrico fully recovers, and with him – we can
surmise – all those who follow Baciccia’s advice.85
Mantegazza’s public role as a scholar and educator also accounts for his
involvement in politics. Indeed, his parliamentary interventions tackled urgent
problems in the Italian school and university system (the low standards of high
schools, the proliferation of small and mediocre universities, the inadequate
remuneration of academic faculty) as well as equally crucial health issues, such
as the relationship between the unsanitary conditions of rice workers and the
diffusion of malaria, at a moment when the connection between wetlands and the
causes of the disease was still not evident.86 But the overall tone of
Mantegazza’s autobiographical account of his experience as a deputy and
senator, Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament (1896), is
one of disillusion and resentment, tinged with cynicism. Mantegazza soon
realized that he was not cut out for what he perceived as the scheming and the
ruthless power games of the governing class. His ideals and his political agenda
did not gain wide support because his vision was often too far-seeing. The
awareness of his strangeness to the world of professional politicians and their
manipulations is translated into the critical, ironic detachment of an observer
who, by recovering his original identity as a scientist, examines, from within, the
bizarre behaviour of inferior creatures, applying his taxonomic mania to the
parliamentary exemplars of what emerges more as a zoo than a governmental
organism.
But if the concrete reality of the present did not always provide Mantegazza
with adequate conditions in which to accomplish his projects, his ideas and
ideals ultimately converged in a fiction of the future. Taking a big step beyond
the merely geographical displacement of his previous travels, in The Year 3000:
A Dream (1897) Mantegazza embarked upon a voyage to a utopian thirty-first
century through two characters, Paolo and Maria (not accidentally the first
names of the author and of his second wife, Countess Maria Fantoni), who, after
a five-year liaison, are flying from Rome (at the time the capital of the United
States of Europe) to Andropolis, the capital of the United Planetary States, where
they will celebrate their wedding and request authorization to have children. An
intriguing work of science fiction, the novel transposes to the new framework,
many of the situations and issues its author had tackled in previous works, but
recombines them in a story imbued with the ferments of a fin de siècle in which
cutting-edge scientific and technical findings (electricity, for instance) blend
with spiritualistic and paranormal elements. Not only is life in the year 3000
made easier by such means of transportation as the ‘aerotach’; even nervous
illnesses can be treated thanks to the ‘psychoscope,’ an instrument that scans
human thought. With an optimism that compensates Mantegazza for his
disenchanting political experience in the Italian parliament, the novel delineates
a world ruled by an efficient government, with no bureaucratic absurdities or
interference from the Church. In Andropolis, divorce is granted to everybody,
women have the power to vote, and medical science has made notable advances
thanks to the inhabitants’ massive response in matters of public health (a sign of
Mantegazza’s self-complacency for the enduring success of his popularizing
initiatives). Last but not least, the population’s overall physical condition has
improved remarkably owing to the suppression of newborns suffering from
hereditary illnesses.
Many of these inventions and predictions would uncannily hit their targets,
such as the instrument that magnifies brain cells (the Mantegazzian prototype of
a CAT scan, as has been observed)87 and the great and terrible conflict that
would destroy European nations (the First World War was two decades away).
The implications of Mantegazza’s vision of a federation of European states and
of their subsequent merge into a planetary organization for our current debates
on Europeanization and globalization are evident, just as his ultimate eugenetic
solutions raise paramount moral questions about abortion and euthanasia that are
still very much with us.
From the years in which Freudian psychoanalysis was elaborating the notion
of dream as wish fulfilment, this dream of the year 3000 reveals Mantegazza’s
most authentic personal interests and desires, well beyond the many and
conflicting voices that rise from his numerous other popularizing and moralistic
texts. His is a questionable, provocative, and at times disquieting vision, but
certainly not an obvious one.

With his fertile imagination, extraordinary insights, intriguing contradictions,

and grotesque limitations (among them a frequent lack of what we now call
political correctness), the hyperactive and versatile Paolo Mantegazza is the sum
of all the diverse roles and characters explored here, but also much more. The
issues raised by the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi about his colleague’s
accomplishments may serve by way of a conclusion. Was Mantegazza a real
scientist? Was he an authentic genius, or simply a dispersive, albeit brilliant,
experimenter, with an excellent nose for laurels? Does he deserve to be
remembered only as the creator of the Society of Anthropology, as Sergi
presumes? An earlier forecast by Mantegazza himself offers an incisive reply: ‘I
am convinced that to my excessive popularity, certainly superior to my merits,
there will follow, during my lifetime or soon after my death, an unjust reaction. I
hope, however, that after that reaction I will float again, but it will be as a
psychologist and observer of human nature.’88
The final answer, of course, is up to the readers of this collection, and our
hope is that they will be infected by the enthusiasm spurting from our author’s
pages. But no matter what reactions the material generates, we believe that a
picture of nineteenth-century Italy without a touch of Mantegazza’s personality
and writings is truly incomplete.

NICOLETTA PIREDDU
 A Note on the Texts and Their Translations

A cultural icon like Paolo Mantegazza, whose face at one point was even
featured on the boxes of an Italian brand of matches, not surprisingly was also
widely translated. The bibliography of his writings published by Erasmo
Ehrenfreund in 1926, fifteen years after Mantegazza’s death, confirms not only
that Mantegazza continued to be read, reprinted, reviewed, and quoted profusely
in his homeland but also that he enjoyed a growing fame abroad. The Italian first
edition of his first book-length work, Fisiologia del piacere, was immediately
followed by a Spanish translation of some excerpts – an early intimation of an
international appeal that would soon be consolidated with full-length unabridged
translations in Spanish (Buenos Aires), German (Leipzig), French (Brussels and
Paris), Polish (Warsaw), and Bohemian (Prague) by 1893. An 1890 Russian
translation also exists, which Ehrenfreund does not record.
This beginning was symptomatic of the diffusion and reception of
Mantegazza’s most popular volumes. Whereas the essay on coca became a
milestone in the history of stimulants in its original language (apart from certain
excerpts translated into French and German, published in various European
medical journals), thanks only to reviews and honourable mentions from Naples
to Berlin, London, Buenos Aires, and Virginia,89 Fisiologia dell’amore was
reprinted several times in Italy in just a few years, a trend that would not easily
be arrested (Ehrenfreund lists at least fourteen different Italian editions in a fifty-
year span). And the frenzy abroad seems no less intense, if, in addition to the
many reviews in European journals soon after the volume’s publication, we take
into account the multiple translations into German, French, Spanish, Bohemian,
Portuguese, and Russian, many of which were enriched by prefaces written by
Mantegazza himself or biographical profiles of him composed by his wife,
Maria.
A similar success was reserved for Un giorno a Madera. After the immediate
exhaustion of the 1,500 copies of the first edition that Mantegazza had printed at
his own expense, the novel reached its thirty-eighth edition in 1920. Having
started as a best-seller, it was consecrated as a veritable classic from the year of
Mantegazza’s death, when it began to be included in great authors’ series. The
rest of the world responded no less enthusiastically, with translations in Spanish,
Croatian, French, German, Dutch, and Portuguese.
The international impact of Mantegazza’s travelogues, however, was far more
negligible. No foreign translation of Un viaggio in Lapponia seems to exist,
whereas records indicate an 1885 German translation of India (interestingly,
published only a year after the first Italian edition), and, curiously, the Library of
Congress Catalogue indicates an 1897 Hebrew translation.90 Likewise, the
resonance of Ricordi politici di un fantaccino del parlamento italiano, despite
Italian and foreign reviews, remained confined to Mantegazza’s homeland.
Beyond the complex question as to whether the intrinsic aesthetic and
intellectual value of those texts may have played a role in their uneven
circulation, it is probably not too far-fetched to claim that the more personal,
autobiographical works by Mantegazza understandably could not exert the
strong appeal of essays on supposedly universal (albeit controversial) questions
like love and pleasure – which highlight Mantegazza’s talent as an initiator of
new social practices – or of sensational novels that could stimulate the
audience’s imagination and threreby transcend cultural boundaries more easily.
Additional evidence of this rather predictable divide between ‘private’ and
‘public’ genres in Mantegazza may be provided by the fortunes of the other texts
included in our volume. Within two years after its first Italian edition, Epicuro
was translated into German, Bohemian, and Portuguese. An even greater
popularity was attained by Il secolo nevrosico, available in German, Swedish,
Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese within a year of the publication of its original
version. Similarly, Il secolo tartufo was speedily translated into German,
English, Polish, Spanish, and Portuguese. Testa appeared in German, Croatian,
English, Polish, Spanish (first in Madrid in 1905, then in Chile in 1934), and
even Yiddish (1933), and L’anno 3000 became available in Russian (within a
year of its Italian first edition) and Portuguese.
Within this bountiful international proliferation of Mantegazza’s works,
English translations were surprisingly scarce, as both Ehrenfreund’s
bibliography and the major foreign library catalogues show, despite
Mantegazza’s remarkable visibility in British and American intellectual milieux.
By 1908, only three of Mantegazza’s texts were available in English in Great
Britain: Physiognomy and Expression, The Art of Taking a Wife, and The
Legends of Flowers. The United States, for its part, seemed more hospitable to
Mantegazza even before his American tour. The Tartuffian Age (Boston 1889,
1890) and Testa: A Book for Boys (Boston, 1889) were followed by three
translations of Fisiologia dell’amore – The Physiology of Love (New York:
Cleveland Publishing Co., 1894), The Book of Love (New York: American Neo-
Latin Library, 1917), and The Physiology of Love (New York: Eugenics
Publishing Co., 1936) – and by The Legends of Flowers, by various editions of
Physiognomy and Expression and of The Sexual Relations of Mankind, and even
by Laura: A Study of Platonic Love, a section of Mantegazza’s original Italian Le
Tre Grazie.
A best-selling author until the 1930s, Mantegazza almost disappeared from
the international cultural panorama soon thereafter, apart from a few scattered
international records.91 Though foreign translations kept Mantegazza’s
popularity alive, in Italy his star set during the decades of the Fascist regime. Not
until the 1970s were the long-buried works of the father of Italian anthropology
exhumed. At that point, spurred by post-1968 liberal social practices, the new
interest in Mantegazza was confined mainly to the works that directly tackle
issues of sexuality, with the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the unilateral
reputation as a sexologist that Mantegazza had gained during his lifetime.92 This
one-sided interpretation of the author’s intellectual production was substantiated
by the often misleading titles of his translated books. The choices underlying
foreign renditions of Gli amori degli uomini, for instance, were particularly
revealing and influential in the construction of a sexually obsessed Mantegazza.
The rather neutral and general Italian title became, in English, The Sexual
Relations of Mankind, and, in Spanish, Amor mundano, and even, in a 1980
English Canadian version, Sexual Taboos; brought to the foreground, therefore,
were the sexual, provocative, and transgressive aspects of Mantegazza’s wider
object of study. Similarly, when Fisiologia dell’amore became Los secretos del
amor in an 1899 Spanish translation (Ehrenfreud 71) and The Book of Love in
English, it lost all reference to the medical and anthropological (however
questionable) framework that Mantegazza had built for his investigation, and
privileged the more sensational and almost mystical underpinnings of the love
experience.

Confronted with such a wide array of precedents, for the present volume we
have made translation choices and editorial decisions that strive to respect and
reproduce, whenever possible, Mantegazza’s style.
The unabridged English translation of Fisiologia dell’amore is based on The
Physiology of Love (New York: Cleveland Publishing Co., 1894) with only slight
modifications.5 The Italian reference text is Fisiologia dell’amore (4th ed.
Florence: Bemporad, 1880).
On the Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine
Nourishment in General is based on ‘Sulle virtù igieniche e medicinali della
coca,’ Annali universali di medicina 167, fasc. 501 (March 1859): 449–519.
From the original Italian we have omitted the long classifications of nervous
elements on pp. 454–65, and chapter 5, ‘Osservazioni pratiche sull’azione
terapeutica della coca,’ pp. 505–19.
The excerpts from One Day in Madeira: A Page in the Hygiene of Love are
based on Un giorno a Madera (Genova: ECIG, 1991), pp. 40–1, 51–8, 69–77,
84–8, 107–16, and 160–72.
The excerpts from A Voyage to Lapland with My Friend Stephen Sommier
correspond to the following sections of Un viaggio in Lapponia coll’amico
Stephen Sommier (Milan: Brigola, 1881): chapter 1, pp. 7–29; chapter 2, pp. 43–
70; chapter 4, pp. 103–14; and chapter 5, pp. 115–28, 133–5, 158–65, 168–70,
172, and 178–9.
The excerpts from India correspond to the following sections of India (4th ed.
Milan: Treves, 1888): chapter 1, pp. 1–6; chapter 2, pp. 35–42; chapter 5, pp.
121–3; chapter 6, pp. 137–44; chapter 7, pp. 165–75 and 180–1; chapter 9, pp.
214–22, 231–2; 238–60, and 266–9; chapter 11, pp. 285–99; chapter 13, pp.
327–39; and chapter 15, pp. 391–9.
The excerpts from Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
correspond to the following sections of Epicuro, saggio di una fisiologia del
bello (Milan: Treves, 1891): chapter 1, pp. 3–39; chapter 2, pp. 43–8; chapter 6,
pp. 190–4; chapter 8, pp. 236–45.
The excerpts from The Neurosic Century correspond to Il secolo nevrosico
(Florence: Barbera, 1887), pp. 58–60.
The excerpts from The Tartuffe Century correspond to Il secolo tartufo
(Milan: Treves, 1889), pp. 59, 62,147–9.
The excerpts from Head: or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds correspond
to Testa ovvero Seminare idee perché nascano opere (Naples: Colonnese, 1993),
pp. 152, 156, and 230.
The excerpts from Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian
Parliament correspond to Ricordi politici di un fantaccino del parlamento
italiano (Florence: Bemporad, 1897), pp. 232–7.
The excerpts from The Year 3000: A Dream correspond to L’anno 3000.
Sogno (Bergamo: Lubrina, 1988), pp. 23–4.
As a farewell in keeping with the nature and purpose of this volume, we have
included a final excerpt – ‘The Psychology of Translations,’ from ‘Psicologia
delle traduzioni,’ in Parvulae, pagine sparse di Paolo Mantegazza (Milan:
Treves, 1910), pp. 103–6 – that gives voice to Mantegazza’s insightful forecast
and desire for a world more interconnected as a result of intercultural
communication. Our hope is that, thanks to translation, Mantegazza’s writings
will continue to travel across linguistic and cultural borders.

Every effort has been made to provide explanations of uncommon names,

situations, and textual references in Mantegazza’s works that may not be easily
accessible to readers. In several instances it has not been possible to identify a
person or place, the correct meaning of a foreign word, or the precise source of a
quotation owing to Mantegazza’s erratic and often inexact transliteration and his
lack of bibliographical accuracy. Much material for the textual notes was drawn
from Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and the
American Heritage Dictionary. Any errors or omissions are entirely the editor’s
responsibility. Similarly, the records of Italian editions and foreign translations
of Mantegazza’s works are sometimes incomplete, incorrect, or contradictory.
Although not exhaustive, the evidence here provided is indicative of the overall
critical fortunes and international diffusion of Mantegazza’s massive production.
Most of the information about translations has been drawn from Erasmo
Ehrenfreund’s Bibliografia degli scritti di Paolo Mantegazza, Index
Translationum, the online databases WorldCat and RLIN, and the catalogues of
the United States Library of Congress, the British Library, and the National
Library in Florence.
NICOLETTA PIREDDU
 Translator’s Note
on Revising the Existing Translation
of The Physiology of Love

Since the base translation (New York: Cleveland Publishing Co., 1894) is
generally excellent and seemed quite faithful to the style of Mantegazza in all its
precision and bluster, I (and we) chose not to destroy its period charm. But I did
modernize some spellings and punctuation (‘to-morrow’ becomes ‘tomorrow,’
‘subtile’ becomes ‘subtle’, etc.).
On reading the translation line for line against the original, I discovered some
apparent misunderstandings of Italian words. Unless early in the last century the
English word ‘lagoon’ meant a gap or lacuna and not a swamp or bog, ‘the
lagoon which must be filled’ should read ‘the gap’ (p. 181), and ‘this glorious
lagoon left by modesty’ should read ‘lacuna’ (p. 190).
Similarly, unless the English ‘limb’ once stood for the Italian limbo, ‘they
drag out a wretched existence in the limb of bastard affections’ should surely
read ‘the limbo of bastard affections’ (p. 161). And likewise in the case of the
English ‘arena’: ‘the arena of the sea’ should probably read ‘the sand of the
seashore’ on pp. 161 and 247.
I have kept ‘germ’ on p. 113, rather than replacing it with ‘seed,’ since the
surrounding pages speak positively of the ‘germinative’. Throughout the text
‘germ’ thus retains the positive association with ‘germination’ rather than
suggesting microbes (p. 194: ‘germs are animated …’). But it seemed better to
change ‘woman, custodian of germs’, with its grotesque suggestion of the
breeding of infection, to ‘custodian of seeds’ on p. 124.
Throughout the translation I have also tried to reduce cognate word choices
where they might sound uncertain or lazy. Appropriately in a physiology of love,
there is much mention of ‘il nudo,’ but in the 1894 translation this is rendered as
‘nude’ and never ‘naked’, which perhaps was too raw a word for the time. But if
one bears in mind Kenneth Clark’s art-historical distinction between the naked
and the nude (essentially, the natural vs the cultural body), one must replace the
phrase ‘it is born nude’ with ‘it is born naked’ on pp. 276–7. No human, to
exaggerate Clark’s distinction perhaps, is born nude, one becomes nude – as a
model, say, for a painter. So I have tried to vary the usage between ‘nude’ and
‘naked’.
Certain phrases seemed needlessly latinate and too close to the Italian
original. For example, ‘oscillate suavely’ seemed preposterous as against, say,
‘waver gently’ (p. 127). So I have made changes as follows:

p. 95: preserve your scorn: save your scorn [much more ‘spoken’ and
direct]; and p. 233: he strives to preserve his heart pure [very
unidiomatic]: … keep his heart pure
p. 116: rosy as the aurora: rosy as the dawn

p. 120: traduces: betrays

p. 133: adherent things: pertinent things

p. 178: the quadrature of the circle: the squaring …

p. 191: cerated varnish: waxen varnish

p. 227: the crepuscule of rising love: the twilights …

p. 282: the balance suspended: the balance hung

p. 296: a scourge without balsam: … without balm

p. 300: insupportable: unbearable

p. 301: [the Italianized] Tartufo: [the better-known French] Tartuffe

I have also changed what would be a confusing use of ‘to prostitute oneself ‘,
where the author means to frequent prostitutes. Thus ‘men who prostitute
themselves’ would be outrageously wrong, so becomes ‘men who seek out
prostitutes’ (p. 265); and the odd ‘the elect never prostitute themselves’ becomes
‘resort to prostitution’ (p. 271), where I assume it will be understood that
‘resorting to (frequenting) prostitutes’ is meant.
I have also trimmed what seemed redundancy in a few cases:

p. 98: If it is true: If
p. 130: wild savage fruit: wild fruit

p. 131: a cup which we prefer to any other: a favourite cup

p. 149: it consequently follows: it follows

Finally, I have adapted some phrases to suit contemporary, or simpler and

spoken, usage:

p. 101: I have arrested my steps: … halted my steps

p. 104: the velvet body of his beloved one: his beloved’s … body

p. 106: simulating indifference: feigning …

p. 107: feathers disarranged: … mussed

p. 153: wrench away her wings: tear away her wings

p. 154: of entire humanity: of all humanity

p. 174: reflected actions: reflex actions

p. 185: avidious: avid

p. 260: a want of the senses: a need of the senses

DAVID JACOBSON
 Suggestions for Further Reading

First Editions of Mantegazza’s Selected Works

For reasons of space, we have listed only Mantegazza’s best-known books and
articles (in chronological order), and omitted many scientific publications in
specialized journals, as well as shorter interventions, such as review articles, that
appeared in popularizing cultural magazines. For a more exhaustive panorama of
Mantegazza’s production, see Ehrenfreund, Bibliografia degli scritti di Paolo
Mantegazza.

Fisiologia del piacere. Milan: Bernardoni, 1854.

Sull’America meridionale. Lettere mediche. Milan: Chiusi, 1858 (vol. 1), 1860
(vol. 2).
‘Sulle virtù igieniche e medicinali della coca e sugli alimenti nervosi in
generale.’ Annali universali di medicina 167, fasc. 501 (March 1859): 449–519.
‘La scienza e l’arte della vita in Francia.’ La Nuova Antologia 9 (1868): 697–
713.
Il bene e il male, libro per tutti. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1861.
Ordine e libertà. Conversazioni di politica popolare. Milan: Bernardoni, 1864.
Elementi d’igiene. Milan: Brigola, 1865.
Igiene della cucina. Milan: Brigola, 1865.
Rio della Plata e Tenerife. Viaggi e studi. Milan: Brigola, 1867.
Un giorno a Madera, una pagina dell’igiene dell’amore. Milan: Brigola, 1868.
Igiene della pelle. Milan: Bernardoni, 1868.
Igiene della bellezza. Milan: Brigola, 1869.
Le glorie e le gioie del lavoro. Milan: Maisner, 1870.
Profili e paesaggi della Sardegna. Milan: Brigola, 1870.
Dizionario delle scienze mediche. With Alfonso Corradi and Giulio Bizzozero.
Milan: Brigola, 1871–75.
Quadri della natura umana. Feste ed ebbrezze. Milan: Bernardoni, 1871.
‘L’elezione sessuale e la neogenesi. Lettera a Carlo Darwin.’ Archivio per
l’antropologia e l’etnologia 3 (1871): 306–25.
Igiene di Epicuro. Milan: Brigola, 1871.
Fisiologia dell’amore. Milano: Brigola, 1873.
‘L’uomo e gli uomini. Saggio di una etnologia naturale.’ Introduction in Enrico
H. Giglioli, Viaggio intorno al globo della R. pirocorvetta italiana Magenta.
Milan: Maisner, 1875. Pp. xv–xxvi.
Atlante delle espressioni del dolore. Fotografie prese dal vero e da molte altre
opere d’arte. Florence: Brogi, 1876.
Il Dio ignoto. Milan: Brigola, 1876.
La mia mamma, Laura Solera Mantegazza. Milan: Brigola, 1876.
Igiene del nido. Milan: Brigola, 1876.
Igiene dell’età. Milan: Brigola, 1877.
Igiene dell’amore. Milan: Brigola, 1878.
La mia tavolozza. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1878.
Igiene dei climi. Milan: Brigola, 1878.
Upilio Faimali, memorie di un domatore di belve. Milan: Brigola, 1879.
Fisiologia del dolore. Florence: Poggi, 1880.
Un viaggio in Lapponia coll’amico Stephen Sommier. Milan: Brigola, 1881.
Igiene del lavoro. Milan: Brigola, 1881.
Fisionomia e mimica. Milan: Dumolard, 1881.
Dizionario d’igiene per le famiglie. With Neera. Milan: Brigola, 1881.
Piccolo dizionario della cucina. Milan: Brigola, 1882.
Commemorazione di Carlo Darwin. Florence: Arte della Stampa, 1882.
Note autobiografiche. Florence: Carnesecchi, 1882.
Le Tre Grazie, amori platonici. Milan: Brigola, 1883.
Un bacio in tre, osservazioni di psicologia. Milan: Voghera, 1883.
L’arte di non ammalare. Milan: Brigola, 1883.
India. Milan: Treves, 1884.
L’arte di campar vecchi. Milan: Brigola, 1885.
Gli amori degli uomini, saggio di etnologia dell’amore. Milan: Treves, 1886.
Le estasi umane. Milan: Treves, 1886.
L’arte di essere felici. Florence: Barbera, 1886.
‘Studii sull’etnologia dell’India.’ Florence: Società Italiana di Antropologia,
1886.
Il secolo nevrosico. Florence: Barbera, 1887.
Testa. Milan: Treves, 1887.
Il secolo tartufo. Milan: Treves, 1888.
Fisiologia dell’odio. Milan: Treves, 1889.
Le leggende dei fiori. Milan: Dumolard, 1890.
Epicuro, saggio di una fisiologia del bello. Milan: Treves, 1891.
L’arte di prender moglie. Milan: Treves, 1891.
Dizionario delle cose belle. Milan: Treves, 1892.
Fisiologia della donna. Milan: Treves, 1893.
L’arte di prender marito. Milan: Treves, 1894.
Ricordi di Spagna e dell’America spagnuola. Milan: Treves, 1894.
Elogio della vecchiaia. Milan: Treves, 1895.
L’anno 3000. Sogno. Milan: Treves, 1897.
Ricordi politici di un fantaccino del parlamento italiano. Florence: Bemporad,
1897.
I caratteri umani. Milan: Treves, 1898.
Il libro delle malinconie. Florence: Bemporad, 1901.
Igiene della morale e la morale dell’igiene. Milan: Treves, 1901.
‘Trent’anni di storia della Società Italiana di Antropologia, Etnologia e
Psicologia Comparata.’ Archivio per l’antropologia e l’etnologia 31 (1901). In
memoria del XXXo Anno della Società Italiana d’Antropologia. Florence:
Salvatore Landi, 1901. Pp. 1–7.
‘Nuovi fatti in appoggio della Pangenesi di Darwin.’ Archivio per l’antropologia
e l’etnologia (1904): 189–91.
‘Darwin dopo cinquant’anni.’ Archivio per l’antropologia e l’etnologia (1905):
311–22.
Le donne del mio tempo. Rome: Voghera, 1905.
La bibbia della speranza. Torino: STEN, 1909.
L’anima delle cose. Torino: STEN, 1910.
Parvulae, pagine sparse di Paolo Mantegazza. Milan: Treves, 1910.
Lezioni di antropologia 1870–1910. Archivio per l’antropologia e l’etnologia
119 (1989).

Selected Critical Works on Mantegazza

Armenise, Gabriella. ‘Paolo Mantegazza: il patrocinatore di un’educazione alla

sessualità responsabile.’ In Paolo Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’amore, ed.
Gabriella Armenise. Lecce: Pensa, 2003. Pp.vii–lxxx.
– Amore eros educazione in Paolo Mantegazza. Lecce: Pensa, 2005.
Arslan, Antonia, and Margherita Ganazzoli. ‘Neera e Paolo Mantegazza: storia
di una collaborazione (con 32 lettere inedite).’ Rassegna della letteratura
italiana 87:1–2 (January – August 1983): 102–24.
Boni, Monica. L’erotico senatore. Vita e studi di Paolo Mantegazza. Genova:
Name, 2002.
Cavalli Pasini, Annamaria. La scienza nel romanzo. Romanzo e cultura
scientifica tra Otto e Novecento. Bologna: Patron, 1982.
Chiarelli, Cosimo, and Walter Pasini eds. Paolo Mantegazza: medico,
antropologo, viaggiatore. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2002.
Chiarelli, Cosimo, and Susanna Weber, eds. Etnie. La scuola antropologica
fiorentina e la fotografia tra ‘800 e ‘900. Florence: Alinari, 1996.
Ciruzzi, Sara. ‘Le collezioni del Museo Psicologico di Paolo Mantegazza a cento
anni dalla sua inaugurazione.’ Archivio per l’antropologia e la etnologia 121
(1991): 185–202.
Citro, Ernesto. ‘India di Paolo Mantegazza.’ Esperienze letterarie 4 (October –
December 2002): 59–78.
Clemente, P., et al., eds. L’antropologia italiana. Un secolo di storia. Bari:
Laterza, 1985.
Croce, Benedetto. ‘Scienziati-letterati.’ In Croce, La letteratura della nuova
Italia, vol. 6. Bari: Laterza, 1957. Pp. 49–54.
DeCaprio, Caterina. ‘Testa e le intenzioni pedagogiche di Paolo Mantegazza.’
Problemi: periodico quadrimestrale di cultura 98 (September – December
1993): 248–58.
De Gubernatis, Angelo, ed. Dizionario biografico degli scrittori contemporanei.
Florence: LeMonnier, 1879.
Ehrenfreund, Erasmo. Bibliografia degli scritti di Paolo Mantegazza. Florence:
Stabilimento Grafico Commerciale, 1926.
Frati, Emanuela. Le carte e la biblioteca di Paolo Mantegazza. Florence: Giunta
Regionale Toscana; Milan: Bibliografica, 1991.
Govoni, Paola. Un pubblico per la scienza. La divulgazione scientifica
nell’Italia in formazione. Rome: Carocci, 2002.
Haeberle, Erwin J. ‘Sexology: From Italy to Europe and the World.’ In
C. Simonelli, F. Petruccelli, and V. Vizzari. Sessualità e terzo millennio. Studi e
ricerche in sessuologia clinica, vol. 1, ed. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997. Pp.13–
22.
Horch, Hans Otto. ‘Fontane und das kranke Jahrhundert: Theodor Fontanes
Beziehungen zu den Kulturkritikern Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Nordau und Paolo
Mantegazza.’ In Literatur und Theater im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter, ed. Hans-
Peter Bayerdorfer, Karl Otto Conrady, and Helmut Schanze. Tubingen:
Niemeyer, 1978. Pp. 1–34.
Hudde, Hinrich. ‘Zwischen Utopie und Antiutopie: Mantegazzas L’anno 3000.’
Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 212 (1975): 77–
94.
Landucci, Giovanni. Darwinismo a Firenze. Tra scienza e ideologia (1860–
1900). Florence: Olschki, 1977.
– L’occhio e la mente. Scienze e filosofia nell’Italia del secondo Ottocento.
Florence: Olschki, 1987.
Lessona, Adele. ‘Notizia letteraria. Un giorno a Madera. Una pagina dell’igiene
d’amore di Paolo Mantegazza.’ Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti 10
(February 1869): 396–401.
Marchioni, Massimo. ‘Scienza e invenzione narrativa: i romanzi di Paolo
Mantegazza.’ Ipotesi 14:2 (1985): 3–53.
Mariotti, Giovanni. ‘“Amore mio, ti ha detto nulla Mantegazza?” ‘L’Espresso 25
(24) (1979):146–55.
Meregalli, Franco. ‘Paolo Mantegazza e l’America.’ Rassegna di iberistica 79
(February 2004): 67–8.
Millefiorini, Federica. ‘Quattro lettere inedite di Paolo Mantegazza a Edmondo
De Amicis.’ Rivista di letteratura italiana 2–3 (2001): 173–86.
Misano, Grazia. ‘Paolo Mantegazza: mito e realtà del “senatore erotico.”’ In
‘Trivialliteratur?’ Letterature di massa e di consumo, ed. AA. VV. Trieste: LINT,
1979. Pp. 301–36.
Papini, Giovanni. Passato remoto 1885–1914. Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1984.
Pardini, Edoardo, and Sandra Mainardi. ‘Il Museo Psicologico di Paolo
Mantegazza.’ Archivio per l’antropologia e l’etnologia 121 (1991): 137-84.
Pasini, Walter. Paolo Mantegazza, ovvero L’elogio dell’eclettismo. Rimini:
Panozzo Editore, 1999.
Pireddu, Nicoletta. ‘Paolo Mantegazza.’ In Biographical Dictionary of Literary
Influences: The Nineteenth Century, 1800–1914, ed. J. Powell and D. Blakeley.
Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Pp. 273–4.
– ‘The Anthropological Roots of Italian Cultural Studies.’ In Italian Cultural
Studies, ed. Graziella Parati, and Ben Lawton. Boca Raton, FL: Bordighera,
2001. Pp. 66–88.
– Ethnos/Hedon/Ethos: Paolo Mantegazza, antropologo delle passioni.’ In
Pireddu, Antropologi alla corte della bellezza: decadenza ed economia
simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle. Verona: Fiorini, 2002. Pp. 131–84.
– ‘Primitive Marks of Modernity: Cultural Reconfigurations in the Franco-
Italian fin de siècle.’ Romanic Review 97 (2006): 3–4. Special issue, ‘Italy and
France: Imagined Geographies.’ Pp. 371–400.
Portinari, Folco. ‘Amore e igiene nello scenario delle isole tropicali.’ In
Portinari, Le parabole del reale. Torino: Einaudi, 1976. Pp. 129–35.
Puccini, Sandra. ‘Il terreno della ricerca e le due anime dell’etnoantropologia.
Dall’Argentina di Paolo Mantegazza al Gran Ciaco di Guido Boggiani (1854–
1901).’ In Puccini, Andare lontano. Viaggi ed etnografia nel secondo Ottocento.
Rome: Carocci, 1999. Pp. 225–71.
Reynaudi, Carlo. Paolo Mantegazza, note biografiche. Milan: Treves, 1893.
Riccardi, Paolo. Saggio di un catalogo bibliografico antropologico italiano.
Modena: Vincenzi, 1883.
Roda, Vittorio. ‘Tra scienza e fantascienza: il cervello umano in alcuni scrittori
postunitari.’ In Roda, I fantasmi della ragione. Napoli: Liguori, 1996. Pp. 125–
60.
Russo, Luigi. I narratori (1850–1950). Milan: Principato, 1951.
Sanguineti, Edoardo. Giornalino secondo 1976–1977. Torino: Einaudi, 1979.
Sergi, Giuseppe. ‘Paolo Mantegazza.’ Nuova antologia (16 September 1910):
231–3.
Starr, Frederick. ‘Sketch of Paolo Mantegazza.’ Popular Science Monthly 43
(1893): 549–51.
Ternois, Ren. ‘Deux admirateurs italiens de Zola: P. Mantegazza et S. Sighele.’
Les cahiers naturalistes 28 (1965): 162–73.
Zavaroni, Adolfo, ed. Dizionario di sesso, amore e voluttà dagli scritti di Paolo
Mantegazza. Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1979.
PART ONE
 The Physiology of Love

By DR PAOLO MANTEGAZZA

Author of ‘The Physiology of Pleasure,’ ‘The Physiology of

Sorrow,’ ‘The Hygiene of Love,’ ‘Pictures of
Human Nature,’ etc., etc.

‘ … Questa cara gioia

Sovra la quale ogni virtù si fonda’ – Dante

‘ … This sweet joy

The foundation of every virtue’ – Dante

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL ITALIAN EDITION

Cleveland Publishing Company

19 Union Square
New York
 Copyright, 1894, by
The Cleveland Publishing Company,
19 Union Square,
New York.
(All rights reserved.)
 To the daughters of Eve, that they may teach men
that love is not lechery, nor the simony of
voluptuousness, but a joy that dwells in the highest
and holiest regions of the terrestrial paradise, that
they may make it the highest prize of virtue, the
most glorious conquest of genius, the first force of
human progress – The Author
 Preface
To the Reader

Love has always seemed to me the most powerful and the least studied of the
human affections: surrounded by a triple selvedge of prejudice, of mystery, and
of hypocrisy, civilized men know it too often by way of stealth and degradation.
Poets, artists, philosophers, legislators snatch at times from the great god a piece
of his garments, or of his flesh, and hurry away to conceal it as a precious booty
of forbidden fruit. To study it as a phenomenon of life and as a gigantic force
which appears under a thousand different phases in the various races and in the
various epochs; to study it as an element of the health of the individual and of
the generations, has seemed to me a great undertaking; I consider even the
attempt laudable.
Three books have been the offspring of this thought of mine. The first is The
Physiology of Love, a series of analyses of the chief affection; it is a study of
love in our modern society, and as it should be in a better one.
In ‘The Loves of Men’ (‘Pictures of Human Nature’), I will attempt an
ethnography, an anthropological study of love, from the lowest races up to
ourselves, who occupy the highest branches of the human tree.
In ‘The Hygiene of Love,’1 I will give an essay on the art of loving,
wherewith the greatest voluptuousness accords with the greatest good of the
individual and of future generations.
I hope to be able to complete this trilogy of love: of you I ask the patience to
follow me in the long and fatiguing journey.
THE AUTHOR
 CONTENTS

Chapter 1
General Physiology of Love

Chapter 2
Love in Plants and Animals

Chapter 3
The First Rays of Love – Good and Evil Sources of Love

Chapter 4
The First Weapons of Love – Courtship

Chapter 5
Modesty

Chapter 6
The Virgin

Chapter 7
Conquest and Voluptuousness

Chapter 8
How Love Is Preserved and How Love Dies

Chapter 9
The Depths and the Heights of Love

Chapter 10
The Sublime Childishness of Love
 Chapter 11
Boundaries of Love – Their Relations to the Senses

Chapter 12
Boundaries of Love – Their Relations to the Other Sentiments – Jealousy

Chapter 13
Boundaries of Love – Their Relations to Thought

Chapter 14
Chastity in Its Relations to Love

Chapter 15
Love in Sex

Chapter 16
Love in Youth and Age

Chapter 17
Love in the Temperaments – Different Ways of Loving

Chapter 18
The Hell of Love

Chapter 19
The Degradations of Love

Chapter 20
The Faults and Crimes of Love

Chapter 21
The Rights and Duties of Love

Chapter 22
The Compacts of Love – Aphorisms on Matrimony

Chapter 23
Fragments of a Code on the Art of Loving and Being Loved
 Chapter 1
General Physiology of Love
It is now many years since I wrote that to live means to nourish oneself and
generate, and the deeper I cast the sounding line into the dark abysses of life the
more I persuade myself that in the above definition are faithfully pictured the
most salient characteristics of all creatures which, from the bacteria to man,
come to life, multiply, and die on the face of our planet. If, however, I wished to
simplify my idea, reducing life to its simplest and most essential form, I would
say that to live means to generate.
Every living body is perishable, but before death it has the power of
reproducing the form that had rendered it capable of living; and that whirlwind
which absorbs and rejects, which assimilates new atoms and repulses old ones,
and which represents so clearly the eternal picture of life in all its manifestations,
is also the most faithful portrait of every form of generation.
Nutrition is a real genesis, and in the great chemical laboratory of living
beings we have always before our eyes the reproduction of histological elements
of organs and individuals. A nail falls off and a new one takes its place; this is
the reproduction of an organ. We generate children similar to ourselves; this is
the reproduction of an entire organism, the true generation. But in one of our
offspring we behold repeated the mole on our nose; this is the reproduction of an
organ within an organism. On the other hand, one race generates another race,
one species generates another species; and here is a broader genesis through
which from the reproduction of a cellule by another cellule we gradually pass to
the generating of an organ, an individual, a race, a species.
The world of the living is a gigantic tree, and from its trunk shoot forth the
branches of the classes, orders, species. On the branches appear the leaves which
are the individuals; but each one of these generates in itself many cellules, true
organisms in greater ones. The world of the living is but a great laboratory of
fecundity, of incessant generation. Cellules generate cellules; organs, organs;
species, species. An intimate brotherhood makes us members of one great
organism.
Of the placenta of the living; and between us we exchange the same matter
which each in turn contributes to the work of apparent destruction called
nutrition, and to those works of reproduction termed generation. To nourish
themselves and to generate, the living are continually exchanging a part of their
own matter, which, in passing from one to another organism, seems to become
renovated and revivified. On the one hand, we have seaweeds that live on
mushrooms, carnivorous animals that feed on herbivorous, herbivorous that
devour herbs, and, lastly, on the top-most branch of the tree of the living, man
who partakes of all: on the other hand, we have males and females that in
continuous succession are casting off a part of their matter, repairing their
primitive forms.
The most elementary form of life is not, however, the cellule, since lower still
we find the protoplasm, the true primum vivens,2 which, dividing, generates the
individual; and, nourishing itself, who can tell what mysterious genesis of atoms
takes place within its most simple organism? The protoplasm cannot live without
a continual exchange of matter, so that yesterday’s molecules are dead today, and
those alive today will be dead tomorrow; for the same reason, also, nutrition in
the last analysis is an intimate and mysterious generation.
Caducity of form is one of the most essential characteristics of the living, and
we term death the fall of every leaf from the tree of life. Man, also, daily sheds
some of these leaves: hair from his head, body; cellules which often produce a
secretion and fall off with it. Before death a part of the pre-existing form remains
to generate the dead form and recasts the parabolical cycle through which the
mother form has passed. This is the most general formula, which embraces all
possible generation from that of scission to the highest possible form of sexual
genesis. One would say that the life of an individual is but a moment of the great
life of the species, of the classes, of the kingdoms of nature; it is a spark which
shoots forth intermittently, passing from one organism to another.
Powerful and irresistible is the tendency to generate; in most cases the
individual sacrifices himself consciously, or he is unconsciously sacrificed by the
laws of nature, provided that before death he transmits life to others. The
individual perishes to preserve the species! Through death to life! is the eternal
cry of nature, which men and infusoria,3 mushroom and oak alike must obey. If
the individual possesses preservative instincts and organs of defence, the species
has a hundred bulwarks, a thousand ways of watchfulness, an excessive means
of protection. And indeed, living beings generate so quickly that one species
alone would invade the earth if the various circles of expansion, meeting, did not
combat in turn, like the circles which appear on the tranquil mirror of the lake
when a handful of sand is thrown into the waters by a little child on the shore.
Apart from the way in which life is transmitted, there is a quantity of life that
passes away, there is so much fecundity, and this might seem, at first glance,
most capricious, whereas it is governed by the laws of preservation.
To be born and to die – fecundity and mortality – are so closely allied to each
other that we can consider them as different phases of the same phenomenon, as
the action and reaction of life. When the reproduction increases beyond measure,
then also increase the dangers for the generated individuals, and destruction
gathers in the excessive number of little ones. Now the food is no longer
sufficient for the offspring; now the parasites and enemies of the species are in
excess, and these, increasing in turn, establish an equilibrium. The destructive
force and the diverting balance alternately, as is the case with many other powers
simpler and better known.
The Malthusian problem, however, is much more complex. If all species were
equally prolific and of equal longevity, the problem would be reduced, in fact, to
a question of space and aliment; but the duration of life and the degrees of
fecundity establish in turn an equilibrium by other means. If the reproduction of
mice were as slow as that of man, they would all be destroyed before another
generation could be born; and even if they could live fifteen or sixteen years,
perhaps not one of them would ever attain that age, surviving all dangers. So, on
the other hand, if oxen multiplied in the same proportion as infusoria, the entire
species would die of hunger in a week.
The individual must preserve himself and generate other individuals in order
to preserve the organic form. Now these powers must vary inversely. If the
individual by reason of his simple organization is little adapted to resist danger,
he must make up for his weakness by reaction, generating profusely. If, instead,
high qualities give him a great capacity for self-defence, then he should
accordingly diminish his fecundity. Given danger as a positive quantity
(inasmuch as the capacity for resistance should be equal in all species) and this
union of two factors, the faculty to maintain individual life and the power to
multiply these cannot but vary in an opposite sense. This simple and sublime
law, which Herbert Spencer read in the great book of nature, is one among those
that govern with the most tenacious tyranny the elementary phenomena of
reproduction, as also the highest and most complex of human loves.
In the Diatomaceae4 the fecundity by scission is gigantic. Smith calculates
that a single frustule5 can produce a thousand million individuals in one month.
A young Gonium, capable of scission after twenty-four hours, can produce
268,435,456 individuals in a week, equal to itself. At other times the process of
multiplication is not that of scission, but an endogenous one, as with the Volvox 6
but the reproduction is always extraordinary. If all generated individuals
survived, a Paramecium7 would produce 268,000,000 individuals in the course
of a month. Another microscopic animal can produce 170,000,000,000 in four
days. The Gordius8 lays 8,000,000 eggs in less than a day. An African termite
deposits 80,000 eggs in twenty-four hours; and Eschricht counted 64,000,000
eggs in the female Ascaris lumbricoides.9
If, from the minute microscopic creatures exposed to every danger and which
consume so little matter, if from these living atoms of which you could enclose
within your fists as many as there are men on the earth, you pass to the elephant,
you have a giant of flesh that requires thirty years of life to become prolific, and
then, after a long gestation, produces but one of its kind. And above the elephant
you have that giant of thought, man, who takes the third part of his life to
reproduce himself and after nine long months generates but one child; and what
is worse, he sees cut down before his eyes one half of the generated before they
have borne either flower or seed.
The methods of transmitting life are many, since in no other function has
nature been so inexhaustible regarding forms as in that of generation; but as we
are treating in these pages of the general physiology of love, we will reduce the
various generative forms to the following few:
Separation or scission. The individual bursts asunder in two parts, and each
of these, being rendered independent, produces a generator. It is the most simple
form of genesis, in which the functions of reproduction are not distinct from the
other functions, but are confounded with them.
Endogenesis. Within an individual many other individuals are formed: the
parent opens itself, and, destroying its own individuality, becomes dissolved in
its offspring.
The individual generates, of itself alone, other individuals. The parent
generates with special organs and without dissolving itself in the offspring. The
generated are eggs, seed – perfect organisms; but in every case these are
elements elaborated by special organs. The generative function is marked and
distinct; it is a laboratory which detaches and prepares some of the elements of
the individual in order to reproduce the same.
Monoic sexual generation. A degree higher, the generative laboratory
becomes complicated, and is divided in two parts, one of which fabricates the
egg, the other the fructifying element. Each, independently of the other, prepares
the element destined for the reproduction of the individual; but if both do not
come in contact, the new being is not generated; we have the sexes well defined,
but enclosed within a single individual. But, strange to say, there are individuals
that produce an egg which cannot be fructified by their seed, that produce a seed
which is of no service to the egg. A double embrace of two hermaphrodites
which interweave a quadruple love, or the appearance of the winds, of insects, of
birds, as fecundatory paranymphs, resolves these problems of a most singular
generation.
Dioic sexual generation. – Finally, the generating organs are detached and
fixed upon a single individual, sterile in itself, which produces but one of the
generating elements, and which, therefore, must be joined to the other in order
that united they may reproduce the new creature, the sum of two individualities,
the male and female, father and mother. Man loves in two; but although like the
other superior animals he is favoured with a dioic sexual generation, still in his
tissues he possesses also the genesis endogenus and scission; he presents
likewise in this regard the remains of the elementary forms of life enclosed
within himself.
In this rapid course through all the forms of generation, we behold delineated
the same laws with which nature governs the other functions. New forces
gradually appear, and new organs come forth to represent the subdivision of the
work. First, it is the entire individual that generates, then an organ of the
individual, two organs in the same individual, two organs in separate individuals.
In the many forms of genesis the singularity of the plan is more than
conspicuous; and we who are superior to all living creatures, while like the
amoeba we contain in our protoplasms, scattered all through our bodies, the
faculty to generate, we behold in man and woman the two laboratories divided
which prepare the seed and the human egg.
While the pathology of love in many forms of lechery shows the last remains
of a promiscuous hermaphroditism, fancy, which outruns science, causes us to
divine how in more complex creatures the sexes can be more than two, and
generation presents a more profound subdivision of work; thus, as in the cynical
and sceptical distinctions of platonic and sensual love and of the more ardent
polygamy of the heart and senses, we behold in the distance other rays, which
disclose to us the horizon of new and monstrous possibilities; some reaching the
super-sensitive, others as base and brutal as the most deplorable retrogression of
ancient times.
When the science of the future will permit our children’s children to collect
all the phenomena of nature, from the most elementary to the most complex,
from the simplest motion of a molecule to the flash of the most sublime genius,
in an uninterrupted chain of facts, then, perhaps, the prime origin of love will be
sought in the physical elements of dissimilar atoms which seek each other and
unite, and with opposite motion generate an equilibrium. The positive-electric
body seeks the negative, the acid seeks the base, and in this conjunction, with
rapid development of light, heat, and electricity, new bodies are formed, new
equilibriums are settled; and it seems that nature, renewing her forces and
becoming rejuvenated, prepares herself for new compositions and new loves.
And is not love the combination of two dissimilar atoms which seek each
other and unite notwithstanding all the opposing forces of heaven and earth?
And thus as the molecule of potassium snatches away the oxygen from the water
with immense development of light and heat, is not the union of those two
molecules called man and woman accompanied by a hurricane of passion, by
flashes of genius, by infinite ardour? Do we not behold a pandemonium of
physical and psychical forces which condense, contract, and equilibrate around
that point in which a man and a woman are attracted the one toward the other to
rejuvenate the human matter and relight the torch of life?
A particular motion arising in the ovary and in the testicle there accumulates
in the nervous centres such a powerful energy as to bring, eventually, the
masculine element into contact with the feminine, so that the generative germs
produced in the slow laboratory of two different organisms become reunited in
that nest, the maternal womb, where the fecundated egg must transform itself
into a human being.
The poet and the metaphysician may give of love whatever definition they
choose: science has but one. Love is the energy which must bring into contact the
egg and the seed: without ovary and without testicle there can be no love.
The progressive movement called generation is so powerful that it can oppose
and also destroy the minor motion – the preservation of the individual; and while
each individual revolves around himself, he is carried forward through time and
space with a movement a hundred times more powerful and irresistible. The first
motion represents the life of the individual, guarded by egotism; the second is
the great life of the species, defended by love.
The most superficial study of the generative functions will convince us that
love is always a phenomenon of the highest chemistry, in which the generating
atoms, in order to combine, must be neither too similar nor vice versa. Scarcely
has the sex appeared in animals when we have in the same individual, but in two
distinct laboratories, formations of two generative elements. Sex, which at a first
glance seems to us one of the deepest mysteries of life, is but a laboratory which
attracts to itself the generated elements of every part of the organism, and
preserves them in order to infuse them into other elements similar but not equal,
generated in another laboratory, the opposite sex. When the two generative
laboratories are separated in two distinct organisms, probably the greater is the
diversity of their germs. If in individuals that bear a close resemblance but are of
different races we unite the generative organs, we will probably still have
fecundity; while if we pass to a different species it will be more difficult; if we
pass to a different genus it will be generally impossible.
But let us set aside the words genus and species, which, in nature, have not
the value assigned them in our museums and in our books, and let us take from
the world of the living a fistful of animals just as they come, so that brothers,
cousins, nephews will pass through our hands, individuals of the same species,
classes, genus, of distinct orders, and let us place them in file according to their
similarity. Now then, if we should try to couple them to study their spontaneous
loves, we would find cases of sterility in creatures too much alike and vice versa.
Therefore, generation moves between two opposite poles, too great similarity
and too great dissimilarity. Hence, a woman with a moustache, atrophied breasts,
and deep voice remains sterile when coupled with a robust man. They do not
generate because they too closely resemble each other. A dog and a cat are sterile
because they are too dissimilar. Nature says to the living, ‘If you wish to love be
neither too similar nor too dissimilar.’
Let us seek to discover the reason of this law. Germs that are too similar
cannot fructify in turn, or they fructify badly, perhaps by reason of the same law
of elementary chemistry which repels bodies equally electrified, and which
resemble each other too closely in their physical and chemical characteristics.
Try the combination of sulphur with phosphorus, of iodine with bromide, and, on
the other hand, observe the ardent loves of chlorine with hydrogen, of potassium
with oxygen.
The impregnation of two different organisms is then, in a sense, a direct energy;
it is the sum of equal resistances; while two different quantities, which may,
however, be united, give a greater number of opposite resistances and therefore a
greater possibility of living and opposing external enemies. An individual is the
sum of many victories over foreign elements, the result of many and infinite
adaptations to the atmosphere which surrounds him. Two individuals dissimilar
but not enough so to impede generation, represent the summary of adaptations to
those victories by which the new creature has the possibility of resistance and
fewer dangers to encounter. Select for a dangerous expedition into the interior of
Africa twelve men as similar as possible, all healthy, all robust, all of the same
degree and form of intelligence. Or send twelve other selected men, some
slender, others stout, in whom all the powers of the mind and all the various
temperaments are represented; let the one be fanciful, the other prudent; one an
able architect, another a distinguished chemist. Which of the two expeditions
will succeed in attaining the difficult end in view?
It is much easier to explain why two dissimilar forms cannot love. This
impossibility is one of the most powerful means of preserving the living forms,
so varied among themselves, in those conditions useful to their existence. When
a living being has gone forth from the struggle of life, when he has bent himself
to external agents and enemies in a certain way, he transmits himself to future
generations with that form and that nature which are the fruit of a long and
successful battle. It is precisely for the same reason that a herbivorous animal,
which is the offspring of another that had nourished its flesh with herbs, can only
increase and multiply, feeding itself on herbs. Imagine, for a moment, that to the
organs and tissues of the herbivorous animal there would be soldered organs and
tissues nourished by flesh. What disorders would not arise? A fragment of the
carnivorous animal shut up in the organism with teeth to chew herbs, gastric
juices to digest herbs, intestinal tubes to assimilate herbs, and olfactory nerves
which discover with joy leaves and flowers. The apparent stability of the species,
which resolves itself, in fact, in a slow modification, is therefore but the
unavoidable necessity for male and female to pour into the crucible of generation
elements that can combine, metals that can blend, forming a homogeneous
league and compact.
Pass with a bound from the elementary physics of generation to the most
ardent sympathies, to the joining together of human characters in the nest of
love, and you will see that the same law governs every one of those facts. Be
neither too similar nor too dissimilar. Love is the sum of analogous but not
identical forces; it is the complement of complements; it is the square of squares;
it admits of neither subtraction nor division.
At every step in our studies we see reproduced in the high spheres of amorous
phenomena, the same laws which govern generation or so-called physical love.
For us, love is simply a function which, to be understood, must not be
barbarously mutilated and divided, so that one part of its members is consigned
to the laboratory of physiology and the other let remain in the studio of
philosophy. Love is that energy which rises from the lowest grades of the most
automatic instinct to the highest regions of the supersensitive. Perhaps no other
physical element strikes more opposite poles. Compare the love of the Australian
who beats to death the first woman he finds in the forest and possesses her, with
the love of St Teresa for a Man-God. Call to mind the worship of a Virgin-
Mother, and the adoration of the Mandowessies10 of North America for a woman
who, after having invited forty of the principal warriors of her tribe, made every
one of them her husband in a single night. Think of the shepherd of the
Apennines who loved a goat, and of Heine, who, when dying, had to be brought
to the Louvre to see once more the Venus de Milo; and you will have a pallid
idea of the frontiers against which battles this ardent, tenacious, violent,
multiform passion called love.
While in the field of chemical facts generation marks the highest point of
molecular chemistry, in the psychological field, love strikes the summit of the
ideal. It is the force of forces, rising when man is strongest, setting when years
have weakened him. Love is the joy of joys, it is the basis of every desire, of all
riches, of every horizon of delights; it is always the highest aim. In every human
sky love is the brightest star; it is the sun of every horizon. It is the strongest,
richest, most human passion.
In all forms of generation, whether agamous or sexual, by scission or
endogenesis; whether we compare the son with the father or with the Adam of
long ago, we behold the generated which preserves a part of the last or of the
first generator; so that the moto11 communicated from the first to the last
generation is transmitted without interruption. Take the Adam of the Bible or the
Adam of progressive evolution, the clay breathed into by a God or the Darwinian
ascidian12 – each one of us contains within himself a material part of the first
man or proto-parent, so that an immense brotherhood unites all living beings. To
the divination of the poet who, in contemplating the flowery meadows, the
forests, the buzzing of insects, was deeply affected and cried out, ‘O Mother
Nature!’ science answers harmoniously on beholding a quantity of matter and a
quantity of life transmitted from one to the other of those organisms called
individuals. To every death responds a birth, and within us vibrate tremblingly
the molecules that have passed through millions of existences and millions of
loves.
If love is the most intense and the most human of passions, it is also the
richest. To its altars every faculty of the mind bears its tribute, every throb of the
heart its ardour. Every vice and every virtue, every shame and every heroism,
every torture and every lechery, every flower and every fruit, every balsam and
every poison may be brought to the temple of love. Everything human can be
overturned in the whirlwind of love; and man frequently regrets that he has but
one life to offer in holocaust to this god. And still this gigantic force is the least
governed of all the passions. It would seem that in its presence man feels himself
too little, too weak; and as the savage falls on his knees before the lightning, or
weeps, or flees, so civilized man, even today, is terrified in the presence of this
sovereign force and acknowledges his impotency and ignorance. In the delirium
of voluptuousness, in the storms of desperation, he permits himself to be carried
away by a force which he considers too superior to reason, too powerful in
comparison with his weakness. He writes timidly in his code, laws which he
violates every day; infamous punishments which the jury always cancel; and a
dense nebula of ignorance surrounds the temple which he enters almost always
as a thief and from which he is frequently rejected. Our amorous legislation is a
miserable union of hypocrisy and lechery, and as we know not how to look love
in the face, we disguise it with the garments of buffoonery and prostitution. Our
laws are so perfect that many dare not love and very many cannot love, and
while we weep for the few victims of hunger, we shrug our shoulders at the
hundred thousand who die in celibacy, not having been able to make their nests,
and we laugh at the million celi-bates who know nothing of love save
masturbation and prostitution. In the presence of love we are all still more or less
savage – exceedingly brutal before the greatest of human forces.
However, even love must be conquered like all the other forces in nature; and
without losing a particle of its energy, or a flower from its garland, it too must be
governed by science, which understands and directs all things. The lightning
which prostrates the savage in the dust of fear is guided by us with the small
cord of the conductor, gilds the charms of our women, and transmits our
thoughts from one hemisphere to the other. Now then, that other lightning,
which, more powerful and more dangerous, explodes in the hurricane of the
human heart, must be guided and reduced to a living force that measures,
weighs, and governs itself. Love should be the dearest, the most precious, the
most powerful of civilized forces. No other passion can aspire to primacy where
it appears; no other can solve the sublime problem of uniting the greatest
voluptuousness with the greatest virtue, of generating the welfare of the future
with the joy of the living, of transmitting civilization to posterity in the spasm of
a fond embrace.
This modest book of mine aims to pay its tribute, so that in the near future we
may see a more moral and a wiser legislation of love.
 Chapter 2
Love in Plants and Animals
Every day and every hour, Arcadians, metaphysicians, and all adorers of the past
curse the modern custom of comparing human beings to creatures beneath us in
the natural order; and they hurl anathemas against this absurd and sacrilegious
profanation of the Man-God. Anatomical, physiological, and psychological
comparisons are for these gentlemen but different forms of a strange aberration
of the human mind, something capricious and morbid which, by the continual
comparison of man and beast, turns us into brutes, prostitutes us, and sends us
back with renewed insanity to the bestial Olympus of men soldered with animal
members and human grafts made in the flesh of a Man-God. According to the
above high and self-possessed gentlemen, these are psychological maladies
which should not be discussed, but cured by contempt and ridicule; they are the
hysterics of thought, which disappear with the generation that saw them come
forth from the corrupt entrails of the human family.
Unctuous, lymphatic, tearful defenders of the past, save your scorn for nobler
causes, return to the shell of your profound meditations, for the worship of the
ideal is not your privilege, and the daily progress of experimental science
elevates it so that our arms can scarcely reach to embrace it, weary as they are
from the long battles of civilization. No, man does not lower himself by a
comparison with the beings which are the matrix that gave him birth; he does not
abase himself by scenting the earth which you call clay, and which is ever the
skeleton that holds you upright and furnishes you the matter for your
psychological aberrations. In these comparisons you see only the grosser part,
the material approach of high and low forms, of the highest and lowest types,
while in the scientific comparison there is an archaeo which you too should
admire. Superficial, even when you wish to be profound, you see in the things of
nature but the varnish, and the further you penetrate into the obscure labyrinth,
the less you perceive that you are hollowing out a shell from which the seed has
already been extracted. From the trunk of science, which, as once yours, the
wood and the pith have gone forth, leaving in your hands but a dry and sterile
bark. Moths of the rind of things lament a past that work of man can never call
back to life. The true metaphysics (if this word still has any signification) are
founded on modern science, which, in the boldest comparisons of the simplest
things with the most complex, of the smallest with the greatest, extracts the
subtle from the subtle, and under the many-coloured larvae of form reveals the
only law that governs them. We are going to seek in the limbo of the living the
first crepuscles of the highest human things, and, bowing the head modestly
before the great simplicity of laws which govern and mould such a wealth of
forms, let us return to the reality of things, neither dejected nor abashed, but
contented to have known how to read the notes of harmony which are written in
the world of dwarfs and giants. It will satisfy our pride, after many comparisons,
to find ourselves the first among all living beings; and the cosmic brotherhood
will enchant us with joyful poetry, and elevate us to an ideal which, amid clouds
and incense, you fabricated in your temples of the supersensitive.
No spectacle in nature is more splendid, more admirable, than that of the
loves of plants and animals. With a less number of notes nature could not write
music more fascinating; and no other phenomenon of life can resemble that of
generation in profusion of forms, in prodigality of artifices, in inexhaustible
fancy of mechanism. One would say that there where the reproductive germs are
attracted; there where life concentrates the better part of itself to become
revivified by another effort, new and strange energies are developed, and the
forces of nature appear in the most gigantic form, with the most pompous luxury.
In every other function, nature, like an economical stewardess, seeks the useful
and often contents herself with the necessary, simplifies the mechanisms, takes
away the attritions, and in the simplest way attains her end. On the contrary, the
good and true do not suffice for generation: the simple humiliates nature, and
surrounding the nest of love by a profusion of aesthetic elements, she exhausts
every resource to prepare a feast for the life which is renewed. It is around a
flower that the most exquisite beauty of form, the most inebriating seductions of
perfume, the most varied tints of the painter’s palette are interwoven. How many
treasures of aesthetic forces in a lily and in a rose! And all this luxury to
celebrate the love of a day, the love of an hour; and all the splendour of a nuptial
robe, a thousand times more beautiful than human industry could ever produce,
to veil the virginal kiss of an anther and a pistil!
And springing with a bound from the rose and lily to the summits of the
animal world, how many splendours of fancy, how many meteors of passion to
weave a garland for the kiss of a man and a woman!
Take a flying walk some fine spring day among the blooming beds of a
garden, among the thousand amorous corollas of the flowers; shake the stern
boughs of the pine and cypress; plunge your feet in the soft carpet bathed with
vallisneria;13 cast a penetrating glance into the humid recesses of the barks and
into the mossy labyrinths of granite; and everywhere a warm sprinkling of
pollen, spore, and anthers will tell your heart that in the vegetable world, among
the perfumes of the corollas and the emeralds of the seaweeds, love exists in a
thousand forms, and the atmosphere is charged with all the warm, inebriating
sparks which, on the wings of the winds and insects and in the rays of the sun,
cast everywhere an amorous, voluptuous wave.
The flowers love mutely in the soft perfume of their corollas, but in many of
them silence does not prevent warm kisses and fervent embraces. Many plants,
although always immobile, have convulsions in their flower; others, though cold,
become heated in the calyx of their loves. They often love only once a year; but
what a profusion of embraces, what a fecundity of pollen and seed! Shake with
your hand a single branch of the juniper tree, or of the blooming pine, and you
will immediately darken the air with a cloud of fruitful dust. Entire forests love
but once, and for miles and miles they fill the air with voluptuous odours;
frequently the winds transport the pollen to the clouds, and the wanton rain
bathes and purifies the atmosphere, tinting everything with the amorous dust.
And knowing naught of jealousy or rancour, in the shade of the flowering
pines, and among the stems of the enamoured flowers, in every blade of grass, in
every cavern of the mountain, in every fissure of the rock, in every tuft of
seaweed, in the deep waves of the ocean, and in the drops of water oozing from
the ice, in the obscurity of the mines and in the azure vault above us, the animals
interweave their loves; so that in every part of the globe, and in every hour of the
day and night, every ray of the sun fires and witnesses millions of kisses, while
every ray of the moon guides the nocturnal lovers to a thousand and more
intimate embraces. If a leaf falls every moment from the tree of life and dies,
each moment witnesses the birth of a new bud, and for every bud how many
embraces, for every newborn how many loves! The flowers planted in the
ground of a cemetery seem to me the choicest form of devotion to the dead; for
if our planet is a vast cemetery, where every atom of time buries a once living
atom, it is also a nest of love, in which every zephyr bears to the ear a sigh of
voluptuousness, and where the harmony of the ether, dreamed of by the ancient
poets, is, perhaps, but the sum of all the kisses which living creatures exchange.
Oh why is it that in the space of the infinite our ear cannot catch every caress
that is given and received in the world of the living? Oh, why cannot our eyes
surprise every kiss which the dove gives to its mate? Why can we not be mute
and timid witnesses of every neigh, every roar, every bellow, every hymn of love
which the living intone to nature in order to thank her for having made them
capable of loving?
If, in the study of generation, the anatomist and the physiologist discover
precious materials to mark the highest laws of the morphology of the living, the
psychologist finds delineated in the loves of brutes almost all the elements that
man embraces under his robust wings. No other function is more adapted than
love for contemplation of the unique type and the infinite legions of its forms,
for admiration of a unique conceit turned into a thousand different languages.
Scarcely has sex made its appearance, when the male quickly distinguishes
himself by his aggressive character. With few exceptions it is the male that
seeks, conquers, retains the prey. Run over the pages of the last work of Darwin
on sexual selection,14 and you will see how many weapons nature has given to
males to conquer and retain their companions. Even in plants it is the pollen
which goes in search of the ovulum, and the ovulum that awaits the spark that is
to fructify it. Likewise in the most simple animal forms, where the male and
female live and die in the spot that witnessed their birth, it is the virile element
which is always borne there where the germ awaits it. And this is the first dogma
that governs the religion of love in the entire animate world; and when all
humanity laughs at the chaste Joseph,15 and when all higher races look with
contempt upon the woman who makes advances and the man who flees, they
only protest against the violation of one of the most imperious laws from which
men and molluscs, women and pistils, cannot exempt themselves.
Man is the recapitulation of all the forms of living nature; so that we are
frequently tempted to affirm that the human being is the greatest synthesis of all
the minor forms of the living, and that he is precisely the first because he
contains within himself all the forces from the secondary to the highest; and this
we observe also in the psychical elements of his loves.
Pigeons, although various breeds are intermingled, are seldom unfaithful to
their companions; and even when the male, in a rare whim, breaks the vow of
fidelity, he quickly returns to the loyal nuptial bed of his mate. Darwin kept a
number of pigeons of various breeds shut up in the same place for a long time,
and there was never a bastard among them. Now then, do you not find in man
splendid examples of the most faithful monogamy? And is it not the social basis
of almost all the superior races?
The antelope of southern Africa has a dozen mates, and the Saiga antelope of
Asia counts them by the hundred. Now then, have you not Solomon, have you
not the lesser and hypocritical polygamies of modern society, and the bold and
most splendid ones of the Orientals? Have you not in man, as in very many
animals, females who submit to love as a duty and males on whom it must be
imposed? Have you not libertinism side by side with chastity? Have we not in
our own world all the lasciviousness, all the ardours, all the lecherous
possibilities of the animal kingdom? And if some one were tempted to believe
that vices contrary to nature are a sad privilege of humanity, I would remind him
of the strange whims of incest and masturbation observed in many animals; I
would remind him that many brutes, monogamous in savage life, become
polygamous in quiet domestic life, thus reflecting an image of corruption similar
to that produced by men in civilized society.
Several fulminating forms of love, which last as long as the lightning flash,
are of frequent occurrence among men, as also the cold and lingering kisses of
many insects are amorous practices of various human temperaments. And
burning, cruel jealousies, bloody battles are scenes common to men and brutes;
nor is dying for love the exclusive privilege of man. The few and coarse passions
of animals are all brought as a holocaust to the altar of generation, while man
brings there all the warm desires of his rich nature, all the infinite forces which
he has drawn from the great womb of the living, and which he has increased a
hundredfold with the accumulations of his centuple civilization. The chaffinch in
the strife of the amorous love song frequently falls from the tree upon which he
intones his erotic hymn, killed by a pulmonary apoplexy; so, many a poet
beholds the lyre of his genius and the cord of his life snap asunder at the feet of a
woman. In the silence of the shady woods the exhausted nightingale swoons
away from love and fatigue, and dies because he could not vanquish a more
fortunate rival by the melody and strength of his notes. And hundreds and
hundreds of times in the obscure labyrinths of life, the human lover dies in the
battles of unhappy love, dies because he could not sing louder and more sweetly
than his rival. Nor is coquetry the special prerogative of the human female. No
woman in the world will ever know how to imitate the perfidious art with which
a canary resists the impatient desires of her companion; and the thousand
travesties with which in the feminine world a yes is concealed under a no are all
pallid imitations of the fine coquetry, of the pretended escapes, of the loving
bites, of the hundred thousand coaxings of the animal world.
As to the aesthetic elements which nature diffuses in the loves of living
beings, they are such and so many that the richest palette would not suffice to
represent them, nor voice of poet to describe them. Here are some pictures from
my poor gallery.

The hottest hour of a July day! I am strolling along the deserted shore of the
Adriatic, inhaling the hot, stifling air of a nature which seems plunged in deep
lethargy. There is not a breeze, not a leaf is stirring, and I would not know where
to find leaves in a land all sand, now level, now hilly, and here and there rugged
with withered thorns and sea-holly which would seem to be made of pasteboard
rather than of the soft tissues of plants. Every force of living nature seems spent,
every animal hidden, every sound hushed, and even the waves of the restless sea
are weary and have given themselves to repose. My wandering foot that longs to
traverse every land, every wave, every desert is the only living thing in the midst
of this furnace, and passes along, leaving on the hot damp shore the frail
footprints of a man. I too am drowsy, I do not perceive that my feet are getting
wet and have barely time to stop in front of a rivulet that crosses my path. It is a
noiseless stream that scarcely furrows the sands of the sea and is blended with it
without a kiss or a shock arising from the meeting of the two waters. That vein
of water, so slow, so hot, is at the same time so lazy that scarcely does it
encounter a shell or a pebble in its course than it deviates, and goes winding
about seeking a softer and easier path. Before the gentle stream poured its
sluggish lymph into the sea, that vein divided and subdivided infinitely, forming
a large fan of a hundred little veins, many of which died away in the sand before
reaching the great heart of the earth.
I have halted my steps and am looking at my feet, which are gradually
becoming immersed in the soft sponge of that anonymous delta, omitted from all
the maps of Italy, when in the islands of sand formed by the diverging stream I
perceive an insect, two insects, many insects flying about rapidly, alighting on
the scorching sand and then darting away to scintillate in the rays of the sun. I
am happy to know that I am not alone, and I already love that companion which,
like myself, does not fear this burning desert nor the silence of the hour muter
than the hours of night. To see it, to desire it, to wound it is the work of a single
moment: man does not always know how to enter into relations with other
creatures, except by giving them imprisonment or death. I too observe this fatal
law, and pursue with my stick the happy inhabitant of these desolate, Lilliputian
islands. I soon perceive that those insects not only live and move, not only
amuse themselves and bathe their feet in the hot wave, then dry them in the rays
of the sun, but, still more, love, and that more than one of them follows a
companion, makes her his own, and transports her with giddy light into heavenly
space. They are grey, black, brilliant as metal, and each of their members
palpitates, shivers, agitates itself, tormented by two fires. I know not which
pleases or stings them the more, the heat of the sand or the ardour of love. A
little coquettish female runs quickly over the sand, the male captures her and
bears her away to the skies; and there after a rebuff and a flight they descend
again to the desert, where a new chase and a new struggle begin. What with the
grey, the dust, and the hot sun, I see nothing for a moment but the shining
paunch of two enamoured little creatures, brilliant as a cuirass of burnished steel.
Has the union of the two fires killed the poor creatures? Has one of them died in
the struggle? Has it sunk into the cool vaults of the sand? I see but one creature!
Two black, two grey, two shining metallic lights have become blended; they are
now but one insect. And I, a cruel man, wish to touch that love, to destroy that
scene; and my stick descends upon the happy group and wounds the conqueror.
A feeler and a wing are detached; the entrails ooze hot and trembling from the
little body, but the lover does not forsake his companion and run away in the
sand, agonized with love and pain; he extends his remaining three wings and
strives to bear away through the air his companion, whom he wishes to remove
from danger, and in the meantime bathes her with his blood. Other more
fortunate couples fly about the unhappy pair, helpless to assist them. And I, there
in that desert, filled with remorse, regard with admiration such a weak creature,
who, although wounded and dying, does not relax his embrace, and whose last
agony is lost in the last spasm of love.
Even in this burning desert they love, even in this obscure corner of the earth
there is a hero of love, and here in this delta of sand there is also a cruel man!16

II

I am in the garden, stretched at full length upon a wall so low that I can inhale
voluptuously the soft aroma of the earth, which has just been bathed by a sun
shower. I have no carpet under my body, nor pillows beneath my head; my bed is
a glittering, rugged slate stone. With one hand extended above the wall I am
nipping the petals of a lemon blossom, while with the other I am frightening
away the ants that are bustling about in the sandy path. All at once two little
shadows, two brown sprites, pass before my eyes and remain in front of me in
the middle of the path. They are two children of heaven, all wings, all beauty;
the organs of life are reduced to one as fine as a hair (but which sucks the nectar
from the flowers) and four gigantic wings to conquer heavenly space. Their
hours are numbered; they must love and die, and nature has adapted them to
intense love by furnishing them with organs of sense greater than the stomach,
organs of beauty greater than the entrails. They are butterflies, but I know not to
what species they belong, and I am sorry. I look around in vain for an
entomologist to baptize them for me: man does not feel he possesses a thing
unless he has sprinkled it with the ink of his dictionaries. For me they will die
nameless; and in vain will they knock at the gates of paradise in order to enter
where dear and beloved ones are remembered. Can you imagine ever having
loved a woman whose name was unknown to you? In love as in religion baptism
is the first and holiest of sacraments.
But these butterflies love without baptism; they are frisking about between
the pebbles in the path, unaware that the greatest tiger of our planet is glaring at
them, and that a great lizard is descending slowly from the little wall and looking
stealthily from left to right, caressing his lip with his cleft tongue, relishing the
delicate flesh of those pretty creatures. They are too happy to think of the
enemies that surround them: and life and love are flowers which are culled in the
midst of hurricanes and battles. The pair have discovered a stunted stalk of grass
which under the footstep of the pedestrian and in the sand of the garden has
nevertheless managed to survive and even bloom. This microscopic bush is an
entire world for the two lovers, and the little female laughs at the sweet assailer
and runs around him like a child around a table, fleeing from blows. But after a
few impatient whirls the lover bounds on top of the little tree and with his wings
shakes those of his companion. A pinch of golden dust is scattered through the
air, and a rebuff, a voluptuous trembling, closes this first scene of love.
Gradually the little female seems about to yield to the impatient embraces of her
companion, and when he, with the timid anxiety of one about to grasp a
happiness, is close, so close to her that he is about to touch with his pubescent
and loving feelers his beloved’s velvet body, she flies two yards away from him.
He pursues her and the coaxing, fondling, teasing begin anew. The heat
increases, and the avalanche of desires has become as ardent as the sun. The
coquette has turned her back to her lover and begins to open her wings slowly in
order to exhibit the pomp and splendour of her gems, her silver, her velvet; she
then folds her wings, raises them, and in a trice hides all the beauty with which
nature adorned her. Nor is the male less seductive. With a pretty little bound he
places himself before his companion, and in turn he opens his wings, exhibiting
his thousand colours and the charm of his golden eyes. But they are growing
impatient. Whoever has witnessed but once the caresses of two butterflies can
certainly imagine how the angels must love; that is, if some planet shelters a
human creature that with wings lives also in heaven.
Those two butterflies approach each other, so near as to touch and kiss with
their feelers; then, quick as a wink, one bounds upon the other, and with a slow,
mild, prolonged caress they fondle each other with their wings. And they repose
as though they wished to relish the sweetness of that full and voluptuous caress
in which the wing of one softly and slowly kisses the silk and velvet of its
companion. How sweet, how sensual must be the caress of two wings which
with a thousand and scintillant ripples touch each other and unite! And still in
this intermingling of nerves and velvet not a speck is lost of that golden dust
which adorns them.
Many a time I saw the happy creatures frisking about and kissing each other;
many a time I stood with beaming eye envying that angelic kiss of two wings.
Indeed, man may well envy the butterfly, which, in its rich love of such a poetic
brilliancy, puts to shame our beastly intercourse. Two creatures naked yet
clothed, passionate and chaste; that love but once and one creature only; that kiss
on earth and couple in the skies; that, inebriated with the nectar of flowers and
the rays of the sun, caress each other with their wings and fall in love with the
beauties of a palette which Titian and Rubens strive in vain to imitate with their
brushes and chemicals; two creatures that in a long caress bid farewell to life and
from the spasms of a fond embrace return to nature their little bodies, killed by
love!
After long kisses and many caresses my two angels gave each other a last, a
more ardent rebuff, then flew away to relight the torch of life, which in them
must soon be extinguished. In their giddy flight, now united, now separated, I
accompanied them, sighing, until they were lost in the azure skies. Why can we
too not love in this way?

III

The first rays of the sun have stirred up an infernal music on my neigh-bour’s
roof. Among the tiles, bronzed and corroded by the black wart lichen, there are
some soft cushions of moss, and in the eaves, cracked by rust and contorted by
the alternate sun and ice, there is some green turf that lives on light and dew,
more frugal than an anchorite and happier than a king. Those tiles and eaves are
a rendezvous for all the sparrows in the neighbourhood, and sprightly, petulantly
they clatter, chase one another, intermix, peck, play with their wings, and dash
against each other with their little feathered bodies. They speak a strange,
inharmonious language, but it seems they are relating the dreams of the night,
and they have many and important things to tell each other. One screeches, the
other prattles, a third hisses; not one is silent. Happy to have slept well, they
already forget yesterday, and reckless of today they are warming their wings in
the first rays of the sun, and with the beak hidden under the wing are making war
upon some troublesome mite. I see little creatures and larger ones: the grey,
coppery, and black distinguish, perhaps, to the naturalist, age and sex; perhaps
also the different species; but in this moment they are all brothers chattering and
enjoying together. No difference of caste seems to humiliate one and elevate the
other; no infirmity imposes pain on some, and on others, compassion; no head,
no servant, no etiquette of rank, no hypocrisy of sentiments. Would those dear
and happy young sparrows have realized the republic of Plato?
But in that whirlwind of reckless mirth, I distinguish a sparrow of a deeper
black, a deeper chestnut tint, and more high-chested than the others. Frequently
he stands erect on his little legs, stretches his neck, body, and head like a child
measuring its height, and without moving from his post he looks to the right and
left with an air of vain complacency. And now among his companions he sees a
female sparrow, plainly tinted, with a soft, elongated body, delicate and pretty,
apparently made to be shut up in the ivory hand of a lady and to stretch forth its
loving little head from that nest of soft folds, the hand of a woman. The arrogant
little male sees her, and without approaching utters a cry of conquest, which, in
force and petulance, seems to me a cry of victory. It appears that in the sparrow’s
dictionary that word must have a great signification, because the pretty little
female hops away from her noisy companions to the edge of the roof. But the
proud lover leaps impatiently after her and repeatedly renews his insistent,
petulant cry; he is already very near her; but the little female flies to the roof of
the house across the road. She has scarcely touched it when her pursuer has
reached her. Both face off and challenge each other; and screeching in different
voices they hurl at each other a world of sounds which seem to me insolence and
tenderness at the same time. The one coos, the other scolds; the one implores,
the other commands; and frequently the prattle is so blended that it seems like
the sound of but one instrument. But the bickering appears to have fatigued
them, and the pretty little female retires hurriedly to one of the eaves, while the
male looks at the sun and awaits new strength. This seems to be renewed very
quickly, for the groans and cries begin again, nor does the insolent lover content
himself with his voice, but runs by leaps and flights to peck his companion; and
a chase, a confused cry, and a continual pulling about succeed at brief intervals
through the mossy labyrinths of the roof. By now many battles have been fought
between the two lovers, and the mania to escape and defend herself from the too
wanton desires of her companion seems so sincere in that winged little female
that I almost begin to believe she does not want to be loved that morning. But if
so, why does she not open her wings and fly away into heavenly space? And if
she does not love too well the obstinate persecutor, why does she call him when
he, piqued, flies to the top of the roof, almost feigning indifference and
contempt? But desire cannot hold out much longer; the male is determined to
win the sweet prize of victory, and almost sliding down on the tiles, with little
hops that seem like steps, he pursues his companion, who retires to the corner of
the roof, there where it stands out in space over the road. Behind her she has not
another span of earth; she must either fly away and lose, perhaps, her lover,
already weary from so many refusals, or yield to him. The millimetres seem to
have become infinite space measured by the pair with a thousand steps and
leaps; and the female tries to raise her voice, but cannot drown out that of the
more robust and courageous lover, who is now so near as to touch her with his
beak and shake her with his wings. The two hot, hot bodies touch, cross,
intermingle. There, on the extremity of that roof, with her little body suspended
over the abysses, the female concedes the greatest voluptuousness to her
companion, and a soft groan and a rebuff, rapid as a flash of lightning,
accompany an ardent, intimate, fulminating love, a love enjoyed over the
abysses of space.
Those two lovers swoon away; they rise slowly and gaze at each other
amazedly and languidly; then, with a shiver, they adjust the feathers mussed by
the embrace; with a second shiver, they absorb slowly, slowly the last tremor of
voluptuousness as it vanishes, and then away to some friendly tree to hide their
happy exhaustion and to renew their strength for new battles and new pleasures.

IV

It was a spring day. I had reached the confines of Galeguaychù17 on horseback

and knew not which way to turn. I was at the end of the last road, with an open
plain before me. I spurred my tramp companion to a gallop and entered a forest
of algarrobos18 and nandubays.19 I wanted to move about and breathe the air
and perfumes: thought had fallen into lethargy, and failed to respond to the
sensations with a single idea. Parrots, teru-teru, horneros, brasitas,20 and a
hundred other birds chattered and screeched among the branches, in the bushes,
and on the ground: almost all talked of love. My horse put to flight the grey
iguanas, which ran like lightning to their holes at the bottom of the talas,
breaking the branches and grinding the leaves in their flight. I stopped a
moment, hemmed in on all sides by gigantic trees whose branches, descending
almost to the ground, prevented my horse from going forward. Among the many
sounds, I noticed quite near me a dull, regular beat which seemed like the
knocking of two bones, one against the other. It was a funereal sound and
recalled to my mind the grave-digger and the dissecting-room. Slowly, slowly,
through the grasses and sods, I approached the origin of the strange rumour; on
the top of an algarrobillo all covered by a mantle of blooming passiflora, I saw,
as I rose in the stirrups, the body of a dead horse and the body of a live
carancho.21 Even here, as everywhere else, a victim and an executioner, a
creature devoured and a devourer!
The horse was no longer a corpse, but a skeleton stretched at full length upon
the earth, prepared by the patient loves of many caranchos. There was nothing to
be seen but the bones, tail, hoofs, and a tuft of hair on the black ground saturated
by the soft mud of blood and entrails. Here and there on the bones were short
black strips of flesh, which this last carancho plucked off greedily and devoured.
And although surrounded by so much filth and so much death, how beautiful she
was – that American vulture, with her brilliant feathers, clean as a young lady.
Shut up among the ample ribs of the horse, she seemed to be in a cage, and from
time to time thrust forth her head between the bones and cleaned her beak by
beating it against one and the other. The regular strokes of the beak, detaching
the last shreds of flesh from that poor carcass, were interrupted by a deep groan,
to which I could hear another respond in the distance. Then my carancho
answered in a louder voice, and, thrusting forth her entire head, looked up
toward the skies. I too looked up and saw another carancho suspended like an
eagle with outstretched wings directly over the field of autopsy. The groans
became more affectionate, stronger; the flyer approached the ground, but the
voracious female, with the exception of a few coquettish glances, continued her
gastronomical strokes with the beak. I concealed myself behind the massive
trunk of a nandubay to watch the loves of two vultures among the bones of a
corpse.
The impatient lover groaned continually; he paraded his beautiful colours and
elegant movements; but the female in her subdued prattle seemed to say, ‘I see
you, but I do not care about you; I find the flesh of my horse a hundred times
more savoury.’ The passionate carancho darted down like an arrow, and beating
with beak and talons against that bony cage, he made it creak with a shudder of
love. The cold coquette crouched within the carcass, then emerged from her cage
in two or three most elegant leaps, raising her wings and exhibiting the softest
and most private down of her breast, and then returned to her post. The two
chased each other, pulled each other about, bit each other. I heard wing flap
against wing, I saw the skeleton jostled in the affray; but the aggressive lover
was repulsed, and he flew off screeching with pain and fury. He had been chased
off; her gluttony was more powerful than love.
The unhappy bird disappeared behind the horizon for a moment, and the poor
female gazed upward in a dazed manner between one mouthful and another. She
thought no more of her meal, but, ascending to the top of her bony cage, began
to groan timidly with real pain. To that groan responded another groan; to that
pain another pain. A robust flapping of wings which made the air vibrate on that
bright spring day warned me that in the innamorato22 love was more powerful
than wrath. The carancho flew around, sighing, and the scornful female, now
enamoured, hurled through space her most loving glances. Her wings opened
and closed at brief intervals, and the feathers of the tail, erecting themselves
convulsively, coaxed the winged companion to voluptuousness. And he not only
descends, but falls like a thunderbolt on his companion: the bodies clasp, four
wings caress each other, a thousand hot and shining feathers intermingle and
blend in an only love; and under the weight and the robust fulminating embrace
of two vultures, the bones of the skeleton yield, bend, and with a dull creak add
their note to the burning kiss of two innamorati.

A beautiful day in spring! I am sitting, or rather reclining, on the shore of one of

our lakes. I have not under me the soft carpet of the sea-coast, but the sand and
smooth pebbles of the lake shore. The last breeze of the north wind is lost in the
farthest outskirts of the eastern border, while a faint, distant sail swells at the first
breath of winter, which is about to resume its daily blasts. Between the last sigh
of a dying wind and the birth of another, a vast expanse of lake is tranquilly
reposing, awaiting to renew the eternal and alternate labour of a rising and a
falling wave. The sky and the water seem to contemplate each other and
exchange in sweet confidence their azure and their fresh smiles. At my feet a
coquettish wave trembles rather than moves, whispers rather than murmurs
between the stones; these, in their eternal laziness, are diverting themselves,
stealing from the sun an atom of his light, which they weave into a golden
iridescent aureole. Among these little babbling waves and many-tinted pebbles
clothed in light, there projects a hard, grey stone which, polished by the long
caresses of the lake, clothed in seaweed and nostoc,23 resists the kisses and
convulsions of the waves. From one side and the other the insolent water is
making repeated and futile attempts to reach the top of the stone; and round and
round it goes, but succeeds only in hurling at that pretty piece of rock a gentle
spray, a shower of pearls. Now and then it seems to me that from both sides two
waves are racing to see which will reach the top first; and then, sliding down,
weary and disheartened, they course around, kissing and embracing each other in
turn. No deafening noise, no cry of man or beast, no hammer of the workshop or
creak of the wheel breaks the silent, peaceful air of the place. Only, from time to
time, some zephyr, precursor of the winter, sends a shiver through the leaves of
the poplar tree above my head, or, flinging itself on the tranquil and distant
bosom of the lake, disturbs it, furrows it, and runs off again to fool with the air.
All at once I behold a quiver-like ebullition in the waters near me, of which
certainly the wind has not been guilty. I rise and rivet my gaze on the spot where
the low and sandy shore descends precipitately, hiding its secrets in that narrow
border poetically and picturesquely termed corona by the fishermen of Lake
Maggiore.24 The water no longer boils, no longer moves: perhaps I was
mistaken! In the meantime I wait and contemplate. No region seduces me like
that where land and water unite; whether it be the waves of the sea and the rocks
of granite; the kiss of the lake and the mossy cliffs; or the gentle brook and the
forest selvedge. The ancients, who divined many parts of the science of the
future in their mythology and in their verses, were much wiser than we when
they constituted earth, air, fire, water the four elements of the cosmos – the four
elementary atoms of the universe. Is matter not solid, liquid, gaseous? And is
there not a fourth mode of existence – vibration, or motion, heat, thought? Do
not the grandest phenomena result from the contact of these forms of existence?
Are not the most sublime pictures represented? Do not the most stupendous
energies in nature burst forth? In any case, Oh friendly reader, think of this as
you will, but if you care to see me and find me happy, seek me there where the
earth kisses the wave, there where the wave returns to earth her caress.
In the meantime I waited and contemplated. Where the transparent water had
become by rapid gradations azure, opaque, grey, I beheld rising from the heart of
the invisible a hundred, thousands, millions of little brown shadows, like an
army in battle, all along the indented border of the corona. They passed and re-
passed, new phalanxes hotly pursued those gone before, an infinite multitude, a
real miracle of the gospel, the transformation of the water into fishes! It was
neither a journey nor a flight. Each of those creatures was impatient and glided
on more nimbly than necessary. And the active ones behind lost patience with
those in front because they did not move on quickly enough; and then the shoal
dashed against one another, the entire lake became as silver and effervesced as
though by force of fire, scintillated as though the sun were diluted in the waves.
Now and then the water did not suffice for that innumerable, impatient crowd,
and they darted in thousands through the air and fell down upon other millions of
little fishes, which, with their backs above the water, were resisting the mighty
host that pursued and pressed them from the deep.
That frisking, that confusion, that ebullition, that effervescence assumed by
degrees the aspect of a giddy chaos. Scales of the fishes, spray of the waves, rays
of the sun were confused and intermingled, and I could no longer distinguish the
elements of animate from inanimate nature, which seemed to have given a
rendezvous for the celebration of some infernal Sabbath. All those creatures
wanted to reach the shore, but space would not permit it, and they rubbed their
soft bodies voluptuously on the sand, and kissed and embraced among
themselves. At times they disappeared for an instant in the profundity of the lake
as though to repose and take breath; then they returned to pursue each other
hotly on the shore, to shiver and to ripple the water, which, hitherto so tranquil,
was suddenly converted into a pandemonium of waves and tempests.
Save a tepid sun, everything which moved in that spot was cold: fishes, water,
stones, sand; but the mass in motion was so hot! Does not science also teach us
that motion is heat? And there was certainly heat in that water and in that place,
for that multitude loved; and drunk with voluptuousness, twisted in a prurient
vertigo, they beat their members against the sand and the waves, pouring out
there the honey of love.
The natives of India, under their burning skies and in the perfumed shade of
their palms, never dreamed of a more promiscuous polygamy, a more gigantic
wreath of orgies than that of those slippery fishes, scintillating and trembling on
the shore. It is not one male that kisses a companion; not one bird that caresses
his faithful mate in the warm nest; not one organ of love seeking to join another
organ of love, but an instantaneous fermentation of a thousand creatures that
love with all the senses, that embrace with all the body, that send back in
thousands the waves of voluptuousness; not a single union of two kings, but an
infinite intermingling in an entirely voluptuous and luxuriant atmosphere: the
love of each is the love of thousands; the love of thousands is the spasm of one
alone.
And the spasms and intoxication of those enamoured fishes were indeed
genuine, for they left their lacerated scales on the sands of the sea, and many
glided forth from the water and frisked about on the naked shore; then, gasping
(I know not whether from voluptuousness or pain), with a supreme effort they
rebounded into the water, which welcomed them to new convulsions and new
loves. They were so inebriated that they no longer distinguished land from water.
Perhaps, like ourselves, they too felt the ideal and wished to pass the confines of
the sensible; for them too, the extreme of voluptuousness approached the
frontiers of death; and also in that cold, mute crowd of living creatures, love had
its victims and martyrs.
 I picked up one little sufferer from that shore. It was dying, incapable of
taking another bound in order to return to the water, and I restored it to the
waves. In its agony it felt the electric contact of that atmosphere of love, and
became conscious, twisted its tail slowly to right and to left, then glided away
rapidly to be lost in the inebriating water, which had become all perfume, all
voluptuousness.

These few pictures, which I have rapidly sketched from nature, are only poor
specimens from an immense gallery rich in warmer tints and more singular
figures.
In no function does life multiply its forces as in love, and the strangest
phenomena are interwoven about the union of the sexes, which, simple in
essence, assumes the most varied forms. The philosopher, the poet, the artist
should study with pleasure the thousand ways in which living beings exchange
the reproductive germ, and they would find therein subjects for profound
meditation and lofty inspiration. It is only in the eyes of the hypocrite or the
cretin that many loves of living beings seem but brutal battles or immodest
embraces. Nowhere does nature manifest herself more powerful, more
inexhaustible, more admirable than there where she teaches the living to eternize
life.
They love continually and so much on the face of our planet that even the
severe walls of the cloister do not succeed in hiding from the modest nun every
scene of love. It is well, however, to conceal, as far as possible, from our
children, especially little girls, the obscene intercourse of animals which most
resemble us. But the most rigorous morality in the world and the most
puritanical modesty would not know how to hide the kisses of the doves, the
amorous duets of the canaries, and the sublime embraces of the butterflies. More
than one maiden has had in these pictures of nature her first lessons in love; and
many years before the lips of a lover have taught her to love in two, the doves,
the canaries, the butterflies have caused her heart to palpitate, disclosing to her
the outlines of infinite and burning mysteries.
 Chapter 3
The First Rays of Love – Good and Evil Sources of Love
Human beings of a low order or of a simple nature do not observe in themselves
the rising of the energy of that new sentiment called love, until the development
of the germinative glands has marked in them the character of sex. On the
contrary, in rich and powerful natures, many years before sex has imprinted its
indelible mark on the organism, a vague, mysterious, and modest sympathy
attracts the little boy to the little girl. There where the sun must rise in the
boundless azure of the skies, one notices a rosy tint scarcely delineated on the
horizon, but which suffices to tell us, ‘It is here that the superior star must shine,
the father of all light.’ The sun is ever the most beautiful among all the lovely
things of the heavens, but I have studied with a warm and constant affection, I
have watched with religious attention the first rays of that other sun which we
are now studying in this book. They appear without being invited by the
precocious corruption of books and surroundings; they rise spontaneously in the
heart of the most unconscious innocence; they shine like the serene and tranquil
rays of a light that later will be ardent and bewitching; they appear and disappear
like lightning flashes which noiselessly illuminate the clouds and then leave
them darker than before. It is a coarse, vulgar malignity to assert that no child is
ignorant of the secrets of love. Childhood innocence is truer, more sincere,
deeper than is supposed, and it holds out limpid and adamantine even when
splashed with the mud of social corruption. The rosy lips of a child can repeat,
with a look of lascivious malice, a jest learned at home from a servant or from a
libertine, but that filth does not penetrate the crystalline nature of the child, and
the spray of a fountain will suffice to wash away the dirt. It is the custom with
the malicious to doubt the innocence of others, as it is the practice of the wicked
to deny all virtue.
In the noisy and turbulent games which form the delight of the first period of
life, all at once a little boy distinguishes a little girl among a hundred, a
thousand; and an instantaneous sympathy weaves the rosy knot of a nameless
affection, of an innocent love unconscious in itself, which could seem at the
same time the caricature and the miniature of a sublime picture. I remember
having seen an angelic little creature, blond as an ear of corn and rosy as the
dawn, throw her arms around the neck of a little fellow, stern as a brigand and
dark as a pirate. She covered him with kisses, but he scorned the fondling and
repulsed her angrily; and she tried to tell him that she loved him very much, that
she wanted to make him her little spouse. A world reversed! – a microscopic
scene of a chaste Joseph who knew not woman and a Lilliputian woman who, in
the innocent ardour of a childish embrace, seemed to be the wife of Potiphar,25
though in reality an angel!
However, these instantaneous movements of affection between two children
of a different sex sometimes conceal a real passion which has proud jealousies,
tears, sighs, delirious joys, a history, a future!
Young girls, whom a kind or a cruel nature destined to arouse at every step
through life a desire and a sigh, are often ignorant of the fact that among the
multitude of their adorers there are also boys who kiss in secret the flowers that
have fallen from their bosoms; who furtively and mysteriously, like domestic
thieves, enter the little room that shelters their angel to kiss the bed, to kneel
upon the carpet where rest the feet of that woman whom they already distinguish
above all other creatures in the world, whom they dare to place on a level with
their mother. And how often, while running her fingers through the hair of a boy
who lays his head upon her lap, a woman is unconscious that there is a little
heart that beats loudly, loudly at the touch of that caress; that when the child
raises his curly head his face is not flushed from congestion, but burning with a
fire of which he himself is unconscious – love.
These rosy phantoms, which gild some of the most fruitful hours of our child-
life, seem to last as long as the shades of morning; and certainly the battles of
youth often make us forget them. And many of slippery memory and sceptical
heart, hearing them mentioned, have only words of contempt and gestures of
compassion for what they are pleased to term childish lullabies to be relegated
among the horrors of witchcraft and the caresses of nurses. Yet how often these
flying phantoms announce the storms of the future, reveal a nature deeply
enamoured, and warp the first threads of a tissue of delirious joys and torments!
Some privileged mortal may, on his deathbed, press the hand of the only one he
has ever loved, whom he loved even as a child before he knew she was a
woman. The trembling lip of the dying man can reunite the last kiss of life with
the first hearty kiss imprinted on the downy cheek of a ten-year-old girl. And
without reaching this lofty sphere of an ideal too far removed from us, how often
after a long life, callous from the tortures of a hundred passions, having lost all
faith and love, in the first shades of evening a last rosy flash of sunset awakens a
dear memory of many buried years, and the heart of an old man races, while a
tear courses down his wrinkled cheek! In front of the weary eyes there has
passed a little straw hat with two blue streamers, but in the depths of that heart
what an abyss has been opened for an instant! In the night of the past a most
limpid ray of light has illuminated a picture all light, all beauty – an antique
cameo seen under the pick of the excavator among the dust and rubbish! And
that picture was a childish love, a flower uprooted by the miry torrents of a
storm, but preserved by the friendly hand of memory, which is not always cruel
and ungrateful.
If you ask the child-man why he loves a little girl, he will run off bashfully; if
you question the little girl, her face will become suffused with blushes. They
love… and they know not the reason why! Ask a precious rosebud why it
bloomed in March instead of awaiting the warm and voluptuous zephyrs of May;
ask a July cyclamen why it did not await the cool breezes of September to
perfume the mossy bed in which it has made its nest… and they know not the
reason why! In passionate men the first rays of love appear sooner because they
long to yield the flowers to ripe and impatient nature, and an entire life will be
for them too short a day to satisfy the intense thirst of love which consumes
them. They love soon because they love much – as men of genius at ten years of
age often reflect on that which the masses will never think of at thirty.
And why, boy, do you prefer that little girl to all the others? And why, pretty
child, do you permit yourself to be kissed only by that dark little fellow?
Because that little girl differs from all the others; because that dark little fellow
is not like any of the other boys. Love, from its first and more confused
appearance, is election, a deep and irresistible sympathy of different natures, the
recomposition of analysed forces, the equilibrium of opposites, the complement
of disunited things; it is the harmony of harmonies; the most gigantic, the most
prepotent of the affinities of attraction!
With the exception of those natures more powerful in love, this sentiment, in
men of the lower classes, rises when a new want springs up under the wand of
that magical transformer – puberty. It is then that on the smooth, round,
pubescent surface of the infantile nature a deep crevice is formed, a void that
woman alone can fill; it is then that that round, smooth fruit called a ‘little girl’
also sheds its childish skin, revealing the soft and juicy pulp of the fruit which
was enclosed therein. It is then that from every accentuated muscle of the virile
organism, from every accent of his strengthened voice, from every hair that has
rendered his flesh bristly, there rises a powerful cry which demands in the
loudest voice, A woman! And from every curve of the child become a woman,
from every proud toss of the head, from every pore of the young girl now a
crater of warm desires, arises a cry which demands, A man!
And innocence and ignorance linked to the arm of the boy and girl urge them
to flee far, far away, through the flower beds of the garden, through the cool
fragrant woods, up, up the steep mountain side. On, on they run, until they are
dazed, wearied, in order to deafen the ear to that incessant cry, A man! A woman!
And they play and fool impetuously to demonstrate to themselves and others that
they are the same as they were yesterday; they laugh and weep without cause to
deceive themselves and others, to tell them that they are more than ever children
beguiled by the last impressions; but all in vain. In play and in chase, through the
flower beds of the garden and among the bushes of the woods, the new demon
does not abandon them, but shouts continually, mockingly into their ears the
same words, A man! A woman! Night comes on and the muscles, weary from
many playful battles, prepare them for a profound sleep in which unmindful
childhood seems to sink into a sea of forgetfulness; but in that sleep unusual
larvae of naked phantoms, ah! too naked, put to flight innocence and ignorance;
and strange torments, voluptuous pains which seem tearful joys, disturb, confuse
them, cause their hearts to palpitate. And the innocent girl, bathed in perspiration
and tears, seats herself on the virginal couch and strokes her abundant hair
dishevelled from the dreams of the night, and asks herself, terrified: ‘What sin
have I committed? Mamma, mamma mia, where are you?’ After a weary, restless
night she runs to her mother, complains of feeling ill, seriously ill, though she
has no pain! And to the affection that smiles or consoles her, she responds with
unusual tears, unreasonable impatience, with a world of new tastes, new desires,
strangest caprices. And how many painless, unreasonable tears, how many
storms in a serene sky, how many romances created by fancy in an hour, and
overturned in one moment by a mad contempt! How many caresses bestowed on
a lapdog that has never been loved, how many kisses given to a canary that has
never been caressed, how often the curly hair of a little brother is toyed with, and
how many passionate glances cast at the eyes and limbs of a St John the Baptist,
in the church during the hours of devotion! How much sudden enthusiasm and
sudden dejection, how many convulsions of the heart, what a pandemonium of
fancies!
The passage over the fatal bridge that separates adolescence from youth is
one of those epochs most freighted with anguish, most blithe with convulsive
joys, and consequently I term it the hysterical period of life. I shall illustrate it
some day, perhaps, in a work which I am preparing on the age of man. For the
present it will suffice to mark with a flourish of the pen how the necessity of
love announces itself in most men. And if I have hitherto referred principally to
woman, it is because she, more modest, more reserved, and a hundred times
more in need of love, feels more deeply the shudder which announces to her the
approach of the new god; and being more innocent than we are, she is ignorant
of his nature – more timid, she has a greater fear of him. Nature has conceded
base resources to man almost unknown to woman, and too often precocious vice
makes him acquainted with voluptuousness before love. If he is modest,
virtuous, and impassioned, he also feels the same raging tumult stirring his
viscera, and demands of nature in wrathful accents and plaintive lamentation, A
woman!
To this cry responds, alas! too often, the first comer. It is impossible for
certain natures to long resist the tortures of a robust and vigorous chastity; the
frail human shell would go to pieces if it persisted in imprisoning an
accumulation of forces, all gigantic, all fresh, all ready for the battle. First love is
not slow in announcing itself, and if the neophyte who appears on the horizon
lacks more than two-thirds of the desired virtues, love is the magician to create
them and to transform a worm into a god.
The maiden in her dreams, as she gazed at the pictures in the church and
those on the domestic walls, thought only of a winged man with nothing of
earthly material save two lips to imprint on hers a kiss. The object desired was
an angel all love and ether, who sheltered beneath his massive wings the soul of
the young girl and bore it away through heavenly space to a golden region, all
light and warmth. The tremor of the wings and a velvety kiss were all the luxury
that the chaste virgin permitted in her dream; and beyond that, an obscure and
infinite mystery of which she knew neither the name, the confines, nor the form.
Instead of this angel there appears before her a man in trousers, with
moustaches, who smokes excessively and betrays women; perhaps his hair is
already grey, he may be a husband and father – but he is a man!
And the youth too has dreamed of his angel. She should have been all eyes,
all hair; with a slender figure, feet to scarcely touch the ground, an eternal smile
wreathed in an aureole of light, a soul ardent as fire, and an innocence pure as
the snow that caps the summit of the Jungfrau.26 And instead, she who wakes
him from the dream of the night is a saucy fat chambermaid, whose firm
accentuated curves only intimate that she is very feminine; instead of wings she
has two sinewy arms and two hands hardened from the use of the pot and broom;
and she pounds the floor with wooden shoes that seem to be tipped with iron –
but she is a woman!
Anything satisfies first love, which is, like the hunger of a million, to be
satisfied with a penny’s worth of bread. How vulgar is the object of that young
girl’s thoughts! A heart of a grocer in the body of a porter! But he is pallid, and
the dullness of his gaze seems to her sentimental languor; he is ill, and his illness
appears poetic; he is robust, and for her he is the god of strength; he is arrogant,
but she thinks him passionate; he is an egotist, and so much the better, for he will
love but her, who alone knows how to make him happy. How much poetry that
ardent youth has wafted to the skies composing hymns to the luxurious bust of a
strong peasant woman! How many elegies has he indited to the sky-blue
paleness of a chlorotic workingwoman! Woe to him if seduction unites itself to
all this tissue of lies with which first love too often weaves its nest! Woe if to the
inexperienced maiden the aged libertine knows how to say in accents acquired
from long practice in the art, ‘I love you!’ Woe if the lascivious old woman,
quelling the appetite with unripe fruit, understands how to warm the innocent
youth at the fire of new voluptuousness! Then the fire is lighted, the flames arise,
and the first object loved is placed on the altar, choruses of eternal oaths chanted
to it, perfumed by the incense of the maddest, most licentious idolatry.
First love does not always originate so basely, but it often only too closely
resembles these first loves which I am expounding. Let us be sincere from the
very first steps in our studies, for hypocrisy is the moth that in modern society
notches and corrodes the highest and strongest trees in the garden of life. The
original sin of love unveils itself to us with its first infant-cry, and even when we
are obliged to use all the artifices of galvanoplasty27 to gild our idol, when the
bellows of fancy labour to warm up first love, our very first utterance is a lie: ‘I
love you above everything in this world; I will love you forever. You are my first
love, and we can love but once.’ And a second oath responds to the first, perhaps
more sacred, more ardent, and in a kiss that is often the sum of two lies the first
hypocrisy is sealed, which to the last generation of the loves of those two
creatures will imprint an everlasting mark on all the expressions of affection, on
all the deliriums of the heart.
Be sincere in the first kiss if you wish love to be the chief joy of life and not
an illicit trade of voluptuous lies. Yes, first love is yours, but because it is the
first, it is neither true, just, nor natural that it should be the great, the one, the
only love. Do not swear falsely, do not perjure yourself before you know what
truth is. To the eternity of your oaths there will reply with a jesting smile the
indifference of tomorrow and the repentance of the day after tomorrow. Before
you have really loved you will sing in every key that virtue does not exist, that
love is a dream; and, young and old at once, you will deny the existence of a god
whose temple you have never seen. Abandoned by a chambermaid who into
your fresh robust youth steeped the heat of her members inflamed by long-
standing lasciviousness, you will cry, ‘Treachery!’ and mistake lechery for love;
hitched for a day to the wagon of a coquette, you will curse the betrayed faith, if
through caprice the silken thread was broken, which bound you together with
many other slaves of the triumph: liars yourselves, you say that love is a lie!
You are two: a man and a woman, you say that you love each other, and,
perhaps, for both it is first love. Well then, during the first days do not swear
eternal fidelity if you yet value honour and if perjury still terrifies you. First love
is rarely true love, as the first book of an author is rarely the true expression of
his genius. We may be weak either from excessive youth or from advanced age,
and love – the one, first, and only, like many other dogmatic forms which delight
so much that hypocritical biped called man – has made more victims in modern
society than many crimes and maladies of the body and mind. If it is your first
love, so much the better. With hands chastely clasped and lips modestly united,
do not pronounce any other words but these: ‘Let us love each other!’ If you are
of the few and happy mortals who love but once; if you are among the rare
exceptions who, in the first man or the first woman, find the angel seen in the
first dreams of youth, then you are a thousand times blessed. The fidelity of the
future will cement for life the virtue of your compact. If the God of the Church
be really seated eternally on his gilded throne and gazing down with undying
patience on the men who scrape the crust of our planet, how often must he not
laugh in his sleeve as he listens to the strange abuse of oaths and the miserable
ill-use that lovers make of eternity! And, perhaps, that smile comforts him in the
constant disgust that he alone must submit to the fatal condemnation of eternity.
As for me, if the progressive growth of a true and healthy democracy should
cancel from judicial institutions the form of oath, I would wish that the man and
woman who love each other should never swear to it. A vow less and an extra
caress, what delight! An eternity less, and a prolonged kiss – what
voluptuousness! Nor should modest and chosen souls throw aside my book,
indignant at the cynicism of my advice. The reading of other pages will show
them that no one more than myself intends to bear love on high to the most
serene regions of the ideal, and that as far as sentiment can reach, I too feel the
strength to follow. The triple and firm rind of hypocrisy that from the time of our
swaddling clothes entangles us, the Arcadian varnish which makes us smooth
and brilliant scarcely ever permit us to see the true nature of things, and in love
we are all counterfeiters. The greatest liberty, the greatest sincerity can alone
cure us of this malady which, more than national, is civil; its virus is absorbed by
every race, every social class; it spares not the highest and strongest natures; it is
incarnate in every fibre of our hearts, in the framework of every one of our
institutions.
 Which are the true sources of love? Which are the ways that lead to the sacred
temple? There must be an only source, an only road, but too many are they who
press and crush to enter there where all await the greatest joy, for not all enter by
the great highway of nature, but through secret gates and oblique paths reach the
centre; and they are unhappy because the original sin of their loves condemns
them to a dangerous life sown with discomforts and bitterness.
All the natural fountainheads of true love are summed up in one alone. They
are drops which slowly distil in the depths of our viscera, and in these they
couple and form rivulets and streams that, in turn, write in the channel of our
veins until they gush forth in the one hot, trembling wave of sympathy.
Sympathy is the true and only source of love. Sympathy, most beautiful
among all the lovely words of human speech! To suffer together – melancholy
predictions of life experienced in two; but, better still, to feel, laugh, and weep
together! Two organisms, one sense; two exterior worlds, but which unite in one
centre; two nerves that by diverse ways bear various sensations, but which
interweave and run parallel in one heart alone. One sees, gazes, desires: a spark
that shoots forth from the contact of two desires; this is the first act of love. Two
solitary wheels in the desert of waters plough the deep, unknown to each other;
the wind impels one toward the other; a shiver of sympathy runs through the
sails and cordage and causes them to creak; they feel themselves pressed by a
common need, and throw out a rope that unites them. From that moment they
plough the same waters, expose themselves to the same dangers, and long to
reach the same shore.
The most rapid and ardent sympathies arise from the admiration of form, that
is to say, the sentiment of the beautiful, which is satisfied in the object desired
and loved. Among the definitions of love that Tasso was pleased to discuss there
are three which express and delineate this idea: ‘Love is the desire of beauty.
Love is the immoderate desire of cohabitation for satisfaction by those who
covet particular beauty. Love is the union of beauty for satisfaction.’ And, in
fact, what is love if not the selection of the better form in order to perpetuate it?
What is love if not the choice of the best in order to triumph over the mediocre –
a choice of youth and strength in order to survive the old and weak elements!
Woman, the custodian of seeds, vestal of life, should be more beautiful than we,
and in her, man loves the figure above all other things. Mediocre forms can –
elevated by a gigantic genius and an impassioned heart – still excite ardent
passions, but these are always medicated sympathies. Where, then, a real
deformity appears, love is dead, or it exists as a prodigy of heroism, or an
aesthetic malady.
 Woman too is immediately carried away by the beauty of the virile form, and
can love a man merely because he is handsome; but in her the field of sympathy
is extensive, and character and genius seduce her more frequently than they do
us. The ugliest men have enjoyed the superhuman voluptuousness of being
loved, but in the phases of their character, in the power of their genius, in the
pomp of their position they possessed a fascination which, nevertheless,
belonged to the world of beauty. Woman contains within herself such a power of
transmission of the germinative elements, and such an accumulation of beauty,
that she can do without that of her companion; but she likes to feel herself
conquered by a superior force, fascinated by something that shines, flashes,
thunders.
In love, genius and character exercise very little influence if they do not take
the shape of the beautiful, and the aesthetic dominates and governs all amorous
phenomena. And this is not enough: even those who seek to place in the loftiest
spheres of the ideal world the criterion of their choice, and despise the beautiful
as a vulgar fascination of dull and clouded minds, seek unwittingly,
unknowingly powers that bear a deep sexual mark. The philosopher, maybe, who
boasts of having loved an ugly, intelligent, and sensible woman; but let him
sound the depths of his heart, study the sources of his love, and he will find that
he admires and loves in his companion qualities essentially feminine: the pliant
grace of tenderness, the noble intelligence of the heart, the insuperable
shrewdness of affection, or the coquettish ways of her charming and modest
personality. In a word, the proud despiser of form was seduced by the lovely
feminine phases of character or wit. And woman, when she happens to love an
ugly man, is always conquered by dominating talent, dazzling ambition, heroic
courage, or the prepotency of some power that bears a deep virile mark. Sex
plays too great a part in the economy of life to be stricken from the ledger, and
love is too strong a current to be turned and guided between the paper banks of
our sophisms and Machiavellian duplicity. If some one is not yet persuaded that
beauty is the supreme inciter of every amorous sympathy, let him remember that
love is the passion of youth, and youth is always a chosen form of beauty.
Love at first sight is the ideal of the most ardent sympathies, it is the most
fortunate combination in the great hazardous games of life. All at once to meet,
to admire, to desire, to embrace with a look like a lightning flash – to feel one’s
self inundated by another gaze, equally passionate and penetrating, so that one
feels himself naked in front of another naked creature, to blush together in the
same moment and to feel all at once that two hearts beat louder, and mutely
make the sweet confession ‘I love you, and you are mine!’ – all this is a joy, too
rare, too perfect, that few have known and few will ever experience.
Very frequently it occurs that the awakened sympathies progress unequally, so
that one has already transported man to the highest summits of desire and
passion while the other scarcely begins to move itself; the one is in spasms, the
other barely vibrates. Even when two loves are called to high and fortunate
destinies; even when they will soon flap their robust wings together in blissful
space, to woman is reserved a task in love’s intercourse which differs too widely
from ours for her to feel with us the same instantaneous and violent emotions.
Man says everything with a look; he instantly and proudly acknowledges his
defeat. Woman, even under the spell of the most ardent sympathy, lowers her
eyelids to shut out the excessive light and summons up all her calmness to
defend her heart. The man has already said to the woman a hundred times with
the flash of his eye, ‘I love you!’ The woman, trembling, scarcely dares to say,
‘Perhaps I love you!’ And the two happy creatures flee, chase each other until
the sympathy of one equals that of the other, until the supreme languor of a long
battle dies away in two notes which vibrate in sweetest harmony. They sigh
together and say to themselves, ‘I love you!’ while to nature they repeat with a
second sigh, ‘I thank you!’
The energies of amorous desire, which the longer they last the more they
accumulate, follow the laws of elementary physics that govern forces. The most
instantaneous loves are not always the most lasting, and if an unexpected
satisfaction follows a sudden desire, love can sometimes resemble a glorious
rape rather than a real passion. It is true that love is not a battle but a long war,
and when to the first victory there succeed a hundred, a thousand, the
fulminating sympathy can also take deep root in our heart and, becoming
renewed after every struggle, reach the ideal perfection of coupling intensity
with extension, of reflecting at the same time the light of those stars that never
set and the lightning flash that ploughs the skies. The most perfect love is a sun
that never sets. In ordinary cases, however, love that rises slowly disappears in
the same manner; and that of the nature of lightning lasts about as long. Anyhow,
a healthy love, well constituted and destined for a prolific existence, should
begin with a violent shock that measures the depths from which the warm
sympathy flashed. All other benevolent sentiments originate in a manner
different from love, whose right it is to be born amid thunder and lightning, as
befits the birth of gods or demons. Princes cannot enter the world like the
masses; and the prince of the affections cannot come to light by the hands of a
fond and intelligent midwife and the domestic care of relatives. Where a
coruscation of the heavens and a trembling of earth do not accompany the new
love; where nature does not hurl forth a cry of voluptuousness, or of pain – no
one can deceive me – a friendship, a benevolence, any kind of a sentiment has
sprung into being, but to the newborn I shall certainly not give the holy baptism
of love.
And thus, naturally, we have arrived at those frontiers which separate the only
legitimate way that leads to the temple, from the oblique, unfrequented paths.
Friendship can be a source of love, an excellent cause, but it has always a
pathological origin, not a natural, and leads step by step to the worst among the
sources of love: gratitude, compassion, vanity, luxury, revenge.
When one has been accustomed to see a woman daily, to talk to her, live
perhaps with her without ever calling her by any other name save sister or friend,
if some day it seems that we love her, such love resembles those tropical fruits
raised in our climate by means of manure and the hothouse. If love be possible
between man and woman is an old problem and one that will never be solved,
because many give this name to real loves, which, meeting on the threshold of
desire, held back by the rigid hands of duty, waver gently and slowly before the
temple without ever entering it. It is proper for the sake of delicacy to term these
loves friendship. I will certainly not condemn the innocent falsification; but a
real, true friendship, with all the specific characteristics that distinguish this
serene affection, between man and woman is possible only on one condition: that
of making tabula rasa of every sexual mark in the two who have shaken hands.
Now the destroying of sex in an individual is a cruel physical and moral
mutilation that destroys more than half the man. If friendship joins two eunuchs
of this kind, I will say that their affection is not that of man and woman, but of
two neutral beings. But as long as it is possible for one to desire the person of the
other; as long as the most modest, the most innocent longing may spring up, the
friendship becomes love. How many are those moral eunuchs? How many men
and women can love without desire? Count them, and then I will be able to tell
you how many are the cases, well verified, of friendship without love between
man and woman.
However, I wish to be more explicit. Do not suppose that because the
problem is difficult I run past it without solving it. Are there in this sublunary
world a man and a woman who are always glad to see each other, who love each
other, and who have never desired even a kiss from their companion? Yes; now
then, those two angels are friends, and I admit the possibility of the
psychological phenomenon: friendship between two persons of a different sex.
One can pass from any form of mild benevolence to that of love, and
therefore much more easily from friendship, which we have admitted
scientifically possible between man and woman. Lasting loves may arise in this
way, but they have always a cold surface, a certain lymphatic tint. They require a
hydropathic cure and sometimes cod-liver oil, because from the lymphatic state
they can also pass to the scrofulous. A common variety of these loves is that
which springs from gratitude.
‘Amor che a nullo amato amor perdona,’ sings the poet28 with truth, but on
one condition only, that between the two who love each other there be no other
difference than in the length of the step; that is to say, one arrives first and the
other soon after; otherwise they never meet on the broad road of sympathy. O
tutors who believe in the love of a pupil; philanthropists who believe in the love
of the orphan benefited by you; old bachelors who believe in the love of the
grateful chambermaid, remember that gratitude alone has never generated a
legitimate love. It has often produced good and honest children, but they are all
bastards. If gratitude takes you by the hand and conducts you over the road of
sympathy, it may be a good guide, but nothing more. There are men and women
who very much resemble the cold-blooded animals, which take their temperature
from the atmosphere that surrounds them but of themselves can generate but
little or no heat. Such men and women know not how to love of themselves, and
need another love which rains down upon them, absorbs them, saturates them
like sweetbreads dipped in wine. Their sympathies are cold and equal for all;
they often ask of books and men what love is; they compare the descriptions
given them with that which they feel in their hearts, like the naturalist who turns
an insect over and over again in his hand, compares it with the chart before him,
and finally exclaims: ‘But it really seems to me that this insect is the amor
verus29 of the entomologist. Am I also in love, really in love?’ For all these
gentlemen, who are much more numerous than is supposed, the verse of the poet
is most appropriate. They always love through gratitude or compassion, which is
almost the same.
This sweet and mild benevolence – grateful love – must not be confused with
that pity which women frequently have for those who love them desperately, and
to whom they sometimes concede a compassionate love. Woman is easily
moved, she cannot witness suffering with indifference, and she often yields, not
through lechery but through pity, to which she frequently unites a legitimate
pride in being able to transform a wretched creature into a happy man. And man
often speculates on this weakness of Eve, and usually abuses it, ready then to
slander her who had made him happy. Man too can love through compassion,
but more frequently he gives himself without affection and through pride, as we
shall see further on in the course of our studies.
Woman, however, sometimes concedes, together with voluptuousness, also
love to him who has wept, sighed, and suffered for her. Compassion is the
benevolent chord which vibrates even in the most brutally egotistical natures,
and in woman, so rich in affection, it can vibrate until it tortures. This sentiment
is of a mild and tender nature in itself, and keeps him who suffers in a state of
subjection, so that true equality can never exist between the one who inspires
compassion and the one who feels it. This is the essential character of
compassion, and even when by long, narrow, thorny paths it guides us to love,
the latter feels the influence of its bastard origin. Compassionate loves are all
forms of affectionate pity, of benign protection, and lack the highest notes of
passion. All in all they are similar to the verses of a would-be poet. The god of
fire does not invade them, warm them; they do not know the holy anger of the
sibyls, and if they can live long in a mild climate they can still be overthrown by
the appearance of the true god who demands his rights – his tributes of blood
and heat. The woman who, unfortunately, has not yet experienced other love
than that inspired by compassion, can deceive herself into thinking that she loves
truly and deeply, but woe to her if a real warm sympathy be awakened in her
heart so that she can compare the true love with the false. The tender plant of an
affection long guarded by pity falls uprooted by the breaking of a fiery torrent,
and the poor creature who really loves for the first time suffers the bitterest pain,
the bloodiest struggles between duty and passion, sympathy and love. I know too
well that some go so far as to crave love on bended knee; but I would rather be
loved for the sake of caprice, revenge, or lechery than compassion.
The woman who loves a man in this way has her foot on his head, and
although the pressure of a woman’s little foot may be just as dear as that of her
hand, in the face of nature we are guilty of baseness and invert the most
elementary laws of the physiology of the sexes. The man who renounces the
primacy of conquest is a lion that permits its tail to be cut off, a Samson after the
scissors – always a mild form of eunuch. May Dame Fortune preserve you,
reader, from all forms of compassionate love!
A still more turbid source of love is vanity. To hear that a woman is very
beautiful and chaste, that she has never permitted herself to be loved, is an
immediate stimulus to man, who knows his strength and admires the daughters
of Eve. And these, in turn, willingly persist in throwing the fish hook at the cold,
lonely fish who live in the most obscure depths of solitude and chastity. Hence
many distrustful plunges which lead oftener to the conquest of the body than to
the dominion of the heart, to trophies of vanity rather than true love. The great
lovers who have long since renounced the virtue of sublime love are accustomed
to conquer the impressionable solely for vanity’s sake – to bind with amorous
chains to their triumphal car a new slave and a new victim. They like to conquer
the most eccentric and difficult character, and you see them ardently desirous of
giving the first lesson in voluptuousness to the innocent, and subjugating the
oldest and craftiest libertine. Together with vanity in this choice of victims there
also cooperates the prurient shrub of curiosity, which is one of the strongest
threads in the psychological web of woman. A weary palate can be excited by
the wild fruit as well as by the sharp pungency of stale cheese; and the gay
woman of pleasure is passionately fond of these alternate acid and burning
relishes, of this succession of men inexperienced in love and those already
consumed by this sentiment; lechery can be carried so far in their natures as to
love through pure curiosity for the unknown, excluding lust, which is not always
necessary in these pathological tastes.
However, even when vanity alone has brought a man and a woman together, a
posthumous sympathy can awaken a real love with healthy members and a long
life. Yet it is always a love that resembles the rich man of low birth, the parvenu
who can, in the midst of luxury and pleasure and in the most courteous manner,
give one a donkey kick. To be born well is ever the first problem of life, and
democracy itself will not see the overthrow of the ancient aristocracy until it can
boast of legitimate and noble births.
Man, who daily accuses his companion of vanity, manifests oftener than she
the most grotesque forms of this sentiment, and in our case we rarely see him
renounce the puerile obstinacy of his loves of bastard origin. How often he
basely insults the woman who blessed him with love, telling her that he sought
her love only to add another trophy to his triumphal chariot! Woman, on the
contrary, almost always, even when she desires to be loved through vanity alone,
also when she is about to dismiss the servant who has wearied her, gives him a
testimonial which makes him happy and persuades him that he pleased for a day,
a month, a year the woman who, perhaps, feigned to love him, or loved him
indifferently. No man is humiliated in thinking himself the sweet victim of a
caprice: all men feel themselves degraded when made the target of a vain
speculation. Woman, very frequently, with a gracious shrewdness, feigns
ignorance of the fact that she is desired and loved solely for vanity’s sake, and
slowly, slowly she makes men love her for herself alone, and, without the hostile
enemy perceiving it, succeeds with subtle art in substituting a sincere and ardent
passion for the wretched ambition that had inspired the attack and the conquest:
one of the thousand proofs that woman surpasses us in sentiment just as we are
superiour to her in the strength of genius, one of the proofs that woman always
endeavours to elevate even the basest loves, while we so often pass under the
pitchfork of voluptuousness even those loves which, like the eagle, are born on
the highest rocks of psychology.
Lechery is the prolific mother of the most vulgar loves, and for many this
sentiment is only the necessity of drinking at a fountain found to be sweeter than
the others. Naked love, without the splendid garments of fancy and of the heart,
with the robust flesh which lent it the sentiment of the beautiful washed away,
becomes reduced to a skeleton – lust, which for many is all love. What a
miserable thing! A practice of lasciviousness! Woman converted into a favourite
cup because with it we have long been accustomed to satiate our thirst. And still
we have loves that owe their origin to the house of prostitution, or the audacious
rape of a moment of unreasonable lust. To have possessed previous to having
loved, to have been possessed before having given the kiss of love – what
ignominy! What baseness! And yet love is such a magician that at times it can
perform the miracle of rising from lechery or the cradle of the brothel. However,
I do not wish that any of my readers should become acquainted with love in such
a way.
Love born of lust is the most difficult to preserve. Even the most murderous
cunning of the art of pleasure blunts its weapons against insurmountable
difficulties; and woman, after prodigies of prostitution and lechery of the heart
and of the senses, can behold her victims snatched away from her by the first
comer. Love can be hot, ardent, a thirst, but the glass that satisfies it is of the
most fragile crystal, and can fall from one moment to another shattered into a
thousand pieces.
Revenge, which is a form of hate, can with incestuous nuptials become a
mother or, better, a stepmother of love. To see one’s self betrayed, to wish to
humiliate the guilty one by flinging into his face a new love – here we have the
origin of revengeful lovers. The unfortunate paranymph that forms the bait of a
degraded passion does not always perceive the insidiousness he loves, and
permits himself to be loved, and often amuses those who feign to love him, or
who assist indifferently at the unworthy spectacle. Vanity diminishes the vision,
and does not permit us to see that, perhaps, in the whirl of a day we have been
seen, desired, conquered; and while puffed up with pride we wheel about like a
peacock, without perceiving that we are placed upon the stage in order to
humiliate and wound him or her who is still more than ever beloved. In some
cases we descend so low as to be placed on a level with a mustard cataplasm, or
a cupping-glass; the cure – thanks to ourselves – is so quick and perfect, and we
are speedily dismissed, like the physician who is paid and saluted impatiently
because his services are no longer needed.
These, however, are the most unfortunate cases which belong to the most
repulsive pathology of the heart; in other instances, revengeful love, through the
virtue of either or both of the lovers, becomes a true sentiment which cures the
old wounds and opens great horizons of happiness to the man and woman who
had become acquainted in such a strange manner. So then it may be said that he
who should be the revengeful executor, he who should be the unconscious
minister of the justice of love, becomes instead the chief physician and afterward
the lover of the offence; while a new sentiment arises upon the ruins of the old
affection.
I certainly do not claim to have explained all the pure and impure sources of
love; but I would like to touch upon the most important; I would like to mark
with a great flourish of the pen the genealogy of this sentiment. In an analytical
work, no matter how much care one takes in order not to detach pertinent things,
it is next to impossible to avoid breaking some thread, or destroying something.
It frequently occurs that the source of love is not simple but complex, formed by
the meeting of several streams, so that it is often difficult to determine whether
the newborn be legitimate or a bastard. A slight but sincere sympathy can be
associated with great vanity, and the desire for revenge can – fortunately for us –
encounter a warm and violent affection. Thus, lechery, vanity, compassion,
gratitude can meet at the same time and fecundate a love which later will run
pure and limpid in its bed, although its source was a turbulent, muddy stream.
Sometimes one loves another not for himself but because that person
resembles a person long loved and, perhaps, already lost. Thus it happens that
one loves the daughter after having loved the mother; and there have been
instances in which one has loved three successive generations. The excessive
disproportion in the age of the lovers – a certain mummy perfume which even
the most carefully embalmed bodies exhale – gives to these loves a character
that compels me to place them at least on the frontiers that separate physiology
from pathology; hence I term them physio-pathological.
The greater the sympathy, the purer and more fervid those loves of mixed
origin; and this element alone would suffice to assign them a place in the
hierarchical scale of nobility. The influence which the first origin exercises over
love is so lasting and so prepotent that frequently affections which are brought
into subjection by grave maladies recover all at once at the tender remembrance
of such thoughts as ‘You really loved me one day of your life,’ ‘You are mine
alone,’ ‘And yet I loved you!’ It often occurs that a man born in the highest
circles and of noblest blood descends gradually to the gutter, loses his dignity,
his fortune, even his outer garment of education and manners; but if you observe
him attentively, you will certainly find in the nobility of some gesture, in the
majesty of his accent, in some fine taste the traces of his distinguished origin,
surviving after so much shipwreck. And such is well-born love. I have seen
passions trailed in the mire of prostitution, tattered and filthy, like velvet rags
picked up in the street; I have seen loves sold and bought again, and passed
through the hands of a hundred hucksters at the public auction of vice and
infamy. But in those poor rags I have always found something which remained
intact, and which revealed the ancient and noble origin. With my own eyes I
have witnessed fabulous resurrections which seemed miracles, and redemptions
that caused me to think of divine intervention and of galley slaves calmed too
Arcadian-like in the rose-water bath of our modern philanthropists.
When love begins we may doubt the reality of the passion before our eyes.
The heart beats more quickly than usual, and in the serene heavenly space some
clouds pass and disappear in the deep azure. Perhaps in the distant fog there is an
occasional flash; but will we have a storm or fine weather? If the heart is
compelled to respond, it may make the same solemn mistakes as the
meteorologists of almanacs or universities. Embryos are all similar, and even
today the most powerful microscope cannot distinguish the egg of the lion from
that of the rabbit. Love too assumes so many and such varied disguises that we
are frequently unable to make a good diagnosis. However, it is always easier to
perceive love in our own case than in that of others, notwithstanding that it is
much more necessary to our happiness to know that we are loved than to feel
conscious of being in love. To distinguish in others the true love from the false,
my study of physiology will be of service to you; to explore your own heart, a
moderate attention to the phase of your sentiments will suffice.
One truly loves when to the excruciating cry ‘A Man!’ ‘A Woman!’ a friendly
voice in the distance replies, ‘Do not weep; I am here.’ One loves when after
hearing that voice the cry is silent and the immense void of desire is filled. One
truly loves when all at once one pales and blushes at the sound of a name, or the
swish of a garment that approaches. One loves when involuntarily one name
alone arises to the lips a hundred times a day. One loves when the eyes are
forever fixed on one point of the astronomical quadrant – there where dwells the
creature who has become the half of ourselves. One loves when one hurries to
the mirror every moment and the question arises within ‘Am I beautiful
enough?’ and we penetrate the unquiet glance into the abysses of conscience to
inquire of ourselves, ‘Can I be loved?’ One loves when in every fibre of the
heart, in every atom of the organism the juices of life are excited and hurry on in
their winding course through every vein and every nerve so that a deep, intimate,
penetrating tumult tells us that something great and unusual is within us – almost
a god has visited us. This is true love, which is not appeased by lechery, calmed
by ambition, cooled by distance, which does not even disappear in the dreams of
the night: to leave us it must carry off with it a great piece of bleeding flesh and
broken nerves.
 Chapter 4
The First Weapons of Love – Courtship
How subtle and mysterious must be that high chemistry which unites the
germinative elements of two organisms of a different sex to rejuvenate life and
generate a new organism! It does not suffice that in the calm, tranquil silence of
thirty or forty years, lived in part by a man and in part by a woman, the germs
are prepared and ready to attract each other; it is not sufficient that the powerful
energies of sexual affinities are attracted; that an instantaneous sympathy
prepares the spark and the conflagration. All this long labour of nature has
prepared every-thing in order to complete the great phenomenon; but the atoms
that seek each other and desire to unite must long remain opposed in order to
spur on the desires and centuplicate the energies. So, to the human male has been
allotted the aggressive mission; to the female, the difficult task of defending
herself. To man, the part I have mentioned is simple and requires only force –
physical, moral, intellectual force, or the complication of many elements, but
invariably the energy of attack and seduction. His part it is to assail and wreck,
one after the other, all the complicated fortifications which woman erects to
defend herself, or rather to let herself be conquered slowly and modestly.
To woman, on the other hand, nature assigned a task much more difficult and
cruel. She must renounce that which she desires; she must struggle against the
voluptuousness which invades her; she must repel him whom she loves, exact
sacrifices where she would only ask kisses. She must be avaricious when
everything urges her to be generous; she must collect all her poor strength to
defend a door ferociously attacked, and must cry out aloud, ‘Wait!’ to him who
longs to press her lovingly to his bosom.
The battles of desire and coquetry, fervour and modesty, impatience and
reticence are fought in various countries and different epochs with a widely
different strategy and tactics, but all can be reduced to this general formula. Even
when the sweet chain of sympathy prepares a sure love for two lovers, the one
says, ‘I want it,’ the other replies, ‘Wait!’ the one says, ‘Immediately,’ and the
other answers, ‘Later on.’ When the sexes exchange strategy and tactics, and
invert the amorous mission, there arises always a violent discord, while virtue
and aesthetics are shipwrecked.
At Paraguay, where the customs are free and easy, a most impatient young
man, who had every reason to believe himself loved, repeated in every key, from
the most tender to the most impassioned notes, with a sobbing voice and
tyrannical accent, this one word ‘Today!’ And the beautiful Creole, who knew
nothing of Darwin and the sexual election, replied smilingly: ‘But how could
you expect it today when you have only known me for ten days? In two months
perhaps …’ With this ingenuous reply that young girl of Paraguay marked the
philosophy of courtship and coquetry – the fundamental lines of the physiology
of sexes.
The more beautiful half of the human species daily throws in our faces the
brutal accusation that we are much less exacting in our tastes, and that, content
with the external forms, we rarely ever seek to discover what the contents are.
And this is natural: the different missions which are assigned the two sexes in
the amorous strategy require as much. If certain curves exercise such an
immediate sway over us, it is because in them we seek involuntarily, and without
knowing it, the good mother and the good nurse, and oftener than it appears,
voluptuousness prepares the welfare of future generations. To render a human
female fruitful, who will be a good mother and a good nurse, the flash of a desire
and the instantaneous heat of a battle suffice; but woman does not seek a
fertilizer alone, she wants a defender of future children, a protector of her own
weakness; she wants to assure herself of the force of the passion of him who
says he loves her; she would cast the sounding line into the abysses of the heart
and mind. The man must build the nest; is he an architect? He must defend it
from rapacious animals; is he courageous? He must educate and enrich his sons;
has he genius, has he ambition, has he tenacity of purpose? It is necessary to
know all this. She is already aware that she is young and beautiful. Many times
have the ardent rays of a thousand desires showered upon her. All at once
numerous adorers fall at her feet – all young, perhaps, also handsome and robust;
but she does not want a man. She wants the man who will be long, powerfully,
and ardently hers. Here in this first weaving of love we read the inexorable laws
which govern it; we see how clearly nature explains to us the inevitable
fickleness of human males, their rambling polygamy, and their very powerful
requirements; just as the modesty, chastity, and sublime reticence of the woman
remain the faithful guardians of the destinies of the future family. Many of these
elementary strategies have been lost in the stormy vicissitudes of modern
civilization; it is requisite to scrape off the varnish and wrench away the tatters
in order to feel the robust members of the chief passion; nevertheless, we come
to find, through the multiform hypocrisy, the kernel of the thing.
Even in those rare and fortunate cases of love at first sight, it is but proper
that man and woman should court each other for a longer or shorter period of
time, that they should show each other in a hundred ways their physical, moral,
and intellectual beauty. After having been rapidly conquered by a glance, they
must reconquer each other every day, every hour with the seductions of the heart,
of grace, and of genius. It is meet that we should lay at the feet of the great god
every beauty, every virtue, every perfection of ours. From morning till night we
glean from the fields and gardens, we go roaming through forests and over
mountains in order to bring to the altars of our idol every leaf, every flower, and
every fruit which our hands can snatch away from fruitful nature. Sublime vying
of homage and tribute – sublime profusion of riches and forces! Even the woman
who feels sure of being loved brings daily to the altars a fresh sheaf, a fresh
bouquet of flowers, and exclaims exultantly, ‘This too is yours!’ And the man
who likewise does not doubt that he is the god of his companion approaches
every moment the door of the temple, he also bearing with him a new fruit, a
new treasure, and always repeating, ‘This too is yours!’
These reciprocal coquetries succeed, especially where the difference is greater
between the two lovers, whether this proceeds from different sympathy, age,
beauty – from whatever diversity there is between the two who must unite to
generate one individual alone. It is natural, then, that the increased energies of
the one conquer by degrees the treasures of the other, so that the differences
vanish and that equilibrium arises without which a perfect love is impossible. A
thousand volumes would not suffice to describe the artifices with which man
conquers the love of a woman, to enumerate the hundred thousand arts with
which woman heats the tepid sympathies, or carries to delirium the grand
passion. In many cases the lover removes a step, the landmark of his hot desires,
and while the eager and ardent hand is about to cull the fruit, it is withdrawn,
impelled by an invisible and cruel hand. ‘Higher, higher, higher still,’ says the
young girl to the little dog that jumps to seize the biscuit from her rosy hands;
and ‘Higher, higher still,’ cry, and should cry, the women of the entire world to
the man who sighingly asks for their love.
Longer, more persistent, fiercer is the battle between desire and conquest, but
richer is the trophy of victory. The daughters of Eve never weep for the time lost
in the first skirmishes of love: not only do long wars prepare the most splendid
victories, but the first struggles are of themselves alone a better part of the
amorous paradise, for a long train of easy conquests is not worth one fiery and
bloody battle of courtship. If then, O daughters of Eve! you have the brilliant but
dangerous mission of defending yourselves from a compact phalanx of adorers,
redouble the arts of strategy and tactics. If you are really powerful, victory must
attend you, and you will choose the best of the excellent. Educate impatience,
and kill the weak with time. The first to retire will be the pallid loves and desires
of libertinism. True and deep passions know no impatience, ignore weariness;
and fighting and advancing every day, they leave the disputed field strewn with
corpses. And when you, tired in turn, will extend your hand to those who have
waited and struggled long, rest assured that you are superior to others.
It is to be regretted that we have no word in our language which expresses
physiological seduction – the conquest of love by way of the laws of nature. The
English call it courtship; and Darwin, adopting this word in a much broader
sense and for all animals, has given it a precious and wholly scientific stamp.
Coquetry is only a form of this art of seduction and conquest. Frequent enough
in woman, it is also found in man; and it is so deeply rooted in some natures that
it rises prior to puberty and disappears only with death. Physiological seduction
is a necessity; coquetry is a vice. The longing to please is one of the most
fundamental elements of love; it is one of its most valid instruments. When the
conquest is made, the physiological seduction lowers the weapons and retires.
Coquetry, on the contrary, is immoral and is daily renewed with fresh ardour and
burning desire. To satisfy coquetry, it is necessary to awaken daily a new desire
in former conquests, and new passions in those who are not yet conquered. It
does not matter whether we share the passion or not, above all we wish to be
loved by many; and in the less culpable cases we wish to weave around true love
a garland of sympathy. While the heart is conceded to one alone, we dispense
smiles, sighs, perhaps also half-chaste kisses and semi-libertine caresses to those
we do not wish to lose as adorers and whom it is well to keep in bondage,
binding them to us with the subtle but tenacious thread of hope. In more serious
cases, the heart cannot give itself to any one because it is promised to all, and to
many the ruthless task of pleasure wearies the sentiment and thus breaks the
vertebrae of the character so as to render impossible the development of any
sincere and ardent affection. The most indefatigable coquettes and the most
untiring swells never love; and if virtue consists in not falling in love, then
coquetry is the first and holiest thing. The moral sense revolts on beholding
many women selling hourly their smiles and desires, posing as Lucretias,
playing daringly with emotions which they do not feel and with love which does
not burn them, hurling anathemas at the one who falls but once, carried away by
a true and strong passion, and who was guilty of no other wrong than of
believing a lie impossible, treachery impossible. The virtue of the coquette is
like that of asbestos, which resists the fire by reason of its incapacity to burn; it
is a virtue entirely physical, anatomical; and he who appreciates it possesses not
even a shadow of moral sense, nor has he even read a page of the physiology of
the human heart.
 O reader, if you have the misfortune to love a coquettish woman, never forget
that coquetry belongs to the history of the lechery of sentiment. If you thirst for
love, go seek it elsewhere, for you have mistaken the road that leads to it. Where
you are you seek play and folly, artificial fire, the unrestrained laughter of the
masquerader; but you do not seek ardent voluptuousness, nor the sublime
palpitations of affection, which never were united to coquetry.
True love, which does not seek only voluptuousness but the full, absolute, and
complete possession of the entire person of the beloved one, cannot manage the
subtle arts of the coquette’s politics, because it cannot have the patience to study
them nor the calmness to learn them. It is a genius that knows not how to adapt
itself to the domestic cares of the housewife; it is a general who knows how to
fight battles, but who pays no heed to the buttons of the uniforms and the
regulations of the barracks. Love shines, thunders, fulminates, threatens, and
prays; disordered, it overthrows; wounded, it kills, curses, and blesses; but it is
wrong in one thing alone: it does not know the game of chess. Coquetry, on the
contrary, is the most famous chess-player ever known.
Natural seduction is the art of making our good qualities appreciated, by
presenting them in the best possible manner. To please, we try our best to
improve ourselves, and, made beautiful by nature and art, we knock at the door
through which the affections enter. Man, who is the stronger of the two who love
and who from strength derives his most irresistible seductions, after having
shaken his leonine hair throws himself at the feet of the woman and begs an alms
of love. And woman, who is the weaker, loves to toss with her gentle hands the
hair of the king of animals, to tantalize him and enjoy the superhuman
voluptuousness of placing her foot on strength, to feel it tremble, and be able to
say, ‘It is mine!’ This is one of the most general forms of the reciprocal
seduction of the sexes; and when man, on his knees and, perhaps, weeping,
pleads for love, he obeys one of the most inexorable laws of nature. Lion for all,
lamb for me! Such is the man who desires a woman.
When grace has conquered strength, the daughter of Eve feels herself
complete; and when the man senses his rough skin caressed by the soft flesh of a
woman’s body, he also fancies himself redoubled; and both, in the fullness of
bliss, feel themselves changed into that perfect being which is – the union of
man and woman.
When a difficult problem of the moral world presents itself to us, the only
way to resolve it is to simplify it and reconduct it to the broad highway of
physiology. We should read and reread the great book of nature, seek to follow
blindly the laws of the human world. This is evident at every step in our studies
on the sentiment of love. What are the elements that render one woman more
seductive than all others? Beauty, grace, affection. Which are the qualities that
render one man more fascinating than all others? Strength, courage, genius.
Behold seduction and sympathy, which seem the most foolish and the most
mysterious things in the world, reconducted to the virgin source of the
physiology of the sexes. Man should become more manly than ever in order to
seduce and conquer the love of the daughters of Eve; and woman should always
endeavour to be more womanly in order to please the sons of Adam. And both
should refine and elevate the type of their respective sex, from excelsior to
excelsior, elevating it to where human hands and poets’ hearts unite. Woman
decks herself with all the allurements of art; she braids her hair with the
perfumed flowers of sentiment, squanders the most elegant graces, and is
consumed with the fire of all her physical and moral seductions; but at the
bottom of all this there ever remains the female, and under the wings of the angel
and the cherub there is always an Eve. And man tortures his ambition in order to
bend it under the heel of love, and spurs on his genius so that he may throw his
treasures at the feet of his idol, whether he be a hero or a martyr, a Spartan or a
Caesar, a domesticated lion or one that roars; but in his loves let him always be
manly, so that, underneath his heroism and his genius, the woman may always
find an Adam. Seduction is neither baseness nor violence, treachery nor tyranny
when it is inspired by a true and a great love; when it is the alliance of all our
forces guided by the most legitimate, the most powerful, the most ardent of our
desires – that of loving and being loved. Without love, seduction is a raping of
voluptuousness, or else illicit trading on the part of inordinate vanity: it is either
a crime or a vice.
 Chapter 5
Modesty
Modesty is one of the psychical phenomena whose physiology it is more
difficult to determine, for the reason that it is very vague and indistinct, although
in some of its forms domineering and quite demanding; because it varies in the
different races; and because, forming a part of the energies which develop in the
approach of the sexes, it seems instead to keep them apart and, born of love,
appears as though it wished to thwart its supreme end.
I acknowledge that I myself, as the years went by, changed the idea I first had
of modesty, and which I treated in The Physiology of Pleasure. At first it seemed
to me a sentiment that rises within us in childhood and youth, spontaneous as
egotism, self-respect, love; and then again I became persuaded that modesty is
taught first and learned afterward; for which reason it is one of those sentiments
which I term acquired or secondary.
Modesty is an extra current of love, and has its principal source in those very
powerful energies which, by means of a battle or a choice, must relight the torch
of life. The animals demonstrate to us some forms emanating from modesty.
Many of them conceal themselves in making their sacrifice to voluptuousness;
numerous females, sought by the male, begin by fleeing, resisting, by hiding that
which they desire to concede. And this is probably an irreflective, automatic act;
it is, perhaps, a form of fear, which rises before the aggressive requirements of
the male; but these flights, these resistances, these phantoms of modesty have the
scope to excite the female as much as the male, and to prepare a soil more
suitable for fecundation. It is possible that the animals conceal their loves from
our gaze in order to place themselves in security from danger, knowing that in
those supreme moments they are exposed to every attack; but until the
psychology of brutes becomes less complex, we are justified in thinking that
modesty is known also to them. If this be true, then we would find the fact
justified that also in superior animals this sentiment appears first in the female,
to whom the anatomy of the organs and the defensive mission in the battles of
love render the acts of chastity more spontaneous and natural. And also to the
human female, nature has assigned the same mission, making her, naturally, a
hundred times more modest than the male.
The first hand brought by woman to cover parts which the male wished to
see, called forth the first energies of the sentiment of modesty, which arose,
therefore, with the first forms of coquetry. Man and woman, then living together
in the family or in the tribe, were naturally forced to become, independent of
their greater psychical development, the most modest animals, because the
female is subject to disagreeable periodical infirmity, and man presents other
genital phenomena which, if not concealed, would attract too much attention
from others and excite perturbation in males and females. It is therefore most
natural that almost all races of the earth present some form of modesty; that, also
in man, the female should be more modest than the male, because the aggressive
mission which is reserved to us by nature renders modesty dangerous and almost
impossible, at least in the final battles.
Love born in this way is taught together with many other things by men to
children, as the latter until puberty could not distinguish the special worth of the
copulative organs, nor the aggressive mission of the male, nor the thousand
offensive and defensive vicissitudes of love. Perhaps, however, modesty rises
spontaneously, or rather by inheritance, in the more perfect and elevated natures.
Hence, we teach modesty to him who of himself would not know it, and we trace
the frontiers in a way to circumscribe it to the purely genital territory, or to
enlarge it beyond the amorous confines. Sherihat30 ordered the Turkish women
to cover the back of the hand, but permitted them to expose the palm. The
Armenian women of southern India cover the mouth even at home, and when
they go out they wrap themselves in white linen. The married live in great
seclusion, and for many years they cannot see their male relatives, and they
conceal their faces even from the father-in-law and mother-in-law. These two
examples, elected from a thousand that might be cited, suffice to persuade us that
accessory and conventional elements which, physiologically considered, do not
belong to true modesty, are often joined to it. We ourselves, without leaving
Europe, find that the confines of modesty are marked in many countries by the
various fashions, not according to morality or the requirements of sex but
according to the national mode of dress. He who exchanged these conventional
elements for modesty could write the great psychological heresy that this
sentiment had its origin in the custom of covering oneself.
We must not confound with true modesty those other aesthetic needs which
compel us to conceal some repugnant actions of our animal life. The true
sentiment of modesty defends from profane eye the organs and the mysteries of
love and those parts of the body which directly or indirectly relate to it, as I have
demonstrated in my Physiology of Pleasure.31 We behold almost all nations
concealing first the genitals, afterward the flanks, the bosom, the legs, the arms,
then the entire trunk, and, finally, also the head; but here modesty yields the
place to the requirements of social intercourse or of jealousy.
 The sentiment of modesty is one of the most changeable in form and degree,
and we will write its ethnical history in the volume which we will dedicate to the
ethnology of love.32 Here it will suffice to indicate how I divide people into
immodest, semi-modest, and modest, depending on how they manifest scarcely
perceptible traces of modesty, or greater or less development of this sentiment.
Modesty is not like intelligence or the sentiment of the beautiful, or other
psychical phenomena, which demonstrate an ascending and regular progress,
rising by degrees from the lowest races to the highest; for which reason it cannot
be taken alone as a dynamometer of progress. The Tehuelches of South America
bathe very often, and generally before dawn, but men and women go down to the
water separately; they are a very modest people, who never in any case doff the
chiripà.33 And we have the Japanese who, with a hundred times greater
civilization than the Tehuelches, are much inferior to them in modesty. The
Malaysians are very modest, and the Greeks and Romans were not too much so.
Thus, without going further than our race and time, we have women who would
let themselves die rather than subject themselves to an examination with the
speculum, and we have men of great intelligence and lofty passions who confess
that they feel scarcely a shadow of modesty.
In the higher races, overlooking the few exceptions and taking the human
groups in a great mass, we can say that modesty, like all psychical phenomena of
an elevated order, increases, becomes refined, and presents the most delicate
forms, the greater the moral and intellectual worth of a people. The nations the
most moral and furthest advanced in civilization are also the most modest.
Modesty is one of the choicest forms of seduction and of the reticence of
love; it is an extra current of the great fundamental phenomena of generation; it
is a physical respect for one’s self; it is one of those psychical phenomena of the
highest order. Faithful companion of love, it is a sentiment which in superior
natures has infinite mysteries, unutterable delicacy, attitudes which merit a
Montyon prize,34 glances which are a paradise, words and sighs which deserve
to be rendered immortal by the pen of an artist. He who has the immodest or
semi-immodest nature of the Fuegano or the Japanese loses more than one-half
of the treasures of love, and resembles the man who without the sense of smell
admires the flowers of a garden.
Woman is the vestal of modesty, the teacher of its most select forms, and if
she is a virgin and pure as crystal, she possesses intact the treasure of the most
perfect chastity. Strolling through the garden of love, she loses some of its gems,
and she loses more if her companion helps her to scatter the treasure. It is
exceedingly rare, though, that a woman, even in the exciting and fatiguing races
of a thousand loves, loses all that wealth of modesty with which nature has
enriched her. Even in the fastest and most libertine life, even in the fetidness of
prostitution, we see with infinite wonder some diamonds flash, which the fire of
lechery knew not how to burn nor the mire of amorous simony to soil. We
remain astonished and moved at such a power of resistance in a sentiment that
seemed so delicate and fragile. And as long as a piece of sacred earth remains to
woman upon which grows one only, the poorest flower of modesty, virtue is not
all dead and rehabilitation is still possible. Bow your heads before this flower, O
jesting negators of every feminine virtue, O insatiable tormentors of wantonness;
respect that piece of sacred earth, do not pluck that last poor flower from a
garden which you have unleafed and deflowered!
Modesty is never excessive when it is sincere; it is never too exacting when it
rises spontaneously from the heart of a lofty nature; it is a sentiment which can
inspire only noble things and prepare us for sublime joys. Modesty has such
power that it elevates to the highest spheres ignorance and simplicity, and
encloses in an aureole of light the most plebeian loves as well as the most
sublime; it contains in itself such aesthetic energies as to suffocate with flowers
the beastliest roar of the boldest man, to cover with an impenetrable veil the
most immodest secrets of the animal man. Without linen or other garments this
sublime magician knows how to cover a nude body with a mantle that renders it
invisible and impenetrable to lust: guardian and priest of love, it follows it at
every step and defends it from the mire as from the fire, and, directing its glance
upward, elevates and sanctifies it. Economical educator of the forces of love, it
preserves them always fresh and young, and when the first kiss causes the first
virgin flower to fall from the brow of the woman, modesty raises up new and
ever virgin blossoms before the steps of the two lovers. Linen that conceals,
glass that covers, balsam which stops every putrefaction, modesty is the most
powerful preserver of long affections; and, perhaps, immodesty has killed more
loves than has infidelity.
If the sentiment of modesty were not a great virtue, it would be the most
faithful companion of voluptuousness, the greatest generator of exquisite joys.
An ardent thirst and an inebriating bowl: what joy, but what danger of satiety!
Now then, the bowl is full, foaming with lust; the lips are inflamed and half open
to the most voluptuous kisses of the sweet liquor; but the bowl is held between
the hands of Modesty, who with suavest art satisfies the thirst and renews it: so
that the lips remain eternally half-open and thirsty, and in the chalice the liquor
lasts forever. Admirable prodigy of an immense wealth, which finds in itself the
fountains of renovation and perpetuation; stupendous spectacle of the most
gigantic of forces confided to the hands of a maiden who guides and governs it!
We should early teach modesty to our boys and especially to our girls,
elevating it, refining it so that it may be a sincere and delicate sentiment and not
the hypocrisy of conventionality. One can be modestly nude, just as one can be
cynically immodest with the body covered like an onion. We teach our young
girls to lower the eyes before the glance of him who seeks and desires them, and
then we take them to the theatre, where the ballet-dancers are more than nude
below the waist, and the ladies are nude above the waist; so that add together the
two immodest halves of the two very different classes of women, one constitutes
a single woman entirely nude and entirely immodest. We teach our daughters to
conceal even the foot from the wanton eyes of man, and then we confide them to
the dressmaker so that she may increase with the needle the too modest curves of
nature and wantonly bend the lines which innocent youth still left chaste and
modest. True hypocrites of the sixteenth century, with one hand we hide the
countenance, while with the other we go on studying lasciviousness. As long as
this profound hypocrisy continues to absorb the marrow of modern society, even
modesty will be less sincere and can exercise but the weakest influence to
elevate and refine our loves; nor do I know if, with all the wanton chastity that
distinguishes us, we can have the right to inscribe ourselves proudly in the
classes of modest nations. If it be true that hypocrisy is a homage rendered to
virtue, let us wait until the epoch of transition is past, and we can feel ourselves
as virtuous as we pretend to be.
 Chapter 6
The Virgin
Since in grammar it is written that adjectives may be either masculine or
feminine, it follows that man too can be virginal; but between his virginity and
that of the woman there is an abyss which it is impossible to sound. A male
virgin is a man who knows not the mysteries of the embrace; but of this
innocence or of this ignorance he bears no trace in his body and often neither in
his heart nor mind; since vice with its thousand subterfuges and nature with its
thousand pitfalls can have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he
can boast of never having violated a vow made to a chaste woman, to a
prejudice, or to any of the many tyrannies of the will. The female virgin, on the
contrary, is an entire world; she is a temple to which the people of all nations
bear the tribute of their homage, their folly, and their adoration; so that to write
the story is to write the greater part of the ethnography of love. In this book,
however, we will confine ourselves to our European virgin, just as nature
chiselled her in the secrets of the maternal womb, and as the civilization of our
times sacrifices her on the altars of Mammon, of love, or of lechery.
Nature, creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our meditations
one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not enough that
sixteen long years were required to make a child a woman; it was not enough
that only through long and cruel struggles all the moral bulwarks would fall
which keep us far from the temple of love; neither the strategy and tactics of
defence nor the impenetrable veils of modesty sufficed to carry the impatience of
desire to folly. All this seemed yet little to avaricious and cruel nature; and when
to your yes another yes responded, when barricades and bulwarks fell, when the
long coquetry of refusal is tired and modesty blushingly retires in a corner to
relish the delights of an ardently sighed-for defeat, then, just there, at the doors
of the sacred temple, a terrible angel with a flaming sword forbids you to enter,
saying, ‘There is a virgin here.’ The rose is pressed to your lips, closed of course,
but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all compact in the chaste
confusion of its hundred leaves; but to imprint thereon a kiss your lips must
bleed, for the virgin is the thorn of a rose. Profound mystery!
There on that threshold, two natures widely different, and yet so ardently
enamoured, have arrived through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles:
that was the rendezvous where they were to empty together the bowl of
voluptuousness; but there, on that threshold, is the angel of pain, and through a
wound, through a butchery you must attain bliss. Cruel mystery! The poor
creature who is to be mother, nurse, and vestal of the family, the woman who in
the long sleepless nights of youth has pictured love as the most fragrant flower,
the sweetest fruit in the gardens of life, must reap the goal through pain, nature
reminding her from the first kiss, ‘O daughter of Eve, you will love and bring
forth children but with much pain!’ And happy to belong to one alone, happy to
be possessed and to possess, she must see in the bleeding hands the delicate
petals of the first flower which she culled in the garden of voluptuousness.
And yet, among those petals lacerated and heated with innocent blood, man
has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the human
heart receive adoration, and there he has crowded as many elements of idolatry,
of passion, of fury, of virtue as his brain can comprehend. There, upon a rosy
piece of flesh finer and smaller than the lips of a newborn, selfishness, love, and
the sense of ownership find themselves pressed together to conspire against
human happiness, as also to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. ‘Mine! –
mine for the first time! – mine forever!’ Three cries, one more formidable than
the other, which love, pride, and the sense of ownership exclaim in chorus in the
apotheosis of delirium and the shuddering of the flesh.
There is a first term for all series, there is a virgin for all things human: to be
first is vastly different from being second. Now nature wished to consecrate
anatomically the first kiss, the first embrace; to incarnate in a physical action that
tremendous union called first love. And civilized man, suspicious, jealous,
avaricious, thanks nature for condescending to bear testimony to the purity of a
woman, and blesses it for having known how to bind fast a compact of faith,
which no one can ever violate with impunity. The Lombards presented the
morgincap35 immediately after the first night of matrimony; and this famous gift,
prize of virginity, often equalled the fourth part of the husband’s wealth. Some
shrewd spouses – adds malicious history – had the good sense to stipulate a gift
beforehand, because they were too sure of not meriting it. Although we are not
Lombards, still we promise to all our young girls a morgincap, provided they
know how to guard intact until the supreme day of official first love the sacred
veil which is the closed door of the temple wherein men are born. This
morgincap is a husband; it is the esteem, veneration, adoration of everybody.
With that veil intact you are a saint, a virgin, an angel, the goal of all desires; you
may dream of the most foolish ambitions, you may become a queen tomorrow.
But should that very fragile veil be rent, you are young, you are beautiful, you
are, perhaps, as pure as you were yesterday, but you are nothing more than a
human female. The temple is violated, the idol is overthrown, the priests have
fled crying anathemas and invoking upon the head of the victim the vengeance
of their god. What mysteries and injustices! I seem really to be in the world of
exorcism and magic.
The poet finds not only one, but a thousand theories to explain the virgin. The
thorn beside the rose, the temple guarded by the wings of an angel, the first
voluptuousness consecrated by a first pain, and the destinies of future beings
marked from the first kiss, all spasms and sweetness; and an infinite mystery
which covers with its dawn one of the grandest and most beautiful scenes of the
human world; such is the virgin of the poet.
And the moralist also finds in his theological theories a hundred reasons for
the explanation of the virgin. The guardian of virtue consecrated by a material
defence, a gentle admonition that love will bring us a thousand sorrows, a sure
guarantee of the honesty of the spouse given to the bridegroom in the most
solemn manner, a precious ‘earnest’ of future faith, of lasting domestic felicity;
behold the virgin of the theologian.
But the naturalist shakes his head and rejects the virgin of the poet, and
laughs at the virgin of the theologian. Every organ wants its function, every
effect must have its cause; to every why must respond wherefore. For me the
virgin is a novice angel; she is the first shadow of a future separation of two
things which are still brutally united in us: the organs of love and the organs of
one of the basest secretions. The more living creatures elevate themselves, the
more they subdivide their labours, and in a creature higher than we, love will
certainly have a special and reserved territory. From the greater sewer we have
arrived at two lesser ones; a step further on and we will have three organs and
three apparati; one of the greatest physical embarrassments of the body will be
cancelled. If my Darwinian theory does not satisfy you, then nothing remains but
the following fable of mine, which I especially recommend to you because, if it
does not give you the scientific why and wherefore of the virgin, it gives you,
however, almost the entire physiology.
One day pride, love, and the sense of possession were called before God to
give an account of the continued and bloody wars which they waged with one
another, never according to the poor sons of Adam one moment of peace or joy.
The Eternal Father was in a very bad humour that day, and, having given the
gentlemen a violent scolding, concluded thus: ‘In a word, if you do not cease to
torment men with your interminable discords, and if you do not give me here,
today, a proof of your reconciliation, I will expel you from earth and hurl you
into the eternal flames of hell.’ The three sentiments proffered many excuses in
their defence, but there was no alternative: it was either make peace, or go to
hell. After a long and protracted discussion, they decided to make a work in
common, in which each should take part, and returning to the presence of God,
they presented to Him the virgin, a most beautiful and precious creature, in
whom it is difficult to decide which of the three accomplices took the lead in the
invention. They say that God laughed heartily and dismissed in peace those three
architects, saying, ‘In my infinite wisdom I would never have imagined a similar
folly.’
Now I think that if I were to ask God if – after so many centuries of the
existence of the virgin – he felt contented to have let her live, he would certainly
answer yes. She is a creature who does a great deal more good than evil, and
were there a question of trust or mistrust, very few men would vote against her. I
do not know whether all women would vote with us, but I believe that the best,
the most virtuous, the most beautiful, the most poetical would be on our side.
Open temples are always less sacred than closed ones, and a mystery, and, still
more, a sanctum sanctorum helps to elevate and inflame idolatry. And is not love
the greatest idolatry?
A virgin is ours a thousand times more than any other woman; she must love
much, or at least she must desire intensely to be caressed, to descend from the
pedestal of the idol to come to us; to descend from the altar and tread the
common evil of earthly life. And the mystery of the unknown, the fascination of
primacy, and being the first teacher of the art of love centuplicate for us the
sweet joys of a first embrace. Then again the dreadful fear of finding the temple
violated holds us suspended over the abysses of desperation and voluptuousness,
of which we sound at very short intervals the depths of pain, the ineffable
delights. And woman too, who knows she is a virgin, measures the greatness of
the sacrifice, and if she has the good fortune to find it equal to the immensity of
affection in her heart, experiences the greatest voluptuousness that can vibrate in
one moment alone nerves and thoughts, senses and sentiments. She has already
given her heart with all its affections to her god; today she gives the seal which
confirms the possession of her entire self; and after having divided with a
companion all that she has, all that she feels, all that she desires, she gives him
also her blood, and in blood perpetuates the most sacred oath a human creature
could take. She confides herself naked, weak, weaponless to a powerful, armed,
invulnerable man! What passion, what abnegation, what voluptuousness! An
angel yesterday, she permits her lover to tear away her wings, and becomes again
a woman in order to be wife, friend, mother. Priestess of a temple, she burns
upon the altar of love the white garments of the vestal and says, sobbing with joy
and sorrow: ‘I am thine, all thine: is there anything I can still offer thee? Tell me
and I will give it thee; I have clipped my wings so that thou couldst raise me on
the pinions of thy genius; I have burned my temple in order to live only in the
temple of thy heart; I have renounced the religion of my dreams to be nothing
but thy companion; do not betray me; I was thy virgin, and now I am only thy
wife. Have for me an immense love, an immense pity!’
And yet it must be said, in order to cause some to pale with rancour who will
read these pages, that there are men who dare to accept the sacrifice of the virgin
albeit they are not priests of love; there are those who receive the victim without
having received from nature the sacrificial knife; there are those who dare to
accomplish it with the coarse knife of the surgeon; there are those who for the
lightning of love dare to substitute a mechanical artifice; there are those still who
prostitute the virgin without making her a woman! And there are men who rail at
the angel with the drivel of the viper. Miserable wretches: amid the tears of
shame and humiliation, the wife can dream of an infinite adultery, offended
human dignity can avenge itself, the profaned virgin can betray a thousand
times, and soar to heaven crying anathema against the sacrilegious profaner of
the temple; the grand jury of all humanity can rise in the majesty of its
omnipotence and spit in the face of the impotent man, who has dared to ask of
heaven an angel and of man a virgin, and a chorus of sneering demons flagellate
him, bind him to the great pillory of ridicule, and proclaim him in the loudest
voice the vilest, the last among men!
The anatomical fact which constitutes virginity has, however, the gravest
inconvenience of being generally understood, so that the masses, proud and
happy to be able to solve the question of virtue with the eyes and with the hands,
throw brutally upon the most delicate scales of the world the sword of
Brennus.36 Let philosophers and sentimentalists prattle as they will about purity
of heart and the frontiers of virtues; for the common people there are only virgin
women or the violated: and physics with its resistances of elasticity, and
geometry with its diameters solve a problem over which the minds of many
thinkers work hard. And in this respect the greater part of civilized man is
vulgar, and many who know how to weep with tenderness and to soar very high,
come to a standstill in the presence of the brutality of an action, acknowledge
themselves conquered, and embitter life, thinking that the woman whom they
have chosen for a life companion did not shed her blood upon the altar of the
first kiss.
Science stoutly affirms that virginity, even anatomically, has many varied
forms, and can be lacking in women who have never felt the breath of man. I
myself, in a medical capacity, have seen with my own eyes some very young
children who were without the famous seal with which nature seems to enclose
and consecrate the virgin; and I sighed as I contemplated the little ones, thinking
that for them virtue and innocence would some day be of no avail in the
presence of an ignorant and brutal man. And then, even when anatomy does not
betray woman in this way, a fall, a shock can without crime cancel the fragile
seal, which is for many the only and secure guarantee of virtue and purity. Nor
does this suffice; often, in early childhood, when vice and libertinism are
unknown words in the dictionary of a little girl, the lascivious trifling of a too
precocious youth, or the posthumous lechery of a wretched old man, can violate
the palladium of anatomical virginity, although the mirror of the heart may not
be exactly dimmed; and later, when the mysteries of love appear clear to the still
chaste maiden, she may feel pure and proud of herself, and carry her head high,
not knowing that she has not the star of physical purity. How many domestic
misfortunes this has caused! How many first nights of love have become infernal
nights, how many ties have been dissolved by a prejudice, a suspicion, a
calumny, which would have been a garland of the purest and most sublime joys!
How many lives cruelly embittered by the brutal elasticity of a veil more fleeting
than the remnant of a cloud that melts away in the first rays of the sun!
And you, jurors of feminine honesty, who with so much assurance and
brutality pass sentence upon hearts and virginity, have you never thought of the
thousand and one compulsions through which a young, beautiful, and courted
woman must pass, and that before becoming a spouse she must struggle with her
own ignorance and the lust of others, with the surprises of the senses and with
the studied artifices of lechery? A moment of weakness, an instant of inordinate
curiosity, can dim but not stain the virtue of a woman, who can be before and
after as pure as rock crystal. No; virginity is a great thing, it is the most brilliant
diamond in the crown of youthful virtue; but it is not all of woman, it is not all of
virtue.
How many wretches who were never pure save in the maternal womb, and
who with studied lust and infinite art preserve intact the physical veil of virtue
through the lasciviousness of a hundred lovers, and full of profound wisdom and
prudent libertinage, weary of lechery, bring to the altar of official first love their
virginity! Beautiful treasure indeed; a diamond fallen a hundred times in the
mire and a hundred times picked up and washed! Beautiful gem – a piece of
flesh preserved pure in a prostituted body! A flower grown up on a lump of clay
in the midst of a stinking marsh! And men often cull this flower with holy
devotion, and they kiss it, adore it, perhaps after having hurled an insult at the
pure and virtuous girl who had all but a seal, like the registered letter sent back
by the postal clerk because it lacked a drop of sealing wax. How often have I
wept with rancour, listening to mothers teaching their daughters this one dogma
of virtue: ‘Preserve physical virginity!’ How often have I cursed modern morals
which teach the spouse: ‘Above all, no scandal!’ These, then, are the morals of
this century of hypocrisy: ‘Virgin first, prudent afterward’; behold the virtue of
woman! An eye to the seal first, an eye to the keyhole later on: behold the
perfect woman of the nineteenth century.
The excessive, brutal, and bestial worth given to virginity by modern society
has created the infamous art of manufacturing virgins; how many times has
virginity two, five, ten different editions, not all improved but always correct and
revised; and the idiot husbands and lovers have applauded the new virtue, the
purest virtue, baptized in the apocryphal blood of who knows what mammal,
tempered in the astringent juice of who knows what bark! The prostitution of the
century of hypocrisy could not be more cynically avenged. You have an entirely
physical and chemical idea of the virtue of a woman; now then, advanced
civilization gives you what you desire; it makes for you a chemical and physical
virginity, and calls to its aid also some gymnastics, dice-boxes, and natural
magic.Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.37 You curse the pure and holy
woman who is a virgin at heart, who has never loved, but on whom the
Lombards could not have bestowed the prize of the morgincap.
Virginity exists: it exists in the physical nature of the human female, it exists
in the sanctuary of civil morals, but it does not begin and end in a piece of flesh
more or less intact; in us it is anatomy and it is the physical; together with the
purity which is tried virtue. The moral fact must be found together with the
purity which is tried by the criterion of the senses if we want purity of heart, the
adamantine transparency of character. The human virgin, the virgin of civilized
man, is not the virgin of the savage, an oyster that can be opened only with a
knife; she is a creature on whom the social mire has not thrown a drop of its
splash; she is a woman who was loved, perhaps, and desired by many, but who
never belonged to any man. She is ignorant of lasciviousness, ignorant of the art
of hiding vice under the brilliant varnish of virtue; she blushes at an impure
word, a too ardent gesture, an impertinent pressure of the hand. The virgin
woman knows that she is intact, because she too has sighed and desired, but has
never given her heart to any man; she knows that she is pure, because into the
sanctuary of her purity no profane hand has ever penetrated. She has not half
opened any part of her garments, any fissure of her heart, any tabernacle of her
treasures. She is white as the snow that caps the summits of the Alps, where foot
of marten nor wing of insect has ever rested; she is pure as the spring which
gushes from the granite in a grotto never explored by human foot; she knows
everything or knows nothing, but she blushes with wisdom as with ignorance,
only her heart beats faster at the sight of a man. She is a virgin because she is
modest; she is modest because she is a virgin; she is a virgin and modest because
she is a woman.
The female virgin was seen naked twice; the day of her birth, but by her
mother alone; the day when she became a woman, and she alone saw herself,
blushed with shame, and wept, and asked of nature the why of the sad mystery.
No one will ever see her naked again but one man, and then only after she will
have given him her heart; she will blush then also more than ever, and the entire
virgin, physical and moral, will fall fainting at the feet of love and will become a
spouse, perhaps also a mother.
And you, O mothers, who were virgins, when you teach your daughters what
a treasure is virginal purity, give them together with a lesson in anatomy and
physiology – which perhaps they do not need – a lesson in high morality. Tell
them that to the man they love they must concede everything; to the man they do
not love, nothing; tell them that one can be physically a virgin and morally a
prostitute; tell them that to the first kiss they owe untarnished all their treasures,
not one gem only, and that the future of their love consists in preserving the
centuple virginity existing in one virgin. If nature with sad mystery has decreed
that woman should love the first time with much pain, it is our duty to crown the
virgin with many flowers of virtue, to perfume her with many odours of grace, to
make the martyr a happy spouse; it is our duty to elevate the physical virgin to
the highest region of purity and grandeur, so that she may appear to us, like an
angel of Beato Angelico, all illumined with the light of the rainbow, where amid
the tears of a first defeat shines the light of the sun of love; and that after the
hurricane of conquest there may be announced the serenity of a beautiful day of
delights. The religion of Christ, in presenting to man the worship of a virgin
mother, wished perhaps to consecrate the purity of the virgin with the affections
of the spouse; to create an ideal of perfection in which would shine the two chief
virtues of woman; to imagine perhaps that one can be a virgin and a mother, as
one can be a virgin and a prostitute. To gaze at the Madonnas of Raphael,
Murillo, and Correggio: the influence which she has exercised upon Christian
arts suffices to prove that this ideal creature has been a sublime creation of the
human mind, and not a riddle or a myth.
 Chapter 7
Conquest and Voluptuousness
If man elevates his loves to the highest spheres of the ideal, if he can call himself
the most sublime lover on the terrestrial planet, he can boast of having had from
nature the largest bowl at the banquet of voluptuousness; he can also pride
himself on being able – perhaps the only creature among the living – to die of
pleasure and to kill himself with lasciviousness. A tremendous thing is the
embrace of a man and a woman who love each other! So tremendous that before
this hurricane of the senses the painter lets the brush fall from his hand, the
physiologist loses the thread of analysis, and the philosopher is stupefied at the
ferocious grandeur and the bestial sublimity of that act, in which every human
force seems to be offered as a holocaust to the animal that fecundates.
Acknowledged or silent goal of every love, dream of every virgin and rage of
every lechery, torment and delight of every man, voluptuousness is the greatest
pleasure of the senses; but it is the deepest abyss into which vulgar loves fall at
every step, where even the great ones are submerged. Voluptuousness! The
tremendous word that recalls the most ardent scenes of men and the greatest
chaos, which becomes more dense wherever an organism is generated or
destroyed; shapeless chaos from which lightning flashes, where elements
tremble and earthquakes rumble profoundly; chaos in which good and evil find
themselves so near as to mingle and become confounded; chaos in which angel
and brute are locked in close embrace, and human individuality vanishes for a
moment to give place to a fantastic monster, half
man and half woman, half god and half demon; chaos from which a man is
born, as from another chaos arose the cry which generated light. I open the book
of human deeds and I read:
In Sardinia the beautiful Lady of San Luri killed with excessive
embraces the young king Martin II of Sicily, of the house of Aragon,
who gave the last blow to the independence of Sardinia, subjugating the
still free part of the island. In 1409 he had obtained a splendid victory
over Brancaleone Doria and the Viscount of Narbonne, when he
himself was conquered in turn by the beauty of San Luri, who, a
modern Judith, killed the Aragonian king with the fury of her kisses.38

The Empress Theodora pleased so many, that it was said that painting and
poetry were not capable of representing the incomparable excellence of her
form. The satirical historian did not blush in describing the nude scenes which
Theodora was not ashamed to represent in the theatre. After having stated that
she wore only a little girdle because no one was Procopius adds, , ‘the
gates were wide open.’ Having exhausted the arts of sensual pleasure, she
complained with the greatest ingratitude of the parsimony of nature, desiring a
fourth altar on which she could offer libations to the god of love. After having
been possessed by everybody, she seduced Justinian, who married her and called
her a divine gift.39
The old age of David was heated by the young Shunamite, and Hermippus
prolonged his days to the age of 105, sustained by the breath of many young
women.40
The few foregoing examples will suffice to mark the frontiers between which
human voluptuousness struggles, insatiable generator of so much good and so
much evil. And yet before science it is nothing but the most powerful of
chemical affinities felt by the most perfect of living brains. Prepared in the slow
laboratory of a man and a woman, the germs of life are powerfully attracted
toward each other; when love approaches they kiss and unite, and hot and
trembling they re-establish one of the most powerful equilibriums of nature and
generate a man. What are the Angels, Archangels, Cherubim, Thrones, and
Dominations of the Christian paradise in comparison with all those living
creatures who, at every throb of our pulses, unite on earth in the embrace of
voluptuousness? If at every second a leaf falls from the tree of life, it is also
beyond dispute that in the same unit of time ten existences at least are blended in
order to relight the torch of life, and if all the gigantic forces which are
condensed in these unions were summed up, they would certainly suffice to send
the world through infinite space without the aid of the laws of Newton. In the hut
of the savage and in the gilded halls of the prince, among the soft cushions of
new-mown hay and on the ice of the Sorata, in the rushing train and on two
camels crossing the desert, within the humid walls of the prison and in the deep
mines where the sun’s rays never penetrate, in the forest and on the sand of the
seashore, wherever a man and a woman find themselves together and can desire
each other, voluptuousness weaves its garlands and says to the man and the
woman, ‘Be gods for an instant!’
There is no love without voluptuousness, but voluptuousness of itself alone is
not love, neither is that which is ridiculously termed platonic. Lechery and
platonic love are maladies or monsters of love, and they are possible, aye, too
prevalent, like deaf mutes, the lame, the deformed, giants, and dwarfs.
There is no attainment without possession of the thing attained, as there can
be no love without voluptuousness. From the tree take away the flower, and from
the flower take away the fruit, and you will have a faithful image of all those
amorous reticences which dissemblingly stop at the threshold of the temple and,
incapable alike of chastity and courage, of vice and virtue, drag out a wretched
existence in the limbo of bastard affections. Very often duty must be stronger
than love, the laws of honesty must often forbid us to love, and love must be
conquered by a cruel and unheard-of torture, but it is better to be heroes of duty
than brigands liberated from prison for lack of proof, often despised, despicable
always. If you truly love, if you can love, and you love in the name of the most
powerful of the gods of Olympus, then love in the name of nature, in the name of
the most sacred of all rights. Do not act like the amorous casuist, the worst of all
human hypocrites, nor hope to conquer with your reticence and your
compromises of conscience the Goliath of the sentiments. How many have I
beheld, after long sentimental tirades upon platonic love and after bitter tears and
vows of virtue, descend from hypocrisy to hypocrisy, even to wantonness! How
many are the guilty lovers who do not wish the sin but enjoy the vice, who do
not wish to commit the crime but experience prostitution! All or nothing; such is
love’s demand: cut down the tree that you cannot cultivate, be everything to
somebody; demand of your companion to be every-thing to him; do not try to
divide the indivisible: do not attempt to overthrow the omnipotent, to conquer
the invincible; one must neither jest, compromise, nor come to any agreement
with love.
Voluptuousness without love is always lust, even in its purest and simplest
forms; it is immoral even when it seems to be hygienic. With love even lechery
is virtue, and the studied casuistry of theologians is more immodest than the
most ardent kiss which has ever been exchanged between two lovers educated in
the embrace by long experience. Voluptuousness is penetrating as light,
inexhaustible as the sun, and, enclosed between two infinities, one of desire and
the other of languor, it will never be thoroughly understood by the human family,
even were it to live for a million centuries. All forms of the beautiful are
conquered by the endearments of art; all forms of virtue are the delight of the
sentiment of the good; every great and true idea is the joy of our thoughts; but
voluptuousness absorbs in one moment alone all the joys of the senses, of
sentiment, and of intellect; quiets all curiosity, extinguishes all heat.
Voluptuousness is a light which gilds every object and weaves around it a
celestial aureole. Not only is the embrace of love voluptuous, but every contact
of the quivering garments and of the glossy hair, every contact of the shivering
skin, every snap of the tendons, every kiss of the flesh. He is indeed to be pitied
who has always drunk voluptuousness from the same bowl of Venus! Let him
take lessons of woman, wisest teacher of every exquisite and sublime sensuality.
Lust is the worst enemy of voluptuousness, its most faithful sister is chastity.
If the poet, the painter, the sculptor knew how to interlace this divine group –
‘The Joy of Love Guided by the Hand of Chastity’ – that picture, a work of the
pen, the brush, and the scalpel, would be as holy a thing as an altar, a lesson of
virtue and a great work of art; fire enclosed in alabaster, the sun carried off and
shut up within itself by an enamoured wave; Hercules led by a child!
Lovers who love, who possess, who become inebriated every hour, if you still
have a moment of prudence, remember that voluptuousness must not be the
bread but the wine of love; that if you wish that your thirst may be eternally
satiated, your voluptuousness must be pure and chaste; you must swim in the
wave but not drown; you must quiver but not fall into convulsions: you must be
dying but not dead. Modest voluptuousness, this priceless treasure, was given by
nature to woman, so that she could restore it to you with many joys. Respect it
then as a palladium of domestic felicity; teach it to your sons, because verily I
tell you that in modern society there is often more modesty in the lowest harlot
than in some spouses educated in the nuptial bed of an aged husband, impotent
in love but most learned in prostitution and shame, and who brought no gift to
the virgin save a prurient weakness.
 Chapter 8
How Love Is Preserved and How Love Dies
The man who, by reason of the circumstances of his origin or through his own
fault, lives on the animal frontiers of the human kingdom is like the brute for
whom love is a desire which springs up, is satisfied, and then is lulled. If in him
affection for woman is not a passion of spring or autumn, it is always an erotic
and intermittent love, which dies with every want satisfied and is born again
with every desire renewed. The stimulus of the flesh marks in him the dawn of
sentiment, and the unwieldy flesh puts an end to the passion of love. The new
desire may apply to the same person or to another; this is for him a secondary
and purely accidental question, and from the manner in which circumstances
force him to solve it, he will be a monogamist or a polygamist, a virtuous man
through habit or a libertine through caprice. Oftener than it seems, this is the way
in which many dark-skinned people love, and many of their fairer brethren, who
nevertheless believe that they faithfully love one woman at a time. The history of
their love is a necklace of Venetian pearls, to which is added a new pearl at every
desire satisfied, and if the colour of the glass is not too varied, one can have
before the eyes a pretty necklace fit to deck a decent virtue and honest passion.
Between the death of one desire and the birth of another, you can have a gentle,
grateful remembrance of the pleasure enjoyed, a sweet hope of greater joy for
the morrow; and then the garland of your passion will become more beautiful,
new flowers will be added, and gradually it will simulate a true and great love.
The lofty heights of sentiment and the apex of thought are reached by few; while
hundreds of humble goats ruminate on the plains, and thousands of bees are
buzzing, and millions of ants are swarming, upon the sapphire summits of the
Alps two eagles alone represent the entire world of the living.
Love, although it is a most powerful emotion, still always follows the laws of
elementary physics which govern all the energies accumulated in our nervous
centres and which we term sentiments. As long as passion remains in the state of
desire, that is to say, as long as the force is in tension and is not transformed into
fruitful labour, the energy lasts and sentiment lives, vigorous and ardent. The
entire art of preserving love is reduced, therefore, to this alone, to preserve desire
and to make it spring up again immediately after it is spent. As, then, even love
with all its omnipotence must submit to physical laws, and as after every spark
that escapes there is always a period of repose, it is expedient to act in such a
way that while one part of the force is transformed into labour, another is
accumulated and prepares as soon as possible a new spark, so that gradually it
will not be possible to measure the interval between one and the other. To
transform the intermittent electric current into a continuous one is the great
secret of preserving love.
As long as desire is not satisfied, as long as the struggle has not become a
conquest, love is not only preserved but increased: and not in vain does woman
provide for future bliss in imploring time and prolonging the battle. That love
which retires from the struggle before the victory must be either very weak or
brutal, and as it is exceedingly rare that a woman concedes everything at once,
the little and great favours which she grants at times to the conqueror mark a
continual renewal of ardent desires and a continuous revival of love. At last,
sooner or later, the day of the looked-for victory arrives, and one embrace
changes two beings into one, blends in a single vessel love and voluptuousness.
Even when love is so base as to be only a thirst for pleasure, it rarely dies with
the first embrace. And who can say that he possessed the entire woman in a night
of love? Human attractions are such and so many, and our aesthetic necessities
are so ardent and exquisite, that even the acquisition of voluptuousness alone is
fortunately very slow, and in the sweet pursuit of new provinces, love is
preserved or revivified. The various treasures of beauty or sensuality of the two
lovers, the art of loving so neglected since the days of Ovid mark the duration of
loves that have their force only from the worship of the form or from the heat of
voluptuousness; and in some cases this duration can be very long, never infinite.
Too soon arrives the hour in which the wing of time lashes the fresh cheeks of
the young girl, the northern blast wrinkles them, and the wind scatters over the
ground the rosy petals of human beauty; too soon arrives the hour in which the
bowl of lechery has no longer a drop of nectar; and then, if there is no other
attraction, love is dying, and no miracle in the world can save it from certain
death. The energy of passion sprang entirely from voluptuousness and beauty;
this is faded, that is sear, and strength is spent. No force in the world rises
without mutation of matter, no energy is increased without transformations of
equilibrium and decompositions of affinity; if the man and the woman do not
arouse affinity or sympathy, no combination can arise; no light, no heat can flash
from their contact. They intone the chorus De profundis, and together they bury
the cadaver of a love which, kept alive by voluptuousness alone, should
inexorably die with it.
This is the general way in which vulgar loves die, and the duration of their
life can be calculated with much precision by weighing the beauty of the two
lovers, their youth, their lust, their art of loving. These loves can last an hour, a
day, a month, a year, ten years; they can, in rare cases, last during the entire
period of human youth. Men, and especially women, do not fall without a
struggle under the lash of time; with unheard-of arts they repair the ravages of
age, and not only do they fabricate daily adulterated and counterfeit forms, but
ever into the goblet of love they pour drugs and philtres; hence to silenced
hunger they give the stimulus of an artificial appetite, and for the heat and
impetus of passion they substitute the soft blandishments and prurient
incitements of the flesh. The battle continues a long time before defeat is
acknowledged, and love changes its nature but still exists. Formerly it was a
volcano, today it is a Bengal flame; formerly it was nude and chaste as a Uranian
Venus, now it is clothed and brazen as a harlot; formerly it was the love of every
hour, now it is periodical, intermittent, of the tertian or quartan type; formerly it
defied with impunity the rays of the noonday sun, and now it seeks the twilight;
but in fine, in spite of so much duplicity and so many medicaments, it is still
always love. O women, who daily behold with horror the cooling off of that fire
at which for so many years you have warmed your enamoured members, if you
were happy on account of your beauty alone, remember that, as the last grace of
the body withers, that fire will be spent, and when to the heart-rending cry which
invokes the stimulus of a desire no one will respond, prepare yourselves for the
funeral psalmody. As long as you can, with the galvanism of lust, arouse a desire
in your lover’s soft flesh, love is not yet extinguished. Behold to what a base
level the art of preserving love is reduced, when this has its origin only in the
desire of forms: it lowers itself to a question of hygiene, I would say it almost
transforms itself into a problem of taxidermy or of Appert’s Preserves!41 It is
necessary to consider the antiseptic virtue of the studied refusals and of libertine
reticence: to analyse lechery chemically and languor physiologically; to meditate
upon the economy of the energies and visit the pharmacy to discover the
aphrodisiacal virtue of various silken stuffs, of the different smiles, and of the
soft movements of the thighs. To these vilest of studies we have lowered woman,
who would gladly have wished to soar aloft with us and roam through the many
spheres of the beautiful; to embrace not only the world of exterior forms, but
also the infinite worlds of sentiment and thought.
You will tell me, perhaps, that I aspire to an ideal love impossible to reach;
you will tell me that the healthy, well-formed man can be handsome for forty
years of his life, and that woman also has a right to thirty years of beauty and ten
years of gracefulness; so that a love which lasted but thirty or forty years would
still be a beautiful and enviable thing. A spring and a summer of forty years
closed by a mild autumn, in which sweet remembrances, suave, reciprocal
gratitude, and intimate friendship prepare for the twilight of old age, can seem to
us a worthy triumph of a huge and splendid life of love. And I agree with you, if
you refer to the common loves of the people; but we must look high, very high,
to arrive at the middle path of the ascent, and we should all desire a love that
lasts as long as life and which is buried with us in the tomb. And then, you tell
me, every healthy, well-made man can present to woman the thyrsus, and every
well-formed woman can offer the cup of voluptuousness to man; but how many
men are handsome, how many women can call themselves beautiful? Perhaps
not ten in a hundred; and the others who in various degrees are removed from
the type of perfection of form, must they not love, can they not be loved?
No; in man, rich in so many physical elements, the beautiful does not end in
the exterior form, nor should love gush forth only from the spring of
voluptuousness. No deformity, no malady in him who would make men; this is
hygiene; but the hundred forms of moral and intellectual beauty, relieved only by
the soft shade of sex, can and should arouse ardent and tenacious passions,
which do not set with the sun of youth. Thus, while love can dispense its delights
to every man and every woman, perfect love should be born of the
contemplation and adoration of every type of beauty; and when that of the form
begins to pale, moral beauty shines in all its power, and later still the beauty of
thought appears to us in all it majestic brilliancy; so that while one star
disappears, another twinkles, and from the desires absorbed by the senses, we
feel more strongly aroused the longing for the treasures of sentiment and thought
of a creature who is all ours, and whom, if at first sight we loved on account of
beauty of form, we now love and will continue to love because she is beautiful in
kindness, in culture, in ideas, and in everything that man possesses of beauty and
greatness. Even character and thought have a profoundly sexual type, and
feminine benignity can be adored by us, just as the sweet and tender nature of
woman bows before virile courage. When we, in woman, have loved not only an
attractive female but also a nature imbued with all the beauties and graces of
Eve, the longest life does not suffice to satisfy our desires of possession, and at
the last hour of extreme old age some new conquest remains for us to make, and
some desire is always renewed, while the accumulation of sweetest memories
fills the void which fleeting youth has left behind it. Sublime triumph of human
nature, in which love survives the spent senses, the silenced voluptuousness, the
beauty of buried forms, and a warm ray of light glitters on the silvery heads of
two aged persons who still love because they still desire each other, because
heart and mind unite in an embrace, sexual in origin, ideal by reason of the
heights which it reaches. Our study on love in old age will complete this picture,
certainly one of the most beautiful and seductive in the great museum of love: a
picture which we should all desire to represent in the late years of life.
When the sources of love are many, while one recedes the other swells up, so
that the insatiable thirst of love never feels the want of a wave to satisfy it. All
the passions in their movements follow a parabolical line, and those that have
risen the highest descend the most rapidly; hence the weariness so allied to
strength; hence the ennui which approaches enthusiasm; hence the thousand
dangers which accompany the death of sentiment. Love presents, more than any
other passion, these phenomena and dangers, and it is almost impossible to make
voluptuousness, ecstasy, and apotheosis last beyond a very short flash of a few
instants. Intermittence is one of the most inexorable laws of the nervous system,
and he who would increase enthusiasm and
Only breathe the exhalation
Of a kiss and of a sigh,

dies consumed by his own fire; and, what is worse, before expiring he beholds
love dead at his feet. We cannot rebel against the laws of nature, nor can we
subjugate them; but it is conceded us to direct them to our advantage; and thus it
is in our case. Between one ecstasy and another we can sow the seeds of joy and
suppress ennui; between one voluptuousness and another we can overcome
weariness and cull the flowers of sentiment, and from too ardent contemplations
we can repair to the cool temple of thought and meditate together. This is perfect
love, this is ideal love, which is preserved pure, unaltered, brilliant as a diamond
in the tortured sand of a stream. Few reach it; many, however, can approach it,
and for human happiness and human greatness it is enough to see it from afar,
like the promised land, which, as the poet says, ‘is always beyond the mountain.’
The man who brutally opposes the holy and noble aspirations of the woman
for a higher participation in mental culture signs his own condemnation; and
when he cynically sends her to bed or to the nursery, he shows that he cares to
know only the coarsest and most brutal part of the joys of love. You may be the
strongest male and the wisest libertine; but even Venus herself, descended from
the heaven of the ideal, would tire you, and for you too will arrive the hour of
nausea; then you will curse life and the vanity of love and recite the litany of
lamentation and disillusion which, from Adam down, has been repeated by all
those who know not how to live, and who bestially ignore the laws of the
economy of strength. We must elevate woman not only in order to fulfil an act of
justice, but also to enlarge the field of our joys and increase the value of our
voluptuousness. A great step has been taken in this respect by transforming the
prostitute of the polygamous gynaeceum into the mother of a family; but this
new freedwoman of modern civilization is tolerated, not raised to any equality by
us; she is like an orphan picked up on the wayside, who lives with the members
of a family without forming an integral part of it. If the concubine has become a
mother, she has still a great step to take in order to become hic et haec homo42 –
a most noble and delicate creature, who thinks and feels with us, and thinks and
feels femininely, thus completing in us the aspect of things of which we see only
a part; and she brings to us in the meditations and struggles of life that precious
element which only a daughter of Eve can give us. If from woman you want only
the joys of love, then teach her the sentiments and ideas of the same. She is like
the bee that changes sugar to nectar, and the juice of every flower into honey;
make her wise, and wisdom will be transformed into caresses; make her strong,
and she will use her strength to enrich you; make her great, and she will deposit
her greatness at your feet in exchange for a kiss. Fear not, she will never place
her foot upon the neck of man, because she loves him only too well, and
because, in order to become a tyrant, she would be obliged to amputate the better
part of herself, abdicating her omnipotence.
There where man and woman are bound together by the senses, sentiment,
and thought, love is easily preserved, and without any artificial aid. Some
fortunate individuals demand with astonishment why their love should ever
cease; love lives in them, ardent, tenacious, invincible, and at death is
extinguished instantaneously, like the porcelain cup, old but always new, which
falls from the hand of the inexperienced servant and perishes as it came into
being, beautiful and brilliant.
It is not thus when voluptuousness is all or almost all of love: then the easiest
way to prolong it is to always preserve in the cup of love some drop of desire, so
that between one embrace and another voluptuousness is never spent, and gives
a deep sexual mark to the relations of conversation and habit. And this is an
indirect but decided advantage, which ever produces chastity between two
persons who love each other without having the fortune to participate in any
treasures beyond those of the senses. One should remember that every virtue is
the fruitful mother of other virtues.
The preservation of love is one of the most sacred rights and duties that
devolve upon woman, although we cannot refuse with impunity to take an active
part in this mission. We, however, are too thoughtless, too polygamous, too
exacting in our instantaneous desires for the prudence and economy of love to be
easy virtues to us. To see all, touch all, desire all and at once, this is the childish
physiognomy of many virile loves. Woman loves more than we, but she foresees
and fears; also, in love she is the better provider, and while she culls the flower
for the joy of today, she knows how to preserve the fruit for the dreary
wintertime. Woe to her if she joins in the thoughtlessness of her prodigal
companion! They will make together a splendid blaze of their affections,
renewing, alas! too soon, the thousandth edition of the grasshopper and the ant.
If the women who read my book learn nothing but this, I would believe them
recompensed for the ennui which they will have experienced; and I will be
happy to know that I have not written in vain for the welfare of the most
cherished part of the human family. With the right of a long and laboured
experience, with the right which is mine by a deep, unwearied study of the
human heart, I pray them and conjure them to close with their white little hands
and their rosy lips the mouth of the man who asks too eagerly for love. Let them
say no and no again, and let them bury the friendly yes under a mass of flowers,
holding back desire for new supplications and new battles. Every sacrifice will
bring them one hundred per cent profit, and for a caress denied today they will
have ten tomorrow. Woman is the ancient teacher of sacrifice, and she makes use
of her experienced wisdom in preserving love, which is the air she breathes, the
blood which nourishes her, her greatest treasure. She must never say yes before
having said at least one no; if she truly loves the prodigal friend, she reserves for
the days of famine the crumbs which fall from his hand and which today he
despises; let her be the stewardess of love as she already is of the household;
man produces and she preserves; man conquers, and she retains the booty.
If genital chastity is the chief preservative of vulgar loves, a certain chastity
of sentiment and of thought, a certain reserve, is also indispensable for the
duration of sublime loves. The man must never see his wife naked, nor should
the woman ever find her companion naked before her; veils and mists, leaves
and flowers should shade the man and woman in their senses, sentiments, and
intellect. The infinite is the only thing that man never wearies of loving,
contemplating, studying, because it is neither weighed nor measured. Now so it
is in love; the beautiful, the true, the good of the person beloved should be
infinite, because we must neither see, weigh, nor measure these qualities in their
entirety. A sun that passes from one crepuscule into another, never manifesting
itself fully, such is eternal and immutable love, which does not fear the frost of
winter nor the hurricane of summer; that dies on its feet like the ancient heroes.
Study the fortunate men who are capable not only of arousing great passions
but also of preserving the same, and you will perceive in them all those exalted
virtues precisely understood in the term politica crepuscolare.43 A beauty that
has more grace than splendour, more seduction than heat, a compliance that
retains strength, an authority that can be made to smile, a deep and tender
benignity, and a genius that has more spirit than grandeur – these are the great
preservative powers of love. Grace preserves love longer than beauty does,
because it has more glimmering tints than the latter, and sympathetic natures
retain love longer than beautiful nature, and wit longer than genius. There are
men and women who at first sight do not thrill, but on every hair of their head
they seem to have a hook and in every pore of the skin a vent-hole, so that you
have scarcely come into intimate contact with them, when you find yourself
seized by a thousand fish hooks and swallowed up by a thousand suckers, as
though a gigantic polyp has embraced you in the absorbing coils of its numerous
tentacles.
Love is dead without possibility of resurrection, when, as is the case with all
living things, there is no galvanism to awaken the sleepy nerves, nor wave of
blood to rouse the heart. How often an apparently dead love has been
resuscitated! And it has been called a miracle, one of the usual mysteries of the
heart; whereas life was not spent but only latent; the truly dead, with the
exception of Lazarus, have never been known to rise again. A nerve was still
sensible, a desire was still possible, and the apparent dead revived. Physicians
observe that cases of apparent death are much more frequent in hysteria,
catalepsy, and all forms of nervous diseases; now it is natural that many live
loves have been interred with most cruel equivocation, since an organism more
nervous, more cataleptic, and more hysterical than love it is difficult to find in
the entire world of the living. In our case, however, the sepulture is less
dangerous, because love of itself opens every casket, every tomb; penetrates
every kind of earth, overturns every sod, and appears, saying, ‘Do not weep, I
am here!’
Love rarely dies a violent death, and cases so termed are wounds, ruptures,
syncope, and nothing more. Real death comes through decay and after long
illness. Duty frequently forbids us to love him (or her) who suddenly appears to
us vile and infamous; but love, condemned to death, weeps, despairs, but does
not want to expire. Chased back to prison, without light, without food, it resists
hunger, darkness, frost, but does not die. The public, perhaps, believe that it has
disappeared from the face of the earth, like those illustrious prisoners concealed
in the stillness of a castle; but love lives there, in the depths, and groans and
tosses about in prolonged agony, and dies a pitiful death alone with him who
feels it.
If the appearance of a new creature on the path of life seems to kill love
violently, it is because it was not a true love; if it really were such, the battle
would be long and bitter, and the prince of the affections would die, as in other
cases, a slow and lingering death. When we shall once have ceased to give the
name of love to the desire of the flesh and the pride of possession, we shall see
that that sentiment is much more beautiful, great, and honourable than is
generally supposed; many miracles will be explained as simple physical
phenomena, and many obscure mysteries made clear.
To cause love to gush forth from the stone of indifference is a seductive
prodigy; to rouse it from its sleep is a desirable power; to sow our steps through
life with love and desires can be the dazzling pride of every living creature; but
to preserve the acquired love, to retain it pure and bright, to make it pass with
impunity through the cyclones of life, the fogs of November and the frosts of
December, to guide it healthy and robust from the spring of youth to the border
of the tomb, so that it dies, like the Mexican victim, amid choruses of admiration
and surrounded by flowers of eternal freshness, is one of the highest ambitions to
which we can aspire; it is as beautiful a thing as to create a work of art; it is as
useful a work as to become rich; it is as great a work as to win fame.
Many say that the most natural way for love to die is to transform itself into
friendship; but several times already I have given the reader to understand what I
think of sexual friendship. Perhaps in some very rare cases neither of the two
remembers that the beloved object belongs to the other sex: but how can they
forget the loves of the entire past, how cancel suddenly the ardent remembrances
of the many years of intercourse? If the sweet habit of seeing each other can be
substituted for exhausted love; if a man and a woman can forget that they are
man and woman, what name will this new and singular affection merit? Perhaps
that of automatic habit; and I will send this psychical phenomenon back to the
laboratory of the physiologist, so that he may study it together with unconscious
and reflex actions.
 Chapter 9
The Depths and the Heights of Love
Whenever I see a flower that opens and blooms on the border of a precipice, the
same thought ever recurs to my mind: such is love; it always seems to live
between two infinities, one of height and the other of profundity. While it darts
its aspirations above, while it seems to seek in the heavens space and light, it
deepens its roots into the most subtle mazes of the rocks and into the most
obscure secrets of the abyss. Star that shines in the infinity of the ideal; root that
shatters the stones in the infinity of depth; reaches all heights and touches all
depths; it is the most human of passions, and was always ranked among the
divine; it is the most heartfelt and the most ethereal; it is thought on the summit
of the mountain, it is strength down in the valley; it guides the poet when he
soars to paradise, accompanies man when he plunges into the hot wave of
sensuality; virgin and father in heaven, lover and spouse on earth. If to live
means to exist in the most beautiful form of life, love is the richness, the luxury,
the splendour of life; love is the divine of the human.
No one will ever be able to say where love penetrates when it excites all the
depths of human nature, there where together with the mire are to be found
pearls and corals. It is a diver that brings to light strange and unknown things,
and reveals to the astonished eye of the observer new things never before
imagined; it is the most daring and the most fortunate of excavators. How many
natures are agitated at the contact of the new god, who seems to evoke from the
depths all the silent passions, all the dormant ideas, all the phantoms of the heart
and of thought. The deep simmering of the psychical elements at the contact
with Jove almost always announces the birth of a second moral nature, and,
renewing life, marks in it a new era. Of our birth we are always ignorant, and of
our death almost always unconscious; between the to be and the not to be there
is possible only a third and great thing – to love. While the many judge from the
skin, the countenance, the coarse voice that the boy has become a man, a
tremendous earthquake announces to him that he should love, that he already
loves; and while mothers behold with trepidation the rounding of the bosom of
their little girl who has become a woman, another deep earthquake tells her that
she should love, that she already loves.
In the season of love many animals change colour and form, they clothe
themselves with new feathers or arm themselves with new weapons; with the
nuptial garments they assume different habits and singular ability; mutes become
exquisite singers; the stupid are transformed into skilled architects; granivorous
become carnivorous; inhabitants of earth are changed into winged messengers of
the skies; caterpillars become butterflies. And so it is with man, only the change
scarcely touches the epidermis of his skin, but sinks into the veins and mazes of
his psychical nature. The phases of puberty deserve a monograph; it will suffice
here to remark that every force is redoubled, every vigour refined, and while
growing to manhood, force and potency are prepared and accumulated, love
calls them into action. Puberty declares war, love calls us to the battle.
Weaponless if impubescent, armed if pubescent; armed and combatants if
enamoured.
Not all human motives are good, and for this reason love calls into action also
bad elements, which in the beginning were not visible. For the first time, from
the deep abysses of the moral man appear phantoms of crime and vice, spectres
of revelry and of the prison. In badly constructed organisms, predestined for the
prison or the madhouse, together with first love there often appears the first
crime or the first mania. To the great musterer of the depths and the heights,
every human element responds, ‘Present,’ and the sudden wrath in characters
formerly mild, the first tears on hitherto smiling faces, the first song of poetry in
brains all prose, the first hysteria in a body that seemed to be without nerves, the
first ambition in the timid youth, the first meditations in the mirror, the first
impetus, the first war declared against the invisible enemy, the first harlequin
follies, the first flashes of genius, the first lies and the first heroisms, are all new
spectres called from the depths by the magic wand of the magician of magicians,
by the greatest conjurer of spirits of the blessed age of sorcerers and exorcists.
The man who loves is twice a man, because for the first time he feels not only
that he is alive, but also the power to create living beings, to generate. Woman is
not the sole generator, since in the male viscera the half of a future creature is
also agitated, and the seed of a second existence enclosed within us is redoubled
and renders us almost as proud as the ancient prophets, to whom God consigned,
as to a tabernacle, the supreme truth, the prophecy of future history. A man who
loves has within him a part of that which will live in the future, the fecund germs
of a new generation.
While all the psychical forces in contact with the new sentiment are
confusedly and still indistinctly agitated, love passes them in review and orders
them all into ranks. Every beauty must transform itself into flowers for a
garland, every passion must lend its fire, every potency must be disguised as a
servant or slave. Many to serve, one only to command; many strong, one only
very strong; many subjects and only one tyrant. No objection, no discussion.
Where love is present, who would wish to propose or counsel? O virgin and
rising forces of youth, bow your head to your god; splendid beauties of human
nature, deposit upon the new altars your tributes; are you not satisfied with the
glory of bringing homage to love? Very rarely does avarice find a place in the
first and deep meditations of an enamoured heart, but the question is continually
repeated: ‘Have I still something, have I anything better to offer? Have I really
given my entire self to my king?’
The most singular and harassing voluptuousness of love is to feel that
everything flees from us and that we no longer belong to ourselves. It seems as
though we were assisting at a satanical phantasmagoria in which we behold
members, viscera, senses, affections, thoughts fleeing from us, running wildly
toward a new centre, in which with our spoils they are going to form a new
organism. Even time appears to be no longer ours, since we no longer measure it
with the watch, but with the impatience of desire or the flashes of
voluptuousness; thought too no longer belongs to us, for it is tyrannically
governed by one image alone. To be ourselves again, to remember that we have
still intimate relations with the man of yesterday, we must go in search of
another creature, who has stolen everything from us. Hence that vague unrest
which invades the body, senses, and thoughts of every lover; hence the attempt –
difficult even for the most able dissembler – to conceal the new god who invades
and penetrates us entirely. Every hair, every pore, every epiderm, every nerve of
the man who loves, sings and says to the universe of the living, ‘I love, and who
loves me?’ Day and night, in the calm and in the storm, the entire nature of a
lover sings its note until another song responds in the same key. Not a moment
of peace, not an instant of truce, until the new energy finds its sister force, which
combats and quiets it. Love is like the sea: it can be as calm as the mirror of an
Alpine lake, mute and soft as a sheet of lead; but there among the rocks that
surround it and the sea-coast that frames it, there is eternal motion; and roaring
or sighing, wailing or caressing, it agitates with never-ending action the land it
kisses. The man and woman who meet and fall in love with each other are like
the sea and the land which are at continual war, now sweet, now bitter, now
caressing, now cruel, now voluptuous, now merciless.
Look at that young girl seated at the window, bending over a piece of white
linen which she is sewing. How attentive she is to the needle. She seems,
between one stitch and the other, to be meditating on the solution of the squaring
of the circle, so absorbed is she in the arduous task. But if I could write a volume
of the thoughts that pass through her brain between the stitches! She is fishing in
the deep abysses of love.
 And there, a short distance away, unknown to her, a young man with
dishevelled hair is standing also at a window, and with his hands thrust violently
into his pockets, his breast swelled threateningly, he has been gazing at the sky
for the last hour. Is he meditating, perhaps, upon the tremendous problem of the
proletarians or of human liberty? Is he dreaming, perchance, of glory or of
riches? No, he too is fishing in the deep abysses of love.
Woman dives deeper and soars higher than man in the regions of love; to her,
society generally denies the field of action, and an infinite time remains for her
to penetrate into the abysses of the heart. How often during many long hours will
an innocent young girl, who scarcely knows how to write, open and reopen her
lips for the kiss which lasted but a second; how often during a long, weary night
she feels again the bitterness of a cold salute or of a rude word. Here you have a
profundity of sense, which, however, is nothing in comparison with the
extravagant and transubstantial processes of sentimental analyses with which
woman pulverizes, analyses, distils a look, a word, a gesture. O chemists, hide
your ignorance before the profundity of the analytical art of an enamoured
woman; for her, the spectroscope is a coarse instrument of prehistoric art; for
her, homeopathic solutions are poisons; for her, atoms are worlds: she has
measured them many centuries before Thompson.44 But a millionth part of
rancour diluted in an ocean of voluptuousness is still most sensible to her
process of analysis; for her, an atom of indifference is a lava of desire
instantaneously marked by the thermoelectric apparatus which she uses in her
laboratory. She is the priestess of the ideal, of the infinite, of the
incommensurable, and will be religious many centuries after man will have
buried the last god. Even in love she is not satisfied with the finite.
Love always elevates the lover above the ordinary man, and as the increased
forces make him capable of greater undertakings, so the horizons are continually
enlarged, and he sees men and things from a greater height. Each one of us has a
different capacity of elevating ourselves to the region of the ideal; but coarseness
and genius, prose and poetry always raise themselves by a work of love to a
world which is more beautiful, more serene, greater than that in which we drag
out our daily existence. How many coarse, despicable natures have been
redeemed by a work of love; how many sluggish intelligences have been guided
to the paths of glory, how many of the vulgar have raised themselves to the
Olympus of thought with the aid of a loving hand! And still the wretched
proverb is daily repeated, that science and glory must guard themselves against
love as a dread enemy, and great men are pedantically quoted, who love but art,
and who to chastity alone were indebted for their greatness. Strange confusion of
ideas, in which hygiene is confounded with morality, chastity with the impotency
of loving! Give me a chaste and enamoured genius, and I will see him scale the
greatest human heights; give me a eunuch of the heart, and he cannot be great
without loving; but a man healthy in sense and sentiment will always be elevated
by love, provided he does not squander his affections on an unworthy creature,
or exchange love for lechery. For one genius killed by love you have a hundred
who to it owe their greatest inspirations, who from it attained the strength to live,
who bless it as superior to glory, who in it alone find the fresh wave that tempers
the boiling heat of enthusiasm and of passion. It is an ancient custom of the
human beast to trample underfoot the rind of the fruit from which has been
sucked the last drop of juice!
If love does not work the same miracles in everyone; if it is not always a
virtue that elevates and refines, it is because we have debased woman to the
level of our lasciviousness, and because even we, civilized men, feel for her
more desire than esteem, more lechery than love. And yet woman has a more
ardent thirst than we for the ideal, and like all oppressed creatures she looks aloft
with more faith than we. Her exquisitely sensitive nature, always open to the
raptures of enthusiasm, pliant to the ardour of poetry, continually urges her to
soar above; and she would have assisted us also to rise, if we had not made of
her a sweet concubine or a good housekeeper. Woman senses the ideal, aspires to
every height of the excelsior, but she has neither the courage nor the strength to
climb, and if she is not supported by the robust arm of the lover, she easily
wearies and sits down to rest on the uphill path. To her, nature has assigned the
task of indicating the landmark toward the goal, to us the duty of accompanying
and sustaining her. In a stupendous painting by Schaeffer,45 Dante is standing
below, Beatrice above: Dante regards her, contemplates, and is inspired: and
Beatrice, with her gaze riveted on the sky above, seems to say to him, ‘Upward,
upward, it is there that we shall go together!’ Nothing is more contagious than
enthusiasm; nothing is more fascinating, more irresistible than the enthusiasm of
woman. Without arguments for belief, without strength for hope, sustained only
by love, she is always full of faith in great and beautiful things, and at every step
of life, now rendered lovely by a sublime imprudence, now moved by a youthful
enthusiasm, she seems to say to us, ‘Onward, onward!’ and with her tender little
hands she pulls us along, guides us, and lends us her ever fresh strength even
when she appears fatigued.
When Christ made faith the cornerstone of his religion, when he said that
with faith we could move mountains, he was inspired, perhaps, by that ardent
faith which woman feels and which makes her strong in her weakness. Woe to us
if previous to preparing for an achievement we were obliged to sum up with
mathematical exactitude all the favourable and unfavourable probabilities; woe
to us if we should undertake only such things as are sure of success! More than
three-fourths of the great achievements of the world would never have been
begun. There is always an element beyond calculation, and it is in the capricious
hands of fate; it is the gap which must be filled by faith, that faith which moves
mountains, which woman feels so deeply and infuses into our hearts so tenderly.
Find me the most celebrated eunuchs of the heart who, without the aid of any
woman, reached measureless heights of fame, and I promise that, guided by a
loving hand, they would have soared higher still. Love is a second sight, and
woman sees things under an aspect which generally escapes the synthetic glance
of man; she discovers many hidden elements of things and helps us to penetrate
more deeply into the substance of every problem, and above all into the
knowledge of human nature. In all things, both great and small, after having
consulted science and art, experience and fancy, after having studied the book of
history and that of the human heart, never fail to consult also the woman who
loves you; in treating of a book, a law, a work of art or of commerce, industry, or
poetry, woman will always have something new to suggest, she will always have
her revelations; and through a work of love you will feel yourselves elevated.
Some men of genius lack the coefficient of ambition, and you often see them
die before their gigantic forces have borne any fruit: woman and love alone can
give them that energy which they cannot have from the stimulus of self-love.
Eve knows how to give faith to the sceptic, ambition to the disheartened,
strength to all; and thrones and fortunes, civil and martial crowns, glories of art
and science are won through the ambition inspired by a beloved woman. During
the heroic and chivalrous ages, this was publicly proclaimed, and men boasted of
it; today, when women sell themselves in houses of prostitution or at the bank of
matrimony, it has become the custom to blush to owe glory to woman, and the
chivalrous element is being too deeply submerged. In my ‘Loves of Men’ I will
study the passage of chivalrous love in the gallantry of our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers, while today in the limbo of the rising generation we think to
discern the germs of a more beautiful epoch for the amorous life of man.
The sooner love casts away the ballast which binds it to earth, the quicker are
we raised to the regions of the ideal. This ballast is made up of lechery and self-
love, and it is woman’s duty to help us to throw it out of our little bark. Does she
not concur with her lasciviousness and vanity in goading to still greater excesses
man’s base and bestial love? In the rapture we feel when inhaling the ether of the
loftiest mountains, we can sometimes forget that night is near and our home far
away; in love too we can feel ourselves so carried away by the poetry of the
ideal as to desire a love without contact, the spirit without the material. These are
sublime maladies of the brain – only too rare – which are touched by the extreme
confines of human possibilities: they lead to delirium, to the sacrifice of oneself,
drag us down to folly or to martyrdom. If a desire continues pure upon the
summit of human love, and the contact of the material does not disturb it, men
contemplate the statue from below as a fantastic monument erected by the
morning clouds of the Alps, nor do they know whether it is a play of mist or the
fancy of a dream: they contemplate and admire.
The pure and intimate communion of thought and sentiment, with nothing of
the senses save two clasped hands and four pupils which blend together, is
certainly the greatest voluptuousness of the sexual world; and independent of
platonic love, it may be that two creatures in that moment forget that one of them
is a man and the other a woman. It is then and there that feminine nature shines
with the aureole of its celestial light; it is at that fount of poetry that genius can
acquire its greatest strength; it is then and there that coarse natures become
refined; it is in that pure air that all human mire is washed away. Women, profit
by those fleeting moments to regenerate the human family and urge it on to
higher destinies! Man remains a shorter time than you in the ecstasy of
sentiment, and your angel will soon fall at your feet, imploring of you the kiss of
the terrestrial creature. In that moment you are omnipotent, for you have the lion
at your feet; and if man is strong, you are very strong, since his strength is all for
you. Guide it to the good, direct it to the beautiful; in that lion at your feet there
is still much of the beast; in that conquered Hercules there is still much of the
savage. Silence that wild beast, and, running your slender fingers through the
waves of that dishevelled mane, call forth from the depths blessed energies,
noble inspirations, and a thirst for the ideal. We wish to be great for your sake;
we wish to be strong in order to give you all our strength; we desire the glories
of conquest, but only to place them at your feet. For every kiss of yours may the
human family produce a great work; for every caress of yours, a useful work!
May your love be the highest prize of every ambition! You are weak, it is true,
but when you are desired you are very strong. Who dares assert that he is
stronger than the no of a woman? What phalanx attempts to advance when the
finger of woman threatens and says, ‘Backward’?
Love, after having sent the minute fibres of its roots into all the deep fissures
of the human world, and after having absorbed every drop of affection, every
throb of energy, consigns to the branches of the robust tree every juice and every
energy. And above, in the far-off ether, leaves, flowers, and fruit drink from the
rays of the sun the sweetest, most inebriating voluptuousness. There, in those
regions full of light and heat, where worms of the soil, atoms of dust, and breath
of miasma never reach, the depths become the heights, and man and woman,
blended together in the ecstasy of an ardent contemplation of the beautiful and
the good, ask of themselves, ‘And what is God?’
 Chapter 10
The Sublime Childishness of Love
The butterfly just issued forth from the chrysalis state still bears upon its
wings some bit of the covering which so long enclosed it; love too, the most
youthful passion, carries with it the spoils of the child of which it has been
scarcely divested. In its caprices and in its follies, in its games rich in grace and
strength, in its blind idolatries as in its infantile sorrows, you would say you had
before you a boy-genius. Now he surprises you with his violence, then he
awakens your sympathy for his weakness; now all-powerful, then most timid;
now a hero, then a coward; today he defies heaven with closed fists, tomorrow
with tears he implores a caress. Love is childish because it is a child; it is
childish because it is a poet; it is childish because, setting at liberty all the forms
of the aesthetic world and all the forces of the moral world, agitating with a
convulsive kaleidoscope all the images of thought, it is more often lyric than
epic, and writes more dithyrambs than history, more poems than philosophical
treatises.
Love is also puerile because it is religious to the point of superstition, and
suffers all the omens that can pass through the brain of a timid and ignorant
woman. Love, even in northern countries, delights in the pomp of southern
idolatry; protests against the iconoclasts, protests against the serious worship of
the Protestants, and, more enamoured of the Roman Catholic on account of its
incense, images, and tinsel, it requires altars and pontificals, canopies and
tabernacles.
No religion was ever more senselessly idolatrous than love, no Olympus had
more gods, more altars, and more priests. It accepts every belief, every worship,
from the fetishism of the savage to the omnipotent, invisible God of the
Christian, admits exorcism and plenary indulgence, the benediction and the
anathema, the amulet and the rogations, the aspergillum46 of the priest who
blesses and the red-hot iron of the inquisitor; admits paradise, hell, and
purgatory, St Anthony and the Immaculate Conception. Full of faith and fears,
love would of itself have invented idolatry if this had not had infinite other roots
to sprout from the human brain.
When man feels, desires, and loves very much, arrived at the extreme
boundaries of the human field, he always erects an altar with whatever he has of
beauty or riches, and there on his knees he prays and adores. To that altar he
brings the amber and coral gathered on the seashore and the gold found in the
sand of the dream; the poetry culled in his vagabond excursions through the
heaven of the ideal; he brings the most beautiful flowers of his thought and
offers all in tribute to a creature of earth or space, of nature or fancy. And to
love, also, man erects his altar, there upon the extreme frontiers of the human,
and on bended knee he pronounces beautiful, good, and holy above everything
the creature whom he loves; not content with this, he penetrates with his avid,
restless glance into the darkness of the unknown, where no form appears to him
save the prolongation of the reflected rays of the known world, and there he is
suspended over the abysses of nothing. In this obscurity dwell all the infinities,
all the gods, all human loves borne to the most distant regions of the ideal.
For love, everything is holy that has been touched by the hand, eye, or
thought of the beloved, everything is holy in which the dear image has been
reflected. All becomes an object of worship, all is transformed into a magic
mirror, in which we contemplate our god. And who does not remember the
adoration for a rosebush from which she had plucked a flower, and the idolatry
for a petal which she had smelled; who does not remember the thousand varied
and foolish relics of love?
In the reliquary of love there is a place for the beautiful and the grotesque, the
horrible and the graceful. I had a friend who used to weep for hours at a time
with joy and emotion, kissing and contemplating a thread of silk which she had
held in her hands, and which was for him the only relic of love. Another kept on
his desk for many long years the skull of his deceased sweetheart, making it his
dearest companion. There are many who have slept for months and years with a
book, a dress, a shawl. And who can narrate all the sublime childishness, all the
ardent tenderness, all the foolish things of the idolatry of love?
In man, the sensations accumulate in the brain such hidden mysteries and
deep energies that at a sign from us they can all rise and erect an edifice before
us, greater and more beautiful than the reality of things. No beloved woman was
ever as beautiful as the image which the lover sees in his solitary desires or
pictures upon the black ground of a night of dreams, a comparison which would
often be dangerous, if the magic brush of fancy did not exaggerate also the
beauty of things seen by the eye and caressed by the hand, a comparison which
sows the lives of artists and poets with sorrow, with disillusion, and also with
crime.
If every beautiful woman could know all the kisses, all the caresses, all the
hymns which are offered her by the men who contemplate and desire her, she
would certainly feel proud of her power to call forth so much force from the
world of the living. Who knows where all those rays end, who knows where the
heat of so much motion is condensed, who knows where so much scattered force
is collected, if it is true that nothing is lost of all that is generated and which is
the transformation of so many ardent desires that project in the infinite void of
space?
On woman, modesty imposes much temperance in manner, often a tyrannical
reserve. She conceals from our eyes the secret adoration, the struggles of the
heart, and the strange hysteria of sentiment. We, always less enamoured than
she, give greater vent to our excitement, and if a beautiful, fortunate woman
would wish to describe the scenes at which she has assisted in her youthful
career, she could really furnish us with a gallery of caricatures before which all
others would become pale and insipid; a gallery in which at every step the
grotesque and the sublime, folly and passion find themselves united. Bold threats
of death and impossible fasts, resignation of dignity, abdications of common
sense, orgies of fancy, and hurricanes of the senses. How much misery, how
many carnivals, bacchanals, and how much baseness must woman witness! She,
fortunately for us, is pious and modest, and for the sake of our honour she covers
us with a piece of her queenly mantle, hiding our puerility from the eyes of the
profane, and often from our own.
To awake in the morning and wish that the first glance be directed toward the
beloved object; to retire at night and daily wish that the last quivering of the
drooping eyelid and the last glimmering of thought be directed to her; to wish
that no hour of the day may pass without having thought of her: these are some
of the thousand requirements of love.
To want to dress in her favourite colour, and with it to paint our houses, our
carriages, and cover our books; to perfume everything with her favourite scent,
and to eat, sleep, and walk at the same time that she does: these are some of the
sublime puerilities of love.
Not to care to read any book that she has not previously perused, and to
always want to read the same page together.
Never to look any other man or any other woman in the face.
To cultivate in our gardens only those trees that she loves and the flowers that
she prefers.
To divest oneself in a day of a vice of ten years, merely because she turned up
her pretty little nose at the smell of a cigar.
To pronounce a word with the accent she uses.
 To dismiss a faithful servant who displeases her, and to sell a house in which
she has fallen downstairs.
To go to church without believing in God, and to curse the supersensible
because he is a rationalist.
To kill a horse in order to bring to her grandmother a rosary forgotten in a
country-house twenty miles from the city.
To kiss a horse that she has caressed.
To cross the ocean in order to kiss her a month sooner.
To learn a science, a language, an art in order to give her a surprise which will
last perhaps a half-hour.
To hate father and mother because they have insulted her.
To become a soldier because she likes the uniform.
To become a hero with the hope of moving her heart.
To feign voluptuousness in sorrow.
To kiss a hat a hundred times, to bestow a hundred caresses on a canary
touched by her, and to mark with the eye a brick of the pavement where she has
rested her little foot in order later on to kiss and adore it.
To become jealous of God, to defy hell, to decapitate all statues in order to
place but one head on every one of them.
To feign illness so as to have her for nurse or have him for doctor.
To feign health even when dying, so as not to cause suffering.
To feign riches, to feign poverty.
To feign genius, to hide genius.
These are things, now puerile, now sublime, now grotesque and sublime at
the same time, which love daily performs, but which are nothing in comparison
to the thousand and one eccentricities of which this leviathan of the sentiments is
capable.
 Chapter 11
Boundaries of Love – Their Relations to the Senses
We do not study a country without tracing exactly its boundaries, following them
in their capricious and serpentine lines, marking the point where individuality
ends and the influence of the neighbouring country is already felt. You may have
trampled every sod, run over every path, you may have scented the soil of every
field and drunk the water of every spring and every stream; but if you have not
marked the borders of a country, you are ignorant of more than half its history.
Everything is equal to itself and its surroundings, and no thing in this world can,
with impunity, approach another, and all things act and react among themselves.
So it is with love, which has frontiers as vast as the human world, as indented as
the coasts of Dalmatia or of Norway, capricious, irregular, changeable. It is a
land which projects into all neighbouring countries; and senses, sentiments, and
thought come into close and complicated contact with it.
Every sense, every passion, every force of the mind is an instrument of love;
but this, in turn, is inclined in a thousand different ways to the senses, the
passions, and thought. It is a continual interlacing of factors and instruments, of
causes and effects; and while this gigantic power heats and moves the inmost
fibres of the human organism, it irradiates its penetrating light into the extreme
confines of the known world.
Love, which requires by the supreme right of existence the contact of two
different natures – which is but the kiss of two creatures who for an instant blend
and mix the germs of their potency – must have the most varied and numberless
relations to the sense of touch. It can also be said, without departing from strict
scientific truth, that physical love is a sublime form of contact and touch. In
inferior animal forms, as in human natures of a low and bestial type, love is
nothing else but touch and contact; but rising to the high spheres of the animal
world and of the human microcosm, the other senses also interweave their
flowers in the garland of love, except taste, which takes no part in the pleasures
of love save in exceptional cases, and which can, without scruple, be dispatched
to the clinic of pathological psychology. Of the other four senses, touch has the
greatest part in love, and hearing the least; sight and smell range between the
two former in different degrees.
The senses differ in the nature of the joys and sorrows with which they take
part in the greatest of human passions. Touch conquers, sight delights, hearing
moves, and smell inebriates. We can easily form a comparative idea of the
various parts which the four senses take in love by comparing these four
moments: to see the beloved woman and contemplate her for a long time – to
embrace her eagerly – to hear her voice without seeing her – to inhale
voluptuously the essence with which she alone perfumes her gowns and linen.

A thousand, a million notes would not suffice to express accurately all the
harmonies and melodies of amorous contact, and as the most voluminous
dictionary in the world would reject such an undertaking, the pen of the writer
would slip where science becomes lascivious. At times I regret that one of the
greater poets has not sung the sublime voluptuousness of love, carrying the style
to such a height as to leave the pen uncontaminated. Perhaps man would also
like to know the limits of the genius of lechery, to mark the confines of this
human possibility; but I console myself with this our sublime ignorance, with
this glorious lacuna left by modesty in the field of human knowledge, because I
think that where poetry is silent and science veils itself, where an intimate
contact of two kisses creates a new existence, an unknown current transmits to
the new man, together with the spark of life, all the treasures of past
voluptuousness; and the son of Adam with a second kiss will transmit the innate
science of love, pour out the entire contents of the chalice of voluptuousness into
the lips of the daughter of Eve. Sublime science, which was never written on
papyrus nor sculpted in marble or in bronze, but which transmits itself in the
heat of a kiss through thousands of generations that loved, love, and will love.
From the most chaste caress given to a fine head of hair to the greatest
hurricane of voluptuousness, touch has still the character designated by its
anatomy. Touch in love is always excited by voluptuousness, it is always deeply
sensual, it is always a positive possession, without contrast or possibility of
contrast. Woman can deceive herself, she can believe herself pure of all virile
contact when the hand of man has never touched but the hem of her garments;
but when skin has touched skin, when a finger has touched another finger,
something is already lost of that waxen varnish with which nature covers the
virgin fruit, still odorous with the perfume of the tree that nourished it. A hand
that clasps another hand means, in love, two fires that blend in one; a head of
hair that touches another head of hair means two streams of voluptuousness
which rush into the bed of another stream. The molecules of a man who loves
can never touch with impunity the molecules of the woman who returns his love;
and as contact can be more rapid than lightning, every molecule that re-enters
the sphere of its own individuality carries with it something that does not belong
to it, and leaves with others something of itself. Touch soft iron with the
lodestone and you will see it magnetized; touch a particle of a man with an atom
of a woman and the two molecules will become different from the first. Touch is
always a spoil of possession, and the thousand contacts can, by degrees, rob us
of so much that we will find ourselves borne to the sphere of the woman we
love, while she is entirely infused into us. It is natural that the modest woman
trembles and rebels at every innocent contact. Every sensation in touch is, in
love, a boundary cancelled between mine and thine; it is a property we are
losing.
It is not only hypocrisy that levies greater requirements on higher races: in
exquisitely elevated natures, contact is more dangerous because it irradiates
rapidly in the field of voluptuousness, of the other senses, and of sentiment.
Vulgar natures begin where refined natures end; and while two elevated natures
live long together, held back by the barrier of a handshake, the uncouth and
audacious rustic snatches a kiss, and embraces ardently at the first declaration of
love. It belongs to this most powerful passion to perform a hundred miracles a
day and thus arrest voluptuousness at the boundary of a kiss; but it requires great
tactics to keep it there for any length of time. From the clasp of the hand to the
kiss the way can be very long and also insuperable, but beyond a kiss given and
returned every definite boundary is lost sight of, everything is possible. In touch,
love has but two principal stations before one reaches the goal: the clasp of the
hand and the kiss. Whoever believes himself or herself a virgin after a kiss given
and returned is a hypocrite, and is somewhat like him who believes that the
studied reticence of lechery can still leave something to attain. O women, who
have the dangerous fortune to be beautiful and desired, stay all your adorers at
the handshake, in rare cases arrive at the given kiss; but remember that a kiss
returned is a tremendous bill of exchange which one should never sign – never,
of course, unless you wish to change your name.

Sight is the first messenger of love, and in rare natures it is so prodigious of joy
to the lovers as to conquer in extension, if not in intensity, also the insuperable
heights of voluptuousness. Sight possesses all save the delirium of possession,
and rapid and penetrating as it is, it sounds the abysses of infinite beauty, over
which is suspended, as in an aureole of light, the creature beloved. The object
one contemplates with eyes of love ends always in two infinities into which
desire is hurled with frenzied audacity and insatiable curiosity. Sight is made to
accompany us in that delicious excursion; and as it can tarry long and suavely in
a dimple of the cheek, in the little vortex of a curl, or in the opal of a nail, it can
also with vertiginous velocity compel us to pass and repass, a thousand times a
minute, through the divine boundaries that enclose our treasure.
 The eyes of love have all the virtues of the telescope and microscope, and
while from them not a single curve of the thousand labyrinths through which
mobile feminine beauty seems to wind and glide can escape, so they also attain
the most sublime summits of ideal beauty. When the eye contemplates and
attains, it invites to the picture which it draws from nature all the senses, all the
passions, all thought, all the psychical energies of man. No other sense possesses
this gigantic faculty of elevating us to the highest regions of the ideal,
compelling also the minor senses, animal intestines, and plebeian passions to
assist at its panoramas. The eye is the first minister of the mind, and while it
refines desire and takes away from passion the coarsest lasciviousness, it
elevates the man and woman who love each other to the highest spheres of
human possibility. Touch likes to remove the veils that cover the beautiful; sight
need not strip the object it contemplates, for its light illumines every shade and
every shadow, penetrates opaque bodies and renders them transparent, meanders
through the most intricate mazes, and while it sees, reviews, discovers, analyses,
measures, compares, it directs with unspeakable agility all the elements of the
aesthetic world.
In all men of a base type, every emotion of love rapidly passes to the regions
of touch. In elect natures, on the contrary, sight has daily some beauty to
discover, a region to explore, a world to conquer. The richest man in the world
can always enumerate the dollars and title deeds he possesses; the most powerful
king can always tell the number of square miles in his dominions: but he who
loves a beautiful creature dies without having seen all, contemplated and
admired all. In the last day of his life there is always some ‘unknown region’
which the eye has not yet discovered or which it has not sufficiently explored.
And this is just the difference that distinguishes touch from sight, and while the
former has well-determined outlines and a definite task, the latter enlarges the
limits of its dominions to a number infinitely greater in aesthetic combinations.
In the flash of a glance you have seen a beautiful creature and exclaimed, ‘Oh,
the angelic creature!’ A chaos of sensations, a world of beauty have surprised,
enamoured you; but how many days, how many months, how many years your
eyes will roam through the thousand paths of that garden, to study every flower,
every petal! How many turns of voluptuous analysis, how many poems of
delight in order to repeat five, ten years after, ‘Oh, the angelic creature!’
Nature lavishes attractions with a generous hand on the body of man and
woman, and life’s short, sad day always departs before we have been able to see
all the forms of human beauty; but to the aesthetic treasures of nature man has
known how to unite those of art, and with a thousand artifices of garment and
ornaments we have added to our forms such and so many beauties as are easier
imagined than enumerated. Perhaps one day I will attempt a ‘Physiology of
Beauty,’47 in which I intend to point out the general laws that govern the
aesthetic world; here I must only indicate the confines where love and beauty
meet, kiss, and fecundate each other. When the eye has love for a companion, it
finds a new world to conquer in the cerulean blossom that our sweetheart inter-
weaves for the first time in her golden hair, or in the red geranium which makes
brilliant her luxuriant raven tresses. A natty little muslin apron can be a new
continent, and a glove too tightly and cruelly drawn over her pretty hand can be
the home of so many new beauties as to move our senses and transport us with
rare voluptuousness. The man who loves a beautiful woman laughs
compassionately at the polygamist who in a hundred women must seek for the
hundred beauties of the human Venus; and the beautiful woman, in the arsenal of
her garments, in the palette of her smiles, in the thousand undulations of her
body, resuscitates to the eyes of her lover not a hundred but a thousand women,
all of different types of beauty.
Sight is the only sense which, in love, prepares for moral and intellectual
discoveries in the beloved; and we contemplate not only to admire and enjoy, but
also to determine by the flash of the eye and the throbbing of the facial muscles
how much affection, how much thought we can find in the one we would make
ours forever. In love, beauty is such a powerful tyrant that it bends us to its yoke
and usurps the rights of the highest wants. A beautiful and desired woman rarely
ever seems to us frivolous and heartless, and the attraction of beauty can make
us pardon every crime, it can give us the most stupid and ridiculous
hallucinations. However, this is not the fault of the eyes that see, but of the
senses that desire too ardently; and it is above all the fault of nature, which
fondles so lovingly the stamps of the forms in which germs are animated in
living bodies! Nature defends and protects the beautiful above everything else;
perhaps because it is the vessel in which the good and the true are blended.
If I wished to indicate by a stenographic sign all the varied and essential parts
which the sense of sight assumes in love, I would like to remember it as a
winged messenger, a sort of Mercury, leading voluptuousness with the left hand,
and with the right elevating our gaze toward the highest regions of the ideal,
where in sweet and holy companionship dwell the good and the beautiful, the
true and the sublime; there where are preserved all the variegated archetypes of
the excelsior.

Hearing has a small but interesting part in the story of love, if we set aside its
great function as an instrument of thought. We are discussing here neither music
nor the value of ideas communicated by words, but the purely sensual influence
of the ear in amorous phenomena.
Hearing has some pleasures almost tactile, and always very sensual, such as
are afforded by some sounds that might be termed lascivious: the swish of a silk
gown, the trilling of some birds, the murmur of certain waves; but beyond these
rare exceptions, hearing has a tender and affectionate part in love; one would say
it moved the affections, disposing them to vibrate with the sweetest, most
impassioned notes. The sexual character of the female voice affects man, and the
virile timbre of our voice causes woman’s heart to throb with deeply sexual
desires. There are some feminine voices that cannot be heard with impunity, so
suavely do their notes descend into the depths of the heart. The voice of some
women resembles the caress of a swan’s wing, and while it delights, disturbs,
and confuses us, it also affects us deeply. Man and woman, sending back the
notes of their voice, reveal, in turn, their sex, and the heart throbs violently, as in
the bosom of a bather who, before sinking the foot into the wave, looks around
at the rustle of the leaves.
The sound of the voice cannot say, ‘I am beautiful, I am intelligent,’ but of
itself alone it can say many other sweet things: ‘I am a woman, I am very much a
woman, I desire much, I am languishing with love, I am alone, I want you at
once, I await you ardently,’ etc.
The seduction of the voice has some of the characteristics attributed to
ancient magic; it surprises, fascinates, and conquers us without our being able to
discover the cause of such a storm, roused by a few accents, a few words. We
feel ourselves almost humbled in being vanquished without a battle, in being
carried off without our consent; and the fascination of the voice seems to us the
work of a sorcerer. We have often resisted the seductions of the sight, the
violence of touch, but the voice conquers us, delivers us, bound hand and foot,
into the arms of a mysterious power, which requires of us the blindest
submission, against which all rebellion is impossible. And this influence of the
voice lasts a long time, is never forgotten, survives often love itself. After long
years of silence, of indifference, of contempt, the wind bears to us the sound of a
voice; and as though it were the first day of our love, we feel ourselves
disturbed, surprised, reconquered. Hearing casts the fish hook into the deepest
waters of our affection; and more than love rises from the cold ashes by means
of a dear voice which we have, perhaps, long since forgotten.

Love has many mysterious relations to the sense of smell. In the animal world,
perfumes are often the more direct and powerful instigators in amorous
struggles, and even before the female has seen the companion by whom she
desires to be conquered, the wings of the wind have borne to her nostrils a
perfume that inebriates and fills her with voluptuousness. Nature has placed
musk, civet, and many other odorous substances in a certain part to show us
clearly to what end she destined them; and the flowers that delight us with so
multiplied and such varied fragrances tell us plainly how intimate are the
relations that bind smell to love and the odorous molecules to the mysteries of
reproduction.2
Man and woman have various transpirations, and in some parts of their body
various odorous emanations; these can be powerful inciters in inferior races and
in coarse men of a high race; but even in the most refined natures smell exercises
a powerful influence in love, by means of the perfumes which we have obtained
from nature. We have extracted the essence of every petal, the perfume of every
calyx, of every leaf, of every bark; we have taken the peculiar fetidness of many
enamoured animals, and mixing with libertine art the odours of flowers and
exciting aroma, we have concentrated in a few drops of essence much more
olfactory voluptuousness than a warm spring could concentrate in a flowering
meadow or a tropical forest. Now then, the deep and intense voluptuousness of
perfumes is a daughter of a remote origin which fraternizes with the sexual
emanations of many beings, and it is solely for this reason that no sense has
more intimate ties with animal voluptuousness than smell.
Study the physiognomy of a woman who is smelling a very fragrant flower
which inebriates her, and you will see that the picture resembles but a sublime
scene of love. Question many deeply sensual men, and they will tell you that
they cannot visit with impunity the laboratories of essences and perfumes.
Interrogate the art of the perfumer, and it will respond that, after having mixed a
hundred essences of flowers and leaves, it revives and improves all those
perfumes by adding an infinitesimal quantity of a matter in itself fetid, but taken
from the organs of love of some animal. Inquire why women love perfumes so
much, and perhaps few will know how to answer, or they will reply with a blush.
But those who, by long practice, have learned the most subtle mysteries of the
senses, all the fine shrewdness of coquetry, will tell you that odours are powerful
weapons in the amorous arsenal, and that some perfumes possess an irresistible
charm for the senses of man.3
It is very difficult to remain a long time in the heated atmosphere of
voluptuousness without sacrificing a great part of those noble forces which are
destined for higher attainments; and this is why a too impassioned mania for
perfumes cannot have a moral influence over us. He who plunges into the tepid,
titillating, and prurient wave of odours no longer proportions strength to a chaste
and robust virility, but squeezes from the fruit the last drop of juice, and in the
rabid convulsions of weariness imagines new delights. But from this human
abasement to the disdain for perfumes there is an abyss, and relegating them to
the woman who sells her body, or to the savage who anoints himself from head
to foot, we cast aside and without reason much sweet voluptuousness, which can
be enjoyed and cultivated without offending morals.
Do you believe that a kiss given to her who loves you, through the petals of a
rose, can be a sin of lechery? Do you think that the love gathered in a nimbus of
violets, hyacinths, and narcissus, between the crepuscules of two sighs, can be
called lasciviousness? Nature is eternally rich, and the garlands we weave with
their flowers around our joys never strip the inexhaustible garden.
 Chapter 12
Boundaries of Love – Their Relations to the Other Sentiments –
Jealousy
In the cabinet of Apollo in the Vatican you see an ancient bas-relief representing
two priestesses of Bacchus; the one is standing, while the heat of voluptuousness
is burning within her; in her countenance is written lechery, and a bull is beating
its horns against her legs; the other falls exhausted from intoxication. These are
two moments of the voluptuousness of love, but they are also the two most
elementary forms that bind man to woman. Now ardent energy, now calm
possession; now the struggle that conquers, now the affectionate caress that
amuses. The most sublime, most constant, most perfect love that man of a
superior race can desire or dream of is a bright, hot flame, lasting as life and in
whose flickering are lighted from time to time the sparks of a desire that dart
forth and disappear.
When love comes in contact with the other sentiments, it governs them,
attracts and trails them in the orbit of its movements like a little piece of cosmic
matter which, having approached too near the sun, is by it attracted and
devoured. The sentiments are forces that have, each in their sphere, laws that
govern them: when they come together, they either unite or elide, or, oftener still,
they exercise a mutual influence which causes them to deviate from the line they
followed a moment previous. When an affection approaches love, it yields to
such a powerful influence as to seem to disappear from sight; while neither
matter nor force can ever be destroyed, but can only change in form.
They say that love is the most egotistic of sentiments, because in it we seek
the greatest voluptuousness; but love and egotism are two affections that follow
very different orbits, since the former brings us to love another creature and has
for its object the preservation of the species; the latter makes us love ourselves
and tends to the preservation of the individual. If by egotism we understand the
search for the satisfaction of a need, then all the sentiments, even the most
generous, can be considered as forms of egotism, since the martyr too satisfies a
very high need of a generous nature.
Love is also in perpetual war with egotism; and although the latter is a
gigantic affection, it pales before the brilliant light of the Titan of the affections.
Many animals suffer death rather than abandon the faithful companion; and even
the toad lets itself be tortured, burned, its members amputated, its eyes taken out,
but while a healthy member remains, with it the female is lovingly embraced.
And do we not also offer peace, riches, glory, science in holocaust to love? And
does not woman too bring to love the long illness of pregnancy, the martyrdom
of childbirth, the pains of nursing, the tribulation of domestic cares? And how
many remember in the intoxication of love the bitter wormwood and nettle they
are sowing in that moment, and who thinks then of all the history of sorrow,
which, perhaps, with inexorable laws they are preparing?
Even the most perfect egotist, if he is a healthy man, desires and loves
woman. With the exception of the few elect to whom is conceded the creations
of thought, for all others love represents the greatest of energies, the greatest of
joys, the crowning of every edifice. Riches and glory are sought, of course; but
in the background there is painted on the horizon a feminine creature at whose
feet must be deposited the trophies of victory. I do not speak of woman, because
for her every satisfied vanity, every hoped-for glory, all desired riches, every
flower and every fruit of the garden of life must be laid at the feet of somebody,
and this somebody is always a man. The fireworks that close every festival must
always be a woman; at the bottom of every common revelry, as on the horizon of
every sublime glory, there is ever an Eve. To love and to be loved is of all things
human the best; and even in the world of the supersensible, the religions of every
country have always promised to the good and faithful an eternity of love, in the
harem of voluptuousness or in a mystic but amorous ecstasy. Read the burning
pages of the mystic writers, the aspirations to the heart of Jesus, and you will be
able to tell me if all that fantastic world is not a transubstantiation of love. The
gods of every Olympus have a sexual form, and there are females for the males
and males for the females. From the cradle to the grave, love is for all and
always the highest security. From the automatic lust of adolescence to the
studied and avaricious lechery of old age, we pass through the febrile hysteria of
early youth and to the deep passions of virility; but for every age love is the
sweetest joy. The tocsin50 of old age begins to sound when with the first white
hairs we shudder and fear that we are no longer loved, that we are no longer able
to love; and we all hope with deep anxiety that for us the hour, the minute will
never arrive in which, like the pontiff of Rome, we must pronounce the dreadful
words Non possumus!51
I do not deny that in some human monsters egotism is so powerful as to
exclude love, like a sacrifice made to the god Myself, but such cases are very
rare. It often occurs that a man trained and habituated to the most sordid egotism,
in extreme old age falls in love with a poor young girl and becomes expansive,
generous, prodigal perhaps; and he too pays at one time and in a very ridiculous
manner the debt which nature had reclaimed of him in vain during youth and
maturity.
Great egotists also love, but their love is selfish, detracting from the most
prodigal and most splendid of the passions that tribute which they cannot refuse
to themselves. They are ignorant of the most sublime joys of love; they know
nothing of the holy voluptuousness of loving a woman more than oneself: but
they also love, they love in their own way. If you wish to study the physiognomy
of egotistical love, compare man’s love with woman’s, and you will find it easy
to penetrate into the mysteries of this part of psychology; if you would have the
contrast more striking, compare the love of an old man with the love of a young
woman: in the former you will have an egotistical type, in the latter a generous
one.
More complex are the influences which the sentiment of possession and
selfishness exercise upon love, and the importance given to jealousy will suffice
to prove this.
Jealousy really signifies a sorrow of the sentiment of love, caused by the
injury done us through the infidelity of the beloved object. This sorrow is natural
in all men, in all times, and in almost all races. It is the injury done our property
in love. The child scratches and bites the one who touches or destroys its fruit or
its toy; it pains us to be robbed of our books, the flowers of our garden; it is
natural that we should detest him who touches our sweetheart, the dearest thing
to us. And, in fact, this jealousy is but a form of hatred, the most natural, the
most legitimate of all others. It is not necessary to create a new energy, or a new
word to express this hatred. We may beat or kill a man because he has brutally
offended our son, our father, our friend, our country, our sweetheart; five
offences against five different sentiments, but always hatred resuscitated from a
sorrow, an energy which is developed with the same mechanism. There were
offended in us the paternal sentiment, the filial, the benevolent, devotion to the
Fatherland, love; and we have responded with centrifugal hatred, with blows or
death. But is the presence of a new sentiment deemed necessary in these various
cases, because a crime has been committed? Certainly not; injured paternal
affection roused such sorrow in us as to lead to assault or assassination; an insult
offered to the flag of our country blinded us and led us to commit a violence.
Why then, when love is offended, must we create a new sentiment – jealousy?
All satisfied sentiments impel us to fondle, to benefit whoever procures us these
satisfactions. All injured sentiments force us to repel those who offend, and do
evil to such as have brought sorrow to us.
Is it jealousy, the hatred that an animal manifests toward the one who
interrupts it in its loves? Well then, for many savages, to whom love is nothing
but intercourse, all the phenomena of jealousy are reduced to this single form.
The instinct satisfied, the unions being promiscuous, woman considered
common property, there can be no jealousy. If woman is a cup which may be
emptied by everyone, why should there be jealousy? A Bolivian girl once made
the cynical remark to me: ‘Woman is the wave of the stream; throw into it a
stone; will you be able to tell me a moment after where the stone broke that
wave? You, men, are very foolish to make fine distinctions between equal things
…’
In polygamous races, man only can be jealous; in the polyandrous, woman
alone can be so legally. Among various nations woman is a possession like
everything else, and hence can be voluntarily offered to the friend or to the
guest, like a horse, a dog. It is only in the higher and monogamous races that the
sentiments of love, selfishness, and possession, forming a triple cuirass around
our women, enable us to defend them tooth and nail; and to this tenacious body,
composed of the union of three sentiments, we give the name of jealousy; here
we have a second psychical form, a second thing called by the same name.
We have termed jealousy a psychical individual organization by which we
become suspicious and tyrannical with the beloved, unjustly offend and deny
him (or her) legitimate liberty. And after having confounded three different
things, that is to say, the sorrow of injured love, the triple combination of three
sentiments – love, selfishness, possession – and a pathological irritability of
suspicion, we discuss at length, and ever in vain, in order to decide if all men are
jealous, whether jealousy measures love with an exact rule, and if one can love
without being jealous: vain discussions, I would say puerile, and which would
not take place if words were defined beforehand. If by jealousy you mean the
sorrow of not feeling oneself beloved or of seeing oneself betrayed, then every
heart that loves must be jealous; thus, whoever loves country, mother, son,
cannot be indifferent to an offence offered to them; but if by jealousy you
understand that form of tyrannical suspicion which torments the person
possessed, I will tell you that we can and should love without ever feeling
jealousy; and we can be jealous and not love. Let us make a few chemical
analyses, and we will understand each other. Under the name of a single
sentiment, a single effective energy, there are embraced the most unlike
phenomena, namely:
1. The sorrow of injured love.
2. The sorrow for an injury done to a possession.
 3. A sorrow of the sentiment of selfishness.
4. A habitual suspicion which refers to the person beloved or possessed.
As jealousy is not an elementary psychical phenomenon but simply a quack
mixture, it has many and varied ethnical forms; and I will treat them in ‘The
Loves of Men.’ It will suffice here to indicate that it becomes necessary in all
countries where polygamy prevents man from physically and morally satisfying
a woman, and where the husband, merely because he is rich and powerful,
selects the wives and imposes upon them his love. The jealousy of many nations
of the Orient is proverbial, and perhaps monogamous peoples too become
jealous through contact with polygamous races, as in Sicily and a part of Spain.
It seems to me, however, that in some cases jealousy has not a clear historical
origin, but assumes an ethnical character through the special constitution of a
race. In any case, in Europe, the Italians, the Spaniards, and above all the
Portuguese are very jealous people; and as I learned in America, the most jealous
of all are the Brazilians.
The generality of my readers will certainly not be persuaded by my
psychological analysis, and will continue to measure the force of love by the
unreasonableness of suspicion; while many dear and lovely women will
continue, who knows for how many centuries, to cast in their lover’s teeth this
foolish lament: ‘You do not love me, because you are not jealous; and how can
you love me if you do not feel for me the least jealousy?’ Foolish lamentations,
indulged in frequently by the contented and who, perhaps, finding it strange and
against nature to be too happy, go in search of occasions of sorrow and regret. Is
it possible to love anybody on earth more deeply than we do our children?
Certainly not; and yet we are not jealous when others love them, and father and
mother sublimely vie with each other in fondling and adoring them. Love your
companion in the same manner; fear also to lose him, but that fear must not be
the anger of the inquisitor, nor the clutch of the miser. Vain counsels, words
thrown to the winds! Jealousy is one of the most constitutional psychological
maladies, and, if inherited, very difficult to cure. May a benign fate keep it far
away from you!
It poisons the sweetest joys of life; penetrates into every pore of the skin;
pours its gall into every drop of water, into every mouthful of bread; it
transforms the man who loves into a carabiniere,52 continually armed, with
attentive ear and watchful eye. The jealous man is ever spying, doubtful, suffers
always; he investigates the past, the present, and the future; in the caress he
seeks the lie, in the kiss he fancies indifference, in love he always fears
hypocrisy. What a hellish life! It is a hundred times better not to love than to love
in this way. The punishment of the few jealous with exquisitely refined heart be
this: to know that their colleagues have generally more selfishness than love, and
that the noblest creatures have always loved without jealousy. The moment in
which we perceive that we are no longer loved, that we are betrayed, let love die
and give jealousy no quarter. From suspicion to condemnation, or absolution, the
path must be short; to a frank question, a frank response; suspicion or love dies,
but they die in a hurricane or in a battle; they do not drag out a miserable
existence between the courtrooms and the prisons; a hundred times preferable
the lightning that prostrates us than the febrile jaundice which consumes the
stamen of life and poisons for us all sources of joy.
Jealousy, moreover, as it is largely diminished in monogamous society, will
continue to become more subtle in the future, when matrimony will be only the
sanctification of love, when the choice will always be reciprocal, when in the
moral relations of the two sexes every trace of hypocrisy will have disappeared.
To know oneself beloved, esteemed, to love and esteem our companion deeply
and sincerely, is the most certain guarantee of defence against that sordid
parasite, that moth of love – jealousy. When woman will cease to be a slave or
freedwoman, and the husband or lover will no longer be the proprietor of a
woman, then all those lepers of love, the jealous-sick, will disappear in a trice.
Selfishness, independent of jealousy, has many relations to love. No man, no
woman in the world can avoid a feeling of pride when conscious of being loved
by some noble creature; and if a delicate reserve prohibits us from heralding our
good fortune, we can still enjoy the secret pleasure of knowing that the world
envies us. It is generally beyond human strength to renounce these joys which
can be relished without humiliating others, joys in which there is no shadow of
rancour. Woman especially, with admirable art, says a world of things with her
silence, and when elated by a noble love, she irradiates such an aureole of light
as to dazzle alike adorers and the indifferent. With the majesty of a queen and
reserve of a woman, she, without moving her lips, can say to everyone, ‘Envy
me, I am loved!’ Holy, just, and modest pride, which I wish to all the daughters
of Eve who will have merited love.
Lovers and sweethearts, choirs of adorers can be objects of luxury as well as
horses and palaces; it is natural for human vanity to seek those things, appreciate
and utilize them to humiliate such as are unfortunate. Vanity uses love then as a
pretext; and many women, incapable of loving, can conquer men solely to make
of them trophies of war; and men also, more frequently than women, can
through pure vanity undertake a war of attainment. All these facts, though,
belong to the story of pride or vanity, and we have already treated them in our
study on the sources of love.

In that study we saw the paths which lead to love, and hence we were obliged to
consider friendship, compassion, and many other sentiments as sources of love;
but all benevolent sentiments can have other relations with the prince of the
affections; they can take the place of the love that wanes. When the sun shines in
the heavens, the moon and minor stars all disappear: and so when love gilds the
horizon of life, friendship, compassion, the other benevolent affections can no
longer be seen or felt; but when love sets, we see in its place the minor
sentiments.
Esteem, veneration, and all other analogous sentiments may be companions
of love, but they are only too often directed to a creature who little merits them.
Love is a magician that transforms and beautifies everything it touches; and we
can have an immense esteem and a deep veneration for the most despicable man,
for the vilest, most wicked woman. This is not much credit to us, but it is true.
No brigand ever stood in need of loves often deep and ardent, and no beautiful
courtesan ever lacked illustrious lovers. What does it matter if the beloved object
is a disgrace to everybody, if he has been fettered to the pillory of universal
hatred? We love him, this is enough. And why do we love him? Because he
pleases us. What can science say, what can morality counsel before the not-to-
be-appealed-from brutality of this reason?
Science recognizes the fact and explains it: a creature despicable in every
respect must please us very much to be able to inspire us with love; and this
sentiment must be really gigantic to conquer human respect, vulgar prejudices,
and the most persistent habits. It has been said, and with much truth, that no
woman was ever so ardently loved as an ugly woman; and the same may be said
of a brutal or wicked man, a prostitute or otherwise vile woman. The illustrious
man, accused of loving a vicious or stupid woman, can strip her before the world
like Phryne53 of old, saying, ‘Let him dare to cast the first stone at me, who feels
himself incapable of loving this beautiful creature!’ And those men who, by
reason of their crimes or baseness, have been ostracized from civilized society,
have for the one who loves them some pure and virgin oasis, in which repose
their loves; some still healthy spot in the heart for the beloved one; and their
loves, concealed and bitter, have for certain natures all the perilous seductions of
strong odours and intoxicating poisons. No man in the world was ever entirely
wicked; and some ferocious kindness of the assassin, some generous impetuosity
of the thief is ever preserved for the companion of love. Oh, the omnipotence of
this sentiment, which like the ancient alchemist transforms the vilest metals into
potable gold, and discovers the only diamond buried in the sand of an alluvium!
Science then admits love without esteem, and with a blush of shame bows its
head and acknowledges that it is only too frequent.
There where science is silent and humiliates itself, morality erects the head
and flagellates. Love without esteem is a crime; it is the fecund breeder of other
crimes. Woe to us when, bold avengers of public contempt, we dare to boast of
loving a vile creature, and impudently parade our loves, as though we arrogantly
wished to impose silence on indignant modesty, or petulantly act as a footstool
for the offended sweetheart. Liars to ourselves, we defy the most holy and
inviolable laws of beauty and honesty, and in the beginning proud, then bold and
petulant, we end as true ribalds; enclosed within a circle of mire, we permit no
gentle creature to approach who could inspire us with a pure and noble affection.
We can raise for an instant the vilest creature on the crest of pride, but the arm
wearies, and we roll into the mire together with our idol of a day.
Our sweetheart must be not only the companion of our voluptuousness, but
also the mother of our children; our lover must be the father and the husband of
the family, and we should not consecrate the blush of our countenance in that of
our children, who will curse our wicked loves, perhaps the name of the father
and the memory of the mother. Pride becomes blunted, the hour of revenge is
over, and when we find ourselves alone with a creature whom we cannot love,
woe to us!
If love is really the holiest thing in life, the most ardent affection, the most
voluptuous joy, we should with our hands erect a temple, and with our most
sublime sentiments chisel a tabernacle in which we can worthily adore it as a
god. Love born in crime and baseness is a nest woven with brambles, while we
should interweave it with the most aromatic herbs and the most beautiful
flowers. Men and women, we should vie with each other in gleaning from fields
and gardens and in bearing to love every gentle affection, every noble aspiration,
every impetus of lofty ambition. Lechery and pride, united, become the
stepmother of every love without esteem, which, like every organism of evil
birth, lives a rickety, scrofulous life, full of sorrow and calamity.
If love is really the most precious gem, we should enclose it in a casket
which, for richness of material, skill of art, aesthetic workmanship, is worthy of
its contents. Only the noblest things should touch it; no hand save an angel’s
should caress it; no heat animate it except that of the kisses of two loving lips.
If tomorrow woman would only concede her favours to the honest and
industrious man; if it were possible that man loved but the modest woman, we
would behold the human family regenerated in the course of a generation, we
would see men educated by means of voluptuousness. For the prison that
terrifies, for the hell that threatens, we would have substituted the caresses of a
woman, the kisses of a man, as instructive forces. Will this be eternally a dream?
Must we always threaten and assault men to make them better? Will we have no
less cruel medicine than sorrow to cure men of vice and crime?
 Chapter 13
Boundaries of Love – Their Relations to Thought
Thought can be, for various reasons, now an ally, now a victim of love. First
instrument of seduction after the exterior form of the body, thought is revived
and elevated in contact with the new sentiment, as is the case with every other
energy condensed in our brain; and while it becomes refined it is also
strengthened, exhibiting some of its rarest, most exquisite fruits. Many torpid
intellects cannot be roused save by the kiss of love, only to fall back into the old
lethargy the moment the goad of desire has left them; healthier brains, however,
rise above themselves when called upon to offer an unusual tribute at the new
altar. For very many, poetry is the song of spring, and, mute and prosaic previous
to having loved, they return to their prose and dumbness when the season of
loves is past. This is because men can continue to possess a woman; but being
poor in moral energy, they have only in the May of life a smile of poetry, which
lasts as long as the petals of a rose. Their cold and indolent fancy permits itself a
little flight among the bushes of the garden, raises its feeble trill, and falls
without wings on the main road, to walk until death. A woman who has been
loved by one of these spring lovers, and who remembers having once seen him
ideal and impassioned, finds it very difficult to persuade herself that the man
who today is all prose from his head to his feet, who lives between his chocolate
and his nightcap, who has seven varieties of flannels and ten kinds of lozenges,
once wrote verses, even fell on his knees at her feet and covered them with bitter
tears.
On the contrary, the more fortunate derive from their loves a continual and
powerful stimulus to the works of thought, which seem to be renewed at every
phase of the passion and every change of lovers. In the life of many artists,
poets, and even statesmen, these various influences can be studied in their
works, which turn out much more vigorous when the artist, the poet, the head of
state is a woman.
The influence of love upon the forces and forms of thought is twofold, and is
derived from self-love and from the psychical nature of the beloved person. As a
sentiment born in youth or which rejuvenates the aged, it excites especially the
fancy, refines the skill for reproducing the beautiful; animates, in a word, those
mental aptitudes that generally reach their apogee in the age in which love
manifests its greatest energies. We can rarely ever be great poets and great artists
without having loved intensely, without having at least a great capacity for
loving. Chastity, forced or voluntary, can conceal love; but there below, in the
depths of the heart, some images, more angelic than human, hold sway; they rise
at every inspiration of genius, at every song of the lyre, at every touch of the
brush, and revive or light the sacred fire of art. The genius of many among the
great poets, artists, and writers of the world had love for a first companion, a
sovereign inspirer, and without this sentiment their names would be unknown to
us. The love born in a sublime brain accumulates gigantic forces, and chastity,
always imposed by the great passions in their first stages, refines and augments
them; so that love seems to transform itself into genius, and genius colours with
splendid tints every amorous manifestation. A chaste genius who loves is a
phalanx of combatant forces, a host of winged geniuses, and hence no conquest
is difficult, no resisting force can offer opposition. Thought, companion of love,
offers to it the richest tributes of its energy, as the enamoured bird sings its most
harmonious notes to its companion, as the flower condenses all its perfumes and
the fascination of its most beautiful colours around the nest in which plants love.
And to thought augmented, transformed, adorned with all its splendours, there is
also united the goad of selfishness, which, in the satisfaction of pride in
possessing the beloved person, always finds new ambition and new incentive to
work.
Not only does the beloved creature receive the tribute; but in the enthusiastic
eloquence with which she expresses her gratitude, it is manifest that she also
feels the same stimulating influence, and the most modest and silent tongue finds
splendours of rhetoric and beauties of style unknown until that day.
An old experience demonstrates that in every country of the world woman
conquers man by her epistolary style and especially by the amorous letter; this is
not only owing to the peculiar nature of the feminine mind, but also to the strong
excitement produced in woman by the stimulus of love. A letter is generally an
exchange of benevolence; and woman feels more deeply than we the intimate
relations of two affections; she loves more and better than we. Man has a
hundred different ways of giving vent to his genius excited by love; art,
ambition, science open to him a thousand avenues wherein to manifest the new
energies; to poor woman, on the contrary, there remains no other literary form
open save amorous correspondence, and she uses and abuses it in a surprising
manner. Among the many hecatombs, among the daily pyres of many perfumed
letters, there are scattered real treasures of art, which should be saved from the
conflagration that consumes so many volumes of words and phrases – since the
commonplace always dominates every field of good and evil, and commonplace,
like all things human, are the generality of loves.
 The eloquence of love, true song of enamoured genius, is not contradicted by
the timid and often stupid silence which invariably accompanies the first
declarations, the first skirmishes. Fear in all its forms dries up the mouth, and the
pharynx suddenly suspends the secretions of mucus and saliva, and for many it is
physically impossible to speak; the deep disturbance of thought confuses ideas
and words, so that eloquence is reduced to an absolute silence or one interrupted
only by disconnected phrases. That love-mute, however, scarcely returned to the
quiet of the solitary chamber, suddenly becomes a new Demosthenes, and into
space, or on paper, launches the torrents of a fiery eloquence, which a few
moments previous would have proved so opportune and so beautiful. Happy love
in the stage of attainment raises all brains above the medium temperature,
fecundating them continually with new energies. Even in intoxication the thyrsus
of the dithyramb never falls from the hand of the happy mortal who loves or
hopes to be loved. When, on the contrary, our affection vibrates with notes of
sorrow, there will follow a sublime elegy, the anguish of thought; we can become
poets or fools. Brains of a superior organization are cured of the great sorrows of
the heart with a book, with a musical creation, or with a picture; but many
human brains are submerged in the hurricane of an unhappy love; the statistics of
lunatic asylums have always an ample file of the love-mad; and in the obscurity
of the domestic walls are concealed many other brains withered or fallen into
lethargy through unfortunate loves.
I am writing in these pages a poor essay of general physiology, or, as it is
usually termed, psychology, and I have neither the right nor the strength to
occupy myself with a work of literary criticism, which still remains to be done,
notwithstanding the beautiful things written by many on the influence of love in
art. Not only has every poetic or artistic genius (and among these I consider the
writer the greatest of all) left in his works the imprint of his loves, but he has felt
and interpreted love, in a way entirely his own, and which in some cases became
the style of a school or of an epoch. The woman loved by Byron is quite
different from the sweetheart of Burns, Laura is not Beatrice, and the woman
seen by Leopardi is not Vittoria Colonna. To attempt the assimilated psychology
of celebrated loves and of the amorous types of art is a gigantic labour in which
the artist, the psychologist, and the literary man should join hands in order to
complete a work worthy of the subject. For me it will suffice to have prepared
some materials for this work of the future with the present essay and with the
other two which will follow at short intervals.
Love ceases to be a spur of thought and becomes its first assassin, not only
when unhappy, but also when stifling in the slough of lechery. Chastity is an
almost entirely hygienic question, and I will treat it at length in ‘The Hygiene of
Love’; here, however, is the place to indicate the point from which the hygienic
branch starts out from the great trunk of physiology. The embrace has never
debased thought, when voluptuousness was but love; but when lasciviousness is
stronger than sentiment, and the animal man regrets having given too much of
himself to the future, the individual rebels against the excessive tribute paid to
the preservation of the species. Then the animal man is ill, or the moral man has
fallen into libertinism. No, nature never punishes those who wisely obey its
laws; and after the sacrifice of love, man is as happy and intelligent as before;
since in the blessed languor of a brief repose, nature stills even the pain of
weariness.
‘Cut down the entire forest of concupiscence, not one tree alone: when you
shall have levelled every tree, every branch, you can then pronounce yourselves
free, pure, virtuous,’ cries the Dhammapada54 (chap. XX), and science utters the
same cry; but instead of the word ‘concupiscence’ it writes the more precise term
‘lechery.’ In our organism every function is so well regulated that we, like the
cedar, can always bear leaves, flowers, and fruits, provided we do not sacrifice
the fruit for the flower, that we do not imitate the monstrous exuberant petals or
the seedless fruits. Wise chastity is the most able administrator of harmonies and
vital energies; love and labour do not disagree, as we shall see in our ‘Hygiene
of Love,’ and as many exacting or hypocritical moralists are continually
asserting with too great severity.
I have previously stated that the influence of love over thought is twofold,
and we have still to study the second phase, namely, that exercised by means of
the psychical nature of the beloved. Two creatures in love with each other are
two bodies excessively electrified, and it follows that of the two thoughts
brought face to face by love, one exercises an influence of attraction greater than
the other; consequently, one gives more than it receives. In general, the stronger
mind exercises a greater fascination, and as man’s talent is more frequently
greater than woman’s, the latter easily acquires the ideas, theories, intellectual
tastes of man. It is not always true, however, that superior attractions are in
proportion to the superior strength of mind, since some special characteristics of
certain intellects render them more fascinating, make their contact more
dangerous, richer in elective affinity. Thought can be robust, original; but when
rigid, unpolished, it dwells in solitary heights, and the beloved contemplates it
with admiration but feels no attraction. It is like a star too cold and too distant
for us to desire. Some other talents, on the contrary, seem to be hooked, so
strongly do they adhere to men and things; when we approach them, we feel
ourselves absorbed, and after their contact we carry away some influence of
contagion, fascination, imitation. These magnetic brains unite to the other
amorous seductions also this most powerful one of subjugating the mind of the
beloved, so that to the sweet chain of affection is added that of thought.
The particular influence of fascinating talents is seen in some women, who, to
their other amiabilities, add also this of conquering the stronger and more
elevated thought of man. Living with them, breathing their moral atmosphere, it
becomes impossible, even for the most strenuous opposers of the ideas of others,
not to think as they think, not to write as they write, not to acquire certain
psychical tastes which form their delight. The style of some writers and the
manner of some painters have unconsciously yielded to these slow and
mysterious influences; and the ignorant masses examine the origin of these
aesthetic mutations and seek it in abstruse causes and in evolutions of art and
science, while, on the contrary, they have a more humble but more natural
source. The style and manner are changed, reposing the head on the bosom of a
blonde friend, or playing among the curly labyrinths of a black head. In the
history of arts and of literature these influences are rarely mentioned, because
they are generally unknown to the biographer and often not perceived by the
artist and the poet who felt them. Woman always confesses, and frequently with
pride, to having conformed her thought to that of her friend; man rarely ever
acknowledges this, but rebels and feels hurt at the strange accusation. When did
the king of the universe ever change his style or direct his thought for the sake of
a kiss or a caress? ‘Mine and mine alone!’ exclaims the man. ‘His and his alone,’
ever sighs the woman; and I with different words must frequently have repeated
the same thing in the pages of this book.
Not only does the robust nature of human brains measure their various
influence in the struggles and caresses of love, but the degree of love makes us
feel the high influences of thought. The more one loves, the more one yields to
the fascination of another’s talent; the more one loves, the more one is disposed
to abdicate one’s own ideas and aesthetic tastes, to assume the tastes of the
beloved. Man, in his stupid pride, constantly repeats in every tone that woman,
in politics, in morality, in religion, thinks always like her lover; and by this he
believes himself to affirm with the most eloquent proof the evident superiority of
his genius. Woman generally feels more deeply the influence of virile thought,
not only because she is weaker than we, but because she loves much more than it
is possible for us to love. She sacrifices instantly and willingly even selfishness
to love; man rarely and with difficulty accomplishes this sacrifice. ‘She is stupid,
but beautiful,’ we say in our happy moments. Woman, on the contrary, often
soliloquizes: ‘How can God exist, if he does not believe in God? And how can
democracy be respectable, if he insults it daily? Socialism must be a holy thing,
if it is his religion.’ Man is ever right in the eyes of the woman who loves him,
because she can seldom love without esteem; we, on the contrary, very often
permit ourselves to love blindly women whom we cannot or should not esteem.
This difference would suffice to prove that in the psychical evolution of the two
sexes woman excels us in aesthetic sentiment as we surpass her in intellectual
development. Woman has already attained perfect love, which is the fusion of all
human elements, the election of elections; we see the concubine even in the
sweetheart and spouse; and the highest genius does not disclaim to pour out the
burning metal of his thoughts into the moulds of an unworthy Venus. In love we
are oftener disciples than masters on the field of sentiment.
Two thoughts cannot with impunity be enclosed in the same atmosphere,
cannot follow the orbit of a like planetary system. The one gives much, and the
other gives little; the one receives more than it gives, the other gives more than it
receives; but together they modify, send back, and exchange influences and
energies. This is a consequence of the most elementary laws of natural
philosophy: two loves and two brains are two systems of forces; or, however
powerful one may be in comparison to the other, both must in their contact
undergo a molecular modification of their movements. To the direct influence of
love join the automatic power of imitation; unite the tyranny of habit, the
epicureanism of the transactions of ideas, of conscience, and many other minor
causes, and you will see how inexorably thought must change when we think in
two.
Not all intellectual phenomena submit equally to the persuasion of love, but
those feel it most that are interwoven with it, forming binary bodies, composed
of affection and thought. Religion and morality are more easily modified than
aesthetic tastes, and these undergo more frequent changes than philosophical
theories. There is a certain architecture in our brain that forms its framework and
can be destroyed only by death or lunacy. Against it love is powerless; and also
certain intellectual antitheses between a man and a woman suffice to render love
impossible, even when the sympathy of appearances and a certain congeniality
of affections should violently rouse the sovereign of the sentiments.
To despise the influence of love over thought may be the fruit of pride, but it
is also more frequently a solemn proof of gross ignorance: pride and ignorance
which we bitterly expiate, because if today we can content ourselves with the
comeliness of appearance, and if robust youth, comforted later by coquetry, can
prolong a love based on voluptuousness, sooner or later the day arrives in which,
when the great disparity of brains destroys every hope of common intelligence,
we find ourselves in the presence of a horned dilemma: either to renounce dual
thought, horrible amputation of intellectual life; or to lower ourselves day by day
in order that the voice of him who speaks so feebly may reach our ear. Hence a
continual toil, a sad and weary strain; hence a tottering of lofty intellects and a
festering of weak brains; hence the inevitable death of a love which should have
submerged only with the last plank of shipwrecked beauty; hence the hidden
polygamy of our modern society, profoundly immoral because profoundly false;
because it wishes to run too impatiently, when it has barely strength to move one
foot before the other; because it petulantly tries to leap with its legs still wrapped
in the sacred bands of the Middle Ages.
We must all inexorably yield to the influence of thought in love. If our robust
brain can elevate a few degrees the smaller one of the beloved person, we must
always humble ourselves, bringing down with us the level of our thought and
wasting many of the nobler forces of human progress. A certain disparity of
levels is inevitable, but it should not be excessive, because in the continual
efforts to equalize those levels, in the sorry attritions that take place in the
attempt to reach equal levels, a great part of love, sadly, can be consumed.
 Chapter 14
Chastity in Its Relations to Love
To many readers this chapter may seem to no purpose in a psychological work,
since chastity is a question of hygiene or a negation of love; and anyway it can
be whispered in my ear, Non est hic locus.55 Let the enemies of chastity or those
to whom it is unknown skip this chapter, which will be among the shortest in the
book, and permit that where we speak of light we may also say what is shadow.
Chastity is the shadow of love, and the most enthusiastic among the adorers
of the sun seeks always the friendly shade of a tree, where among the knotty
roots or on the soft field-carpet he can slowly drink in the light of which he went
in search; he too must love a tranquil shade, from which he can contemplate the
distant splendours of the supreme father of every energy and every heat. Even in
the sandy desert of Sahara, or the grassy pampas of South America, man feels
the necessity of reposing in the shadow of his camel or his horse, to brood
voluptuously over the long and fiery suns absorbed. Do you also repose in the
shadow of the hair or eyebrows of your sweetheart, to drink in the long
memories of the lightning flashes of love.
Chastity is not only repose, but also a wise and powerful creation of new
energies and infinite poetry. Voluptuousuess is a hurricane or thunderbolt, but
always a superior force that brutally tears up and prostrates the tree of life,
dashing the leaves rudely against the ground that nourishes them. Chastity is a
boundless temple, in which the fresh and silent atmosphere dries the sweat of the
struggle, refreshes the stifling air of the battle, and restores tranquillity to every
brow. The chastity of two lovers is a real temple, in which the animal man takes
shelter, prays and invokes an unknown god to make of him an angel; and love is
refined, cleansed from all mire, and mounts, flapping its wings, to the highest
regions of the ideal. Desire subdued without violence, unhesitatingly by chastity,
lowers the brows, inclines the head, and bends the knee before the statue of love,
and, trembling but subdued, caresses with its long neck and warm hair the soft
knees, like an enamoured swan that lets itself be fondled by the gentle hand of a
nude but modest woman.
Have you ever noticed two lovers sitting on one chair and reading the same
book together, while a child, fruit of their first loves, is seated at their feet
shouting and prattling? When that little angel raises its head too petulantly or
screams too boisterously, the caressing hand of the mother or the severe hand of
the father brings it back again to silence. Thus should desire remain a long time
in sweet imprisonment at the feet of two lovers, obedient to the amorous voice
and not to the rattan of the old-time schoolmaster.
No more odious virtue than the chastity taught by the intolerant and often not
very chaste priest; no more delicate, more sublime virtue than the chastity
instilled by love and the noblest faculties of the human mind. An immodest love
can be happy for a time, can laugh and smile; can let itself be transported by the
vortex of voluptuousness into a dissolute, giddy dance, but it is always a drunken
love; and intoxication ends quickly, and generally badly. Chaste love is an ardent
but pure love; it is a love ever armed and cheerful; it is a sapphire illuminated by
electric light. Monastic chastity is a hidden form of onanism, sickness, or mania;
it is an affirmation that something is lacking in the man, or it is a violent
amputation, a cruel mutilation. The free and agreeable chastity of two lovers is
the wisest lust that sacrifices the daily bread to the splendours of a Sardanapalian
feast;56 it is the education of the senses and the affections; it is the holiest
worship of the noblest joys of thought; it is one of the most precious gems that
can ornament the tissues of life. Blessed those who know how to be chaste in
this manner, who understand how to make of love an energy that educates and
ennobles, who make it also the greater coefficient of noble ambitions and
magnanimous purposes.
And you, O women, who have ‘intellect of love,’ teach us chastity, for this
holiest of virtues is difficult for us to acquire. Prize dearly this delicate mission,
because you will be the first to enjoy the fruits. With coarse and vulgar
calculation, you prefer to disarm your lovers, in order that they may not wound
other victims besides yourselves: perhaps, also, that they may not hurt their
hands; but your reckonings are falsely based: from the nausea of satiety springs
more infidelity than from the prudent custody of the desires; and to leave a
desire always kindled and a virgin flower ever in your garden is one of the most
precious secrets of reigning eternally, of being always loved.
There is an absolute chastity imposed by the cruel written and unwritten laws
of the sects or of society; we will speak of them in ‘The Hygiene of Love’ and in
‘The Loves of Men.’
There is another absolute chastity imposed by ambition, by a misunderstood
virtue, or even by egotism; chastity is reduced to an idolatry of oneself, an eager
concentration of forces to reach lofty or foolish ends. The fruit which human
voluptuousness reaps is generally inferior to what it desired or hoped for, and
nature avenges itself in a thousand ways upon those who outrage it. In many
cases, however, true, sincere chastity imposed by an iron will is so admirable as
to merit a place in the museum among rare and valuable things. Not one in a
hundred of those whom history venerates deserves the incense which it is the
custom to offer them, because many of these forms of chastity are false or easy
through impotency; hence, a false virtue. Others are sterile as the sands of the
desert, they are clouds that rise without shape or aim among the fancies of the
human heart, and evaporate without leaving a trace of themselves; however, they
do not belong to the history of love, and to discuss them here would warrant the
kind reader to whisper in my ear a second time, Non est hic locus.
 Chapter 15
Love in Sex
Man and woman can love with the same force, but they will never love in the
same manner, since to the altar of their passion they bring a vastly different
nature, even apart from the unlike genetic mission assigned to each. As long as
there shall be a man and woman on our planet, they will eternally exchange and
re-exchange this innocent reproach: ‘Ah, you do not love me as I love you!’ And
the lament will be forever true, because woman will never love like man, and
man can never love like woman. A complete monography of the assimilated
psychology of the two sexes could mark the distinctive characteristics of virile
and of feminine love, and who knows but one day I will try it; here it is
sufficient for me to indicate the two phases of a passion unique in its essence,
but rendered so very unlike by the two different natures called Adam and Eve.
Let us listen to two spontaneous cries, from two distant races, and we will
find the first lines of a physiology of the sexual character of love. The Munda-
Kolhs of Chota Nagpore have some popular songs in which they express the
psychical difference of man and woman. The women sing:
‘Singbonga from the beginning has made us smaller than you, therefore we
obey you. Even if it were not so from the beginning, you would still have
overburdened us with work; our strength is not equal to yours. To you God has
given two hands, to us but one.’
And the men sing to the women:
‘As God has given us two hands, so he has made us greater than you. Are we
great of ourselves? He himself has separated us into great and small. If now you
do not obey the word of man, you certainly disobey the word of God. He himself
has made us greater than you.’57
Here is a Kabila song in which a chorus of young women alternate with a
chorus of sturdy youths.
The women: ‘He who would be loved by woman always goes armed; puts the
butt-end of the gun to his cheek and cries, ‘Come to me, O maiden!’
The men: ‘You do well to love us. God sends us war and we die, and there
remains at least the memory of the happiness that we have given you.’
Rising from the Munda-Kolhs and the Kabils to the higher and more civilized
races, we always find a remnant of this savage cry of nature, in which man
proclaims his strength or imposes it, or woman yields to or invokes it. Hence the
very unequal part of joys and sorrows, of rights and duties, that man concedes to
his companion in the world of love; hence an ever increasing usurpation of joys
and rights on the part of the strong, the lower we descend in the human scale;
hence a continual aspiration of civilized people to make a more equal division of
good and evil between the two sexes, that still share so diversely and so unjustly
light and darkness, joys and sorrows.
Where muscular strength is the criterion of the hierarchy, where it constitutes
the first of human forces, the difference between man and woman in the rights
and joys of love is immense, and woman becomes little more than a domestic
animal, which is bought, sold, or killed according to the necessity of the
moment. Polygamy originates there where morality is uncertain, where lechery
is ardent; and woman, guarded as a treasure of voluptuousness, falls morally
lower than in a wandering tribe of naked but monogamous savages, where
woman is the companion of the labours and joys of man. It is for this, perhaps,
that Solomon in his harem cried out, ‘And who will find me a strong woman?’
Even among us, woman does not play the part in love that nature has assigned
her, and here also she can rank herself without scruple among the oppressed who
await their jacquerie58 or their statute; here too she is a legitimate pretender, who
by means of right or strength will one day or other attain her proper place in the
world.
But of rights I will speak in another chapter; here we must remain in the
confines of physiology, which still is, or should be, the legitimate mother of
every human legislation. If anthropology would place at our disposal all the
moral and intellectual elements that separate man from woman, science could
with surety insert in its laws and customs a rightful place for each.
Nature has allotted to woman the greater part of love, and if this difference
could be expressed in figures, I would say that to us there has been conceded but
a fifth, a quarter at the most, of the amorous territory.59 No civilization, no
caprices of tyrants, no omnipotence of genius has been able to modify this
immutable law. In the rancid, fetid hut of the Eskimo or in the palace of the
prince, woman gives her entire self to man, first as daughter, then as sweetheart,
wife, mother; she is the great receptacle of the living, the bosom from which we
draw blood, voluptuousness, love: every pleasure that inspires us with love,
every heat that animates us. Woe to us if with a bastard education we poison the
source of human life! Woe to us if we deny to Eve the holiest of rights, that of
loving and being loved! For woman, love is the first necessity, that which rises
pre-eminently over all others; her entire organism and psychology are bent and
formed by the influence of love. Van Helmont brutally asserts, ‘Tota mulier in
utero,’60 but thinkers of all times applaud the aphorism of the Dutch physician.
Woman physically desires and possesses very long, and she can enjoy attainment
every day, every hour, and make of it a warm and perfumed atmosphere in which
she lives as in a nest; woman cradles in her viscera an angel that desires ardently
and continually and does not quench in her the affection for her companion; she
forms, nourishes, and fondles man, and every year she can see herself, her flesh,
and her loves transformed into a host of little angels, who are pieces of her heart,
rose petals fallen from the flower of her beauty, and who all softly call her
‘mamma,’ that is to say, receptacle of life. From the eager embrace of the man
she loves, she passes to the caresses of her children; voluptuousness does not
weary her, heat parch her, nor passion disgust her; from her head to her feet she
is entirely absorbed by love, and this is the sap that circulates in every vein and
moistens every fibre; so that when it is taken from her she resembles the tree
torn up by the whirlwind and which sees every leaf wither and every flower fall.
The love of man is a lightning that flashes and passes; the love of woman is a ray
of the sun that descends slow and warm into the heart and fecundates it; and she
absorbs it gradually and voluptuously; every root of sentiment, joy, or thought is
nourished, so that, even when the sun is set, its fecundating rays still remain
concealed in the soil it warmed.
Many have contradicted my opinion, advanced about twenty-eight years ago
in my Physiology of Pleasure, that to woman nature conceded a larger bowl to
drink from at the inexhaustible fount of love’s voluptuousness; and as until now
joy has never been measured nor weighed, the problem will still remain a long
time in discussion. Eve can thirst longer than we to renew the battles of love, and
realize the blessed dream of a voluptuousness that, changing form, is eternally
renewed, so that weariness remains unknown. But if for many men
voluptuousness is the whole of love, for woman it is only a sweet episode, even
for the most lecherous of sensual women. And if you do not believe this
audacious affirmation, send heralds throughout the civilized world, call together
all men and women and invite them to a strange tournament of love; ask each if
they would accept a lasting, faithful love without voluptuousness in exchange for
a voluptuousness without love: a hundred women would vote for love; perhaps
ten, perhaps five men would join in the sublime refusal of the embrace.
O all you who have studied the heart of woman in the street or in the house of
ill fame, and think to make your companion happy with lechery, gold, and fine
dress, remember that, above all, woman desires to love, to feel herself warmed
by the breath of a man, to lean entirely on the faithful arm of a man, to feel
herself necessary to a companion of whom she would be proud; she wants to be
the first for somebody. You behold one The Physiology of Love 223 woman
unhappy in the midst of luxury’s splendour, fondled by a kind husband, her
every wish gratified; and you see another happy though surrounded by misery,
oppressed by the brutal caprices of a lover.
Mysteries of the heart, you say; most natural things, I assert. The first does
not love her husband, the second loves her lover. And this is another essential
difference between the loves of man and woman; man wants to be loved, woman
desires above all to love. The sentiment that consumes her is more active and
more expansive than in us; she requires little from her companion, because she is
too rich and her affection is too strong to require the aid of selfishness in fighting
the battles of life. Certainly, perfect love is the sum of these two beautiful things:
‘I love – I am loved’; but for woman it is often sufficient to be able to exclaim, ‘I
love,’ while man is generally satisfied to repeat, ‘I am loved.’
Never ask a woman why she loves: she sometimes loves a creature so ugly, so
poor, so deformed as to fill us with surprise and terror. Provided that creature is
entirely hers, she will know how to adorn him with the flowers of fancy,
illuminate him with the bright light that emanates from the heart. When woman
loves she always believes herself to be loved in return. Did Caesar ever doubt
that he would win a battle? Did Napoleon ever doubt that he was immortal? So it
is with the love of woman; it will cringe like a reptile at the feet of her
companion or roar like a lion that demands what it needs, it will be the rabbit
caressed in the lap of a child or the eagle that mounts with its prey. The eager
faith of the neophyte, the proud faith of infallibility, the boundless impatience of
the fortunate conqueror are virtues common to the loves of woman, very rare
among men.
For woman to love it is enough to find genius, strength, even crime in him
whom she would make her own; she can love the ugliest, the vilest, the most
deformed among men. She elevates every man she touches; she believes herself
capable of heating even ice. Man prefers the beautiful to everything else, and
pardons the rest; man often abases even the most exalted loves. Woman bears
even lechery to the high regions of sentiment; man sinks even affection in the
mire of lust. Pardon the cynical phrase, but do not reject it, because it is only too
true: man in his loves is much more beast than angel; woman is more angel than
man. And now let us take from the breast of two lovers the bleeding, hot,
palpitating hearts, and let us analyse them with the needles and pincers of
anatomy; many sexual differences of love will appear clear to us, which until
now have not been apparent.
 And let this be a poor essay of assimilated physiology of the two sexes. Every
thought, every word, every gesture of the man and woman who love receives the
stamp of sex; and when the characters are inverted, we find ourselves before a
caricature, a monster, or even a crime. Sometimes, however, women of a virile
temperament love manfully, and men of gentle fibre manifest in their loves
tenderness, weakness, and sublime pictures which should be observed only in
woman. We are still in the field of pathology; but the psychical forms, through
the unusual intermingling of figures and strange colouring, can have an aesthetic
element which rouses our amazement and invites us to meditate.
However varied may be the sexual elements of love, our modern civilization
is guilty of a grave sin, because to woman, the true and great priestess of love we
concede only a poor and wretched tribute. We have ambition, glory, science, and
the mad thirst for gain; we have refined every nourishment of the heart and
mind, demonstrating that she must only love. After having usurped almost the
entire field of human activity, we have left her the garden of love as her only
possession, her only comfort. And when this poor prisoner, with all the eager
curiosity of her nature, begins to cull the flowers and scented herbs of her
dominion, when she would cultivate the garden in her own way, we interfere
even there, planting the placards of our restrictive regulations and the palisades
of our laws. That flower bed is reserved, you must not pluck that flower, and do
not walk over that path. Even the selection of flowers to be cultivated must be
made by us, who possess the field, the meadow, the forest, the ice of the Alps
and the wave of the ocean. Thus, we have a slave who murmurs and conspires
against us; we ourselves have unleafed the garden in which a proud and noble
chatelaine would have been able to receive us and quiet us after our glorious
labours; thus, instead of being welcomed to halls resplendent with gold and
gems, we have a prisoner or a slave who places her head upon our knees and
weeps. We have measured out to her the bread and wine of life, as the jailer
measures for the thief; and, tyrants even in love, we have assigned ourselves the
part of the lion in voluptuousness as in the free choice of the sovereign affection.
But every injustice is repaid, as every rupture of equilibrium is settled again; and
the continual and often justified betrayals of our slaves, the plots of the seraglio,
the conspiracies of the palace, assure us daily that we build on a false foundation
the edifice of the family, and they cry out to us in a loud voice that it will soon
be imperative to give to woman that which belongs to woman: the free choice of
loves, equality of rights in affection as in the family.
 Chapter 16
Love in Youth and Age
In studying the twilights of rising love, we have involuntarily outlined the
lineaments of childish and youthful love. We have seen it, timid and spasmodic,
exerting itself between the last swaddling clothes of infancy and the first
weapons of youth, like a little warrior armed with a wooden sabre and a tin gun.
It is in adolescence that this sovereign affection reveals to us the most sublime
puerility, the maddest hysteria. Side by side with the most ideal aspirations we
find the impetuous and automatic outbreak of first lust; and youthful fancy,
inflaming the first fevers of lust, agitates and startles the tender and fragile
organism. Happy those who in the first storms of life find a loving hand that
guides and comforts them, and preserves them from the thousand dangers which
threaten at the same time health and morality.
After the first and impatient lusts of adolescence there generally follows, in
elect natures, a period of reaction, during which they make heroic vows of
chastity and extraordinary endeavours to learn to hate woman. It is then that in
the diary of the boy-man we read these vows and aspirations to chastity which I
copy here:
…Tremendous dilemma of life: the universe without woman – woman
without the universe.

I have been able to pass an entire day without embracing a woman or

directing any fervid aspiration to her; and yet I have passed a very
happy day! Try always to do without the vile race of Eve.

I was seated near a young Creole, and I found her beautiful, inebriating,
voluptuous. I thought of the paradise of delights enclosed within her,
and I wavered. The most Creole embrace in the world, however, is not
worth the cosmic synthesis, as I have conceived it and as I will know
how to describe it to men.

No pleasure is shorter than erotic delirium; no sacrifice more fruitful of

advantageous consequences than the disdain for this voluptuousness.

Instinct, with the fury of its power, represents pleasure to you in its
most attractive aspect; it is only a faculty of yours, and would draw into
its whirlpool your entire activity.

It is only one of your faculties and that which you have in common
with the vilest creatures at the end of the scale of creation, and this
faculty desires to be the first: the first, and only for a few moments; but
in these moments the least noble of your powers can and will take away
a great part of yourself, of your ego. It is a sovereign who reigns only a
few seconds, but who has enough power in the period of his dominion
to destroy half the state and to leave his throne on a heap of ruins,
brands, and ashes; it is easy to destroy, but from a mass of ruins and
ashes an overthrown state is poorly reconstructed.

But you have soldiers to send against this ephemeral monarch; and if
you know how to arm and discipline them, they will bring you of that
sire nothing but a corpse, and you will see what a miserable carcass it is
of putrefaction, dirt, and worms.

But beware lest your soldiers parley with him; he has a voice so sweet
and mysterious, a look so attractive that he would enchant them, and
succeed even in stupefying your faithful captain, Reason, and reason
would be conquered by instinct.

Oh, foresee that fatal instant! A moment after, sorrow and

repentance would be too late.

A moment later you would see instinct with an infernal smile

holding reason beneath its feet.

A moment later you would no longer be able to think.

And, taking you by the hand, that putrefying skeleton would make
you its toy and decoy bird; you would be like the blind man guided by
the hand of a jesting youth.

Oh, you would be worse than he; he has lost only the light of the
eyes, and you would have lost the light of reason, that which makes you
superior to all beings which the transforming power develops on earth,
that by which you think and glory in feeling.

Elect souls, in passing, would look on you with an air of disdain, and
would withdraw from you in disgust.

Oh? you could no longer follow, nor hear their soft voices!

Your hands are held, one by instinct, the other by crime; and all
around you behold for companions vice and infamy and another throng
of similar issue; and at the end of these you have Suicide with a dagger
in one hand, poison in the other, gazing, with bloodshot eyes and hair
standing on end from fright, now at the dagger, now at the bowl.

And all these companions surround you, binding you with numerous
chains, each of which ends at the same point, which is grasped by
instinct, your sovereign conqueror.

And you hear in the distance a sound as of a sigh or groan of a dying

man; you hear a languid voice calling you; but that sound, that voice is
far away; you have heard that voice, and it causes a shudder of horror
to glide down your skin.

It is the voice, it is the sound of expiring reason; it is the voice, it is

the sound of your faithful soldiers dying on the deserted battlefield.

How sad that voice is, how tremendous is that sound; it has ceased
perhaps, but you will bear the echo always with you; always, even to
the tomb.

How wretched is the condition of the man who becomes a slave of

passion, and pays for an instant of pleasure with inaction of mind and
prostration of strength? He was burning with passion, his eyes were
flames, he longed ardently for voluptuousness, the force of his
imagination represented pleasure to him in its most attractive aspect.
Reason reminded him of the repentance which follows the crime;
represented to him the detriment of yielding to instinct. There was a
 momentary struggle – reason surrendered: the man abused the laws of
nature, and made an end of that which was only a means; enjoyed an
instant of pleasure, but this was short; it had scarcely vanished when he
repented, reason was clouded, and remorse and sadness possessed his
soul. The first made him feel the brevity of pleasure; and he was sad
because the faculties were disturbed, and part of his being was detached
from his ego and had diminished his essence. And the mind, perturbed,
weakened, did not repose in the calm joy of existence, but was sad. The
part gone forth from the body had impaired his corporeal being,
rendering it restless and infirm. Oh, wretched the man who has
diminished his essence, not to form a being similar to himself, but only
to taste voluptuousness, which nature wishes to accompany generation!
Oh, wretched the man who has ranked pleasure before glory, the
consciousness of his own strength, and the esteem of men! God, who
sees him, does not bless him; the men who hear him do not respect him.

These fragments of childish literature are faithfully transcribed from the diary of
a youth, and will suffice to manifest the reaction of the individual who at the
rising of the new sun of love protests against the rape of nature, and attempts in
vain to fight against it.
In the same pages we find a still more singular form of this reaction, which is
felt more or less by all men born under the sun; it is an experiment at founding a
science and a new art, Agnology (science of chastity), namely, the art of resisting
love. I transcribe:

Elements of Dogmatic Agnology

1. General definitions. Dogmatic agnology is that science which treats
of chastity, considered as a physiological fact and applied to the
civilization of individuals and nations. This is a science of the greatest
importance, because it progresses equally with morality, and embraces
the three worlds of sense, sentiment, and intelligence.

Nature, all-powerful in its commands, compels man to surrender a

part of his life with the seduction of the most violent sensual pleasure.

In this illusion nature acts toward us like the mother who, in order to
snatch a gold piece from her child’s hand, offers in exchange a
 confection.

These pages, taken from the great book of nature, are but the thousandth
reproduction of a psychical phenomenon which is repeated in all men when they
pass from the threshold of adolescence into the gardens of youth. A historical
fact, together with a proverb, embodies this truth, in two great monuments: in the
Council of Trent it was the youngest priests who voted for celibacy; and the
French language has a proverb which says, Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse
pouvait!’61 Vote and proverb that merit a volume of meditations, and which find
their origin in the deepest roots of the human heart.
Exuberance of strength prepares us for the battle; but at the same time it
leaves us calm and serene, because true force is always calm. A boaster is rarely
strong, and the frequent mentioning of one’s own energy is generally a symptom
of decadence and weakness. The sick person who fears death often says he feels
much better, even before we interrogate him on the state of his health, and he
endeavours to deceive himself and others concerning the danger that threatens
him.
The young man is always more timid in love than the adult and the aged; and
this fact has so many and such mysterious causes, as to be verified also in many
animals.
The birds, among others, the older they are, the more economic are they of
preliminaries in their amorous attainments.62 The young man, however he may
be invaded by love, still trembles. He is a mature and sweet-scented fruit, but the
rude contact of the gardener and of the shop have not deprived him of the pure
colouring. He has renounced the useless and too unequal struggle against love
and flung himself into its arms; but he still trembles when the currents of the god
pass through his viscera and cause his nerves to vibrate. He is the priest initiated
in the mysteries of the temple but who in the sanctum sanctorum still trembles,
and a gentle, sublime timidity tempers in him the too virile expression of
strength. We have before our eyes one of the most sublime pictures of the moral
world: the acme of beauty without the affectation of pride, the maximum of
strength without the shadow of convulsion; an ever active force, a serene but
infinite energy; ready for the start, the work, the reaction.
The physically well formed young man belongs entirely to love, and love is
the property of youth. All the energies of sentiment, all the powers of thought
take in that age the form of the sovereign affection, which absorbs and draws
everything into its hot and raging whirlpools. Whoever does not love at twenty is
less than a eunuch, because even a eunuch can love; there is an amorous sterility
which has its seat in the brain and in the heart, and which is more humiliating
than any mutilation of organs and of functions. If, at twenty, a man does not
encounter a woman in the social paths, he loves a painted or sculptured female,
he loves the heroine of a romance or poem; and the young girl adores the angels
that flap their wings against the bolster of her virginal couch.
At twenty, one possesses the physical energy to love a hundred women, and
even the most modest maiden finds in the air at every step a spark that darts from
the contact of a man. Notwithstanding a gigantic and fruitful possibility of
polygamy, man and woman are, in robust youth, essentially monogamous, and in
their most foolish idolatries are still monotheists. One only god, one only temple,
one religion alone. One must be born singularly perverse to be polygamous
before the first steps in love, and the young woman who already loves more than
one man at a time must have been conceived in a house of ill fame, kneaded with
the blood and flesh of a bacchante.
Against this virtuous, this energetic, this holy monogamy there rise on all
sides most frightful obstacles; formidable adversaries are moving against it from
every direction and opposing the first steps. Adam has found his Eve; Eve has
seen her Adam; but between the embrace of these two lovers, how many
enemies, how many barriers, how many abysses! Adam loves Eve; Eve loves
Adam; what can be more simple, what affinity can be more intense, what
affection more inexorable than their meeting? And yet before embracing each
other the two unhappy creatures must ask the permission of prejudice, hypocrisy,
conventionality, hygiene, morality, religion, above all, finance; and one in a
hundred has the fortune to hear the answer ‘Yes’ from all these superior
authorities, who have the right to veto their affection. The nightingale has seen
and loved its modest companion; in the deep shadow of a mysterious alder he
sang his tenderest song and inspired her with love. Today they sleep happy in
their love, and tomorrow they will find pliant branches and downy moss to
weave a nest for themselves; no need of civil matrimony, religious matrimony,
financial matrimony. But woe to the man who trusts to nature to weave his nest!
The tomorrow of his loves will be cursed by hunger; and scrofula and rickets
will kill his children, born of a union which lacked the consent of finance.
Further on we will study the tremendous contests of love with matrimony; here
we must consider how the powerful youthful energy is bent and deformed at the
sudden encounter of so many rocks and impediments.
From the clash of two contrary forces there arises a decomposition of
movements, a transformation of energies: thus, pure love, virginal and powerful,
which, scarcely issued from the hot viscera of nature, finds the bristly porcupine
of social impediments and is rudely dashed against them, foams and returns,
dragging along with it a heap of pebbles, chips, and mud displaced by the furious
clashing of so many forces and resistances. Would to fate that in that first shock
love suffered nothing but sorrow! Tears have blessed thousands of loves and
bathed them with a sweet lymph; very few have they killed. But in the dashing
of first love against the cruel rock of social resistances, many new and cruel
forces spring from the decomposition of the two contrary motions, and a
thousand compromises of conscience stain even the swaddling clothes of
newborn love, humiliating it with the shame of an original sin.
The first transaction of the pure and enamoured youth whom society hinders
from being monogamous is that of analysing love into sentiment and
voluptuousness; he strives to keep his heart pure and to erect to it one temple
only, while he sacrifices himself to lechery on the thousand altars of the roaming
Venus.
And still this decomposition of love seems to the most refined and virtuous
lovers a very wise shrewdness, a miracle of art, the ideal of morality joined to
the most urgent needs of the heart and senses; and after some skirmishing and
lamenting, everyone adapts himself to this compromise of conscience and
accommodates himself as in a badly made carriage, but in which one must be
resigned to making a long journey. The most gentle, the most virtuous lovers are
continually looking forward to the fortunate day when all hypocrisy will be
cancelled, and physical and moral love united will give them the right to weave a
nest in which sentiment and voluptuousness will keep faithful company. And in
the meantime they go on between a reticence and a lie: the heart to the wife of
another, the body to the house of prostitution.
Young men who resign themselves too easily to this vile and turbid
compromise of conscience are cruelly punished for their crime, since they are
ignorant of the richest and most splendid treasures of youthful love. Do not lie,
do not betray; do not seek your love in the mire, but in the skies: and then
abandon yourselves heart and senses to the wave that bears you to paradise.
Inhale all the perfumes, cull all the flowers from a garden into which an icy
breeze never enters, and where for every petal that falls a hundred new corollas
are blown. Be rich, be recklessly rich; be gods once, at least, in life: nature
concedes even to the most miserable creature a day of spring, weaves a garland
on the head of the most abject of men. Remember there is no iron safe in which
an hour of sunlight can be enclosed, nor artifice of chemical art that can preserve
a blooming rose.
 The fortunate young man who has not subjected love to the process of
decomposition indicated by us, loves ardently, recklessly, nobly. His love is a
sunny day in May, cloudless, joyous; it is a festival that knows neither weariness
nor disillusion. He lives because he loves and he loves because he lives; he
loves, loves, and loves, and thinks of nothing else; he neither weeps, foresees,
fears, nor calculates; he loves, loves, and loves. He burns his incense to the
goddess, but it is chaste and knows no lust; it is sometimes so pure as to cause
the woman to blush who, having passed her thirtieth year, already loves too
wisely. He neither measures nor weighs; and who has ever dared to calculate the
force of a thunderbolt or the kilograms of an earthquake? And the loves of a
young man are thunderbolts and earthquakes. He is not very jealous; he is less
so, in any case, than the adult and the aged man: he is too confident, too happy to
doubt; and besides, he has no time. The cruel calculations of suspicion and long
and hidden observations require much time, and he has not any: he is too
occupied. He must love; and he loves, loves, loves. His lips are wreathed in
perpetual smiles; a ray of sunlight rests on his brow and gilds it with an aureole
of bliss. Tomorrow for him does not exist, except under the form of a
continuation of the happiness of today; the future is a prolonging of the desire of
the present: he does not remember the past, and in good faith believes himself to
have always loved his goddess, even when she was unknown to him. He believes
in innate loves, as Rosmini believed in cognate ideas. Happy youth!
If the young man is the most potent, the most ardent lover, the adult is the
most skilful. The use and abuse of life have blunted the corners for him, and
almost cooled off the flames of passion; but useless impatience, excessive
timidity, the sudden bursting forth of desire present no obstacle to the blissful
plenitude of his loves. He loves with shrewdness, passion, and finished art; he is
a hundred times more lecherous than the young man, but he is also more delicate
and richer in exquisite tastes which belong to the world of thought. The youthful
lover is a naked and often ferocious savage; the adult lover is civilized from long
experience and clothed with the blandishments of art. His most spontaneous
sympathies are for unripe fruit, for the flowers still enclosed within the bristly
calyx of innocence and ignorance; but he willingly loves the independent
woman, the widow, and the mature female; he is essentially eclectic. His joys are
scarcer than in youth, but they are more precious, because rendered more
delicious by an economy almost touching on avarice. He knows that his hours
are numbered. Rich in the past but poor in the future, he concentrates on the
present all his care, patience, and attention. He is the most clever, the wisest
teacher of love; and when health and freshness of heart are not lacking in him, he
can awaken ardent and lasting passions. Woman is less apt than we to search for
white hairs and to examine baptismal certificates; provided she feels herself
loved deeply and ardently, she willingly forgets two or three lustra of age.
In the love of the adult for the young woman there is always a benevolent and
tender protection, an almost paternal affection, full of tenderness and generosity.
This characteristic of mature love tends to deprive it of some of the hot and
voluptuous expansions, to cool off the volcanic explosions of youthful love; but
the paternal affection, which would easily tend to become authority and to
destroy the perfect equality of the two lovers, is tempered by a deep and hidden
diffidence in oneself.
The young man asks for love on bended knee, but he knows he has legitimate
rights; and often from the humble position of one begging alms, prostrated in the
dust, he leaps to his feet, demanding with the force of beauty, genius, passion
that which through humility he could not obtain. The mature man, on the
contrary, has lost many rights, and requests with greater modesty, with a reserve
full of grace and delicacy; he often implores with a tenderness so ardent and a
tone so supplicating that it is difficult to deny him. The continual alternation of
an authority that teaches and an authority that implores gives to adult love the
most characteristic tint, the most salient mark. And when poor nature, medicated
by art, has known how to attain love, the precious affection penetrates its roots
into the deepest recesses of the heart. The adult has tenacious passions, and no
one is more faithful in love than he; he is the best husband: and not only for the
sake of egotism does the bridegroom seek a spouse a few years younger than
himself. Man ages later, and two ignorant young people seldom unite in
matrimony without exposing themselves to serious danger.
The woman of thirty also loves with modesty, with deep tenderness, with
religious fidelity, with avaricious sagacity. If I were permitted to express an
audacious desire, I would like to love a young girl and be loved by a mature
woman, who was beginning to need the shades of evening and less glaring
lights.
The man who is aging is a trunk on which every day a branch withers, and
every gust of wind detaches a handful of yellow leaves. When the entire tree is
dead, then upon the ruins of love rises an implacable hatred for those who love
and are loved, and the cruel domestic inquisitions, a posthumous and ridiculous
ostentation of forced continence or of mummified modesty poison the existence
of the intolerant old man, who avenges himself upon the young for his
misfortune in no longer being able to love. It is an inexorable law which
condemns those old fellows to the mystic meditations of the sacristy, since in all
times and in all countries the last spark of lust serves to kindle the choleric light
on the altar of superstition. Unhappy indeed is the poor young girl who confides
the story of her first love to a peevish and bigoted old woman, who considers
love a synonym for lechery and in affection sees only the sin. The deformity of a
Chinese foot is less monstrous and less cruel than the forced contortion which a
youthful love must undergo in the clutches of intolerant bigotry.
Man, however, is a tree so robust and vigorous that it rarely dies all at once,
and in the old man there often remains solid the branch of lechery only. It is then
that the economy of the adult becomes true avarice, lust becomes wantonness,
and love takes unheard-of forms. The lechery of the old man, warmed in the
hotbed of the aphrodisiac and by the burning, stifling air of vice, is like a
mushroom fabricated by the fetid artifices of horticulture, and bears fruits which
smell in the distance of the manure in which they were raised. We cannot give
the name of love to these lusts; it would be more appropriate to baptize them
erotic illicit trading and the prostitution of innocence to the calculations of the
probability of life or of near heredity. And yet some so-called potent lovers carry
into extreme decrepitude phantom desires, and like eels they go on rubbing their
slimy paunches in the hot mire of the lowest social depths, and until the last sigh
they unleaf with their wasted hands the rose bushes, or at fabulous prices
purchase an ‘I love you’ chillier than the snow and more deceitful than a Jesuit.
The man of high type can also love until advanced age; but then, lechery
spent, every right of attainment abdicated, love is elevated to the highest spheres
of the ideal world and becomes a sublime contemplation of feminine beauty.
Before the maiden and heroic greatness of Joan of Arc or before the succulent
sensuality of Barzaghi’s Phryne;63 at the lively prattle of a girl of fourteen or at
the side of a calm, plump matron, even the venerable old man feels himself
affected; and perhaps, under the childlike or compassionate caresses of a woman,
he feels his eye moisten, and he invokes, if a believer, the benedictions of
Heaven on the more beautiful half of the human family.
If even the old man can love woman, the old woman can also love the young
man; but their love should be a serene contemplation of the beautiful, the suave
reminder of joys possessed for a long time and ardent aspirations to an ideal ever
loved because never attained. Also, the hoary old man, without offending the
modesty of her who cannot be his, can caress with paternal affection the hair of
Eve, can in her adore the most splendid manifestation of the aesthetic forces of
nature, can again warm his cold fancy at the ardent fire of others’ loves; and,
without envying them, can say with sweet complacency: ‘I too have done my
duty; do yours now. I also have loved without sowing the seeds of remorse; try
to follow my example!’
 Chapter 17
Love in the Temperaments – Different Ways of Loving
I shall not repeat in these pages for the hundredth time the criticism of the
temperaments as defined by the ancient schools, and which I have expounded in
many of my works. My method of classification has not been universally
adopted, but all agree with me in the belief that the temperaments have had their
day, and that hygiene, medicine, psychology await from the progress of modern
physiology the elements to define, as science requires it, the physical and moral
characteristics of an individual. Against this impotency of the physiology of
today I have protested, changing the name ‘temperament’ to that of ‘individual
constitution’; innocent revenge of all men who, powerless to alter the nature of a
thing, satisfy their rage by changing its name.
Every man loves in his own way, and as to love we bring the greatest possible
tribute of psychical elements, it follows that human loves differ among
themselves more than hatreds, more than the manner of eating, motion, etc. The
lower we descend from the branches to the trunk, the more human elements
resemble each other; the higher we mount to the loftiest branches, the more the
elements diverge and differ. Ask a demimondaine or a Don Juan how many are
the methods of loving, and both will not only answer that everyone loves in a
different manner, but add that the ways are so intensely unlike that it is
repugnant to call all the varied forms of loving by the baptismal name of the
same sentiment.
It is true that some authors have amused themselves by describing a ‘sanguine
love,’ a ‘nervous love,’ a ‘lymphatic love,’ a ‘hepatic love’; but these pictures are
innocent pastimes, arabesques traced on the epidermis of human nature; and the
schools of psychology and literature, which succeed each other, cancel these
arabesques so that not the least trace of them remains. Even when, instead of the
caricatures of the temperaments, we should chance to succeed in distinguishing a
true family of human constitutions, it would still be very difficult for all the
forms of love to enter. The thousands and thousands of tesserae of the Roman
mosaics suffice to classify the innumerable tints that a practised eye succeeds in
discerning; but who will give me a palette so gigantic that I may be able to
extend all the polychromic impasting, all the simple and compound colours, all
the proteiform iridescence that human light presents in passing through the
powerful prism of love? Take even the largest dictionary of the richest language
in the world; search for all the adjectives from A to Z, and you will find that all
these treasures of language are not sufficient to cover the many forms of love. It
is for this reason, perhaps, that some, too deeply enamoured of the study of
assimilated physiology, die before they have been able to subject to the
experimental criterion all the adjectives that can baptize love.
The question as to the quantity of love an individual may feel is the easiest to
solve; but it is also one of the most important. In every psychological problem
there is an element of quantity; and as it is the most simple and most apparent, I
would almost say the skeleton of the phenomenon, it is expedient to grasp it
eagerly as a conducting wire which guides us through the labyrinth of these
studies.
Many men, as well as those of exalted minds and gentle hearts, have asked
themselves seriously and frequently if they were capable of loving, because they
were unacquainted with all that world of mystery and passion which they found
described in many books and by the enthusiastic voice of some enamoured
friends. My book, although a purely physiological study, may seem to them an
exaggeration, a caricature of the natural. Now then, these are weak and
insignificant lovers. For them, love is an intermittent pruriency that begins at
eighteen and ends at forty or, at the latest, fifty; pruriency between the pleasing
and the troublesome, and which morally can be cured only by one medicine
alone – woman. This medicine, they say, is sometimes worse than the evil, and it
is well to reflect long and maturely in order to decide if they should prefer that
pruriency which the poets call ‘love’ or that other weighty burden termed by
naturalists ‘the female of man’ and by polished vocabularies ‘woman.’ When
these eunuchs of the sentiment of love prefer woman, they may find that this
animated object, so like ourselves, is also tolerably pleasing and sympathetic,
and tender habit of benevolence binds them to this companion whom they truly
love, in their own way of course, calmly, prudently, gently. These unhappy
creatures have reason to ask themselves if what they feel is love, and to inquire
of true lovers, ‘But tell me; will you explain to me what is this love?’ The moon
emanates heat, the frog develops heat; well then, these gentlemen also love.
Peaceful love, faint or cold love (call it what you will) does not belong
exclusively to the male; it also presents its most perfect, but rarest, forms in
woman. Man, however weak a lover he may be, cannot renounce the mission of
sex which constrains him to attack, assault, declare the war that must lead him to
conquest. Woman, on the contrary, if she is a born eunuch, need not combat the
companion in any way; she can, if she will, relinquish the labour of directing her
gaze toward her lover and of opening her lips to say a yes; to let herself be loved
is enough! What lymphatic delights in these few words! To let herself be loved;
to leave to others every labour of conquered timidity, of violated modesty; all
strategy and tactics of moral violence; to resign to others all the work, to reserve
for herself only the voluptuousness of leaving the gate ajar or letting others open
it. To let herself be loved! What aesthetic, angelic bliss, what voluptuousness of
soft, wavy motions, of carnal pruriency, what wonderful gentle heat of sweet
caresses! And then no responsibility for the future of a passion which is never
confessed; no storm; a tranquil lake without ebb and flow. And should the larded
heart permit itself the liberty of a restless throb, there is instantly a cataplasm of
cooked figs to bring it back to duty; modesty to justify the perennial ice; and
virtue to warrant the absence of aroma. Oh, why can we not reduce love to a
problem of hygiene and régime?
From this zero of the amatory scale we rise by degrees to the maximum
gradations of the pyrometer, where each metal is blended and volatilized, and the
entire human organism is transformed into a red and ardent vapour that burns
everything it touches. There are tremendous lovers, who have loved before they
were men, who will love also when they have lost their manhood; there are
women who have loved, perhaps, since they were enclosed in the maternal
womb, and will love even the undertaker who will nail up in the cold casket their
prurient flesh; there are men and women in whom every affection takes a sensual
form, and love absorbs them like a sponge born, grown, and decayed in the
saline depths of a tropical sea. Having neither time nor patience to wait, they
love the first come and yield them affection and fancy; then, discouraged but not
wearied, they love again the next come, and always loving more than they are
loved in return, their thirst remains unsatisfied forever; happy when they
succeed, at rare intervals, in contenting themselves with successive loves; but
oftener they precipitate quickly into contemporaneous polygamy, where through
sophism, reticence, and compromise with conscience they love the one with the
heart, the other with the mind, and all of them with the senses. They have a first
love, an only love, a true love; but very frequently they forget the name, and
with it they baptize too many different lovers, and like the polyps they extend
their hundred eager and monopolizing arms in the hot, succulent flesh of the
feminine cosmos. Among these polygamists there are some who love only with
the heart, others solely with the senses; while to a few giants nature concedes the
sad gift of a twofold thirst for affection and voluptuousness.
Between these two poles, which mark the extreme measure of amatory
intensity, agitate the innumerable masses of men who are neither Don Juans nor
Hebrew Josephs; the numberless women who resemble neither Messalina64 nor
Joan of Arc.
 Besides the varied force of amorous needs, the sentiment which we are
studying together assumes different characters, according to the passion which is
most energetic in the individual and which gives to love a mark, proud, humble,
egotistical, vain, furious, jealous, etc. And around these binary compounds of
love and pride, of love and egotism, of love and vanity, there are grouped many
other minor elements, which with less energetic affinity result in forming a
homogeneous whole; this might be called a ‘temperament of love’ or a
‘constitutional form of love.’ I will try to sketch some taken from truth.
Tender love. – This is a love with shaded outlines and few reliefs, and is felt
more frequently by men of mild and gentle character. Emotion surprises them at
the slightest cause, tears are always ready to gush forth at the first impetuosity of
joy and of sorrow; a perennial compassion and an inexhaustible tenderness
drown all declarations of love, warmth of voluptuousness, and outbursts of
affection in a sweet sea of milk and honey. Tender love is suppliant, sad, and
faithful; at times it touches the boundaries of sensual love, but never enters there
with swelling sails. It is a love that is often constant, almost as immutable as an
old and serene friendship; it leads, however, only too frequently to sighs, groans,
and tears. It has, nevertheless, stupendous expansions which, however
interminable they may be, are fruitful of intense joy and sweet comfort, and
dispose us to universal benevolence, to philanthropy, and to pardoning offences.
It is a Christian, evangelical love that prefers the caress to the kiss, and lingering
kisses to the instantaneous battle. Its most aesthetic forms are found in woman,
to whom we readily pardon a certain weakness, and who can even faint without
falling into ridicule. Blondes of fine and rosy skin love in this way, as well as
Germans and the scrofulous.
Contemplative love. – A high aesthetic sense, an irresistible tendency to
inertia, and few genital wants constitute the soil in which bud and thrive the
various forms of contemplative love. It is a sublime love, too sublime; it has
something of the mystic and supernatural; the lover places his idol very high and
prostrates himself before it, lavishing upon it adoration and incense.
Contemplative love is situated in the anterior lobes of the brain; it moves but
slightly the hollow depths of the heart and scarcely skims over the hot wave of
voluptuousness; it lives on ecstasies and meditations, and, making of the beloved
creature a god or a goddess, forgets too frequently that in the god there is
enclosed a male, and in the goddess a human female. This sublime forgetfulness
makes this love more horned than is supposed, because nature can be neither
forgotten nor offended with impunity; and while one adores and contemplates in
the temple, warlike and rapacious love profanes the tabernacle and carries off the
god.
Contemplative love lives on the frontiers of pathology and belongs properly
to Arcadians, the hysteric, and the mystic. Disillusioned and betrayed, they
accuse love of simony and falsehood, when they themselves are the cause of
their sorrows and disappointments.
Sensual love. – It is one of the most ardent, most inebriating, most tenacious
of loves, because it springs from the most fruitful and spontaneous source of
sensual affections. It is the most sincere and powerful love, because it satisfies
one of the most natural and irresistible needs of man; but it rests on a mobile soil
– beauty; and its ardours are indicated by too deep a note – desire. It does not
deceive; it does not don the hundred garments of amorous hypocrisy, but it is
nude, entirely nude, and often modest in its nudity. Brazen or tender, insatiable
or satisfied, rash even to insolence, it is, however, always what it is: the
tremendous attraction of two great and opposite organic units; a burning thirst
that seeks the fresh water of the Alpine spring; the vigorous clash of the two
most gigantic forces in the world. From voluptuousness to voluptuousness – if
youthful strength does not accompany it – it generally descends to
lasciviousness, where it sinks with each day that passes and each force that
declines, and down, down it plunges into the filthiest mire of domestic lechery or
of the wandering Venus. It is a love inexhaustible in discoveries and inventions,
indefatigable in voluptuousness; it is also a sublime artist, and presents to our
view warm and fascinating tints. Born in the lowest depths of the animal man, it
rarely rises to the high spheres of the ideal, and knows neither dignity, delicacy,
nor heroism; on the contrary, it is often suppliant even to baseness, impure even
to nausea. It accepts also a bone to gnaw, just as it accepts voluptuousness
without love. It is of no consequence to it whether voluptuousness is reached by
the sole moral course of love, but it seeks it by all possible means; and it
conquers, steals, buys love: goes even so far as to borrow and forge it. Provided
the insatiable pruriency be appeased, sensual love acts as mediator to the loves
of others, becomes usurer, thief, and forger with the same indifference. This love
is generally masculine: in women even licentiousness always throws over itself a
splendid garment of sentiment, and in it hides its insolent nudity.
Ferocious love. – Perhaps the word which baptizes this love is too
conspicuous; but in painting a psychical portrait one is irresistibly inclined to
exaggerate the tints and outlines, and make it more salient than truth. A great
development of the sense of ownership joined to a certain impetuosity of
character is the most natural source of all those violent loves which I embrace
under the common name of ‘ferocious love.’ Its birth resembles the eruption of a
volcano, and so many storms accompany it that one would suppose a hatred had
come to light instead of a love. And this fault of origin accompanies it through
life and ends only with death; you see these ferocious loves giving certain kisses
that seem bites, and certain embraces that resemble homicides; and you behold
them tyrants without jealousy, furious without anger; insatiable even after
possession, because voluptuousness does not calm nor fidelity always satisfy
them. Ferocious love, in all the sublime greatness of its forces, resembles the
conquering Venus. If politeness and the patient file of education do not succeed
in rounding the angles, this love often becomes surly and also brutal. Such must
have been the love of our remote ancestors of the caves and mountains, who,
continually bathed in the blood of the chase and of war, imbrued their hands with
blood in order to love, woman also being the prey of the strongest and most
audacious. As it is easy to divine, it is generally man who loves ferociously; but
woman likewise occasionally feels this cruel form of love; and the more devoted
she is to her lover, the more she torments him, and the deeper she penetrates the
talons of passion into the depths of the viscera, to feel the heat, and to be able to
say with voluptuous fury, ‘These too are mine.’
Proud love. – It is a binary compound of one part love and ten equivalents of
selfishness. When proud love is satisfied, when it is in all the pomp of its bliss, it
can present the appearance of a pure, great, sublime love; but selfishness
scarcely stings when it foams, and puffs up like a snail or a basilisk, and exhibits
in all its ugly bareness the dual nature of its energy. Even in the few moments in
which this affection is wholly contented, it never manifests the same, never
abandons itself to an unreserved confession of bliss; for the same reason that the
rustic never acknowledges that he admires new and great things. Proud love
occupies itself much more with being loved than loving; speaks always of rights
and often ignores duties; it is full of requirements and has little consideration; it
goes wheeling round and round if fortunate, and murmurs at the slightest
suspicion; it is the most jealous of loves and among the most unhappy, the
poorest in sweet abandonment and ingenuous voluptuousness. Even in the most
secret intimacy it never unbosoms itself, for fear of ridicule or of spoiling some
fold of the ancient military cloak in which it is wrapped: it is never the first to
give the caress, but awaits it as a right and a duty; it is a love which in order to
be approached requires much consideration, much etiquette, and many
ceremonies, that tire quickly and frequently disgust. It exacts fidelity, not as an
agreeable reciprocation of affection but as a right of its own dignity, and pardons
readily the sins which the world ignores: it is a sterile, dry, sickly love.
Excoriated love. – The sources of this form of love are often confounded with
the preceding; but it is more unhappy still and belongs by full right to the
pathology of the heart. It is a love that can be sincere, tender, and passionate; but
it is so irritable that a mosquito annoys it and a pebble between the toes causes it
to cry out, ‘Misfortune and treachery!’ like the ancient Epicurean who could not
sleep unless he had a folded rose petal under his back. It also seeks, like all
human affections, the goal of its aspirations, but never reaches it, because
suspicion, susceptibility, and fear arrest them at every step, cut off the word from
their lips, withdraw the arms in the embrace, extinguish the flame when scarcely
lighted. I compare this affection to a St Bartholomew who was obliged to walk
among brambles and over pointed rocks; for this reason I have given the strange
and new baptism of ‘excoriated love’; the French would call it un amour
mauvais coucheur.65 It is perhaps the most wretched of loves, because besides
the natural and inevitable misfortunes which happen to every daughter of Eve
and every son of Adam, it creates some for itself and enlarges them with the lens
of the most unhappy fancy. Excoriated love is a fatal alembic which transforms
rose petals into nettle, honey into wormwood, perfume into fetidness, nutriment
into poison. If kissed, it murmurs because the kiss was too violent or too cold: if
caressed, it asks of itself if the caress did not have a second end in view; even in
the raptures of creation, it asks of the creator why he made the light so soon or so
late. Whoever is loved by these unfortunate creatures has always the right to
repeat to them the words of the courtesan of Venice to the unhappy and foolish
philosopher of Geneva: ‘Zaneto, Zaneto, ti non ti xe fato per far a l’amor!’66
And yet these unfortunates love and love deeply, and it is the enviable glory of
powerful lovers to cure and conquer them, even to make them confess that at
least once in life they were truly, faithfully, and passionately loved. It is one of
the most admirable triumphs of amatory art to find a tissue so fine that can touch
the excoriated skin of these poor unfortunates, and to fabricate for them an
artificial atmosphere, in which they can move without lamenting, breathe
without coughing, and live without cursing life.

These forms of love, which I have poorly outlined, are rarely found in nature in a
simple state, but are complicated and interwoven among themselves, forming a
thousand pictures; a real mine of resources for art, a treasure of torments for the
psychological thinker.
No man loves like another, and no man loves perfectly, as the type of a
sublime love can be idealized in the thinking regions of our brain. To the perfect
harmony of one love there is lacking a note of sensuality, to another a tone of
energy; one love is too restless, another too languid, a third too violent. And
even the most fortunate, those that have in themselves a just measure of
voluptuousness, sentiment, and poetry; even those who know they are loved
passionately and faithfully aspire to a love more perfect than that which they
feel, and better than what they receive; and when this thirst for the ideal does not
lead us to violate the compacts of fidelity, there is nothing to regret, because love
too is subject to the common law of aspiring always to purer regions, richer in
splendours and most fervent in desires. At the dawn of day love awaits the
promise of a hot noon, and in the burning sultriness, longs for the fresh twilight
of the evening; love is also led by that impulse which impels forward men and
things, matter and force, and the bliss of today awaits a more intense
voluptuousness for tomorrow. If this insatiable thirst for better things should
cease in us, it would be because in us life is spent; if the irresistible longing for a
higher love should cease, it would be because to us, as to the blind, are closed all
at once the regions of the ideal, there where all the infinite targets are reunited at
which the glances and arrows of the human family are aimed.
 Chapter 18
The Hell of Love
Pain, so rich in tortures, which in its varieties is as infinite as the grains of sand
in the ocean, as deep as its abysses, has also allotted its greatest bitterness, its
most cruel torments to love. And so it should be: the deepest passion should
precipitate into the lowest depths; the passion richest in joys should be the most
fecund in sorrows. From the passing breeze of a suspicion more rapid than the
lightning flash, frailer than the word written in the soft sand of the seashore, to
the conscience most certain of an unexpected betrayal; from the impatience of
him who awaits a beloved person, to the prolonged desperation of him who can
no longer expect her, love indicates all the notes of torture, all the torments of
the senses and all the pangs of sentiment. In the long path through which the
human family passes on this planet, among the bones they scatter daily, very
many are left by love and suicide; homicide and madness reckon in their
cemeteries and hospitals a much greater number of victims than is noted in the
great statistics of our sociologists. All this, of course, pertains to those who love
not only with the senses but also with the heart and mind. He who considers love
a question of régime and hygiene recovers quickly from the loss of the lover
with a little tear and a new conquest; cures betrayal with betrayal, and with
licentiousness heals every malady of the heart, and in it stifles every sorrow.
I certainly have neither the strength nor the courage to accompany the reader
into the depths of the amorous hell. If you have already passed the thirtieth year,
you must surely have among the reminders of your past some half-hour of
desperation and some sleepless night, which terrify you at the mere
remembrance; you must have suffered certain torments, compared to which
Dante’s dark depths can seem to you blooming flower beds, and you must
imagine that nature rarely torments a man with all the tortures of amorous
passion. In human nature some sorrows render the heart incapable of suffering
certain others, and the furious rage of a jealous passion arms us against the bitter
sigh of a generous sorrow, as the chaste reserve of a modest nature cuts off the
possibility of suffering the ardent thirst for certain pleasures. You will tell me,
perhaps, that with these oppositions and these incompatibilities of suffering,
Providence kindly cures some of the most cruel sorrows, and I brutally reply
that, without appealing to Providence, I believe a lion cannot be at the same time
a viper, nor a sphere a prison: a thing cannot be all at once gall and arsenic.
If you wish to open ever so little the door of this hell, if you would sound the
abysses with a fleeting glance, imagine on the one hand all the hopes, all the
voluptuousness, all the riches of love, and on the other all the fears, all the
bitterness, all the miseries that correspond. And after this cruel description, you
will not have ended yet, because the fields of suffering are a hundred times
larger than those where joy is sown. The physical possession of a woman is one
alone, the tortures of having the fruit before one and not being able to touch it
are thousands; and this example will suffice for all.
Thus, as the antithesis of life is death, so in its presence all the arrows of our
pride are blunted, all our hopes are broken, all our joys interrupted. In the
delirium of passion and pride we repeat hundreds of times, ‘Better dead than
belong to another – a thousand times buried, but not unfaithful.’ And frequently
the man who utters this blasphemy, with livid lips and hair standing on end,
imbues his hands in the viscera of a victim. Folly and delirium! Hurricanes of
the heart where love and hate, pride and love, crimes and tortures contend and
blend in the tumult of a dreadful storm. But true love, infinite love which
transforms man, ideal love that few feel and see dimly through the glimmering
of a supersensible to which their hands cannot reach, recognizes no greater
torture than the death of the beloved. Yes, let indifference, contempt, hatred,
betrayal all come, provided the dear one lives. Let others possess this creature
whom we have believed to be ours, into whose veins we have poured our blood;
let this temple, which we have adorned with our flowers, perfumed with the
incense of our thoughts, with the lingering love of our passions, become the
church of another god; let our flowers be trampled upon, our crowns broken,
ourselves chased away by the broom of the brutal sacristan; but let the god live
who sojourns there, and on the altar shine the idol of our life! Reviled as a
fugitive, despised as a guilty creature, vituperated as a spy, in the cold and
distant solitude we drink drop by drop a bottomless chalice of gall, and in which
every drop is more bitter than the other; but we know that she breathes the air of
the same planet that we inhabit; we know that she is elated by the same sun that
warms us; we know that among the infinite shadows that wander through
invisible space there is a creature around whom the air grows more bracing and
the light brighter; that there are certain sods of earth which bend under the
weight of a body that we love. No, as long as the beloved one lives, hope does
not pluck off all its feathers, and in the far-away, more impalpable than a dream,
more invisible than heavenly space, more inconceivable than eternity, she still
flutters on our horizon; she still lives and keeps us alive.
But when we still have the baseness to live, to breathe, to eat, and she is shut
up in the humid miasma of a wooden box; when everybody exists and she is
dead; when the joy of a thousand flowers that open to every ray of light, the
chirping of a thousand birds that sing of love, the choruses of the fortunate who
embrace, and the benedictions of so many happy creatures make a cornice over a
void all ice, all darkness; when we remain suspended between an infinity of joy
that was ours and an infinity of sorrow that is ours, and will be as long as we
have the baseness to live; then we regard suicide as the supreme joy of life, as
the most sublime human pride; then we understand how man in a flash can
dream of the great voluptuousness of mingling his bones with those of another
creature; then we can understand how fancy can smile at the idea of the embrace
of two skeletons, at the fusion of two heaps of ashes, at the resurrection of two
spent existences in the perfume of two flowers grown upon a human grave and
which the caressing wind brings together so that they kiss again.
In the silence of the cemeteries, there are those flowers that kiss, to which
perhaps responds under the earth the quivering of certain bones; there are certain
lips on our planet, which are closely pressed one day, which death cruelly
disunites, and a second death joins once and forever. And when one survives it is
because a new organism is created in us, and today we are no longer what we
were yesterday. The thoughts of the past, the members of the past, all that we
were yesterday is dead and forever; from the seared trunk of our existence,
science, duty, friendship, paternal, maternal, or filial love cause a new branch to
shoot forth, which reproduces the ancient plant; and the passeby, seeing the same
leaves, the same flowers, the same fruits, believes that only one corpse has been
buried – but he is mistaken. We can survive certain sorrows in one way alone –
accomplishing the miracle of dying today to be born anew tomorrow with the
same name, but with a new life. And for the honour of human nature these
survivors remain faithful and silent priests of the retired god, similar to those
Peruvians who, on the summits of the Andes, among the eternal frosts of the
Sorata, still render homage to the god of their fathers. To understand certain
sorrows is the mark of a lofty mind; to experience them is a martyr’s glory which
refines and ennobles us.

I am very sure that many who weep for love or because they are not loved in
return, because they fear betrayal or have already been deceived, or because they
suffer the bitter disillusion of having burned their incense to an idol of clay or a
statue of marble, will find my description exaggerated, which nevertheless is a
pallid picture of a sorrow that pen of man will never be able to portray faithfully,
but will succeed only in divining from afar. Many think that death, the absolute
evil, in the presence of which perishes every hope, is preferable to the torture
that threatens life yet does not destroy it. To these gentlemen I wish that from
their own experience they may never have occasion to make the cruel
comparison, the assimilated anatomy of two great sorrows, one of which is
termed death, the other desperation. If they truly love, may they die before the
beloved one! This is the sweetest blessing that I can offer them from the pages of
my book.

Love is a passion so fervent, so deep, that it is not to be wondered at should it

have sudden convulsions and instantaneous swoons. Accustomed to dwell in
lofty regions, to feed only on extreme voluptuousness, to vibrate with the highest
notes of sentiment and the delirium of the senses, it can be seized all at once,
when it least expects it, by unreasonable fears, foolish suspicions, inexplicable
restlessness. I do not intend to speak of diffidence, jealousy, nausea, weary
licentiousness, or bitter disillusions, but of a vague and shapeless cloud which
invades the heart that is languid from having felt too deeply, and congeals the
nerves exhausted from excessive quivering. It is a confused hysteria, which from
a slight indisposition can reach the maximum grades of deep bitterness.
An immense love, from whatever source of the heart it gushes forth, is always
followed by a shadow of intense fear. You adore your child; you have left him
for five minutes in the flower bed of your garden, intent on filling his little cart
with sand; he was fresh and rosy as the flowers near him; he was bright as the
sun that gilded his curling locks. Now then, seated at your table, you wish to call
him, I know not why, perhaps to hear the sweet sound of his silvery voice; and
he does not answer; you call him once more, and again silence. He is wholly
intent on his wagon; but you, running in a few seconds through a thousand miles
of thought, have imagined he is dead, that a snake has bitten him, that he has
fainted – who knows what you thought – and with throbbing heart and perspiring
skin you fear to rise, in order to defer a moment the spectacle of a cruel loss. Of
these and other follies we are given a sad and daily spectacle by that love of
loves, which alone was called by this name, the prince and god of all the
amorous sentiments.
Today he kissed me distractedly – he thought of someone else. His love
begins to grow cold; he is already tired of me; he tolerates me because
he has not the courage to tell me that he no longer loves me.

I am too happy, and bliss cannot last. My heart tells me that some
dreadful misfortune awaits me – I know not what, but our love cannot
live much longer in such happiness – I feel like weeping.
He did not notice that I wore in my hair a geranium, his favourite
flower; he no longer loves me.

She is not as lovely by day as by night; perhaps, perhaps – But why do

I make this observation? Is it a sign that she does not please me
sufficiently? A first impression fascinated me. Will I always love her?

My God! She coughed; is she ill? Her aunt died of consumption – she
is very delicate; and if she should die?

Do I love him enough? Do I adore him according to his merits? Am I

worthy of him? Can I preserve for myself the love of such a handsome,
intelligent, and good man?

Today he came to our rendezvous just at the hour appointed, while

formerly he always arrived before the time. He was displeased when I
remarked it to him. He showed me his watch; it was slow. On the
contrary, he should have been proud of my observation and answered
more graciously. He does not love me enough.

I content myself looking at him; I feel happy when he holds my two

hands clasped in his; but he always wants kisses and is never satisfied.
He loves me because I am young and beautiful: he loves me with the
senses and not with the heart. Ah! all men are alike!

Why did he say he could not? Is there anything impossible in love? Is

there something of greater value than a desire of mine? But then this is
not love!

He never perceives that I have changed a gown or a ribbon, and I, on

the contrary, always know the colour of his cravats; I immediately
notice if he has tied the knot before the mirror. He does not observe me
enough; I do many things for him which he never senses. But then he
does not love me!

I have always heard that love is the supreme joy of life: I love and am
loved; and yet I often weep and know not why. But then?
 These are some of the thousand querulous voices which rise spontaneously
from the heart of a lover; but they are not the most unreasonable or the most
sorrowful. Neither the most patient and prolonged observation of human
phenomena nor the most lively fancy could enable us to divine all the trifling
torments that lovers inflict upon themselves, perhaps to obey that cruel law
which, according to some people, wills that no one should be happy on our
planet.
In this field of evil, temperament is everything; there are some to whom may
be applied the phrase of Linnaeus concerning the loves of the cat: Clamando
misere amat.67 For these unfortunates (I have already described them) love is
tinged with so much bitterness, surrounded by so many thorns, that it truly
resembles a brambled meadow all thistles and worm-wood. Suspicious,
melancholy, it fears and examines all things; passes them through the filter,
pulverizes them to find the mite or the poison. In the kiss they seek ice, in the
caress indifference; of the hurricanes of love they appreciate only the damages.
And then even the little honey that love has for all, they wish guarded in so
many tabernacles and under so many seals that they are fortunate if they succeed
in finding and testing it! From a jealous lamentation they fall into a hysterical
soliloquy, and, scarcely issued forth from a gloomy meditation on the infidelity
of man, they fall back like a thunderbolt into the autopsy of a love letter. These
creatures are certainly born unlucky, and even if nature would make them a gift
of a Venus clothed with the Graces, and of an Apollo with the brain of a Jupiter,
they would still be always unhappy, because the bitterness is on their lips and not
in the goblet of love. Terque quaterque68 unfortunate! On their tomb they
engrave the story of their torment: Clamando misere amavit.

There is perhaps no greater torture than that which obliges a human creature to
submit to the caresses of one whom she does not love. And I do not wish to
speak of brutal violence that brings the embrace near to homicide, I relegate it to
the criminal code: in this case we have on one side a human beast that strikes,
bites, sheds the blood of a poor creature who swoons away with terror or
struggles powerlessly in the clutches of a tiger: they are sorrows which belong to
the story of terror, to the bloodiest pages of supreme tortures. I intend to mention
here the caresses that you must accord to a man, because the law, money, or a
surprise of the senses has sold you to him without your having loved him; I
intend to speak of that bitter, secret torture, deep as infinity and which brings the
prostitute very near to the martyr.
These sorrows, among the greatest that the human heart can suffer, were
reserved by a cruel nature almost exclusively to woman. Man, by the special
nature of his aggressive sex, must be urged on to the embrace by an
instantaneous enthusiasm, he must be clouded by a deep lust. In him
voluptuousness can do without love; in him physical love has a joy that suffices
to kindly conceal all that is lacking in him of sentiment and passion. For if
indifference, hatred, contempt absorb him entirely, invading even the last
entrenchments of love, then there is no caress that can revive him, no law human
or divine that can impose upon him a caress which is repugnant. There is no case
in which the ancient theory of free arbitration shows its ridiculous falsity as in
this.
But woman can be all ice, can feel cold shivers of loathing and nausea
pervading her entire body; woman can hate even to the desire of death, can
despise even to abhorrence a man who is beside her; and yet she can in many
cases (in many others she must) submit to the caress. She, cold as ice, with regret
in her heart, hatred on her lips, beholds the ardour of another, who burns but
does not warm her; she sees the sublime enthusiasm, and for her it is but the
height of ridicule; she sees passion, and finds it only grotesque; she sees
impetuosity, and for her it is merely violence; of love, with its flashes, its light,
its perfumes, she sees, smells, touches only a brutal force which abases,
prostitutes, and defiles her; an endless shivering in a sea of nausea!
When woman is in the mire through her own fault she certainly could not be
more cruelly punished. The immensity of prostitution is avenged with
numberless outrages; the holiest thing is plunged down, down into the most fetid
mire; the greatest joy is substituted by the greatest shame. But when, on the
contrary, the daughter of Eve is brought to this sacrifice of the body by the
tyranny of the laws, by the perverse guiding of the moral education; when she
finds herself led to that cruel misfortune through ignorance or through the fault
of others; oh, then, if she does not yet possess the scepticism that heals the heart
or the cynicism that arms it, if she still knows what modesty is, if she still
remembers love’s pulsations, oh, then, that poor woman drinks drop by drop the
most cruel torture that any creature can endure; then she passes through a long
and cruel agony.
To have dreamed for years and years of the promised land of love, to have
reached it through the reveries of childhood and of the rosy dawn of
adolescence; to have had an immense, a horrible fear of dying before having
loved; to have loved and to love, to feel a volcano in the heart, to be at the gates
of paradise and through a portal ajar to inhale the inebriating perfumes, and then,
after all this, to behold oneself transformed into a vessel which satisfies the
thirst, to feel in the viscera a roaring beast, to be obliged to perform the functions
of a purgative, to take part in the régime of a man, like magnesia or leeches –
truly this is a torture more cruel than any the inquisitors ever invented; it is really
too great a sorrow for one weak creature!
And in fact, besides a boundless cynicism that with the pulsations of the
embrace counts the money, and a blessed and stupid thoughtlessness which in
love sees but a pleasing diversion, there is only a supreme counsel of duty that
can make of woman a martyr, that can force a human heart to accept so much
torture.
How many volumes of meditations, how many abysses of desperation fall in a
few seconds upon the head of a woman caressed by a man whom she does not
love! How much eloquence in certain periods of silence, which Ovid, the
libertine, eagerly advised women to avoid! Many a time a man presses to his
breast a creature whom he does not love, whom he prostitutes too thoughtlessly,
while the victim meditates a long and cruel revenge. More than one adultery,
more than one assassination have been thought of, discussed, sworn to in that
instant, in which man, enjoying the supreme bliss, believed himself to have in
his arms a happy creature. Many an embrace is the father of twins, generating a
new man and a new hatred: a hatred tenacious and bitter, which only the death of
the one who hates can cancel, since it often survives the death of the person
hated.
O men, who in love see only a chalice to empty, and in matrimony find only
an association of two capitals or a mechanism for reproducing the species,
remember that for many creatures love is the first and the last of passions, the
first and the last of joys; and remember that for very many women, whom you
care nothing about, whom perhaps you despise, love is life.
There is no man born weak or sickly who cannot become robust when he
enjoys the climate, food, and physical and moral atmosphere that agree with
him. And I believe the same is true of love. If we could dedicate half a century to
the search for the right woman, and if to Diogenes’s lamp69 there could be
adapted the electric light which modern science concedes to us, certainly among
the millions of men who walk the earth we could and should be able to find the
one who would be happy with us and make us happy. Unfortunately, life is too
short, and love is too rapid and exacting in its desires, to render such a research
possible, and even to the most fortunate and wisest, a part of happiness is always
among the unknown quantities that chance determines, and not reflection. Hence
the many and beautiful natures tied by love-knots and still not happy, because
the characters fit in many sides of the great human polygon and not in all.
The study of these oppositions, of these partial incompatibilities would
require a moral analysis of the entire man, of all his social surroundings, and
many of these pains do not belong solely to love but are the result of all human
affections, and poison friendship, fraternal, filial, and paternal love: some,
however, belong especially to the love of loves.
To feel in the same hour, at the same moment, in the same degree the stimulus
of a desire or the thirst for a caress is a rare thing, a fortunate coincidence which
gilds with the most beautiful rays the happiest hours of life; it can never be the
daily bread of bliss. In all other cases the thirst arises in one of the two and is
transmitted to the other, so that spark calls forth spark, the caress generates
caresses. It is an invitation of lips, a striking of wings, it is a harmonious note
which from a branch calls to the branch; but it is always the invitation to a
rendezvous, it is ever the awakening of one who slumbers. In these invitations,
in these first skirmishes, the ridiculous runs parallel to, and very near, the
sublime. Love is between them, it is true, and will never permit them to unite;
but the least inattention, the least dishonest or listless movement can cause the
two elements to touch; and the ridiculous, there where it touches, wounds
selfishness and with it love.
Even to the most impatient, the most ridiculous, the most grotesque desires,
throw at once the mantle of love to cover them. Every threat of ridicule
disappears then in smoke, any wounding of selfishness is impossible, and I
address myself to woman, because oftener than we she has occasion to repair
these damages, because she has her hand ready to aid and is delicate in healing.
Woe to you if your companion must blush through your fault, because you knew
not the time and place to close the eyes or extend the pitying veil of your hand or
your love!
How much bitterness, how much spite and contempt, how many thorns and
nettles are found on the blooming path of the most fervid passion, just because
delicacy of sentiment does not always know how to reconcile the incompatibility
of the senses, because a too exacting modesty insults the lively ardour of the
temperament, or woman does not condemn with wise perception the hungry
demands, dictated by selfishness and not by love! Fleeing, one loses and
conquers; remaining, one loses and conquers; but many flee when they should
remain, remain when they should flee; hence many defeats, in which conquerors
and conquered remain discontented, and love often lies down imbrued in its own
blood.
 The tortures, the contempt, the bitterness, the weariness, the torments of love
must be deeply studied, because they move side by side with joy and
voluptuousness, and very few are the fortunate ones who do not stumble. Much
luck, a thorough knowledge of men, many arts can defend us; so that at the end
of our career we can bless love, which together with some slight sorrow has
perfumed life with its most beautiful flowers.
I have indicated here only some of the torments which populate the hell of
love; but their number is infinite, their name is legion. In every field of
sentiment, of the senses, and of intellect man possesses a much greater
possibility of suffering than of enjoying, and when bliss is attained and we cut
off the veins from which oozes forth the bitter sap of sorrow, it is always after a
long, rough battle, in which we defend ourselves with all the weapons of nature
and art. Here also, perhaps, more than anywhere else, the weight of genius is
revealed in all its power, together with the influence of a noble and generous
character. The ardent, impetuous heart is not a source of greater amorous
bitterness when together with it there burns the calm light of reason; when the
sublime incapacity to act basely accompanies the desire for the good; when we
enjoy more the pleasure we give than that which we receive.
Even weak and defective natures are strengthened and set upright when they
lean against the robust columns of an affectionate and disdainful nature; even the
angry rancours of little hearts lose their bitterness in the calm blue ocean of a
character all sweetness and nobility. We should revel in all love’s joys, refuse or
quench all its sorrows.
 Chapter 19
The Degradations of Love
Love, being the most powerful known agitator of human elements, stirs up the
slime which is found in the noblest natures, while in men kneaded with mire it
becomes the greatest coefficient of vice and crime. Love, like all the other
sentiments, has a pathology of its own and a superior one, because it extends its
sphere of action into a larger field and has more powerful needs to satisfy. The
man who would not be capable of baseness even though dying of hunger, even
when about to lose all that he holds most dear, can compromise with conscience
where there is a question of love, and many, many blemishes stain the textures of
the noblest and loftiest natures. Love wants to possess us with our hands and feet
bound, to have us in its possession, as the Jesuits wish to have their neophytes
perinde ac cadaver.70 This is an inexhaustible source of degradation and crime.
The degradations of love are as innumerable as the sands of the sea, and are
as many as love’s delights; they are of every magnitude, and can adapt
themselves to every degree of human baseness. It seems to me, however, that in
a general study of physiology they can be reduced to two principal forms,
impotency and prostitution.
Impotency is not only a disease that should receive the attention of the
physician and the hygienist, it is not only a case for the legislator, but a moral
degradation that must be thoroughly studied by the psychologist who seeks to
trace the natural story of love.
In the simplest organism of the inferior animal, every desire of love ceases
when age, disease, or a wound has exhausted every energy of the genital organs.
In man, on the contrary, the most irresistible and beastly wants are so
complicated with the psychical elements of the moral and intellectual world as to
survive the organic disease. The innocent man loves before he is conscious of his
manhood, and a woman can die of love and yet know nothing of the existence of
the womb. It is very true that in the perfect eunuch every amorous note is silent,
or, if we behold the phantoms of a strange lasciviousness wandering here and
there, they are spectres that belong to the limbo of transcendent pathology. These
poor pariahs of nature are, however, very rare; while our rickety civilization
fabricates by hundreds the semi-eunuchs who fill with cuckold ornaments the
sanctuary of the family and the low world of wandering loves. The statistics,
fortunately, cannot give the exact number of these ‘semi-men’ and consign them
to the inexorable files; it is enough for us to know that they are much more
numerous than feminine virtue and patience can tolerate.
True love is not all sentiment or thought, but it is also a function of
reproductive life, it is also a need of the senses. Martyrs and saints have
mutilated themselves and died happy in consequence; but the human majority
does not consist of saints and martyrs. Every mutilation of love is a disgrace and
the most fecund generator of many other minor degradations. In the chaste and
fresh dawn of youth, many a woman has consented unknowingly to an infamous
agreement in which a man offered her a great name, great riches in exchange for
a ‘yes.’ The wretched man loved her, desired her, but he could not possess her as
nature commanded man to possess woman, he wished to own the temple without
having the right to enter. Sometimes the eunuch confessed his shame before
betrayal, and the innocent maiden did not understand and accepted the contract.
Who does not believe himself a hero or a martyr at this age? And the eunuch
embraced the precious booty, inundated it with sterile kisses, and endeavoured to
warm it with his impotent caresses; and the marble statue of adolescent virginity
trembled with new and incomprehensible emotions. Later on the virgin
perceived that she was a woman, that she was one in vain, and love seized virtue,
ruined it, notwithstanding its clamours, and the agreement sworn to in good faith
was cancelled by the omnipotence of the affections. How many domestic
misfortunes, what a fruitful sprinkling of bastards, how many brigands spring
forth from this filthy source!
Real eunuchs, half eunuchs, quarter eunuchs, do not hope to be loved by a
woman on whom you have imposed an infamous contract; no virtue is sufficient,
no oath can resist the sacred laws of love: nothing is stronger than nature. And if
you have found a heroine, why make of her a martyr? Do you want to be the
executioner of her whom you say you love? And you, generous women, noble
women, who can elevate to the highest regions even the basest passions, do not
consent to an agreement that requires a mutilation of love. You, teachers of every
kind of sacrifice, think to make happy an outcast of nature; you impose upon
yourselves, smiling perhaps, the sublime mission of redeeming a desperate
creature; but I assure you neither virtue, sacrifice, nor heroism can stifle that
formidable cry of the universe of the living that wants you to be spouse and
mother. While the martyr, with the palm of sacrifice clutched tightly in her hand,
will try to smile, a cruel spasm of the viscera will say to her, ‘You, Eve and
daughter of Eve, will become a mother only by means of a crime; you will enter
the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the tabernacle of matrimony through the door of
domestic treachery.’
No, love is not all senses and lust; sentiment can pervade it to such an extent
as to conceal voluptuousness in the most secret of hidden recesses. No, woman
can be happy without voluptuousness, provided she feels herself loved; but she
wishes to and should love ‘a man.’ I appeal to all the daughters of Eve, and, in
order to be spared a blush, they reply with a nod of the head and without moving
their lips: is it not true that they would prefer a hundred times to be loved by a
‘real man,’ even with a vow of chastity, rather than to be profaned and gorged
with lust by the hands of a eunuch? Is it not true that they want to lean on that
strong column called an honourable man? And certainly he is not a man, who,
having lost his manhood, presumes to possess a woman and be loved by her.
The semi-men who at forty, at fifty years of age aspire to become the head of
a family, after having trailed the half of their virility through the lasciviousness
of prostitution and the gastronomy of the erotic kitchen, never suppose that
lechery can take the place of true love in a woman. They may prostitute their
spouse, but they can never make her love them deeply and seriously. They are
called upon by the inexorable laws of nature to give the largest contingent to
predestined husbands.
When impotency falls like a thunderbolt on the head of two happy lovers, it is
only a disease, it is a misfortune that concerns the physician and the pharmacist;
but when it precedes love, it is a baseness, a degradation, an infamy. The honest
man never attempts to conceal it, to justify it; he either courageously renounces
love, which is something that does not concern him, or he exposes the sore and
invokes the aid of the surgeon. He becomes a man again, and then sees if he can
be a lover and husband; he cures the flesh, and then sees if he can aspire to the
delights of sentiment. Before he becomes a farmer he possesses some land.
The complicated mechanism of our social organism, in the same manner that
it offers to the thirst of ardent youth voluptuousness without love, imposes on
many lovers, with more cruel amputation, love without voluptuousness; two
chief sources of the thousand sorrows that human society prepares for those who
love: ‘voluptuousness minus love,’ that is, all the shame and degradation of
prostitution; ‘love minus voluptuousness,’ namely, all the tortures of enforced
chastity. Between these two hells the enamoured youth remains a long time
suspended, until, in order to survive, he ships lechery and fancy in a gloomy old
barge and away he flees with them to hide among the cane reeds and marshes of
self-abuse – greatest of the degradations of love and which occupies a
convenient place between impotency and prostitution. Yes, as man should enjoy
the Olympus of love, he should also submit to its degradations. He is an animal
that prostitutes himself and makes love without the female; he is an animal that
buys and sells voluptuousness or fabricates it for himself in the familiar shell of
the basest egotism. Man, in love, is monogamous and polygamous. How rich in
resources, how multiform in loves!
In the book which I will dedicate to the hygiene of love this problem will be
thoroughly studied; here I will indicate only what concerns the physiology of
sentiment. It is sad to say, but true: our modern society has rendered love so
difficult to many unhappy creatures as to make them pass under the Caudine
Forks71 of this cruel dilemma: either to buy voluptuousness and with it
counterfeit love, or in the mire of lasciviousness to dream of love. In one way or
the other we are condemned to be counterfeiters, and to blush before ourselves at
the manner in which we satisfy the most powerful of human needs.
Self-abuse is not only a sin of hygiene which destroys health and vigour, but
also a moral offence and the poison of happiness. He who is frequently obliged
to blush and who repeatedly falls again into the same crime tarnishes daily the
limpid purity of his own dignity; weakens daily the strong spring of virile
intentions; and daily makes himself more cowardly for all the battles of life.
While he blushes for himself and curses himself and the love that condemns him
to a daily abasement, he blushes more than ever in the presence of woman, of
whom he does not feel worthy and of whom at each fall he feels less worthy. He
poisons the wave of love in its first sources, and even when later on he succeeds
in loving, he has spoiled the purity of his tastes, of his aspirations, and in the
arms of a woman who loves him he complains of the solitary twinges of a
diseased voluptuousness resembling in everything the one who, having burned
his mouth with the pungent aromas of the pipe and brandy, can no longer relish
the perfumes of the pineapple and strawberry.
Love is the greatest of conquests, the sweetest of delights, it is the joy of joys;
to renounce it in order to supplant it with degradation is worse than a crime, it is
an infamy. Better a hundred times chastity with its sublime tortures; better a
hundred times prostitution with its mire. True and complete love is the splendid
banquet under the fragrant trees of a garden, among the harmonies of music and
the merry badinage of friends: solitary love is the furtive meal of a bone gnawed
in the dark and taken from the fetidness of a dunghill.
Prostitution is, after self-abuse, the greatest degradation of love, and, what is
worse – it should be said at once – in modern society it is a necessary
degradation. Tibullus hurls at it a splendid malediction:

Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primus

Quisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis.72
 This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every age, could not prevent for
one day alone the sale of love, and universal experience demonstrates that St
Augustine was a sound philosopher when he wrote, ‘Aufer meretrices de rebus
humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarurm loco, labe ac
dedecore dehonestaveris.’73 If St Augustine had written but this sentence alone, I
would proclaim him a thorough psychologist; in a few words he has indicated all
the phases of the tremendous problem, he has given a lesson of toleration to the
intolerant, a lesson of social science to economists, and today, after so many
centuries, his words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he pronounced
them to a world so different to ours. Today Alfieri also, in his memoirs, speaking
of woman, did not blush to write, ‘As the health of my soul had become again a
thousand times dearer to me than that of the body, I endeavoured and succeeded
in my efforts to flee always from the virtuous.’
Difficult problems are not solved by fleeing from them or concealing them;
and yet many physicians, many philosophers attempt to solve the most burning
questions of modern society after the manner of a child, who, closing the eyes,
thinks to flee from the dog that threatens him. Catholicism has only one method
of solving the problem, and the moralist of its school proclaims it to the four
winds, now with a touching, pathetic voice, now in angry and threatening tones.
The city of Rome, one of the most corrupt in the world, bears a horrible
testimony of the fruit derived from public morality. I never wondered at this
morality nor at its unavoidable consequences; but I certainly wept when I found
physicians allied to Catholic intolerance. To Dr Monlan in Spain and Dr Bergeret
in France, who thought to save society by abolishing prostitution, I replied in a
few words which I wish to save from the shipwreck of journalism in order to
gather them in the shadow of this book.
I have never wondered at finding some philosopher who studies man in
Fichte or in Kant without ever having touched the palpitating viscera,
or examined a fibre with the microscope; and who advises the legislator
to destroy in the social organism with iron and fire that livid and
cancerous spot called prostitution; I have never raised the hue and cry
of fright or of miracle when I heard the auto-da-fé invoked against
cases of toleration by some moralist who has had the singular fortune to
be born without the sixth sense; or the still rarer merit of smothering it
with the extinguisher of an iron will. But when I hear these intolerant
cries from the mouth of a physician, I shake my head diffidently, and
with a compassionate voice I ask myself, Is he really a physician? It
 this moralist perhaps someone who has seen man in a convulsive
delirium and, cold and hard, has cut into his flesh on the chilly marble
of the anatomical hall? Is he who hurls the anathema at prostitution
really the physician, who should serve as a kind link between the
legislator, who in man sees only an accused person to punish, and the
philanthropist, who in him considers but an unhappy creature to heal
and help?

These questions and other similar ones I addressed to the illustrious Spanish
physician Monlan, when he proposed to his government the absolute suppression
of houses of ill fame; and then I had the pleasure of seeing my poor words
printed in the progressive Spanish medical journals. Now I make the same
reproach to Dr Bergeret, who, in one of his memoirs on prostitution in the
villages and small towns of France, flung an anathema against that caustic
wound which civilization has opened in the diseased flesh of the modern social
organism; and I, with a sad air, repeat to the French physician a melancholy Tu
quoque, fili mi?74
Bergeret lost much time and ink in narrating lurid stories of what occurs in
French country towns. And who is ignorant of these stories? We have the same
in Italy, in Germany; the same things must happen in every land where there are
men who love and suffer, who get drunk and seek out prostitutes; wherever the
eye of authority cannot penetrate into the fissures of the social edifice, where lie
concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But from the deploring of
the evil results of clandestine prostitution to the destroying of all toleration there
is an abyss that must not be crossed by the physician and the legislator on the
waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but over the solid bridge of a wise criticism.
Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn vice
in houses of ill fame; but without taverns would there be no assassins,
without pharmacists would there be no poisoning cases, without
manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would there be no wars?
And who, pray tell me, makes houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers,
poisons, firearms, if not man himself, that man whom you ought to be
able to understand, if it is true that you also are made of the same
dough? Your morality is that of the inquisitor who burns the sinner
whom he cannot convert; it is as false and coarse as that of the
legislator who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of
the guilty; it is that of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the
 member that with a wiser and more compassionate science he should
preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the inquisitor’s
stake; it has more faith in books than in prisons and halters, more
confidence in preservative medicine than in the surgeon’s knife. And as
long as the social organism is diseased, as long as it is a poor creature
saturated with evil humours, with many carious bones and many
scrofulous tumors, we kindly cauterize the flesh to keep it alive, to
diverge in more ignoble parts those acrid humours that would poison
the sources of life, until with the tonic cure of education we succeed in
renewing the blood in the veins of this old invalid, and then strengthen
flesh, bones, and nerves and make of them something new.

This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we wish

to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician keeps a
precious sore open which saves the life of a diseased organism; and
believe me, worthy ultramontane colleague, that when life will no
longer be threatened and the organism will be strengthened, we will
heal this wound also, together with many others now bleeding. We will
then close the houses of voluptuousness, when every man can have a
nest of his own, and when love will not be a crime for anyone.75

Lubbock76 attempted lately an ethnography on prostitution: I will delineate it

still more completely in my ‘Pictures of Human Nature;’ here we must occupy
ourselves only with the sale of love as it is carried on in our European society.
There are some savage races who do not prostitute themselves: no civilized
nation lacks prostitutes; on the contrary, every country, even the most moral, has
the refined and very refined, the low and very low. Not in all countries are
prostitutes cynically named according to the price they require for their favours,
as in Persia, where they are termed the fifty tomans,77 the twenty tomans, etc.;
but everywhere a tariff rates the hierarchy of vice and a scale of lechery.
Alexander Severus did not wish the money collected from taxes on houses of
prostitution to enter the treasury; and Ulpian, his minister, devoted it to the
maintenance of the theatres and public health. With youthful sagacity the
government of Brazil devotes to the circumspection of vice the money received
from the sale of decorations and titles of nobility. In our country a tax is levied
on lechery, but they dare not enter it on the state ledgers, and it goes toward
increasing the secret funds, destined for the rule or misrule of that pandemonium
of our modern society called quaestorship, espionage, electoral broils, etc.
Wherever we find women who sell themselves, we also find, to our honour, that
society is ashamed of this stain, conceals it, and is silent; and a great mystery of
a mephitic air hangs heavily over the simony of love.
A thousand muddy streamlets bear their tribute to prostitution; but the source
of all is the same powerful one; in man the brutal appetite for voluptuousness, in
woman the frightful want of bread or licentiousness, or of licentiousness and
bread at the same time. And unfortunately woman can sell, at all hours, five
minutes of voluptuousness without love, without desire; she can sell herself with
nausea in her heart and hatred on her lips. And the joy she sells is paid for
according to the requirements of beauty, luxury, manner, according to the
infamous art with which she feigns pleasure and counterfeits love. Procurers and
procuresses hasten to the market of lechery to feel the flesh of the precious
victims, to fatten the lean, and to buy the plump at the greatest advantage; and in
the shadow of the law they conceal in the lurid or gilded prisons of prostitution
that trembling herd of youth and shame. And there are found shut up in the same
atmosphere obscure martyrs of love and many affected with nymphomania;
victims of hunger and victims of ignorance; fallen angels and filthy demons – all
the lowest depths of feminine society.
And there, at the sound of a bell which seems to call a victim to the scaffold;
at the creak of a door that seems to open a prison or a galley, a human female
must run, smiling, to a man who, without love, without ever having seen her
before, for a few pennies or a few francs can make her his own, insult her in
what woman holds most sacred, and can make of it dung for his intoxication and
tainted drivelling for his most obscene lusts. If at least the money were hers,
earned with so much shame; if she could with that filthy lucre, accumulated with
so many tears and so much frivolity, dream of a ransom, a real oblivion of the
past in distant lands! But no: that money is restored to the mistress of the place,
to her who buys and fattens those anonymous chickens of universal lechery; for
them suffice the bread that nourishes and the silk gown loaned at illegal interest,
which serves as a bait for the blackbirds.
And there, in those dark haunts of licentiousness, man forgets how to love,
there he loses daily the holy poetry of the heart and the mysterious quiverings of
sentiment, there he prostitutes the most gigantic forces of thought and affection.
Without hunger one partakes there of delicious food, without thirst men become
intoxicated, without the necessity of overcoming modesty one obtains
everything, and money levels all virtue and concedes the wildest polygamy; and
there one sees the nude and chaste statue of love trailed in the fetid mire by a
merry, tipsy crowd. Behold the love that modern civilization offers to the
hundred thousand pariahs who cannot find a straw wherewith to weave the
chaste family nest; to all those who cannot make a vow of chastity, and who do
not wish to betray an innocent maiden or violate the wife of others.
Our civil society can really be proud of this: the philanthropists with their
tearful dirges, the economists with their wise reflections, the legislators with
their elaborate codes can all chant in chorus hosanna to the stupendous solution
of the problem. Either a starving family or prostitution; children cast on the
dunghill of misery or faith betrayed in the house of a friend; degradation or
crime. Stupendous dilemmas that crown our society with a wilderness of horns,
that sow betrayal, hunger, and corruption everywhere. If the rotten trunk of our
modern civilization were not covered by a thick rind, what a horrible spectacle
would be presented to us! And when a sincere moralist, when a true philosopher
attempts to split the bark, and through a little fissure would show us the thorough
rottenness, we flee appalled, raising the hue and cry of sacrilege and impudence.
There where modern society is pitifully and modestly wise is when, although
cursing prostitution, it tolerates and oversees it as a senile wound that preserves
the old social organism from a deadly corruption. And we should do likewise,
until civil progress will have conceded to all men a woman and a nest; until
progressive education will have given many to understand and enjoy the holy
delights of chastity. As we are constituted at present, prostitution, with its
degradation, infamy, and gangrene, is a hundred times preferable to the
proletarians who abandon their offspring on the public roads; a hundred times
better the purchased voluptuousness, than domestic treachery, habitual adultery,
and matrimony made the illicit trade of capital and the friendly shadow of
polygamy; a hundred times better voluptuousness cruelly wrenched away from
love, than friendship betrayed and love contaminated in the sanctuary of the
family, and all society saturated with the cancerous sap of false virtue and
profound lechery that kills it slowly but surely.
In this country the government should handle prostitution as a malady to be
treated, not because there is any hope of cure, but because society owes to every
sick person a physician and a bed. It should not be permitted to spread, to parade
its lurid sores, to cover itself with tinsel and false gems; but it should be pitifully
guarded as in a hospital, so that it may awaken in the passerby compassion
instead of lechery. If some people, cynically audacious, write on certain houses,
‘Here is enjoyment,’ I would write these more appropriate words: ‘Here is
weeping, and here the healthy become diseased.’
And while the state watches and guards, writers and teachers should raise the
level of general culture and teach the elect the paradise of chastity, which
contains a treasure of delights for the future (that the libertine will never be able
to understand) and preserves for true love, which all may hope to attain, the
infinite joys of a virgin voluptuousness. And every one of us should teach men
that prostitution, even in extreme cases, should be but a question of hygiene, and
can never be substituted for or united to true love. The sale of love should
neither be proclaimed as a feast of the human family nor officially suppressed,
because then it overflows all the paths of society; it should be tolerated and
pitied, as we tolerate and pity many other maladies of our social organism.
To reach this sublime goal, to at least hope to attain it, we must above all
scrape off the hundred coats of hypocrisy of modern love; we must not permit
our children to learn love as a crime in the houses of vice, but immediately, at
the first dawn of youth, they should be taught that it is a sublime delight
conceded to the good and excellent, and must be attained in the same manner as
glory and riches. No, the chambermaid or the prostitute should not be the first
mistress of love; she should be a modest and pious maiden, a woman who
teaches us love before voluptuousness, who teaches us to be chaste in the desire
to possess her some day. I dare to suppose that this, my poor Physiology of Love,
may be read by a youth and contribute to his virtue. Today, while we do not even
permit a maiden to direct her gaze to a sympathetic youth, and to our sons,
already men, we do not concede the right to desire and to love, the innocence
which we think to guard with an Arcadian and ridiculous rigour plunges into the
mire of domestic concubinage, solitary lasciviousness, corrupted prostitution.
We conceal and with silence think to suppress the passions and suffocate
desire; but we have concealed too much and have been silent too long. In the
most reserved country in the world, England, one of the most honest and wisest
physicians of London published a book that has already reached the ninth
edition, in which he frankly dared to assert that free love, without fecundation, is
the only remedy against the proteiform corruption that invades modern society,
on account of the impossibility which the majority find of morally satisfying one
of the most powerful needs. I do not agree with the English physician, who
wrote anonymously in order not to offend the delicate susceptibility of those
dear to him; but in the perusal of the book I stop in sad surprise, as one stretches
the ear at the sound of the tocsin. When in England they can write such a book
and devour nine editions; when an honest physician can calmly discuss
preventive intercourse; when Malthus finds so ardent and eloquent a
commentator, who brings his theory from the field of economy into that of
morality, hygiene, and even religion, I must affirm that society is thoroughly
diseased, and should be cured.
Yes, modern society, which, tainted with so much prostitution and adultery,
daily proclaims itself monogamous and is largely polygamous, demands a
physician to cure its sores, to cleanse it from all degradation, to concede it loves
more free and virtuous, at least less deformed with mire and lies. And this
physician should have a morality less false and less exacting, but at the same
time more exalted, because more human; it should be a morality that teaches us
never to separate voluptuousness from love; that teaches us chastity as the most
beautiful and holiest of joys, as the most watchful guardian of true love.
Even today the elect never resort to prostitution themselves, because they
love, and because, having once entered the paradise of love, they are too
reluctant to descend to the mire of the simony of voluptuousness. The few elect
should exert themselves with all their strength so that the masses too may elevate
themselves to the high spheres in which they dwell, where, as the air they
breathe is purer, they also cull more beautiful flowers.
 Chapter 20
The Faults and Crimes of Love
If you ask a hundred women what is the most common fault of love, very
probably the same reply will be repeated a hundred times: ‘Love is inconstant,
love is a liar.’ If, on the other hand, you consult the gloomy volumes wherein
man collects the statistics of his crimes, you will find an extraordinary number of
suicides and homicides for love’s sake; will you not find inconstancy noted, and
rarely, scattered here and there, will you run across some case of adultery. The
jury then, in which amorphous and chaotic mass every idea of right and guilt is
dissolved and tempered, always inflicts slight punishments for crimes fined in
the code with the penalty of death or the galley, and often absolves homicides
committed for love’s sake. What a confusion of ideas, what contradictions in the
customs and laws of a people; what a cruel irony of paradoxes in man who
would be an angel in his laws, who is a tiger and serpent in the paths of life, and
calls to the tribunal of justice a body of men all at once elevated to the rank of
judges and who can in a sudden emotion applaud or hiss him, send him to the
clamorous triumph of the public square or to the slow agony of the prison cell.
Nowhere does such heavy darkness reign as on the field of love, where an
intricate mass of reticence, contradictions, toleration, and cruelty causes
common sense to stumble at every step, and, what is worse, offends and wounds
the sentiment of justice. It is written in the laws that adultery is a crime, subject
to the gravest penalties, and in practical life adultery is the most common and
most venial sin we know; it is not only tolerated but celebrated, and almost
admitted as a social institution. According to law, homicide is punishable with
death, and many who have become assassins for love’s sake are borne in triumph
by the people, or at least absolved. The incitement to prostitution is considered a
very serious crime, and many gowned legislators sell their daughter to a rich
husband who cannot love her, who will never love her, and who will drag her
down to the irresistible necessity of adultery. And this is not prostitution? Either
man is not worthy of the laws which he imposes on himself, or he is lost in a
dizzy maze; he is either an arrogant blockhead or a brazen liar.
Man is a little of all this, but he is chiefly a hypocrite. He proclaims solemnly
to the four winds that he is a son of God and that he inhabits the earth by chance:
born in Olympus, he will return there soon and forever. He is a god sojourning in
the country who adapts himself to play and eat with the rustics; but he is winged
and lives only on the ideal. A moment after, he forgets his proclamations, his
flourish of trumpets, and proves himself more than ever an animal of the soil; he
revises the sad contrast between what he has said and what he has done, covers
himself, and retreats in confusion. Here is the immutable formula of his eternal
contradictions. In love he lies more frequently and more brazenly than in any
other case. He has supposed for a moment that love could be just, and hence
measured according to the reckoning of the other sentiments, and above all
levelled by the yoke of the other affections. And yet love can possess all virtues;
it can be pitiful, heroic, gracious, generous, but it can never be just; born in
injustice, it lives on injustice and dies of injustice: it has but one right, strength;
it possesses only one weapon, power.
When betrayed love arms itself with a homicidal knife, I brand that crime
among the most inevitable of instantaneous hatred and of the most natural
revenge; when one imposes love as a duty on a maiden and instead of love a
hatred is born, and instead of affection there springs up contempt, I note that
love cannot be ordered at a fixed hour like a dinner, and that if bastards are born
of the obscene union of gold and vanity, love has nothing to do with it, because
love was absent; and he who can prove an alibi is at once pardoned by the most
cruel and headstrong of public prosecutors. When I see love killing dignity,
friendship, the holiest affections of the heart, when I behold it breaking with
furious rage the iron grating of the cage in which a cruel code of laws has
imprisoned it, I absolve it instantly, because love is not a wild beast that can be
shut up in a seraglio, but a creature free as the air, that lives on light and burning
suns, on the aroma of the forest and the fragrance of the fields. You have
rendered it hydrophobic through hunger and thirst; you have made it furious with
your violence, and you complain because the madman bites and kills? As there is
an immense inequality between that which the laws require and that of which
human loves are capable, men, by universal consent, shrug their shoulders and
forgive; forgive always, forgive all even there where human justice should rise in
all the solemn grandeur of its majesty to guard the holiest rights of the family
and society. In the laws, love is often a crime; in the paths of life, it is for the
very rigorous at the most a weakness – a dear, a sympathetic weakness.
For me hypocrisy is an intricate mass that chokes love in modern society, and
I dare to affirm that the only fault, the only crime that this sentiment can commit
is falsehood. Let us commence to tear off the leprosy that infects, devours,
vituperates it, and then we will see what remains sound in that dear, naked, and
virginal love that Mother Nature has conceded us. Let us first save the life of this
poor creature, and then we will see if it has other misfortunes, if it can commit
other crimes besides that of lying.
 Today, in my opinion, love is a liar from head to foot; it is a liar when it
swears and forswears; it is a liar when a hundred times a day it pronounces the
words eternal, eternity, eternally; it is a liar in law and in life; it is unfaithful, it
is a thief, a traitor solely because it is a liar. I may have a Scipionian mania, my
head may be full of my delenda Carthag;78 but if I should be obliged to reply to
him who would ask me, ‘Which are the true, the great loves?’ I would reply
without hesitation, ‘The sincere’ ‘Which are the happy loves?’ ‘The sincere.’ All
the faults of love are all lies, almost all the misfortunes of love are daughters of
untruth; and finally, adultery is nothing but the most infamous of love’s lies.
What is, I will ask in my turn, the only remedy for unhappy loves, the only
anchor of salvation for betrayed loves? Sincerity, sincerity, nothing but sincerity.
At the risk of beholding many disciples and masters of love smiling
sceptically, I will say at once that woman, from the first day she loves, is less
given to lying than we. Man, in his first declarations, even when he is not quite
sure that he loves, swears instantly, swears an eternity of infinite affection; while
woman, more modest, more reserved, replies that she does not love yet, that she
has not yet consulted her heart, that perhaps she will love. The less one swears
the less one forswears; and if a holy horror of the oath can hinder some fiery
accent, some inebriation of amorous expansion, it gives nevertheless to the
human word a masculine stamp of dignity, which makes it blessed among
women, while it gives to the sexual relations a character of mild reserve and
delicate serenity. Man often uses the eternal oaths as weapons of seduction, and
parades them at every hour, as a measure of the endless depths of his love; but
sometimes he swears sincerely, honestly, because there is no more eager creator
of eternity and infinity than armed desire. And only too often is the hasty and
imprudent oath the fecund father of lies and most fruitful grandparent of
infidelity.
Eternal loves are rare as geniuses, Venuses, and Apollos. We all anxiously
climb the hill of the ideal, but few can gather a branch or a leaf of the sacred
tree. The lower orders of loves last some years, some months; there are some as
transient as the ephemera, for which the life of a day is long. Now then,
frankness can give to all loves the baptism of honesty, and even a frivolous man
can die without amorous remorse, because his loves were all vulgar but honest.
He has loved much and transiently, but he has never been guilty of an untruth, he
has never perjured himself.
Sometimes people tell lies through compassion, and woman, more frequently
than we, endeavouring in vain to preserve the life of a dying love, dislikes to
cruelly wound the companion who still loves her, and she strives with a cruel
effort to deceive herself and him, until with habitual hypocrisy she succeeds in
feigning a love that no longer exists; and from the lie to betrayal the road is short
and slippery. The lie at first was pitiful, then it grew to a habit, until it became
transformed into crime.
No, lovers or husbands, companions of voluptuousness or vestals of the
family, never tell an untruth, even when the same is suggested to you by pity. It
is hard, it is cruel to see the blooming tree of a happy passion rooted up by a
sudden hurricane; tremendous is the rending of a heart that breaks in a day under
the shock of an atrocious disillusion; but these are sorrows that do not abase and
that, capable of killing us, do not humiliate us. Love killed by violence remains
stretched on the beautiful soil like a thunderstruck angel, and memory crowns it,
and with the most precious aromas and balsams preserves it from the larvae of
putrefaction. Love killed by the lingering decay of a secret betrayal is a leper
who dies in the fetidness of a hospital, a horror to himself and others; it is a
corpse slowly corroded by phthisis and scrofula, and which leaves no trace
whatever of the time in which it too was a young and robust organism.
False and cruel is the pity that causes us to simulate a love which no longer
exists. No sorrow is greater than that which a betrayal inflicts upon us: love,
selfishness, self-love, love of ownership, all the warmest and most powerful
human affections are lacerated at the same time, and the pain is so intense that it
poisons life with wormwood and gall. How beautiful, on the contrary, how
sublime is a love that, without swearing eternity and infinity, lasts as long as two
human hearts throb with the same affection; how beautiful a love that needs no
chains, and lives on faith and liberty!
To love means to belong entirely to one alone; to be loved signifies to have
become a living part of another: the lie begins when, with cynical licentiousness,
the man or woman divide themselves in two parts, and give to one person the
body, to the other (as it is termed) the soul. Love is a whole that cannot be
divided without killing it, and, unless voluptuousness is made a base question of
hygiene, one cannot and should not love two human creatures at the same time
without betraying both. I esteem much more highly a woman who, after a long
career of facile loves, can say, ‘I have never loved two men at the same time,’
than I do a bigoted matron who boasts to her confessor and to God of having
never betrayed the duties of a spouse, because with wise and cautious lechery
she could sell voluptuousness without seriously compromising the property
reserved to the husband.
Lies are all infamous; but in love there are the venial and the perfidious: it is
one thing to deceive an old libertine and another to betray a faithful husband; to
tell a lie to a frivolous coquette differs vastly from betraying a pious woman. We
will treat further on of the rights and duties of love; but here we must indicate
the stem from which they are suspended. Woman belongs to man, man belongs
to woman; love is the son of the most free election; it is born when it will and as
it will; it appears on the plains or on the summit of the mountains; it is born
naked and free as the air; it asks not for passports, because it violates with
impunity all the custom-houses.
Men and women, free and pure, seek ye each other and love; study true love,
and consecrate it with the only vow that love should make, when it would
enclose itself in the family temple. If you truly love, if you are worthy of each
other, if your love offends no superior duty, no human force can oppose itself to
your powerful attractions, and nature and men will bless your election. Read and
read again all that I have written on first loves; swear seldom; at least, swear but
once, the first and last oath that will make you spouses. The compact violated in
the first steps of the life of love is a homicide and prepares one for the career of a
brigand tolerated by civilization. To betray a virgin is, according to law, a
question for the public prosecutor or the mayor of your community; to betray her
without dishonouring her is an anonymous infamy that poisons two existences
and two loves, that leaves in you an eternal bitterness, in another an eternal
rancour. Love, seek, study each other, but never swear, never tell a lie to the
maiden who at the dawn of youth demands of the first sun a ray to enlighten and
warm her.
There is, however, in love a lie that exceeds all lies, a betrayal that surmounts
all others; there is a rascality that surpasses every assassination, every homicide,
every rape, namely, love with the wife of another; a crime which, protected by
the laws, celebrated by our infamously deceitful customs, escapes the prison and
the scaffold, only because it takes the precaution not to be termed adultery. To
introduce oneself into the sanctuary of a happy family, to become a friend of him
whom we wish to betray, to cover him with the mantle of our benevolent
protection; to seduce slowly and pitilessly the wife of another; with surprise,
with the thousand pitfalls of moral violence to open for her an abyss into which
she falls; to propagate bastards, and open in the family a large vein of gall that
will poison two or three generations: to do all this without expense and without
danger, is termed in our century shrewdness, the consoling of unhappy wives,
and it can be done once, twice, ten times, without losing the love of women or
the esteem of men.
To be seized by a vertigo of the senses, to embrace publicly the wife of
another, or to let oneself be seen by the husband, is called adultery, and
according to the circumstances, and above all according to the gravity of the
scandal, means a journey to prison or to the galley; signifies a dishonouring of
one’s name and that of one’s children. Modern society above all recommends
prudence, the avoiding of scandal; it does not wish to be disturbed in its amply
polygamous but piously circumspect loves; modern civilization does not care to
behold publicly any nudity whatever; it desires to be believed moral, respectful,
and respected. It matters little and does not concern it at all if a shrewd libertine
spends his youth in propagating bastards, awaiting the day when he can abandon
the betrayed wives to make a prudent match. It is a private affair, with which
husbands and wives should individually occupy themselves. It is recommended
to make no noise, to take care of the keyholes, and to listen attentively for
approaching footsteps. The meshes of the law are wide, very wide; he must be
more than an idiot who stumbles and cannot extricate himself. The flag of
matrimony covers all contraband goods; the search for paternity is prohibited;
the sons of two blessed spouses are legitimate: onward, onward! For God’s sake
do not weary me with caprices and embarrassing declarations of foreign
merchandise. The guardians of finance close the eyes and see not, they shut the
ears and hear not; why do you foolishly wish to awaken them with your
impatient cries? Onward, onward! The meshes of the law are wide: degenerate
families, falsify names and surnames; sprinkle the lie and sow betrayal in all the
paths of social and civil life; spread corruption and infamy everywhere; make the
name of father a senseless word; make the name of mother a blasphemy!
 Chapter 21
The Rights and Duties of Love
‘Love me, you must love me.’ This is a cry of sorrow that man often utters, and
still more frequently the forsaken woman; but it is generally an impotent cry. To
require love as a right is one of the greatest follies; it is like asking poetry of the
slave of thought, it is expecting to find the perfumes of the rose and cedar in the
icy zone that freezes the head and feet of our planet. However, lovers have
always the right to hurl into space another lamentation: ‘You must not betray
me.’ It is better to wrench out of the hand the goblet of love and shatter it in a
thousand pieces than to pour into it secretly the poison of betrayal and the
wormwood of indifference. Love bursts forth spontaneously from the human
heart, and attains all its beauty and strength from the infinite freedom of the
horizon in which one moves. The code that governs it is simple as the simplest
law of elementary physics: to render love for love, sweetness for sweetness, to
give joy to those who make us happy – this is its law. If love was only a contact
of hearts and thoughts; if, having ascended to heaven, you did not descend with
an angel; if in your embraces you have not rekindled the torch of life, shake
hands cordially, bless the happy hours that your love has conceded you, and
preserve in the most precious caskets and among the rarest things the memory of
the time that was. Never close a day spent in Eden with a blasphemy or a
remorse; tears of sorrow can be the dew of a summer’s night that tempers the
ardour of the enamoured corollas; but your tears should not be cursed by a lie, a
betrayal, an insult.
To the only right of fidelity there corresponds a very simple duty, that of
making oneself beloved. You could not command love, and by beauty of form or
vivacity of wit, by the voluptuous grace of movement or the virtues of the heart
you have roused the affection of affections; preserve it, and you will be loved
forever. At the beginning of every code of love, at the head of every gospel of
two lovers, I would always write this sentence: ‘If we are not loved it is always
our own fault.’ And in a hundred different forms you will find this sentence
written in the pages of my book.
Ask the most fortunate of women if she has not often found it necessary to
win again a love that threatened to escape. She conceals with jealous care the
numberless arts with which she warmed the tepid, aroused the sleeping, caused
the weary to smile, and gave hunger and thirst to those who had the happy
misfortune to have dined to excess at the banquet of voluptuousness. Man is
naturally polygamous, naturally more unfaithful, more brutal, more capricious,
more licentious than woman, and it is her duty to make him monogamous,
faithful, constantly tender, and modestly virile. If it is true that man attacks and
conquers, it is also very true that nature assigns to woman the more difficult task
of guarding the acquisition, of being the vestal of the fire that man has generally
been the first to kindle. This is perhaps the most common formula that expresses
the different mission which man and woman have in love. We kindle the fire, our
companion must keep it burning.
By all that you hold sacred on earth do not be so brutal as to register the
embrace among the rights and duties of love. This is written in the code, and is
daily repeated by the Boeotians, for whom love is the union of male and female.
Voluptuousness should be the inebriating foam that floats on the trembling wave
of passion, and overflows and sinks irresistibly in those abysses where man loses
the consciousness of existence and believes in the infinite: it cannot be a feast
ordered for a stated hour, much less a tribute exacted with the brutality of a tax
collector. No, the embrace is not a right, and much less a duty; it is a unanimous
consent of two powerful energies that seek each other through infinite space,
and, the one with the other mildly struggling, they become exhausted together in
an ocean of sweetness.
Sincerity and fidelity, which are identical and constitute the entire code of
love, must never be discussed by two lovers, and the words right and duty should
be excluded from the amorous vocabulary. Who ever loses his time descanting
on the beauties of the sun, and who thinks of doubting the necessity of air to
life? When certain things begin to be discussed, it is because they are already in
serious danger. I do not fear sudden anger between two lovers, nor querulous and
tender lamentations; but I have a deep horror of every question of right and duty.
When these discourses appear on the horizon, I always see at the same time dark,
heavy waves, I behold the horns appearing of Balzac’s tawny moon.
I am discussing here only the general base or foundation of the rights and
duties of love, the particulars of which you will find in the last chapter of the
book, where I have outlined a code on the art of loving and being loved.
Are the rights of love equal in man and woman? No, a thousand times no, I
proclaim it in a loud voice and after the first white hairs and great experience
give me the consciousness that I speak without either anger or love. No, the sin
of infidelity is not the same in Adam and Eve; it is in the latter a hundred times
greater. Before right and justice all equals are equal, and man and woman differ
too greatly to be punished equally. If the code is one, the jury numbers a
thousand, the accusers and lawyers are many; and the sentence of amorous
betrayal has been pronounced by all civilized nations and always in the same
manner. This consent was not dictated by the power of men, who alone were
legislators and judges in the forum of public opinion. No, this unanimous
consent was dictated by a deep consciousness of the social necessities, by a
profound and subtle justice that descends into the viscera of things seeking the
roots of that blundering and superficial justice which asserts that all men are
equal before the law. The history of the jury, one of the institutions in which our
century seems to glory, will suffice to prove the falsity of this dogma.
From man society exacts a hundred different and difficult virtues: man must
give his blood to the Fatherland and the sweat of his brow to labour for the
family and society; he must be strong, ambitious; he must not permit himself to
be corrupted by gold nor the seductions of vanity. A physician, he must throw
himself into the inglorious and tremendous battle of contagion; a soldier, he must
hold his head high in the face of the homicidal fire; a lawyer, he must resist the
allurements of gold and ambition; a politician, he must fight against himself,
against his family, for the welfare of his country. Defender of the weak, the
shipwrecked, the poor, natural defender of the female half of the human species,
he is an armed warrior in perpetuity, and if he neglects even one of his duties he
is a coward; society despises him, a woman ignores him, no one cares for him.
Woman, on the contrary, can be a coward in the presence of fire, work,
contagion, and in all the battles of life; she can be ignorant and timid and still be
loved and esteemed by all; for weakness in her approaches grace, and it is so
sweet to take the trembling dove to our bosom and comfort her with our courage,
defend her with our strength. And how amusing are even stupid blunders when
pronounced by the beautiful lips of a beloved woman! We forgive her all and
require only one thing from her: fidelity; we impose upon her only one virtue:
fidelity! I pray you, most gentle and divine companions, from which part is the
balance hung? Certainly not from our side.
Woman may be humble, ignorant; she may tremble at every leaf that moves
on the tree and at every insect’s wing that vibrates on the air; but let her be
faithful to him who loves her. Gracious to all, she should, however, resist bold
glances and the corruptions of gold and vanity; she should be the heroine of
sentiment, as we are the heroes of all the battles of life. She is the vestal of our
heart and blood. While we are fighting for her in open field, for the name she
bears, for the honour of our children, she is guarding alone and faithful the
sacred fire of fidelity; she does not let it die out through neglect, nor permit it to
be ruined by the hurricane. This is the only virtue we ask of her; is it perhaps too
much? What duty has she then? What is the difficult struggle that must give to
her also the characteristic mark and make her equal to us, that must render her
worthy to be our companion? If she is beautiful and we are strong; if she is
graceful and we are witty; for her we have conquered our planet, for her we have
ruled the lightning, destroyed the wild beasts, invented the arts, and created
sciences. But neither beauty, grace, nor wit is sufficient for the baptism of
civilized man; on us there are imposed a thousand dangers, on her but one, that
of seduction; we are called to a hundred battles, she has only to conquer the
senses; from us there are required a hundred virtues, from her but one faith. Are
we then tyrants, are we too exacting with her whom we love so tenderly, for
whom we do so much, to whom we dedicate our thoughts, our glories, our
dreams, and our labours?
No, a thousand times no: modern society is thoroughly just when it exacts
from woman much more fidelity in love than from man; it is just when it terms a
crime in woman that which for us is only a fault.
But there is another powerful reason why the duties of love are differently
assigned to man and woman.
Man, by the special mission which sex imposes on him, is an impulsive
aggressor, and can have organic necessities that are unknown to woman, and
which he can satisfy with the rapidity of lightning. He, without changing in his
love, can have a caprice more fleeting than the lightning flash and which, once
disappeared, leaves no trace of itself behind, not even a pinch of ashes. I neither
praise nor justify these sudden surprises of the senses, these passing infidelities,
but I describe them, because I find them frequently in the aggressive and wanton
nature of the virile sex. Woman, on the contrary, must defend herself; and
according to this point of view I confess that in love I would prefer to be a
woman. Man loses a great part of his energy in the tooth that bites and in the
claw that firmly holds the prey. Woman draws in her horns, like the snail in the
spires of its labyrinth, and languidly and voluptuously concealed in the foam of
her shell of love, she permits herself to be caressed. Woman too can have
caprices of the senses, but they are light clouds which scarcely appear when they
are dissolved in the azure of the skies, and only become ardent desires when the
human claw presses and condenses them. Woman is silent even when she
desires: weak in the attack, she is formidable in the defence, and her no has
sufficient power to stop and disarm a host of combatants. With much shrewdness
she daily defends her weakness, telling us that seduction makes war upon her
from every side; while we seek the opportunities to sin. This is one of the most
insidious sophisms, but it is also one of the most powerful arguments of defence.
Man attacks and assaults simply because he is a man and could not await
seduction without condemning himself to be a eunuch and without inverting the
most elementary and inexorable laws of nature. And woman would not commit a
minor sacrilege in becoming the assailant instead of the assailed, profaning the
sex and violating nature in that which it holds most sacred and immutable.
Not in vain has nature made the human female a virgin, and denied to us the
sad virtue of virginity. The woman who yields to the first amorous pruriency is a
Messalina; the man who hurls the first arrow of love is a warrior, who with wise
prudence prepares the weapons for the long battle that awaits him. Man
commences with yes and I will, woman begins and ends with no and 1 will not.
The sudden caprice of the senses is in her harassed by so many physical, social,
moral and, religious impediments that really she must be more than an Amazon
to overthrow them with a single struggle. Everything provokes man to the
transient assault, and which perhaps does not scarify the first epiderm of the
heart: everything defends woman from these caprices. To yield she must have
long fought against nature and society; laws and religions offer her a thousand
allies for defence, and not one time in a hundred can she say, without touching
the frontiers of prostitution, ‘I had a caprice.’ No one believes in the efficacy of
overbearing power, much less woman herself, when she has no need of this faith
to justify her own sin. In love, every fault, every crime is possible, even to
parricide and incest; but stealth is never possible. Let woman never profane
herself nor ruin the often very just cause which she defends, speaking of
seduction and violence. Let her speak rather of the irresistible need of
vengeance; let her discuss the natural right, because there she is on the soil of
truth and justice; let her cry aloud, because I will add a chorus for her in the
pages of my book which you will find a few steps further on; let her cry aloud,
because in the human organism she is the left side, the weakest, the least
honoured, and the oppressed. Let her demand the right to love and to be loved,
but never ask for equality of punishment for sins too unlike.
Not only according to the reckoning of the natural right does society measure
human culpability; but the more the crime generates sorrow, the more it offends
human needs, the more severe the punishment. Have you ever thought of the
various consequences of a caprice of infidelity, according to the guilt of the man
or the woman? For man a caprice of an hour is a stain that tarnishes the bright
mirror of a sworn faith, of an immaculate and sublime love: but a few moments
afterward, a new kiss, more ardent and pregnant with the pungent aroma of
remorse, revives love perhaps more intensely and renders impossible for long
years, perhaps forever, another infidelity. The amorous caprice can be a
blasphemy that breaks forth from the lips of a saint, but which is immediately
washed out by a wave of holy prayer; it is the weakness of a robust courser that
stumbles over a stone, but proudly resumes its way and with excited steps gains
in speed a hundredfold. The amorous caprice in woman can in a single instant
create a bastard, poisoning the wave of milk and honey of an entire family; it can
sow a generation of fraternal hatreds, of infinite sorrows; it can overflow a vast
field, inundating everything with wormwood and gall. In man a stain, in woman
a gangrene; in man the wound of a pin, in woman the rottenness of a bone; in
man a leaf that falls, in woman a hurricane that uproots a forest; in man an
offence, in woman a crime; in man the remorse of an hour, in woman a
monument of infamy that time can never efface.
O enamoured women, O holy women who have loved much and sinned
much, do not think to find in my book a malediction, a blasphemy without
redemption. No, society requires from you more certain fidelity and virtue
without stain; but it should also concede you the right to love, it should not bind
you hand and foot, like an African slave, on the gloomy vessel of an infamous
marriage. As the contracts of love are today, which make of matrimony almost
always a sworn prostitution, no one has a right to hurl at you the first stone. Your
sin is very great, but the truly guilty are the men who create infamous laws, who
deny you the first and last right of love, free election. I reserve every
malediction, every blasphemy, every condemnation for the men who live, like
rapacious vultures, on the carrion that is thrown them from the dunghill of
modern civilization; all my contempt, all my disgust is for those who, able to
redeem the victim, corrupt her, who kill instead of saving; for those who with
impunity taint our society with bastards and adulteries, that live on and enjoy
social corruption, even as the louse lives on the filthy juices of the human
dunghill. If the law does not interfere with them, it is perhaps on account of the
modesty that in the ancient code denied even a place to parricide in the file of
crimes. For my part I have placed them below the traitor, the spy, and the
assassin, beneath the basest and vilest things that can be termed human; and so
they should always be regarded by honest men.
To the unhappy woman who sinfully loves because an infamous society
denies her love with virtue, I can only repeat these sublime words of Christ:
Much will be pardoned him who loves much.
 Chapter 22
The Compacts of Love – Aphorisms on Matrimony
Love is not only a voluptuousness given and returned, it is not a twisting and
untying of instantaneous knots, but a compact between two creatures who, after
having given themselves to each other, can in a single instant have created a
family, perhaps also a nation. In man love is likewise fecundation, but it is,
above all, the interweaving of two existences, a union of new relations, deep
modifications of the manner of existence of a man and a woman. Even in the
lowest races, where morality is only interest defended by strength, and sacrifice
is a stupidity; where there scarcely exist vague phantoms of religious sentiment;
where they bury alive the old mother, or celebrate victories and vendettas with a
sea of blood; even there love is bound by a compact, silent or sworn. Prostitution
is also a compact, that can last an hour, a minute: in any case, the sale and
purchase of voluptuousness cannot found a family, a tribe, a people, and even the
greatest libertine and the wildest savage feel other needs than that of fecundating
a female; they feel the necessity of loving a woman. And to love does not mean
to tie the members of two bodies in a single knot, but to possess a long time, to
desire, to defend, to protect; it means to hold oneself responsible to nature for the
weakness of one creature and the violence of another, for the future of the being
whom we have created together and brought into the world.
The fecundated woman is for nine months weaker and more vulnerable; the
woman who brings forth is a wounded creature; the woman who nurses can
neither flee nor defend herself: the man-child is for a long time defenceless and
very weak. Hence the man who has loved a companion, even for a day, becomes
for a long time the friend and protector, without ceasing to be the lover. This is
the simplest form of the nuptial compact, which is found in many low people
and which we will study in ‘The Loves of Men.’ While the savage female leans
affectionately and confidingly on the male who has made her fruitful, he often
finds himself still a man when his companion cannot be a woman, and he then
fecundates other females, who are added to his possessions and whom he
protects with the same devotion and affection with which he protected and
defended the first woman he made his own. The very weak man can have but
one female, and he must often do without her, because the strong have more than
one and the very strong have many, who often dwell in joyous companionship
among themselves and without being in the least jealous of one another. A
polygamy limited to a few females is the most common form of human society
in the lower races, and this custom is so incarnated in our organism that even in
the highest forms of civilization, where morality and religion do not lend their
valid support, monogamy slips and falls, to give place to a polygamy more or
less acknowledged or concealed.
We, however, must occupy ourselves only with our European society, where
the compact of love has only one moral form, matrimony; while it has various
forms that belong to the world of pathology, namely, prostitution, rape,
concubinage.
We have already considered prostitution: it is the sale of voluptuousness, it is
the possession of bodies without love, it is the barter and deceit of nature; for if a
new creature is born of a purchased embrace, it enters the world with the mark of
infamy on the brow, and, anonymous child of vice, it is cast by society into the
most obscure corner of the social vaults, there where lie the things we wish to
cancel, forget, or let die. Prostitution is a safety valve, only too often necessary
in our immoral society, falsely and wickedly constituted, and it proves with most
cruel eloquence that many men cannot love, that very many men should not
love.
We have also spoken of rape in the house of others; even this greatest of the
crimes of love we have been obliged to discuss: secret agreement of two traitors
who, in the shadow of a social and holy compact, violate the faith of the family
and corrupt the world; vile contract of the thief and the go-between, who in
obscurity assassinate and conceal the victim between the wide folds or in the
deep fissures of our written laws.
Concubinage is a form of matrimony, which lacks only religious and civil
consecration. It is more despicable in its origin than in the nature of the compact
that binds it, since if it lasted eternally, supported only by the word of honour of
two creatures who love each other, it would be a true marriage, sealed by the
faith of two lovers. Only too often, however, concubinage has an obscure and
even shameful origin: it is domestic lechery transformed into a habit; it is a
vulgar custom that has a newsprint type and a mustiness of the kitchen or stink
of the hospital. Born among Turkish slippers and nightcaps, among after-dinner
yawns and the counsels of the hygienist, it is aware of prostitution and rape, but
knows neither the inebriation of the former nor the pungent remorse of the latter.
It is a vulgar pickpocket who begs pardon of the public and is ashamed of
himself and weeps when caught in the act; it is something low, plebeian, and
shameful, that does not confess publicly, and hides itself like a wound in a leg or
a false tooth; abases love to pygmy proportions, lowers the level of the spouse
and elevates the chambermaid; an upstart who can dress well, but reeks of the
stable; a despicable creature, tolerated, often even ridiculous. And yet into
concubinage fall many priests of a cruel religion, which condemns them to be
eunuchs although potent; and therein fail very many celibates who, despising
matrimony and adoring independence, slide down, down into this slough of
domestic concubinage, which has neither the dignity of matrimony nor the orgies
of prostitution; neither the splendours of a passion or a virtue, nor the free
intoxication of an easy voluptuousness that is bought and forgotten.
And these scorners of matrimony often leave an unpublished fruit of their
daily and hygienic expansions, and without having the holy pride to call
themselves fathers, they often leave, however, sons whom society justly ignores,
because it knows not how to name them. No, I say it frankly and without
blushing, prostitution inspires me with the pity which I feel for a moral infirmity
of the human family; concubinage disgusts and horrifies me. Before the former I
feel myself a doctor and examine the pulse and seek the remedy, before the
second I am but an avenging scourger. If the word love means only
voluptuousness, if for you love is not a sentiment but a need, why do you not
purchase the animal love which you alone understand? Go to the house of ill
fame and satiate your thirst; there are wines of every colour and every price:
there is a tariff on kisses and a hierarchy for lechery; hurry and help yourselves;
modern society is ingenious, pitiful, generous. And if, on the contrary, you truly
love the one with whom you divide the hidden burdens of daily life, with whom
you share bread and bed, why do you not give her the dignity of spouse? Why do
you not consecrate love with the compact of an honest and social man? Why do
you not give to your children the civil baptism of men? Amphibians of love and
guilt, make yourselves fish or men, but be one thing or the other.
Thus, as modern society is constituted, concubinage is a vile thing that
destroys all dignity of character, that cuts off the last nerves that hold upright the
social organism on the wheel of duty, that corrupts all the relations of man to
man, of man to woman, of father to son. When one escapes from assuming all
moral responsibility; when through sluggishness, or ignorance, or scepticism one
abdicates the sovereign primacy of spouse and father, rights that not even the
naked and cannibal savage relinquishes, he becomes in modern society a species
of preceptor to whom liberty is granted with the agreement to be continually
inspected by the police, he is a sort of tolerated brigand who cannot be
condemned for lack of proof. A hundred times better prostitution with its
degradations and vile infirmities! Public opinion, the laws, books should hang on
the pillory of ridicule and opprobrium this bastard compact of concubinage,
denying it all assent, consent, and toleration. And women, who can be, even
better than the laws, the avengers of these social degradations, should also
flagellate these amphibians of love, denying them caresses and esteem,
demonstrating to them every hour of the day with cruel art how different are the
voluptuous aromas of true love from the daily broths of domestic concubinage.
The man of a high race, and who aspires to be called a civilized man, should
be monogamous, and cannot consecrate his love with any other compact than
that of matrimony. And yet modern society knows how to lend to man a love so
perfect as to render matrimony impossible to many, difficult and dangerous to
all. But what more? After having reduced it to a pitfall for the ingenuous, society
leaves it defenceless to the attacks of all, and makes it, deprived of all free
movement, abased and prostituted, a subject of the most childish sarcasms in
books and in theatres, and crushes it with ridicule after having wounded it to
death in its laws.
Matrimony, as it is today in our country, is a corrupt institution which must be
thoroughly reformed in order to regain its natural dignity. Not in vain have men
called in the highest authorities of the human world to witness this compact,
religion with its mysterious myths, the law with its oaths; not in vain have they
called men and gods to the altar of the most solemn of social compacts. Today
the gods have fallen, through decrepitude, from their Olympic seats; religion has
been declared destitute of civil authority, and is not called to witness our
compacts save by those for whom the name of a god, the administrator of human
things, does not sound in vain. The religious ideal died before its time; it died
before a successor was born, and matrimony has become a purely civil compact,
and very often an infamous agreement.
Today the nuptial compact is frequently (according to a great writer) a sworn
prostitution: it is a trading of capital and blazonry in the higher class; a factory of
proletarians on a vast scale in the lower classes. Today matrimony is one of the
most fruitful sources of misfortune; it is a slow poison that kills domestic
happiness, the morality of a nation, the economic development of the forces of a
country. Matrimony is often a patent which gives free irresponsibility to woman
and an easy and unpunished polygamy to man; it is a false mask of virtue, with
which they cover the vice of modern society; it is a safeguard which justifies all
smuggling of infidelity, all treachery; it is a flag that hides a domestic slave-
market, an exchange of easy lechery, or a bigamy tolerated with enviable
longanimity by offenders and offended.
Matrimony in modern society is the most cruel, the most inhuman parody of
faith, of the oath, of eternity. Today the woman is a girl, and for her the slightest
fault is a crime; if she should become a mother she would be brought to the
public pillory as a wretch; the seducer would be dragged off to the Court of
Assizes79 first, afterward to the galleys. Tomorrow she has added to the laws of
nature a written law and an oath: her sin must be a hundred times greater, and the
seducer should be bound to the tail of four wild horses. Nothing of all this; the
links of matrimony are wide, and through the chains one passes comfortably and
easily: a virgin, she was punished if she felt herself a woman; a wife, she belongs
to all, and under the large wings of a sworn compact procurers, seducers, and
bastards are friendly welcomed. Modern marriage is a house of prostitution into
which one enters without blushing or paying; the proprietor of the sworn brothel
opens the door for you himself with a smile on his lips and a warm shake of the
hand. Why do you not profit by such a generous providence, and why do you not
laud to the skies an institution so moral, so accommodating, so agreeable?
Not all European society is as corrupt as ours and that of the French, and the
less matrimony has of hypocrisy and barter, the more dignity it possesses. We
are immoral even in the nuptial compact, because we have lost the religion of
Olympus and we have not yet that of duty; we are deeply immoral in the most
sacred family contract, because we are badly trained and ignorant. Vice and
corruption are the offspring of ignorance. And still matrimony is the cornerstone
of families, and of families nations are formed; the nuptial compact should be
the sweetest, holiest, most inviolable bond of human society. What can be hoped
from a nation that is no longer religious, and that has substituted a sworn lie for
the oath! What can be expected from a society that has made an institution of
adultery; from a society for whom the word bastard is no longer a term of
infamy?
Matrimony should be a free, a very free election, as much for the woman as
for the man; it should be the election of elections, the typical election. In our
country, on the contrary, it is only the man who selects; woman generally accepts
or yields to the choice. It is more out of derision than justification to say that
woman has always the supreme right to pronounce a no when kneeling at the
altar or seated in front of the legislator. It is the same as to assert that a man,
chased by a hundred voracious wolves and driven to the brink of an abyss, is free
not to fall therein. Surround an ingenuous maiden with all the solemn armament
of paternal and maternal authority, of religious duties and filial duties; cut off all
paths of retreat, and urge her on every day, every hour, every minute there where
you wish to conduct her; and then tell me that she is free to refuse that which is
imposed upon her, which she is entreated to do; then tell me that the timid no,
which her little heart pronounces in the depths of her breast, is capable of
making itself heard in a chorus of yes, which everybody cries out to her, sings
and echoes around her! And even when parents are sincere and believe in good
faith to leave to their daughter the free choice of the spouse, how can there ever
be a true and free election when there is a complete, absurd ignorance of the
human world? How can one choose without distinguishing, and how can one
distinguish without knowing? Perhaps your daughter has not spoken to ten
handsome young men who could love her. It was told her and repeated a
thousand times that love was a crime, and around her chaste desires there were
erected such catafalques of crime, unheard-of offences, that she scarcely dared to
desire and look any man in the face save an old one. And even when, modestly
audacious, she wished to look upon men, what would she have known of them?
Nothing but the rind. When was she ever able to study a human heart, to
distinguish in it the phases of a desire or the hypocrisy of a seduction, to
conjugate the various tenses of the verb to love, with a man who told her he
adored her; when have you ever left her alone with the omnipotent weapons of
her innocence to combat with true love or with hypocrisy, with true passion or
with the desire of voluptuousness? And you say that she chooses, that you leave
to her free election?
Rousseau, who now and then, between a puff of bile and a hysterical
declamation, read well and deeply in the human heart, says that in a society
where girls are more facile, wives are more virtuous; and this truth is confirmed
by the most superficial observation of European and American society. Nor is
there any value in the coarse and cynical assertion that in Germany and England,
among the coldest people under the heavens, they can permit the contact of
Adam and Eve with more impunity. The human passions have much more
powerful exciters than latitude and longitude; and in the Argentine republic,
there where a southern race loves under a sky beyond the sea, where most
beautiful women excite ardent desires in their adorers, in the midst of an easy
and thoughtless life, wives are much more virtuous than in our country; because
young girls are free, very free in their election, and because they study and know
men better than our ignorant young maidens from schools and convents. In that
country and in many others, the lack of dowry and the facility to enrich oneself
by labour add much dignity to marriage, since prospective husbands do not seek
the dowry and brides know they are not sold.
Until we give to the young woman a free and wise education so that she may
choose well, until we grant her the equal right of election that man possesses, we
can never elevate matrimony. The common consciousness in two creatures of
choosing each other freely and loving each other without any bond of interest,
any pressure of authority, prejudice, or ambition, is the sacred stone on which the
most splendid temples of conjugal felicity are erected.
Neither do I believe in sudden and irresistible loves, nor in the future
happiness of two spouses who, without straw to weave the nest, in the open
country, amid the frosts of misery, wish to erect a temple to love. No, matrimony
is love and should be nothing else than love, but love is naked and wants to be
clothed; love is delicate, and wants to be nourished and protected from the winds
and frosts; love is fruitful, and should have bread and wine to keep alive the little
angels that will bloom in its gardens. All this should be known by our young
girls; we should never impose anything on lovers except patience; and this in
itself is sufficient to cause many transient desires to vanish, while it invigorates
true loves. But in any case and always the election should be free, and to prepare
for it the education of our daughters should be more sincere, more frank, less
false. Teach your child modesty and personal dignity, and you will see that with
such sentiments one rarely enters the fortress you wish to guard. Perpetual
diffidence rouses many false alarms, and stirs up in many frivolous and captious
natures the desire for revenge. Diffidence always armed gives me, then, a
pessimistic idea of the virtue of the mothers; perhaps they remember how poorly
they resisted temptation, and try every art to avoid it in order to strengthen the
forces that should defend virtue.
The free election of woman is much more important in our society, because
she is not ignorant of the fact that in marriage she will find an indefinite liberty;
perhaps she also divines that, even should she not love the official spouse, she
can still love and be loved. When a society is entirely saturated with adultery and
hypocrisy, even the chaste and ingenuous maiden is aware of certain things
which she dare not acknowledge to herself. And without leaving the domestic
nest, perhaps she has more than once repeated to herself, ‘I will not sin, but – I
too could sin with impunity.’
Free election is the best guarantee of faith; it is the only touchstone by which
are tried the true natural rights of mutual fidelity. No one has a right to cast the
first stone at the adulteress if she was dragged, ignorant, to the altar; no spouse
can be condemned if she was forced to sign the compact like a victim and a
slave. If she obeyed through filial pity, swearing on your faith, while you have
bound her forever to an ignoble man, then she is cleansed of every sin, and the
adultery and misfortunes of the future will fall upon you, who are the truly
guilty, the unpunished wretches of modern society. When, on the contrary, two
spouses truly love each other, when they have freely clasped hands to pass
together through the paths of life, then they alone are responsible for their
infidelity, they alone must undergo the shame and misfortune. They can accuse
neither paternal authority nor the social laws; they alone have sinned; they alone
devour in silence the bitter bread of repentance; society is irresponsible, and
washes its hands of them. Have you exchanged desire for love, voluptuousness
for passion? Suffer the consequences of your sin.
Even beside the easy infidelity born of the limited liberty of election that
woman has in matrimony, we have sown in our soil thorns and brambles, of
which everyone gathers the part that awaits him as a member of a false and
corrupt society. We daily despise the culture of woman and hold it up to ridicule;
we forgive her ignorance, puerility, inconstancy, provided she is gay and pretty,
provided she plays with expression and dances voluptuously; we adore her,
provided she is a pleasing, graceful, and entertaining little animal. From among
these nice little animals, formed to our image and likeness, we select one to be
our spouse, the mother of our children; and then, when spring has passed, we
complain that the plant we cultivated is sterile of fruit. We have trained it to
produce flowers, nothing but flowers, and then we lament because it cannot give
us some fruit. All the forces of life were used and consumed to bring forth
petals, and we are astonished and annoyed at the result of our art; we ask for
seeds after we have cut off all the stems of a fecund nature. When the flower of
beauty is withered, we would like to have in our companion the cultured friend,
the woman who aids us in the struggles of labour and ambition; but the nice little
animal was not educated for those beautiful things, and, weeping, she thus
replies to our desires, ‘I do not know, I cannot.’
All these reforms, which must elevate marriage, can be introduced only
slowly, with the progress of education and customs; with morality improved by
means of science and not by fear; by a greater respect for the liberty of woman,
who must soon be elevated from the base level in which modern civilization has
left her until today. However, a reform could be made at once in the laws that
govern the nuptial compact, and this is the introduction of divorce.
We want divorce because we have a high esteem for matrimony and human
dignity; we want divorce in order to tie with a more internal knot the sworn
compact between a man and a woman. It is not the ferocity of the laws that
moralizes a people, and the punishment of death has never yet prevented a single
crime. It is not the written indis-solubility that maintains the sanctity of a
compact, but the consciousness of having sworn freely. It is an old and vulgar
objection that the laws should not provide for the honest, since to do good they
need no laws, but for the inconstant and frivolous masses, who are liable to
break at every step a compact which is the base of the social order. There where
the moth of vice corrodes the parchment of the nuptial compact, the bond is
broken against the law and in spite of the law; the children scattered, separated,
or tolerated, and the spouses neither united nor disunited, carry off their piece of
galley chain, multiplying to infinity concubinage and prostitution.
To know oneself free is one of the greatest needs of social man; to feel
ourselves free gives us courage for sacrifice and heroism; while a compact which
binds eternally, and without any participation of our will, cuts off much dignity
and merit from faith. The higher we rise in progress and civilization, the more
sensible our neck becomes to every kind of yoke, and although crowned with
roses and lined with velvet, the yoke always offends human dignity. Moreover, if
psychology and right had not given us a priori ample reason to demand divorce,
there would be the wide experience of European society, which has opened in its
codes this safety valve, that can liberate two desperate victims and not unbend a
single link of the fortunate, born to live happily together. Those communities
that have introduced divorce into their code are the most moral and have the
highest conception of liberty and human responsibility; and yet very few profit
by it, morals are improved, and the intellectual level of a nation is raised.
Very few among us today dare to defend divorce with arguments deduced
from the happiness of married couples, but many still defend the absolute
indissolubility of matrimony as a safe guarantee for the children of misfortune.
In sterile unions they would find perhaps no difficulty in granting a divorce;
before the abandoned and separated children they feel their hearts swelling with
pity and dare not vote the salutary reform. This deep sigh which breaks forth
spontaneously at the cruel sight of the disunited members of a family is a pitiful
weeping, but not a wise pity. The rabid rancours of an unhappy union are daily
spasms of the children, and they, reunited like serpents poisoned in a brambled
meadow, daily attack and bite each other, and the union is almost that of the
executioner and victim, tiger and lamb. And how often the impossibility of
divorce, generating concubinage in its ugliest and most disgusting form, gives to
the children this joyous spectacle of a father and mother who, hating each other
to death, defy each other daily with revengeful anger, and in the family nest
profane the sanctity of a compact which the law upholds, but which they have
lacerated with horrible torture, the bleeding fragments of which they cast into
each other’s faces every day! On the day of divorce the children follow the
moral attractions of the elective affinity, and whoever has the most heart assumes
the most sacrifice and abnegation; the poor creatures, whom fate denied the
supreme joy of feeling themselves embraced by four loving arms at the same
time, lament the sad separation but do not blaspheme; they suffer but do not
despair. The old family dies, but it expires with dignity and in religious silence:
as it is, a hundred families live in a perpetual agony, which is at the same time
torture and vituperation, malediction and treachery.
Divorce should be written into our laws as soon as possible; happy couples
demand it in order to ensure their dignity, offended by a tyrannical bond;
unhappy creatures implore it on bended knee, whom misfortune or guilt
condemned to the greatest of human tortures, that of a slavery without
redemption, a yoke without repose, a scourge without balm, a sorrow without
hope.
As an appendix to this chapter, I here transcribe some aphorisms which I
would like to be read again and again by all who are thinking of taking a
husband or wife.

I. To marry for hygienic reasons is often the same as to drown oneselfin in

order to satiate thirst.
II. To marry to enrich oneself is a baseness and a fecund factory of horns.
III. To marry to impoverish oneself is a stupidity and a crime; to bring
proletarians into the world is one of the gravest responsibilities a man can
assume.
IV. To marry to do something is a stupidity and a most fruitful sowing of
horns.
V. To marry for the sake of a title is to buy at a very dear price a bauble of no
value.
VI. To marry in order to get a beautiful woman is to buy at a very dear price a
handful of earth, from which one contemplates a sky that belongs to all.
VII. To marry in order to possess a beautiful woman is almost the same as to
sell one’s birthright for a mess of pottage.
VIII. Before marriage it is well to make long meditations before the mirror;
very long ones before the money-coffers.
IX. Always suppose, before measuring your forces, that your wife is the
purest woman in the world; but admit that she can be the most dissolute of
chaste women.
X. To marry in a dignified manner it is necessary to have double health,
double strength, and a double income for that which is absolutely necessary.
 XI. To have the necessary to take a wife means to have the feet bare and to
walk in the snow with a piece of mouldy bread under the arm.
XII. Before taking a wife or husband it is well to read at least twice the works
of Malthus.
XIII. Read again and again the affecting stories of celebrated cuckolds and
illustrious bastards.
XIV. Read and reread Kempis, Jeremiah, the De virginitate by St Ambrose,
and The Physiology of Marriage by Balzac.
XV. If a maiden thinks to accomplish a heroic action in marrying an
antipathic man in order to make her parents happy, she deceives herself in great
part. No authority of a father nor blessing of a mother can take the place of love,
and many of these heroines end in becoming adulteresses.
XVI. It is not to be wondered at that excellent marriages are rare, because to
constitute a perfect union there are needed so many such and such rare
ingredients that to put them all together would require great ability and an
enormous fortune.
XVII. The elementary analyses of an excellent marriage have given me the
following results:
 XVIII. To take a husband because a woman should marry in any case is one
of the greatest prejudices and very fruitful of evil.
XIX. Modern civilization is preparing for woman the sweet possibility of
living single and happy.
XX. The idea of being bought and sold should be for woman a hundred times
more humiliating than that of not finding a husband.
XXI. As much for man as woman, to await matrimony is to place much
probability of good on the plate of a balance. In this case, that often occurs
which is written in the gospel, The last shall be first.
XXII. Hastiness in everything that concerns love is the assassination of future
happiness.
XXIII. Fabius the Temporizer should be the saint to whom parents, lovers,
and sweethearts offer their vows in order to attain their frequently different and
contrary ends, Wait, wait, wait; this is the virtue of virtues, the art of arts, the
secret of secrets.
XXIV. Waiting cures caprices and strengthens true love; waiting kills false
loves and makes the true ones great and noble: to wait means to be sincere,
prudent, good, holy.
XXV. Matrimony is not a question of love, hygiene, social economy, beauty,
sentiment, or similarity of thought alone; it is neither the satisfaction pure and
simple of an ardent desire, nor an affair; it is a correct harmony of all these
different things.
XXVI. Love is the best godfather of matrimony; reciprocal esteem, its most
faithful friend.
XXVII. The marriage of a very young man or a very old one can have the
same filthy and dangerous origin, lechery.
XXVIII. The marriage of a young and an old woman is generally a barter; the
marriage of two old people is an innocent joke or a pleasing caricature of
friendship.
XXIX. To unite in matrimony without knowing each other would be a crime
if it were not a folly.
XXX. To marry in order to save one’s honour is often necessary but always
horrible.
XXXI. One can never enter the temple of matrimony with impunity through
the door of weakness, prostitution, or lechery. One can enter there triumphantly
only through the wide gates of love and esteem.
XXXII. To make a happy marriage, congeniality of character is much more
necessary than harmony of wit.
XXXIII. Congeniality of character does not mean identity or resemblance, but
a harmony of things which, placed side by side, are united but not subtracted;
they form a harmonious or melodious accord, and not discord.
XXXIV. The harmonic accords of characters for the happiness of matrimony
are much less studied than the musical and gastronomical, perhaps just because
they are much more important. Often in the nuptial bed, as in the kitchen, the
sweet-and-sour and the aromatic bitter succeed well.
XXXV. Never believe in a woman who wants to know your entire past,
swearing to love you in any case. To be sincere and frank does not mean to serve
at the table of a friend the mud of one’s own shoes. Who has not a little mire on
some sole or undersole of his own moral world?
XXXVI. Women have lost time in being jealous of the past, and you owe
them only the present and the future: be, then, sincere but prudent.
XXXVII. O woman, before giving the name of husband to the man you love,
you should have seen him once, at least, after dinner, and once angry.
O man, before making a woman yours forever, you should have seen her
once, at least, in her chemise, even were you obliged to abase yourself to look
through the keyhole.
XXXVIII. In taking a wife or a husband it is generally useless to ask counsel
of others so as to enlighten oneself on a difficult problem: if you have a stubborn
will, act in your own way, against the judgment of everybody; but if you are
wavering between yes and no, you can lose the little will that you possess.
XXXIX. To have truly loved him or her whom we have chosen for a
companion through life is an antidote against many evils, a supreme comfort in
the greatest bitterness, an almost certain impossibility of being entirely unhappy.
XL. Men always prefer the curious to the good, the rare to the beautiful; it is
perhaps for this reason that in the search for a wife they take care to find the
virgin, while above all things and before all things they should seek the woman.
XLI. The widower generally makes an excellent husband, so women easily
pardon him a dozen extra years.
 XLII. The same cannot be said of the widow; in her, no matter how good she
may be, one can always taste the spices in the warmed-over soup.
XLIII. Beyond the second edition, marriages belong to the history of
mummies and fossils.
XLIV. If you love beauty, remember that the most lasting is in the eye, the
frailest that of the lips and the tint of the skin.
XLV. If you love virtue, remember that the first virtue of all in matrimony is a
sweet kindness, a tender and impassioned kindness.
If you admire wit, remember that the most precious is that which you yourself
discover in the mind of the beloved one, not that which belongs to the public.
There are unbearable great men, there are enchanting procuresses.
XLVI. Man, fear above all things the coquette; she will sin a hundred times
more than the wanton.
XLVII. Woman, fear the idle man; he will kill you with nausea.
XLVIII. Men who wish to be happy, fear the gossiping woman, the bigoted
woman, the woman who talks too much of her virtues and her dowry.
XLIX. Women who wish to be happy, fear those men who talk too much of
their horses, their blazonry; fear Don Juan, but still more Tartuffe.
L. Never marry the daughter of your sweetheart, especially if the latter is yet
alive.
 Chapter 23
Fragments of a Code on the Art of Loving and Being Loved
When an artist has given the last touch of the brush to his picture; when the
sculptor has given the last, the most amorous caress to his statue, I do not think
that all the sighs, all the pulsations of art are on the canvas or in the marble. On
the palette, in that little chaos of tints many sublime aspirations have remained as
in a limbo of future fecundity; and in the white marble dust the sculptor has left
many incomplete ideas, many germs of future beauty. And thus it is with a
writer: having reached the last page of his book, he knows not how to detach
himself from the work which he has loved so well, and among the tools of his
laboratory he too finds scattered here and there germs that he knew not how to
fecundate, abortions which he could not finish, phantoms that glided from his
hand in his handling too impetuously the plastic clay of his thoughts.
I do not know if all writers experience this feeling, but it certainly occurs to
me in every one of my works. To scatter those germs, to destroy those larvae,
always seemed too cruel to my paternal hand, and lovingly I collect and arrange
them, like the savage maiden who, roaming through meadows and forests, makes
a booty of seeds and flowers to weave them into a necklace for her fine brown
throat.
Neither the aphorisms nor the mosaics or fragments of codes with which I
have concluded several of my books were placed together by me to obey an
irresistible aphoristic requirement of my genius, nor for the avaricious pleasure
of preserving jealously all that was mine. It seemed to me that, besides the
symmetrical interior of the book made after a preconceived plan, traced by that
architect of ink called an author; it seemed that to leave to the reader, besides the
work, a maiden fistful of that first material from which the little or great creation
called a book has been excavated, might be useful to all. Among the atoms of
that germinative and fecund matter, the reader can find many seeds which
perhaps belong to him, and which he can cultivate and raise to a robust plant. In
that chaos, the property of everybody, the interweaving of the thought of the
writer with that of the reader seems to become warmer, more intimate.
A book that aspires to live and to enter into the veins of a generation, or to
pour out at least a drop of its blood, must be a long, warm, affectionate shake of
the hand which the author gives to the reader; and you know that two hands
which unclasp, in the last moment leave a deeper imprint of their contact.
 Now then, this last chapter is the last handshake which I give to you, reader:

I. It is our own fault if we are not loved: this dogma is eternal as the world,
ancient as man, immutable as the laws which govern the physics of the universe.
II. Everyone receives precisely the quantity of love he merits.
III. On the scales of love, beauty can balance genius, affection, heroism,
adoration.
IV. To say to him who loves, ‘Be just,’ is to utter the most ridiculous and
insensible joke in the world, since one of the most essential characteristics of
love is injustice.
V. Love is the boldest, most powerful, most irresistible, most colossal of
injustices. Independent of truth, virtue, gratitude, the written laws, love casts its
favours to the first-coiner, to the most superior as to the most inferior of
creatures.
VI. The mother has brought forth, nursed, and nourished for twenty years
with kisses and caresses a gentle creature; she has breathed with her, slept with
her; with her she watched during the long nights of sorrow, with her she enjoyed
the festivals of life. Mother and daughter have been united heart with heart, skin
with skin, thought with thought during all the millions of minutes that pass in a
fifth of a century. Now then, one fine day that rosy angel of twenty meets on the
path of life a pair of black moustaches, carried about with a pair of trousers; and
those moustaches and those trousers make a tabula rasa of twenty years of love;
the maternal sun is eclipsed, frozen, timid in the presence of the most cruel, the
vilest injustice.
VII. Speaking of love, use even the most polyglot of vocabularies, but never
pronounce the word injustice, because it would be sheer nonsense.
VIII We enter the temple of love through many doors, and by stooping we can
also get through the low and narrow one of gratitude. Compassionate loves are,
however, generally affections of organic vice, of original sin; they are scrofulous
children cured with iodine and salt baths.
IX. In any case, it is a hundred times better to accord a love through gratitude
than to implore it. It is always preferable to be a creditor than a debtor.
X. There are loves sown in the furrow of reason, manured by prudence, daily
refreshed with habit. They are little plants erect and healthy which bear flowers
and fruits; but these flowers and these fruits are really the product of love.
 XI. Few healthy men die without having possessed a woman, many die
without having loved. For them love is like hunger and thirst; it only differs in
this, that instead of being appeased with bread and wine it is satisfied with a
human female.
XII. The sky of Italy is not less serene nor less splendid after long days of
clouds and thunderstorms. Thus it is with love: if it is true love, it cures the
gravest and most bloody wounds; it can rise from the slumbering ashes; it can
die a hundred times and be born again as often. If it cannot accomplish these
miracles, it will be friendship, lechery, but not love.
XIII. O lovers, fear not tempests, cyclones, thunderstorms; fear not the
dagger, poison, the earthquake. If you wish to preserve your fire eternally, the
gems of your treasure always sparkling, fear a little insect, the most formidable
enemy of love: the moth of weariness.
XIV. To love for an hour is natural to every animal; to love for a day is natural
to every man; to love for a lifetime belongs to the angels; to love for a lifetime
and one creature only is of the gods.
XV. The animal man is polygamous; the manly man, monogamous.
XVI. Nature has made man polygamous; it is the sublime mission of woman
to make him monogamous.
XVII. Contemporaneous loves are hypocrisy, lechery, cynicism, or simony:
not one of them is true love. Successive loves can be all sincere, all ardent, all
divine.
XVIII. To say that in life we can love but once is to utter one of the greatest
affronts of which love is daily guilty.
XIX. Those who have often loved are really embarrassed to tell which was
the first, the true love. To extricate themselves from the difficulty, they should
imitate the naturalists when confused in their classifications; they should follow
the chronological or alphabetical order. Then the most ardent love is the most
ancient or that which begins with A.
XX. To free love from thorns and thistles, to heal its wounds, to restore it,
ennoble it, make it sublime, the fecund nest of joy and gymnasiarch of virtue,
one thing alone will suffice, a little sincerity.
XXI. In love, homicide is a venial sin; a shock is a mortal offence and a
sacrilege.
XXII. When insult can kill love, it is because selfishness was greater than
love.
XXIII. How often love is only selfishness seasoned with lechery!
XXIV. He who in a hurricane complains of a windowpane spattered with mud
resembles him who in nature seeks the bug and the excretion; both are like him
who in amorous storms sticks with a pin an unhappy speech or an insolent
gesture so as to preserve them in the domestic museum of rancour.
XXV. For love there is no stain, no baseness, no degradation. It is a light that
brightens all things; it is a heat that melts every ice; it is a sweetness that
destroys all bitterness.
XXVI. Every contact of male and female is indecent when not excited by
love; every lust is modest in the shadow of the great wings of love.
XXVII. It is not modesty, virtue, nor the immodest doctrinal treatises of the
casuists that mark the frontiers of honesty and dishonesty between man and
woman; they are traced with the sure and infallible hand of love.
XXVIII. The woman we love is always an angel: she is mother, sister,
daughter, wife. The woman we do not love is only a female, even were she as
beautiful as the Fornarina,80 as plastic as the Venus de Milo.
XXIX. From the moment in which a man and a woman have pronounced
together these sweet words, I love you, they unconsciously become the priests of
a temple in which they must guard the sacred fire of desire. To keep it alive is
the great secret of loving eternally.
XXX. In love, desire is a little bird from the nest given into the hand of a
child; he handles it so much and gorges it with such a quantity of food that the
little bird dies.
XXXI. Lechery is sometimes the mother of love, but more frequently its
executioner.
XXXII. ‘I love you always, I love you always the same.’ Another boast of
lovers, another falsehood of the most lying century in the history of the human
family. We always love differently; and every day, every hour of the day, and
every minute of the hour, love is transformed and changed.
XXXIII. He who believes that two kisses resemble each other, that two
caresses are equal, has never even read the alphabet of love.
XXXIV. They will see you – They have seen you – They will see us – They
have seen us; four successive scenes that alternate eternally in the great comedy
or in the great tragedy of love.
XXXV. The handshake is the last, the most intense salutation of friendship; it
is often the first step in the conquests of love.
XXXVI. The hand lies much less frequently in love than the lip or the eye;
even the most deceitful woman does not mistrust a shake of the hand, because
she believes that act the most innocent of expressions.
XXXVII. He who does not know the language of a hand that presses is
worthy neither to love nor to be loved. With it the most simple woman in the
world knows how to say, ‘Stay’ or ‘Go’; with it she can say, ‘I have loved you –
I love you – I will love you.’
XXXVIII. How often and in how many ways a woman can say to us with her
hand the tremendous word perhaps.
XXXIX. Love, like the sun and all the great things of human thought and of
the world, rises and sets between two crepuscules, the perhaps of hope and the
perhaps of remorse.
XL. Love is a flower, matrimony a fruit; but floriculture and horticulture are
twin arts, and their interweaving is a delightful combination.
XLI. ‘Which will you have, a rose or a fish?’ As stupid a question as ‘Do you
prefer a lover or a husband?’
XLII. Matrimony is the Appert’s Preserves of love.
XLIII. In your love have ever the least selfishness possible, but always
suppose in the love of others the greatest selfishness possible. In this way you
will neither wound nor be wounded.
XLIV. The criminal code of every nation has many crimes and transgressions,
and infinite forms of punishment. The code of love has but one crime, the lie; it
has only one punishment, death.
XLV. Many people wonder how it is that with only seven notes our musicians
have been able to reach torrents of harmony; how with only twenty-six letters of
the alphabet men express millions of thoughts. I find the thing very simple,
because love with only three notes can create infinite worlds of passion and
voluptuousness.
XLVI. The three notes are to desire, to possess, to regret. How many
combinations, how many variations on these three notes!
XLVII. Desire is, for the generality of men, a glass that one empties; for the
more fortunate few it is a sea with ebb and flow; for the elect of the paradise of
love it is an eternal wave of the stream that flows on and on and never stops; the
water pursues the water, and the movement never ceases.
XLVIII. Among the masses of lovers, desire generates love and love kills
desire; among the elect, love is the son of a desire and the fecund father of a
thousand and new desires.
XLIX. All those who ask themselves why they are alive, all those who
blaspheme life, have never loved or have loved too much.
L. He who has loved and been loved, even for a day, has no right to curse life.
LI. Love in all its problems of quantity easily persuades us that the chemical
balance is a very coarse instrument.
LII. The supreme voluptuousness of love demonstrates to us what a crude
instrument a chronometer is for measuring certain minutes more infinite than the
universe, shorter than a lightning flash.
LIII. The joy of joys, the delirium of deliriums, the intoxication of
intoxications, the gem of gems, the treasure of treasures, the infinite of the
infinities is always love.
LIV. There is no hunger that bread cannot appease; no thirst that fountains
and cellars cannot silence; no lechery of the palate that the art of the cook cannot
flatter; but love, even after a life of loves, dies thirsty, and we all die with a
virgin capital of passion, which we leave, perhaps, as an inheritance to our sons.
LV. Lasciviousness is to love as fire is to the sun.
LVI. Few men have seen love naked, perhaps because they are not worthy to
see it.
LVII. Men and civilization cover love with new garments, new varnish, new
plaster, studying to conceal degradation.
LVIII. Nature is always naked, innocence is always naked: at every violation
of virtue, at every stain of innocence, man throws a new veil over the statue of
love.
LIX. No creature is more modestly covered than innocence in a chemise; no
one is more naked than a courtesan who places between the world and the skin
twenty strata of linen and of thirst.
LX. Conceal voluptuousness: the sweetest and holiest prudency of virtue.
Feign voluptuousness: one of the most obscene lies of vice.
 LXI. To possess does not mean to love, much less to be loved. The senses
have their needs and their caprices, and in order to have free access to the sacred
temple they disguise themselves with the garments of love.
LXII. They say that the cold shower bath is a sovereign remedy for many
evils; I know, however, that if it falls in the form of icy words on the flame of
love, it can cause death.
LXIII. Love, the son of a warrior always armed, fears not violence, but it
detests brutality. To understand where one begins and the other ends is one of the
greatest secrets of the art of love.
LXIV. Many wiseacres in the art of love are accustomed to concentrate all
precepts in this one: ‘Dare!’ People of little intelligence! It is the same as to say
to him who would cross a torrent, ‘Jump!’ Before daring and jumping we must
measure our courage and how far our legs can reach. To go beyond the mark is
the same as not to reach it.
LXIV. Woe to you if after audacity you should manifest cowardice. You
would lose in an instant all that you have gained.
LXVI. If you have remorse, digest it alone. Nothing is less gallant, more vile
than to invite your companion to ruminate with you the sins of yesterday.
LXVII. After rashness we must be calm and serene; we must show that
strength has become right.
LXVIII. To prepare the mechanism, combat the attritions, weaken resistances,
and show that the machine moves of itself is the art of every famous mechanic.
LXIX. Men daily avenge themselves for many refusals by calumniating
woman; but the fact remains that it is easier to conquer a hundred men than one
woman.
LXX. To conquer man, a mediocre beauty suffices, or a certain formation of
the body; to be a woman is often enough. For a woman to be conquered, she
must above all things be pleased.
LXXI. To please a woman is a phrase that expresses the sum of a hundred
virtues and a thousand artifices.
LXXII. The lowliest of chambermaids can in five minutes conquer an Apollo
Belvedere or a crowned king. Apollo can be refused by a prostitute. This is the
true greatness of woman.
LXXIII. Man or woman, never cause your companion to blush without
chasing away the blush with a kiss or a caress. It is a wound light or serious, but
which can be healed only by the assailant.
LXXIV. O woman, do you wish to be loved? Be beautiful: beautiful in body,
in heart, or in mind. You are in the world of the living the vestal of form, the
sacred guardian of seeds, you are the web of life; you must be beautiful.
LXXV. Man, do you want to be loved? Be strong in muscle, in brain, in
rashness of passion, or in the flash of genius. The woman who admires is in the
vigil of love. Nature has made you the defender of the family, the rouser of latent
forces; it has made you a soldier destined to love and to live; you must be strong.
LXXVI. Men are caught like flies in the battles of love, with the hand, with
milk, with bird-lime, with the smoke of a thousand burned substances, but
especially with that of incense. There is no need of art or books to teach this
easiest of easy things. It is much more difficult to catch a mouse, because there
must be a trap made ad hoc; while to catch a man a woman’s old shoe often
suffices.
LXXVII. Women, like great fortresses, are taken only by hunger or assault,
after you have made the breach with the strongest artillery.
LXXVIII. To leave a woman’s poor heart without the bread of friendship, the
wine of voluptuousness, the air of love, and to persuade her that you have in
your fist bread, wine, air, and water: this is called taking a woman by hunger.
LXXIX. To seduce the senses, to fascinate the fancy, to conquer the faculties
of the mind one by one; to open the breach with all the formidable artillery of
human passions is called taking a woman by strategy or tactics.
LXXX. It is much easier to take a fortress by surprise than a woman. When
one thinks the conquest has been made by surprise, the woman has been
possessed, but without love. The senses of woman are in the vanguard and can
easily be turned aside by a stroke of the hand; but the heart has too many
sentiments, and it is not conquered without a siege and a strong and continual
bombardment.
LXXXI. The woman taken by a surprise of the senses has always the right to
say to her assailer: ‘You have possessed me, but I have not loved you. The flag is
torn, but it still exists, I am not yours.’
LXXXII. The possession of a female is for man, as for an animal, a physical
act which we do not dispute; but woman is morally ours only when she has
given us her heart, and this is never taken by surprise.
 LXXXIII. Even after has been the surrender prepared by hunger or by the
breach, woman needs a last and more vigorous assault if she is to be conquered.
She yields only after having burned the last cartridge, after having beheld the last
redoubt crumble under the last stroke of the last cannon. She always comes forth
from the fortress in flying colours, with weapons and baggage. Her surrender is
always honourable.
LXXXIV. No fortress in Europe can boast of never having been taken by
assault, by hunger, or by treachery; many and weak women have resisted the
most fiery assaults; and man avenges himself, saying she is a weak creature!
Three times a liar!
LXXXV. The women who are the most easily won are the most difficult to
keep, and vice versa.
LXXXVI. To preserve the love of a man or a woman it is necessary, after
having won it, to win it again every day.
LXXXVII. Salt is a great preserver of meats and loves; and to the many who
lose love, I am accustomed to repeat, ‘A little more salt!’
LXXXVII. Studied absences are a good antiseptic to preserve love; but much
prudence is required in order not to obtain the opposite effect. Absences might
be compared to pruning in the art of gardening: an opportune cutting strengthens
the plant, an excessive cutting kills it.
LXXXIX. Woe to the woman who satisfies all the desires of a man in a year,
a month, a day! Two lovers, two spouses should die without having emptied the
last drop of the goblet of love.
XC. The tradition of St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins was wrongly
interpreted by learned men and historians. It signifies that the virgin encloses
within herself an infinite legion of minor virgins, who wish to be loved and won
in turn.
XCI. The tonic and antiseptic value of absence can be appreciated only by
men and women who have a heart. To the men who are won with the hands and
the women who are bought, the ancient proverb may be applied, Out of sight, out
of mind.
XCII. Never mistrust your companion in love, but, on your part, never give
him occasion to sin.
XCIII. Indifference and contempt as weapons of seduction must be handled
with the finest art, and they find no support where a certain energy of will and a
good dose of pride are lacking.
XCIV. To simulate infidelity in order to rouse love is like blistering and
cauterizing: excellent means when the capacity of reaction still exists in the
organism, when the healing forces of nature are still vigorous. To adopt them at
the last hour is a useless torture.
XCV. The artifices of coquetry for arousing love succeed well when
concealed and practised by a master hand. When they reach the form of a philtre,
they hear the enchantress a mile away, and there is danger that the artificial heat
conceals a deathly ice, that the false appetite hides dyspepsia.
XCVI. Love is, in the physical and moral world, the force of forces, the
health of health. He sins grievously who curses love after having experienced its
delight. The last sigh of expiring voluptuousness should be a benediction to life.
XCVII. Woe to the woman who shows a superior knowledge concerning
certain things. The man wishes to be the teacher and not the disciple of his
companion.
XCVIII. In virtue, in beauty, in coquetry, in voluptuousness, that is delightful
which is neither too little nor too great, too sweet nor too tart, neither ostentation
nor ingenuity: a just, mean, pungent, prurient glimmering.
XCIX. Infidelities for the sake of revenge are pretexts to sin, compromises of
conscience; they are plants that grow in a soil where love is already dead.
C. Study as long as you will the chemistry for the soil and the art of
agriculture, but to reap you must sow. He who sows much and well generally
reaps in the same proportion.
CI. The libertine is often like the soldier surprised without weapons and with
an empty stomach; the chaste man is like the soldier who is always on the alert.
CII. Love has forms so varied and opposite that it can be great, sublime,
noble, as well in the garments of a slave as in the mantle of a tyrant.
CIII. To have a penetrating and mysterious glance is a bill payable at sight, is
to possess the best qualities of a conqueror.
CIV. Woman is for man always a?; and man, in turn, is for woman an x: how
many loves are born to answer the ? to solve the x!
CV. If in love all the ? were changed into! how many happy creatures this
world would contain!
CVI. One can be jealous without love; one can love without being jealous.
 CVII. All the analyses of love, all the alchemies that divide it into platonic
and sensual, belong to the stem of putrefaction.
CVIII. Platonic love is a part of love, lust is a part of love; when put together
they are all love.
CIX. One can love platonically for life, as one can be a great man without
ever having won a battle, invented a machine, or written a book: but in the one
case and the other humanity has the right to ask, A quoi bon?
CX. To reawaken love twenty years after its death is a sin against nature; it is
the lechery of the grave-digger; it is a taste very similar to that of him who eats
putrefied woodcock.
CXI. To heal the wounds of the heart with voluptuousness is one of the
sweetest, most infallible cures, in which it is difficult to say which is most to be
envied, the physician or the patient.
CXII. To love with avarice is one of voluptuous tortures of maturity; to love
basely, one of the greatest degradations of old age.
CXIII. And who is not vile in love, who has not been so at twenty?
CXIV. To place a great fortune at the feet of a poor woman is one of the
greatest glories of man; to sell oneself to lecherous riches, the greatest of human
degradations.
CXV. The woman who sells herself to man is to be pitied; the man who sells
himself to a woman should be crushed underfoot.
CXVI. The beautiful woman is usually jealous of the witty woman, while
illustrious women are often jealous of their chambermaids.
CXVII. Jealousy is the most bestial, the most foolish, the most ridiculous, the
most cruel, the most imbecile of human passions.
CXVIII. The happiest, the most honest, the most perfect of lovers is he who at
the close of his life can say, ‘I have never caused sorrow to any woman; I have
sown a thousand joys, and not one of them has generated a pang of remorse.’
CXIX. Our false modern society has written in its code infamous and cruel
punishments in order to defend the modesty and innocence of woman, and it has
sown in all paths of life so much impunity in order to defend its vices, as to
render every infamy lawful to man, to disarm woman of all weapons.
CXX. Each white hair on the head of man is an expiring desire; on the head
of a woman it is an arrow that is becoming blunted.
 CXXI. To pretend that a prudent marriage generates love is the same as to
sow pumpkins and wish them to produce melons.
CXXII. Great lovers are often tired, but in their weariness there is no shadow
of disgust.
CXXIII. One of the greatest miracles of love is to behold a new and stronger
desire arise from spent voluptuousness. Love is an insatiable thirst: love is the
ocean that no one can empty: while the sun steals away a single wave, a hundred
streams pour into it thousands.
CXXIV. Misery and love, suffering and love, prudence and love, nausea and
love, cold and love: impossible combinations, the greatest incompatibilities
found in nature.
CXXV. In love it is better to receive one kiss more and one letter less.
CXXVI. Women write their love letters very well, but all these together are
not worth one of their glances, one of their smiles, one of their sighs.
CXXVII. If fewer letters were written, how much less remorse, how much
less disillusion, how much more happiness! I think that ink is the greatest poison
of love.
CXXVIII. The woman who weeps without a known cause is the solitary bird
who, single, invokes a love.
CXXIX. There are tears that mean wait. There are others that signify enough.
We must know how to distinguish them.
CXXX. It is vile to taunt a lover with the joys and voluptuousness that have
been accorded him. It is the same as to boast of being an egotist.
CXXXI. In love at twenty, one travels a mile in a hundred days; at forty, one
makes a hundred miles in a day.
CXXXII. At sixteen and at fifty, love is requested in the same way – that is,
as an alms.
CXXXIII. To render a rival ridiculous is the most pitiful and surest way to kill
him.
CXXXIV. Ask nothing, obtain all: here is the most precious secret of great
loves and of refined coquetry.
CXXXV. Coquetry is the most faithful and most perfect imitation of love in
nature.
 CXXXVI. To scrape off the hundred coats of varnish and the thousand
disguises with which modern society has covered love is one of the most
sublime missions of moral and civil philosophy.
CXXXVII. To give much, to give very much, but never to give all: this is for
woman the most precious secret of being loved for a long time.
CXXXVIII. The two sexes give each other lessons in love with an affecting
exchange. The youth learns them from the woman of thirty, and the man of forty
teaches them to the young girl.
CXXXIX. There is a more mathematical, more inexorable, more just leveller
than death: it is love.
CXL. Love is the only precious thing which with money we cannot buy. That
which is acquired with gold is lechery.
CXLI. Youth is the most beautiful metal in which to set the gems of love.
CXLII. The young peach tree bears many peaches; the old peach tree bears
few fruits, but they are always fresh. Thus it is with love: we love in every age,
and each one loves with his own organism; but in youth it is much, in old age
little.
CXLIII. The shake of the hand is to the caress as the kiss is to x.
CXLIV. The embrace is, for very many, all of love; for him who knows how
to love truly it is the safety-valve which prevents destruction.
CXLV. Love should always be a choice, an exaltation of the excellent over the
better, of the better over the good; it should be the incarnation of an immortal
hope, of an inextinguishable desire.
CXLVI. If all were sons of love, everybody would have it for his child.
CXLVII. In Italy they love more and better than in any other part of the
world, because it is the country of beauty and art.
CXLVIII. To obtain nothing, to suffer always and always love: one of the
daily miracles of love.
CXLIX. To see everything with closed eyes, to see nothing with open eyes:
other daily prodigies of love.
CL. To make love reason is to wish to solve the problem of the squaring of
the circle.
CLI. To be ugly and to be loved: the greatest human voluptuousness.
 CLII. To be loved and to betray: the vilest of crimes.
CLIII. To preserve the hair, the ribbons, the thousand relies of the beloved
object is, perhaps, idolatry; but idolatry is the principal part of every religion.
CLIV. It is a pity we cannot bottle love as we do wine; that we cannot
preserve it as we do mushrooms; that we cannot embalm it as we do rare birds!
What a knave would be extracted from each process of mummification!
CLV. He who must sacrifice himself to lechery to prove a passion should be
relegated to Boeotia or among the eunuchs.
CLVI. Women, after having read a book, admired a statue, a picture, or a
poem that treats of love, always draw a long sigh, exclaiming, ‘All this is not
love; man knows nothing of love save lechery!’ It is well to let our companion
cherish the innocent pretension that she alone possesses the patent of love.
CLVlI. Woman is so accustomed to sacrifice that she would have us believe
that even on the altar of love she sacrifices herself to us.
CLVIII. To inquire into the origin of amorous caprices is one of the most
stupid of human imbecilities.
CLIX. Many die virgins in this world; no woman dies who has not conjugated
at some time or other the verb to love.
CLX. The world of love has an Olympus of heroes, martyrs, and saints to
discredit the paradise and the pantheon of all nations.
CLXI. To be the unconscious medium of another’s love is certainly
ridiculous; but it is perhaps more ridiculous and humiliating to serve as an
entr’acte between two loves.
CLXII. Many writers, who never visit the countries of the torrid zone,
nevertheless assign love to the tropics, perhaps because love and the tropics are
very hot things; but they certainly did not think to affirm such an undeniable
truth. Not only is it very hot in both places, but there are found in both the
crocodile and the rattlesnake, the drug that irritates and exalts and the opium that
induces slumber, the tiger and the hummingbird; there life is short and ardent,
and the yawn is long that follows the brief intoxication.
CLXIII. No matter how science advances, love will always remain an art; no
matter what heights genius attains, love will always have stronger wings than
genius; no matter what happiness riches and glory can confer upon man, the
supreme joys of life will always be given by LOVE.
THE END
PART TWO
 From On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca and on
Nervine Nourishment in General
A MEMOIR AWARDED THE DELL’ACQUA PRIZE IN 1858

Lhe dava a verde folha da herva ardente

Que a seu costume estava ruminando.
(Camoëns, Canto vii, l. 58.)1

Introduction: A Classificatory Sketch of the Nervine Foods

Man, in his use and abuse of life, feels the continual need to repair through
nourishment his molecular wear and the expenditure of forces that constitute his
mode of being. Some of the substances which he takes from the outer world help
him to repair in particular the tissues that regularly fray apart in the exercise of
their vital actions, and they are called plastic nutrients; while others, made for
calorification, are burned by the oxygen breathed into the vast web of all the
organs, or are deposited in the form of adipose in cellular tissue, where they
serve as spare fuel, and they are given the name respiratory nutrients. To these
two classes of nutritive substances, established some time ago by the illustrious
Liebig,2 I should like to add a third, namely the nervine nutrients, whose purpose
is to heighten the action of the nervous system in all its various attributes.
Needless to say, we should not take this classification of foods very strictly;
as ever, it is impossible to do so in the area of physiology and pathology. For
here the elements, the phenomena, the functions cross and overlap so frequently
and so intricately that it becomes all but impossible to separate even two things
without mishandling or destroying them. The analyst’s scalpel, however
skillfully and penetratingly it moves over the fabric of life, cannot help but leave
some droplet of blood as proof that what was cut into formed a whole. Life
cannot be understood in its truth except by considering it in its entirety and in
infinitely small moments; whereas studying a single phenomenon across time,
although it may be highly useful work and, alas, all too necessary for weak
human nature, distracts from the truth and at every step creates artificial
distinctions, which we ultimately believe to be facts of nature. For this reason I
would like to see banished forever from our science the words for systems,
classes, genera, and species, which are at once overambitious and impotent; we
should leave them to the exact sciences which, more fortunate than our own, rest
upon solid terrain that allows them to draw straight lines with a mathematical
hand. We must be content to classify physiological and morbid phenomena, and
many others of secondary importance, in families, which bring together the most
similar facts without claiming to imprint upon them an indelible mark that would
make them recognized by all, infallibly different from other facts: and just as in
human families we find closely similar individuals, less similar ones, and
seeming interlopers, so it is with our divisions – in which we must never search
for a scientific system, but only a thread to guide us through the dark, intricate
path of our studies.
All we have said thus far is amply confirmed in the case of foods. No
nutritive substance is entirely plastic, respiratory, or nervine. Muscle tissue, no
matter how thin, always contains the sugar of flesh, which is a respiratory food;
bread contains amylaceous and proteic elements; cocoa, which is a nervine food,
contains a material that can aid breathing, and so on. In dividing foods into these
three families, we should content ourselves with reuniting them into natural
groups that serve to indicate their most important physiological function; and if
science has admitted a clear distinction between the plastic and the respiratory, it
cannot also refuse to admit the nervine.
These foods are distinguished by the following salient characteristics:
1. They almost invariably act in small quantities, and their action depends
more on their nature than their mass.
2. They are consumed only by humans, who possess a more complex nervous
life than all other animals. Among these fellow animals, those closest to us in
intelligence may like these foods when introduced to them in their domesticated
state. Monkeys, parrots, and even dogs often take to coffee and tea; but in their
wild state they never instinctively seek out these substances.
3. In the various ages of life their consumption is always proportionate to the
cerebral-spinal axis. A baby is content with milk, which to date is not known to
contain any nervine nourishment; a child must consume coffee and wine in great
moderation and generally feels no need of either. An adult man, at the height of
his nerve functions, may consume all nervine foods in careful abundance.
4. A man needs them more than a woman because his brain and his muscles
are more active.
5. Civilized man needs and enjoys these foods more than the savage, and in
the brilliant deployment of his intelligence may in a single day consume the
fermented juices of the vines of Vesuvius, the misty beer of England, the cocoa
of America, and the tea of remote China.
6. The stomach, under the immediate action of these foods, creates a peculiar
feeling of well-being and rebels against any diet that completely excludes them.
Raspail,3 insistently drawing physicians’ attention to the usefulness of fragrant
condiments, has rendered a true service to science, once one has pardoned his
helminthomania.4 Children and women can feel well for some time on a diet of
milk and fruit, but an adult man almost always rebels against it. The sheer
drowsiness and dullness of sensation that follow a drink of milk are at the root of
this. When milk is heated, this effect is less perceptible, since the heat imparts a
stimulating effect that utterly vanishes when wine is added. In this regard, the
café au lait dreamed up by a woman of high standing in France is a culinary and
hygienic discovery of the first order, for it offers, combined in one pleasant,
easily digested form, the three families of foods. The casein represents the
plastics, the sugar of the milk and butter supply the respiratory materials, and the
coffee stimulates the nerves as one of the principal nervine foods. This drink
even contains the salts our skeleton requires. So it is not by mere habit and
fashion that some four-fifths of the inhabitants of Europe and America breakfast
upon milk mixed with tea, coffee, or chocolate.
7. The nervine foods are almost all absorbed very quickly, and once they enter
into the eddy of circulation, at every point in our organism, they stimulate the
various regions of the nervous system. Some, indeed, are apparently absorbed
without prior digestion, enabling the foods to quickly repair the use of the nerve
force. Just as a farmer returning from the field craves nothing so much as a glass
of wine, the traveller in South America, after a gallop of fifty miles or more in
the pampas, is courteously handed a cup or gourd of mate on the rancho. Once
the organism has quickly been strengthened by alcohol or caffeine and by the
aromatic properties of mate, the stomach is better disposed to patiently await the
more solid, long-lasting restoration of the plastic and respiratory foods.
8. The nervine foods pass unmodified into our organism or undergo further
transformations. This is an area in which physiology eagerly awaits fresh
illumination from chemistry. Some of these foods, from the wealth of
hydrogenic-carbonated properties they contain, have a respiratory value
comparable or superior to their nerve power. Such is the case with alcohol and
the fat content in cocoa. These foods could be termed nervine-respiratory.
Others have a pronounced plastic property, as is the case with tea, which in
certain Oriental countries is eaten, and gives the organism a great abundance of
casein (neuro-plastic foods).
 9. The nervine foods contribute considerably to a happier life. Through their
influence, one’s sense of existence is always heightened, moral suffering is
mitigated or forgotten, and a cheerfulness is revived that may ascend to the
heights of happiness (coca, opium, etc.).
10. These foods exert different influences from one other, adapting to the
various needs of life as determined by age, sex, temperament, climate, and race.
We can only impatiently await the history of the nervine foods studied in their
multiple relations to civilization, health, and medicine. I hope to return to this
subject at greater length; for now I must be content to sketch a few lines that
may help to show where I would like to situate coca. Suffice it for me to say that
these foods find clear-cut favour with given parts of the nervous system. The
exertions of the intellect are more quickly repaired by a cup of coffee, whereas
alcohols better prepare use of the muscles. Guaranà strengthens the genital
organs, whereas opium rekindles the imagination.
11. The words excitement and stimulation should not be understood in the
sense given them by the champions of diathesis.5 The nervine foods can serve
the life of the nervous system by halting the effects of organic regression and
thereby suspending one function for the good of another. To want to expand and
elaborate upon this point, however, would be to rush ourselves beyond our
current state of ignorance. Let us settle for the little known over the ill-known.
[…]

Chapter 1: The Botanical and Agricultural History of Coca

The coca, Lamarck’s Erythroxylon6 coca, is a small, prolifically branching tree

that reaches a few feet in height and is adorned with alternating, oval, sharp,
unary, membranous leaves generally marked by three longitudinal venations,
about an inch and a half long and one inch wide. The flowers are small, whitish,
grouped over some small tubercules that appear on its branches in May. When
the fruit is ripe it is a red, oblong, and prismatic stone fruit.
The coca tree grows only in hot, very humid, and thickly vegetated places
called Yungas, along the entire eastern side of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes.
No author, to my knowledge, has yet noted the presence of this cherished little
tree in the Argentine Confederation; but I think it can be affirmed upon the
authority of a very distinguished American friend of mine, Mr Villafane, the
former governor of Oran, who assured me he had seen the coca in the woods of a
district in the province of Salta. He confirmed this statement in his most recent
work, published last year, and mentioned as well that he knew it to be of the
highest quality.
It is hard to trace, in the depths of the historical traditions of America’s
indigenous peoples, when the Incas found coca in those virgin forests; when they
recognized its precious qualities; and when they brought it to their own fields,
which they knew how to cultivate so masterfully with irrigation, tilling, and
fertilizing. What is certain is that at the time of the Conquest the Indians of
Upper and Lower Peru were considered to have cultivated coca from time
immemorial, and to have long reserved it for the royal family and its dependents.
There are those who think that the Spanish, by granting free use of coca for all,
endeared themselves to the masses tyrannically deprived of one of life’s greatest
comforts. At the same time, Pizarro’s companions, by levying heavy taxes on
this important commercial item, reaped quite a large harvest for the ever greedy
coffers of Spain.7
What seems almost incomprehensible is that the Spanish should never have
drawn the attention of learned Europeans to a plant that provided nervine
sustenance for an entire nation; and it is even more remarkable that travellers of
all nations forgot coca for the span of some three centuries, barely noting it, or
else relaying only partial or erroneous information about it. It is also truly
notable that in Pereira’s8 great work on medicinal substances I have been able to
gather precious little bibliographical information on the subject.
Coca is grown especially in the department of Yungas in Bolivia, where they
choose the dampest spots down in the valleys and the first slope of the
mountains; there, they build low walls to keep the soil from breaking apart. The
coca is sown or planted. In the former case the seeds are deposited in the ground
in December and January, the hemisphere’s hottest months, and seedbeds are
made, from which the tiny plants are transplanted the following year. This is
almost always the preferred method. In any case, the leaves are harvested in the
second year.
The harvesting of the leaves, which are the plant’s usable portion, is called
mita, and it is repeated two, three, or four times a year. It is done with the
greatest diligence, by manually detaching leaf after leaf from branches, and
transporting them into various paved courtyards, since the harvesters need them
to dry quickly, on stone in the sun. This operation does much to bring out the
good qualities of the coca, because if the damp and rainy weather interrupts its
drying or wets it, it very easily undergoes a process of fermentation that alters it
and changes its effect.
 To show the importance of coca in the agriculture of Bolivia, it is enough to
note that in several places the coca fields are hedged with coffee plants. To those
uninitiated into coca’s pleasures this may seem a true sacrilege, especially when
one considers that Yungas coffee is one of the finest in the world.
When the leaves are dried, they form loaves, which are wrapped in banana
leaves and covered with a very coarse woollen fabric. Tambor is the name given
commercially to the joining of two loaves in one woollen sack; each of these is
called a cesto and contains about a rubbo9 of leaves (25 pounds, in pounds of 16
ounces). This very crude way of preserving and shipping coca may suffice for
the commerce of Peru and Bolivia, countries with very arid air, but would hardly
do for its exportation to distant lands.
Coca is consumed almost exclusively in Bolivia, Peru, and the two Argentine
provinces of Salta and Jujuy. I would say that it is also used in the American
republics that make up the former state of Colombia, although I have failed to
find definite proof of this.
For now, wanting precise data to determine with certainty the annual
production of coca in Bolivia, I must content myself with an official, and highly
reliable, record published in La Paz in 1832. It states that Bolivia harvests
400,000 cestos of coca annually, 300,000 in the province of Yungas and the rest
in those of Larecaja and Apolobamba and the department of Cochabamba. The
average price was then 30 francs per cesto in La Paz, the general depository for
it, which would bring the Bolivian republic an annual revenue of 12 million
francs for its coca production. According to Orbigny,10 Peru, in this same period,
produced 1,207,435 francs; in all, 13,207,435, a huge sum given its population.
In fact the number of indigenous or mestizo inhabitants of the provinces in
which coca is consumed can, in Bolivia, reach roughly 700,000, which would
mean an annual consumption of 17.50 francs per person.
However much coca Peru might produce, it always buys a certain quantity
from Bolivia, deeming it far superior to its own; and in 1856, 7851 rubbi came
from this country, at a value of 205,600 francs. The Argentine republic buys
3,000 rubbi of coca annually from its neigh-bour, a huge quantity given the
sparse population of the two provinces, Salta and Jujuy, that consume it, and in
which there are rather fewer natives relative to the white population than are
found in Bolivia.
Since the official data we have thus far cited were published, the cultivation
of coca has spread somewhat, and its price risen. Suffice it to say that it is
bought for between 60 and 80 francs, depending on the scarcity or abundance of
the harvest, as well as on its quality. In certain years a rubbo fetched even 100
francs. In Salta it is usually sold at 7 francs a pound.
High-quality coca presents whole leaves of medium size and bright green
colour. It has a very light fragrance reminiscent of hay or chocolate. It breaks
down easily when chewed, and gives off a rather bitter flavour that is not
unpleasant.
When steeped in hot water, coca turns an attractive green colour that grows
darker the poorer its quality. This tea has a pleasant taste that is like nothing else.
The brew has a rather sickening, even nauseating taste.
Coca is always more or less bad when brownish, spotted, or very hard to
chew. The worst coca gives off a foul smell, and is close in colour to roasted
coffee; it is crushed and reused in a thousand different ways.
The best, from the province of Yungas, may, in certain tiny cestos, fetch a
very high price under the name of coca selecta. The worst, since it is very tough
and not very powerful, comes from Peru.
Between the worst and the best, then, an infinite variety is to be found, and
those varieties can be distinguished only by connoisseurs, who bring to their
habit a subtlety of discrimination befitting the voluptuousness of a pleasure
studied over many years.
The still uninitiated European pharmacist should always look for the two
most salient traits in coca, its green colour and the thinness of its leaves.
Many travellers insist that the fruits of the coca plant serve as coins in Peru,
and the Chevalier de Jaucourt,11 who wrote a brief article on this plant in the
Grande encyclopédie française, repeats this fact, which I believe to be false. On
the other hand he refuses to believe what others have written, namely, that the
revenue of Cuzco’s cathedral is but a tenth that of the coca trade.
Other authors have drawn on the coca/cuca distinction to posit two entirely
different erythroxylon plants.
I know of no chemical study of this plant and anxiously await Italian research
on its active principle. I believe I have been the first in America to prepare a
hydro-alcoholic extract, which seemed to me to represent the integral active part
of the leaf. This solution was created in the pharmacy of the Flemings,
distinguished Irish chemists who settled many years ago in the Argentine
Confederation.
Anyone wishing to acquaint himself with coca can find it in the Brera
pharmacy run by our illustrious Erba, who does such credit in Italy to
pharmaceutical chemistry.12 This is the only coca thus far to be found in Europe.

Chapter 2: On the Use of Coca in America

Coca is consumed in three large regions of South America, namely, Bolivia,

Peru, and the Argentine Confederation, and in the last of these, only in the two
provinces of Salta and Jujuy. Forgetting for a moment the political divisions of
the American republics, which have arbitrarily joined together such different
countries and disparate races, we could say that this leaf is used by the
descendants of the great nation of the Incas. It makes up the treasure of the full-
blooded Indians and the cholos – the children of Indians and whites – and less
frequently it is chewed by the black, the mulatto, and, rarely, the white.
In his chuspa (leather sack, made of a bladder or other material) the Indian
always carries a certain supply of coca leaves, and with this he welcomes the
new day and the setting sun, which was once his God. With all the attention lent
to a cherished habit, he takes a small bunch of leaves, which may vary from one
to two drams, and puts into his mouth a sort of bolus or cud called an acullico, to
which he joins a small fragment of llicta.
The llicta is an alkaline substance made from cooked potato and bonded with
rich potash ashes obtained from the combustion of many plants. Travellers are
wrong to cite only the llicta of Chenopodium quinoa; for I have seen used, in
addition to this plant, the woodlike torso of the buckwheat stalk, vine leaves and
stipes, and a grass the indigenous call moco-moco (this grass, which I took back
to Europe, was examined by my very good friend the distinguished botanist Dr
Gibelli,13 who recognized it as Gomphrena boliviana). The llicta, by breaking
down in the mouth, serves both to stimulate the secretion of the salivary glands
and soften the leaves. I have several times used coca by chewing it either with or
without llicta and have never found this alkaline matter to alter even minimally
the coca’s overall effect, although using it I did occasionally have to endure a
very annoying irritation of the mouth’s mucus-producing glands. The coca that
grows in Peru has such tough leaves that one often must remove their veins in
order to chew them, and for this reason perhaps the Peruvians must use
quicklime instead of llicta. In fact, they carry it in a small silver and gold
receptacle, and remove it with a small pencil-brush. This habit is very similar to
that of the Malaysians, who use lime to chew betel leaves and arec nuts; perhaps
this is what misled Don Antonio Ulloa14 to believe that coca and betel were the
same leaf. To this day everyone knows that the latter substance – the delight of
all the inhabitants of the Archipelago – is made of the leaves of the Piper betle.
I do not understand how Raynal15 can assure us that coca is eaten with a
greyish-white, clay dirt called tocera; nor how, in the general history of his
travels, La Harpe16 refers to llicta by the name of mambi. Never did I hear these
words used in the lands in which coca is chewed, nor did I hear them recalled by
people who had made long voyages into the interior of Peru and Bolivia. Perhaps
these terms were used in the republics of the former Colombia, but with the data
available to me I can neither confirm nor deny this.
The swallowed acullica is chewed slowly, wetted with saliva, and left to melt
slowly in either cheek, while the juice is slowly squeezed out and drunk. The
coquero17 is immediately recognizable because he resembles some ruminative
animal or monkey who has hidden his theft of fruit in his cheeks. After a while,
nothing remains of the coca but a stubbly mass from the woody webbing of the
leaves, and the descendant of the Incas must always take care to place it above
various monuments made by wayfarers, who set down a stone in the same spot
as if to greet one another. This custom is performed with all the reverence of a
religious rite. The most moderate coqueros consume between half an ounce and
an ounce daily, divided into two rations, one for their morning labours and one
for their evening rest. Few, however, are content with such a small amount, and
are forced to accept it mostly by poverty, not lack of desire. An Indian may chew
two, three, or even four ounces of coca a day without being called a drug fiend,
and it is only when he takes six to eight ounces a day that everyone considers
him a lost soul.
Scarcely has the Indian been weaned from his mother’s nipple than he is
introduced to the favourite stimulant of his fathers; and even as a small child he
is entrusted with a full day’s watch of the sheep or llama herd with no other
provision than a little sack of coca leaves and a bit of llicta. While thus he leads
the animals that constitute his sole paternal wealth over the bald rocks of the
Andes, which are faintly vegetated here and there with a bit of moss or a rare tuft
of pajonal,18 he chews the leaves that are his only food for many long hours.
Coca serves the native as a food and stimulant, and without being able, most
of the time, to explain its action, he feels lighter in spirit, more strengthened and
comforted in his ongoing struggle against the elements, and better able to
withstand the harshness of his continual, often abasing labours. Without coca he
poorly digests his potatoes (which freezing deprives of extractive materials), his
charqui (dried meat), his mote, and his lagua; rough foods all made with maize;
without coca he cannot work, or enjoy himself, or, in a word, live.
 Imagine a small man with tiny feet and a very wide torso, obliged to live on
very bad food and at an altitude ranging from 7,500 to 15,000 feet above sea
level. In these conditions other men would scarcely survive; and he must live
and continually work. He serves as a foot postilion, or mule guide, escorting for
several leagues a traveller almost always mounted on a good mule and riding up
and down the slopes at a quick trot with scarcely a thought for the poor Indian
who must accompany him. Working at other times in the mines, barefoot, in the
morning he breaks up the frozen mud mixed with a silver amalgam, and sweats,
driven on in his labour, beneath a sky that would numb the heartiest. All these
prodigies the Indian accomplishes with coca, and without it he rebels against his
master and against life itself; and this everyone knows, because in addition to the
usual terms of a salary, the hired man is almost always allotted a coca ration.
When the Indian must stand guard or walk many leagues or take a wife, all
deeds requiring greater than usual strength, he raises his normal amount of coca,
meticulously calibrating it to the expenditure of nervous energy he needs.19
Human nature is so constituted that in every clime and every country the next
step to enjoying a pleasure is abusing it; and this is no less true of coca. The vice
of coquear is, indeed, one of the most tenacious and invincible known to man.
The incorrigible coquero always has his acullico in his mouth and can be seen
without it only when he is eating. He often sleeps with coca in his mouth. He
forgets his own duties, forgets his family, and even takes from life’s most
pressing needs the time and money to devote to his passion. If fortune has not
made him rich, he works only as much as he needs to buy himself his cherished
leaf, and, withdrawing into the solitude of the woods and mountains, lingers
there, a prey to the delirium that inebriates him with pleasure. I knew a Negro
who would vanish every so often from his master’s house for an indefinite
period, and return only when not a single costermonger would furnish him,
penniless and without credit, with the smallest dose of Bolivian leaf. I know a
gentleman of the white race who, addicted to this vice, left for good his own
family, and for long intervals could be found only in the densest forests, prey to
the basest degradation. And so it is no mere metaphor when the Americans say,
Fulano anda perdido por la coca.20
The coquero is self-sufficient; social ties, the most sacred bonds of affection,
ambition, all life’s amenities are meaningless to him; his pleasure absorbs all
others, and when, through money, labour, or fraud, he has come by a generous
supply of leaves, he has before him a sure future of several days of happiness,
nor does he seek anything else. To this summit of prostitution arrive, more than
the Indians, the blacks, the half-castes, and the whites. Contributing to this fact is
the varied effect this substance exerts on the different races. From my experience
I can say that the pure-blooded native is the man least subject to the ravages of
coca, the black the one who most readily succumbs to its delirium and mental
alienation.
Sometimes the coca addiction is connected with alcohol abuse, the two
combining to abase the man to the lowest degree, causing him even to lose any
sense of who he is.
In America, coca, beyond its dietetic importance, has many uses in popular
medicine. Its infusion is continually used in cases of indigestion, for stomach
pains, for hysteria, for flatulence, and above all for the enter-algias of all sorts
that in that clime go by the general name of colicos. In such cases, the infusion is
administered orally or through an enema.
The horror the coca vice inspires in Europeans who have settled in America
may perhaps have contributed to its limited use among the white race. Indeed, a
ridiculous prejudice against it has arisen by virtue of which those who chew it
are hidden away, as though to consume it by infusion were to place it beyond
reproach, and the immorality of this act were confined to its chewing. I know,
however, of a respectable prelate in Chuquisaca, less fastidious than others, who
did not blush to present at his table, after the fruit, a silver platter full of greener,
more fragrant coca leaves, assuring his guests that it brought him the best
digestion in the world.

Chapter 3: On the Physiological Action of Coca and Its

Applications in Hygiene
Two main sources provide us with the materials necessary for ascertaining the
therapeutic impact of a substance: tradition, and the study of its physiological
effects. The most valuable treasures of the pharmacy do not come from scientific
divination but from one of the manifold tendencies of the instinct for
preservation and the vagaries of chance, and in this the living art of the people
has done rather more than medical science. We are left with the task of humbly
receiving the legacy of time and of recording it in our name-rich, fact-poor
protocols.
To classify a remedy, I, however, do not intend to find it some small slot in
one of the many pigeonholes that vie for space in the thousand archives of
pharmacy; I mean, rather, that one should study physiological effects, weigh
advantages and dangers, exactly define its therapeutic limits, and finally try to
counterbalance the findings of popular tradition with the results of science, to
see where they overlap. If the physicians had had the patience to do the former
before receiving every medicinal substance with open hands – and closed eyes –
we would now find the ground we stand on less shaky, and could build ourselves
a sturdy edifice.
To date, as far as I know, no physiological study of coca has been undertaken,
and I offer the following remark as the first lines in a picture that men more
learned and experienced than I will have the chance to complete.21
Until physicians provide us with an analysis of the Bolivian leaf, I have
thought to set up experiments about its juices as extracted by chewing, because I
was thereby producing only the leaf’s utterly inert wood texture, which put me in
the exact situation of the Indians who use coca in this way.
When one ingests a dram of this leaf, it is rapidly steeped in saliva, and there
is no need to follow the Americans in using llicta, which is excessively irritating
to the mouth; and by the chewing, it is quickly reduced to a soft mass that easily
allows the pressing out of the juice, which has a bitter taste at first, then a
herbaceous one; gradually the cud of the coca loses its juice. Shortly after
swallowing the salivary solution of the leaves, one feels a sense of well-being in
one’s stomach that is neither hot nor tingling; it might be better compared to the
feeling one has of having digested something well. On an empty stomach this
sensation can elude many people, but when one chews coca after a meal, it is
impossible for its beneficial effects to go unnoticed even by the least sensitive or
observant person. In this instance, five or ten minutes after beginning to use the
leaf, a wholesome exaltation announces to us that the digestive process is
working more easily and rapidly than usual. This advantage is better noticed by
those with low, difficult digestion. A young doctor in Milan, who found himself
in this circumstance and who for years awakened in the morning with a filmy
mouth and a white tongue, found such advantages to taking coca after meals that
he never forgets it a single day and has given up cigars and coffee.
Coca has a most mysterious effect upon the stomach; it neither hastens
digestion nor stimulates it, irritating it in some excessive way; I, taking it almost
daily for two years, have never found that it irritated my stomach, even when I
took a rather copious amount. It does seem slightly to excite the nervous system
of the upper viscera of the epigastrium, removing any awareness of its activity or
easing the process. I, for example, absolutely cannot occupy my mind after
dining without experiencing headache and difficult digestion, and only when I
chew coca or take it in a hot infusion can I engage in light reading after meals
without taxing my stomach or brain.
Without being absolutely sure of this, I believe that coca aids in the secretion
of the gastric juices; for when a large amount is chewed on an empty stomach,
acid eructations follow. Llicta would probably bring the stomach’s acidity up to
its maximum level, unless some foods might benefit from it for their own
dissolution. When I took coca at breakfast with some granules of bicarbonate of
soda, I never suffered acid eructations.
Habitual use of coca greatly whitens the teeth, and I have always found them
to be quite magnificent in the Indians who have taken it daily for years. It is not
uncommon to see octogenarians in Upper Peru whose teeth are now only a few
millimetres tall through the wear of constant chewing, yet are otherwise
exceedingly healthy. Contributing to this fact are certainly race and the alkaline
llicta with which coca is consumed in America; but I have always noticed my
own teeth to be whiter and better able to break through hard substances
whenever I have chewed the precious Bolivian leaf for some time. I have been
able to verify this fact several times in different climates of America and Europe.
Convinced of the healthy effect of coca upon the teeth, I merely doubt whether
and to what extent the leaf’s chemical nature and the mechanical effect of the
teeth bear upon this fact. All organs are evenly perfected in their functioning,
and the coqueros chew ten times more than others who use their teeth only for
food.
When the first acullico of coca has been used up and one starts to chew the
second, one feels a thirst that comes from a dryness of the mouth and throat, not
from stomach irritation.
The abuse of coca exerts no other influence upon the first stage of digestion
beyond that mentioned, and if the appetite diminishes, or rather one feels a less
urgent need for food, one should trace this back to its overall effect, and not to a
harmful effect upon the stomach.
Slight or non-existent is the action erithroxylon exerts upon the small and
large intestine. Enteric digestion and the final action of the rectum suffer no
modification by the use and abuse of coca. The faeces lose their foul odour,
taking on instead the special smell of coca juice. The habitual use of high doses
of coca may result in constipation.
Coca exerts a marked effect upon certain secretions. Shortly after chewing
one or two drams, one feels a dryness in the eyes and the pituitary gland, which
enlarges in proportion to the dose. This dryness is in truth produced by a
weakness in secretion and precedes the slight redness of the eyes that later
appears as a symptom of cerebral congestion. I have occasionally seen an
increase in urine. Sweat appears only when a fever arises from larger doses.
Using a moderate dose of coca several days in a row, I noticed a small rim of
pityriasis22 form around the eyelids; only by momentarily discontinuing my use
of erithroxylon did I see it go away. I corroborated this fact twice in different
climates and, never having suffered on other occasions from this harmless
ailment, cannot believe that it was a pure coincidence.
Anyone not yet used to using coca can, after chewing a few drams of it, see
certain spots of simple erythema surface on his limbs and torso, spots which are
transitory and harmless; at other times one experiences a pleasant tingling in the
skin and, with the urge to scratch, sees oneself redden more than usual,
particularly at the least rubbing.
Sperm, then, is a very important secretion, for its relation to the entire
nervous system and for the influence it exerts over health, and it may be excited
by immoderate use of the Bolivian leaf. One must be fairly well addicted before
erections increase in frequency and potency; but chewing a few drams a day and,
to a far lesser extent, taking it in a hot infusion, ought not in the least to alarm
the scruples of the more chaste; I would only bar its use to someone who had
excessively demanding needs, and attempt to curb them with all the physical and
moral anaphrodisiacs available. Anyone, on the other hand, with naturally weak
organs I would advise to read and meditate upon the next chapter, in which he
will perhaps find some useful advice.
Wishing to ascertain with exactitude the influence that coca has upon heart
movements, I performed upon myself certain comparative experiments by which
to measure its effect against that of other nervine foods and of hot water.
The circumstances of the experiments were always identical, and I made the
observations with as much precision as I could apply, checking my pulse before
having my drink, one minute after, and then every five minutes for an hour and a
half. I went no further than this, mindful that, after this time had elapsed, the
pulse stayed the same or slowly followed its usual inclinations over the course of
a day, without further succumbing to any influence by the drink. The pulsations
were always counted for a full minute and in a sedentary position, which
produces an average rate for all the positions. During the experiment, I remained
calm, and did not perform any action that might appreciably alter heart motions.
The water was consistently four ounces, the quantities of substances involved
88 granules, and the brew, consistently prepared in the same way and at the same
time for the infusion, was 61.25°C, the temperature most people prefer for hot
drinks. Only in the case of cocoa was a decoction prepared instead of an
infusion. As for the substances, I obtained them while they were at their purest,
and except for those with some question mark hovering about them, I procured
them where they are produced and got them from thoroughly reliable sources.
Let me add once more that the outside temperature was almost always the
same in all experiments, and I always conducted the experiments in the period
between three and four hours after lunch, so as to choose the most opportune
time and to make the experiments comparable in the respect also.
The immediate results of my tabulations, and of other small corroborative
experiments it would be pointless to refer to, are as follows:
1. All hot drinks raise the number of heartbeats; the maximum rise, which
almost always comes right after drinking, gradually ebbs until the pulse-rate
returns to normal.
2. An hour and a half later, pure water almost always reduces the pulse-rate.
This fact, which is also in certain rare instances verified for tea and coffee,
occurs only later with these drinks.
3. The rise in the pulse-rate under the influence of hot water is followed by a
state of exhaustion, when the pulsations are scarcely returning to their normal
rate, and even more, when they are falling; whereas the other drinks give off no
feeling of weakness even when the number of heartbeats has returned to the
physiological number, or even diminished. In the fifth experiment, in which,
after I took hot water, the pulsations, after the usual ascent, remained normal, I
felt no illness, but it should be noted that the next evening I had chewed a half-
ounce of coca, there by putting myself into a state of overexcitement. This fact,
which at first sight may seem exceptional, confirms, rather, the physiological law
that the causes of weakening are all the less active the more resistant the
organism is to them.
4. The rise in the pulse is somewhat different with different drinks, and can be
precisely represented, according to the experiments I performed on myself, by
the following numbers:
We see, then, that the erythroxylon infusion excites the heart four times more
than hot water and tea and twice more than coffee, and the substance that comes
closest to it is mate. Cocoa would seem to be only slightly more exciting than
coffee.
5. The influence exerted by hot drinks on the heart varies according to an
infinity of circumstances, and only now, I believe, can it be said that the pulse-
rates rise the slower their effect is, and vice versa.
Coca, beyond raising the number of heartbeats when it has barely reached a
certain quantity (between 100 granules and several drams), produces a
temporary fever, with a rise in heat and number of breaths. Once under its
influence I observed a temperature of + 37.5°C in the palm of the hand, and, on
two occasions, + 38.75°C under the tongue. During the circulatory reaction, the
face grows flushed and the eyes sparkle. Larger doses induce heart palpitations,
and the congestion of blood in the vital centres is obvious. After three drams I
experienced some moments of heart palpitations and cold hands and feet.
The highest rise in the pulse-rate under the influence of coca was 134
pulsations, whereas the normal rate is 65.
When the name of unknown regions has been expunged from the outlying
parts of the nervous systems, a few words will suffice us, perhaps, to pinpoint
the particular effect coca has on the cerebral-spinal axis and the ganglia network:
at present, it would be an act of temerity, an idle classificatory whim, to seek to
assign them a single term. I leave it to others to place them among the narcotics,
the hypersthenias, the antispasmodics; had I to choose the least misleading
among these words, I should stay with the first.
Shortly after one has chewed one or two drams of coca and swallowed its
juice, one starts to feel a sensation of mild, and I might say fibrillar, warmth
spreading over the whole surface of the body, while one sometimes feels a very
gentle buzzing in the ears. At other times one feels the need for space and the
urge to rush out as though in search of some wider horizon. One gradually grows
aware that the nervous powers are waxing, that life is turning more active and
intense; and we feel heartier, more agile, better disposed to all sorts of work. In
certain people I have seen a state of drowsiness precede this awareness of
strength, though this effect occurred only with stronger doses. With a bit of
attention to apprehending the changes in consciousness in this first phase of
cocal inebriation, one finds it quite different from that of alcohol. In the latter,
nervous excitation is immediately accompanied by exaggerated or violent, and
always irregular, movements; there is a general disordering of thoughts and
muscular actions, whereas in the inebriation induced by coca it appears that the
new strength imbues our organism in all senses and quite pleasantly so, like a
sponge dipped in water. The delight of this phase is almost entirely bound up
with the heightened awareness of being alive, and we, crouching inside
ourselves, enjoy this period without feeling impelled to put the newly acquired
strength to immediate use.
The sensitivity and excitability never increase: whereas the intelligence turns
more active and we speak more vehemently, and feel, in a word, that the
intellectual mechanism is more active, nevertheless, with our sensitivity either
not having grown equally or often even having been blunted, we feel less apt to
take on a higher level of mental labour. In this, coca works rather differently than
coffee, and more closely resemblies opium. The precious coffea bean hones
sensibility and the inner perceptions of consciousness, inducing us to search and
find, and supplying the mind with many elaborate materials; whereas the
Bolivian leaf vehemently arouses the whole brain without providing it with more
abundant and more delicate sensations. Several times, for instance, I would put
together, under the influence of the first doses of coca, some quite unimportant
work, only to find it too slight to give vent to my mental overexcitement; and
while my pen furiously raced across the page, I could no longer conceive new
ideas nor at that moment imagine a more intense labour, nor a higher level to
which my brain’s extraordinary state could be adapted.
With two to four drams, one begins to withdraw from the outer world, and
one plunges into a blissful awareness of pleasure and of feeling intensely alive.
An almost absolute immobility takes hold of all our muscles, and even
summoning words is a bother, since it seems to disturb the altogether calm, tepid
atmosphere in which we are immersed. Every so often, however, life’s very
fullness seems to stifle us and we do burst out with energetic words, or feel
impelled to deploy our muscular strength in various ways. I, who am by nature
utterly inept at any gymnastic exertion, after four drams of coca feel
extraordinarily nimble, and once jumped with both feet onto a tall writing desk
so deftly and surely that I disturbed neither the lamp nor the many books piled
upon it. At other times I felt I could leap over the head of the person near me.
In general, however, these excessive feelings are fleeting whims, and one
immediately falls back into a blessed state of torpor, in which we think we could
remain a whole day without moving a finger or feeling the least desire to change
states. In this period of inebriation one never loses consciousness of oneself, but
attains an ideal laziness, in all its perfection. One heaves deep sighs,
occasionally laughs like a madman, and when one wishes to convey to others
what one is feeling, the words come hard or confusedly at best. Several times I
had to speak with extraordinary slowness, dividing the very syllables of my
words at extremely long intervals.
Others say that the first doses of coca induce in them a sense of heavy-
headedness and genuine pain; others feel their brain shrouded as though by a
cloud; still others feel light-headed. All, at any event, among those who are
examined by someone not under the influence of the American leaf present a
blessedly still physiognomy, fixed in a peculiar smile that may even assume a
kind of daze. All seem to be sleeping, but waver within those mysterious regions
that divide wakefulness from drowsiness and sleep.
If, after passing through the first stages of cocal inebriation, one stops and
goes to bed, sleep comes quickly and is very deep, interrupted at times by long
intervals of drowsing with a peculiar feeling of well-being; almost always
accompanied by the oddest dreams, which mount and straddle one another with
amazing rapidity.
The particular drowsiness produced by three or four drams of coca can, in
certain individuals, last for more than a day, but it wears off without a trace.
Coffee, tea, and mate curtail this state, quickly bringing back the customary
activity of the brain and nerves. In America everyone thinks that coca can cure
alcoholic intoxication, and vice versa. I admit to the former case because I have
witnessed it several times, and because the very pronounced digestive power of
this leaf takes away one of the most distressing complications of alcoholic
drunkenness; but for the moment I refuse to believe that wine can remove cocal
intoxication, having never witnessed this, nor having reason to believe it could
happen.
The highest dose of coca I ever chewed was eighteen drams in a day, of
which I consumed the last ten in the evening, one after another. This was the
only time in which I experienced the delirium of cocal inebriation to the ultimate
degree, and I must confess that I found this pleasure far superior to any other
physical ones I have ever known.
At the outset, until I reached eight drams, I felt the usual effects of a kind of
fever pitch of excitement, a pleasant torpor, and a slight headache; but shortly
before I reached ten drams my pulse had already climbed to 893 and I felt an
indefinable exaltation, which I somewhat hesitantly described with these words:
‘I do not know if it is I who hold this pen in hand … I speak and hear my voice
echo as though it were not mine; my hands are cold, I am tingling and feel only a
slight ache. The skull bones seem to want to crush my brain …’ Fifteen minutes
later my pulse had reached 95 beats.
A half-hour later I chewed another two drams of leaf, and my pulse
instantaneously soared to 120 beats. I then began to feel a sense of extraordinary
happiness, dragged my feet as I walked, distinctly felt my heart beating, and
could write only with the greatest difficulty.
Over the next two hours my consumption gradually reached two ounces of
coca, and I felt deep happiness. My heart palpitations had ceased, but the pulse
remained at 120 beats, and I was lying down with a divine sensation of a more
active, fuller life; then, roughly a quarter-hour later, after taking the two last
drams, I started to shut my eyes involuntarily, and the most splendid and
unexpected phantasmagoria began to pass before my eyes.
At that moment I had full self-awareness yet seemed isolated from the
external world and saw the most bizarre, splendidly coloured, and splendidly
shaped images one can imagine. The pen of neither the deftest colourist nor the
fastest stenographer could for a single moment render those splendid apparitions,
which straddled one another in the most disconnected fashion, at the whims of
the most unbridled fantasy, the most fertile kaleidoscope.
A few moments later, the swiftness of phantasmagoric images and the
intensity of inebriation reached such a level that I sought to describe to a
colleague and friend near me at the time the full felicity now sweeping over me,
but my words were so vehement that he could jot down only a few of the
thousands I was shouting at him. I quickly fell into the gayest delirium in the
world, but one in which I lost no consciousness at all, because I extended my
hand to my friend – only to discover that the pulse had reached 134 beats.
Some of the images I sought to describe in the first phase of my delirium
were full of poetry, and I mocked those poor mortals doomed to live in a vale of
tears while I, carried aloft on the wing of two coca leaves, was flying through the
space of 77,438 worlds, each more radiant than the last.
 One hour later I was calm enough to write these words in a steady hand: ‘God
is unjust because he has made man unable to live always cocheando, I prefer a
life of 10 years with coca to 100,000 … (and here there followed a line of zeros)
centuries without coca.’
I could not, however, manage to resist the desire to see the phantasmagoria
repeated, and took two drams of coca, which I chewed in a real frenzy. The
images still appeared, but I was overwhelmed as if by a nightmare – truly
terrible ones, full of ghosts, skulls, satanic dances, strangling victims …
Gradually, however, they grew calmer, more serene, to the point of reaching the
most aesthetic ideal of art and imagination, and in this state of calm I spent three
hours without my pulse ever falling below 120.
Three hours of tranquil sleep restored me to the life of daylight, and I could
move on to my usual occupations, feeling that I could study more assiduously
and without anyone being able to tell from my expression that I had experienced
sensations of a voluptuousness I would previously have thought unattainable.
For forty hours I remained under the influence of coca without eating any
food and without feeling the least weakness. From this experience I realized very
clearly that the vice of cocal inebriation can be unstoppable, and that the Indians,
who still travel on foot, can, with their treasured Bolivian leaf, live for three or
four days without taking any food. What most amazed me in this experiment is
that I felt neither exhaustion nor languor, although I had used up so much vital
energy in just a few hours.
The day after inebriation I felt a pleasant warmth throughout my body and felt
mildly constipated. Thereafter, my digestion was excellent.
Another time, chewing coca after my meal, I began to see phantasmagoria
after the sixth dram, and this continued for over three hours, during which time I
chewed another two drams. Immersed though I was in a state of ineffable bliss, I
still had extremely clear consciousness and could clearly delineate some of the
bizarre images that passed before my eyes swift as lightning. Here are a few:
note that for every one I could set down upon the page, ten others eluded me in
their too rapid succession:
… A grotto of lace beyond the entrance to which one could see at the other
end a gold tortoise seated upon a throne of soap.
… A battalion of steel pens battling an armada of corkscrews.
… A glint of glass shards perforating a wheel of Parmesan cheese crowned
with ivy and mulberry leaves.
 … A saffron-coloured inkpot out of which rises an emerald mushroom lashed
with rose-coloured fruit.
… A ladder of blotting paper lined with rattlesnakes, down from which are
leaping red rabbits with green ears.
… Flowers of striped porcelain with stamens of burning silver.
… Looms made of tapers, on which a group of cicadas are weaving various
pine plants made of sulphur.
The next day too after this experiment I felt more energetic than usual,
although I had slept but an hour that night.
To sum up in a few words the physiological effect of erythroxylon, let us say:
1. Coca has a special stimulating effect of some aid to digestion.
2. In a high dose it raises body heat, pulse, and breathing, also inducing fever.
3. It can cause some slight constipation.
4. In mild doses (1 to 4 drams) it excites the nervous system enough to make
us more prone to muscular fatigue and gives us a very high resistance to any
altering external causes, thereby creating in us a state of blissful calm.
5. In higher doses, coca produces truly delirious hallucinations.
6. Coca possesses the very rare quality of exciting the nervous system and
letting us enjoy, through its phantasmagoria, one of the greatest pleasures in life
without draining away our strength.
7. It probably reduces certain secretions.

Coca’s hygienic applications are easy to deduce from its physiological effect,
and in America have long been determined by many centuries of experience. It
remains to be adopted in Europe as a genuine treasure of the New World, on the
order of opium, and the bark of a country common to both substances, Peru.
A hot infusion of leaves is the healthiest drink to take after a meal,
particularly when one has a weak stomach or when one has somewhat exceeded
the bounds of temperance.
Coca tea, when taken regularly, offers the huge advantage of mitigating
excessive sensitivity, so that I recommend it for vaporous and sentimental
creatures of the fair sex.
Coca chewed in a dose of a few drams makes us resistant to cold, dampness,
and all the altering causes of climate and fatigue; so one must warmly
recommend it to miners and travellers in swampy terrains and polar regions.
Coca fortifies us against heavy fatigue and counteracts the exhaustion of force
that follows our exertions of nervous currents – I unhesitatingly consider it the
most powerful nutrition for the nerves.
Taken in high doses it can make life more cheerful, bringing with it hours of
true happiness that need not offend the most scrupulous morals. Wine, consumed
at times to the verge of drunkenness, does not make us guilty; no more does
coca, chewed to the point of inducing highly pleasurable phantasmagoria, turn us
into addicts.
Coca in high doses should not be used by those who suffer from cerebral
congestions or tend toward apoplexy. Used in infusions, it is harmful to
everyone.
The abuse of coca, if prolonged over years, may produce idiocy and
dementia. I have never been able to detect any trouble in the functions of the
digestive organs.

Chapter 4: On the Therapeutic Action of Coca and Its Use in

Medicine

In those blessed times when the sharp sword of dualists, cutting with a single
stroke through the awful tangle of pathological doctrines, sent two fine words
aloft, coca might, with the greatest of ease, have been marshalled into one or
another column of therapeutic aids. Yet I, out of an unconquerable horror of
words that do not represent things or that tyrannically legislate over facts, gladly
forswear any facile efforts to systematically baptize this leaf, settling for
pointing out its practical usefulness in medicine.
Having always noticed how white the teeth of coca users were, I naturally
thought of using it as a dentrifice, particularly in the north of the Argentine
Confederation, where the condition of most people’s teeth tends to be terrible. I
therefore recommended that they wash their mouths once or twice a day with a
concentrated cold decoction of coca, and rinse their mouths often with the
powder of the leaves, either on its own or mixed with rose honey. I have always
stood by this advice, above all when the tooth cavities are caused by a scurvy
altering the gums as they gradually recede. Since coca, however, though very
useful in these cases, does not seem to displace other known remedies and
remains quite expensive, I would advise that it be used in Europe only in those
cases of gum softening that often accompany slow stomach infections, or when
the other known substances have proved ineffective. To anyone who wishes to
use it for this purpose, let me point out only that it has the advantage over bitter
barks and harsh-tasting roots of cleansing without irritating and of not having an
unpleasant taste.
Beyond cleaning the mouth and teeth with it, I have never used coca
externally in any way, nor can I yet say whether its various preparations might
act as a narcotic when applied to the skin or the outermost mucous passages.
Coca’s most important medical uses can be deduced quite naturally from its
physiological action upon the gastroenteric mucous membranes and the nervous
system.
The Bolivian leaf acts in two quite different ways upon the digestive organs,
and up to this point they have not been combined so harmoniously into any other
remedy. It eases the digestion, animating it when it is slow and readjusting it
when it has been altered; at the same time, it dulls the sensitivity of the
gastroenteric mucous, often easing even the strongest pains.
In general, the substances that stimulate the stomach to greater activity often
tire it and almost always exhaust its physiological powers, even when they do
not induce greater irritation in it, or a slow phlogosis. This is why their action is
more or less dangerous, and in a healthy therapy their use is seldom indicated.
Coca, on the other hand, mysteriously reanimates the stomach’s digestive
activity without ever irritating it; nor do I recall having seen, even once, either in
myself or others, the well-known symptoms with which the very delicate viscera
rebels against anyone who would force it to work without first protecting against
its festerings. While practising medicine for almost four years in tropical
countries, I had on several occasions to treat genuine phlogosis-induced stomach
irritations produced by the abuse or even just use of mate, coffee, or tea –
irritations I never found among the coqueros. The Europeans who settle in Upper
Peru and the northern provinces of the Argentine Confederation can almost
never resist their preference for coffee, and almost always feel its bad effects on
the stomach and on the nervous system as well; only after many sins of
persistence are they persuaded to consume a coca infusion after a meal,
temporarily abandoning their delicious-smelling coffee.
I have recommended coca to young and old, healthy and convalescent,
Indians, blacks, and whites of many nations, and to hybrids of all colours; I have
used it in one or another hemisphere, in countries at sea level and at altitudes of
thousands of feet, and I have no hesitation in saying that it is superior in its
digestive powers to tea, coffee, and other, obscurer hot beverages served at the
end of a meal.
Those fortunate enough to have a good belly would be wrong to replace
beverages they prefer with a new and perhaps less enjoyable one; but to those
whose digestion is slow, difficult, or painful, I warmly recommend use of this
infusion for many consecutive months. It can be prepared with a denaro or half-
dram of leaves in the same way as tea is brewed. A great many people prefer the
latter infusion, since it is less strong and more delicate.
I would advise gentlewomen and the highly-strung to blend their coca with
orange leaves, preferably of the bitter variety.
The narcotic or antispasmodic action of the American leaf upon the stomach
and the intestine is very pronounced, and leaves even the most sceptical
physician free of doubt. Gastralgia and a whole range of ventricular neuroses,
simple enteralgia, colic pains, and flatulent enteralgia are almost invariably
overcome by a coca infusion. I have always found it to be of great utility against
the diarrhoea that often attends bad digestion and is almost always accompanied
by very distressing pains.
In the case of enteralgic or colic pains, I administer it orally or through an
enema, making sure that the infusion passes through the rectum in a more
concentrated form (one dram to every four ounces of boiling water) and in small
quantities, lest it be expelled too soon. If a first injection is not enough to calm
the pain, it should be repeated at half-hour intervals, using the same leaf for two
or three infusions. Since I have never seen a single case of saturnine colic in
South America, I could never determine what benefit coca might have for
wiping out the fierce pains this sickness brings.
I have never used it for vegetal colic. I am inclined to set great hopes on its
beneficial action against Asian cholera, because it combines great stimulation to
the nervous system with a very healthy influence upon the gastrointestinal tube.
Except in cases of acute inflammation of gastrointestinal mucus, I encourage
coca use for dyspepsia, gastralgia, enteralgia, and all spasmodic and painful
ailments of the digestive organs. A slight gastric or enteric irritation or liver
blockage is never sufficient cause to counterindicate use of this leaf. One should
never forget coca in regard to pepsin, and indeed one should closely study the
cases in which one or another was used.
In convalescence from long illnesses, when one must resort to tonics while
fearing that they might not be tolerated, it would be advisable to consider coca
first. It has the advantage of restoring the convalescent’s strength in two ways,
by easing the digestion and invigorating the nervous system.
The action of this substance upon the cerebral-spinal axis is even more
important and mysterious than that which it exerts upon the digestive organs, and
warrants deep study. The few observations that I can offer are accompanied by
the keenest desire to be illuminated by my colleagues, who by trial and retrial
will probably be able eventually to obtain precise therapeutic indications for
coca, thereby expanding the very narrow circle of my doubts and convictions.
Whether the erythroxylon leaf suspends or slows the incessant destructive
motion of the tissues, as the distinguished Lehmann proved for coffee, and
whether this leaf rouses the organism’s neural battery to great action, it is true at
any rate that coca sustains life by making man capable of greater expenditure of
his nervine force.
The intelligence is revived only at the outset by the effect of coca, and only
when it is taken in small doses; later, the mind comes to a state of rest in calm
contemplation. The muscles are better able to sustain the incessant contraction,
and the whole organism has less need to be restored by foods. The coquero eats
little without losing weight, and the coca user who does not overindulge can
withstand humidity, cold, and all other altering causes considerably better than a
non-user.
With these facts in mind I have used coca in all cases of great nervous
prostration; of general weakness, hysteria, hypochondria, and tedium vitae. On
occasion I have administered it in highly concentrated infusions, at other times
in hydroalcoholic extracts in doses of 5, 10, or 20 granules a day, depending on
the cases.
Given all the obscurity that surrounds the nature of cerebral and nervous
disorders, the physician should proceed cautiously in reaching a diagnosis, but,
once sure, should indicate coca use without hesitation or fear. It is a remedy that
exerts a slow but deep effect, and when used over a long period of time can
permanently modify the nervous system. When there is real congestion, or
phlogosis, or organic damage to the central nervous substance, coca is
dangerous.
I have used coca in cases of mental alienation, and warmly recommend it to
physicians who use opium to treat melancholia. In high doses it may have the
same advantages as poppy juice, but with added beneficial influence upon the
stomach. But here let me simply set a stone marker in the road and hope to
return to this subject another time.
 Coca should be given in all those cases in which there has occurred a
functional disturbance to nervous life, stemming apparently from a state of
weakness or perversion. Simple spinal irritations, idiopathic convulsions,
constitutional dulling of sensitivity are always or almost always improved by the
action of erythroxylon.
I have a strong desire to try administering it in cases of simple chorea,23
hydrophobia, and tetanus.
These indications are quite tentative and may well seem insufficient, but one
should not be too demanding when one recalls that to this day the effect of
opium and the cases in which it should be used are still subject to debate, and
coca, as far as I know, has never as yet been used in Europe.
If my studies have entitled me to briefly describe the action of coca upon the
nervous system, I would like to relate it to that of opium and the antispasmodics,
while recognizing that it differs from all other hitherto known remedies.
As a substance that generates nervous strength, I rank coca superior to all
others known to us thus far; and to a man in imminent danger of losing his life
through nervous exhaustion, I would give either a tincture of it or a strong dose
of its extract.
In America there is no one who doubts the aphrodisiac action of the Bolivian
leaf, and I myself, if I wished to believe in certain observations I have amassed,
would have to concur with universal opinion. Persuaded, however, that doubt
permits science far greater advantages than affirming without a firm basis of
certainty, I shall say only that on some people coca unquestionably acts as a
stimulus to the genital organs.
The American nations that use coca are surely among the world’s heartiest in
love’s combats, and if modesty permitted us to make a gynodynamometer we
would see its highest degrees reached among the descendants of the Incas, who
maintain the most enviable prowess into very advanced age. I have also
observed certain cases of daily or nocturnal pollutions from weakness of the
genitals improved and cured by the chewing of coca after dinner, and have often
heard, from various Europeans of different countries, that their erotic desires
were reawakened by varying doses of erythroxylon. I never gathered enough
data, however, to determine with any precision what role the use of coca and the
influence of race played in the genital vigour of Bolivians.
Erythroxylon rouses the genital organs to action, stimulating the spinal axis or
boosting the circulation yet never irritating the mucuous of the bladder or the
urethra, so that if its aphrodisiac power were once recognized, the power would
be that much greater thanks to its two precious qualities of aiding the digestive
organs and doing no harm to the genital-urinary apparatus.
Of all the functions regulated by the brain and the spinal marrow surely none
is more capricious than genital activity; for this reason there is so much variance
of opinion among physicians and non-physicians over the relative value of
aphrodisiacs. In the Orient, where a large part of life is spent among the
embraces of the harem, blissful sybarites often urgently demand that foreigners
prescribe for them certain aphrodisiacs. A renowned traveller, embraced with
urgent entreaties by an old man in Indonesia who only that day had married a
very beautiful young girl, in order that some remedy might help him overcome
his terrible fears of what must take place on the first night of pleasure, prescribed
for him two granules of muscat with calomel. When this traveller passed through
the same land several years later, the good native, overjoyed, showed him a
sprightly little boy, saying that he had named him calomel. In this case, then,
even mercurous chloride had gained fame as an aphrodisiac – proof of what a
supreme influence the imagination exerts upon the reproductive function. For the
Orientals, opium, asafoetida,24 hashish, and swallows’ nests are aphrodisiacs,
whereas in South America liquors made from corn, guaranà, and coca are
considered such.
Until we know the chemical composition of coca, I advise using it in infusion
form, or, better yet, for those so willing, chewing it in a dosage of one dram a
day. If there is need for a profound action upon the nervous system and the
patient refuses to chew it, one can resort to a powder of the leaves (in 1–4
dosage) or to a hydroalcoholic extract, which can be given daily in from five to
ten granules, with a gradual rise in the dosage.
The coca tincture is a very active preparation.
I have always blended coca only with aromatics in the infusion, and with
subnitrate of bismuth when I was taking the extract in pill form.
The action of coca varies somewhat with different individuals, and the first
sign of intolerance is a sense of heavy-headedness, which in certain cases can
turn into a genuine ache. The careful physician should encounter this drowsiness
or delirium only in very rare cases.
I do not know what place coca should be assigned in the treasury of therapies;
I do know that it is likely to be championed or contested, rousing excessive
enthusiasm or excessive indifference; I believe, however, that it will remain,
with its other siblings, among the host of heroic remedies that often change
country and name, but which sensible physicians never remove from their
pharmacopoeiae.

[Chapter 5: Practical Observations on the Therapeutic Action of Coca]

 From One Day in Madeira: A Page in the Hygiene of Love
[…] On the eve of his arrival in Madeira, William’s joy was mixed with
agitation; he seemed fitfully nervous. He spoke in broken phrases, shut himself
up in his cabin a hundred times a day, and a hundred times re-emerged on the
quarterdeck. Often he checked his watch; and although he sat at table with the
others, he could not for the life of him have later said with whom he had drunk
or eaten. He spent the night on the quarterdeck.
On the morning of the 17th all the passengers stood on deck, devoured by a
common curiosity to see land, and quickly recover from the sea-weariness long
afflicting them. William was not among them […]
[…]
We are climbing along rapid roads enclosed by a scattering of low walls, we
ride from field to field; but some gentle soul has, along with the bread of men,
sown flowers, which here and there, tousled, dot the meadows, bushes of
heliotropes and geraniums, jasmine and roses, all in bloom. Our head often
comes under the shadow of a vault entwined in honeysuckle and passion flower.
I sit up in my stirrups and eat the aromatic fruits, bend left and right and fill my
hands with a booty of rose, heliotropes, and other flowers in a thousand colours.
The abundance justifies the theft. My companions, male and female, increase the
booty, without fertile Nature seeming at all despoiled by our rapine. Our hands
cannot contain the plunder, and among us breaks out a war of flowers, throwing
roses against carnations, showering the hair and shoulders of the women with
jasmine and violets. The intoxication of the perfume floods over us; and every so
often I look back and gaze at the ocean, mingling the fragrance of the flowers
with the tangy salt scent of the surf.
For a long stretch the road leading us to Palheiro is steep and we can move
only at a trot, but as soon as it grows less precipitous, I feel the need to spur my
horse as though I wanted to sink into this enchanting nature, this sea of delights.
I am mindful that my arrieiro, my muleteer, has fastened both his hands on my
horse’s hair and with legs dangling let himself be dragged in the most ludicrous
way imaginable. I cannot help but laugh, and I point out to the lady near me that
her horse is also dragging behind it the curious appendage of an arrieiro.
We laugh together, laugh heartily, but the two muleteers, although they wear
their carabuza, or cloth cap, light blue on the outside, scarlet on the inside, with
a long, very straight pigtail to it; a cap so tiny it barely covers the crown of the
head, a true comic solideo or skullcap – it seems the most paradoxical hat in the
world for an extremely hot country – despite all this, the arrieiros remain serious
in their place of honour and let themselves be drawn along, whether I go at a trot
or coax the horse to a gallop.
Eventually, however, I too turn serious, and attempting to make my Italian
more Portuguese, tell the gentleman behind me that I would like to ride alone;
but he either does not understand my Portuguese or chooses not to, which either
way brings the same result. I remain patient, however, and strive to improve my
Portuguese.
Wasted effort! The arrieiro is still hanging upon my horse’s tail. Here my
patience gives out, my Portuguese gives out with it, and I lapse into perfectly
good Italian for cursing, before resorting to the universal language, the language
that makes all men brothers and part of a single family, the language of gesture.
I give two or three lashes of my riding crop to the arrieiro’s hand; cursing in
turn, he releases his prey and leaves me alone with my horse.
Would I had never done this! The living appendage seems to have been
necessary to the steady progress of affairs, because no sooner did he detach
himself than my horse champed the bit and then took flight among walls high
and low, leaving me not a second to brake. My position was difficult, but would
become even more so just a few minutes later. The horse broke into a trot in a
side path that only barely let it pass through and skirted the edge of an abyss.
My feet were being broken against the stones of the low wall; my eyes were
lost in an abyss of hundreds and hundreds of metres, and my panting horse, with
its breast foaming, ran as though possessed.
It happened in a minute’s flash; all my strength was gathered to a single end –
to stay in the saddle; but my wandering brain managed to formulate this thought
I shall never forget: If in a minute my bones should land in the depths of that
chasm, what would I feel? Instantly a deep chill came over me and, like some
sudden breeze over a lake, made my whole body shudder.
A moment later the horse was under my control, and I, having lost my way
and my companions, found myself on a beautiful road, slightly sloping, broad,
opening amid sugar fields. My horse was sweating, and so was I.
Before me lay the sea, apparently close, with a white sail seeming to frolic
happily over its surface of a nameless blue. All at once, at a bend in the road, I
saw before me, though some hundred paces on, a young lady on horseback, all
alone. I felt I was dreaming, or had fallen into a canto of Ariosto. The horse was
walking slowly, and the lady, loosening the bridle at its neck, sat like one weary
or ill, folded in upon herself. Her body was thin but elegant, covered with a long
blue Amazon-like dress. Her neck was slender and her bowed head rested on her
shoulder: from a little black cap adorned with a pheasant feather, thick blonde
hair rained down upon her shoulders.
I wanted to rouse my horse to a trot in order to catch up with this fantastic
apparition, but at once the steed, untempered by its living counterweight, shot
out like an arrow along the path and reached the lady in a flash, and scarcely had
I time to puzzle all this out when I had overtaken her, since her horse too, seized
with sudden imitation, had taken up the same furious pace. I trembled for the
lady, but was utterly helpless, charging ahead ever faster on the wings of my
demon.
As soon as I could, with all the strength in my hands, rein in its ardour, I felt
behind me the gallop of another horse, and looked: but its saddle was empty. No
longer did I think of the whims of my own horse; I turned the bridles and a few
paces from the edge of a field saw the beautiful lady stretched upon the ground
in a faint. Where she had fallen there were no stones; I hoped that no harm had
come to her; I leaped off my horse, ran to a nearby spring, and with my little
leather boat brought water to where she lay, and sprinkled some drops onto her
ashen face. She drew in an arm that still held a silver-handled riding crop in its
fist, and she sighed without quite reviving.
I thought I could unlace her suit, but although I was twenty-two years old, I
did not dare to do so, so fiercely was my heart beating with emotion, and again I
sprinkled water, even more water, on her lovely face. She opened her eyes, and
since I was so close at hand, her face turned from its deep pallor to red, at which
she could only shut those eyes and murmur, ‘Sir, I thank you.’
This very young woman was a miracle of delicate beauty and deep
melancholy. Her golden-brown hair was loosened from a net and fell copiously
upon her neck and breast. She gathered it in now and with a fleeting glance
assessed that, in her fall, she had exposed rather more than her foot; she took
care to cover her aching body; with more modesty, however, than pain. Bending
over the ground before this creature, happy to help her, I had few moments in
which to relish the delight, for along the same way by which I had come I heard
the approach of a trotting horse.
It was William, his pale face imprinted with a nameless distress. He
recognized me, halted, and before I could barely glance at the ground, I heard
two shouts at once, such as I had never heard before and shall never in my life
hear again:
‘William! …’
‘Emma! …’
How much passion, how much sorrow, how much joy, how much delirium in
those two shouts! In my soul I heard only the distant echo of this, but enough to
know its torment, and hurrying back onto my horse, I said to William: ‘Sir, take
care of this poor young lady. I shall go and get her horse.’
This I did, and brought it back to those happy creatures, who, with hands
interlocked, were gazing at one another and weeping; and in the veil of their
tears shone an ardent passion, a boundless joy.
Who can now remember what those lovers said to me?
William, unable to speak, may have sobbed a word or two to me. I think he
took my hand and called me his friend, but I cannot recall whether Emma also
touched me. I hastened to leave them alone, once I knew that the lady had not
suffered the slightest contusion and that they had no further need of me.
[…]

Three Years Later

For two years in a row I received letters from William, although there would be
long intervals between them. Many surely went missing; and it was natural that
this should happen, both of us being nomads travelling in more or less wild
countries. I received some from Rio de Janeiro, from Minas Gerais, then from
Mato Grosso; then a long silence, a painful interruption. Then all of a sudden the
first letter came from Valparaiso, then, by Bobija, from Lima, Guayaquil. The
last was from Quito.
Map in hand, I strung together my unhappy friend’s strange itinerary,
following its sorrowful stations. Long travel, changing places and activities were
unavailing to bring peace to that desperate soul; it seemed, rather, that time only
aggravated the pain and poisoned the wound.
These were the pains with which one would live and die if one had to live for
centuries.
Some of those letters had such an aspect of torment that I could truly imagine
them having been written on the eve of a suicide; but the deep piety and the
religion of the uttered word, perhaps more than all this a ray of hope, kept
William alive.
After the last letter received from Quito in the summer of 1856, I heard no
more from my friend, nor could anyone else give word of him.
By now I was mourning his death, when I received a parcel from the British
Legation of Buenos Aires, which I opened with great agitation. As I had neither
affairs nor friends in England, in my heart I feared that these were my William’s
papers.
In the parcel I immediately found these few undated lines:
My friend,

Here, gathered together and sealed, you will find some letters: my
dearest possession in the world. Keep them another ten years, and if
during this time no one has come to you to ask for their return in my
name, publish them. In so desiring this I heed the call of my Emma
when she told me:

Every act in your life must be a useful action; even our sorrows must
be useful to someone.

My friend, I thank you once again for all that you did for Emma one
hour in Madeira, and all you have always done for

Your William

[…]

William to Emma
London, 15 January 18–. Why are you silent, Miss Emma? Why are you so
cruel? Were you perhaps born in Spain? Have you the blood of St Dominic in
your veins? Have pity and slay me, then, in one single blow; every fibre of my
heart is stirred, every feeling weeps; all the faculties of my soul are nought but
pain; all that I am, all that I think, is only pain.
I would never have believed that man could suffer so much and not grow
weary in his pain. Byron was right to say that pain is half of his immortality.
Hunger is sated, joy is sated, labour wearies, thought rests; ambition sleeps,
greed sleeps, genius sleeps: but pain does not sleep, does not rest; no, it feeds
upon itself, like the phoenix of ancient fable it is revived out of its own ashes;
and when the nerves no longer suffice for such torment, pain changes shape and
grows crueller still, and torture ever fresh.
After a biting wrath, I feel a clawing torment; after torment, despair; after
despair, bitterness; after bitterness, dejection, and then again torment and torture,
the vampire that sucks the blood from my heart, the dismay of a frightening
dream; and always, a bottomless chasm of pain, boundless, black, eternal, icy,
inexorable.
Ah! Miss Emma, anyone who has dared to laugh at religion has never
suffered.
And you are the executioner of so much torture; and you the only one in this
world who understands me, who can understand the magnitude of my pain. You
bring suffering not only to one man but to two generations of men … as you
know. In me, love has united two races, two destinies. Two worlds.
My mother was Italian, my father English; they were two natures whom
Nature never made more remote, more different; and love, the most powerful of
alchemists, was called upon to perform the miracle of reuniting them as one.
And I feel two natures within me, two worlds of thoughts, sensations, joys,
and sorrows. At every stroke I feel Vesuvius and the London fog; and you,
laughingly, have more than once called me volcano and fog, depending on
whether the Italian or the Englishman was speaking in me.
Never as in these days have I felt what it means to be double. Hot senses,
burning imagination fire me with the speed of lightning; I feel that in me
Mongibello1 and Vesuvius flare at one time, and I gaze at myself and touch
myself, thinking that so great a flame will consume my thin, frail body, and
suffer and savour and feel like the children of the land that gave us Dante and
Leonardo, Machiavelli and the Borgias; but the senses do not devour me, nor
imaginings consume me; in my crater I have never seen ash, only the constant
blazing fire. I feel like a man made of asbestos, always amid the flames yet
never consumed. Amid delirium, the Englishman does not die; and I observe
myself and count my heartbeats, and steel my will to put the fire out; and the
man of action and the man of the senses breathe together, fight together, suffer
together.
And after delirium, when the man of the south, consumed by the flames,
sleeps and rests, the Englishman rises refreshed, more active, more eccentric
than ever, renewing passion and rekindling pain.
I feel as an Italian does, I take action as an Englishman does; and if perpetual
motion exists, and if eternal pain is no dream, then I find in myself perpetual
motion and eternal pain. Nature that has given the volcanoes to Italy has given it
a breeze perfumed with orange-groves, Nature has given the tropics the Arab’s
jealousy and the lust of the seraglio, has also given it long sleeps and blissful
yawns; but I have the volcano and the fog; I have the intensity and the expanse
of pain. Why does love permit itself these cruel jokes, welding together the polar
bear and the tiger, the pine tree and the rose, ice and fire? While I suffer from a
nameless sorrow, which should be quelled in a wordless lament, in a thoughtless
delirium; the Englishman’s will is to master pain and sorrow, bring forms of
lofty thought to bear upon it, to change torture into an art, and in the tormented,
throbbing viscera seek the beautiful. Emma, Emma, you have understood all
this, you could have educated me, you could have managed to find the secret for
bringing order to all these forces, so that I would not be a living paradox, but a
good and useful man.
Emma, why do you wish to kill yourself, why commit suicide? You sense
this: that this is not pride on my part. Our souls are welded together, our hearts
beat at one and the same time, the breath of your soul seeks out mine; in killing
William, you bring death to yourself. Why should you, so young, so beautiful, so
dear, wish to die? Why wish to cause the death of two creatures who, placed
close by one another, would be so happy that they would bless the hour of their
birth, and their father and mother, and the Creator who had made one for the
other? What word, what secret can explain such a horrendous misdeed?
I am growing superstitious; I seem to feel I am in the cold, dank grotto of a
sibyl I cannot see, I seem to feel chills and be awaiting in some magic word the
decree of my destiny. Does fate exist, then; is the nightmare real, does the witch
exist, and magic and the arcane, the inexorable silence of the temple and the
word that kills without reason? Does the invisible sword of destiny exist,
hovering over one’s head, unjustly, unreasonably, prompting the cynic’s sneer,
and the curse against life, against providence, against God?
Why do I not go mad? Why can I not die? Yet even if I should be the last, the
poorest, the unhappiest, the most contemptible of men, I am a man nonetheless,
and you, a woman, must reach out your hand to one suffering so much. For one
last time caress your victim before delivering him to the hangman’s noose; grace
him with a single word.
I am asking not for love, not for pity, I am asking for the charity of a word. It
is three days since I have written to you; do you understand, Emma, what three
days mean? Three days and three nights; seventy-two hours, since reading a
piece of paper you signed and on which you told me that you could not be mine.
The modern laws still allow the death penalty, yet the condemned man at least
hears his sentence being read; he knows why he is being killed. Should I be
treated worse than a killer, worse than a parricide? It is three days since you have
received my letter, and you have managed to keep silent three days? Are you not
a woman … not even a human being? Surely you are dead, you cannot be alive,
knowing that, just a few steps from you, in front of your house, around the walls
of your garden, a spirit restlessly roams that is your own, a part of yourself,
dying of frostbite, its teeth chattering with cold and for which no one opens the
door to warm it. Surely you are dead, Miss Emma.
I am a weak, craven creature; I do ask you for pity, for the sake of your father,
whom you constantly invoke and whom I hate as you do, as do all people, as
does the universe … for the sake of your father, a word …

Emma to William
London, 16 January 18–. For the sake of my father, whom you hate, for the sake
of your love for me, forget me, William.
Do you not realize that I too am suffering, that I too curse the fate you dread,
which is not some fantastic dream in our minds, but which exists, which is above
us and stronger than us? Poor drops in a boundless sea, a sea to which we owe
our joy and our pains. Before us duty exists, the human family exists before us,
and to it we owe our sacrifice of blood and tears. The creature of a day has no
right to snuff out the sun to warm himself or the nest of those he loves.
Forget me, William, you will be fulfilling an obligation, performing a
generous, great, and noble act, and I will be performing it with you. In the bond
of a holy duty we shall be bound together for all of life.
Remember your Emma, but love another woman; above all, forget me. Love
is not everything for a human being, higher than love is virtue, is greatness of
sacrifice – there dwells the happiness of the human family. All creatures love, all
creatures burn with their fire of love; but man alone can put out love’s fire to
become noble and great. Smother Vesuvius, William, and become an
Englishman again.
I suffer no less than you do, but I know how to calm myself, and dry my tears
so that they will not fall upon this sheet of paper and leave a fire that will
consume you, my good friend. I am entirely English, as you know; then too, dear
William, I have always suffered, and grown mistress of my sorrow, whereas you
rise up against your misfortune because it is the first sorrow you suffer. It is
great, it is infinite, my dear William; I know, my William, how infinite it is; but
before now I have wept a thousand times and for years and years have suffered,
so that my life already seems rather long.
But this sorrow is the first, and the greatest of my sorrows; it crushes me,
drains me of all strength, kills me. Is it not enough, William mine, that I tell you
this? Is this not yet enough? You wish to know more?
On my own I did not feel the courage to fight; and in these three days of
silence in which your imagination pictured me as utterly intent on tormenting
you, I sought, loudly implored allies. My good aunt wept with me, but she too
had need of the very force I asked of her.
After two days of weeping, my dear William, I gathered up enough force to
go to my father’s old physician; the one he had advised me to consult in the
hardest moment of my life. Well, that good old man, after spending an entire day
with me, ordered me out of England.
And when you read this letter, I shall already be on the Continent. Do not ask
where I take my steps, my sorrows. Leave a line, and nothing more, at my house,
telling me that you obey me, and that you will live, and do your utmost to forget
me, and transform yourself into my brother. And then, William, swear that you
will not seek me out, nor ever write to me again.
Farewell, my dear William; do not snuff out your youth, your strength, your
genius in a barren path that can lead you only to despair. We are creatures too
weak to struggle against all others. May your life not be a curse! Look within
yourself, see how many difficult things you can accomplish: how many truths
you can conquer; work, console, lift up the fallen, comfort the downcast, sow joy
and truth all about you.
Do this for my love, for love of your sister Emma.
[…]

Emma to William
San Terenzo, 20 April 18–. William, my dear William; do you need me to tell
you for whom my heart beats, after so many months of shared distress, after so
many shared sorrows; do you need words to know whom your poor Emma
loves? Do you not know better than I? But Emma cannot be yours, nor anyone
else’s; by a sacred oath she is bound to live alone, and die alone.
My blood is cursed, and fatefully vowed to remain unmingled; neither your
love nor mine nor all the human forces united together could conjure away the
inexorable decree before which your Emma has bent her head for years now,
even before knowing you.
I pledged to my father never to become the bride of any man, before I knew
what love is, and when affection for my father filled my heart. Scarcely more
than a child myself, I pledged never to take upon my knees a babe that would
gaze tenderly at me and laughing call me mamma! Now I know what it means to
love: but I shall be neither bride nor mother, nor ever break my oath. Oh! Why,
my dear William, did cruel fate ever thrust you in my path, why did you have to
love me, why did you love me so much? Alone, I might have borne all the
weight of my grief, alone I would have lost myself in the infinite emptiness of
my solitude, alone with the memory of my father, proud to be fulfilling a duty,
remaining loyal to his ashes, to the sanctity of my word! Why did I draw you
into the vortex of my inexorable, immutable fatality? Listen to me, William, and
you learn how equal our sorrows are.
I do not know if I was born, as all human beings are, crying, but I do
remember that my whole childhood was uninterrupted weeping, that I grew up in
tears, and that I was to shed the bitterest tears yet once I became a woman. I
lived amid a pain that, though ever varying, has never abated.
I played with my older sisters, holding dearest a twelve-year-old brother,
John; and when I could not live without him, he fell ill and, after a few
bedridden months, died; and I remember Jenny, an angel of a sister, always
dressed in white, with a tear in her eye that never dried, and who also died,
slowly, slowly wasting away like a piece of sugar dissolving in water.
In the duskiness of my earliest memories, I remember saying one day to
Jenny, ‘Why do you grow more pale and thin each day?’
And Jenny, running into her room in a burst of tears, cried out, ‘Because I am
dying.’
There was no laughter in my house. When my little brothers and sisters made
noise, our father would stalk in with a warrior’s frightening scowl and silence us.
There was always someone ill lying abed who could not be disturbed. The doctor
and his medicines were always going and coming from our house with eternal
monotony. At table too silence reigned, and we were accustomed to eating
without scraping the fork and knife on our plate, and drinking without the
glasses clinking against the bottles. For many years I recall that in our house we
always dressed in mourning.
We were twelve children; and I, as you can see, am the only one left; the last;
and through my birth I killed the mother I thus never knew.
My father too was always ill, coughing all the time, and I remember that for
many winters we went with him to Nice or Pisa. Once we went as far as Algeria
and remained for some months aboard a ship. I could count the words my father
spoke to me in my life; but often he would hold me on his knees and kiss me
hundreds of times, and pass his hands through my hair. He combed and dressed
me himself, and I both loved and feared him; I felt for him the sort of veneration
one feels praying to God in a large, deserted church. My father was so unhappy,
bore upon his face the traces of a suffering so deep, so infinite, that I could not
look at it without a compassion full of love and respect.
At fifteen, I was the only one left of all the children to whom my father had
given birth. All had died of consumption, and all those years my father faced the
threat of dying a similar death.
I remember that kissing him I always had to take care not to pull his left arm,
where he bore a wound the doctors had opened in his flesh. Many times the
house servants would give me a compassionate look and say to me with a cruel
pity, ‘How hard for poor Emma, she doesn’t want to die, but who knows what
will become of her?’ A maid of my aunt’s, really a good woman at heart, made
me cry once for an entire day. My father had forbidden me to go out at evening
into the park around our house, saying the cool night air would be bad for me;
but one evening the moon was shining so beautifully behind the little stream’s
pine trees that I asked Mary to accompany me to the park. I knew I was
disobeying my father, but wanted my Mary to be my accomplice and abet me in
this sin. Mary hesitated somewhat, and then, covering me with a warm coat,
said, ‘Let us go, let us go, Emma, and for once enjoy the life that’s left you; your
sister and brothers also followed all these precautions, and yet they are dead;
come, let us go, let us go into the park.’
I burst into tears and did not want to go see the moon between the stream’s
pine trees and, mightily sobbing, told Mary I wanted to obey my father and did
not want to die. I cried all that night and all the next day.
So, my dear William, went the childhood of your Emma; so I lived my
adolescence, and when I sensed I had become a woman, in the age in which a
world of paradise, all poetry and all hope, opens up to every other young girl, I
was accustomed to living only amid tears, and seeing my family so unhappy and
utterly blameless, that more than once I wondered why God had dealt so unfairly
with us; why we alone should have to be devoted to living in a cemetery that had
always had a grave lying open for us.
Poor Aunt Anna was a good woman, and you know her, William, a very good
woman, who had been a nurse to my mother and my eleven siblings; but she
never comforted me with her fond, long speeches. She never cried, because her
eyes were always moist and red, as though tired and worn out by now for having
already shed so many tears, and when I questioned her in order to discover what
awful mystery weighed upon our house, she would answer with some
monosyllable and immediately start fussing over my little flannel jacket and my
damp stockings; and I could not breathe once more than usual without everyone
being alarmed, putting me to bed, and summoning the doctor.
When I was very young, my father called a new physician, Dr Thom, who
from that moment on became his dearest friend, and was the only person I saw
laugh, the only one who brought a ray of light and pleasure into the eternal
shades of our family. To him I owe the sole consolations of my early youth.
My father, when he had lost all his little children and I alone remained, made
Dr Thom pay me a visit, even when I felt perfectly fine; but that good doctor
managed somehow never to be annoyed and always ended with the same words:
‘Miss Emma is delicate but healthy, there is no cause for alarm.’
One autumn my father was sicker than usual, and Dr Thom advised him to
leave at once for Menton.
We left, but my poor papa was so weak that it was necessary to stop at every
point along the way, and it took a full fortnight to go from London to the
Mediterranean.
At Menton he spent almost the entire winter in bed, and I had to walk over
meadows and mountains alone with the governess, because my father always
said, against the opinion of the doctors, that his illness was contagious; and he
did not want me to stay more than a few moments in his room: and even when,
in the morning and evening, we went to say our good mornings and good nights,
he was never willing to kiss me on the lips, but only on the forehead. Dr Thom
had come from London and suggested a change in treatment that restored his
strength within a few days.
He rose and, leaning upon a stick, would spend several hours in the garden.
Aunt Anna and I were quite pleased with this improvement, but when we tried to
make our patient smile, he would simply shake his head and on his face reveal a
desperation that frightened us.
One day he rose early and gave orders for us to ready ourselves to return to
London. Aunt Anna and I, worried by this rash decision, ran to him, attempting
to steer him from his plan. Dr Thom had ordered him to stay in Menton until he
himself gave him leave to depart, but now, for the first time, my father was
disobeying his doctor. Aunt Anna shouted, threatened; I threw myself at my
father’s knees and, tightly embracing him, begged him for the sake of my love to
wait until the air was a little warmer to undertake such an ambitious voyage.
It was all to no avail, and he grew so exasperated that he stood up and
shouted, ‘I wish to go and die in England; I wish to die in my own home.’ I had
never heard such a tone from my father and, withdrawing to pack our trunks,
wept for a long time, convinced that in those words I had read my poor papa’s
death sentence.
In eight days we were back in London: but my father arrived there in a
deplorable state. Dr Thom, the moment he saw him, shook his head and said,
‘This man wanted to kill himself!’
For ten days my father lay abed devoured by a fierce fever, and then one
evening he summoned me to him. It was late evening, and I was just about to
retire for the night. I found him there alone: the oil lamp was dimmed and
hidden. My father was seated on his bed, and scarcely had he drawn me to him
than he took my hand, and I felt him burning and damp with sweat. Without
letting go of my hand, he motioned me to sit on the bed and said to me:
‘Emma, do you know why all your brothers and sisters have died? Do you
know why for so many years our house has been a cemetery? … Because I have
killed all my children.’
And my father dried the sweat from his pale brow, which seemed waxen, and
passed his hand through his hair.
‘Yes, my dear Emma, I have killed your brothers; I have killed your sisters,
and condemned you to an unhappy life.’
‘Papa, dear Papa, this is mad talk, you are delirious,’ I muttered.
‘No, I am not delirious; I was sick, I had in my blood the germ of the illness
that is killing me now, and I have transmitted it to my little children and killed
them. I had no right to become a father, yet I wanted to have a family; I had
received only nature’s condemnation, but instead I wanted to have children, and
I have poisoned them all with my blood, killed them all, you understand?’ …
And my father, seized with a strong fit of coughing, had to rest and take
several sips of water before continuing his speech.
‘And you, my dear Emma, bear the same poison in your blood: and only the
efforts of art and a posthumous pity from Providence have sustained you, so that
you might close the eyes of your poor father, who without you would die alone,
alone with his remorse and the weight of a repentance that can end only in the
grave; but you, dear Emma, can become no one’s bride; you must not become a
mother. You must swear to me, Emma, swear here on this page that I have
written for you and that you are to read when I have died. You are to live with
Aunt Anna. Do whatever you wish: devote your life to the arts; to travel, to
charity, to religion; I grant you anything except to become any man’s wife, ever,
ever. Swear to me, Emma … only if you swear this to me will I die in peace.’
I wept and stifled my lament to spare my father further desperation; I
understood none of this; I understood only that a word from me would console
my dying father; but sobs and tears prevented me from speaking.
‘Then swear to me, Emma, swear it; I am dying; I cannot wait.’
My father was gasping horribly for breath.
‘Yes, I swear it, Papa, I swear it.’
‘Swear it by your mother, by your father.’
‘Yes, papa, I swear by you and by my mother. I shall live and die alone.’
My dear William, my father’s eyes shone at that moment with a divine joy.
He threw his arms about my neck and covered me in kisses, and I, beside him,
wept and wept while I felt that his arms and hands were growing chill. I cannot
remember what happened after that, I remember only that a few moments later
my father was dead.
William, do you now understand why Emma cannot be yours? Do you now
understand my pain? Do you still have the courage to curse me? William, what
was written on the pages left me by my father? Read and see if anyone in this
world can rightly claim to be more hapless than I.
Farewell, William, come to see me when you have vowed to yourself that you
can be that you wish to be, only my friend, only my brother.
No one has the right to give life to others when reason, experience, universal
agreement shout aloud that this life will be brief, and sickly, and unhappy.
[…]

William to Emma
London, 3 July 18–. How joyfully, catching sight of our letters, do I see that a
long chasm of days separates the last that you will be writing in the paradise of
San Terenzo from the one that, at a few minutes’ distance from your house, I am
writing under the grey London sky. You, my tyrant, have ordered eight days of
exile, and your slave, humbly kissing the hand of his master, has accepted the
exile. You have told me smiling, and giving me a little grimace, that I see you
too often, that I was stealing over the borders that must separate us, that the
brother is growing too much like a lover; and I suffer the pains of my attempted
transgression. I am not complaining, Emma; I shall try to become a true brother,
nought but a brother to you.
It is no easy craft and one I never learned, having been an only child, but with
a master as patient and calm as Miss Emma I shall make strides, and I too shall
become a master of brotherliness toward the woman loved more than anything
else in this world. But no, no: I haven’t the right to complain – nor to conceal my
sorrow beneath a varnish of malign irony. Have you not given me hope, have
you not decided, out of love for me, to consult the three most celebrated doctors
in London to find out if, by recovering your strength, you might not be able to
become a mother without fear and without dishonouring your father’s memory?
And would I have the right to accuse you, in that, being stronger and better than
I, you lead me back, with a gentle and imperious look, onto the path of duty?
Emma, Emma, I feel I am so small a thing when I am near you, that you
could do with me then whatever you will. I have a duty to obey you my entire
life, because you once allowed me to command you; and weeping by the tomb of
your father, you asked his shade to release you from the tyranny of an oath that
has enchained you for a lifetime.
When I think, Emma dear, of the long struggles you waged in San Terenzo
and here in London, I feel proud to be loving you. Love and duty have warred so
bitterly that I could not tell you if I loved you more when, in tears, you said to
me, ‘My father will forgive us, will he not?’ or when, suddenly sitting up, you
exclaimed, ‘William, our love would be something too base if duty could not
conquer it!’
And you came here to London to consult the shade of your father, and,
through the mouthpiece of old Dr Thom, he answered you that if frail, cough-
racked Emma were once to become a strong, sturdy woman, she could, without
grief to her living soul, give her hand in marriage to William. Your father, Dr
Thom told you, would twice bless you if you knew you could manage to be
happy and faithful to the spirit of his word.
Woe to man if he had not dams of duty, if he had not to prop his faith, his
conviction, on the cornerstone of indisputable principles! Woe to us if man had
in each instance to weigh on scales passion, reason, eternal oaths, and the
negotiations of conscience to decide how to act!
It would be tantamount to losing his dignity and living his whole life in a
nauseous, see-sawing seasickness. A hundred times you have said this to me,
Emma, and you have convinced me. Man must bow his head to duty; but when
our frail nature is about to dash itself against that ever sturdy column, hurl your
from the billowing wave of life, you are allowed to ask for help; and none ever
dared call the drowning man base who asks for such help. Now we have asked
Dr Thom for a rescue plank, and he has thrown it out to us and made us happy;
because in a sky that has long glowered with the blackness of the hurricane, a
rim of blue sky has pierced the clouds. To the two of us, poor castaways on the
sea of life, Dr Thom has thrown the rope-line of hope, and we have held out and
won with the fierce tenacity of the dying man who sees the smiling shore a brief
arm’s-length away, yet still does not reach it. Emma, my Emma, my love for you
is as large as the world; in it I see an image of the infinite; but I would not wish
to be yours by the sacrifice of your duty, by violating an oath.
Had I loved another woman, my egotism would have smashed everything,
would have forced the sanctuary doors, but before you, Emma, I bow my head
and wait. You have carried me into a sphere too lofty to permit me to separate
love from duty; and if, in giving me your love, you had to take away your
respect for me, I would tell you, ‘Emma, without your love I shall die, but I wish
to die with your respect.’ When with my mind’s eye my gaze seeks you out and
you appear before me as serene and as beautiful as a starry sky, without wishing
to I always picture myself prostrate at your feet, because you are so far from me,
so much higher. If there are angels and the angels love, they must be loved as I
love you, my dear Emma.
You can be sure that, in our consulting the leading doctors in England, and
then your declaring yourself prepared to bow your head, I certainly did not wish
to make you unhappy: I wanted only that you not need to make others unhappy.
At Dr Thom’s word the most scrupulous conscience can keep calm and assured.
He was your father’s closest friend and first confidant; he knew the man’s every
thought, read deeply into that noble and tortured soul. He accepted the mission
to enlighten you with his knowledge, correcting you with his broad, sure
experience.
When he speaks to you, it is the voice of your father that caresses your ear;
when he commands you, as you have said yourself, it is the authoritative accent
of a father who convinces and subdues you. If he said to you, ‘Emma, recover
and hope,’ this ray of hope comes from your father, and we must receive it with
the holiest reverence, the most serene joy.
Emma, console these days of my exile with long letters; give the prisoner a
half-hour of light and air; grant him to await his sentence without dying.
[…]

Aunt Anna to William

London, 3 August. William, our Emma is dead; I can find no other word, I
cannot imagine the pious hypocrisy that would allow me to silence this fact. Ah
William, you who have loved her so, you who will live for all eternity with the
memory of that angel we have lost, will understand my brutality. Why should I
attempt to conceal from you the awful news amid the folds of long periods, why
should I attempt to conceal it in the last page of my letter? I am sure that on
opening this sheet of paper, you will scent in the air the odour of the grave, and I
could not deceive you. For a while I might forestall the dread word, but silence
would be crueller still.
She had sworn to write to you at every post, and you would have received no
more news from Emma. There is something worse than death, and that is agony.
It is a fortnight since our Emma has been laid to rest in the pine grove in the
park, near the little bridge; and only because the courier is leaving today have I
managed, after long torment, to take pen to paper and write to you.
William, how can those who do not believe in God tolerate life, how can we
feel ourselves tear out the beating heart in fine shreds, while we go on living,
without believing that we shall someday see our loved ones again? I have read
that the inhabitants of Abyssinia tear palpitating strips of flesh from their oxen
and then have them cooked for their food: and so, day by day, do they slaughter
and torture those poor animals, until there remain only the bones and the guts,
half living, half dead. But all told, are we not, over the course of our life, equal
to the oxen of Abyssinia? Do we not lose, strip by strip, our holiest affections,
until anyone who lives long enough finds himself reduced to a fleshless, joyless
skeleton that goes on walking nonetheless, weary and pale from the long habit of
having lived?
William, just think that your Emma died with the assurance of seeing you
again in a better world and shut her eyes calmly and serenely, trusting that you
will manage to withstand your pain and not push forward the clock of your life
by a single minute.
As long as I live I shall weep for my Emma, whom I loved like my own
daughter, yet through my tears I shall always have the cherished hope of seeing
her again. And you too, William, must weep for her in this way; return to
England to kiss her tomb, return to us. I have been so very alone, the last of a
numerous family extinguished over just a few years. You are my adoptive child,
come and give solace to a poor old woman who walks in silence in a vast house
and takes fright at the sound of her own steps, the last remainder of so much life,
so much sound.
For many years she had not heard the glad uproar of little children, the shouts
of innocent crying, the exclamations to old Aunt Anna; but for a year Emma
filled the house once more with new life. Wherever that angel moved, wherever
she breathed, there was an ever flourishing garden. She did not say a word that
was not a living poem; never wore a smile that was not a caress; melancholy,
infirm, suffering, she had nothing but joys and benedictions for the creatures
who came near her.
What a void a creature whom one loves leaves in this world! Come, William,
and gather up all this heritage of perfumes and passions. It is yours, yours only,
none before you will be coming to profane it. I have closed the house to the
curious, the distant relatives, the friends. The house in which your Emma lived is
all yours, yours only. Let me be sole keeper of your cemetery.
You will still find the harpsichord open, and on the stand, the last music she
played. In the glass beside the bed in which she died you will find her flowers,
dried now but still fragrant; you will see her clock, which ticked on another
seven hours after she died; you will still find her canary alive. On her easel you
will see an unfinished drawing; you will find her clothes, her favourite books:
you will find everything but our Emma, who rests in peace in the park, beside
her father. Come, William, do not die in distant lands, among foreigners who do
not understand you, people who have not known you; come and take in the last
breath of that soul who has lived for you, and you alone. Come and kiss her
spirit that flies about this nest, like a butterfly beating its delicate wings against
the windowpanes in quest of the rays of a sun that no longer sets.
Our Emma felt death near, and, despite her resoluteness, she feared it. Days
before it came, she wished not to be alone any more and, when she had a maid or
friend by her, would be put out by mere trifles, contradict everything, and fly
into a rage. She, always the most patient of persons, would snap at her maids,
then regret her conduct and beg their pardon.
She said she felt fine but coughed more than usual and had no appetite; and
after having said a few words, she would be tired; and even a few steps of the
stairs made her terribly winded.
I suggested a doctor be summoned; but at that proposal she unleashed her
furies and turned so red in the face I thought a raging fever had struck her with
the speed of lightning.
Restless, irascible, unhappy with everything, she would lie upon her bed, then
rise to sit, then, collapsing again, fling herself head first among the pillows. In a
single hour she would do a hundred things; in a single hour she would read,
write, play the harpsichord, try to paint, ask for the newspapers, roam through
the library, and nothing would satisfy her.
In the hottest hours of the day her strength was so spent that she would not
leave her room. I saw her suffering but could not console her. I tried every way
of doing so, but it was a deep, irremediable pain that gnawed at her bowels; and I
did not insist on importuning her with my questions and advice. She who had
always had the ability to read into the heart of anyone around her without need
of words, was grateful now for my respectful silence.
One morning – it was to be her last – I rose late, as I did not feel very well,
and, asking for Emma, was told that she had risen very early and, wrapped in her
shawl, had left the house, saying to the maid, ‘Tell my aunt that I have taken the
first train to Bath, to visit my father’s grave, but that I shall be back at meal
time.’
The whole day I was nervous, my eyes impatiently gazed at the clock, and
more than once I put my ear to it, for it seemed to me to have stopped, so slowly
did the time seem to be passing.
Finally at four she returned: I ran to her: she was deathly pale, unable to
speak from the sheer labour of having to walk upstairs. She tried to smile at me
and, as though with mute lips, tried to reply to the hundred questions that rushed
into my mind and were engraved upon my worried face and frantic gestures. She
rushed into her bedroom and crashed down upon the sofa, with neither time nor
strength to remove her shawl, hat, or gloves. Her hands were frozen, and the
only signs of life in her were repeated shudders and deep, laboured sighs.
I pulled the small bell with such force that I tore the rope: I shouted for
someone to fetch the doctor at once, and then, beside myself, supporting myself
against the chairs and walls, thinking I would fall in a faint with each step, and
with each step renewing the force of my will, I left her room looking for I know
not what.
I wanted to do a world of things all at once; wanted to have mustard, fire,
cologne; would have wanted to have all the doctors and the pharmacists of
London by me; but above all I looked for William. It seemed in that moment that
you were the thing most necessary to my Emma.
I went back in a few minutes later; only to see the maid tearing her hair and
hear her scream wildly, ‘My mistress is dead! Miss Emma is dying!’
I approached the bed and saw how my child had turned the colour of wax: her
livid, bloodless lips were swimming on the pillow in a pool of blood that also
flooded the bed and had fallen upon the rug. Those lips were opening and
closing, and her last breath gurgling in the blood. I threw myself upon my child,
squeezed her in an embrace, shouted to her, ‘Emma! Emma!’ with such force that
my cries frightened me.
She opened her eyes, attempted to speak, lifted a hand and motioned to the
writing desk, and then, raising herself and pulling herself together in a supreme
effort, leaned her lips to my ear and clearly pronounced your name, William; and
then fell back, and I lost my senses.
William, for two days and two nights I was beside myself and opened my
eyes only to weep, for all that remains to me in years or months in this world; I
opened my eyes again only to feel wretched and alone.
Only a few days after the death of our Emma did I remember that supreme
gesture with which she had motioned me to the writing desk, and with religious
fear I approached it and opened the drawer. I instantly glimpsed a letter sealed
and addressed to you. I am sending it to you, William, having kissed it a hundred
times.
I feel that in those pages our angel must have enclosed some sacred thought
that will be a balm for you who loved her so. I feel that in those pages you will
find the courage to live, the strength to hope; and I cannot detach myself from
that final treasure without pain and a terrible apprehension that, in such a long
voyage, it can go lost.
 May an angel accompany those pages across the ocean: may they reach you
intact …
William, I know that with this letter I have given you the cruellest torment
that a human heart can bear; but I too weep and suffer and live because I wait for
you: and I shall count the days and hours, because I know that with the first
postal boat from Panama you will be here with me. From then on I shall keep
away from the house our Emma lived in every curious person, even friends. No
one shall touch her books, her flowers, her harpsichord, anything that was hers.
No one shall take profane steps there, beneath the pines, where she rests
beside her father. More than once she told me that she would sleep her last sleep
there; and I have laid here there for ever. Come to weep with your old Aunt
Anna over that grave.
Come, William, come at once; I await you.

Emma’s last letter bore the date of 14 July, the eve of her death.

William, I feel I am dying. I did not say so to my good Aunt Anna, nor to the
doctor, because I feel it would all be useless. The gentle climate of Madeira cast
a thin veil over my wound, but the London fogs have reopened it, crueller than
ever. I can no longer live, and the only thing that grieves me is that I shall die
without having seen you. Every hour, every hour I gaze at your portrait, and I
gaze at you with such intense desire that it seems you must reply to me, that you
must see me one last time.
But you will not come.
And then the thought frightens me that I shall have to die suddenly. In my
breast I feel a burning fire; it seems something is going to burst from one
moment to the next.
All this means nothing, my dear William, everyone dies: dying should be an
easy thing.
I have in me one divine joy that gives me courage, that makes me proud to
have lived, that makes me blessed to have known you, to have loved you, and to
have been so loved by you!
How selfish we are; I am about to die, and rejoice like some young girl in the
blessed certainty that you will belong to no other woman, that you have
belonged and will belong to no one but your Emma.
But you have loved me too much! I leave you too rich a treasure of memories,
too splendid a legacy of affections, for you to be someone else’s. This thought
makes me delirious with joy. I must place my two hands on my breast and
squeeze those hands tight, for my heart races so fast it seems to want to choke
me. My faith in your love is as sure as my faith in God.
Ah, Father, I have done your bidding. Tomorrow I shall go to visit your tomb,
shall go and murmur in your ear that your Emma has kept her word and is
worthy of you, that she is dying without having brought into the world other
unfortunates who would have died like herself, but who might have cursed life
and her who gave it to them. You, no, Father, you were not to blame for having
brought me into the world; you did not know you were ill when you gave me
life.
Do you not see, dear William? I was right to resist your love, to resist your
hopes. The climate of Madeira closed up my wound, but it did not cure me. Had
I given you my hand in marriage, we would have had children cursed in their
mother’s womb. An eternal remorse would have poisoned our love; I would have
been unable to think of my father. It would have been a hell.
But you must live, dear William, as you swore to me you would, my William;
here at the bottom of this page, on which your Emma’s pale, gaunt hand has
rested for the last time, you must write your oath; you must swear, for the sake of
this little daisy, this first flower you picked for me in the park at Bath, when you
told me, wordlessly, that you loved me.
You must swear upon this lock of hair, upon which one day, in a delirium of
love, you planted a kiss. These are the relics of your Emma. When your last day
will come, be buried with these; keep them for me, until we meet again in
heaven.
William mine, you must not only live, you must make your life fruitful with
courageous works, great works. Your splendid mind can find in all places a field
of activity. In science, in travels perilous and new, in the ardent terrain of
politics, you can, must be a great, useful, powerful man.
Do all the good I myself could not do, that we could not do together. And I
too shall not have lived in vain, because my memory will accompany you in
your struggles, in your weal and woe. I die with the pride of having inspired
lofty sentiments in you, great and useful accomplishments.
When, in the silence of your study, your mind will dictate sublime pages that
teach men to be honest, remember that the shade of your Emma is near you; that
she crosses her thin, pale hands in her lap; know that she is contemplating you,
smiling in the flashes of your keen mind. And when, in the struggle of political
passions, you will fight for freedom; when, in the whirlwind of affairs, your
sublime warrior’s eyes will flash, remember that amid the crowd the shade of
your Emma is concealed; remember that she is applauding your triumphs,
weeping with joy to have been loved by a man so noble, great, and generous.
And when you come to the poor man’s house, and when you dry a tear, when
you study the sad problems of impoverishment and suffering, remember that I
see you and hear you, weep and rejoice with you. And when you contemplate the
beauties of nature, which we worshipped together so many times like two devout
priests of beauty, and in the blue of a calm sky and the moon’s melancholy ray
and the mystic silence of the thick woods, and among the grasses of the fragrant
meadows and the tossing wave of lakes and the howl of the sea, remember that I
am with you; am hidden but trembling with love, mute but sighing, blessed to be
accompanying you everywhere, to be living still in your hopes, your memory.
Dedicate to me every good work, every sacred idea, every generous impulse,
and your Emma will be proud of all your ingenuity, of everything great that you
do. She waits for you, awaits you sure of clutching your breast in an eternal
embrace, carefree, free of regrets; unslaked with a thirst that will have lasted
infinite centuries, but which the infinite will have to extinguish.
Your Emma is leaving and waits for you there where you too will come.
Farewell. Live and be great; live and be useful; live and spare the living soul
suffering; live and love me; as I shall eternally love you.

Traced in violent, tremulous characters below this page read the lines ‘I swear,
my Emma, that I shall live. I swear to you to be useful and diligent, I swear it by
your love. Quito, 27 October 18–. William.’

Since receiving the relics of Emma and William, I have always waited
religiously, and silently, for a letter telling me something of my hapless friend,
and I have always waited in vain.
Ten years have passed and I have the right to publish these ardent pages of
two of the noblest creatures I have ever known.
Despite my right, I have written to England several times, to William, to Aunt
Anna, but never have I received any response. And after having waited to the
last hour for a word from my friend, I have thought to publish the papers he sent
me.
I hold the firm conviction that having read them will harm no one and will do
many good.
 From A Voyage to Lapland with My Friend Stephen Sommier

Chapter 1

Scandinavian Notes – The Lake of Blonde Tresses – Copenhagen –

Sweden’s Canals and Lakes – From Göteborg to Stockholm –
Stockholm and the Swedes – A Meal at Retzius’s House

I
Voyages undertaken in haste have their advantages, and do not deserve the ill
repute in which they are so often held. After all, in the fevered pace of life today,
what do we not rush through? Do we read every word of a book? Do we study a
political reform for ten years before enacting it? Do we even perchance
remember what we did yesterday? We have been put to sleep for so many years
with the lullaby of immutable dogmas that, once awake, we go running off for
who knows how long. Then too, when one knows how to read well, one can also
read quickly, except in those very rare cases in which the book is an artistic gem
to gaze upon, contemplate, caress, and which, like some beloved lady, reveals to
us every day new treasures, new beauties.
So with voyages; they too can be made well and quickly, and even from the
window of a wagon or an inn, many precious aesthetic and psychological medals
may flash in thought’s stenography. Cross, for example, the picturesque
mountains and the beckoning valleys of the Tyrol; in the railroad stations you
hear the poetical blast of mountain trumpets, at the crossroads of country roads
you see the large crucifixes guarding over the corn’s ripening, and you recall the
deeply religious feelings of the good Tyrolians. Cross the woods of the Black
Forest, the fields of central Germany, and see hung about everywhere the
artificial nests that bid the Lord’s small birds to live beside human dwellings,
and you find here revealed a page of Germanic sentiment, so lovingly protecting
small creatures. And so forth.
Even those with little time to spend I advise to spend a month in Scandinavia
without remorse for hurrying their travels. It will be a shower for the psyche,
refreshing their fevered blood. What a splendid thing it is to rest eyes that in the
Italian summer must look upon so many parched meadows, to rest them upon
endless plains, cool green meadows, or let them wander calmly over dense
forests of pine and birch! How splendid to rest the ears in the silence of a society
that moves, amuses itself, and toils without making noise! Here, even in the
large cities, the bells do not toll, the dogs do not bark, newspaper sellers do not
shout, the urchins do not curse: all is still, reposing in a serene contemplation of
nature, and activity itself is also calm and noiseless. Silence for the eyes, silence
for the ears, and silence too for that other sense, the quintessence of them all, and
which makes the daughters of Eve so endearing. In Italy we have too many
heads of raven-black hair sending off sparks, like a feline’s electric fur; we have
too many pitch-black pupils in whose deep abysses one loses the serene peace of
a tranquil life.
Here, from Copenhagen on, you will swim in a calm lake of fair tresses (if
you’ll permit me this harmless baroque conceit). Ah, how much blondness, and
oh how many beautiful, beautiful shades of blonde there are! The blonde of linen
stubble and the blonde of cornsilk, chifel blonde and auburn blonde, which
shines in the sunlight like molten gold, and chestnut blonde, with its thousands
of undulations of in-between shades; and then, beneath those blonde frames, so
much milk and so many Bengal rose petals that one feels refreshed the whole
way, and cured of the conflagrations of our women’s raven tresses and deep
pupils.
There is something else refreshing and reposeful in the feminine world of
Scandinavia: the lack of the curvilinear and of serpentine movement. (May the
geographers forgive me, but ethnologically and psychologically I am including
Denmark in Scandinavia.)1 In Germany one already starts to see that men move
with another system of joints, and that ladies, not to show them up, follow suit;
thus, in Scandinavia the curving line of movement is strictly forbidden in all
cases and all directions. People walk at an angle, laugh at an angle, sit at an
acute angle. You will find beauty, strength, majesty, thousands of aesthetic
elements in the human figure, but grace is absent and unknown. Who will show
me even one of those supple movements that are a poem of elegance and
sensuousness; who will show me the grace of the Graeco-Latin races? Yet the
angles have their own refreshing, calming aspect too, and if you go to
Scandinavia, they will do you great good.
I beg our own beauties, on hearing this, not to swell with pride. Up north their
sisters have a breeding that is truly surprising, and a serious, profound breeding
it is, not the gloss of patent leather and Dutch enamel. In Stockholm I was able
to speak Italian (imagine with what pleasure) with Countess Hamilton and Mrs
Retzius, the wife of one of the most distinguished anthropologists;2 but then
those two ladies also speak French, German, and English extremely well. Here
the most distinguished professors have true working partners in their spouses.
One of these ladies is a photographer, another works with microscopy or dissects
insects, because the man has made her the helpmeet of his labours as well as of
his joys; and in Italy too I know ladies with raven hair and deep pupils who
could certainly do what their Scandinavian sisters do on a daily basis.
In Copenhagen something else consoled me – not seeing ragamuffins on the
streets; nor have I seen them anywhere else. The filthy, tattered urchin does not
exist, one does not find the unwashed workingman, lacking many parts of his
attire; every man, every woman has a clean, decent appearance; you could say
that the proletarian does not exist, or at least is hidden. In addition, people show
great respect for one another and want to be respected; in shops one must
remove one’s hat; in a great many places one cannot smoke; there is great order
all about. One feels, then, that one is living in a saner, cleaner society, both
indoors and out, one that is toned and vigorous; not fitful and jaded, agitated one
moment and collapsing the next.
In the park of Frederikstoy at Pentecost I saw thousands upon thousands of
people strolling; a wave of calm, serene people, smiling, speaking little, yet
apparently well entertained. I then spent more than eight hours in Tivoli,3
studying the blessed naivety of a populace happy because it feels fine and needs
no inebriation to enjoy life. Naivety is a quality that, for some time now, has
disappeared from the Latin races: in Copenhagen’s Tivoli there was enough of it
to flood all Italy. This fine people amused itself on Russian sleds, in bowling
matches, in breaking pipes with wooden balls, and a printed announcement
enjoined them, Pubblicums opmaerksomhed henledes paa TULIPANFLORET –
to admire the extraordinary beauty of the tulips in bloom … Who, oh who, can
bring us even a little of this sancta simplicitas?
And here I am ready to end my description without having said anything
about Copenhagen; but my official character as an anthropologist bids me to
study humankind with livelier affection; besides, you need only open a
guidebook and you will find for yourself the description of monuments,
museums, churches.
Denmark has erected a veritable temple to its Torwaldsen,4 in which all his
works, either originals or copies, are assembled. It is at once a palace and a
church, in which you can admire all the fruits of one of the most productive of
modern artists.
Italy has not managed to do as much for its native son Canova, much less its
Raphael or Michelangelo; but then the Danes have not been as rich in artistic
glories, and every one of our cities is both a museum and a temple.
The prehistoric museum and the ethnological museum of Copenhagen are
indisputably the leading ones in the world, and I cannot speak of them lightly,
just as one can speak only confidentially and in a hushed voice about the lady
one loves. I have spent enough hours in them for my eyes to go blind and my
legs to fail me. Steinhauer and Worsoe honoured me with the courtesy and grace
that are such an endearing quality in all Scandinavians.
A short while ago, in the very lovely castle of Rosenborg, a third museum was
created, which gathers together the artistic and industrial products of the modern
era, so that, without leaving Copenhagen, you can trace the historical evolution
of human labour from the enormous flint hatchets of the fathers of the Scans to
the latest fancy goods of our trinket-cluttered century.
Copenhagen is an austere and beautiful city. Some palaces have a thoroughly
Greek architecture, no houses have balconies; the roads are broad and straight;
all about there are trees. Gigantism and tastelessness are ubiquitous: tramways
look like towers, omnibuses seem to be whales, and people walk about rigged
out in dress that suggests that tailors do not exist in Denmark and the clothing
has been brought to the city from some faraway country by people no one there
has ever laid eyes on.

II
To go from Göteborg to Stockholm, I traversed Sweden, following the lake route
and failing at every turn to summon words of praise, from our lexicon or the
even more amazing German vocabulary, sufficient to admire all the beauties that
passed before my enchanted eyes: wunderschön, wundergross, wunderhübsch …
In Scandinavia it is necessary to know German, and on the coasts of Norway one
must know English in order not to live in isolation amid a world that we do not
understand and that does not understand us. Unfortunately, however, even
German and English help only for speaking with educated people; in shops,
among the common people, with railway employees, one must use the universal
language of gesture, and the even more eloquent one of money and threats – the
two poles within which so many things move and operate in this sublunary
world.
My admiration lasted three days and three nights, and then finally was
sufficiently spent to be declared dead. Our poor human nerves also have their
limits, and the cup of joy, alas, has a bottom too soon discovered.
 I advise touristes not to take the steamboat to Göteborg, but to reach it by
railway to Trollhättan, the better, and more calmly, to visit the enchanting falls at
Gotaelo. That is what I did; and on foot, blissfully savouring the soft, cool
contact with the mosses and erpines, I moved from one cascade to another, under
the guidance of the sprightly blonde little scamp who wore emblazoned on his
cap Cicerone No. 12 – an Italian word found at long last deep in Sweden and
worn on the head of the sweetest, most innocent little lad I have ever laid eyes
on. The eleven other ciceroni were his companions at the station, but as soon as
they saw that they had not been chosen as our guide, they bade us a courteous
goodbye, without cursing the heavens or shaking a fist at their luckier rival.
What a difference between those numbered Trollhättan ciceroni and our own,
who have no numbers on their caps but are so often insolent, brutish, and
insufferable!
Anyone who has seen the classic waterfalls of Switzerland will find those in
Sweden less imposing, yet nowhere will you see a greater number, one after
another, or a greater variety. Here the river suddenly hurtles from a great height,
surrounding a cliff with a coterie, and, a little further on, gathers up a jet of foam
to fling into a black, narrow, deep abyss; while half a kilometre off, the frothing
waters make three or four leaps between the cliffs, in alternation with billowing
rests, like a horse shaking its mane amid its caracoles. The falls are framed by
gentle hills covered with pine trees and paper-making factories and romantic
cottages that jut out in pert profiles among the trees.
Spend the night in the Trollhättan hotel, built entirely of wood and redolent of
pleasant pine scent and bunches of flowers and sprigs of juniper or pine, which
you will find scattered through the entrance-hall of the houses or gathered in
small saucers set on the floor in each room; a Swedish and Norwegian custom
full of a heady poetry.
The next morning, leave this land and embark on the Baltzar von Platen, a
steamer that greatly resembles a great cetacean but which bears an illustrious
name, that of the man who, with iron tenacity, gave Sweden one of the longest
and most wondrous waterways known to the world.5 No poverty in the country,
no greed of ministers, no whim of parliament could steer him from the purpose;
and today, with systems of basins that follow upon one another like steps of a
giant staircase, hundreds of winding canals connect an entire system of natural
lake, by which iron, timber, and passengers move from Göteborg to Stockholm
and reunite two seas and two coasts in a brotherly embrace. Poor Platen died just
a few years before his enormous undertaking was concluded, yet died happy in
the knowledge that its existence was forever secured. He wanted no grand
monuments: he sleeps out his final rest on the banks of his canal near Motala, in
the shadow of huge birches, and I have doffed my hat to him upon finding that
he had chosen for himself the greatest and most poetic of tombs. The man who
sleeps at the foot of his own work must sleep the sweetest and most glorious of
sleeps.
Traversing the wondrous valleys of Scotland once, I remembered our own
great Leonardo and the distant glories of my country. As a passionate lover of
natural beauty, I have experienced ecstasy a hundred times over on seeing from
afar the enormous ships raising their masts above the pines, confirming with my
own eyes the dream of an enchanted ship moving amid the forests and over the
hilltops. With truly incredible, consummate skill these sailors slip their
steamships and their large ships into these basins, plying up and down without
collisions, without jolts, without the least incident. The pilot too must be
extremely adept, since at every moment the canal winds and winds again,
serpent-like, following the whims of the woods and the plains, hugging the
banks to kiss its flowers, and surely not to harm the boat.
At Venersborg the canal abruptly opens into Lake Vener, Sweden’s largest,
and the third largest in all of Europe. It will suffice to tell you that it has a
surface of 5,214 square kilometres, a length of 150 kilometres, and a width of
75. It is, then, a veritable sea, indeed has its own storms and shipwrecks, yet I
found it calm and caressing, covered over with a splendid blue sky, and around
which was a halo of white clouds whose nearly southerly shapes made for it a
lovely crown. After having wound among pines and navigated over the
mountains, this great, calm, silent lake produced in me a new, deep sensation,
reminding me of life’s vicissitudes, which change with such variety of scenes.
When you have finished with the lake, you return to the canal, and between
one basin and another you can go down and walk along its shores, treading upon
an extremely soft carpet of flowers, as though you were in some princely park.
And a true park it is, almost three days’ voyage in length, and enchanting with its
cool shadows, its lichen shimmering with dew, and the velvet of its mosses. At
every steamer station, blonde little girls with invariably clean faces come up to
offer you bouquets of lilies of the valley, narcissi, lilacs; and they hand you them
without a word, without insisting, happy to receive a single coin, perhaps even to
receive none. How sweet and lovely they were in their silence! It seemed to me
that Nature herself was offering those flowers by way of little nymphs, creatures
not of this world.
After a long tour of canals you cross another lake, Lake Vetter, as blue as
sapphire, then other rivers and endless canals.
The sun sets after nine o’clock, in a sky aflame in a mix of purple and pearl.
In the soft outline of the distant hills, a giant windmill, also stilled in so much
silence, rests its eye, and seems like a cross weeping over the sun’s death. The
villages of purple wooden houses sleep too, and the quivering birches barely,
noiselessly shake their small, elegant leaves.
During the night, as the moon makes love with a sunlight that here and in this
season never dies, there are points in which our steamer ploughs amid birch and
pine leaves, and we can caress the plants from the quarterdeck.
In the morning, you pass by Motala, a city of large dockyards, and by a tier of
locks you descend into lovely, graceful Lake Boven; a truly enchanting,
transparent mirror in which the sky gazes coquettishly on itself and casts its
image with its white clouds. The coasts are altogether lithe, curving, voluptuous
even, with the soft undulations of a woman’s body; pubescents of spruce firs and
birches.
In one of the most beautiful hills is shyly hidden among the trees a villa
riddled with daylight; and the fortunate mortal who owns it, in the entry-hall of
his house, can see at one and the same time two lakes, because Boven, winding
about a peninsula, doubles back here, infinitely multiplying its beauties. The air
temperature is simultaneously warm and cool, and reminds me of a gruff man’s
caress, all the more welcome because it comes so rarely.
Next you pass by Husbyfiöl and Lake Jocksen, set between rolling,
Lilliputian hillocks, with scattered villages and squat black and white villas
comfortably set in soft meadows, framed by pines, created apparently to hide the
secret delights of a long love.
After Norsholm, the canal runs parallel to a river visible from above and, in
the great variety of its banks, unwinding before your eyes like a magical ribbon.
And the fantastic race continues, and from the lakes, the canals, the rivers, and
by night, before you have realized it, you have entered into the Baltic, and again
you pass over a canal into a lake, this time the Melarn, which will lead you on
clear to Stockholm. And you will see it in all its seriousness, there at the bottom
of the pine trees, with its tall domes and its jet-black iron bell-tower, sharp as a
sword.
O fortunate lovers, who crave a cool, calm nest in which to enjoy your first
love, go to verdant Sweden, and kiss on the banks of those lakes I am smitten
with!
 III
Stockholm is a beautiful city, large and austere, framed by forests so deep, so
green, so tall they make a Druid of anyone who passes beneath the vaults of their
giant birches or those oaks that count the centuries the way we count the years.
Anyone who has compared Stockholm to Venice has not seen Stockholm and has
never been to Venice, or rather has seen neither of these cities. Sweden’s capital
is situated on the water and is surrounded by water; but it has none of the
mysterious silence of Venice’s canals, nor the urban walkways that turn into
water, nor the gondola; finally, it is not a place that makes you say, Here one can
only plot or make love. Stockholm is set on the banks of Lake Mälar and on an
island that rests on its mouth to the sea, and the water is intertwined with the
land in amorous embrace; which raises a surpassingly keen feeling that you need
to have an elegant yacht in which to move about in this labyrinth of salt and
fresh waters, woods and villas.
The city is dominated by the imposing royal palace, which raises its colossal
walls to 130 and 137 metres high. Facing it is another palace, built not for the
kings but for the comfort of voyagers; it is the Grand Hotel, one of the most
beautiful I have seen anywhere in Europe, and which, by virtue of its location,
commands the finest panorama in Stockholm. Here, as in Denmark, you find an
alternation of pure Greek architecture with Scandinavian. In theory it would
seem that, seen alongside each other, they should sound a strident note of
disharmony, yet a certain stern majesty unites them, born of simplicity of line.
Everything can enter into architecture, provided it represents an idea; nothing
repels me more than pastiche, the invasion of knick-knacks and even
confectionery in the sacred domains of this supreme art, which should inspire all
other arts.
The Palace of Fine Arts, or National Museum, is a splendid edifice of
Venetian Renaissance architecture, and we could only wish to see our own
masterpieces housed as splendidly. Unfortunately, in Stockholm the contents
count less than the container. In the entry-hall you realize at once that you are in
Scandinavia, admiring the three colossal statues by Fogelberg of Odin, Thor, and
Balder. Walking up a flight you will find many drawings by Dürn, and some
statues by Sergel, Byström, Göthe, Fogelberg, and Quarnström, who are not too
ashamed to be seen alongside the Sleeping Endymion, the one found in 1783 in
the ruins of Hadrian’s Villa. As a curiosity you cannot turn away from a Venus
Callipigia that King Gustav III commissioned from Sergel, who gave the figure
the head of Countess Höpken, to avenge the opposition this lady of the high
aristocracy directed against the court.
Stockholm also has a prehistoric museum devoted entirely to Sweden, a rich
ethnological museum particularly for objects of the hyperborean races, and an
anthropological museum that historically is the father of all anthropological
museums in the world, having been founded by the great Retzius,6 the creator of
modern craniology and the father of one of the most distinguished scientists that
Sweden has today. The son is a professor of histology at the University and, with
Kei, has made extremely important discoveries in the delicate structure of the
nervous system. He has recently published a huge work on the ethnology and the
craniology of the Finns; having been printed in only two hundred copies, it will
not be released commercially; but of the two hundred, at least a dozen are
intended for Italy, which Retzius and his wife love so much that they have
converted their hospitable house into a small temple of Italian art. Furniture,
sculptures, watercolours, etchings, vases – everything is Italian, and the beautiful
tropical plants crowning these artistic jewels make you forget utterly that you are
on Scandinavian soil. Retzius is currently at work on a comparative histology of
the ear in batrachians, salamanders, and fish, and his first findings are already
very important, contributing new, precious materials to Darwinian science.
To speak only of my own field, how many great researchers Sweden can
boast today; and Loven, Illebrand father and son, Axel Kei, Montelius, Van
Düben, Stolpe, and so many others demonstrate to us that the land that gave us
Linnaeus and Berzelius is still fertile ground for great men who open new
horizons in natural studies.
The Swedes have a distinctive physiognomy. In the common people you often
see the Finnic type of face, indeed almost Lapp; it is squarish and very broad,
with a small nose and large mouth. In the upper class, on the other hand, you see
the German, or rather Skanic, physiognomy. These are generally plump, blonde,
stout, and sprightly people, conveying strength and affability; smallish grey or
blue eyes, not large. Cheerful, lacking full, rounded grace, grazia rotonda, in
their movements. Everything about them is angular; they greet by bowing like a
pair of compasses that can snap shut, or lower and raise their head a number of
times, like machines. Courteous, hospitable, they present you with bouquets of
flowers at every turn.
It has been said that the Swedes are the Frenchmen of the north, but this was
said also of the Russians, and such phrases are in fact always commonplaces that
spare us careful or deep observation. A human character is not something to be
defined with a phrase.
 It has also been said that mores are rather relaxed in Sweden, and certain
statistics appear to prove that Stockholm is, after Munich, the European city with
the greatest number of illegitimate children. I would prefer to leave open this
question, since I have seen, in the daughters of Eve of every class, a good deal of
demureness and reserve, and have not found the courtesans that parade their
impertinence about so many other cities.
In Sweden I found a quite pronounced democratic tendency in the middle
classes and, even more, among literati and scholars. Whereas in Denmark a
ribbon in one’s buttonhole brings happiness to many mortals, in Sweden no one
wears one, and I know many professors at the University who have turned down
such an honour. Nordenskjöld, the great polar explorer,7 who is awaited from
one day to the next with the glorious booty of his exploits, was once shown a
lesson by the king. His majesty had conferred on him some order or other, and
Nordenskjöld had declined it. The great scientist in turn offered him a
magnificent fur from his voyage, and Oscar accepted, saying to him, ‘You are
prouder than I; I have accepted your gift, you have declined mine.’
The pietistic party is very active in Sweden, and is strenuously combated by
the middle classes and intelligentsia. Popular instruction is nurtured with great
love, and the city’s most distinguished ladies dedicate the best part of their time
and their money to it.
I have had the pleasure of being invited to a dinner at which Retzius, with
exquisite courtesy, thought to surround me with the capital’s most illustrious
anthropologists and physiologists. Never had I seen franker, fuller, and more
brilliant hospitality. Dining in Sweden is something original and grand,
reminiscent of the Middle Ages in its finest forms.8 Above all you find arrayed
on the table at least twelve or twenty little dishes, in which earth and sea offer up
to you their most alluring and appetizing treasure: ox tongue and cod roe,
Norwegian herring and marinated eels, raw salami and ham. Picking from here
and there, you wash it all down with aquavit, which comes in three or four
different fragrances. Then comes the soup, which might be made with turtle or
freshwater shrimp or even nettles. They keep in reserve large fresh- or saltwater
fish, venison or beef, and wood pheasants; ices of balmy cream; the wines of all
the peoples of the earth that have vineyards. With delicate care Retzius had laid
the table also with Chianti and muscatel from Gerace. And with each new drink
the master of the house took, he invited me to drink with him, toasting me anew.
And I would drink and thank him, while all our table companions graciously
lifted their glasses to me. Whenever one drinks, one invites someone to give a
toast in friendship, what is called skole.9 Round the dining table there also
circulated the imposing Ölbolle, a huge painted wooden cup filled with beer, and
everyone drank fraternally from the same vessel. After this banquet, everyone
goes up to shake the hands of the master and mistress, thanking them. These are
patriarchal customs, redolent of ancient chivalry, taking us back to a time in
which no one blushed to express what he felt in order to learn with subtle
hypocrisy how to express what he did not feel. Blessed be the countries in which
progress does not mean erasing all memories of the past and being ashamed to
have had ancestors. […]

Chapter 2

The Trip to Öjungen – The First Lapps

Let me backtrack a moment to tell you of a trip I took over Norway’s central
plateau on a visit to various Lapps who have lived from time immemorial in the
mountains surrounding Röros. Professor Friis,10 the leading authority on things
Lapp, had told us in Christiania that these Lapps represented the purest type of
their race, and, to encourage us to visit them, had given us a letter of
recommendation to his brother, a distinguished engineer who directs the copper
foundries of Röros.
I set out from Christiania, then, on the morning of 15 June with my friend
Sommier,11 with the sort of enthusiasm blended of curiosity and impatience that
stirs us to see new things. The weather was glowering and reminded us of the
gloomy days in March when, with irritable alternation, in a matter of minutes
came rain followed by gusts of wind and then sunshine. Heaven’s ill humour
could not penetrate us, however; an inner climate of warmth armoured us against
all of Scandinavia’s bad weather. In two or three days, perhaps even on the
morrow, we might be seeing our first Lapps: how, then, could we be less than
happy?
At eight in the morning, with the last whistle of a small locomotive, we left
the city of Christiania and steered the prow of our ardent desires (as a
seventeenth-century poet might say) toward Röros. Rain dulled the landscape,
and we preferred to focus our thought within the train compartments. Nielsen’s
German guide and study of certain Norwegian words claimed the first hours of
our voyage; later, we examined the snug place in which we were enclosed. Small
but clean cars: between compartments a crystal urn full of ice offered us fresh
water from a silver tap; but in fact we felt no need, wrapped as we still were in
warm winter overcoats. A huge signboard hung upon the car offered us a map of
the country we were traversing, with stations, the minutes we would be stopping,
and all necessary information for the traveller. Another signboard gave the prices
of hotels along the route in which we could have spent the night.
[…]
A Norwegian railway car is a guide and a school. A third sign, in Norwegian
and English, urged us not to throw matches or lighted cigars from the windows,
since they might set fire to the forest we were crossing: ‘Passengers are
requested not to throw lighted cigars, matches, etc. out of the carriage windows.
Doing so has occasionally caused turf, heath, and thereby forests to be ignited.’
Meanwhile, 10:46 arrives, and with it we must leave the train at Eidsvold
station to take a steamer across Lake Mjösen, the most beautiful in all of
Norway, Y-shaped, like our own Lake Como, and reminiscent, with shores poor
in villages but rich in pine trees and rugged cliffs, of the Scottish lakes. On
board, our meal is served by strapping blonde Scandinavian Amazons, who are
rather more appealing than the dishes they serve: boiled mutton, the never-
ending salmon, the never-ending beer, and a salad dressed with sugar and milk.
But an excellent cream served with multeber (fruit of the Rubus chamaemorus)
reconciles me to Norwegian cuisine and makes me bless life. Lombard though I
be, I must confess, for the sake of the truth, that Norwegian cream is far superior
to ours, which is delicious enough: it is smooth and rich, like the Lombard
variety, but more fragrant and less thick; a true balm for one’s fussy, hard-to-
please ventricles.
At 2:15, Lake Mjösen has been travelled up and down, and we come back to
the railway, where, to my great pleasure, I find that my second-class ticket gives
me the right to advance to the first class, and I enter, with my loyal friend, into a
carriage that is all mirrors and purple velvet. In this gracious sitting room we
traverse beautiful woods, dense with birches that rise up from soft carpets of the
Cenomyce rangiferina.12 Here and there we glimpse wooden cottages crowned
with earth that harbours saplings and grasses, a veritable little hanging garden
atop a human habitation. On the left bank of the Glommen River I find six or
seven villages, all of motley-coloured wood. All the stations are tiny, but tidy
and clean. None are without flower vases in the windows, and always a huge
thermometer stands out announcing to all one of the most important facts for
man’s well-being in these hyperborean climes. Some of the stations are adorned
with elk or reindeer horns.
 On the right the Glommen accompanies our every step, and here and there
large heaps of morainic pebbles tell us aloud that we are stepping over the bed of
ancient glaciers.
In the stations I observe, with an anthropologist’s eye, the face of the
inhabitants. Among the long, blonde faces and large heads of the Scandinavians,
other faces stand out: those of lowly people, with their very broad Mongoloid
faces and very small noses. Can they be Finnic or Lappoid? I shall not answer
that question, because it is all too simple to venture conjectures or devise
theories, but strict science judges both to be just so many pages of historical
novels.
The station at Koppang demands a few minutes for us to admire it. Beautiful,
heavily rusticated wooden houses surround it; but to human labours I always
prefer the works of nature, and close by, with the guidance of my friend Stephen,
who botanizes even in the stations, I pick, for the first time, the Betula nana,
Europe’s most microscopic tree, many purple violets, and a beautiful heather, the
Andromeda polifolia.
We arrive at Toenset at 11:55 p.m. and dine on salted salmon, hardboiled
eggs, and beer. We must spend the night in this station: because in Norway, one
travels only by day, and the train, like some fine old diligence from olden times,
stands still before us, awaiting our morning reawakening; while many travellers
leave their things in the carriages, sure they will find them intact on the morrow.
Our hotel, made completely of wood, has large reindeer antlers on its door, and
our plain little room is diminutive, the bed tiny, and the peaceful light of a night
that is day gently floods over us, rocking us in a somnolence that cannot turn
into sleep.
Gradually the veiled light grows strong, nay, insolent; the two twilights of
evening and morning, like two ardent paramours, can part for only a few
moments before kissing anew, fused in the embrace of a single dawn. The train’s
horn warns us that we must be off; but if some traveller should be straggling or
longing to sip his coffee with greater leisure, the conductor makes no bones
about this and halts the departure for a few minutes. Here men are not made for
trains, but trains for men, and the railways are full of affability, patience, and
obligingness.
We are back in our elegant little red-velvet sitting room, but we cannot enjoy
it for much more than two hours, because Röros station halts us. It is here that
we must gather information about the Lapps of Ojung, it is here that the fine
engineer Fries must serve as guide and master for our adventurous expedition.
He is so nice that, even as we are heading to his house, he has come to meet us
and, without needing a photograph or passport with personal notes, guesses who
we are. In his house we study the map of the place and decide to send a telegram
to the engineer Hauan, who manages another copper foundry in Eidet. He replies
after a few hours that there are Lapps at Ojungstrakten, and that on the morrow
he will be waiting for us at the station in Eidet with all we shall need for our
expedition.
Röros is a sad and a heart-chilling place; it lies in the middle of Norway, on a
plateau more than two thousand feet above sea level; not a tree in sight: an
almost deserted moorland, with glacier ruins scattered across it, ill-shaped,
barren mountains all about it, almost always snowbound. Mercury always
freezes in the winter, and last winter Engineer Fries forged a fine silver nail out
of mercury, beating it into shape with a hammer on an anvil. Tiny, grey houses;
streets paved with metallurgic slag; smoke, sulphur fumes everywhere; a torrent
that has torn at the bowels of that infertile earth, and that roars among the coal
heaps and piles of copper mineral, giving this countryside a bread that must taste
of sulphur and be cold itself.
Yet even in Röros I reap two smiles full of beauty and life. In the arid sands
that surround this hellish landscape, spontaneous bushes of pansies are
blooming, so thick that a single plant yields a bouquet. In the station hotel,
fragrant with pine resin, other budding creatures smile: they are the blonde,
roseate daughters of the stationmaster-cum-host, and with their blue eyes they
scatter rays of fresh youth and innocent sympathy. They bring you early morning
coffee while you are abed, rightly trusting in their virtue and in the man’s respect
for the virginal purity of youth.
From Röros the railway descends to Eidet, and as it gradually leaves the arid
plateau, the trees spring up and the forest grows more dense. At Eidet, engineer
no. 2 stands ready, Mr Hauan, who, to judge solely from his sombre, even surly
face, must be less than delighted to have to accompany us to the mountain-tops
in search of Lapps; but who, on the contrary, is warm-hearted company, and has
prepared for us a horse, a cart, and the men needed to carry our heavy
photographic luggage to the foundry, which lies below, at the bottom of the
valley.
Engineer Hauan, a disciple of the Freiberg school, is a man of few words but
many deeds. He sees our boxes being lowered from the baggage car and watches
them in excruciating silence. At our insistence that he translate that silence for us
into German, and, if possible, also into Danish, he answers with long-drawn
hmm hmm’s that do not bode well. My companion and I are constrained,
therefore, to translate this gloomy silence for ourselves, and we succinctly render
it: These two Italians must be madmen to think they can carry their photographic
boxes to the heights of Ojung; it would be easier to get the Lapps to come down
to them, if not the mountains to the valley.
There’s nothing crueller than to have to speak a few stilted words of a foreign
tongue with a man who holds his tongue in all languages. At your lips you feel
rivers of words surfacing, arguments, and persuasions, torrents of questions,
beguilements, reasonings, all of which you would like to array in legions,
regiments, squadrons, batteries to persuade, to excuse yourself and beg pardon;
and instead you have, on the one hand, a human monolith who stares at you in
silence; on the other, your precious few words, coming out one by one,
laboriously, distortedly, and always off the mark. Were Dante to come back to
life, he would assign a new circle of his hell to this, damning all expansive,
garrulous men to the fearful punishment I endured at Eidet station, in the central
plateau of Norway.13
If one cannot speak, then fact must be serried against fact, deed against deed,
and there, in the freight room in Eidet, Sommier and I set about simplifying our
photographic luggage, reducing it to a bare minimum. The camera lucida with its
large Dalmayer lens, the developing tent, a few plates, fewer reagents.
Meanwhile, to complete our happiness, it is raining.
The bare minimum, meanwhile, has been packed into a two-wheel handcart
pulled by a pachyderm that has something of the donkey, mule, and horse about
it and, accompanied by us on foot, descends the slope to the foundry, led by Mr
Hauan. Simple, sincere hospitality, blonde and rosy-cheeked ladies, babies with
honey-and-cream complexions, reconcile us to life and to the Lapps of Ojung.
When our meal has ended, the man of few words invites us in to the courtyard,
where the caravan stands ready to take us on our journey. A horse for Mr Hauan,
a cariole for me, another for Sommier, a two-wheel cart for the luggage, drawn
by a pachyderm of uncertain species. Everyone falls to the place assigned to
him, and I, reins in hand, for the first time in my life lead a horse without being
on horseback. And upward, upward, up the steep slopes peopled by pines, as far
as Törmo, where even the carioles cannot advance and the draught animals must
be changed into saddle horses. The single cart and the single horse incertae
sedis14 will carry on as they are. While the caravan undergoes this radical
transformation, we enter a house at Törmo, where they offer us extremely fresh
milk, wooden chairs almost as white as the milk, and smiling faces, with the
kindest, most endearing hospitality. The women are busy at the oven baking their
flatbread, or fladbröd. It is a scene from the lives of our stone-age forefathers. A
woman with sturdy bare arms, and singular skill and agility, moulds an
extremely thin circle of dough, into which many different grains go, rye, barley,
possibly oat as well; and no sooner is it made than she tosses it onto a large stone
disc that has been quickly heated by a good fire of twigs. The high temperature
of the stone and the thinness of the dough make the baking almost instantaneous,
and the cornet, piping hot on both sides, is taken out dry and semi-toasted and
ready for the mouth of anyone with any appetite. This national Norwegian bread
lasts months and years; it is tasty, easy to digest, and can seem like a dainty
compared to the bread of the Lapps, more prehistoric still.
But we are already on horseback, have bid adieu to our ladies of the oven, and
go up and up the mountain slope, which grows ever steeper. Meanwhile a fine,
icy, gloomy rain soaks us to the bone and makes us more silent than fish. From
the height of my saddle I look at Sommier, who looks back at me from his; we
cannot quite claim we are being amused, but we submit to our martyrdom,
waiting for the Lapps. Not from the extinction of the light, which, in those
latitudes and in that season never goes out, but from our own weariness we grasp
that bedtime must already have arrived; yet the leader of the caravan presses on,
and the guides follow him grudgingly, in the foulest mood. The clock tells us
that 11 p.m. is nigh, and we are obliged to stop, while the engineer and guides,
on horseback and on foot respectively, disperse in different directions, in search
of someone or something. Perhaps they are looking for the Lapps, and the idea
of spending the night in a Lapp hut lifts our weary spirits and promises us much
poetry. But instead, they have been looking for a saeter. And the saeter has been
found: a little cabin shrunk to the smallest scale possible, made of wood and
straw, in which the shepherds spend two months of the summer grazing their
cows. The key is hidden in the roof, reached at arm’s height. They step inside
bowing their heads and immediately light the iron stove, the most important and
expensive part of the whole house. In a moment the birch branches crackle, burn,
and heat the tiny nest in which we have been gathered, while the horses, left free
to roam under the fine, freezing rain, search, amid the sod that the snow has just
abandoned, for some scrubby, yellowed blade of grass. Bread, butter, chocolate,
and aquavit keep us alive until morning, and, stretched over wood, we prepare
for our future exertions. Three hours of sleep pass quickly, and the dawn of a day
that has never died urges us up onto our horses again.
It is 3 a.m., and already we are all gathered together in front of the little saeter
door, surrounded by an amphitheatre of snow-covered mountains. At our feet,
deep in the valley, sleeps picturesque Lake Ojung, with its multiform little islets,
also full of snow and small barren trees, where, through our telescope, we can
see the first budding gems of green (and this on 18 June!). If the trees up above
are still sleeping out the last sleeps of the long, long winter, the gentle meadows
of those plateaux are a true beauty, and even a man less enamoured of nature
would immediately compare them to a Persian carpet, so variegated and
seductive are they in all their polychromatic disorder. My friend Stephen, who
accompanies me on my voyage and who, in all his intelligent affection and
stalwart youth, comforts me in the harshness of the journey, baptizes in passing
all those gentle little creatures of Norwegian flora. Learning their names, I feel I
love them even more.
It is hard to find a vegetation more distinctive, more full of character than the
one I admired on the Ojung plateaux. Up there, trees, mosses, herbs, and short
grasses, tamed by the common enemy, the cold, are all of diminutive size; they
level off to the same height and form a hundred-coloured surface, as though
sensate shears had trimmed them all. Among the microscopic shrubs of the
Betula nana, the dwarf birch, you see the profuse flowers of the rose-colored
Azalea procumbens, the white little pillows of the Diapensia lapponica, the red
frills of the Silene acaulis, the yellow spots of the Pedicularis oederi, the white
blots of the Arctostaphylos alpina, the thick gilded heads of the Viola biflora;
while between one little garden and another stretch the microscopic little woods
of the Empetrum nigrum and the broad fringes of hundred-coloured lichens.
Among them, the Cenomyce rangiferina raises its soft, filmy head, a sign to you
that the reindeer cannot be far off.
But unfortunately love of life does not let me long admire this Persian rug
spread over the Norwegian plateaux. The difficulties of the path increase with
every step. Now it is a peat bog that threatens us, now, blocking the road, a pile
of snow into which the horses sink: once, mine fell onto its knees, and it was a
miracle that I and it could emerge with our limbs still sound.
It was raining, it was cold, and the silence round about us was colder than the
snow; but past the lake there were the Lapps, and so, with profound resignation,
we pressed on. But, alas, a merciless river, the Galoe, having risen with the last
rains, snatched our photographic equipment from us, and we, alone with our
horses, wading at great peril, forded the wicked water that would keep us from
photographing the Lapps of Ojung.
At one point a guide shouted, ‘Look, a reindeer!’ It was the first I had seen,
and its white profile, giant antlers, and calm, measured gait were to remain
deeply etched in me, there where the most vivid memories of our travels linger
until the day we die. Was it a straggler, or a wild reindeer? Our imagination
inclined toward the latter hypothesis, although we know from those who have
travelled in the polar regions that where the tame reindeer live, the wild ones
stay away, as though out of disdain for the air of enslavement surrounding them.
There must be certain exceptions, however, since a wild buck sometimes
approaches herds of the civilized she-reindeer, flirts with them, and then
fecundates them, as also occurs between the wild boar and sows, the muflon and
ewes.
The exhilarating effect of that reindeer passed quite quickly, as the path
became more impassable with every step, and it was necessary to let the horses
go free and continue our search for the Lapps on foot. Our feet, of course, were
already freezing in the snow, now sinking into the treacherous peat, now slipping
on stones subdued by the glacier’s long caresses; and I, sweating on the inside,
rain-soaked on the outside, was gazing southward and thinking of Florence, my
fair Firenze, which at that very moment must be shining in the golden rays of its
flower-perfumed air.
Engineer Hauan and the guides were running ahead of me on their Norwegian
ankles, but they all seemed to be in a bad mood for not finding the Lapps. They
would not answer our questions, and to judge from their general gestures it was
easy to understand how they must be cursing, if only under their breath and in
the deep silence of their consciousness – but with sullen, cruel curses, the kind
reserved for great occasions, pitched battles waged with men and things. To us,
uncertain as we were whether to go on or to stay, it was enough to see, every so
often, the profile of a guide or Hauan’s hat; but suddenly the guides vanished,
the engineer’s hat vanished, and for over an hour we felt about us the coldness of
silence, which together with the fine, freezing rain was deeply demoralizing for
us. I, who run, with my imagination and my nerves, from joy to sorrow at a
speed faster than light, gave myself up for dead and felt fully submerged in the
blackest fog of despair. Yonder, beyond the river, the photographic gear washing
up onto the bald countryside; here the horses let go, close by us but in danger of
straying; we, alone in the desert, forsaken by guides, without supplies.
Abandoned, I flung myself down upon a carpet of snow dazzlingly white and
unsullied by the tread of man or beast, longing for it to enfold me like a winding
sheet. And I launched into lamentations worthy of Jeremiah, accusing myself of
rashness and frivolity, railing, like the engineer and the guides, against the
Lapps, and, even more, against my appetite, always larger than my stomach.
Without the comfort of my friend, always so serene, so calm and self-assured, I
would have given myself up for dead; but he consoled me, helped me to see the
Lapps just a few paces on, led me to the flowering hills of hope …
And behold! All at once a distant barking of dogs, steadily approaching …
the dogs of the Lapps. I rise from my snowy winding sheet, feel my heart
beating, reborn to a new life. The little black dogs already cavorting among us;
we follow them and are soon outside two Lapp huts at the bottom of two small
hills. From one of them rises a thick column of blue smoke that seems to be
giving us warm welcome and inviting us to the hospitable table of these good
people. Little more than termite mounds, these two houses are a blend of peat
and sod held up by a few posts. An upper opening to let smoke escape, a
triangular opening in front to let people in, an opening closed by a canvas
stretched by a few laths. It is so narrow, this opening, that one person can barely
squeeze in, and must do so by bending over at two points. You must bend your
head, round your back, and then slip in sideways. It is not very comfortable, this
door, but I would have entered on all fours just to be able to see a Lapp hut. Here
the body must learn to bend at any moment and in the strangest ways; for no
sooner have I entered than I must throw myself on the bed of birch branches that
forms the house’s floor, not to be choked by the smoke.
The interior of the hut was one of the most stunning pictures I have ever
beheld. What a want of comforts and wealth of life, what poverty of space and
condensation of creatures, what contrasts of hues for a Flemish painter, how
many psychological scenes for a philosopher, how much tenderness for a friend
of mankind! A reversed black funnel, that was the form of the house; black the
walls, from the smoke’s long kisses, black the human faces, also smoky with
soot; black Fick, Nump, and Kiarf, who with their pointy ears and their eyes
blacker and shinier than anthrax smut burrowed into reindeer pelts stretched over
a springy bed of birch boughs; in the middle, the fire, contained amid so much
combustible matter by large stones, and above the fire a chain holding up a pot.
Round about, a mountain of ladles, knives, smoked meats, reins for the reindeer,
a tangle of boys, women, and girls who seemed to be stewing and fermenting
together. In a corner a small genre scene cheerfully, picturesquely jumping out of
the larger tableau. There was a furswathed baby, who raised his frightened little
blonde head from his tiny bed and, with his large, still bright eyes glazed with
blessed sleep, looked toward us without quite knowing whether to cry or laugh.
Hauan and the guides were also crouching in that cave, which seemed to resolve
the large problem that, according to sacred tradition, must be resolved on the day
of universal judgment from the small Valley of Jehoshaphat. The contents of the
hut seemed much larger than the container.
 None of us would give his dog or goat such a habitation; and yet those good
Lapps, who, possessing more than three thousand reindeer and wearing silver
rings, were veritable Rothschilds of Lapland, were not only content with this
house but were gay, serene, extremely happy. How various the range of man’s
capacity for happiness! I gradually became aware of my hosts, who had
welcomed us with a very cordial handshake. All the men were absent, because
they were following the reindeer, who were grazing on a nearby hill. Margaret,
the mother of the family, in her forties, with chestnut-blonde hair, a Mongoloid
face with its tiny nose, her hands and skin blackened by the smoke. Her young
daughter Eva, eighteen years old, with bright golden hair, and who seemed to
laugh all the time, baring close little white teeth. She was naive, nimble,
savouring of a wild beauty. With her blue eyes and blonde hair, with her
impertinent little nose, her prominent cheekbones, her fresh complexion tanned
by long frosts, her bare little feet and little hands, she had all the dangerous
allures of some rustic fruit whose taste she does not even know. A little sister,
barely younger than Eva, and two or three boys made up the family.
This good family spoke passable Norwegian, and our friend Engineer Hauan
would translate into German what they were saying, constantly bringing us into
a bond of sympathies and ideas. The mother immediately set about grinding
excellent coffee for us, speedily preparing the Lapps’ favourite drink, which we
drank sweetened with extremely white lumps of sugar. After the coffee came the
meal: smoked reindeer meat with reindeer tallow hardened by the cold, all of it
cooked rapidly over a very strong birch fire. It was tough but flavourful food,
with a goatish, rather wild, aroma. We ate everything, and digested everything;
but we had to struggle against a true seasickness to behold the strange cleaning
method of the good Margaret. She was wielding her large metal ladle to serve
first the coffee, then the thick, rich reindeer, then the drinking water. That all-
purpose tool was always washed with the tongue, which, like a very busy dust-
cloth, cleaned away all the fat and made the spoon more polished than silver.
The tongue, for that fine woman, was the soap of soaps, the broom of brooms;
so much so that when we parted, Margaret, before putting out her hand, quickly
licked herself with amazing deftness. Every so often our courteous hostess also
used her fingers to clean her nose, without recourse, this time, to her tongue.
In action, Margaret was all perpetual motion: she stoked the fire, slapped a
dog that too impudently stuck its snout toward the meat or the tallow; then with
her hands she cleaned a little girl’s nose, gave a piece of raw meat to a little boy
who was too hungry to wait till it was boiled; and all this she did with a pipe in
her mouth, which at very short intervals she would empty and refill.
 When hunger and thirst were sated, clothes dried, and a more breathable air
stirred up by the excellent coffee of the Lapps, the hour came for exquisite
courtesies, gifts, and trade. It would be hard to gather more diverse people into a
smaller space: Latins and Goths and Scandinavians and the ancient Mongols of
the Altai; a people raised under vine leaves and olive branches, or hardened by
the pole’s sempiternal frosts, children of Odin amid children of Horace; yet at
that moment all were squeezed around one and the same hearth, with a single
atmosphere bringing them close and heating them with the same flame of
sympathy.
I offered Eva an excellent, gold-label cigarette. She took it warily, looking at
her mother with bashful eyes.
‘Our girls do not smoke.’
And Eva sought to return it to me.
But I wouldn’t accept.
‘Madam Margaret, today, just for today, let Eva have a cigarette.’
Bowing her head, she agreed.
And Eva, blushing with joy and gently thanking me with laughing eyes, lit it
and drew in two or three mouthfuls of smoke, then passed it to her mother, who
finished smoking it.
Engineer Hauan poured our hosts cognac, and Margaret, Eva, and all the
others emptied their small glasses in one gulp, after dipping their index finger
into them, making the sign of the cross on their brows, and saying, May it do no
evil.
I offered chocolate. They had never seen it. Margaret asked if it was soap. I
told her to try some and set an example. She found it excellent, had Eva taste it,
and then tucked it away in a spot under her thighs, saying she would save it for
her husband. It was the place she hid everything, money, cigarettes, knives. It
was the house’s sanctuary. It was where, close by, she had a small wooden
bench; closed with a key, where she kept the silver jewellery, the Norwegian
Bible, a gospel-book in the Lapp language.
I bought two wonderful reindeer antlers for two crowns (three lire). I fell in
love with a leather chatelaine15 that Margaret kept by her side and which, from a
beautiful brass star, dangled a bell-rattle of small domestic tools. I wanted this at
any cost for the museum in Florence.
‘How much do you want, Margaret, for this chatelaine?’
 ‘I cannot sell it; it has been with me since my marriage.’
‘I will give you as much as you need in order to have a new and more
beautiful one made.’
‘I cannot, I am sorry.’
I offered a splendid Norwegian knife with a sculptured wooden handle.
Margaret found it very beautiful, and showed it to Eva; the children and
babies had to pass it around, each admiring it; yet the knife was not accepted.
I offered four crowns, then six, then seven, eight; and for eight crowns the
chatelaine was mine.
The good engineer Hauan had, however, to make a drawing of the piece and
to promise to have a jeweller in Eidet make another one just as fine.
Margaret knew how to sell, but was not greedy. I wanted to buy a sausage
made of milk and reindeer blood, but she gave it to me, laughing and saying in
bad Norwegian, ‘Ikke betale. This you not pay for.’
Strangest was the exchange of a lock of hair for fine little English scissors I
carried in my pocket, and which Eva had liked enormously.
‘Give me a lock of your hair, and I will give you the scissors.’
‘That is impossible, impossible’ – and she laughed like a mad girl.
I put the scissors back in my pocket, but soon after she asked for them again.
And again the scissors came out of my pocket and blonde Eva opened them;
closed them, admiring the device that could fold in on itself; hid their points.
And I again hoped to have the hair and to put it in my museum in Florence.
All at once Eva starting laughing, with the air of one who has hit upon some
piece of devilry by which to reconcile two opposite things – and proposed
trading the small English scissors for the hair of her sister.
I accept, and with the very scissors in question she snips a lock of her little
sister’s hair, which is the same colour as her own. She has won the match! The
scissors are hers, without her sacrificing a single strand of her own beautiful hair.
I did not want to concede full victory to the wiles of a Lapp Eve, and told her
that I also wanted a kiss from her.
And the innocent girl kissed me on the mouth, without scruples or malice. As
she was too elated, however, to contain her joy in the narrow confines of the hut,
she offered to call the reindeer so that we could see them more closely. She
stuffed her reindeer-skin shoes with a hay so green and fragrant and well combed
that I envied her for them. Once outside, she began to run on the lichen-softened
rocks, skipping from stone to stone like some insolent chamois, with her hair
blown by the wind; and fixing her gaze on the far horizon to see where the
reindeer had gone and to point them out, she laughed and frolicked. How
beautiful was this wild innocence of hers, how precious this blameless youth;
this joy that knew no regrets, this smile of a happy life, which responded to a
pale sunbeam that, among the wind-torn clouds, shone amid an extremely fine
silvery rain of tiny pearls.
Eva could read, speak Norwegian, could milk and lead the reindeer, sew and
cook, and dress the younger children. She was good, clever and, in the Lapp
way, knowledgable; what matters more, she was happy. How many of our ladies
would not envy her here in her Ojungstrakten hut!

Chapter 4

The Scandinavian Environment – The Sea, the Cold, and the

Silence – The Character of the Scandinavians
Every country has an environment of its own, and until we have breathed it in
and absorbed it, so that it penetrates into the least and deepest veins of our
organism, we cannot say we know the new land we would study or describe.
It is a certain quantity and a movement of air and light, it is a certain warmth
of human breath, it is a special perfume that emanates from the ground; it is
certain dominant colours in the sky and in houses; it is certain sounds that things
living and dead emit, mingling with one another; it is certain female profiles and
male characters that meet or clash with our aesthetic tastes; it is hidden currents
of sympathy and antipathy; finally, it is a consummate physical and moral
atmosphere, surrounding us both along the brain’s five senses and through the
thousand associations of our past, that binds us with hatred or love to the country
through which we make our first voyage.
The Scandinavian environment is one of the most distinctive I have ever
encountered in my many long voyages; and if the things in our inner world could
be photographed as one can photograph those set before the lens of the camera
obscura, I think that I would faithfully and vividly portray the image of that
polar world, because I feel it in my heart and mind as something of my own.
 That cold world should make the wide-open pores of our Italian skin cringe:
that desert world should distress our eyes, accustomed as they are to find a
village on every slope and every hilltop; these men are mute, and our ears,
trained upon the gay din of endless chatter, should thirst there for words and
songs; those lands are buried for eight months of the year under a winding-sheet
of ice, and we who grew up in the shade of sempiternal laurel trees and among
golden stalks should look with horror on that ground of desolation and frosts. Yet
nothing of the sort occurs: Scandinavia has a mysterious fascination for us,
attracting us, enamouring us, and leaving an abiding memory more precious than
any immediate enjoyment. Love of contrast, deep, mysterious inner
concentration of life in small points separated by vast deserts; the giant festival
of a summer that never tires of a three-month-long sun; the infinite jaggedness of
a land intertwining in a thousand love-embraces with a turbulent sea; and a sad
grandeur of nature and a naivety full of strength and chastity in the humanity
there, are utter novelties for us, satisfying healthy, virginal tastes we may not
have suspected we have, or barely met with in the early hours of life, when
desire is a vague light that gilds all it touches.
Man in Scandinavia seems to have disembarked on land yet remains ever
ready to return to the sea whence he came. There, sea is everything, land,
nothing: in the latter, life is meagre, gruelling, short; in the former, life is fertile,
inexhaustible, sempiternal. There are so many islands you can scarcely count
them, but terra firma is an island too, and the coasts, not the roads, guide the
traveller’s path. For the gentlemen of Stockholm and Christiania it is supreme
bliss to tack in an elegant yacht in their fjords and rivers; and in the Glacial Sea
you find yourself invariably in boats steered by women’s arms. And fishing is
more than half this people’s life and in its vagaries follows the highs and lows of
national wealth. Herrings which, a century ago, crowded the waters of Göteborg,
suddenly deserted it in this one; then, gradually, they returned, until in the winter
of 1878–9 great schools of them appeared. Correlated to these leaps are statistics
for mortality and wealth; the prosperity or poverty of an entire people is bound
up here. When the herrings appear in great numbers toward the end of summer
in the fjords of Lapland, the sorrow is universal, because the fishermen know
through long experience that herrings and cods never swim successively in the
same waters in one year. On the other hand, when there are few herrings, new
boats are built, fishing lines and nets are borrowed, and the joy of imminent
wealth can almost be tasted.
The sea, transformed into everyone’s main road, makes men and women
brave and strong; and certain hysterical simperings on the part of our ladies, and
certain mental and spiritual scurvies common to so many of those youth of ours
sallow from the theatre wings or the sultriness of cafes, are impossible in this
country utterly imbued with the salt scent of the waves. For a Norwegian girl, to
go from Tromsoe to Bergen to visit a girlfriend or some female relative, is a
pleasure tour – it is sufficient to consult the map to measure the length of such a
journey.
When you have disembarked on that very narrow strip of land, enclosed on
all sides by the ocean, you continually think you will encounter the prehistoric
beasts you have dreamed of in some sleepless night of your childhood. At any
moment you fear or hope to brush up against some long-horned reindeer or giant
elk, white bear or pack of wolves.16 Where there are no people, the earth can
only be at the mercy of the beasts.
But what this land is at the mercy of is silence, which forms the most
characteristic and, for us Italians, the most surprising note of this beautiful,
beloved Scandinavia. Never could I make peace with that continual muteness of
all nature. Not a thunderclap in the sky, not a crash of waves in the sea, no little
girls singing in a field; no cicadas in the trees, nor crickets in the meadows: mute
is the earth, mute the birds and quadrupeds, mute the men and boys, mute the
dogs and insects. All nature submerged in an infinite silence, in serene and
tranquil self-contemplation. Never shall I forget the strange impression of a walk
I took in a pine forest around the station at Koppang, in the Norwegian upland
plain. The lodge was entirely made of wood, heavily rusticated; over the door,
two large antlered reindeer heads, and in the building’s one and only storey a
poetical little terrace with chairs made of woven hazelnut boughs. In the
esplanade in the front of the house, a microscopic-sized palace harboured turtle
doves that, as evening drew on, would wing in silence to their night refuge. Not
even they billed and cooed, but, nipping each other silently with their beaks, they
gave one another a last kiss, amorously riding one another’s backs and flaring
their wings with a silent shudder. Farther on, the train departed without a single
screech of iron, or human cry. In the post-house all was silent. I set out on foot to
the pine forest, where not a bird sang, not a leaf rustled, not an insect murmured.
The silence fascinated me and absorbed me into the mysteries of its
impenetrability; all at once I noticed, almost with terror, that I could not hear
even the noise of my own footsteps; the myrtle bushes lounged upon the soft
cushion of reindeer lichen, and even my footsteps were muffled in the soft,
smooth carpet that seemed laid there to quell every sound and not disturb
Nature’s eternal sleep. I almost feared I was no longer alive, I thought perhaps
my consciousness of feeling alive was but a memory from my already
extinguished life, which itself was dissolving into the infinitude of that silence;
and seized by a strange whim, I struck a tree-trunk. The noise came and went on
its own, unaccompanied by any echo, or response of fear or surprise of man or
animal; it seemed to me a profanation, that noise, one I would not repeat,
immersed wholly in that enthralling mystery.
And if you consider that, in that silence, another companion, muter than ever,
the cold, abides with that silence for eight or nine months of the year, you can
guess what self-concentration must come to the men of those lands. Among us,
the house is a refuge against the sun, it is a nest in which to find love or repose;
yet our true home is the open field, whose ceiling is the blue sky and whose
walls are the far-off curtains of the mountains and hills. For the Scandinavian,
the house is an oyster shell, the coleoptera’s elytron, a second skin, almost as
alive as the first that mamma has woven over us, only warmer perhaps. To take
the house away from Nordic man is to pry the shell from the oyster, the elytron
from the insect; to tear out and expose its very bowels. And in those houses,
where nights that last months are spent, every wooden table, every book, every
door, every stair, and every picture is imbued with human emanations, desires,
and memories; and the house lives, pulsates, thinks, heats up, and freezes
together with the man who dwells in it. From this emerges a deep familial
intimacy; from this, the long solitary meditations that temper the dignity of
conscience and the endless communal readings that increase the most precious
family bonds of thought and refine the heart in its most hidden delicacy.
In those houses in Sweden and Norway, the garden too enters the house and is
part of it, and the architects have had to increase the windows, not to open and
broaden the paths for light so much as to make life possible for the flowers that
the women grow with boundless art. In the salons of gentlefolk in Tromsoe, at
nearly seventy degrees northern latitude, I have seen the most beautiful roses and
daisies in the world, even blazing tropical cacti.
Marmier17 saw a lady in Tromsoe weep with emotion at a flowering stalk of
lilac that her husband had brought to her from Christiania – ‘Oh my God!’ she
shouted, ‘it is seven years since I last saw anything like that.’ It was a childhood
memory, the memory of a land that had been richer for her in sunlight and
flowers.
The cold has many other virtues; it slows down every action in life, and in so
doing conserves. One of us sees and has not yet seen that he loves and hates,
worships or disdains, and in the whirlwind of a sudden fire ignites, blazes, and
gutters out. The man of the north sees and thinks and then thinks again; for the
sake of precision, he feels truly, and thinks how he feels. Tomorrow and the day
after tomorrow as well, slow thought will lead him into long travail to ponder
and act. Meanwhile, the surprises of the senses and the excesses of passion
become impossible, keeping the man more immaculate and serene.
The slowness of response, of decision, and of understanding makes us
impatient at first, but then persuades us that it is something of a virtue. Once
Marmier lost patience in a posthouse, having waited three hours for a change of
horses for his kärra. So the post-master walked up to him with a solemn air and
said: ‘My dear sir, why are you complaining that you have waited three hours for
your horses? Sometimes folks wait even four.’
With this slowness, however, comes a great tenacity of feeling. After several
years of absence you can be sure to find on the same lips the same smile of a
friendship not forgotten. Add to this a naive simplicity, a deep honesty, a very
winning naturalness, all those virtues of sympathy that rest upon a spontaneous
sincerity. I have never seen a dyed beard, false hair, but in a Scandinavian setting
have felt transported into an ancient world, as if into an earthly paradise pre-
dating Eve’s sin; I have felt cleansed and purged of the hundred and one
hypocrisies with which one is painted, masked, travestied every day, every hour
of life. In that frozen clime I have found a human society based on reciprocal
respect; whereas, among us, I see a society that rests its laws and customs upon a
mutual distrust, so that half its citizenry is charged with keeping watch over the
other. In Scandinavia there are no beggars.
And please do not think that in idealizing I exaggerate; no, there too there
exist vices and crimes, there too they drink to excess and love loose women, yet
vice is but an episode or a sickness; it has not penetrated into all veins, all fibres,
all marrow. There I have not seen a policeman on every street, or carabinieri in
every station; there I have felt free of the daily, slow, tyrannical inquisition of tax
collector, priest, or judge. There I have seen the umbrellas left out on the streets
to keep the stairs dry. There I have seen the jeweller’s shops not closed the entire
night by wooden shutters, but protected only by fragile glass, and there I have
known that the whole large city of Trondheim had only eight policemen; and
even they never left their barracks, for lack of work!
But is it not true, therefore, that man moralizes only when he is kept, as it
were, on ice, like a slab of conserved meat? Is it not true, therefore, that the same
sun that fires our blood with the surges of passion, inflames us to base lust; that
the same light that burns our skins and exalts our nerves, leads us into the
shadow of hypocrisy, betrayals, and crime? But isn’t this sentence inexorable
that confers on man one property only, either impetuosity or tenacity? Can we
not, we other children of blue heavens, aspire to the serene, everlasting light of
the stars, to flare up only in volcanic eruptions or to burn in the sultriness of dog
days?
A harsh sentence upon our descendants;18 we, for now, must content
ourselves with fondly saluting that virgin land of the north, where men are so
sincere, and women so serene, and freedom is not writ only in the proud bronze
tablets of our laws; but fused with the blood or flesh of every citizen, from the
Lapp king on, forming the first light of that inclement sky, the prime nobility of
that able and hard-working people.

Chapter 5

Natural History of the Lapps – Their Number and Their Name –

Portrait of the Lapps by a Poet and Priest – Habits and Customs –
[Sleds, Huts, and Nomadic Life – Their Psychology –] Weddings and
Funerals – Social Organization and Political Economy – [Their
Industry –] Origin of the Lapps

What exactly are these Lapps, then? What place should we assign in the
hierarchy of intelligence and sentiment to these geographical brethren of ours,
who in fact are so barely European and so different from us? Let us start with the
easiest part, the plain headcount: arithmetic being always the alphabet of science
and the surest basis on which to support the edifice of our cognitions.
Friis and Réclus19 are the two most reliable authors regarding a census of the
Lapps. The wonderfully learned professor of Christiania tells us that there are
somewhat fewer than 30,000 scattered over a surface of 10,000 square miles of
Norway. Norway counts 17,178 pure-bred and 1,900 cross-bred; Sweden, 7,248;
Finland, 1,200; Russia, 2,000.
Réclus’s statistic is more recent. He reckons 30,000, in the following
distribution:
It is necessary to counter this census with one of the reindeer, an animal so
closely tied to the Lapp and without which this variety of Homo [sapiens] would
surely vanish.
Census of Reindeer

According to Réclus, the Lapps, rather than disappearing, are rising in

number, particularly in Norway. According to the tax records of 1567, 1799, and
1815, the nomads have tripled over three centuries, and grown sevenfold in
Norway alone.
Von Buch20 provides these figures for the year 1799:

But everyone will probably share my opinion that when one goes back to
such ancient statistics, figures are little more than good intentions to achieve an
impossible accuracy, particularly in reference to a nomadic people.
And now that they have been counted, let us baptize them: for even in natural
history this is the first sacrament performed on every living creature. The Lapps
call themselves salme or same (plural, samek). The name we give them was
given to them by the Finns, who called them lappalainen (plural, lappalaiset).
This word probably derives from the Finnish lappaa, which means forward and
backward (for their vagabond ways). The Norwegians, and especially the
northern ones, called them finner, a false designation, originating in their
confusion of two different albeit close races, bound by a distant kinship.
The Lapps divide themselves into fieldlappen (field Lapps) and fisklappen
(fisher Lapps). The latter, in Lapp language known as jaure-kaddle-sameh,
constitute the whole group found in Russia, while in Sweden there are only a
few, and most of them indigent nomads who, having lost their reindeer, have
sought in the sea the bread that the earth denied them. Some authors also divide
the Lapps into nomadic and settled, but this is an arbitrary and highly artificial
classification, since nomads can always, by nature and ancient traditions, settle
down, exceptionally, for some years in a port, only to revert to their vagrant life
once the land no longer provides their reindeer with sufficient grazing.
The geographical divisions too, although they bring with them differences of
dialect, do not change essentially the pronunciation and the character of the
Lapps, who can be studied all together, as one of the most natural and
homogeneous groups in the great family of man. And we are saying
homogeneous because the crossing of Lapps with Finns is a rare occurrence,
albeit less rare than the crossing with Scandinavians.
And now that we have counted and baptized them, let us look into their faces
to see what part of them is in us and what of us is to be found in them.
Heine has given us a humorous portrait of them in some famous lines of
poetry, in which the humour, however, is joined with the sure trace of the man of
genius. But caricature is often more accurate than portraiture.

In Lappland sind schmutzige Leute,

Plattköpfig, breitmaulig und klein,
Sie kauern um’s Feuer und backen
Sich Fische und quäcken und schrei’n.21

Another portrait in Linnaean style was given to us by Knud Leem, though it is

not on a par with Heine’s: ‘Vultum habent fusci et luridi coloris, capillos curtos,
latum os, genas cavas, menta longa, oculos lippos.’22 Here we see that the priest
studied the soul rather better than the body, and failed to observe that the cheeks
were prominent, the jaw small, and the skin grimy, not fosca. 23 The poet has
managed to see better than the priest, as is only natural. If the poet did not have
the sharp, profound mind of the observer, he would be lacking the most powerful
string of his lyre.
The first impression that a Lapp makes on us is of a poor, modest human
creature who excuses himself to the powerful for existing in this world, of which
he asks to occupy the least space possible. He is so small, this poor fellow, and
so hampered in his fur covering, and so unprepossessing, with so little to claim
before all the grandees of our European life, that we feel for him that sympathy
laden with compassion and benevolence that every man inspires in us who
rouses in us neither envy nor ire. Indeed, all travellers have always spoken with
great sympathy of the poor Lapps, and some have even been impelled to a lyrical
sentiment that distorts the truth; and some we may find going even further in
speaking of the moral character of these third cousins of ours in the great
European family. Réclus, who may be the last writer to have spoken to us at all
of the Lapps, creates too flattering a portrait, following Van Düben. He says that
their forehead is noble and the largest among the Scandinavians, and adds, ‘La
bouche est souriante; l’éclair du regard vif et bienveillant, le front élevé, est
d’une véritable noblesse.’24
This is true adulation, yet it comes closer to the truth than the disdain and
repugnance that almost all Norwegians express for their poor neighbours of
Mongolic extraction. It is proverbial for them to say, He’s as annoying as a
Lapp, A Lapp is no better than a dog. Von Buch has collected these insults,
which now one may hear less frequently, perhaps because the Lapps drink less to
excess than in the past. In any case, locals and travellers always view an inferior
people a little differently. The traveller is almost always good-humoured and
given to optimism, seeing all objects and reproducing them in his books with
rose-coloured glasses; whereas when a superior race is dogged by greatly
inferior men whom it can neither educate nor kill, it hardly feels disposed to
indulgence. If you go to Norway and speak with prefects in the provinces
occupied by Lapps, you will scarcely have sat down before you must hear the
Scandinavian’s lamentations against the same: – They are filthy, they are
cunning, they invade our fields with their reindeer; There’s nothing to be done
about them, they are the scourge of my province. They are partly right, but still
forget that the north of the peninsula would manage to provide neither bread nor
well-being for the Scandinavian races, who would have to endure the winter
without their tasty helpings of reindeer meat if those poor same were to vanish
today from the face of the earth.
The Lapps are among the shortest human beings on the planet. Dalk found the
average stature of shepherd Lapps to be 1.60 metres; according to Van Düben
and Humboldt, it is closer to 1.50. Ecker came up with these measurements:
Nilla (male), age 20: height 1.53 m
Puches (male), age 17: height 1.37 m
Kaisa (female), age 24: height 1.42 m
Ippa (female), age 20: height 1.44 m
The measurements taken by Sommier and myself would bring the following
results:
 Average height of 59 men: 1.52 m; max. 1.70, min. 1.32
Average height of 22 women: 1.45 m; max. 1.60, min. 1.27
These calculations excluded all people under the age of twenty.
The Lapp certainly does not look athletic, and more often is lean than fat;
indeed, I can say that I have never seen one who warranted that adjective. The
children, as happens in nearly all human races, are chubby if not plump, but
grow thin over time.
Knud Leem describes them as magni roboris25 although small, and as one
proof of their robustness cites the fact of a woman who, five days after giving
birth, in wintertime, made a long voyage on foot across the snowy hills to be
purified in church. This, however, is proof of resistance to snow, and nothing
else. All the Lapps I and Sommier saw were subjected to dynametric testing and
generally yielded numbers lower than our average.
When they are dressed in their furs and look like walking sacks, no one would
think them nimble, but they are, as a result of the exertions polar life imposes on
them. They seem to fly on their skates, and Knud describes them with poetic
words: ‘Et tanta feruntur pernicitate, ut venti circa aures strideant, crinesque
surrigant.’26 For the good Norwegian parish priest there is proof of great agility
in the ability to sit folded in two with heels under the buttocks, and he credits
this ability to the fish oil they constantly rub into themselves (!). It is this same
oil, with which their clothes are also soaked, that also makes them, more often
than not, foul-smelling: ‘Eundem foetorem non aliunde quam ex vestibus hujus
gentis perpetuo in tuguriis fumo et oleo ex pinguedine piscium expresso, imbutis
et perunctis, provenire.’27
The Lapps are among the least hirsute of peoples. The men have little beard,
and often none at all on their cheeks, but only on the upper lip and the chin. We
have seen certain ones without any hair in their armpits, and one stocky man we
photographed hadn’t a single pubic hair. Certain women, of whom we could
examine the underarms only with great coaxing, had hair there; but it was
absolutely impossible to explore the lower parts. The examination they did allow
us showed flaccid, drooping breasts in young women who claimed to have never
given birth, a striking fact in a people living in such a harsh climate.
They have a lot of hair on their heads, and the women’s is always longer than
the men’s; never curly, but not straight and thick either, as are many Mongolic
and American races. The rarest colours for them are light blonde and deep black.
Among the Swedish Lapps we photographed in Tromsoe, only one had truly
black hair, and light blonde we found only in Ojung, in one other rare instance.
The commonest colour is brown, ranging from light to dark, with occasionally a
fine tawny shade. We never saw albino or red hair. They turn grey later than we
do, and baldness too is fairly rare, and for the most part partial. The Lapps’ hair
seldom encounters a comb, and their style of hair can be described as dishevelled
or tousled. The women too are often content to gather their hair in a bun tied at
the crown of the head; the most decorous among them make very simple braids,
which they often neglect for days and weeks.
The Lapps have white-brown skin, and many among them, if well scrubbed,
would be whiter than an Italian.
The Lapp’s forehead is handsome, broad, high, and as such stands in
remarkable contrast to other features typical of inferior races.
Their eyes are mostly grey or bright blue, but fairly frequently brown as well.
They are small eyes, with scant eyebrows, and tend to be rheumy and teary
owing to their always living between smoke and snow-glare. Leem relates that in
the winter, upon return from the hunt, they remain blind for days on end. Yet
they are not wont to wear eyeglasses to protect themselves from the snow’s
glare, as do other peoples living about the poles. Some of them told me they had
thrown them out because they weakened their eyes, which instead needed
fortifying against the stark whiteness of the snow and ice.28
Almost all the Lapps have the same shape of nose, which can be termed one
of the most characteristic traits of the race; it is short, flattened, quite broad at
the base, with a very small point, and sometimes upturned. The mouth is large,
with thin lips and teeth marvellous in both their evenness and their whiteness
and strength. The Chukchi also must have these precious prerogatives, as can be
said of other hyperborean peoples, the beauty of whose teeth might be suspected
of being preserved by the smoky atmosphere of their huts and the action of the
cold.
The face is invariably very broad, but this breadth quickly tapers around the
chin, which ends almost in a point, so that the lower jawbone is small and
delicate. It is this that gives a Lapp face the character typical of the Mongol,
which at times shows up in the most Turanic races of the north of East Asia,
whereas it can vanish by infinite gradations until it gives the physiognomy an
Aryan character. It is hard to say whether this is due to the admixture of other
blood or to the individual variations to which any man born under the sun is
susceptible.
 The hands and feet are small, in conformity with the smallness of the body,
and the index finger is always shorter than the ring finger, sometimes to a most
remarkable degree. This observation, which we first made, would seem to
corroborate Ecker,29 who found in this fact a character inherent in inferior races
and, relating them to anthropomorphic monkeys.
The Lapps are a long-living and healthy people. My travel companion saw
several octogenarians and even nonagenarians. They have no particular diseases,
and Leem says he has in the span of ten years never seen them sick with
dysentery, leprosy, or malign fevers (typhoid fevers?). It appears they very rarely
suffer from phthisis, though often from cephalea, but it is rather difficult to
gather positive information about their pathology, since they treat themselves
and rarely resort to our hospitals. It is said that their popular remedies are
revellents30 and asafoetida.31 They treat many internal ailments by drinking the
hot blood of seals or reindeer. They treat leucoma by putting a common louse in
the eye, and toothache by rubbing the tooth or teeth with wood from a tree
blasted by lightning. They use the thread taken from reindeer tendons to bind
broken or sprained limbs, though women must get this from a female animal and
men from a male. Bear fat was the most prized remedy against rheums, though
again men and women had to get the fat from an animal of their respective sex.
Smallpox only rarely has struck and devastated them.
The Lapps are not ugly, and the smile of the girls in their springtime can
sometimes even be said to be beautiful.
The concept I have been able to formulate of their general physiology cannot
corroborate Virchow’s opinion of the Lapps as a pathological race.32 It is a small
and wretched race, but suited to its environment. One could just as well declare
the dwarf birch a pathological species. Beyond that I shall not insist on disputing
with my illustrious friend from Berlin, having never believed that boundaries
between physiology and pathology truly exist in nature; they are borders marked
by our pencil in our books, and nothing more. […]

The luxuries of the meagre polar cuisine are coffee and tobacco. You have
already seen how they prepare the former; the latter they either smoke in a pipe
or chew. The pipe is always in the mouth of every Lapp, of both sexes and of all
ages, so that they chew it more rarely. When tobacco is hard to come by, they sit
in a circle on the floor and pass around a single pipe. When the divine nicotine is
nowhere to be found, they even gnaw the wooden vessels or bowls that have
held their supply. It has also been learned that in chewing they spit into the palm
of their hand and snort in the delightful juice, lest any of their divine narcotic be
wasted. And thus my friend Sommier was right to tell me the Lapps have three
gods: fire, coffee, and tobacco. Undoubtedly the abuse of coffee and tobacco
contributes in no small measure to the remarkable nervousness of the Lapps,
which very often leads them to hallucinations and the strangest hystericisms of
the imagination; yet what poor humans could tolerate their polar life without
these two nervine foods?
The Lapps have all the most marked characteristics of lower peoples.
Heedless, inert, only in rare instances busy; whimsical and in all respects much
like our children. They themselves are the children of a land that is among the
most sterile on earth, covered with ice for so many months of the year, and they
have done nothing to attempt improving this land and making it more fertile.
Their environment rules them, not they their environment. Without the reindeer,
they would cease to exist or would be transformed (were such a thing possible)
by utterly different customs and qualities. In winter, the night is eternal and they
sleep long, long hours: in summer, the sun shines sempiternally on the horizon
and they sleep little or not at all. When Forbes expressed his wonder at seeing
work extending into the night at Bosekop, and people sleeping either very little
or sporadically, someone replied to him, ‘We have enough time to sleep in
winter.’ Even in summer, however, I have seen them napping day and night.
When they have nothing better to do they lie down at random on the ground, at
some roadside, on a pile of stones or planks, or piled alongside each other,
looking like heaps of furs or dirty linen. […]

The Lapps have a gentle, kindly character, and hospitality is one of their most
salient virtues. Leem says they never curse, which makes them, in this respect
(he adds), far superior to the Norwegians.
Fjellner relates that they used to be hospitable in the fullest sense of the
term,33 so that, according to custom, the guest slept next to the wife and
daughters of the master of the house. Now that they are more civilized, the
Lapps still receive guests, but with a certain rationabile obsequio.34 Von Buch
relates having once knocked in vain at the hut of a Lapp. The master of the
house answered his request with these words: ‘Today two Lapps came from far
away and they have taken the only places available.’ The guide who
accompanied the illustrious voyager was mortified, and, after brief bickering,
uttered this biblical sentence: ‘When there is room in the heart one soon finds
room in the tent.’ Van Düben also says that today the Lapps sometimes think
nothing of eating with their families without offering anything to the guest who
watches them. When a storm breaks out, however, fifteen or even twenty may
enter the hut. Those whom they know are given coffee or meat; the unknown
guests are offered only water and fire.
Even the most affectionate among the Lapps are, on a first encounter, cold
and reserved; later, when the ice has been broken by conversation or, better yet,
by small gifts, they grow courteous and expansive. In Swedish Lapland they
greet you on arriving with a buorist (well!), and bid goodbye with a batze
dervan. They kiss by rubbing noses, or they embrace and wrap the right arm
about the waist, touching nose against nose. There used to be an entire hierarchy
of greetings: a kiss on the lips among very close relatives, a kiss on the cheeks
for less close relatives, a nose-to-nose ‘kiss’ for others. Today few still grasp the
right arm, others shake hands as we do.
One mark of their decency is the great infrequency of murder among them,
which occurs only out of religious fanaticism. Many travellers, therefore, are not
entirely wrong in saying that they do not shed blood. They do steal reindeer,
however, and often cheat in business. Even the good Leem, who is so fond of
them, says, ‘Lappones, ut reliqui mortalium suis quoque vitiis laborant, sed
paucis sane et raris …,’35 and the vices in question are drunkenness (today all
but forgotten) and fraud. In their selling they manage, among other things, to
pass off bad furs as good, skilfully hiding the holes and patches. Domestic theft,
however, is practically unknown, and Leem says that in all the years he lived in
Lapland nothing was ever stolen from him, although he left all his things out in
the open.
Marrying very young, the men passionately love their wives and children.
Maternal affection is evidenced in the cradles they make so artfully and decorate
with painstaking love. These are wooden, fur-covered, and for the winter have a
casing of soft fur, with a sort of canopy to shield their little one’s eyes from the
light. Women breastfeed their babies for two years and sometimes longer.
Weddings are extremely simple. The bridegroom goes to the house of the
bride with some of his kin, one of whom serves as his advocate and spokesman,
and entering the hut offers wine to the future father-in-law. If this is accepted, the
matrimony is arranged, and all the relatives drink the same drink. Finally, the
suitor also enters, and offers the girl a small gift, which is usually some article of
silver. The nuptials are later celebrated with a small dinner, without pomp or fuss
and without any singing or dancing. When the ceremony is over, the bridegroom
almost always remains with his bride in the father-in-law’s house for the span of
a year, after which he will set up his own household, receiving all he needs for it
from the father-in-law. Matrimony among kin is forbidden.
Funerals are as simple as weddings. The corpse, attended by a small cortège,
is carried on a stretcher to some outlying site, where it is buried, not very deep,
in a birch casket, or even with no casket. At one time, the sled of the deceased
was planted on the grave-plot, and a crude monument in stone and birch bark
erected.
The wealthiest sometimes receive a funeral supper.
Regarding the modesty of Lapps, opinion is sharply divided. If I had to judge
from my own experience, I would say that their women are more modest than
many others, for I never managed to photograph any in the nude, even when I
offered the handsome sum of 150 lire for this favour.
[…]
Cheerful and voluble, they love to chat for hours at a time; and to us children
of the nineteenth century, it seems strange that they can find so much to talk
about in their narrow world. They sing without any harmony and love to declaim
their poems, also improvising their vuoleh, especially when they have been
cheered by a bit of aquavit. Often two singers embrace and, long clinging
together, respond to each other in song, weeping with emotion.
[…]
The Lapps have no clocks and keep time only rather approximately with the
sun. Time is the last thing on their minds. If a thing does not get done today, it
will be done tomorrow, and if it is not done tomorrow, it will be some other time:
that is their philosophy. They make decisions slowly, willy-nilly, but once
something has been decided, it is carried out with dispatch.
[…]
The Lapps are generally thrifty, and in their contracts they prefer coin, which
they call blanca, to paper money, which, however, does not have forced
currency. Commerce used to be enacted by barter, but now it is done with
money. They often give gifts to their clients, but with the assurance of receiving
something in return. Having seen Lapps buying and selling, I have found them
quite similar in their transactions to the Indians of South America. They are
peevish, insistent, meticulous; they hide their cunning under a thick mantle of
geniality and seeming dull-wittedness, but in the end, in dealing with us people
of higher race and evangelical morals, they are more often the taken than the
takers.
 Every Scandinavian merchant who has business dealings with the Lapps has
his own particular clients. When he wishes to draw up a contract, he must first
and foremost bring aquavit and offer small gifts. The Lapp, for his part, offers
him reindeer and wild game meat, which he then receives cooked by his
merchant. In general, when dealings have been concluded and the balance drawn
up, the poor Lapp remains forever in debt, which binds him all the tighter to his
merchant, without being able to offer his wares to any other merchant. The debts
are recorded in the simplest way, by notches scored on a piece of wood that is
cut into two equal halves, one for the creditor and one for the debtor. In general,
every notch stands for a half crown (0.75 lire).
When one thinks that vast deserts of marshland and ice separate debtors and
creditors for long months, one must give a civil crown for honesty to those poor
hyperborean dwarfs who conduct their business dealings in such naive forms,
with such trust in the promises made them.
The Lapps enjoy all the rights of citizens of Sweden and Norway, though they
are unaware of having them.
They faithfully pay their taxes; they learn to read and write, because this too
is one of their duties, and they would otherwise be denied the sacrament of
confirmation, which they hold quite dear; yet their literary culture is mostly
limited to poorly reading the Gospels and roughly signing their names. Some,
however, are more open to study and cultivation.
[…]
But these Lapps of ours, where did they come from? Who are they? By what
ring are they joined to the great family of peoples of Asia or Europe? Today, we
rightly feel we do not know a creature on this small sublunary globe if we have
not assigned to him a genealogy and conferred upon him a hierarchical place in
the great story of becoming.
[…]
An ancient tradition has it that they came from the Orient; and Castren, taking
up that tradition, thought he could be more specific by asserting that they came
from the Altai with the Finns – which, however, is easier to say than to prove.
Van Düben, more sceptical than Castren, finds the Lapps too different from the
Finns to trace them to a single stock. It is true that their languages are similar,
and that both belong to the UgroAltaic group; but physiological affinity is one
thing and ethnic affinity quite another. The Lapps may have been the first to
emigrate from a great Altaic centre, moving northwest, along the Irtisch or Obi
river, passing by the Urals. It is impossible to say when they arrived in Europe.
The Lapps have 18 words in their language to express the form of mountains,
20 for ice, 11 for cold, and 41 for snow and its varieties, whereas their
vocabulary for the things of temperate climes is quite poor. This fact is also a
powerful index showing, that this poor people was born amid the ice and
emigrated yet again amid the ice, merely exchanging the cold of Asia for that of
Europe.
These are the few certainties that ethnological criticism can state about the
origin of the Lapps; to advance on narrower paths in search of more minute
particulars would simply be to lose one’s way in the labyrinth of the historical
novel.
 From India

Chapter 1

The Symphony of the Book [– Journey from Florence to Bombay –

Notes from My Notepad – Port Said and Suez – The Red Sea – Aden –
Life on Board – In the Indian Ocean – The Last Day on the Singapore –
Hymn to the Earth and Anathema to Cremation]

Surely there is no one among us who in childhood did not dream of India and in
youth did not yearn for it. The Thousand and One Nights, Golconda, nabobs,
elephants, bayadères1 are part of popular poetry in the theatres, and come to us at
night in mysterious dreams. We find something of India in our brain even before
it has been born in outer life; we find fragments of it in our dictionaries, on our
skin, in our words, everywhere. A child in Lombard says; Va a Calicut, go to
Calcutta; the man of the people wears a shirt of Madapolam cotton; our fine
ladies cover their shoulders with cashmere, on their breast gleams a sapphire, on
their fingers a little piece of heaven made from Tibetan turquoise. The words
with which we display our feelings have their roots in that faraway land of
blazing sunlight and intoxicating perfumes. Why have we not the same
sympathies for America? Has it not deep virgin forests? More gigantic rivers?
Has it not, perhaps, also perfumes and flowers, and if not Golconda, caskets-
worth of gems even more brilliant in its hundred thousand hummingbirds? Java
too is more beautiful than India, Africa too has its aesthetic mysteries and the
dangerous, fatal seductions of virginity. But America, and Java, and Africa are
not India. India is the country from which we have come; India gave us the
blood, the language, the religion, and the bread of daily life, and that other,
golden bread, as necessary, nay, more necessary perhaps, than the first, which is
the ideal. India exerts a charm upon us that no other land on earth can have. That
is because we are all fragments of it. In no other instance do we see atavism
work more powerfully within us. Thus I too, in childhood, in boyhood, in youth,
dreamed of India, dreamed it as you did, as all do. And when, having grown into
manhood, I devoted my whole being to studying mankind, as a physician, a
pathologist, an anthropologist, I felt it was my duty to see that problem-ridden
land. And I was and remain happy to have done so, as one is happy after
satisfying any long-harboured, ardent desire. The philologist may have a
profound knowledge of Sanskrit, the historian may solve great problems, without
setting foot in India. The anthropologist must go there. Apparently this need is
generally felt, too, because, on finding Haeckel2 there, I learned that Lubbock
also was expected.
Half a century ago, Jacquemont3 took eight months to go from France to
Calcutta; today you can go there and come back, in the same length of time, after
a stay of six months traversing that entire land so rich in people and problems.
Two hundred and fifty-two thousand million people, all the climates in the
world, all the colours of human flesh, Buddhism, Brahmanism,
Mohammedanism, and every form of the religion of Christ, plus the wildest
fetishism; Buddha, Brahma, Christ, and the Sun. All the material needed to
resolve the largest questions of anthropology and ethnology.
The fruit of my voyage to India is this book, which has no claim beyond the
very modest one of limning in broad strokes one of the most fascinating
countries on earth, and of enticing the reader to go there, be he a man of science
or an artist, a businessman or a touriste. All will experience there new emotions,
troves of observation for the present, precious memories for the future. Beyond
this book I shall publish four scientific memoirs which, assembled under the title
‘Studii sull’etnologia dell’India,’4 will form a volume illustrated by original
photos I took during my voyage.
To make a book about India, however, I should like to be a musician, to be
able to write a symphony that could serve as a preface to my volume.
Music is the only art that can generally express the indefinite, the immensity
of sensations that India arouses, it is the only art that could speak of all the warm
sensuality and the interlacement of great, exalted, multiform thought to which
we are borne in visiting that faraway land; a country of cholera and elephants,
the most beautiful orchids and tigers, and where almost 300 million people of all
colours throng like ants in an anthill on the Queen’s coronation day.
Excess is the dominant note in India – too many people and too many
animals, too much heat, too-high mountains, too much wealth and too much
poverty, too much senility and too much childhood, too many colours and too
many odours, too many fevers and too many loves, too many dead and too much
life. We poor lukewarm men of the temperate zone feel overwhelmed, inundated
by too many sensations; one is dazed, dazzled, wearied. Inside and out, one is
forever sweating.
Temperance, modesty, shame, thrift are all exotic plants in that land of fire,
and there we are led at every turn to envy its natives. I should therefore be
writing a symphony in the key of the excessive, and then I would want to take
you inside dark, horrid temples, with cows and peacocks and mendicant priests,
and elephants covered in gold and silver, and gleaming gems on the breast of
babes, and princes who have on their garments millions in precious stones, and
coolies5 who live on four lire a month, and black people, naked, always
gleaming with coconut oil or sweat or both at once, and then an orgy of naked
flesh, well shaped, not deformed by layers of dress and trousers, and then
multicoloured apparel that veils, covers, but does not hide the human body,
speaking and feeling, rather, with the man who uses it, and then the grotesque in
the saint and the gigantic in the awkward, monkeys that are worshipped and holy
men who don’t budge from their spot for thirty years, and monkeys kept at the
expense of the state and hospitals for cats, and dogs and ravens and snakes and
elephants, crocodiles, rhinoceroses, buffaloes cavorting in fevered lands and
bamboos tall as towers and forests of magnolias and rhododendrons big as
chestnut trees, and bayadères who seem epileptic, and faces dulled by opium and
teeth corroded by betel and mouths that seem to spit blood everywhere, and
mountains among the tallest on the earth, and shops smaller than a cupboard; and
a pandemonium and a dithyramb of gleaming things, grotesque things, things
very big and very small that seem some colossal masquerade dreamed up by a
delirious Victor Hugo.
But I am no musician, and the symphony will not be written. I shall, instead,
make a simple narration of my trip, drawing it from the jottings in my notebook
and alternating it with studies on the Hindus and their ways. I make but two
claims: scrupulous veracity in every detail, and the clear distinction between
what I myself saw and how much I learned instead from the written word of
books and from the talk of the many Englishmen I met in India and who had
resided there for many long years. […]

Chapter 2

In Bombay – The First Scent of India – Watson’s Hotel and Indian

Hotels – Servants and Their Delights [– Bombay Described by a Hindu
Poet – The Market – The Animal Hospital – The School of Arts – The
Black Town and Dwarkanath – Bombay’s Bazaar]

Before you have barely disembarked at Bombay, you sense a smell that is new to
you, utterly peculiar, that comes close to that of a blend of musk and spices. If
you open the window in the morning, it wafts into your room as the first greeting
the land of India gives you; you smell it more strongly where the indigenous
population gathers, probably owing to the sandalwood and other sacred scents
burned in the houses. In Madras and in general through the south of India, the
smell of the place is, rather, one of coconut oil, and in the stations, the districts
inhabited by the natives, and the market, it smells its sharpest, almost seizing
you by the throat.
For those with delicate senses of smell, many countries have a characteristic
odour, and I recall, among the best known, that of fish oil in Norway, of fog and
fossil coal in London, and of gatinga (the Negroes’ sweat) in Rio de Janeiro.
The smell of the air, however, is not what strikes you most when you land at
Bombay. It is the fantastic spectacle of a half-English, half-Indian city, with a
population among the most multicoloured in the world, where human flesh is
presented to you in all its pigments, and human garb in all styles and shapes, all
the hues of a carnival or a Venetian palette. It is a museum of races, an
exposition of ethnic types, a kaleidoscope of dazzling shades and bizarre figures
composed for you – and decomposed before your eyes. Woe to you if, in that
magical city, in your first days you have kept that intensely calm sensitivity you
enjoy in our cool continent of Europe. You will be intoxicated and feverish, as I
was at the age of twenty-two, on landing for the first time on the coast of Brazil.
Instead, luckily for your nerves, the gentle weariness of the tropics embraces you
on your first descent into India, and in the preferred horizontal position that you
immediately assume, you peacefully see pass before you the magic lantern of the
white Parsis6 having stovepipes for hats, the naked coolies, the pariah girls black
as ebony, the red, yellow, violet turbans, with or without a horn, with or without
a tail, and horses and coaches and palanquins; and you hear a confused murmur
of all the world’s tongues, which seem to collide unwittingly, like dialogues
between drunken people, lingering in the air.
My lodging is the Esplanade or Watson’s Hotel, one of Bombay’s best; I have
taken a small room on the fourth floor.7 It costs me two rupees less than if I had
chosen the second floor, and one less than the third. If I were to go up to the
fifth, I would pay one less than that. As for board and service, I am treated the
same as the other guests; that is, I may eat all that is available in the kitchen and
appears on the menu. I could, for example, if I were to try emulating Gargantua,
consume ten plates for lunch and twenty at dinner, without counting the tea and
coffee with bread and butter in the morning, and the bath, which I am free to
take whenever I wish. For all this, by God’s grace, I pay a mere six rupees a
day.8
 India’s hotels cost little, but are the most hilarious thing in the world. When
you scold the English for their deplorable state, for the utter lack of comfort
found in their Indian hotels, they start to laugh and shrug their shoulders. They
frequent them only by chance and for very few days at a time, having homes of
their own, or finding easy accommodations at the houses of friends or in their
clubs. Then too, they always go about with one or more of their own servants.
Yet I, who travelled through all of India with no servant, something as
remarkable as a European travelling among us without valise or trunk,
experienced the delights of Indian hotels.
At Watson’s Hotel, for instance, these things happen: at one moment you
could have dropped dead and no one notices (they do not have alarm bells here),
at another, you are assailed by a cohort of servants that won’t leave you in peace.
One day when I received many visits, the visitor for chamber pots entered the
room four times within an hour to see if I needed his help, naively lifting the
bed-covers to verify this fact. My indignation was all for nought, since he
understood not a single word of English. Another time I was wakened ten times
between five and seven in the morning, five times to offer me a bath, which I
had said I did not want, and five times to offer me a tea I had declined.

Pum, pum! ‘Will you take a bath?’

‘I don’t take a bath this morning.’
Pum, pum! ‘Will you take a cup of tea?’
‘I don’t take tea this morning.’9
At the tenth knock I leapt out of bed in my nightshirt, and made a terrible
scene in the corridor, yelling and shouting and cursing in English, Milanese, and
every language I could muster. Apparently they understood, since I was left in
peace.
Words cannot describe the dinner scene at a table d’hôte in Watson’s Hotel.
An immense room, more than a hundred or even two hundred people, all
Europeans, at table. The punkahs (huge fans suspended in the air and moved by
a coolie posted behind the door) are all waving together, scattering menu cards
and napkins, and blowing the hair of those who have hair and wear it long.
Behind every seated person a servant, in addition to the hotel servants, who must
number at least fifty, and who come and go, ask without receiving a reply, and
reply without being asked. It is the dining room of Watson’s Hotel that first gave
me a sense of what took place at the Tower of Babel, that famous day when it
pleased the Lord God to prepare so many thesauri for the study and pleasure of
the future philologists of Europe.
Those servants ought to have been there to serve, and indeed, anyone who has
a servant of his own reads the menu and orders him off into kitchen to fetch the
desired dish. This process is not quite so smooth, however: for the private
servant,10 dispatched into the kitchen, finds many other private servants who,
like him, want to bring their master the best portion of said dish, so they fight,
with words or fists, with or without mercy, depending on their respective
temperaments and relative breeding: but sometimes two servants at once want
the same good turkey thigh, and both grab it, until it falls onto the floor and a cat
snatches it. Meanwhile, the table companion, who is hungry, waits with
philosophical patience for the dish he has requested and envies his neighbour
who, by not having a private servant, has all at once received four turkey thighs
from four different servants. The slowness of return of the dispatched man
depends at other times on such incidental causes as his finding a comely servant-
girl in a corridor.
All things considered, however, he dines best who has his own manservant. I,
for example, who did not have one, once asked four servants in a row for beer,
only to be told, ‘Private.’ I had mistakenly turned to private servants. On another
occasion, by the law of compensation, I asked for two eggs to drink, and my cry
of hunger, received by five hotel servants with nothing to do at that moment,
resulted in my having, a moment later, ten eggs before me. Add to this that the
hour of the table d’hôte is so elastic that, while you are eating your soup, your
neighbour to the right is already having his cheese, and the one on the left his
entrée. Add the multicoloured colour of all those servants, the clinking of
glasses, the clash of plates and knives, the shouting of the help, the calls of the
hungry, and the sighs of the patient, and I assure you the scene is worthy of the
pen of Rabelais or Yorrick.
Nor do the consolations of a first-class Indian hotel end here. One night in
Watson’s Hotel I awoke, hearing a noise as of teeth gnawing upon something: I
turned on the lamp and saw a large rat fleeing away, dragging off with it one of
my shoes. The hole through which it had entered, though, was too small, and it
left its loot with a break big as a scudo.11 I hung my shoes on the nail of a picture
and calmly went back to sleep. Travelling in India in the wintertime, I did not
encounter the famous land bloodsuckers, nor did I see snakes roaming about
loose, but I did have dealings with rats on several occasions.
In the Deccan in 1878–9, some rats destroyed whole harvests of sorghum,
devouring everything. It was the Golunda mettada, of which Elliot spoke half a
century ago.12
But to return to the servants. I wished, and managed, to travel throughout
India without any servant; but I would advise you to take one. Among the other
fine things you cannot do without one is to be invited to dine, since even in the
host’s house you must have your servant behind your seat, so that he can go into
the kitchen to get you your food. I dined more than modestly only in the house
of governors and kings, or Italians and foreigners kind enough to have the heart
of kings; there, I was always served by the of those who had invited me. […]

Chapter 5

[The Peculiar Way I Began the Year 1882 –] Journey from Bombay to
Madras – Indian Railways and Cold Showers on the Train [– Madras
and Its Hotels – A Tragicomical Boarding in Madras Bay – A Quick
Presentation to the Reader of the Town of Madras]

[…]Wednesday, 4 January. I awaken at 4:30 and find myself among cultivated

plains of sorghum, tobacco, cotton, and the castor-oil plant. Here and there are
groups of Acacia arabica, one of the commonest plants in all of India. A village
with Muslim tombs. Every so often there rises from the plain a conical hillock
with ruins of ancient fortresses.
At a station I see an old black woman with her face and arms dyed yellow. It
is one of the most horrid pictures yet painted with the human palette.
Over the Deccan Plateau, and at a station I buy Hyderabad currency.13 As
though as an antidote to the old black woman, I see a young Indian woman
almost naked, who smiles in the chaste and maidenly pride of her bronzed limbs.
I watch her with an eye perhaps too European, for she, blushing as well as
bronze can blush, draws a veil across her shoulders and drapes herself like a
Greek statue.
At Cooty I marvel at many stark white houses, so tiny one might think they
are a wooden village erected out of a Nuremberg toy-box. The men are all
shaved two-thirds up to the crown of their head, and the remaining hair is
gathered in a ponytail. The women have hair so black and sleek with coconut oil
that it flames into a shade of blue I have never in my life seen.
We are in the first days of January, but the heat is tremendous. I allow myself
the luxury of going into the small room annexed to every first-class car, and
there I take a cold shower, while from the windows I see fleeting groups of
palms and acacias. It is a new pleasure, worth a voyage to India.
One travels very well and inexpensively in Indian trains. A first-class car has
only four seats, and if you are three friends travelling together you can be sure to
be left alone. And the four seats change into beds at your pleasure, and you have
desks and blinds and blue-tinted glass lest you tire your eyes in the garish light
of the tropics. Every white-coloured car is protected from the sun’s rays by an
awning and has a double covering, across which, in the hottest summer months,
a sheet of cool water runs. From the car you enter the water closet, where you
can take a shower or a cool cleansing sponge-bath. Baggage is expensive, but
travelling in first class you can carry gratis as much as you desire in your car.
You must always travel in first class, however, unless you want to find yourself
in contact with not always clean Hindus, who are wont to travel in second class.
There are cars for ladies only (i.e., Indian women) in the third class as well, and
there is also a fourth class, in which one travels for just a few cents. The Indians
travel a great deal and love the railways, and a train in India accordingly is one
of the most picturesque spectacles you can imagine. Colours you would find
only on the wings of parrots or in a country church consecration feast; as many
physiognomies as Noah gathered into his ark; and if by chance you come upon a
car for ladies only, when the train has halted, you see as many marmoreal and
sculptured feminine bosoms as you can dream on for a good long while. At the
stops, a Hindu black as ink runs bare-legged along the cars, shouting in a nasal
voice, Pani, pani (water, water), and you see a hundred naked arms extending
jars gleaming like gold to receive the water. […]

Chapter 6

From Madras to Metapollium – The Nilgiri Mountains – My Toda [–

The Coconut Dance – King Karudi and the Beautiful Ponmomi – At
Ootacamund Market – A Trip to the Todas’ Mund – Milk and Betel at a
Hindu Home – At the Botanical Garden – At the Seven-Kairns-Hill with
Dr Griffith – Prehistoric Relics of India]

I gladly leave Madras and, happy to find myself safe and sound after breathing
that air mixed with warm fog and germ-laden dust, steer my prow toward the
Nilgiris, those enchanting mountains I have dreamed of for years and years,
those blue mountains where I must find the Todas.
 After a whole night spent in the railway car I see some lovely mountains at
Salem, then endless palm trees and cultivated fields of rice, bananas, sugar,
cotton, and capsicum peppers. Many villages ensconced among the coconut
palms attest to the dense population and the riches of this land. Before Pothanur
I could already see the Nilgiris in the distance and greeted them with anxious
love. At Pothanur we leave the Bepur railway and board the branch line that will
take us to Metapollium.
We are at the foot of the Nilgiris, or, as Breeks14 calls them, the Niligiris
(from nila, blue, and giri, mountain). They call them this because in the distance
they seem blue, or rather because in springtime the meadows on those mountains
are covered with a thick carpet of blue flowers. The English today write Nilgiris
or Nilgherris, and I leave it to the philologists to decide which of these forms is
the correct one. What is beyond dispute is that the Nilgiris are set mid-tropics
between 11° 10’ and 11° 32’ north latitude and 76° 59’ and 77° 31’ east longitude
– and that they are an earthly paradise.
At Metapollium the railway ends, and one must ready the tonga15 for us, the
ox-carts for baggage. I had telegraphed to have four tongas, whereas one would
have sufficed, and an ox-cart, rather more economical than a tonga, would have
accommodated all our baggage. Instead, the four tongas required some eight
spare horses and an expense of two hundred rupees. An error that truly cost us
dearly!
I was soon to undergo a second panic, when I saw descend on my trunks a
whole population of coolies. They were so many that, even had I given each fifty
cents, I would have had to spend quite a sum. Just imagine, that upon one
medium-sized valise six coolies found the means to set their heads and arms.
The stationmaster laughed at my dismay and assured me that I would not be
ruined. In fact, the transportation of all the immense baggage cost no more than a
rupee!
Forthwith I forgot my false alarm and the terrible bleeding made in my purse
by four tongas, when in the multicoloured, Malaysian-type crowd milling about
the station, I noticed a young black woman with long black curls and eyes of a
blazing beauty. Certainly she was a Toda; she very much resembled the very
beautiful portraits I had admired so often in Marshall’s work.16 I approached her
smiling and said to her, in a questioning tone, ‘Toda?’ And she replied, ‘Toda!’
Alongside her, an old woman held a lance decorated with peacock feathers.
My anthropologist’s innards were afire with love, desire, frenzy. Here I was,
at last, in wild India, meaning at home!
 The colts of the tonga were tiny but ardent, never slowed their gallop, and at
every moment were exchanged for others awaiting us along the road. They were
running too quickly, those little horses, for I would have liked more time to
admire the beauties of such fertile nature. First, there were fields of an extremely
soft green rice and then forests of Areca, one of the loveliest palms in the world,
shooting its emerald head heaven-ward with an agile trunk smooth as a column,
then other palms (Borassus) and giant bamboo bushes, which at their base
measured up to 500 millimetres in circumference and, bolt upright, propelled
skyward for 20 and 30 metres, bending their spindly extremities in an arc, as
though they were fishing rods. And from a single shrub sprang thirty, fifty, a
hundred bamboo shoots, as from some pyrotechnic apparatus in the form of
shooting rockets, which turned a single tuft into a forest. Now and then small
silvery torrents and deep valleys with giant trees and leafless lianas that hung
straight as ropes for 10 to 20 metres or wound in on themselves, coiled like a
nest of vipers; and dangling below them, fruits and flowers of all colours and
multicoloured little birds which looked fearlessly at us from their perfumed
haunts, as though they were in a cage Nature had fashioned; and a warm scent of
virgin forest that made my head spin. When the horses changed, I leaped down
from my tonga with my botanist’s seed-receptacle and within a few minutes
made a little booty of the loveliest plants for my friend Sommier.
At Coonoor, the Cutigliano of the Nilgiris,17 we changed carriages. Giant
eucalyptuses and huge Australian acacias showed the invading but also
reforming hand of the English: yet in that artificial flora I was happy to see the
first flowering rhododendron, with its great bunches of red flowers, its
ferruginous leaves, its trunk thick as that of our mediumsized chestnut tree.
As we approached Ootacamund (7,416 feet), the vegetation became entirely
Australian, and the Eucalyptus and Acacia melanoxylon made up an enchanting
garden. At 6:30 p.m. we arrived at Silk’s Hotel, where I took Room 2. I dined
with four or five Englishmen and a lady with teeth so brilliantly white they were
a poem unto themselves; then I warmed myself at a crackling little fire, which
made me happier than I can say. Only a few hours before, I had sweated as I
gazed out on sugar-cane fields, and now I was warming myself at a fire of
Australian acacias.
Saturday, 7 January. I rise extremely early and climb the mountain, moving
from one intoxication to another. This month of January, which for us others
means snow, fog, stoves, and head colds, here signifies an emerald green on the
land, a deep, transparent blue, a sapphire blue in the sky; an inebriating air of
tepid coolness between land and sky. I walk amid woodland jasmine, flowering
rhododendron, and the loveliest ferns. Every plant is a new friend to me, every
bird that greets me a new acquaintance. From on high I see with real emotion,
below, the first two Toda huts. I meet an Indian who, where I pass by, is
breaking, to the right and left of him, a twig of the shrubs he has found. From the
suspicious, fearful air with which he gazes at me, I think I can guess that with
that operation he is defending himself from the evil eye I could cast upon him.
Homo homini lupus18 and the evil eye are not just a Neapolitan, not even a Latin,
invention. In that enchantment of nature, in that earthly paradise, man awakens a
note of fear and suspicion. In my idle excursion I find a tiny, tranquil lake,
designed by some fairy to hide her loves there. You reach it by immersing your
foot in erpine and lichen velvets, and from a picturesque cliff a shrub of
flowering rhododendron hangs over the water, which mirrors its bunch of pinks
in the tranquil water. Beside that shrub a pure aloe, in bloom from its spiky nest,
hurls skyward a direct flower-laden flame. The air is inebriating and raises my
sensitivity to the highest pitches: it is so transparent, it seems you can touch the
farthest mountains with your hands. The landscape is so rich and, in the vibrancy
of the light, achieves hues so novel they keep me in a continual state of aesthetic
intoxication.
Wednesday, 11 January. Cosa bella e mortal passa e non dura,19 and when
the Eternal Father in his infinite justice finds a happy man on the face of the
earth, he immediately declares him in flagrante delicto of a violation of the laws
of nature: ‘Will be prosecuted!’20
And I was punished, in my excessively long walks and the excessively rapid
change of climate, with a fierce lumbago, which for some days kept me fastened
a sort of highchair, unable to photograph the Todas, to conduct research on
skulls, to work. I must content myself with taking notes on the rare and valuable
works I have borrowed from the Reading Room of Ootacamund, to which I have
subscribed. […]

Chapter 7

A Brief Account of the Todas and Their Neighbours – The Irulas –

The Kurumbas – The Kotas – The Badagas

To the Todas I shall be dedicating an illustrated monograph based on the

portraits of them that I made from life, but permit me here to sketch some
outlines of them which may serve to illustrate my voyage.
 The Todas live in the Nilgiris, scattered over a vast mountainous territory
surrounded by the Kotas, the Kurumbas, the Irulas, the Badagas,21 and many
Hindus who settled in that country after the English made it the most important
sanatorium22 of Southern India. According to the revised and corrected census
of 15 November 1871, they number 683, distributed as follows:

The Todas are divided into two classes or castes, which cannot be joined in
marriage, and are the Devalyal and the Tarserzhal. The first class claims to
represent, more or less, the Brahmans, and consists of the Peiki Clan; the second
is subdivided into the four categories of the Pekkan, Kuttan, Kenna, and Toda.
Their hardiness, their noble bearing, their very handsome features have won
them comparison with the ancient Romans, but surely what has greatly
contributed to this false analogy is simply the mantle, their only article of outer
dress, with which they drape themselves, indeed, with singular majesty. There is
also among them a quite Semitic type, some of whom could easily serve as
excellent models for biblical patriarchs. They have thick, jet-black hair, flowing
black beards, thick eyebrows, aquiline, often rabbinical, noses, large black eyes,
fine mouths with very large lips, splendid teeth, chins neither receding nor over-
prominent. The colour of their skin is like that of high-roasted chocolate, and I
cannot concur with Shortt23 in calling it a dull copper hue.
The measuring of their heads has yielded to me the following results:
 The Toda villages are called mund or mott and for the most part are made up
of five distinct buildings, three serving as habitations, one as a dairy and temple,
and another as a pen for the calves during the night. Their houses are made of
bamboo, rattan, and sod, meshed together so tightly as to shut out the least ray of
light, the least air bubble. When they have closed the tiny door from within with
a real square cork, they are sealed up as though in a box. The houses are 10 feet
high, 18 feet long, and 9 feet wide. The door is 32 inches high and 18 inches
wide, so that one can enter only by slithering along the ground like a snake.
Around the houses there is a stone wall with a narrow entrance, and a gap
between house and wall 2 to 3 feet high, with a space of 13 feet by 10 feet. The
facade is coloured with coats of red and black.
The inside of the house is 8 to 15 square feet, and only at the centre can a man
stand up. It is divided into two parts, a lower one, where you find the fireplace, a
few copper and bamboo vessels, the pestle for grinding the rice and other grains,
and a hole in the ground, which is the mortar. The upper part, rising 2 feet above
the lower, is the bed, and presents only some buffalo and deer hides: there, ten or
twelve people of both sexes and of all ages sleep together.
The inhabitants of a mund are generally relatives and are considered one
family. Each family may possess two or three mund in various regions of the
mountain, to which they will periodically repair in order to graze their buffalo
herds, which are almost their sole wealth, their treasure, the first object of their
affections, if not their adoration.
The shepherd of the mund is also a priest. He milks the she-buffalo mornings
and evenings during the months of monsoon, and in the other months only in the
morning. The milk is kept in a dairy which only the priest, or pujari, may enter.
Every family has a recognized head, in the case of whose death the older son
almost always succeeds him.
The Todas are a pastoral people who live only on buffalo milk, honey, and
gudu, or a grain tribute paid to them by the Badaga and Kota peoples as rent for
land, which is considered the Todas’ ancient and legitimate property. They
disdain work, are proud, and laugh often and heartily even at the Europeans.
Inheritance is divided equally among the sons; the house goes to the younger
son, whose obligation it is to provide for the sustenance of the women of the
house.
The Todas, up until recent years, were polyandrous, but now, with infanticide
of their newborn girls strictly forbidden by the English, they are becoming
monogamous, and I have known some among them to have confessed to being
polygamous.
The women embroider red and turquoise into their white mantles, which are
made of cotton they buy from their neighbours, they tend to the kitchen and
fetch the water. The men take care of the firewood and raise the livestock.
Here are some names the Todas take:

Men’s Names

Kevi: sacred bell of the buffalo

Pernal: great man
Narikut: jackal’s son
 Ponkut: son of gold
Tshinkut: idem
Padrithzh: with God who dwells on the mountain
Kedalven: man of the funeral
Alven: man
Beltaven: like silver
Kirneli: small on

Women’s Names

Kathaveli: silver coin

Darzthinir: jewel splinter
Tshinab: golden
Berzth: ?[sic]
Depbili: silver ring
Piltimuruga: white earring
Piltzaras: white ring
Takem: doctor (because she was cured by a European doctor, shortly
after birth)
Pondshilkammi: little golden bell worn at the ankle

The Todas dress in a large white cloak or mantle, and go about barefoot and
bareheaded. Only recently have some adopted the Hindu turban.
The women wear huge silver earrings, extremely heavy bronze bracelets, and
other lighter, more ornate silver ones, and wear rings in various shapes. They
tattoo the neck and arms in blue, simple, elegant designs.
They burn their dead like the Hindus, sacrificing buffaloes during the funeral
they call the green one, and they let their neighbours the Kotas eat the flesh of
the sacrificed animals. They hold a second funeral, which they call the dry one,
and which once they would always solemnize two or three months after the first.
Today, however, to spare the buffaloes that must be killed on that occasion, they
wait at least a year and thus mourn many dead at one time.
For the dry funeral they save fragments of the cremated skull and a tuft of
hair and offer these once more to the pyre, after dousing them in the blood of the
slaughtered buffaloes. On this occasion, various objects which belonged to the
deceased are also burned, together with a flute or a kind of bow and arrow and
another sort of buffalo horns. These are sacred symbols and nothing more, since
the Todas no longer use bows and arrows and have no weapon but a large, high
staff with which they kill the buffaloes in their two funerals.
In the dry funeral they also perform a sacred dance, in which anywhere from
twenty to fifty men take part.
It is difficult to gain an accurate sense of the religion of the Todas. They
recognize the existence of various divinities, and perhaps their Usuru Swami is
also a supreme deity. They have neither idolatry nor fetishism, and offer their
gods neither human nor animal sacrifices. They believe in an afterlife, but have
no clear ideas about it, unsure if it is only the soul that passes beyond death or
whether the body also accompanies it.
The Todas’ place of origin is still uncertain. Marshall, who lived among them
a long time and studied them with loving exactitude, thinks it fairly likely that
their ancestors lived in the low hills between the Canarese and Tamil districts, in
the direction of Hasanur, and that they emigrated from there, breaking up into
two different groups. One of them headed northward, to Kollegal, and the other
settled in the Nilgiris. Metz25 says they came from Kaligal, and they themselves,
when questioned on their origin, reply that they have always lived in the same
country. What is certain is that they have always had a relation with the west
coast of India, as the ornaments of their women’s face-powdering prove.
The first reports about the Todas, according to Breeks, are found in the
journal of the archbishop of Goa, Aleixo de Menezes (Coimbra, 1606). At the
Synod of Udiamparur in the State of Chichin held by the same archbishop in
1599, you have information about a Christian people that inhabited an area
called Tadamala that had lost its religious beliefs; so it was decided to send
certain priests to visit it, including Iacomo Ferreiro. In the account he left of his
voyage, he describes the Todas, but says he has found no record among them of
Christian faith. They said their fathers had come from the East.
The Todas are discussed also in the Viaggio alle Indie Orientali by Padre F.
Vincenzo Maria di Santa Caterina da Siena, procurer-general of the Barefoot
Carmelites (Rome, 1672; Venice, 1683). This father made his voyage in 1657,
but gathered notes on the coast. This is what he says: ‘The Todri [sic], a small
tribe of a rather light-skinned [sic] people, live on the mountains behind Ponane,
in the Kingdom of Zamorin, and pray to the buffaloes on which they live. They
select the oldest cows and hang on them a little bell, which suffices as a means
of adoring them. They allow the buffaloes to wander at will and also to graze in
the fields, and everyone considers himself fortunate to eat something that
belongs to them. Although the buffaloes are often killed by tigers, the people do
not cease on that account to adore them.’
All ethnologists classify the Todas among the Dravidian races, but let me
repeat what I have said elsewhere, that we must throw out the concept of a
Dravidian race. Dravidian languages exist, but not races, and the philological
criterion, as in many other cases, adopted as the sole classificatory criterion for
peoples, has led to the gravest errors. The Todas, of Semitic type, speak
Dravidian languages, as do the Kotas, as Aryan as the finest European, the
athletic coolies of Madras, and the Malaysian-type people of the Malabar coast.
For this reason, must we say that men this diverse in skull formation,
physiognomy, indeed, all their anatomical characteristics belong to a single race?
By that logic one would have to assert that all humans on the face of the earth
belong to one race and are but varieties of Linnaeus’s Homo sapiens. Bold as
this assertion will sound, for me there are no distinct, well-defined races such as
the Dravidians, just as Semites and Aryans do not exist, and it would be wise to
erase these distinctions, which in their philological baptism suggest an ancient
error, one imposed with the full force of an indisputable, irrevocable tradition on
anthropology and ethnology. […]
And these Todas, so splendid, so hale, so happy, what will become of them?
What will become of their neighbours? They will vanish, intermingling with
races close to them.
Their individuality pales by the day. With their infanticide hindered, and their
prosperity increased, they will gradually become monogamous, perhaps also
polygamous. They already wear the turban: soon they will be finding trousers
and jacket more comfortable. Perhaps they will also become Christians: then
they will cross-breed with Hindus, with Muslims, with Eurasians, and their
blood will be lost in the great ocean of the human family.
A traveller visiting the south of India two or three centuries hence will
glimpse, here and there, some Toda physiognomy, the ancestral glimmer of a
lost, and quite ancient, form, and will say, ‘Look, here is a Toda, like one in
those photographs by Breeks, Marshall, Mantegazza.’ Perhaps, too, nothing of
these black patriarchs I have so lovingly studied will appear again. In the ocean
all drops look alike, whether they have come from the glaciers of the Faulhorn or
Kanchanyanga, from the forests of Cotopaxi or New Zealand. If all those drops
were to tell their stories, they would give us the greatest poem the world would
ever know, they would give us the history of the living and the dead, from the
tears of a dying man to the dewdrop gathered at dawn from amid the rose-petals:
but all those drops sunk into the great seabed fall asleep or murmur a single
language, telling us that from the microcosm of an atom to the macrocosm of the
universe, existences and forces, actions and reactions war and are reconciled,
recuperate the small in the great, preparing for the morrow’s struggles in a
moment of respite, while human shades flit across the horizon, like fog
dissipated by the rising sun.

Chapter 9

[Darjeeling –] The Kanchanyanga – [The Market and the Purchase of

a Chonga –] The Puhari – A Trip to the Bhootea Bustee – [My Portrait
among the Clouds –] The Himalaya and the Alps – A Ride to Runjit –
[A Hand-to-Hand Fight with a Bootia Girl – Master Partridge – My
Occupations in Sikkim –] The Wandering Merchants

[…] 19 February, 7:45 a.m. For a half-hour I have been on a hillock behind my
bungalow, seated upon a gleaming mica schist. The ground is silvered with
hoarfrost, and the grass bare. Facing me is Kanchanyanga,26 which I am seeing
for the first time. It is the second, or we might say the foremost, mountain in the
world, since Everest is only somewhat higher. It is the finest thing in creation; I
would not place a starry sky or stormy sea beside it; the sky we see from the
time we are babes, and the sea in its fury is always so convulsive. Here, though, I
have before me force without struggle, grandeur without pride.
I saw it at 6:45, on climbing over the edge of a hillock. Behold it, calm,
serene, stretching east to west its boundless arms bristling with silver tips and
glaciers. Beneath the snows, light, fleecy clouds knit for it a sort of cravat,
farther down they weave it a garment, then its whole body plunges into a sea of
thick, shapeless clouds. Who can ever count the peaks that the great giant
Himalaya commands? To the right they stand out, high and hardy, then lower
and lower fade out in a fine, jagged line.
I am dumbfounded, and even if I were not alone would still be speechless. I
feel too small in the face of this overlarge scenery. I look for something more
like me in its smallness.
Behind me a small Anglican church sleeps calmly in the peace of faith: about
me all is silence, and even India’s eternal ravens, which for months now have
deafened me with their clamour, have either flown far off or fallen silent.
I rested my eyes on the little church, yet my eyes strayed back to
Kanchanyanga, spellbound by that colossus. Just look at him there, he seems
mirrored in the ocean of clouds at his feet, and gazes out with pleasure to come
off so big, so handsome.
Yes, he is king of all those clouds hugging and squeezing him everywhere, he
is their lover. They have just left him practically uncovered; yet they seem to
yearn to kiss him again, and run back, collide, dart over his brow, and every so
often veil him, hiding him from me. But here comes a more powerful morning
breeze, crashing down all those petulant clouds, so that Kanchanyanga again
appears quite naked, yet chaste in all his nudity.
My heart is pounding, as I wish I were a poet, a lyric poet at that, to sing the
beauties of this giant. Nothing speaks inside me but a hymn. The mountain is
silver, diamond too, the flower of stones; it is inorganic nature’s feast, its hymn.
And yet, when the clouds gird him and closely cleave to him, I seem to see a
little bud of musk rose made for a garden of the heavens and a God of flowers. I
catch myself lapsing into the seventeenth century, as the language of men, so
inspired before the colossus of Himalaya, turns grotesque. I am a child standing
on tiptoe to kiss a giant.
20 February, 6 a.m. This morning the clouds are unwilling to quit the
embrace of their giant. In vain does the sun rise behind me at this moment, to
give its customary morning kiss to Kanchanyanga. The clouds refuse to uncover
him. Some, very, very gently, tear themselves away, into vaporous flakes, rise to
fall again to kiss the brow of their lover; other, pinker ones encircle his neck, his
breast, all over. And he, motionless, consents to their love and admiration.
It seems proper to me to be witnessing a scene of creation, to make out the
face in this chaos of clouds that have a form, yet still find no form in them; I
seem to be seeing ancient protoplasm, reduced to an amorphous vapour; seem to
be witnessing some occult, mysterious fermentation which moulds and organizes
the first peak of Kanchanyanga, the first land of a world to come. No, I am not
deceiving myself, what I have before me is Genesis in action. Here is the ocean
of protoplasm, here, down in the deep chasm of Himalaya’s valleys, is a
borderless grey air on a gradual ascendant; the soft, vaporous grey rises, rounds
into swan plumage, wool fleece, cotton flakes, sketching out the first twilights of
form.
But behold, this ash-grey ocean is torn at some point, and, like a cliff in the
sea, an unimaginably green hillock rises up; on it sits a small human habitation
…
21 February. I see you a third time, O Kanchanyanga. You are still beautiful,
ever beautiful. You are virgin, O Kanchanyanga – you alone are that.
Everywhere that the sun has kissed the earth, a hundred, a thousand creatures
have been born, be they dwarf birches or giant well-ingtonias, wart viruses
invisible to the naked eye or religious, thousand-armed fig trees, each tree a
forest unto itself, bacteria beside which a dust mote is a mountain, or elephants,
which are mountains of flesh; deep within the caves or the sea’s chasms,
wherever the air has touched the earth, the creatures swarm and crowd.
Our planet is one great marriage bed of easy, tireless loves.
You alone are virgin, O Kanchanyanga, your cliffs are not eaten by lichen nor
dressed in moss; over you neither fly nor butterfly’s wing has ever beaten; nor
has bird’s voice ever sung. Your snow is still pure of the contact of human feet,
that arrogant tread that has touched and sullied everything.
Yet you are too beautiful, O Kanchanyanga, not to love! You make love with
the light that intoxicates you as it dresses you in silvers and purples; you make
love with the clouds that caress your calm brow; you make love with the sky’s
infinite spaces, within which you plunge, with the daring of the strong.
Your loves are eternal, as unliving things are eternal. You are the inorganic
world’s feast, its hymn. The plant world has the wellingtonia and the baobab, the
animal world the lion and the bird of paradise; the mineral world the
Kanchanyanga, Illimani, Mont Blanc. You are the wealth, the beauty, the jewel
of mountains. You alone manage to touch the sky so closely you can squeeze it
with your mighty arms, so that you can conquer its boundless fields, you are so
large you win admiration, and so close to us you win also our love; the love of us
poor creatures of a day, who have fixed boundaries and duties levied upon on
every sense, our every desire, our every love.
22 February. Ah, today you are naked, my Kanchanyanga; you are naked, yet
chaste as a statue by Phidias. Even the most modest ladies allow the companion
of their loves to contemplate their naked beauty a moment.
Yet behold how even today I could not truly call you mine, since on your
shoulders you wear the sheerest opal-coloured veil, which does not conceal you
but multiplies your infinite beauty. It is the roseate flesh of a young girl seen and
not seen through a gauze veil.
You are naked and you are beautiful, nor have you need of hands to hide any
defect. The most beautiful things do not reach the highest peaks of ecstasy unless
they are beautiful from the tips of their feet to the last recalcitrant curl on their
head. You are large without being baroque, and the ornaments of your profile are
worthy of your immense beauty. Nature, having exalted you to the skies in a
surge of giant fecundity, has patiently chiselled you with her hand from head to
toe. With my enamoured gaze I follow your silvery outline and count ten, twelve
larger peaks, each different from the other and all bound up with other, lesser
jagged outlines, petulant as the marble breast of a maiden or as finely serrated as
fern leaves. To left and right you stretch the curtain of a hundred peaks, give
your hand to Nepal and Bhutan and hide China from my eyes. If a railway could
lead me to you, I would touch you in a half-hour of travel, but neither rail nor
telegraph wires have yet tamed or conquered you. You stand there like a
milestone between the Mongol and Aryan worlds; a giant godfather of two of the
greatest civilizations.
And how many tiny new beauties does my eye not discover in your sturdy
limbs, how many shadows and penumbrae of polished, blonde silver. You have
the full cool, graceful range of white, the purest, most chaste, most virginal of
colours. And between one white and another you place black shadows of granite
to let the splendours of your silvers stand out all the more dazzlingly. You are a
colossus drafted by Michelangelo and chiselled by Cellini. The measureless
grandeur of your slopes deprives you of none of the graces of a Grecian statue.
So it often happens that one must also admire in some superb Roman beauty
dimples of the face and the unsurpassed loveliness of the pubescent lip – lesser
beauties of a divine beauty. So too on the brow of an Arab horse black as night, a
miracle of agility, elegance, and strength, you see Nature, insatiable in its
aesthetic fecundity, whimsically painting a small silver star.
After great things, small ones; after lyrical emotion, which carries you aloft,
the pedestrian walk that takes you along the modest paths of daily life. Thus is
man; thus complete life, which rests upon change of sensations, which multiplies
the bread and fish of our poor, brief life with the miracle of skilful alternatives.
In fidelity to the plan of my book, I am transcribing other notes from my
notebook. […]
Monday, 20 February.27 For many long hours, and with great sensual
pleasure, I warmed myself by the blaze of my small fireplace. The notion that
I’m in India delights me, the blaze cheers me, and I am just a bit proud that the
wood now warming me is magnolia and rhododendron.
Before my meal I step out for a walk alone in the hills. In vain do I search in
order to find some specimen of a flowering plant for my friend Sommier, but
above the ridge of a higher hill, amid the low shrubs, I discover a place sacred to
the Buddhist cult. There are clots of blood, fleeces of wool, and small cloth rags
of various colours hanging from the branches of the trees and the nearby shrubs.
Later, on other occasions, I saw the same things in other places, and beside
the blood, which came from small animals, I also saw chicken feathers. I have
never been able to witness the actual sacrifice.
The bath water is brought to me each day by a poor Indian, lame and ugly as
sin. He is no cleaner than his brethren in Sikkim; indeed, if such were possible,
he is even dirtier than they. And yet he lives, in two senses, by water.
I have seen a few others similar to him. They do not have the Mongolian face,
and tell me they are pahari or puhari.28 They are brown but not yellow, have
neither slanted eyes nor prominent cheeks; they have flowing black hair, beards
fuller than the Sikkimese. They assure me they were born in Nepal and in the
Kshatriya29 caste. If it is true, then they must be the caricature of Mars, for they
have nothing bellicose about them, and I think they have never waged any war
but against the people of Pediculus,30 by whom they have been invaded, like all
their brethren in India. Should you wish to do anthropology in these countries,
and even more, should you wish to take photographs in them, for pity’s sake do
not forget to bring phenic acid; otherwise you will threaten to populate Europe
with some new species of the genus Pediculus, sowing great confusion among
the entomologists. […]
21 February. At last I have been able to see the Buddhist temple at
Darjeeling. It is reached by a picturesque road winding on the mountain slope
that sinks and rises and dips to make way for a streamlet framed by trees and
grassy clods of earth that stretches along the edge of the chasms and widens out
before certain Bhutanese31 houses that look like swallows’ nests set between sky
and earth.
Along the road you find a whole Bhutanese village, a village without streets,
because you find no more than two or three houses at the same level; instead
they are scattered, or rather, flung helter-skelter, over rock clefts and in the small
inlets of the mountain. Men, sleepy-eyed and dishevelled, emerge from them in
droves; they seem permanently suspended between the drowsiness of weary lust
and narcotic hallucinations, but the Bhutanese girls are much better looking,
with cheeks in a deep pink that contrasts with the yellow undertone and their
slanted little eyes and their whimsical little noses that give them an air of
charming pertness. That dark pinkishness greatly preoccupied me for the length
of my stay in Sikkim, because it is a rare colour in the Mongolian races, and at
times it seemed I should have to consider it artificial. They blush, however, at
your mere glance at them, and this is certainly a natural reddening, contrasting
with the free mores of their polyandrous life.
How cheerful those lovely lasses were as they chattered! I saw them upon an
esplanade in front of one of their huts, leaping, dancing, and running about with
bundles of lit straw which they threw at one another over their shoulders,
laughing scornfully with enviable naivety. They offered us their jewellery, their
bracelets; yet they always asked permission of their mothers, and lovingly
discussed among their family how best to fleece us.
Further on below the Bhutanese village you find the tomb of a lama, almost
impudently white, in an extremely simple architectural style of the sort often
seen reproduced in travel works. Finally you reach the temple, where the ugliest
thing is the church, damnably clashing with the quite splendid panorama of the
deep valley, the nearby mountains, the distant giant of Himalaya. A broad fence
stands before the temple like the small piazza of one of our small mountain
churches, then plunges over the deep and narrow valley. Many quite tall
bamboos bear veritable bed-sheets of paper on which are written Tibetan
prayers.
The temple is a small lime and brick house with a covered atrium decorated
in wood and painted board. On the left, beneath the tiny porch, a lama, seated on
the ground, with a rather unscrubbed and, worse still, moronic face, has before
him a large book in which he makes a show of reading while constantly spinning
with one hand a huge prayer machine, on which are inscribed the customary
Tibetan prayers. The large spinning holy machine strikes two bells, small and
large, that clang in different tones. On both sides of the atrium, or doorway if
you will, you see arrayed two sets of other, smaller prayer wheels, covered in
painted and gilt paper. Three other lamas crouching below these ridiculous
playthings sing out their nasal psalms.
The famous prayer wheel, or ‘coffee roasting machine,’32 is one of the
greatest curiosities of Buddhist worship, and no traveller, however miserly he
may be, ever visits Sikkim without taking home one of these odd little machines,
which are copper for the poor and silver for the rich, with a cover and a metal
ball that helps it to spin, and upon which are almost invariably carved the
prophetic words Hom mani padmi hoong,33 Praise be to the lotus flower, praise
be to the jewel! When the little machine has a cover, you can have another
prayer, any prayer, written on the paper. The devout Buddhist, walking, riding,
idling, continually spins the little machine and thinks of quite other things.
Meanwhile, however, he is satisfying a religious obligation, and the Eternal
Father is satisfied by this mechanical prayer. They look like large-scale mills
over which prayers fall like water.
I entered into the temple anything but disposed to worship, and saw, on the
ground on both sides, seated in Turkish fashion, some twenty lamas singing
through their noses before huge books that a young cleric was perfuming with a
sort of burned incense as he passed from one lama to the next. Behind them,
little boys were crouching, and in a corner of the church I also espied a large
vessel of murva.34 People more lanky, stupid-looking, and abject would be hard
to imagine, and one lama, seated apart in the middle of the church, spinning a
silver prayer-mill with monotonous regularity, held out his hand and spoke
perhaps the one English word he knew: Money, money, money. I felt an
unspeakable disgust, a deep shame to be a human being and to see this puerile
and debased business dignified with the name of religion.
I bade my interpreter tell the mill-wielding priest that I would give money35
after I had visited the temple, and would pay them well provided they sang well.
As though by a spell, scarcely was my thought translated into their language than
these twenty singers raised the pitches of their chant, though still reaching them
through the nose.
No church more closely resembles one of our own than a Buddhist temple.
An inner altar at the farthest end with three gilt gods, entirely decorated with
flowers, vases, small vessels with offerings of rice and perfumed little candles
burning slowly. At the foot of the altar, the musical instruments of the Buddhist
cult, from huge bronze trumpets to a humble shell.
Seeing a basket holding an immense number of little brass vessels for the
offerings, I asked an officiating cleric for one, offering of course to pay him for
it, and as much as he wanted. The good little priest was perhaps the only one
among those slyboots, drunk on music and who knows what preternatural lusts,
who truly believed in the religion of which he was minister. He took deep
offence at my proposal and firmly refused to sell me one of the little vessels. I
begged, implored, but all in vain; then, making an accomplice of one of my
travel companions, I stole from him the little vessel he would not sell me. The
museum directors, the collectors, numismatists, etc. all are more or less thieves,
and now I was too; except that I stole badly, for my cleric exposed me as a
sacrilegious thief to the singer-priests, who rose from their places and encircled
me. Their imbecilic but malicious faces did not frighten me in the least,
however; and I, adding a lie to a theft, denied stealing it and dared the over-
zealous little cleric to prove my theft. He gesticulated and shouted like one
possessed, saying there were x many little vessels, all of which he would count
out in front of everyone until he found one fewer, which would certainly be in
my pockets. That diabolical lama in the making had an eagle’s eye!
Except that a European from Monza neither could nor should let himself be
defeated by a fanatical little priest from Darjeeling; and having called to my
accomplice, while the cleric was deliberately distracted by my friends without
realizing it, I set the little vessel back among the others. It was then, dear reader,
that, sure of my slightly posthumous but nonetheless genuine innocence, I
crossed my arms over my chest, defying my adversary to prove the theft!
He counted, recounted, furrowing his brow to hone his mathematical skill,
and had to conclude, with the greatest confusion, that the little vessels were x
many and just as many as there should be, and that he had imagined a non-
existent thief.
I laughed to myself, but laughed even harder when, on leaving the temple, I
saw a fat old lama grin sarcastically and with a wink approach me, and put my
hand in his pocket; in it I found the little sacred vessel I had shortly before tried
to plunder. I in turn gave an Attic grin and slipped a rupee into the hand of that
good lama, who had corrected the over-zeal of the neophyte cleric. The latter, the
next day, putting in order the temple’s implements and recounting the little
vessels, must have found one fewer and slapped his brow, telling himself who
knows how many times he was a befuddled idiot. But I was not the thief!
Those lamas of Darjeeling really are sly! I had tried to buy one of the long
bronze slide trumpets which I had seen at the foot of the altar, but however high
I kept raising my offering price, all the priests rejected the sacrilegious proposal
with horror. This indignation too was false! The next day around sunset, a
messenger of the lamas came to my house and my room with a mysterious
bundle and laid out before me two of those sacred trumpets. One is now in the
hands of the lawyer Michela, the other is an outstanding piece in my museum in
Florence.
As I left that temple with its filthy lamas, I could see two of them with large
red mitres who, standing together by the church fence, blew their shell trumpets,
calling the faithful to prayer. Their notes were echoing mysteriously through the
deep valley, and the distant echo repeated the notes with a mocking air.
And I, homeward bound, thought sad thoughts.
Ramdas Sen was quite right to say of Buddhism in his lecture in Calcutta on
19 September 1870, ‘Unfortunately the religion of Buddha no longer finds itself
in the state of purity it enjoyed in the days of Sakya Muni.’
 The ethical part of the Buddhist religion is genuinely sublime. The Buddha’s
Dhammapada, or ‘Way of Virtue,’ is a true brother of the Gospel.36
Fergusson also finds many analogies in the histories of Christianity and
Buddhism: ‘Three hundred years after Buddha, Asoka did for Buddhism what
Constantine did for Christianity. He adopted it, made it the religion of State,
actively cooperating in its propagation. Six centuries after Buddha, Nagarjuna
and Kannka did for the Oriental religion what Saint Benedict and Gregory the
Great did for the Occidental religion. In the XVIth century we have the
Reformation and sixteen centuries after Buddha we have in Sankara Acharjya
the Luther of India.’37
If Buddha were to rise up from his tomb, he would not recognize as his
disciples the stupid priests of Sikkim; just as the Christ would have to chase
from the Temple those who call themselves his followers.
Why is there this conflict?
For many reasons, but this one above all: that religion is the least progressive
of human institutions, because its dogmatic form immobilizes it and its
indisputability and sanctity make even the least change abhorrent.
From this derives the fact that while arts, sciences, letters advance with a
certain concord and considerable parallelism, religion lags behind and no longer
responds to the needs, sentiments, or criticism of today. For this reason it can
agree only with the tastes of the lowest strata of human society, that is, with
those who, straggling behind through their lack of culture and deficiency of
thought, find themselves differing less with ancient religion since they belong to
a time whose sun has set. And the priests, to make matters worse, speculate in
the industry of simony.
The high and intelligent classes no longer side with religion, and the
indifferent follow its rituals by tradition but without faith or enthusiasm.
All this does not prove the uselessness of religions, but rather the need for
those to be reformed and to follow the destined course of our thought, as
happens with every other human institution. There may be, nay, there have been,
still are, and always will be men who do not feel the need for a religion, yet the
family of man will always be religious, because the hope in a better world, or at
least in one different from this one, because the need to believe in things unseen,
untouchable, because the love of the mystical are all human and indisputable
elements; yet anyone who would redeem religion must be ready to reform it
when it no longer responds to the moral and intellectual climate of an era and a
people. It is better to bury a glorious corpse than to leave it standing up lifeless,
while the ghosts of simony and the drones of superstition devour every shred of
its flesh, infecting the air, spreading stench and corruption all about them.
Men have forever walked on high and men will always love ascending to the
heights of the ideal world. First, they moved about on their feet, then on the
backs of horses and elephants, then on steamers, and, who knows, someday
perhaps they will go flying about.
Religion too bears us aloft, and one should not, must not suppress it, but for
the pedestrian religion of the savage or the religion borne upon the backs of great
thinkers, one must spread the wings of all poetries, all the hopes, all the ideals of
the family of man.
21 February. Yesterday for the first time I saw a surprising spectacle. I was
roaming over these charming mountains when all at once, casting my gaze
toward the valley, I saw my head reproduced on a giant scale over a facing
cloud-bank: and the sun, at my back, was surrounding my fantastic image with a
halo of shining, iridescent rays. For many minutes I was stunned; then, like a
boy, I took to moving my head and arms, enchanted to see my portrait drawn in
giant proportions by the sun over the clouds of Himalaya.
I really am in an enchanted region, and Hooker38 may not be exaggerating in
calling Darjeeling the most beautiful spot on the planet. I too have toured a fair
share of the world, and of all I have seen of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, I
would not hesitate to say that coastal Rio de Janeiro and landlocked Darjeeling
are the two natural settings I have most admired.
Here, truly, I find all the forms of the beautiful – the grand, boundless
beautiful that leaves you humbled and small, like a grain of sand amid the
deserts of the Sahara, and the graceful beautiful that you can fondle with your
hands and almost kiss with your lips. Before your insatiable eyes rises the
greatest mountain chain the planet can boast; and between you and Himalaya lies
an ocean of mountains, hillocks, hills; ever green forests of magnolias,
rhododendrons, and conifers, with villages scattered through the greenery like
little swallows’ nests, and above all that world of stones and greenery, another
ocean of sky and clouds and fogs ever in motion, now about to be chased after,
now lying still on the giant basins of the valleys. Nowhere have I seen such
restless, turbulent clouds; they move from vale to vale, plunge from a mountain
gorge, as though an invisible hand wanted to pour them into and completely fill
the valleys below. Then, all of a sudden, a capricious wind seizes on some
winged fleece that flies and flies, and to your great envy it rushes off on a junket
to Tibet, and a few moment later, seeing that all’s well in China, returns to you in
India, only to pour itself into the infinite lake of other, sister clouds.
How happily the sun sports, how it amuses itself amid that ocean of clouds,
how the moon revels on high amid those thousand shadows and penumbrae of
the little dales, the inlets, the deep clefts. The most colossal trees seem from afar
to be the silken down on a baby’s face, and the tree ferns jutting far off the edge
of a precipice seem like those ‘flaws,’ those cherished beauty marks that
prodigal, gallant Nature sometimes plants on the face of our loveliest ladies.
One sometimes feels weary from too much admiration, one feels the need to
take refuge in the woods, to sit at the feet of a magnolia with one’s eyes shut.
Today I have hidden in a forest and for a long time have remained seated on the
dry leaves, savouring the voluptuousness of a long silence. When my restless
hand moved to rummage in that bed of leaves, I found beneath them a carpet of
gilt soft ferns and of bronze-coloured true ferns delicate as Brussels lace; and
amid the ferns I picked a white violet with blue stripes. It was the first flower
that spring let bloom on the first steps of Himalaya.
Which are more beautiful, the Alps or Himalaya?
If love of country does not befog my judgment, I would say that the Alps are
not only more beautiful than all the mountains of Europe but also than the
Cordilleras of the Andes and Himalaya. Nature has fashioned them with a richer
aesthetic, caressed them with greater coquetry of profiles, outlines, and colours.
They are the worthy frame of that gem of our planet that is Italy: they open the
gates to the earthly paradise of art. Himalaya is grander, more severe; it is the
curtain worthy of parting the two most populous families of man, the Mongol
and the Aryan, the Chinese world and the Indo-European.
25 February. Having had, through no fault of my own, to abandon a voyage
to Tumlong, the capital of independent Sikkim, I wanted at least to say that I had
been to China, or in some tributary state to it, so with my companions and other
young Russians and Frenchmen I made an excursion on the River Runjit. On the
descent they all took the route on foot; I being older, lazier, and, above all, surer
of the ability of my Tibetan pooni, made the whole way on horseback. And no
beauty he was, my pooni! A dirty bay, completely dishevelled, gaunt, he seemed
made more of wood than flesh. He did not neigh, did not shake his ugly head,
did not impatiently paw the ground; yet what assurance in the way he slipped
through those abysses, what an eye, what sureness of step, what indefatigability!
He never stumbled, never showed the least tiredness, never bent his back.
Although a mere quadruped, he was much more likeable than the green biped
who accompanied me as my coolie. He was taciturn, sullen, unpleasant, and you
can’t imagine the ugly face he made to me when I, with the kindest smile in the
world, offered him one of my sandwiches. It contained beef, and he was a thrice-
orthodox Hindu!
But then all our coolies were quite unpleasant. Another, without warning me,
threw over into the valley a splendid bamboo knot which I had bought along the
road for the mere pocket-change of two annas. It was more than a half-metre in
circumference, and I had planned, once back in Florence, to make from it the
most beautiful and unusual cup in the world. And I had even promised him a
one-rupee tip. But he was a coolie, not a porter, and could not lower himself to
carry a bamboo for me. I had engaged a third man to carry for me a narguileh39
of bamboo and terra cotta that I had bought from a travelling merchant; but he
threw the pipe away, snorting and disdainful. I had offended him: he was no
porter. I begged him, implored him, promised him a suitable tip, but he would
not yield, until I myself had put into my pocket a piece of the narguileh, indeed
the heaviest. Just as well: his honour was saved, and my pipe in safe keeping.
These, however, were but insignificant stings amid the magnificent world
surrounding me on every side. The deep green tea plantations alternated at every
turn with the virgin forests, where the most enormous trees bore hundreds and
thousands of orchids on their boughs. The tree ferns, in their slender elegance,
raised their heads over the edges of the abyss, reunited in little families of three,
four, and five individuals. The flora grew richer the farther one descended into
the deepest, hottest valley, and the ferns, in a hundred different species, revealed
to me all the most delicate, aristocratic, and multicoloured forms in their
exquisitely beautiful family.
After traversing ten miles among the charms of a landscape unique in the
world, we arrived at the Runjit, a river crossed over by a very unsafe and shaky
wooden bridge. On foot I wanted to see where this river joins the Teesta. The
latter has cold, sea-coloured water, whereas the Runjit has dark green water,
bright as emerald, and warmer. The two waters flow together a long way,
without fusing, until, tamed by long contact, they embrace, merging into a single
wave.
The Runjit forms the border between independent Sikkim and Bhutan. I
crossed it in a giant canoe dug out of a single tree-trunk. One could not even
consider crossing it on the rattan suspension bridge, so worn not even a monkey
could safely use it. I was unable then to experience the feeling of motion these
most ingenious bridges give, slung like hammocks between sky and water and
on which only one person at a time can cross. At the bottom of this water many
motionless trouts were visible.
Beyond the river I came upon a very poor village, from whose wooden
houses were emerging dirty, dishevelled, ragged people. They spoke of being
Magìa, but who knows what they meant by this word. To me they looked like
Limbù.40
They were extremely greedy for money, and for that money they were willing
to show me their hands, and sold me jewels and a sacred trumpet made from a
human femur. A girl fled in fear into her hut and shut herself in there because I
had asked to see her necklace with the goal of buying it. I gave another pretty
girl a box of wax matches decorated with a small mirror, which made her beam
ecstatically before the object, so new and curious. Some men wanted to grab it
away from her, but I made them give it back to her, for which she showed me
great gratitude. It was impossible to persuade a fisherman to sell me a splendid
sort of net that I have seen used in several places across India, most often on the
banks of the Ganges. He replied to me that without that net he could not eat and
so would die of hunger. I kept piling up the number of rupees in my hand and,
jiggling them about fondly, answered him (always through an interpreter) that
with those fine silver coins he could have made himself another net and bought
other things too. He stared at the rupees, looked at the net; yet I kept my money
and he his net.
An old drunk emerged from a hut, but no one except some boys laughed at
him. On the contrary, everyone else was visibly ashamed, and happy only when
they had him removed from my sight.
I crossed back over the river in the same pirogue; but when I wanted to try to
play my trumpet made from a human femur, I saw the most unfathomable
dismay come over the face of my oarsmen, and a Lepcha41 flung himself at my
knees, imploring me not to play, since if I did, we would all be drowned.
I dared not continue, since the distress written across that poor Lepcha was
too harrowing, and I stepped back down onto the right bank of the river, re-
entering English India, where a curious incident awaited me that threatened to
become an outright accident. A native was scooping some water from the river
with a lovely cup made of tree-bark and with a graceful handle. I had never seen
anything like it before and wanted to have it for my museum. Bargaining, I got it
for eight annas.
I was proud of this acquisition and went about showing it at a distance to my
companions, when suddenly out of a hut came a young, not unattractive woman,
who flung herself upon me and, without leaving me a second in which to defend
myself, seized the precious cup from me, screaming and hurling who knows
what curses against me. I called out for my interpreter and companions, but no
one heard me; and I grappled with this strapping woman, who, stronger than me,
kept the cup tightly tucked in an armpit. Seeing, however, that it was not very
safe there, she moved it between her thighs, which I could approach at my peril,
thus paying for my decency with my property rights. I was still trying to resolve
the problem for the best when I found myself surrounded by many Indians
armed with bows, sticks, and their wrath, who closed ranks about me with
threatening cries.
Thereupon my travel companions became aware of my struggle and,
laughing, ran to my aid, thinking, however, that I had wanted something quite
other from this young woman than my cup. For a few moments I was considered
victim to an access of erotic fury. A young Russian, however, correctly grasped
the situation and helped me wrest the cup back from the woman. I then gave her
to understand, through the interpreter, that the cup was mine, since I had bought
it from an Indian man, and having suddenly seen him among the many men who
had rushed toward me, I pointed him out to the young shrew. It turned out that
this man was her husband, and without consulting her had sold an object that not
only was hers but was cherished by her.
Ope, ye heavens! Never shall I forget the look of shame and compunction on
the face of that poor husband. She punched him with her fists and scolded him
with words I could not understand but that must have been extremely harsh,
given the effect they produced. He was silent, visibly repentant, and implored me
with his gaze to return the cup to the aggrieved woman without whose
permission he had sold it. The bad thing was that he did not want to return the
eight annas to me; and I wanted either the cup or my money. I doubled, tripled
the price; but there was no way of obtaining the cup. I took back the money, and
the woman retrieved the cup, which, without the intervention of the courteous
Russian and the explanations and translations of my interpreter, might well have
landed me in a very bad position.
Our meal was in the entryway of a small mud house, which also served as a
shop, and I ate with a poet’s appetite, devouring chocolate, bread, a sandwich,
oranges. Some itinerant merchants were watching us, sternly silent. Their
natures did not correspond with ours. And yet I felt a keen need to make contact
with those men.
 A sprightly, cheerful child was grazing some kid goats close by us; and with
some effort I made friends with him, by gifts of oranges and paise. He put out
his hand, then brought it reverently to his brow and saluted me, with a beautiful
smile. He, at least, was a brother to me.
While we sweated on the bank of the Runjit, in Darjeeling it was snowing
heavily, and upon our return the snow was still whitening the very tops of the
hills of the capital of English Sikkim.
The Himalayan chain was a dazzling, adamantine white on the blue horizon,
hundred-peaked, and a deep sigh scarcely sufficed to pour out the fullness of
emotions that flooded me.
What a beautiful day I had spent! I had touched the soil of independent
Sikkim, had seen the trouts of the Runjit, and struggled bodily with a Lepcha
woman! […]
Monday, 6 March. I am leaving Darjeeling and Sikkim, tenderly and for the
last time saying goodbye to the Kanchanyanga. My Bhutanese and Nepalese
merchants come to say goodbye to me too, sad to see the departure of one of the
good victims whom they have been fleecing on a daily basis for nearly a month.
Shortly after waking up, I looked out the window and saw them already
crouching on the ground on the esplanade of the Doyls Hotel. I quickly hid
myself and shut myself up to write and work. But to take my meal I had to leave
my rooms, and however much I ran, they had already snagged me, offering me a
large Nepalese knife, a prayer machine, a rosary, or a trumpet made of a human
femur.
‘After breakfast, after breakfast …’ And off I went.
Even during the meal, too, they peered in the window and banged on the
panes, displaying their wares. And again I would go out and, according to the
mood of the day, already variable in me, highly variable at those altitudes, would
go down to bargain or refuse any discussion.
But they always smiled and followed me everywhere and annoyed me to the
point of making me a hydrophobe. Nothing more closely resembles a fly than a
merchant from Sikkim. Shoo him away and he returns, change place and he
returns, close your eyes and you hear him buzzing again. Do the vile thing and
swat him, and he won’t die; cruelly crush him in your hands, and breathing out
his last breath, he will bequeath to his daughter, sister, mother the endless task of
pestering you and keeping up an eternal buzzing designed to make you curse life
and contemplate suicide. A travelling merchant of Sikkim can be insulted but
accepts the insults as politeness, he can be beaten and, scratching himself, he
smiles to your face. It is true that he could be killed, and perhaps then he would
not leave behind the fly’s legacy; yet having reached the age of fifty without a
murder on my hands, I shall die virgin of human blood.
And if these merchants are tedium itself, annoying as flies and untiring as
Tamerlane’s ant,42 they are as thieving as … as the most thieving of European
thieves. They ask you a price two, three, even ten times higher than the true
value of an object, they sell you fake coins, fake jewels; little musk-deer pouches
rich in fur and almost empty. There is no trickery they do not try, no fraud they
do not know, no Judaic merchant’s eloquence they do not use.
This, however, is not a quality peculiar to the travelling merchants of Sikkim,
because I have found equal merit in many other of their brethren in Baroda,
Geepore, Bombay. The best way to defend oneself from their clutches is to have
at one’s side a smart, honest servant who speaks their language. It is also good to
bully them and treat them rudely: never hurry to buy, nor show a great desire to
buy. If you are propelled by curiosity, by impatience to possess an object, you
will immediately expose your vulnerable side to your enemy, who studies your
physiognomy and counts up your desire in rupees. The object you think is
unique, that you don’t want to let slip out of your hands, is actually common,
and tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, the same merchant will be offering
others that are choicer and less expensive. Feign the greatest indifference, show
disdain, hold off your purchases to the last hour before your departure, and you
will be glad to have received my advice, the fruit of cruel experience gained at a
considerable cost in rupees.

Chapter 11

From Darjeeling to Calcutta and from Calcutta to Benares – The

Sacred City of Hinduism – Temples and Palaces, Cows and Monkeys –
Muslim Sepulchres, and a True Saint [– The Ruins of Sarnath – A Visit
to the King of Benares – Two Bayadères – Hindu Jugglers and Snake
Charmers]

To go from Darjeeling to Benares, I was forced to see Calcutta again, and

remained there the least amount of time possible. I shall never forget the sad
hours I had to spend in customs in order to send on my collections and some of
my trunks to Bombay. There is a certain hall there, or rather a little room or stall
up one flight, where many clerks, separated, like horses or oxen, by wooden
partitions, sweat, spit blood, or smoke. The place is rank with all human odours,
and had Dante seen it, he would have made it a circle in which to punish people
who had been too finicky and epicurean.43
But now I have left Calcutta, this time never to return. A night and nearly a
day of railway travel take me to Benares, where I check in at Clark’s Hotel,
clean, cool, the most likeable hotel in all of India, maintained by a lady who
bears all the grace and delicacy of her sex. On my table I find an alcaraza44
filled with almost frozen water, fragrant with the delicate fragrance of moist
earth; and in my toilet chamber I find a bath that washes away the dust of the
voyage and restores both my body and my morale.
A single day spent in Benares is worth ten years of a common life spent
among the annoyances of a bureaucratic job and the idleness of a poorly
ventilated cafe. There, you gather enough sensations and memories to last an
entire lifetime. Benares, the greatest of battlefields between Buddha and
Brahma, which twenty-five centuries ago was already a famous city,
commanding the admiration of all of Asia when Rome was still a baby, when
Athens was barely beginning to raise its head, when Tyre was founding its first
colonies, when Babylon was vying for primacy with Nineveh.
Benares today is not yet a ruin, but one can hear in it the groans of a weary
old age. It is still the Rome of Hinduism and a major centre of the Mohammedan
religion, but as in Europe’s Rome the memories of the past overshadow any
fertile stirrings of the present. The Gods are old in the Orient as in the Occident,
and if Benares still counts 1,470 shivalas45 and 280 mosques, out of those
temples step somnolent throngs, fakirs inebriated with opium and asceticism; the
warm thought of Indian youth has forsaken shivalas and mosques and looks to
the West, envying Europe in its fever.
Early in the morning I betook myself to the Ganges banks, when the first rays
of the sun were scattering into the blue air the last mists blanketing the yellow
waves of the sacred river. To that site a Brahman had led a virgin cow, which
gives milk without having known love, diminutive in form, gilded in its horns,
oiled and perfumed in its hoofs, covered in jewels. She is brought in a carriage
that is also a small temple, and there she remains the whole day, ready to receive
the adoration and alms of the faithful. And at the feet of that sacred cow was
prostrate a white woman, slender and elegant as a palm tree, wrapped in
dazzlingly white linens embroidered with gold and silver. She hid her face in
veils, but not so much as to hide her jet-black, blazing eyes, kept narrowly in
place by a hedge of lashes so thick as to seem a crown of thorns, thorns that
seemed to sting and caress, arousing desires at once amorous and cruel. The
colour of her skin, white as bronze when it is barely cast from the furnace and
made to scald any flesh that might have touched those oriental velvets. But no
sooner could any lust emerge than it was extinguished in contemplation of that
woman, in whose face had hardened a boundless, marmoreal sorrow, almost
beyond hope. And yet she had prostrated her queenly beauty and her martyr’s
pains at the feet of a milk-cow from which, humbly praying, she invoked grace.
From a fine little golden vessel she had poured some sort of ointment, and with
her hands was anointing the hoofs of the dumb ruminant beast; and after praying
long and long weeping, she tossed the Brahman a fistful of rupees and returned
to her palanquin, which, with four coolies black as ebony, attended her a little
farther on.
This was a day of great solemnity, and the temples were packed. Amid all the
coming and going of the pious throngs, the hundred-coloured crowd, in the
temple of sacred cows, I though I still saw the white angel from the morning.
The crowd parted, as though in involuntary respect, before that shade, who
slipped silently amid men and women, utterly absorbed in her grief and the
mysteries of her faith. I sought her, longed to follow her, but lost my way among
those human tides delirious with asceticism.
At sunset, however, I found her again at Bishasharnath, in the temple of
Shiva, the favourite God of the Benarese, there where they worship an idol, said
to be the king of all India’s Gods. That temple is also called the Golden Temple,
for the golden tiles that cover it and were paid for by the famous raja of Punjab,
Ranjit Singh. There pilgrims in the thousands rush from all parts of India to
worship Shiva and leave their offerings. And this offering site is no meagre
alms-collection box like ours, but a ditch a half-metre deep and a metre square,
in which copper paise and silver rupees clink together and glisten. Ranjit Singh
himself filled it once with gold coins.
That evening the gold roof of Bishasharnath was glistening in the last rays of
the dying sun, while beneath the temple vaults it was already night. The crowd
was thickening, jostling, fermenting in the warm breath of men and the harsh
perfume of sandalwood, rosewater, and jasmine. Boys, youths, and old men
rubbed elbows without looking, without thought to politeness, and more than
one trembling, decrepit old man was leaning against the wall in order not to be
knocked over by the drunken, furious wave. A burning brazier shot sparks from
its gilded rims, and I, with my own arms, removed from there a poor old woman
upon whose tattered and oily clothing the sparks were playing, while she, lost in
ascetic contemplation, gazed upward, beseeching Shiva for who knows what
favour. Two bells hanging at arm’s height gave a heavy, high-pitched peal, rung
by all the pilgrims who, passing by, took the clapper and drew out their two
notes of adoration and noise. I broke open that tangle of black, sweating flesh,
trod who knows how many garlands of jasmine and rose, and to seek less impure
air, I turned to the darkest part of the temple, where beneath a smaller temple a
huge lingam,46 looking like the isle of some microscopic little lake, was leaking
out thick drops of butter amid the dankness of the Ganges’s sacred water. There,
on the edge of that small lake before the image of Shiva, my white lady lay
prostrate still, her eyes amid those shadows sparkling like black diamonds. At
her side she had the little golden sacred tabernacle for oblations, and from it she
drew grains of cooked rice and curcuma powder and jasmine petals, which at
intervals she lay on the lingam, after fervently, eloquently praying. I hid behind a
column and contemplated her long and lovingly. Although I could not make out
her words, I understood that the poor woman was sterile, calling out for a child,
seeking, with the fervour of faith, to wrest from the God of fertility one of the
many seeds that Nature, so prodigal, was denying her. Oh, why would Shiva not
comfort that angel, why would he not give that woman her sex’s supreme joy,
that of motherhood?
She did not see me, nor shall I ever again see her, nor can I hope that she will
ever read these lines of mine.
Coming home sad and weary, given the sad things, and the excess of things, I
had seen this day, I thought, oh, why in every place on earth, alongside religious
feeling, one of the highest, most sublime needs of the heart, was the parasite of
priestly simony born; why, alongside the divine, humanitarian dogmas of the
Buddha was there born the ridiculous, trite bric-a-brac of holy trumpets and
drums made of human skulls; why out of the bowels of the terrible, grand
mythology of India did the abject worship of the lingam and milk-cow arise?
Why, alongside the sublime morality of the Parsis, must we find the vultures and
ravens of the Tower of Silence47 and the faithful who wash their face with cows’
urine? Why has the rose always mildew and worms; why in the grain-stalk that
gives us bread, is a fungus born that kills us? Why, in Noah’s grape-cluster must
a malign fungus nest, to poison our nectar of joy?
Truly, in the devil, good sense and common humour have incarnated a great
truth. The devil complements the angel – and is more necessary, and more
inevitable, than the angel.48
But the white ghost has drawn me far, and we must return to the banks of the
Ganges, where a large boat awaits us by which the temples and palaces of
Benares will pass in review.
Oh, how many ruins, oh, what a weight of weary, sickly asceticism! The
palaces alternate with the temples, all heavy and grotesque and ruined. The guide
presents them to us: ‘There it is, that building more ruined than all the others
belongs to a Brahman, that other one belongs to the temple of monkeys, and that
one there to the Raja of Benares.’ How rusty and leprous it is! Out the cracks in a
window is born a giant cactus, and between one wing and another of a palace,
coconut palms and rubbish teem. ‘Here there used to be a palace, but it collapsed
in a landslide.’
Amid those giants’ ruins on the bank the faithful sit or kneel, and you see
them dip their heads into the Ganges tide and then pour some drops from their
cupped hands into their mouths. Without looking our way, these good people
plunge into the asceticism of an intensely ardent faith.
We descend to visit the temple of the king of Nepal. You climb first by a very
modest stair, where a hearty Ficus religiosa has grown between the walls, and is
splitting them apart. Along the road two lingams rearing their heads bear the
recent traces of libations and offerings. In a sort of chapel, another, finer,
broader, painted lingam is bathed by the Ganges water that drips through a large
grass vessel hanging over it. Around a tabernacle are sculpted in wood the
lewdest scenes, with a humour at once comic and erotic. I admire two young,
handsome Brahmans, like two angels, who have physiognomies too shrewd and
intelligent to believe in such nonsense. Clearly they are gleaning the last tributes
of the ignorant populace left in the wake of the ancient faith. From a window,
however, a poor madman who has lost his reason through praying shouts and
cackles, declaiming a sacred book he is holding.
I left speechless and humiliated. I hastily visited the mosque of the king of
Delhi, saw a dead boy submerged in the Ganges with an amphora at his neck,
saw pyres lighted and consumed, saw ravens floating on the river over black
firebrands that were human corpses badly burned so as to spare kindling. The
note of sorrow rose steadily in intensity, and the caricature of the human ideal
appeared before me more grotesque than ever.
Like a victim I let myself be carried to the Durga-kund-shivala, or temple of
monkeys. More than a thousand monkeys are kept there by the priests or by
public charity. They have an amazing pool to bathe in, and a church with the
golden image of a great ape, and the faithful who bustle about ring the large bell
that hangs there. Within the surrounding wall, a tamarind, twelve centuries old
and the only clean thing in all this dungheap, hides the she-monkeys as they give
birth among its hearty roots, and casts a pious shade over all that human and
anthropomorphic stench. The monkeys assail you for jujubes, corn, oranges.
They are so old they have no fur left, are snotty-nosed, ringworm-afflicted, full
of sores, and drag along on weary limbs to receive from you the tribute of fruits
to which public charity has accustomed them.
The environs of that temple-sty are plundered by the sacred monkeys, who,
not content with being housed and fed so splendidly, go thieving in nearby
gardens. Anyone who kills them is punished by death; yet in the silence of night
some impious person does avenge himself on these filthy beasts and, after killing
them, buries them at the feet of the trees they were out to sack. Had Virgil
known Benares, he would have added another Sic vos non vobis to his
Bucolics.49
Archaeologists and protectors of animals will shed tears of emotion in
Benares, artists will shed tears of aesthetic admiration for the peerless ornaments
of various temples; I, had I wept, would have shed tears of shame to see how low
man can sink through ascetic delirium.
However, I wanted to see everything, and see it I did, like someone who
fulfils a hard and painful obligation. Bishasharnath, or the golden temple, is
dedicated to the idol Bishashar or Shiva, the tutelary god of Benares, and the
holiest of holy idols of Benares.
I also saw a temple with cows and a stupendous bull who was husband to all
those milk-cows, fatted to the glowing point by generous devotees. It is there
that I saw the urine of those cows drunk with pious compunction, it is there I
realized that the most rigidly faithful Benarese send their servants in the morning
to fetch the water in which the mendicant Brahmans have their feet washed and
then devoutly drink of it.
It is there that in a corner I saw a comely youth who had been squatting for
who knows how many years in the ashes, naked, pale, dim-witted with
asceticism. He was entirely covered in ashes, and three of his followers were
worshipping him, picking up for him the coins thrown his way.
I also saw the Well of Wisdom. Great is the name – and small the thing. A
fairly shallow puddle of not very clean water that a priest offers the faithful in a
silver cup, thereby gathering abundant alms. When the Gods of the Indian
Olympus struggled with one another for possession of amrita, or the ambrosia of
the immortals, fierce Shiva carried off the whole cup for himself alone, having
emptied it into a vessel of his own. In his haste, however, some drops fell upon
the earth, filling the Well of Wisdom.
And where do I place the chapel of the Giaggenoot, where around an
amorphous statue of a giant you see the oddest things in the world, etites,50
shells, idols large and small? And where do I put the beggar’s temple, a miracle
of ornamental art, where an artist could enjoy a lifetime of aesthetic meditation?
And how shall I ever forget that comic temple where a sly, malign priest beats
sinners on their shoulders with a stick rapped in rags to wash away their guilt? A
servant robs, and with the stolen money goes to pay the priest, who absolves
him, striking him more or less gently, not according to the gravity of guilt but
according to the significance of the contribution. It is the form of our confession
without the annoyance of having to blush before another human being. It is a
cleverer invention than our own.
About all these temples you have narrow, crowded streets, full of people
praying and buying sacred trinkets, holy shells, holy stones, lingams, tabernacles
for home worship, the same sort of bric-a-brac industry you see around St
Peter’s.
I stared into the faces of all those people drunk with asceticism, but managed
to find nought but a formal cult lacking in all respect. In the Benares temples I
saw boys thrashing themselves and men gabbling like beasts. And everywhere, a
stench of livestock and urine mingling with the pleasant perfume of burnt
sandalwood, and mixtures of the grotesque, the mysterious, and the lewd; an
orgy of colours, light, and shadows, a total wreck of human reason, dignity, good
sense. And in that shipwreck floated only the bass note, the vile note of the priest
reaching out his hand and, content with a farthing, shouting, Bakshish!
Bakshish!51
I roamed about in those sacred stables, in those cluttered streets, among those
sweating and soiled masses, as a man struck speechless and saddened, as a pity-
laden physician who walks through the halls of a hospital full of the dead and
dying, and in that pandemonium of vulgar simonies and religious cataleptics I
thought that benign fate had, however, spared me an uglier scene, a spectacle
even more humiliating.
At the gates of Benares even today, perhaps, you can find an aghor-punt,
human pessimism in its most cynical expression. This is a naked biped, made
like you, born like you from the viscera of a human Eve, but who holds in his
hands a skull of which he has eaten the eyes and brain, and upon which he has
long exercised his teeth, gnawing at the flesh. That skull is the cup in which he
drinks water, milk, aqua vitae, cow urine. You toss him a coin and he thanks you,
you spit in his face and he thanks you, you slap him and he answers with a smile
that everything is the same for him, that everything in this world has equal value.
In Benares there are many Muslim sepulchres, among which distinction falls
on that of Sheikh Muhammed Ali Hazin Guilani. This holy man had his tomb
built within his lifetime, and sometimes went there on Thursdays and sat doling
out alms: ‘He sees death approaching without fear,’ said a Hindustan poet, ‘who
considers it the door to immortality; verily, death does not change the state of a
man who has learned to die, who is still alive.’ […]

Chapter 13

The Population of India – Confessions of an Anthropologist – Portrait

of the Hindus [– Clothes in India – General Physiology of the Hindus –
Food and Beverages – The Liquors of Ancient India – Pan supari,
Tobacco, and Opium – The Moral Character of the Hindus – Five
Kinds of Greeting]

The last census for India dates back to 1881 and sets the population of the
Indian empire at 252 million; but to do a bit of ethnological analysis of this large
figure, we must go back to the previous census, of 1871, in which the subject
residents of the English government directly or indirectly numbered 186 million,
which broke down approximately as follows:

In a forthcoming scholarly work of mine, ‘Studii sull’etnologia dell’India,’ I

attempted to sketch, with much modesty and a great deal of restraint, an
ethnography of India. Permit me here to give you the most important
conclusions of my studies.
I would distinguish in India the following different ethnic types.

1. The Aryan-type Hindus are probably the children of Aryans and indeterminate
races, but autochthonous and older than they. For me, however, the Aryans too
are a historical myth, in which truth is mingled with quite a bit of fog, and
perhaps many errors too. Faithful to my old sceptical yet prudent dogma that in
classifying the races we must exclude to whatever extent possible their origin, I
assert with much reservation that in India today we have a great mass of Aryan-
type black or very dark men; but let us immediately add that science today does
not possess the material necessary for giving these races precise anthropological
traits, nor to mark their boundaries, nor to provide an ethnical analysis.

2. The Malaysian-type Hindus, who live especially along the Malabar coasts and
in the south of India, black or very dark skinned, but who have the craniological
and physiognomic characteristic of the Malaysian race.

3. The Semitic-type Hindus, found in the north of India and the Nilgiris.

4. The Mongols, of whom we have many varieties, especially in Sikkim.

5. The Jews of India. In the Malabar they are both white and black. The white
ones form a moderately populous community in Cochin, the black are scattered
about; but like the white ones, they can read the Bible in Hebrew.

6. The Parsis.

7. The Muslims. I speak less scientifically here, as it is extremely difficult to

separate them anthropologically from the Hindus, with whom they are cross-
bred, especially as a result of their polygamy. Perhaps some accurate
anthropologist study of certain regions of India, such as Lucknow, Agra, Nizam,
could allow us to recognize even today the existence of more or less pure
Turanic races. It is more prudent, however, to speak of Muslims rather than of a
Turanic, or if you will, a Scythian, race. Hunter52 too says very aptly that to this
day the Muslim of the Ganges Delta differs as much ethnically from the Afghan
as the lower-caste Hindu of the same delta differs from the Brahman.

8. An infinite number of savage races, who can be considered relics of

autochthonous races or races settled from time immemorial in India, and who
have maintained themselves purely or partially, having been bastardized, united
with invading races.

India’s ethnography can still be traced only in its most general lines, and
anyone who would enter into details would risk seeing his own statements
destroyed tomorrow.
We must apply a great deal of dedication to gathering skulls, portraits, and
measurements before making a complete fusion of different ethnic elements,
preparing the necessary material for future research.
We must, in classifying the Indian races, greatly distrust the language, the
degree of civilization, and religion.
Following philological criteria, we have built a castle of cards of the
Dravidian races that does not hold up to examination of the facts; as for
civilization, we find several savage tribes who, surrounded by a stronger race
much more advanced along the way of progress, have been able to assume the
veneer, without intrinsic merit, of a certain civil tinge that dazzles the impatient
or superficial observer; whereas men of intelligence and even advanced, perhaps,
to a certain degree of civilization, finding themselves, by peculiar accidents,
isolated and dispersed, have been able to fall back and then remain at a level of
savage barbarity. As for religion, it is not necessary to demonstrate the dangers
of adopting it as a classificatory criterion. Christians are represented today by
almost all human races, and anyone who lumps together all the people who
swear loyalty to Mohammed would create the biggest mess in the world,
bringing together, among others, Aryans with the purest Turanic Mongols.
As for the filiation and kinship of the Indian races, I think that, today, one
cannot say anything other than this. India in deepest antiquity possessed
hundreds if not thousands of races that gradually, by dint of their progress and
owing to large foreign invasions, came closer together and in part merged. Thus,
over the long course of time, an almost homogeneous mass formed in the great
centres, while here and there ancient types emerged owing to atavism. Some
isolated tribes, however, doubtless remained, separated by thick forests and by
high mountains, and who even today can give us an idea of what pre-Aryan and
pre-Muslim India was like. To assert more precise dogmas or enter into more
minute particulars is not to do science, but rather to write ingenious
ethnological novels.
But let us go on to study the Aryan-type Hindus.
In describing the Hindus, what type shall I take as a model? Perhaps the
Naiads of Malabar, pariahs among pariahs, or the Brahmans of the highest
hierarchy? Shall I take the hyperdolicephalic Hindus I have seen walking
through the streets of Benares or the black Romans of Calcutta?
I shall take a median type, excluding all those who have a Malaysoid and
Mongoloid type, and I shall trace my outlines with great caution; since in Europe
we have few Hindu skulls and in India they have taken few measurements.
Before taking up the scalpel, however, permit me to go back again for a
moment to the presumed origins of the Aryans and the current state of the
ethnological question of India. It will not be wasted time to formulate well the
terms of the issue, even at the risk of repeating myself or insisting too much on a
single concept.
Up until now, historical tradition, very obscure in deepest antiquity, and
languages have, almost by themselves, served as taxonomic criteria. That these
are utterly impotent with respect to their appointed purpose is borne out by
Brace’s paradoxical statement ‘Colour and physical traits are not distinctive
signs of race in India. Nowhere has blood been more purely preserved; yet
colour and the tall physical type are found to vary infinitely, according to the
position, climate, and food.’53
Just what is a race, then, if colour and features do not serve to define it? The
ethnography of India will be traceable with some certainty once we have
assembled many portraits, many skulls, and many measurements. Then we will
be able to say, the Hindus of today are made this way and differ from other
people in these particular traits, and so we will have marked a fixed point in the
evolutionary history of one of the most populous races on our planet.
As for tracing the ethnic history of this people, I think we shall never reach
that stage, as will happen with all the great ethnic races; because ethnography,
when it is concerned with origins, is, and always will be, a historical novel. A
troubling state of affairs for anyone searching for the truth, but an agreeable and
amusing thing for all those who, with few, confused facts and few, nebulous
traditions, manage to erect one of those great card-castles known as ethnological
theories.
And what does theory tell us today? It tells us that the noblest of the world’s
races originated in central Asia and scattered from there, walking westward and
eastward. In the west they founded Persia, built Sparta and Athens, laid the first
stone in the eternal city of seven hills. Other Aryans pressed onward as far as
Spain to mine silver, and went to England to smelt tin. At the same time another
ethnic stream braved the steps of the Himalaya, populating the Punjab and the
north of India.
These our most noble fathers, these men whom the learned Germans, with
little modesty, called the Indo-Germanic race (for why not Indo-Mediterranean
or Indo-Latin?) were shepherds and farmers; and with animals tamed for the first
time by them, with metals molten in their primitive furnaces, with dreams
dreamed in the cool, calm nights of their highlands, they gave us the skeleton of
our industries, our languages, our religions.
All this is lovely, poetic, highly seductive, but it is a historical novel or a
mythology of history. With wearying toil the philologist discovers a gem amid
the darkness, cleans it, facets it, polishes it, and sets it in one of those dazzling
little gold caskets that are ethnic theories, presenting it to us as an image of truth;
but a gem alone does not make treasure.
The Vedic singers of fiery, red-hot India, praying to the Gods for long life,
were asking for a hundred winters, remembering the astonishing cold in which
they were born and raised. The words for father, mother, brother, sister are
roughly the same, whether they are spoken on the banks of the Ganges or the
Thames or the Tiber; and the lovely word that in many European languages
means girl recalls the Aryan girls who milked cows. Here is another philological
gem, the glory and wealth of modern philology: except that this and many other
philological jewels do not explain to us why today the children of the Celts are
brown-haired and the children of the Cimbrians blond, nor why a very blonde
Scandinavian with eyes blue as the Indian heavens should be so different from a
Spanish woman with jet-black hair and eyes black as the polar night.
Far be it from me to think to diminish the importance of the wondrous
discoveries and bold divinations of comparative philology, but the philological
origin of European languages still does not give us the genealogical history of
the Europeans. In all likelihood the Aryans who came from the centre of Asia
were already differentiated from one another when they forsook their country,
and to reach this point they must have found Europe already inhabited by other
people; and in their long route, who knows how many other peoples they
encountered, displaced, and dragged along with them in their lengthy voyage,
before becoming the fathers of the modern Europeans.
If, with quite a bit of modesty, I could express my opinion on a theme that has
strained the minds of the greatest philologists and modern historians, I would say
it was highly probable that the Aryans gave Europe a good deal more of its
words, arts, industries, and religions than they did of its blood. And so it
happened that a people younger in terms of civilization, perhaps even semi-
barbarous and wild, adopted the outer apparel carried to them by men of Asia,
yet under that apparel preserved their own limbs and their features.
But let us step out of the fog to stand upon the solid terrain of positive facts.
 The Hindu, as he is today, is a black man, or brown as roasted coffee or coffee
with cream,54 with invariably black, never curly hair, medium stature, small
hands and feet; the face a fine oval; a straight, almost aquiline nose; beard and
body hair less abundant than among modern Europeans; at times muscular, at
times slender, but generally with upper limbs more powerfully developed than
the lower ones.
If I had to choose the European who most resembles the Hindu, it would be
the Greek and Italian. If it is a term of nobility to resemble our Aryan fathers, we
are the most Aryan among all the Europeans, and the Finn-type Russians least
so. I, who have a sort of face quite common in southern Italy, would, if I were to
colour it black, quite easily pass for a Hindu.
Hodgson describes the Aryan of India as follows: ‘In the Aryan form there is
height, symmetry, lightness, and flexibility; in the face, an oval contour with a
wide brow, medium jaws and mouth, round chin, at a perpendicular to the brow,
regular, distinguished, and fine features; a long, straight nose with elliptical
nostrils; well-set, wide-open eyes, not slanted; the lashes, eyebrows, and beard
well developed; light and dark skin, often no longer as dark as that of many a
southern European.’55
The three most characteristic features of the Hindu face are the eyes, nose,
and mouth.
The eyes are large, oval, with an almost always rather gentle expression. They
are among the most beautiful eyes in the world, and in the bayadère girls of
whom we have dreamed since we were children as miracles of beauty, these eyes
form almost their sole charm. The lashes are long, the eyebrows very thick. It is
quite rare, almost impossible, to find in India the small, grey eyes, highly
common in Europe, that seem like glass shards lost on the path, formless and
meaningless.
The nose is long, straight, sub-aquiline, less long among the women, as with
us.
The mouth is large but beautiful and graced with teeth that are almost always
quite beautiful. The lips in all the races of India share the characteristic of being
fairly thick; I do not know whether for the sake of greater sensuality and thus
greater development of an organ that plays such a role in voluptuousness, or as a
result of some distant atavism that brought these features to India, as was the
case with the house of Habsburg. […]
 Chapter 15

The Hindu Woman – Her Position in the Social Hierarchies of India –

A Physical and Moral Sketch of the Indian Woman [– Ancient and
Modern Upbringing – Heroic Women – The Widow and the Stakes –
The Nautch-Girl – Female Poets and the Bayadères’ Poems – A King
Prisoner and Poet]

Woman, even for her most brutal detractors, makes up at least half of
humankind; but anyone who judges her fairly and reverently loves her, who is
rather more than half of the family of man; for through the beauties of her body
as well as the graces of her spirit, through tenderness of feeling as well as all the
powerful forces that she wields, she can exert, even upon us, a very great
influence for both good and ill. Indeed, I would venture to say that, having noted
woman’s hierarchical place in human society, we may judge from this a people’s
general degree of morality and progress. The greater the share of this in the
family horde, the more this is taken into account, the higher is the level of the
people into which she is born, lives, and dies, after having given the living joy
and peace, and to future people, blood and moral and religious direction. In the
nations that today occupy first place in the scale of civility, womankind gives us
the wife of Stuart Mill, who credits her with all his highest inspirations; it gives
us George Sand and Somerville, Agnesi and Mme de Staël; while in the lower
strata of humanity, a woman is nothing but a female of the species and, being
muscularly weaker, worsened by work and the injustices of men who are
stronger than she.
Hindu society is neither so high nor so low, and women, accordingly, find
themselves midway in it: woman is not entirely Frederick II’s squeezed and
trodden orange, but neither is she man’s boon companion.
A woman in India, upon coming into the world, is greeted with a curse and
received as a stroke of bad luck. As proof, one need only adduce some of their
names: Khayuto (cessation); Arna (no longer); Ghirna (disdained); Chee-Chee
(derogatory word).
It is certain that until the beginning of this century infanticide was extremely
common, especially among the Rajputs of the north. In the high aristocracy, in
fact, one sees few girls, and one wonders why. It seems that shortly, after being
born they are drowned in a tub of milk or poisoned with opium. It is certain that
in 1821 in Ceylon the males outnumbered the females, and in a single district of
that island, for every hundred men there were only fifty-five women.
When the Europeans upbraided the Hindus for these cruelties, the latter
would brutally reply, ‘Pay us the dowry for our daughters and they will live.’
And in fact the huge expense involved in marrying off a daughter has been the
primary cause of the infanticide of poor Indian girl babies.
The elder Walker opposed with all his might this inhuman usage in the
country he governed, and before leaving Gujurat he was saluted at the gate of his
palace by a young troop of upper-class girls, who owed their lives to him and
came to kiss the hem of his garments and shower him with flowers, hailing him
as their saviour, their second father.
In India, when a man does something badly, he is told, You’ve done it like a
woman; and he, when apologizing for anything at all, answers, What a woman I
am! Two cruel pronouncements that remind us of the Tuscan brutality that refers
to a bad speech (un discorso cattivo) by feminizing it as una discorsa.
Apparently, the sense of one’s own inferiority is so rooted in the Hindu woman’s
brain that she disdains her husband when he treats her with deference and
kindness. One of these women, speaking with some women friends of hers, said
disdainfully: ‘My husband’s behaviour fills me with shame, and I dare not show
my face. Such behaviour never used to be seen among us. He has become a
paranguay (European) and thinks perhaps I am one too.’ I found something
similar in Bolivia, where a woman sometimes demands to be beaten by her
husband, and where the proverb has it, Mucho me quiere, porque mucho me
aporrea!56
To corroborate these humiliating pictures of human nature, let us recall the
chivalric institution we see in India, in Rajastan on the occasion of the festival of
the bracelet. This festival is celebrated in the spring, and the ladies, giving a
bracelet to a youth, confer on him the title of adoptive brother. He tacitly accepts
serving as swain and paladin to the lady who has chosen him out of all men, and
yet on certain occasions he risks his life for her without her being able to thank
him publicly, or even give him the happiness of a smile.
At Seringepatur a woman’s work is paid three times less than a man’s. The
position of women in the Deccan is not as lowly; there, where her toils are equal
to a man’s, her rights are scarcely different. Even in the warrior tribes of the
north, a woman is valued more than elsewhere. Mars was ever the natural friend
to Venus.
One of the greatest misfortunes of the Indian woman, the one that alone
suffices to show her humiliating position within her society, is her being given in
matrimony from infancy, without ever being able to choose or refuse. She is sold
and contracted away like merchandise, and when she later understands what love
is and also wants to love, she must debate on the horns of this dilemma: either
crime or perpetual slavery. In the new family, which she enters at an extremely
early age, unless it be in rare, extremely fortunate circumstances, she must be the
humble, resigned slave of the mother-in-law, brothers-in-law, and all her new
relatives, and holy aspirations, just desires, and tender affections will be cruelly
crushed in her by the gears of patriarchal despotism, daily strife, family
concerns, and domestic jealousies.
And yet the woman of India is beautiful and good, with a tender, passionate
nature. She almost always has certain beautiful aspects: eyes black as night and
burning like the tropics, large, sealed off by long lashes and very thick eyebrows;
shoulders, arms, and breasts worthy of a Greek statue; small feet, unspoiled by
the constraints of tyrannical shoes, but embellished by rings and by long reposes.
Ugly aspects are skin colour, weak lower extremities, teeth blackened by daily
use of pan supari.57 Perhaps our judgment would be greatly improved if we
could see Brahman women and the ladies of the highest social classes, who live
in an enclosure scarcely less harsh than that of their Muslim sisters. I have,
however, been able to procure some photographs of women of the high
aristocracy and have seen among them the same type I have had occasion to
observe among the dancing-girls and the women of the people, who show to
everyone their flaws and merits.
Here is a quite flattering portrait of the Hindu woman made by an Englishman
in the 1873 Madras Athenaeum:
Those who have been able to know the flower of women in India will
tell you they are admirable in many respects. They are sensitive and
affectionate, gracious and lovely, and have a light, aerial way of
walking. The movements of their lathe-turned body have something
poetical about them. They have a tender heart and gentle speech. Their
fidelity to their husbands is proverbial. Their black eyes can send out
languid, graceful gazes or shoot burning rays of fire. They have an
affectionate tenderness for their children, and have often given touching
proofs of this.

If we foreigners do not appreciate Indian women, it is because we do

not know them sufficiently. Their oriental manners are no less natural,
 piquant, and delightful than those of European women. Should we
perhaps wish them to affect the manners of northern countries? Should
we perhaps wish them to leave their graceful clothing, the romantic
turn of their spirit, and make them forget their birth, their native land?

The Hindu woman at home is always shut up in her zenana,58 and sees the
world only through the parda.59 She goes out only with veil lowered, or is shut
up in a palanquin. In the trains there are carriages for dames seules even in the
third class, and from the palanquin they enter the carriage through a corridor
improvised with two pieces of cloth. At the arrival of the Prince of Wales in
Calcutta they wanted to make an exception to usual custom, and many ladies
dared to show themselves in open coaches with their husbands. Babù Iaganand
was even emboldened to introduce the prince into her zenana, although this
violation of India’s most sacred customs was greeted with universal opprobrium.
Scandal was shouted everywhere, and in the national theatre of Calcutta a
comedy was offered, full of unseemliness and obscenity, Iaganand and the
Prince, in which poor Babù was ridiculed. The English governor banned the
piece, but it was enough to hinder any other effort to rebel against the domestic
customs and usages of holy India.
Even when the husband has more wives, one alone is principal and superior,
the mother of the family. The others are merely upastri or bhogyà,60 concubines.
Only the first provides legitimate heirs; and not even kings, if they have sterile
wives, can have legitimate heirs from other women.
The English missionaries are greatly embarrassed when a Hindu who has
more than one wife wants to become a Christian.
Quite recently the Thakur of Bownagar, one of the most powerful rajas of
Katiawar, at the age of twenty wanted to convert to Christianity; but at seventeen
he had wed – in a single day – four wives, who were, respectively, 22,12,15, and
16 years old. Knowing that he could keep only one wife, he chose the fifteen-
year-old and repudiated the other. How Christian an act was that?
The Brahmans often have a great many wives in different places, whom they
visit every so often in their roving lives. But these women in turn lead lives
scarcely more virtuous than that of their husbands.
But generally in the lower classes, the Hindu is monogamous, and takes a
second wife only if the first is barren. Yet the first always remains at the head of
the family. Bachelorhood, however, is considered so abominable in India that a
husband remains a widower for only a matter of days. […]
 From Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful

Chapter 1

They will accuse me, perhaps, of vain arrogance and foolish pride, but in me
there cries out, louder than the fear of these accusations, the deep conviction that
aesthetics is still in its cabbalistic or metaphysical phase. Even in the best books
on the subject, the author’s idea is always couched in clouds of divination; you
find in them the apostle’s faith or the priest’s exorcism; the admirer’s enthusiasm
and a thirst for the ideal; in vain you search for science’s serene contemplation,
the pure and simple description of facts.
We have dealt with the beautiful as we earlier did with religion, politics,
morals. We have created Gods and codes before knowing the boundaries and
powers of the matter at hand, before having defined good and evil. Man has done
metaphysics before knowing physics and has believed in good faith that, by
resting his ladder on the clouds, once he climbed it he would be able to step back
down at will onto level terrain: instead, he has done continual somersaults, and
anyone following after has tried in vain to find a more secure point on which to
lean the ladder of science. When building houses, we have always made the
ground floor before the upper storey; yet building those other houses called
sciences, we have instead, almost always, made a point of constructing the top
floor first.
Of all the Gods who inhabit the human Olympus, the beautiful is one of the
most indefinable, the vaguest, so that many inferior peoples have confused it
with pleasure or other psychic elements; nor have they felt the need to create a
word for it. Even among us, high people of a higher race, the word exists and is
often used, but outlandishly, whimsically, and very few really would know how
to define it.
In books there are various definitions of the beautiful, indeed there are too
many, and their very number serves to indicate that common people and
philosophers alike circle about this great unknown, touch it – yet fail to embrace
it. Is it really some unsolvable logogriph, or some rolling fog that cannot be
contained in the frame of a definition?
Some definitions are patently metaphysical.
Gioberti teaches us that the sublime creates the beautiful; but what did he
mean by such a riddle?
 Let us not torment ourselves by trying to puzzle it out. For the same
philosopher managed to write, with a straight face, ‘Poetry and art are in general
the fantastic hypostasis of the ideal formula of what science really and
objectively offers us.’
Let us be off then, without a single regret!
Charles Blanc says, ‘Le beau procède de l’[h]umanité, et le sublime
appartient à l’univers!’1
And Paul Lenoir: ‘L’Etre, le Beau, le Vrai absolu sont des limites. Le poète et
l’artiste s’immortalisent en s’efforçant d’y atteindre.’2
The divine Plato himself, who, as we shall see further on, has given us the
most sublime definition of the beautiful, has, however, bequeathed us another so
metaphysical as to be theological: ‘The feeling for beauty is a reminiscence of
divine perfection.’
Other definitions, while not metaphysical, tell but a partial truth.
Thus, for example, Davanzati’s quite modest one: ‘The beautiful is what gives
pleasure.’
And these other definitions, all defective:

La perfection est l’[h]armonie du divers.3 – Wolff

L’euryt[h]mie est le suprème élément de la beauté.4 – Bellaigne

The beautiful is sensible perfection. – Mengs

Beauty is a figurative, objective perfection of material. The material’s
perfection consists in its analogy with our ideas; our ideas are the
consciousness of an aim; a house is perfect when it presents the idea
that it is exactly one with its material; the perfections can be considered
the agents of nature, among which the most perfect are those that in
their kind best fulfil their destiny. – Mengs

In these few lines is couched a deep truth, but how German, how
metaphysical the form!
La beauté véritable est dans l’intelligente adaptation des choses à leur
fin.5– Souriau
 Le beau pour le crapaud c’est sa crapaude.6 – Voltaire

The beautiful is the splendour of the true. – Plato

These last two definitions mark out for me the two poles of aesthetics, the
metaphysical and the physical.
Plato’s definition is at once a poem and an aesthetic treatise; it is one of the
loftiest and grandest things ever thought by man.
Voltaire’s definition is the sharp, satiric statement of a great truth; it is the
condemnation of all the metaphysical definitions; it is the assertion, full of good
sense, that the concept of the beautiful is essentially subjective.
If, instead of just a few definitions of the beautiful, I had wished to present a
hundred, or a thousand, I would have added nothing, because in these examples
you find represented all types that other authors on art or aesthetics have given
us in different words.
And here, I imagine, the reader is asking me, with irony or derision, ‘And
you, who have sat down to write a large volume on the beautiful, after haughtily
saying that all definitions hitherto given are metaphysical or incomplete, do you
hope to offer us a better one?’
No, I shall not be offering you either a better or a worse one, since I believe
that the definition of the beautiful, in the current state of positive or experimental
psychology, cannot be hazarded, any more than one can hazard that of pleasure
or pain.
But were you to hold a pistol to my chest and demand, if I valued my life, my
definition, I would tell you, The beautiful is the true + x.
And to determine, quite approximately, just what that x might be, I would add
that to that end I have written this book, which is my subjective definition of the
beautiful.
Let us then lay the beautiful on the anatomical table and proceed with the
autopsy. They have, after all, laid the Gods themselves on it, and the beautiful
will not disdain our knife, from the certainty that, unlike the Gods, it will rise up
young and more lively than ever after our dissection.
The beautiful per se exists neither in nature nor in art; but beautiful things do
exist.
It is the same as with the sweet and the bitter, the white and the black, the
good and the bad.
The beautiful, then, is an abstraction of our thought, and would be able to
exist if we did not have, on the one hand, an object that produces a sensation in
us and, on the other hand, a nervous centre which distinguishes in that sensation
a character common to many others, which we call beautiful.
Therefore, the beautiful is a fact of consciousness or, rather, the characteristic
of a sensation, like pleasure or pain.
The beautiful has very close ties to pleasure, but is not pleasure. All beautiful
things give us pleasure, but not all pleasures are beautiful.
In the beautiful, subjectivity so dominates the fact of consciousness that no
one can persuade us that a thing is beautiful when it does not please us. But just
as most people agree about a great many things, so too in aesthetic judgments we
have a consensus, oscillating around a centre; at times with wide differences, at
times with very narrow differences, depending on the degree of beauty and on
the beautiful things. In the following study of this consensus, we shall find
material with which to trace the first lines of a physics of aesthetics.
I once had the good fortune to have true scholars among the students in my
anthropology courses, and would give them problems in positive psychology to
solve.
Once I put to eight of these smart young people, all of them now professors,
the question: What, for you, is the most beautiful thing in nature? and what do
you find the most beautiful work of art?
Here are the eight responses:
M., from Verona: The starry sky and Giotto’s campanile.
M., from Urbino: A sunset on the sea and Giotto’s campanile.
E., from Prato: A sunset and the music of Bellini.
G., from Sinigaglia: The starry sky and the music of Rossini.
S., from Lucca: The sea and the music of Donizetti.
L., from Prato: A mountain panorama and Michelangelo’s David.
L., from Tuscany: A spring day and lyric poetry.
P., from Tuscany: My judging one thing more beautiful than another
would depend upon circumstances.
Were you to extend this aesthetic survey to infinity, you would be able to
gather as many answers as there are individuals, and you would have raw
material from which to cull the first, elementary law governing the beautiful.
There are beautiful things for all people on earth.
There are ugly things for all of them.
There are beautiful things for some, indifferent or ugly things for others.
In the gradations of aesthetic hierarchies, there are no two people alike,
because in the final judgment so many and such variable elements enter into play
that any repetition of perfect agreement becomes impossible; just as it is
impossible to obtain two identical five-number combinations twice in a game of
chance. And aesthetic judgment is quite different from a game of chance!
Nothing is vaguer, more undefinable, more indistinct than the aesthetic
element of many sensations. One might say that the beautiful is the extreme
opposite of mathematical truth, which must be clear and identical for all.
Even the best writers on aesthetics, even the most ardent worshippers of the
beautiful, when they write or talk, adopt an obscure, uncertain, often
incomprehensible language. They speak to us of pastosità,7 of chic, of good
taste, of a certain something, a je ne sais quoi, and often must let gesture
buttress the indeterminacy of their language, which is too blunt a tool to handle
the aesthetic element.
Mengs, as a consummate painter and strong thinker, had rights second to none
to speak to us of aesthetics, and to it he dedicated a darkly hued volume8 in
which, amid much fog, there are lightning flashes of genius.
When he speaks of drawing, chiaroscuro, colouring, or of the ideal of
Raphael, Correggio, Titian, the scalpel of his analysis penetrates more deeply
than a hundred others; but how much indeterminacy, how much obscurity his
words contain! He would like to be precise and remains foggy; he strives to be
technical, practical, and at each stroke falls into a metaphysical idealism.
In the first pages of his book, he begs that no translation be undertaken,
declaring the writing untranslatable; unless (he adds) the translation be made
under his direct control, since he is convinced that the ‘manner of writing of
which I avail myself, cannot be interpreted in other languages. In Italian it would
be unintelligible, in French it would seem ridiculous, even absurd, and might
offend the delicate ears of most writers and persons who read for simple pleasure
… ‘
And yet, if beautiful things exist, and if we have felt the need to think about
the beautiful and ascribe to it rules and laws, this entire world cannot escape a
calm and rigorous analytic process.
In every psychic phenomenon that refers to the aesthetic world, we find a
sensation, a feeling, and a thought; which is to say, the great human trilogy.
I (let us assume) have never seen an aurora borealis, nor do I know what it is,
nor have I ever heard talk of it. I look out of a window and see it. I feel the need
to exclaim, Oh, that is so beautiful!
And why do I find the aurora borealis beautiful?
The beautiful aspect of that great phenomenon is not the red of the sky, it is
not the flaming of the rays, it is not the grandeur of the scene; but in that red, in
those flames, in that grandeur there is a something more and a something other
than anything I have yet seen. This is aesthetic sensation or emotion.
And a centrifugal energy impels me to admire that phenomenon and to try to
see it again, and if I feel capable of this, I shall make myself reproduce it with a
brush or pen. This is feeling.
Then, I analyse the optical elements of that sublime scene, I compare them
with others I have already seen, I compare, I judge, I consult science. This is
thought.
Knowing how to isolate the aesthetic element from others that complicate it
and are invariably associated with it is a fact of a high order, a very lofty level of
evolution, which one arrives at only after a long experience culled in childhood.
Certainly, when Mummy, holding us in her loving arms, shows us the moon
or a rose and tells us, Look how beautiful that is! we understand nothing. Later,
however, hearing this epithet repeated a hundred and a thousand times and
applied to the most varied things, we manage to distinguish that that beautiful
thing provides us with a pleasure and is called beautiful; because it has a quid
more, a quid other than other similar things.
And beautiful is that which approaches or reaches the lofty type of a body, a
sensation, a phenomenon, a thought.
The universality of a feeling for the beautiful in all men is the most eloquent
testimony that all living beings tend toward an excelsior, that all progress or
raise themselves up; because among many good things they all choose the better,
and in the better seek the best, and beyond the comparative and superlative,
imagine a superlative of superlatives, which is the ideal.
Without comparisons, the beautiful is neither felt nor understood, so that it is
the excelsior of the normal type, it is the true + x; it is the splendour of the true.
 Even in the animal world there exist quite clear aesthetic energies, energies
which Darwin has exaggerated in making the prime cause of sexual selection.
Let us recall, but only in passing, the bull Durham, who preferred not to
fecundate lean or mud-spattered cows; the females of Chera progne,9 who refuse
the embrace of the males when they have had their long tail-feathers torn from
them, and which they are enveloped in only in mating seasons; and a silver
pheasant who was the favourite of all the females of his harem but was forsaken
for a more handsome rival when he damaged his plumes in an unfortunate
accident.
I have already battled Darwin’s exaggerations about sexual selection,10 and
this is not the place to repeat myself. It is enough to recall that the animals sense
the beautiful because they too are capable of choice, and they sense what it is
even outside the sexual realm.
And scarcely does man appear in the first twilights of the prehistoric ages
than we see him not only choosing the most beautiful women, but decorating
himself and his tools. If it is still permissible to draw a scientific distinction
between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, we may say that the two differ by an
aesthetic phenomenon.
Palaeolithic axes killed as well and as quickly as Neolithic ones; but the latter
were more beautiful.
Man painted himself and ornamented himself even before dressing and
making himself a home, and aesthetic feeling has been with him from the first
dawns of his history until today.
The Duke of Argyll, in his quarrel with Darwin, says that the beautiful is
nature’s purpose (!), and that the Creator is directly concerned with it. Darwin,
on the other hand, finds in the beautiful a rationale of utility for the individual
and for the species; and Wallace, defending Darwin for reasons of his own,
exclaims, ‘If God has the same idea of beauty that we do, then why did he make
so many ugly things, so many monsters, so many deformed beings?’11
The beautiful is always relative to the type of things we judge to be beautiful,
and here animals and humans, genius and the masses, are in agreement.
The hen which the rooster thinks is beautiful is the one which in the modesty
of her colours presents all the characteristics that are constant with and proper to
the rooster’s female. She may, moreover, be young, that is, capable of being
impregnated. Thus we find ugly a woman who is bearded, breastless, and
hipless. And a silver- or gold-coloured woman would also be ugly or monstrous.
 In all aesthetic appreciations we always find the need to encounter clear,
eloquent expression of type. And every colour, every form, every object in its
entirety, and every element of that object, has a proper type.
We have seen, for example, many horses, and have in our brains the type of
the perfect horse; so that if we see one that is either too lean or too fat, too small
or too large, too tall or too short, we judge it to be ugly. And when, on the
contrary, we judge a horse to be beautiful, we may be including secondary
judgments, which concern the colour of its hair, the form of its head, its neck, its
legs, its agility, etc.
As it is the property of marble statues to be white, a marble of dirty white
strikes us as ugly, and one that is very white we consider beautiful.
It is the property of the raven to be black, of the gazelle to be swift, of the
elephant to be huge; and we judge as beautiful a very black raven, a very
graceful gazelle, and a very large elephant.
It is pointless and puerile to debate whether there is an absolute for beauty.
The beautiful without the beautiful thing does not exist, and every object has a
beauty of its own, which is the prototype of that thing. There is a beautiful
human being, a beauty for the white race and for the black, the Malayan race and
the Hottentot; and the Medici Venus, stunningly beautiful in our eyes, is not so
for the Hottentot, who looks in vain for her mastodontic buttocks. And we
ourselves would correct that statue by adapting it to our own individual tastes,
now wishing it to have fuller breasts, a larger head, or a smaller foot; for every
one of us has in mind an individual type of feminine beauty, which hovers
around the average type for all civilized men.
If an absolute beauty exists for science, it can be only the average type of all
the individual types of well-constituted and intelligent men. In declaring what is
beautiful, we always have the result of many elements that may be added,
multiplied, or subtracted. Thus, two scars on human flesh may produce in us an
identical sensation, but we deem one beautiful and the other horrid. Thus, a scar
on the forehead from some cutting tool or fire may be judged beautiful; one upon
the neck from scurvy may be judged hideous.
In the constant, immutable types of nature, aesthetic disagreements are
impossible. Thus, the blue sky, the green woods, wide-hipped women, motley-
coloured birds, thick-maned lions are beautiful things in the eyes of all
beholders. But a long or short dress, sombre or bright colours, may be judged
either ugly or beautiful according to the taste of the times, fashion, or
individuals.
 The beautiful is the result of a comparison, not only of objects with nature
itself, but also with all other objects bearing some analogy of colour, form, size,
movement, etc. And truly, we cannot express the beauty of an object except by
immediately comparing it with another object, even if it be far lower in the
hierarchy. The child and the savage, like the poet and the man of genius, scarcely
receive the aesthetic emotion before they feel the need to make one or more
comparisons.
Before a frothing waterfall, the child, the savage, and the poet exclaim:
It looks like a flood of milk!
And a lovely rose looks made of wax.
And a flower made of wax and rag looks real.
A beautiful Grecian cup looks like the breast of a beautiful woman.
And the beautiful breast of a Venus looks to us like a Grecian cup.
Locks of hair are of ebony or the colour of wheat-stalks.
And the blonde wheat-stalks are a lady’s locks.
A blue eye is heaven.
And heaven is a sky-blue iris.
Flesh is of alabaster.
The young maiden is like a rose.
The palm tree is a column.
The sail is a seagull’s wing.
The peacock’s tail is a jewel box.
Teeth are pearls, lips are corals.
Dewdrops are diamonds.
A picture is a landscape and, conversely, a lovely landscape is a picture.
Etc., etc., etc.

Why this need of comparisons?

By the law of mental associations, because the sensation brings into
sympathetic synergy the centres of the brain, in which analogous sensations are
stored.
One of the most salient characteristics of all psychic facts, from the simplest
to the most complex, from the lowest to the highest, is that they present us with a
continual transformation of the initial motion, which often occurs with
extraordinary rapidity; so that our eye cannot connect the primum nascens and
the ultimum moriens.12
 An aesthetic emotion is already a result of various psychic moments, but it
spreads in turn to various centres of the brain, summoning them to a synergy of
actions. In men with low brain organization, an aesthetic sensation elicits only
the simplest, elementary phenomenon of a cry of admiration: in a man of genius
the same emotion is transformed into an immortal hymn, a marvellous painting,
a divine statue.
Give a piece of bronze to an ignorant worker, and at most you will get a bell;
give it to Benvenuto Cellini, and he will turn it into Perseus.
Shower the ballerina with roses, and she will respond with a gracious smile
and a voluptuous turn of the hips. Shower those roses over the head of Alma
Tadema,13 and he will have transformed the emotion it has brought him into one
of his most amazing canvases.
To better understand the most important transformations of aesthetic emotion,
transformations that constitute the elementary physics of the beautiful, here is a
very simple diagram:

Let us now apply my diagram to a particular instance of an aesthetic emotion.

I see a girl and find her very beautiful. Aesthetic emotion.
The emotion spreads to the erotic centre, and I receive it. Different
phenomena of sexual exaltation.
The emotion spreads to the artistic centre, and, depending upon my particular
dispositions, I reproduce the girl’s features in a poem, a painting, a statue.
Artistic reproduction of the beautiful.
The emotion spreads to the affective centre, and I love, I desire the girl. Love.
The emotion spreads into centers x, y, z, the storage sites of other aesthetic
emotions, and I compare the fair creature with a gazelle or an angel or a Goddess
and find there the blue of heaven, the blonde of wheat-stalks, the red of coral, the
whiteness of snow or alabaster, etc, etc.
Apply the same diagram to a rose or a dawn; to a palm tree or a bird of
paradise; to any beautiful thing at all, and you will easily be making the positive
analysis of an artistic phenomenon, from its first appearance to its last phases of
progressive evolution, of transformation into energy; thereby obtaining the
perfect equation of the force developed and the work produced.
To many people this will seem a brutal autopsy of one of the larger idealities,
a barbarous act of materialism. To me, however, it seems but the application of
experimental method to the study of psychic phenomena; which are neither
outside nor beyond the world, but are governed by the same laws of the physical
and chemical facts, human and animal.
And let the spiritualists not be alarmed, for this experimental method applied
to the study of the beautiful does not pluck at a single petal, nor douse a single
perfume, nor cloud a single ideality.
Has astronomy, perhaps, with its numbers and its calculations, destroyed the
infinite poetry of the starry sky?
Has the histology of the brain extinguished a ray of inspiration or a flame of
genius?
And has botany, placing the rose in the category of rosacean flowers, and
counting its petals and sepals, stamens and pistils, made it any less beautiful or
fascinating?
No: science has its rights and its obligations and sternly, inexorably performs
its autopsy of the Gods and the passions, aesthetics, and morals – of all that is
human and divine.

Chapter 2

Benares Boxes [– The Boundaries and Sources of the Beautiful –

Symmetry and Contrast – Colour – The Large and Small of Things –
Multiplicity of Simultaneous and Successive Sensations and of
Aesthetic Associations – Movement]

One of the most faithful images we have of human science comes from Benares
boxes. Open one box and in it you will find three, six, twelve groups of other,
smaller boxes, and each of these, when opened, reveals other, ever smaller
boxes; until you reach the last, which you can scarcely pick up with your fingers,
so microscopic is it.
The sciences too have some initial problem to address, and, once solved, they
yield another and yet another contained within them – but with this difference,
that in the Benares game the boxes grow ever smaller, while in the game of
science they grow ever larger; so that at each instance you are confused, unsure
which is the larger and which the smaller problem, which the box that contains
and which the box that is contained; and as if this were not enough, the first box,
which should be the largest, has not yet been seen, and the last box, which
should be the smallest, has not yet been found.
Study even the simplest of phenomena or beings in the world, and you will
find enclosed another phenomenon, another element; and likewise you will be
able to enclose the phenomenon and the element in other, larger phenomena and
elements, from which they take their form.
So too with the beautiful: when, after contemplating with amorous intellect
all the beautiful things in the world of nature and of art; after searching to extract
from these some reasonable definition, you think you have put your finger on the
pulse of the problem – lo and behold, this problem tempts you with new
curiosities, inside you find, as in a fruit, the best and most vital part, that is, the
cotyledons, and, jealously hidden among them, the embryo, and inside it, various
organs, and in each organ, cells and protoplasms; so many Benares boxes,
enough to keep sceptics and casuists busy, while tormenting honest thinkers and
the sincere adepts of truth.
And just what have we done when we have defined the beautiful as good or
evil?
Nothing, or next to nothing. We have marked, on a map which in its
whiteness accepts all and never blushes, a stenographic sign meant to represent a
world of diverse things; we have given a creature, the daughter of our thoughts
and of curiosity, a first and a family name.
And that is the whole of it! But when a newborn has been given its civil
baptism by the mayor, and its religious baptism by the curate, what do we know
of the moral and intellectual character of that new human entity? Nothing,
absolutely nothing. And our definitions are themselves so many baptisms; now
the civil sort, that is, performed by positive science, now the religious sort,
performed by metaphysics; now it is civil and religious simultaneously, to please
mayor and curate, reason and faith; but after? Let us end by saying that the best
definition is the thing itself, even if, with these words, we make the most bald-
faced confession of impotence and ignorance.
 Very well, then: the beautiful is the element of a sensation, it is the true plus x,
it is the archetype of the type of things; but this aesthetic molecule, which is the
individual, within what cell does it move, within what organism does it live,
when is it born and when does it die?
And why are not all true things beautiful?
And why does the aesthetic concept change with climates, peoples, customs,
races, individuals?
More Benares boxes!
Let us humbly try to open some. […]

Chapter 6

[Infirmities of the Aesthetic Sense – Gradual Passage from Perfect

Health to Much-Touted Illness – Partial Aesthetic Anaesthesias –]
Perversions of Aesthetic Sensibility – The Immutable Criteria of the
Beautiful and Common Consensus – A Curse upon the False Right of
the Majority – Aesthetic Aristocracy

[…] For judging the beautiful in art, the criteria are more uncertain, and we shall
see why further on. They are, indeed, so uncertain that one cannot always say
which of the various judgments of the aesthetic value of a work of art is right
and which wrong.
The very term good taste, used to signify a normal or perfect aesthetic
sensibility, serves to indicate that in these matters est judicium difficile;14 having
appealed to the coarsest of senses, the one which, along with smell, gives us only
confused and uncertain sensations. Why, in linking the aesthetic sense with one
of the five specific senses, did we not appeal to sight, which is the most precise
and intellectual sense? Precisely because the aesthetic sense is uncertain and
confused, like taste and smell.
At times the differences of opinion in aesthetic judgments are such, and so
numerous, that we resort to that ultima ratio,15 the consensus of the majority,
which is as brutal as a cannon and as ignorant and incompetent as a jury.
Oh, blessed, a hundred times blessed the dear creature who, in the twentieth
century, will bequeath to our children the critical history, comical and
philosophical, of the majority rule, a veritable Pontius Pilate washbasin, in which
science and reason, the rights of genius and the truth, have washed their hands in
order to save themselves the trouble of choosing, commanding, and perhaps
even cudgeling those born to be cudgelled, and of locking in the stable those
born cattle and not men!
But while we are still deep in the Middle Ages and the sheep count for more
than the shepherd, because he is but one and they are a hundred; while majority
rule holds tyrannical sway in politics, morals, and the courts of justice; while our
generation boasts of having those most ingenious machines known as
parliaments and juries, we concede this right too to aesthetic tribunals.
And we judge as beautiful what the masses proclaim to be beautiful, and as
ugly what the multitudes cannot understand. Genius is a folly and aristocracy an
arrogance!
The common herd of artists and writers (who are also artists) always follow
universal consensus; but the elect among them follow the immortal criterion of
the true and the beautiful, protesting against the brute right of the majority or
imposing their judgment on them, until they have transformed the minority into
the majority. The common herd turn art into an industry, which prospers only
with the consensus of the many; the elect make art a religion and prefer to be its
martyrs rather than its sacristans.
The history of art, with its alternating decadences and its rebirths, is proof of
what we are asserting. Bad taste often spreads epidemically, and a whole
generation or a whole historical period grows sick from the malacia estetica,16
deeming the grotesque beautiful and the baroque most beautiful. Nature,
however, always wins out, and tends to eliminate from its womb the monsters
and the sicklings; so that a decadence in aesthetic taste is always followed by a
reform, which sets the truly beautiful, the eternal, back on the altar, hurling on
the ground the false idols. And it is always one of the very few who carries out
the reform; because human society is essentially and eternally aristocratic, and
the few are always the good and the very few the best, and democracy can
triumph only by replacing a better aristocracy with one less good, a vigorous one
with a feeble or moribund one.
When democracy or aesthetic taste gives the right to the many only because
they are many, the solitary thinker exclaims, Multiplicasti gentem, sed non
multiplicasti laetitiam!17

Chapter 8

[The Beautiful in the Life of Mankind and in the History of Civilization

 from Isocrates to Lamartine –] The Beautiful with Respect to the Good
and the True – It is the Greatest Creator, the First Spring of Progress,
The Largest and Most Democratic Dispenser of Joys – The Beautiful in
Italy

[…] The Chinese of the south have a proverb, No man can simultaneously have
a great fortune, a son, and a fine beard – implying that these three things are the
greatest blessings in life.
I, not being a native Chinese, would be content with far less, and if I could
have a life of my own devising and in that life embody the perfection of an
immaculate and painless happiness, I would wish always to live in an
environment of beautiful things, smiling my first smile in the presence of a large
natural scene and spending my last gaze in contemplation of a beautiful woman.
For me, the beautiful is the highest note human ideality can reach. The true is
but the skeleton of things, and for the intellectual world what health is for the
living organism. And so, poor Truth! That skeleton serves to fill the graves over
which other soldiers will tread, questing after other truths.
The good is but the fruit of the plant Man, human society’s internal policing;
and as sacred as the good and the true are, I can worship them only if they are
also beautiful; because the true and the good must also be beautiful if they are to
please me.
How many truths have died from Plato on! How many shipwrecks and
transformations of morals from Moses to us! But after the passage of so many
centuries, Homer is still divine, the Parthenon is looked upon in ecstasy, and the
Venus de Milo is contemplated with delight; and it is because Homer, the
Parthenon, and the Venus de Milo are so beautiful.
Today’s truth has buried yesterday’s truth, today’s truth awaits the sexton who
will come to bury it in turn. And the good changes its dress the way the
policemen of various peoples and various times change uniform. But Raphael
does not bury Apelles, nor has Shakespeare murdered Sophocles; nor did Horace
bury Pindar. Beautiful things draw together and add to one another; they do not
annul each other, they enrich the early treasure, the first glory of the human
family.
The beautiful is the grandest creator of progress; it may indeed be said that its
primary strength is that of creating.
If the man’s beauty enamours the woman, if the woman’s beauty enchants the
man, it is to bring them closer, to fuse them together, so that, from their blood
poured into a single cup of voluptuousness, a new creature may be born.
If natural beauty deeply moves us, it is to make us reproduce that beauty,
creating a work of art – which is not a living thing unless it be the child of
natural beauty.
And works of art, contemplated by men, in turn generate new children, that is,
new beauties.
In the moral realm as well, the beauty of what is good, the sublimity of
sacrifice and of heroism enamour us and encourage us to generate other moral
beauties.
So too in the realm of thought.
At sight of the sea, at sight of the flowering meadow, of the thousand-armed
forests, the savage responds to those beauties with the simplest song or a
scribbled drawing; whereas the poet and painter respond with a hymn or a
sublime canvas; yet ever and always fertile beauty creates new beauties, opening
up new sources of the highest joys, fertile in their turn with other joys.
The beautiful is surely not all of man, nor all of man’s thought, nor all of his
heart; but it is a very great part. The beautiful is human nature’s luxury, and if
our history were to be stripped of all that belongs to the aesthetic world, what
would remain of so much blood shed from our devouring one another, from so
much ink spilled to make ourselves by turns ignorant and idiotic!
When man has eaten and drunk, when he has slept and made love, whether he
has sat at a king’s table or slept in Cleopatra’s bridal chamber, he differs little
from the man who has eaten in a hut and slept on the savage’s straw. The path to
hunger, thirst, love is not very far, and for all it is almost the same. For the
beautiful, the hierarchies are as countless as the sands of the sea, and give us a
faint sense of the infinite.
If the mystic apple of Eden is our original sin, the need for the beautiful is our
original virtue, which awakens us, goads us, fascinates us; makes us work to
conquer new aesthetic forms and leave them as an inheritance to our offspring.
The beautiful is the Sphinx, which from the mountain heights urges us to climb
always higher; and the last man who will tread upon our planet when it is
reduced to cold dross, to a planet-corpse, will die aspiring to a beauty more
beautiful than any of those his fathers and his near, far, and very far forefathers
have seen and created.
It is through admiring the beautiful, reproducing it, conquering it that the man
in bearskins came to velvet and lace; that he moved from shaping mud with his
hand to Chinese porcelains; that from the reindeer sketched upon a bone he
arrived at a Cellini goblet; that from the rhythmic cry of the savage he came to
Anacreon and thence to the Divine Comedy; from the Australian corroboree18 to
Lohengrin.
The joys that the beautiful imparts to us are among the most democratic, and
the poor artist who, with a piece of bread and cheese in his pocket, admires the
masterpieces of the Uffizi Galleries, enjoys rather more than the idiot millionaire
whom Nature endowed with material wealth and aesthetic poverty.
Sun, sky, sea, flowers smile with equal light in the eyes of all who understand
the beautiful, and aesthetic wealth is not bought with gold; rather, it is acquired
with study and contemplation of beautiful things. Nature is juster than man and
dispenses the greatest joys in life to all. Thank God, aesthetic emotion and love,
the two most precious and resplendent jewels in man’s crown, are not for sale,
but are equally dispensed to the poor man and to the rich, to barefoot Cimabue
and to Rubens bedecked in gold and silken brocades.
To speak of the different degrees of aesthetic sensibility accorded to the
different races and to different people would be to retell the history of art, that is,
to repeat matters already handled by the loftiest minds in all of literature.
It is enough for us to say that no race, no people has ever rivalled the aesthetic
wealth of ancient Greece, which still remains a sort of luminous and singular
beacon shining with the brightest light in the history of humanity.
Italy, the first and the finest heir of Greek civilization, still has in its veins the
blood of Phidias and Apelles, and has not yet lost, after so much history, after so
many shipwrecks and cataclysms, its artistic primacy. If it is second to France in
painting, if in architecture it is sleeping a sleep we hope is temporary, its
sculptors, poets, writers, the whole people with their works, their aspirations,
demonstrate every day that the beautiful is still our God, and we its eldest, most
devout, most ardent priests.
 From The Neurosic Century
[…] To children we teach grammar, which is the metaphysics of language; to
youths we give a steady diet of a philosophy long buried and mouldering; the
school-leaving exam is acrobatics that breaks the limbs if not the neck of many
sensible young people, while opening a triumphal route to just as many jackasses
endowed with the memory of parrots, and with this we claim to be producing
happy people, wise thinkers, and useful citizens!
If we are still fortunate enough to have happy people, wise thinkers, and
useful citizens, it is certainly not because of, but despite, our schools. Luckily,
good sense is more efficient than pedantry; and while great men succeed without
school and despite school, a great part of the studying multitudes is saved from
shipwreck by forgetting nine-tenths of what it uselessly learned in order to
achieve the numerical grades it needed to pass the test and graduate.
O all ye whose hair has gone grey, take stock of what you learned in the
schools and of what you retained to use in life and for the gymnastics of your
thought, and you will see if my philippics are the exaggeration of some reformist
grumbler or the cry of everyone’s conscience. Who taught you to think, to tell
shadow from substance, to mark out a hierarchy in human cognition?
Do you know what a school-age youth resembles, fresh from graduating from
the halls of learning, having passed through the Caudine Forks of liceo exams? A
Strasbourg goose, nailed to a board (read, school-bench), and crammed with
heavy, indigestible food, who, when it no longer wants to eat, is force-fed with a
funnel. Down go the nuts, down the Latin; down goes the mash, down logic,
metaphysics, and psychology; down goes the milk and down physics, chemistry,
mathematics; down and down, until the liver swells and fattens, and the brain
grows soft and dropsical, turned to wormy fodder for superstition and
obscurantism. Nothing more closely resembles the liver of a Strasbourg goose
than a human brain schooled in the dewy Arcadias of our age. The former is a
tasty morsel for modern Luculluses,1 the latter the favourite dish of bourgeois
tyranny and the speculators in human imbecility!
And while so many human brains vanish into the bog of false modern
education, others manage to save themselves only by fighting against the
schoolmaster and school, and in this doing and undoing, in this cruel torment of
the delicate human entrails, the neurosics spring up like mushrooms, the
neurosism spreads and grows, trained by those dear schools that would more
aptly be called torture bureaux.
In modern pedagogy, which works so hard to turn us all into neurosics, there
presides like original sin the blessed equality that must impose on all men born
under the sun the same school-bench, the same ration of sciences, letters, and art.
The certificate and diploma equalize all men, says the law and echoes the
minister; but twenty years later one of those graduates dies of starving in the
gutter while the other is a millionaire or President.
If only, among all the boards of inspection that abound in our dear and
beautiful country, there were one to judge which brains should be decked with
laurels and which are born instead to be festooned with salamis and mortadelle,2
how many fewer misfits there would be, and how many more happy men!
And yet it is claimed that such investigating bodies already exist in the form
of Examining Commissions, stopping human minds at various checkpoints! I, for
one, do not see them, or think they are insufficient, since I see so many jackasses
parading in triumph while so many fine young horses are flunked! Either the
board of inspectors does not exist, or it is blind or not working properly! […]
 From The Tartuffe Century
[…] Before proceeding to study the various human hypocrisies, the various
disguises of King Tartuffe,1 I must justify the name with which I have baptized
our century – lest I otherwise be accused of slander.
And why should one want to accuse our century of hypocrisy, when you will
tell me that hypocrisy was born with the first man and woman? In every age
mankind has had the same vices and virtues: at most, the vices and virtues
change name and garb; but the nature of good and evil always remains the same.
[…] […]
Now, the nineteenth century (may it take no offence) is critical, it is industrial,
it is positive, it is sceptical,2 it is many other things, fair and foul; but before and
above all else, it is hypocritical.
It is hypocritical, because it is a period of transition, a passage between a past
of assorted violence and ignorance that is not entirely buried, and a just and
scientific future glimmering with the rosy twilight of the dawn. […] […]
Our society is so old that it stinks; and the odour of its putrefaction rises to
the nostrils of even the least finical, despite the many disinfectants and perfumes
used to combat the deep dissolution of what is no longer alive. Corpses, for
better or worse, can be embalmed, but not laws or social statutes, which, being
living things, must follow the fateful law of life’s evolution.
We have promised liberty to all the redeemed of 1789; but what use is liberty
when most people are shackled at the wrists, shackled by ignorance and
paralysed by hunger?
We have promised the oppressed equal justice for all; but who can afford
justice when it costs so much time and money?
We have promised fraternity to all; but I see only brothers who rob one
another, who dispute the free defence of strikes, who dare not apply to all
industry the sovereign justice of sharecropping,3 which, in so many provinces of
Italy, is already applied to working of the soil.
Our laws are less unjust than they once were, they are progressive, they are
full of good and sacred intentions; yet how many impostures, how many lies are
not hidden still among the deep folds of our codes and regulations!
For some time all our legislators’ efforts have been reduced to propping up an
edifice that is crumbling on every side, worm-eaten by a deep rot beneath all the
varnish and the gilding. Modern society is founded on a base of many large lies,
of which it no longer believes a single one.
Let us desist for once from the propping, and descend into the dungeons, the
underground, to test with touch the solidity of the foundations, bravely striking
at them with the hammer of humanity.
Nothing lasts except the true, and we are false; no feeling endures but true
feeling, and we are Tartuffes of feeling, as we are Tartuffes of thought. […]
 From Head: or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
[…] Respect, my dear Enrico, all honest religions. They are all forms of the
ideal, they are all different paths that lead to the same goal. In this world, small
as it is, men speak hundreds, nay thousands of tongues, and one and the same
thought wears the garb of the most varied and foreign idioms. So it is with the
need for the ideal: all men on earth feel it, but they satisfy it in different ways.
Religions are so many languages of the ideal, with which we speak the same
thought. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, let us all respect one another
and love one another: from the vaults of Christian temples, from the minarets of
mosques, from the gilt spires of synagogues, from the white roofs of Buddhist
churches, issue songs and hymns, all raised up toward the same heavens. […]
[…]
Another great human value is that of our intelligence. One is born with a
certain power of thought, but with education we can intensify it, above all make
it nimbler, readier for all manner of agitations. In my garden you have seen those
sturdy pine trees, and beside them their companions, frail and dying. All started
out with the same capacity, but the different terrain in which they were planted
and the different care with which they were raised has made them different. So it
is with our mind; it grows and gathers strength with that cultivation known as
instruction, and which in a broader sense is called education; whereas it weakens
if abandoned to the sterile terrain of inertia and ignorance.
And then, beyond the degree of the mind’s power, if we enrich it with all that
we learn, we are called a cultivated, or uncultured, or highly cultivated man; and
thus a man’s intellectual value rises with the mass of his knowledge. First,
however, it is necessary to have the capacity to elaborate all that gathered
material, to order and arrange it, so that we can easily summon it and put it to the
use of our talents, gradually, as we need it.
In line with this faculty, however, the value of thought grows with the amount
of our knowledge. Every new science we learn is a key that opens new worlds to
us, that reveals new regions to us, that enriches us with new strengths and new
possibilities. So it is with every language, every art, every new industry that we
add to our thought. […]
My dear Enrico, endow your life with the most you can of the ideal, if you
wish to be content to live, if you do not want, like so many others, to curse life
as a divine punishment. Every action of yours should be inspired by the heart
and guided and corrected by reason. I have told you this several times, but need
never repent of repeating myself:
The heart without the head is a sailboat without a rudder.
The head without the heart is a rudder without a sail.
Head and heart together spell the harmony of all energies, thought and
feeling, signify an intelligent gentleman, that is, a perfect man.
The priests have surely taught you that there are three theological virtues,
faith, hope, and charity, and no doubt they have explained why these marvellous
things are so. But I too, though no priest, have found that in practical life three
theological virtues are needed, which are the fertile mothers of so many and so
many other blessings.
These three basic virtues are honesty, work, and ideality.
Cultivate all three, my dear Enrico, and if you have learned nothing more than
this from your old Uncle Baciccia, I think you will not have chattered with him
in vain these many months.
An honest man who always works and always has an ideal in view is a happy
man, a useful man, and, after living his own life, he can shut his eyes content
with himself and with others. Whether we are great or small, weak or strong,
rich or poor, geniuses or ordinary, we all have the right to be honest, to work,
and to have a heaven to which to turn our gaze. Who shirks even one of these
tasks violates the laws of nature, breaks the pact that binds the past to the future,
and dearly pays the penalty for his own crime.
You, my dear Enrico, have a feeling heart and a clear head, and so I am sure
that you will be honest, will always work, and will always have the heaven of
the ideal over your head. […]
From Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
[…] One then enters the Chamber,1 by various routes, depending on the criterion
used by the electorate, who naturally have a wide range of values.
The elective Chamber should be a great family of men united, if not by blood
ties, at least by a great psychic kinship bred of common honesty and an equal
share of cultivation and cleverness.
Instead the Chamber, which one enters by such varied doors, is not a family
but a crowd of diverse, jostling individuals.
Luckily the place has such a charged and red-hot atmosphere that all these
individuals soon reach the same temperature; so that, if their knowledge and
brains do not make them one family, having to breathe the same air makes them
kinsmen.
Put dwarf and giant, tame and wild, noble and common horses into the ring of
a circus, and into its midst a strong director with a big whip, and within a few
days dwarf and giant, noble and common horses will be running circles together
in the ring of that circus.
So too in that other circus maximus,2 the political Colosseum we call the
Chamber of Deputies. Except that not horses are running there, but citizens who
have arrived by the various criteria, honest and dishonest, true and false, which
we have studied together.
They differ more among themselves than horses do, being as varied as human
consciences and human minds. Some always want just to lope, some always go
at a trot, and some are always getting winded in their gallop; but then the big
whip of the political has them all racing, albeit at different paces, around the
same track, some snorting or yawning, caracoling or rearing, all circling at the
crack and command of the whip.
Deputies, like plants, can be classed according to either an artificial system or
a natural method; the former is easier and more practical than the latter.
Artificially they are wont to be classified according to the colleges that elect
them, or rather according to the locale that produces them. Thus, they are
northerners or southerners; Lombards, Venetians, Tuscans, Sicilians, and so on.
Another classificatory system that groups the representatives of the nation is
that which arranges them according to the party to which they belong or claim to
belong. They are of the left or the right, radical or socialist, ministerial or
opposition.
Not always homogeneous, these groups form and disband frequently,
following the vagaries of political meteorology, which is less stable and obscurer
than that of the heavens.
I then, being a naturalist and physiologist, prefer to classify the deputies by
natural method, which groups them according to many of their characteristics
and the subordination of these same characteristics.
And here let me venture what may be the first classification of our
representatives into
Walk-on deputies, including the variety of the telegraphics.
Profiteer deputies, or industrialists of politics.
Forensic deputies.
Conscientious deputies.
Political deputies.

Let us trace in broad outline the characteristics of these families; and let us call
them such, for I do hope they truly represent homogeneous families and not
artificial orders, like those of Linnaeus.3

Walk-on Deputies

They make up the great majority of Parliament. They are men who by either
wealth or noble title, celebrity or literary, scientific, or patriotic fame have
earned themselves the attention and sympathies of their native place, which
sends them to Montecitorio4 so that the whole of Italy may know that this man
was born in Milan or Syracuse, Asti or Barletta.
And so they feel no obligation to make great speeches or do great things.
They have been elected regularly, and wear their little medals on their watch
chains with some dignity. They are diligent about public meetings, though
somewhat less so about their duties: they are never absent from the big votes,
and always vote with the party that has elected them.
When they are less diligent or even very negligent, they never fail to obey the
telegraph when it summons them to Rome in solemn circumstances. They leave
immediately after the vote, and for this reason are called telegraphic deputies.
 Having, moreover, neither political attitudes nor political passions, they are
content with one or two elections, after which they quite pleasurably return to
their preferred occupations or their leisure.

Profiteer Deputies

Fortunately, they are a minority, though enough of one to pollute the atmosphere
of a Parliament.
They go to the Chamber to obtain money, investment or employment, railway
and industrial franchises, supplies, crosses to sell or resell; favours to grant the
highest bidder.
One day Depretis5 looked vexed or downcast and held in his hands an open
letter. When a friend of mine asked him why he looked so sad, he answered by
having him read the postscript of the letter, whose signature he hid with his hand.
The concealed author had written, ‘May I remind Your Excellency that I live
on commissions.’
And here Depretis, heaving a deep sigh from his broad chest, added, ‘How do
you expect a government to run when a deputy is impudent enough to write and
sign these words?’
And he was right.
The profiteer deputies who have the wit and cunning to do so form little
groups of five, ten, or twenty colleagues and then ratchet up their demands of
ministers, depending on the number of votes they have available. In a word, they
practise blackmail, outright political banditry. They are the plague of
parliaments, and their number is a very accurate gauge of a country’s and an
era’s corruption.

Forensic Deputies

They are almost all lawyers. Masters in the art of the word, they enter Parliament
to keep their voice and eloquence in practice, and to ply their dramatic arts on a
stage larger than the law court or Court of Assizes.
They are often mistaken for the profiteer deputies, because the notoriety that
Parliament brings is useful for a legal clientele, which in turn is useful for
election rigging and political life.
Sometimes, however, they are honest and can be called artists of the word, so
that they willingly accept defending some agenda meant to save a ministry or
party. They fight for the pleasure of fighting: often, too, they speak without
needing to, for the pleasure of speaking, and the applause of the Chamber makes
them happy.

Conscientious Deputies

They make up a small minority. They are modest and studious and have no other
ambition than to serve their country, and their always conscientious vote is also
always well informed.
When they do not understand an issue, they have it explained by those most
learned and most practised in the arts of politics, even sacrificing their party
when it does not agree with the dictates of their conscience.
Their number indicates the varying degree of morality of a country or an era.
In a healthy Parliament their number should constitute a sizeable majority of
deputies.

Political Deputies

They are a Parliament’s aristocracy, its General Staff.

They are men born and bred for the political life, and always end up
becoming general secretaries, ministers, and party heads.
They do not always need to be very learned or very deep; knowledge they can
borrow from others, but not political judgment, nor energetic action, nor sure-
sightedness, nor any of the other uncommon qualities that I have outlined in this
chapter and that present a true photograph of the political deputy. […]
 From The Year 3000: A Dream

Chapter 1

Paolo and Maria Leave for Andropolis – One Evening in the Gulf of La
Spezia

Paolo and Maria left Rome, capital of the United States of Europe, in the largest
of their aerotachs, the one intended for long trips.
It is an electrically run airship. By releasing a spring, they convert the two
comfortable armchairs that stand in the middle of the ship into quite comfortable
beds. Opposite the chair-beds are a compass, a small table, and a quadrant
bearing the three words motion, heat, light.
With the touch of a button the aerotach sets off, gaining speeds of up to 150
kilometres an hour. With the touch of another button the room can be heated to
the temperature of your choice, and the touch of a third button lights up the ship.
A simple switch turns the electricity into heat, light, movement, whatever your
pleasure.
The walls of the aerotach are stocked with enough provisions to last ten days:
condensed juices of albuminoids and carbon hydrides, representing kilograms of
meat and vegetables; cohabated aethers1 replicating the scents of the most
pungent flowers, and all the most exquisite fruits; a small canteen with a
plentiful supply of three elixirs that stimulate the brain centres that regulate the
major forces of life – thought, movement, and love.
There is no need in the aerotach for mechanics or servants, since everyone
from their early school days has learned to drive it wherever they want to go.
One of the quadrants tells you the kilometres covered, the room temperature, and
wind direction.
Paolo and Maria brought just a few books with them, among them The Year
3000, written ten centuries earlier by a physician with a bizarre imagination who
tried to guess what human life would be like a millennium on.
Paolo told Maria: ‘It’s a long trip, so I’m going to help while away the
boredom by translating the strange fantasies of this ancient writer from his native
Italian. I’m really curious as to how well this prophet guessed the future. I’m
sure there will be some beauties to laugh about.’
 Bear in mind that, by the year 3000, Cosmic has been the only language
spoken for over five centuries. All the languages of Europe are dead, not to
mention the languages of Italy, (in chronological order) Oscan, Celtic, Latin,
and, finally, Italian.
The trip Paolo and Maria are setting out on is indeed very long. From Rome
they plan to reach Andropolis, the capital of the United Planetary States, where
they hope to celebrate their mating match, having already been together for the
past five years in a love match. Now they must appear before the biological
Senate of Andropolis, whose Supreme Assembly of Sciences must judge their
suitability to transmit life to other humans.
But before they cross Europe and Asia for the world capital at the foot of the
Himalaya, formerly known as Darjeeling, Paolo thought his fiancée should see
the great Necropolis at La Spezia, where the Italians of the year 3000 have
collected, as in a museum, all the memories of the past. […]
 From ‘The Psychology of Translations’
[…] Once upon a time books walked, and it meant much to an author to know
that in his lifetime a book of his had crossed the boundaries of his province.
Today books also run, on railway tracks and with steamship propellers; they are
promoted on the wings of the telegraph, and in this new course they meet and
greet one another and exchange their visiting cards. From certain books jostled
along such routes, from mountain to mountain, sea to sea, shoot sparks that send
off flames, and a hot, luminous aura spreads all about them, warming even those
far away, uniting even strangers.
Just as today expanded civilization allows us to enjoy the fruits of the five
parts of the world at a single table, so too at that supreme dining table of
intellectual foods we enjoy every day the flowers and fruits of three, four, ten
literatures; and thought, losing much of its own indigenous physiognomy in
translations, becomes more human, more universal. One may mourn, perhaps,
what is lost in this accelerated movement of circulation and catholic apostleship;
but one can only be moved to admire the great gain it represents.
In the disappearance of the small, which melts and merges into the large and
spreads into the very large, rivulets and rivers lose their own name but not their
water-drops, and bring to the ocean that absorbs them all their beauty, their
energy, their life. The thought of Milan, Naples, Tuscany, the Romagna are all
merging into Italian thought; and gradually Italian, French, German, Russian,
English ideas and affects, convening under the single roof of a free civilization,
will become European ideas and affects, and then human ideas and affects.
To this beneficial, lofty, sublime work, destroyer of custom-houses and
demolisher of borders, translations from one language to another contribute
powerfully, because languages too are custom-houses and borders that we all
must try to tear down or at least remove; so that we can pass between points
without passports, without tolls, harassment, and distrust. […]
 Index

Abyssinia, 369
Account of the Primitive Tribes and Monuments of the Nilagiris, An (Breeks),
434n
Account of the Tribes of the Nilgiris, An (Shortt), 438n
Acerbi, Giuseppe, 37n
Aden, 423
adultery, 272
examples of, 277–8
and prostitution, 273
aesthetics: lack of scientific studies of, 483
physics of, 486. See also Epicurus
Africa, 91, 99, 424, 455
Agnesi, Maria Gaetana, 478
Alexander Severus, 267
Alfieri, Vittorio, 263, 264
Alma-Tadema, Sir Lawrence, 493
Alps, 44, 157, 226, 456
Ambrose, St, De virginitate, 297
America, 322, 324, 423, 424, 424n, 455
Amor mundano (Mantegazza), 58
Amori degli uomini, Gli (Mantegazza), 4, 4n, 6n, 16, 27, 47, 58, 77n, 145n, 202,
218. See also Sexual Relations of Mankind, The
Anacreon, 501
Andes, 250, 324, 456
Annals of Rural Bengal (Hunter), 472n
Anno 3000. Sogno, L’ (Mantegazza), 57
Apelles, 499, 501
Apennines, 92, 435n
Apollo, 198, 253, 275
Appert, Nicholas François, 167, 167n, 306
Archivio per l’antropologia e l’etnologia, 6
Argentina, 7, 325, 326n
Arouet, François-Marie (Voltaire), 485
Art of Taking a Wife, The (Mantegazza), 57. See also Arte di prender moglie, L’
Arte di essere felici, L’ (Mantegazza), 47
Arte di prender marito, L’ (Mantegazza), 6n, 18
Arte di prender moglie, L’ (Mantegazza), 6n, 18
Aschenbrandt, Theodor, ‘The Physiological Effect and Significance of Cocaine
Muriate on the Human Organism’, 8n
Ashurbanipal, 217n
Asia, 99, 455
Augustine, St, 264
Avishag the Shunamite, 160, 160n

Babu Iaganand, 481

Bacchus, 198
Balder, 386
Balzac, Honoré de, 281
Physiologie du mariage, 14, 297
Baron de Montyon (Antoine-Jean-Baptiste-Robert Auget), 146n
Bartholomew, St, 245
Barzaghi, Francesco, 237, 237n
Bathyllus, 468n
Bauer, Ida (‘Dora’), 18
Beato Angelico (Guido di Pietro Trosini), 158
Beatrice. See Portinari, Beatrice
beautiful, the: and aesthetic aristocracy, 498
aesthetic sensation in, 488
analytic process of, 488–9
complexity of, 495–6
as creator of progress, 499, 500
as different from pleasure, 483, 486
experimental method applied to, 494
as fact of consciousness, 486
feeling in, 489
as human nature’s luxury, 500
Mantegazza’s definition of, 486
Mantegazza’s survey on, 487
metaphysical definitions of, 484–5
as result of a comparison, 492–3
as shaping genius and character, 124
as superior to good, 499
taste for, 497
thought in, 489
through transformation of aesthetic emotion, 493–4
and the true, 496, 499
types in, 491
uncertainty of, 497
universality of feeling for, 489
vagueness of, 483, 487. See also beauty; Epicurus; squandering
beauty: as anti-modern, non-Western space, 46
lack of absolute in, 491
 and love, 124–5
in nature, 100
as not quantifiable, 47
purposeless and excessive, 48
as superior to truth, 46
as unconditional expenditure, 20. See also Epicurus; beautiful, the;
love; squandering
Bellaigne, Camille, 484
Bellini, Vincenzo, 487
Benares, 463–4, 467, 467n, 469, 470, 474
boxes, 495, 496
Bergen, 405
Bergeret, Dr (French physician), 264, 265
Berzelius, Jöns Jakob, 387
Bhutan, 447, 459
Bishasharnath, 465, 469
Black Forest, 377
Blanc, Charles, 484
Boas, Franz, 438n
Bobija, 355
Boeotia, 315
Bolivia, 325, 326, 326n, 331n, 479
Bombay, 44, 423, 425n, 427, 428, 431, 462, 463
multiethnicity of, 427–8
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 167n, 223, 408n
Book of Love, The (Mantegazza), 57, 58
Bove, Giacomo, 415n, 418n
Brace, 474
Brahma, 425, 464
Brazil, 267
Breeks, James Wilkinson, 434, 434n, 442, 443
Brennus, 154, 154n
Brera, 327
Breton, André, 11
Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme, Physiologie du goût, 14
Broca, Paul, 7
Brussels, 456
Brutus, Marcus Junius, 265n
Bucolics (Virgil), 469
Buddha, 212n, 425, 453, 464, 466
Buenos Aires, 355
Buffon, Comte de (Georges-Luis Leclerc), 19
Burns, Robert, 211
Byron, Lord George Gordon Noel, 211, 356
Byström, 386

Caesar, Caius Julius, 223, 265n

Calcutta, 423, 424, 453, 463, 474, 481
Camoëns, Luis Vaz de, The Lusiads, 10, 319, 319n
Campania, 262n
Campbell, Archibald, 455n
Campbell, George John Douglas, 8th duke of Argyll, 490, 490n
Canova, Antonio, 380, 380n
Canzoniere (Petrarca), 436n
Carthage, 274n
Castren, Matias Aleksanteri, 422
Cato the Censor, 274n
Cattaneo, Carlo, 41
Cavour, Camillo Benso, Count of, 27
Cellini, Benvenuto, 447, 493, 500
chastity, 227
different origins of, 217
and hygiene, 211, 216
and love, 214–18
science of (agnology), 230
Chile, 326n
China, 16, 447, 455
Chota Nagpur, 219, 219n
Christ, 25, 180, 285, 425, 453
Christiania, 389, 390, 404, 405n, 407, 409
Cimabue, Cenni di Pepo (Giovanni), 501
Cini, Cosimo Giovanni, 389n
Claudius (Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus), 241n
Cleopatra, 211, 500
coca, 319
addiction to, across races, 332
cultivation of, 325
excitability induced by, different from that of coffee, 339, 340
as food and stimulant, 330–1
hygienic applications of, 343–4
inebriation induced by, different from that of alcohol, 339, 340
Mantegazza’s consumption of, 341–3
Mantegazza’s experiment with, 336–8
among nervine foods, 323
and other aphrodisiacs, 349–50
physiological action of, 332–343, 348–9
plant, features of, 323–4
 plant, history of, 324
production of, 325–7
similarities to opium, 339
as superior to other substances generating nervous strength, 348–50
therapeutic actions of, 344–8
use of, in America, 328–32. See also On the Hygienic and Medicinal
Properties of Coca and on Nervine Nourishment in General
Coins of Southern India (Elliott), 431n
Colombia, 325
Colonna, Vittoria, 211
Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia, A (Hunter),
472n
Compendio della flora italiana (Gibelli), 328n
Comte, Auguste, 17
concubinage, 287–9
concupiscence, 211, 212
Constantine, 453
Coonoor, 44, 435
Cooty, 432
Copenhagen, 39, 377, 378, 379, 380n
museums in, 380–1
tastelessness in, 381
coquetry, 100, 109, 138, 215
as form of seduction, 139, 140. See also courtship; love
Correggio (Antonio Allegri da), 158, 488
corruption in Italian politics, 510–11
Cotopaxi, 443
courtship, 136–42
Crescent, The, 431n
Criminal Man (Lombroso), 29
Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (Lombroso), 29
Croce, Benedetto, 5, 25, 34, 46
Cuore (De Amicis), 50
Cutigliano, 44, 435, 435n

Da Gama, Vasco, 319n

Dalk, 413
Dalmatia, 189
Dante, 180, 247, 357, 393, 394n, 463, 463n
Divine Comedy, 128n, 501
Inferno, 463n
Darjeeling, 45, 444, 449, 452, 461, 463, 477n, 514
beauty of nature at, 455
Buddhist temple at, 449, 450–2
Darwin, Charles, 7, 98, 99, 137, 139, 326n, 424n, 489, 490, 490n
The Descent of Man, 7, 98n, 196n, 231n
The Origin of Species, 7
Selection in Relation to Sex, 98n, 231n
theories of, in Mantegazza’s works, 41, 152
Davanzati, Chiaro, 484
David (King), 160
De Amicis, Edmondo, Cuore, 50
De Filippi, Filippo, 36
De Gubernatis, Angelo, 3, 41
Peregrinazioni indiane, 41
Storia dei viaggiatori italiani nelle Indie orientali, 41
De Menezes, Aleixo, 442
Demosthenes, 210
Denmark, 378, 378n, 385, 387
Depretis, Agostino, 510, 510n, 511
Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 7, 98n, 196n, 231n
desire, 21, 126
and conquest, 139
as motor of love, 165
Dhammapada, 212, 453, 453n
Di Santa Caterina da Siena, F. Vincenzo Maria, 442
Dio ignoto, Il (Mantegazza), 47
Diogenes, 256, 256n
divorce, 52, 295–6
Dizionario delle cose belle (Mantegazza), 46
Dominic, St, 356
Don Juan, 238, 241, 301
Donizetti, Gaetano, 487
Donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale, La (Lombroso), 29
Donne del mio tempo, Le (Mantegazza), 18
Dora. See Bauer, Ida
Doria, Brancaleone, 160
Duke of Argyll. See Campbell, George John Douglas
Dürn, 386

Ecker, Alexander, 413, 415, 416

Eden, 279
education: and intelligence, 506
notionism in Italian, 502–3. See also intelligence
Ehrenfreund, Erasmo, 55, 57
Eidet, 392, 393, 394
Eidsvold, 390
Elementi di igiene (Mantegazza), 32
Elements of Materia Medica and Therapeutics (Pereira), 324n
Elliott, Sir Walter, 431, 431n
Ellis, H. Havelock, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 17
England, 270, 292, 360, 364, 376
Epicuro e l’epicureismo (Trezza), 47
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful (Mantegazza), 46, 48n, 193n
aesthetic elitism in, 48–9
idea of beauty as excessive in, 48
materialist aesthetics in, 47
Erba, Carlo, 327, 327n
Eschricht, Daniel Frederik, 86, 86n
Eskimos, 221
Essai de chimie microscopique (Raspail), 322n
Estase umani, Le (Mantegazza), 10, 46, 48
Europe, 16, 41, 47, 49, 50, 322, 327, 328, 345, 348, 385, 427, 429, 455
United States of, 513
Everest, 444

Fabius the Temporizer, 298

Fantoni, Countess Maria, 52
Faulhorn, 443
Fergusson, James, 453, 453n
Ferreiro, Iacomo, 442
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 264
Finland, 409
Fisiologia del dolore (Mantegazza), 14–15
Fisiologia del piacere (Mantegazza), 12–14, 47
translations of, 55
Fisiologia della donna (Mantegazza), 18, 26n
Fisiologia dell’amore (Mantegazza), 12, 24n
translations of, 55–6, 57, 58.
See also Physiology of Love, The Fisiologia dell’odio (Mantegazza),
15–16
Fjellner, 418
Flora andhirica (Elliott), 431n
Flora of British India (Hooker), 455n
Florence, 6, 45, 47, 397, 409, 423, 453, 457
Fogelberg, Bengt Erland, 386
Forbes, James D., 418
Fornarina, 305, 305n. See also Sanzio, Raffaello
France, 264, 265, 424
Frederick II, 478
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 8n
dream as wish
fulfilment in The Year 3000, 53
dreamwork and the creative process, 10–11
‘Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, 17
Mantegazza’s influence on ‘Cocaine Papers’, 8–9
and sexology, 17
Friis, Jens Andreas, 389, 409
Futurism, 10–11

Galeguaychù, 107
Ganges, 475
Gargantua, 428
Gazetteer of India (Hunter), 472n
Gazzetta di Venezia, 3n
gender differences, 20–2
 in love, 136–7, 219–20, 223, 224–5, 281
in psychical evolution of sexes, 214
generation: forms of, 87–8
and love, 89–94, 100
as scope of life, 83–6
and self-preservation, 86, 89. See also love
Germany, 265, 292, 377, 378
Gibelli, Giuseppe, 328, 328n
Giglioli, Enrico Hillyer, Viaggio intorno al globo della R. pirocorvetta italiana
Magenta, 36
Gioberti, Vincenzo, 484
Giotto, 487
Glommen River, 391
Golconda, 423, 424
Göta Canal, 382n
Göteborg, 377, 381, 383, 404
Göthe, 386
Gozzano, Guido, Verso la cuna del mondo, 43n
Grande encyclopédie française, 327
Greece, 501
Guayaquil, 355
Guide to the Orthography of Indian Proper Names, A (Hunter), 472n
Guizot, François, 425n
Gustav II, King, 386

Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August, 424, 424n

Haiti, 424n
Hamilton, Countess, 379
hate, Mantegazza’s insights on, 16
Head: or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds (Mantegazza), 50–1, 506
 and De Amicis’s Cuore, 50
as interactive
book, 51
plot of, 50
Heine, Heinrich, 92, 411
Hercules, 162, 182
Hermippus, 160, 160n
Hierta, Anna (wife of Magnus Gustaf Retzius), 379n
Himalaya, 44, 444, 450, 456, 514
Hindus, 433, 437, 443
Aryantype, 472–7
social position of women among, 478–2
Hirschfeld, Magnus, Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, 17–18
Histoire des deux Indes (Raynal), 329n
Histoire naturelle de la santé (Raspail), 321n
Hobbes, Thomas, 436n
Hodgson, Brian Houghton, 477, 477n
Homer, 499
Hooker, Sir Joseph Dalton, 455, 455n
Horace, 400, 499
Hugo, Victor, 426
Humanitarian, The, 21
Humboldt, Alexander von, 413
Hunter, Sir William, 472, 472n
Husbyfiöl, 384
Hyderabad, 432, 432n
Hygiene of Love, The (Mantegazza), 77, 211, 212, 218, 262. See also Igiene
dell’amore
hypocrisy, 77, 121, 123, 156, 161–2, 191, 203, 204, 233, 270, 273
 in modern society, 274, 504

Igiene del nido (Mantegazza), 26n

Igiene dell’amore (Mantegazza), 16, 32, 77n
Igiene di Epicuro (Mantegazza), 47
Igea, 30
impotency, 259–62
India, 40–5, 112
Bhutanese village in, 449–50
Buddhism in, 453
ethnic types in, 472–7
excesses of, 425–6
feminization of, 44
hotels in, 429
Mantegazza’s trip to River Runjit in, 458–9
mountains of, compared to Italy’s, 456
nature in, 435, 436
population of; 471,
servants in, 429–31
Sikkim merchant in, 461–2
smells of, 427
trains in, 432–3
as Western dream, 423–4.
See also Hindus; Todas
India (Mantegazza), 37, 394n
collectionism in, 45
cultural comparisons in, 44
exoticism in, 44
narrative style of, 42–3, 43n
 purpose of journey narrated in, 40–2
superabundance of descriptions in, 43–4
Todas as subject of investigation in, 40–1, 44–5
translations of, 56
Inferno (Dante), 463n
intelligence, togetherness of head and heart in, 507
Irtisch River, 422
Italian Society of Anthropology, 6
Italy, 41, 49, 101, 265, 315, 378, 380, 456, 504–5, 510
deputies in, classification of, 51, 509–12
parliament of, 508
schools in, 51

Jacquemont, Victor, 424, 424n

Japan, 16
Jaucourt, Louis, Chevalier de, 327, 327n
Java, 424
jealousy, 200
definition of, 202
in different races, 201, 203
future disappearance of, 204
negative effects of, 203
Jeremiah, 297
Jesus, 199
Joan of Arc, 237, 241
John the Baptist, St, 119
Joseph, 99, 241
Journal historique concernant l’établissement des français à la Louisiane
(Raynal), 329n
Judith, 160
Jujuy, 325, 328
Jungfrau, 120
Jupiter, 253
Justinian, 160

Kanchanyanga (Kanchenjunga), 44, 443, 444, 461

Mantegazza’s hymn to, 444–8
Kannka, 453
Kant, Immanuel, 264
Kashmir, 425n
Katiawar, 482
Katmandu, 477n
Kei, Axel, 386, 387
Kempis, Thomas à, 297
Koch, Robert, 32
Kollegal, 441
Kols (or Kohls), 219, 219n
Koppang, 391, 405
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis, 17

La Harpe, Jean-Baptiste Bénard de, 329, 329n

La Paz, 325, 326
La Spezia, 514
Lake Boven, 384
Lake Como, 390
Lake Jocksen, 384
Lake Maggiore, 111
Lake Mjösen, 390
Lake Vener, 383
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 323
Lapland, 37, 40, 377, 404
Lapps, 40, 389, 393, 395
bargaining with, 401–2
behaviour of, 419
census of, 409
classification of, 410–11
commerce of, 421
compared to Chukchi, 415, 418, 418n
and environment, 417–18
etymology of name of, 409–10
funerals of, 420
Mantegazza’s encounter with, 398–400
Mantegazza’s search for, 397
in Ojung, 392, 394
origins of, 422
physical traits of, 413–16
portrait of, 411–12
Swedish, photographed by Mantegazza, 414–15
use of nervine foods by, 417
weddings of, 420
Laura (Petrarca’s muse), 211
Laura: A Study of Platonic Love (Mantegazza), 57
Lazarus, 173
lechery, 212, 261
in old men, 236–7
redeemed by women, 223
tax on, 267
Leem, Knud, 411, 413–14, 415, 418, 419
Legends of Flowers, The (Mantegazza), 57
Lenoir, Paul, 484
Leonardo da Vinci, 357, 383
Leopardi, Giacomo, 211
Lezioni di antropologia (Mantegazza), 20n
Liebig, Justus von, 319, 320n
Lima, 355
Linnaeus, Carl, 253, 387, 443, 509, 509n
Lombroso, Cesare, Criminal Man, 29
Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, 29
La donna criminale, la prostituta e la donna normale, 29
relationship of, with Mantegazza, 29–31
L’uomo delinquente, 29, 30
London, 270, 363, 364, 367, 373, 427
love: and age difference, 237
in birds, 105–7, 109
causes of extinction of, 172
and chastity, 120
through chastity, 172
childishness in, 184–8
in children, 116–18
‘constitutional forms’ of, 242–6
difficult classification of, 239
duties of, 281–5
as against egotism, 198–200
elevation of individuals by, 179–81
end of, 166
as energy, 92
as entrusted to woman, 171
as excess and luxury, 20, 96–7
and fear, 251–3
first, 121–2
in fish, 112
and friendship, 127–8, 174
as gist of life, 16, 77
global perspective on, 18
and gratitude, 128
and health, 31, 77
hearing in, 194–6
idolatry in, 184
in insects, 102–5
laws of, 165
lies in, 274–7
Mantegazza’s approach to, 19
in mature man, 235–7
as multiplication of vital forces, 113
and oaths, 122
perfection of, from adoration of beauty, 168–9
physiopathological, 133
and pity, 128–9
in plants, 97–8
platonic, 161
polygamy in, 241
prejudices against, 16
preservation of, 164, 171–2
in puberty, 118–19, 176
relation of, to other sentiments, 204–7
and revenge, 132
role of genius in, 209–10
 and senses, 189–97
and sex, 115
in sex, 219–26
sight in, 192–4
smell in, 196–7
social and legal misinterpretations of, 19
as against social impediments, 233
sources of, 123–35
sympathy in, 123–6
temperaments in, 238–46
and thought, 208–15
torments of, 247–58
touch in, 191–2
unreciprocated, 253–5
and vanity, 130–2, 205
as warped by bigotry, 236
woman’s submission in, 254–5
in youth, 227–35. See also One Day in Madeira;
Physiology of Love, The
Loven, 387
Loves of Men, The (Mantegazza), 77, 181, 202. See also Amori degli uomini,
Gli
Lubbock, Sir John, 266, 424
The Origin of Civilization, 267n
Prehistoric Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners
and Customs of Modern Savages, 266n
Lucullus Ponticus, Lucius Licinius, 503, 503n
Lusiads, The (Camoëns), 10, 319, 319n

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 357

Machiavellian duplicity, 125
Madapolam, 423
Madeira, 351
climate of, 373, 374
Madras, 427, 431, 433, 443
Malabar, 472, 474
Malthus, Thomas Robert, 270
fecundity as Malthusian problem, 85
Mandowessies, 92
Mantegazza, Paolo, 3–60
and bourgeois values, 28–9, 34
compared to Lombroso, 29–30
conception of anthropology of, 36
as creator of Psychological Museum, 45n
as cultural theorist, 7, 15
eclectic personality and style of, 3, 5, 7, 9, 14, 36–7
Epicureanism in works by, 47
on feminism, 21n
on homosexuality, 29, 29n
on human classification, 36
hygienic and health concerns of, 6, 32, 50
as against hypocrisy, 13, 49–50
in Index of Forbidden Books, 5–6
as initiator of seaside holidays, 6
misleading translations of titles by, 58
and modernity, 49, 138
Nietzschean attitude of, 48
Orientalism of, in travel narratives, 40
and politics, 51
 as promoter of photography for anthropological research, 6, 38, 38n
on religious progress, 454
reputation and reception of, 55–8
as sexologist, 6, 16, 25

Works: Amor mundano, 58

Gli amori degli uomini, 4, 6n, 16, 27, 47, 58, 145n, 202, 218

L’anno 3000. Sogno, 57

The Art of Taking a Wife, 57

L’arte di essere felici, 47

L’arte di prender marito, 18

L’arte di prender moglie, 18

The Book of Love, 57, 58

Il Dio ignoto, 47

Dizionario delle cose belle, 46

Le donne del mio tempo, 18

Elementi di igiene, 32

Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful, 46–9, 193n

Le estasi umane, 10, 46, 48

Fisiologia del dolore, 14–15

Fisiologia del piacere, 12–14, 47, 55

Fisiologia della donna, 18, 26n

Fisiologia dell’amore, 12, 18n, 55–6, 57, 58

Fisiologia dell’odio, 15–16

Head: or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds, 50–1, 506

The Hygiene of Love, 77, 211, 212, 218, 262

Igiene del nido, 26n

Igiene dell’amore, 16, 32, 77n

Igiene di Epicuro, 47

India, 37, 42–5, 56, 394n

Laura: A Study of Platonic Love, 57

The Legends of Flowers, 57

Lezioni di antropologia, 20n

The Loves of Men, 77, 181, 202

La mia mamma, 18

The Neurosic Century, 49, 502

On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca and on Nervine Nourishment

in General, 8–12, 327, 333, 333n

One Day in Madeira, 31–5

‘The Perversions of Love’, 29, 29n

Physiognomy and Expression, 4, 15, 57

The Physiology of Pleasure, 143, 144, 145, 222

Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament, 51

Quadri della natura umana, 10, 55, 145n

Ricordi politici di un fantaccino del parlamento italiano, 56

Rio de la Plata e Tenerife, 37

Il secolo nevrosico, 57

Il secolo tartufo, 57

Los secretos del amor, 58

The Sexual Relations of Mankind, 57, 58

Sexual Taboos, 58

Studi antropologici sui Lapponi, 38

Studii sull’etnologia dell’India, 43, 425, 471

Studj sui matrimonj consanguinei, 32, 33

‘Sulle virtùigieniche e medicinali della coca e sugli alimenti nervosi in generale’,

8–9

The Tartuffe Century, 49, 50

The Tartuffian Age, 57

Testa: A Book for Boys, 57

Testa, ovvero seminare idee perché nascano opera, 57

Trasformazione delle forze psichiche, 493n

Le Tre Grazie, 57

Un giorno a Madera, 56

‘L’uomo e gli uomini’, 36

Un viaggio in Lapponia coll’amico Stephen Sommier, 37, 56

A Voyage to Lapland with My Friend Stephen Sommier, 37–40, 45n

The Year 3000: A Dream, 52. See also Physiology of Love, The

Manuel annuaire de la santé (Raspail), 321n

Manzoni, Alessandro, 408n
Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, 154n
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 11
Marmier, Xavier, 407, 407n
Mars, 480
Marshall, William E, 434, 441, 443
Martin II, king of Sicily, 160
materialism, 19
in aesthetics, 47. See
also Epicurus; Physiology of Love, The
Mato Grosso, 355
matrimony, 286–301
corruption of, 291
as moral covenant, 287
need for reform of, 289–90
right of election in, 292–4
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 510n
Menezes, Aleixo de, 442
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 484, 485, 488, 488n
Menton, 363, 364
Messalina, Valeria, 241, 283
Metapollium, 433
Metz, Friedrich, 442, 442n
Mia mamma, La (Mantegazza), 18
Michelangelo (Buonarroti), 380, 447, 487
Mill, John Stuart, 478
Minas Gerais, 355
modesty, 143–8
and civilization, 146
in different cultures, 145
mutability of, 145
as preserver of affections, 147
and virginity, 157
in women, 144, 146. See also love; virginity
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 504, 504n
Mongibello (Mount Etna), 357
Monlan, Dr (Spanish physician), 264, 265
Montelius, Oscar, 387
Monza, 45, 452
Morocco, 455n
Moses, 499
Motala, 383, 384
‘Movimento femminista, Il’ (Sergi), 21n
Mozzoni, Anna Maria, 21n
Munda, 219, 219n
Murillo, Bartolomé Estéban, 158

Nagarjuna, 453
Narbonne, Viscount of, 160
National Association for Women, 21n
National Female Union, 21n
National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, 6
Negri, Francesco, 37n
Nepal, 447, 449, 459
Neurosic Century, The (Mantegazza), 49, 502
neurosism, 49, 502–3
New Zealand, 443
Newton, Isaac, 161
Nilgiris, 44, 433–4, 435, 437, 472
Nobile, Umberto, 37n
Nordenskjöld, Adolf Erik, 387, 388
Norsholm, 384
Norway, 37, 189, 381, 389, 394, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 421
railways in, 390–1
Nouveau système de chimie organique (Raspail), 322n
Nouvelle géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes (Réclus), 409n
nutrients: classification of, 319
nervine foods, 321–3

Obi River, 422

Odin, 386, 400
Odore dell’India, L’ (Pasolini), 43n
Ojung, 414
vegetation in, 396
Öjungen, 389
On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca and on Nervine
Nourishment in General (Mantegazza), 8–12
Coca experience as creative process in, 10
enjoyment of coca as purposeless surplus of energy in, 10
ethnographic significance of, 11–12
Freudian dreamwork in, 10–11
influence of, on Freud’s essays on
cocaine, 8–9
methodological hybridity of, 9
as pioneering study, 8–9, 11–12, 327, 333, 333n
 racial prejudices in, 12
sensations for their own sake in, 10
therapeutic applications in, 11. See also coca; nutrients
One Day in Madeira (Mantegazza), 31–5
exoticism in, 35
hygiene in, 31–3
moral message of, 32–3
reception of, 34–5
setting of, 32
travel in, 35
tuberculosis in, 31–3
Ootacamund, 436, 437
Oran, 324
Orbigny, Alcide Charles Victor Marie Dessalines d’, 326, 326n
Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and Physiology (von
Liebig), 320n
Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Physiology and Pathology (von Liebig),
320n
Origin of Civilization, The (Lubbock), 266n
Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 7
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 165, 255

pain, semiotic interpretation of, in Fisiologia del dolore, 15

Palestine, 455n
Palheiro, 352
Panama, 373
Papini, Giovanni, 5
Paraguay, 137, 326n
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, L’odore dell’India, 43n
Peregrinazioni indiane (De Gubernatis), 41
Pereira, Jonathan, 324, 324n
Pericles, 160n
Perseus, 493
Peru, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328
‘Perversions of Love, The’ (Mantegazza), 29, 29n
Petrarca, Francesco, 436n
Petronius, 157n
Phidias, 447, 501
Phryne, 206, 237, 237n
Physiognomy and Expression (Mantegazza), 4, 15, 57
Physiologie du goût (Brillat-Savarin), 14
Physiologie du mariage (Balzac), 14, 297
physiology: aesthetic nature of, 14
classification of phenomena according to, 320
and disease, 31
for exploration of love in others, 134
as fundamental science of humanity, 221
general, as psychology, 211
as enabling a holistic approach to life, 9, 12
and materialism, 19
and seduction, 139
of the sexes, 137, 225
Physiology of Love, The (Mantegazza), 12, 16, 19n, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 31, 34,
46, 57, 77
as best-seller, 17
desire in, 21, 23
divorce in, 26–7
female inferiority in, 22–3
marriage in, 26
 messianic tone of, 25
pioneering insights of, 25
prostitution in, 26–8
role of, in education of youth, 270
sacrifice in, 22–3
seduction in, 21
sexual issues in, 16–18
style of, 19
virginity in, 23, 25. See also love
Physiology of Pleasure, The (Mantegazza), 143, 144, 145, 222. See also
Fisiologia del piacere
Pilate, Pontius, 497
Pindar, 499
Pistoia, 435n
Pizarro, Francisco, 324
Platen, Count Baltzar Bogislaus von. See Von Platen, Count Baltzar Bogislaus
Plato, 105, 484, 485, 499
Plautus (Titus Macchius Plautus), 436n
pleasure: as content and form in Fisiologia del piacere, 14
physical aspects of, 19
science of (hedonology), 13
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament (Mantegazza), 51
polygamy, 99
in modern society, 215, 278
Popular Science Monthly, 4
Port Said, 423
Portinari, Beatrice, 180, 211
Portinari, Folco, 34n
Pothanur, 433
Potiphar, 116, 116n
Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and
Customs of Modern Savages (Lubbock), 266n
Procopius, 160
prostitution, 162, 233, 254, 262–71, 287
Catholic intolerance of, 264
causes of, 267–8
as compact, 286
political measures for handling, 269
realistic approach to, 265–6
social responsibility for, 268–9, 271
purposelessness, 20, 20n
of beauty, 48–9. See also On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of
Coca and on Nervine Nourishment in General

Quadri della natura umana (Mantegazza), 10, 55, 145n

Quarnström, 386
Quito, 355, 375

Rabelais, François, 430

Ranjit Singh, Maharaja, 465
rape, 287. See also love
Raphael. See Sanzio, Raffaello
Raspail, François Vincent, 321, 321n
Essai de chimie microscopique, 322n
Histoire naturelle de la santé, 321n
Manuel annuaire de la santé, 321n
Raynal, Abbé Guillaume-Thomas de, 329, 329n
Réclus, Elisée, 409, 410, 412
Reise durch Norwegen and Lappland (von Buch), 410n
Relation du voyage dans l’Amérique Méridionale, La (d’Orbigny), 326n
Retzius, Anders, 386, 438n
Retzius, Magnus Gustaf, 39, 377, 379, 386
Mantegazza’s dinner at home of, 388–9
Retzius, Mrs (Anna Hierta), 379, 379n
Revue des deux mondes, 409n
Riccardi, Paolo, 3
Ricordi politici di un fantaccino del parlamento italiano (Mantegazza), 56. See
also Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
Rimini, 6
Rio de Janeiro, 355, 427
Rio de la Plata e Tenerife (Mantegazza), 37
Rivista politica e letteraria, 21n
Robinson, Victor, 4
Rome, 52, 200, 264, 464, 510, 513, 514
Röros, 389, 390
landscape in, 392–3
Rosmini, Antonio, 234
Rossini, Gioacchino, 487
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 245n, 292
Rubens, Peter Paul, 105, 501
Russia, 409, 411
Russo, Luigi, 34n

sacrifice, 22–3, 34
as higher than love, 359
as taught by women, 171
in virginity, 153
of women, to love, 213. See also love
Salta, 324, 325, 326
Samson, 130
Sand, George, 478
Sankara Acharjya, 453
Sanzio, Raffaello, 158, 380, 488, 499
Sardanapalus. See Ashurbanipal
Scandinavia, 37, 39, 378, 378n
aesthetic standards of, 379
blondness of women in, 378
environment in, 403–5
female emancipation in, 379
house, importance of, in, 406–7
moral characteristics of population in, 408
naivety in, 380
order in, 379
peacefulness of, 378
silence in, 405. See also Copenhagen; Denmark; Lapland; Lapps;
Norway; Stockholm; Sweden
Scheffer, Ary, 180
Scipio (Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus), 274n
Scotland, 383
Secolo nevrosico, Il (Mantegazza), 57
Secolo tartufo, Il (Mantegazza), 57
Secretos del amor, Los (Mantegazza), 58
seduction, 141–2
Selection in Relation to Sex (Darwin), 231n
Sen, Ramdas, 453
Sergel, Johan Tobias, 386
Sergi, Giuseppe, 5, 53
‘Il movimento femminista’, 21n
Severus, Alexander, 267
sexology, 16–17
and feminism, 18
Mantegazza and European debate on, 17–18
Sexual Relations of Mankind, The (Mantegazza), 57, 58. See also Amori degli
uomini, Gli
Sexual Taboos (Mantegazza), 58
Shakespeare, William, 499
Shiva, 464n, 465, 466n, 469
Temples to, 464, 465–71
Shortt, John, 438, 438n
Siberia, 415n
Sicily, 203, 357n
Sidenbladh, Elis, 405n
Sikkim, 461, 462, 472
Singh, Ranjit, 465
Smith, Rev. William, 86, 86n
Soffici, Ardengo, 5, 30n
Solera, Laura Mantegazza, 18, 18n
Solomon, 99, 220
Somerville, Mary Fairfax, 478
Sommier, Stephen, 37, 377, 389, 394, 395, 396, 413, 417, 435, 448
Un viaggio d’inverno in Lapponia, 389n
Sophocles, 499
Sorata, 161, 250
Souriau, Paul, 485
South America, 36, 216, 322, 326
Spain, 203, 324, 356
Spencer, Herbert, 86
squandering, emotional and physical, 20, 25. See also beautiful, the; Epicurus;
On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca and on Nervine Nourishment
in General
Staël, Anne Louise Germain, Mme de, 478
Starr, Frederick, 4
Statistical Account of Bengal (Hunter), 472n
Steinhauer, 380
Stockholm, 39, 377, 381, 383, 404
architecture in, 385–6
compared to
Venice, 385
museums in, 386
Stolpe, 387
Storia dei viaggiatori italiani nelle Indie orientali (De Gubernatis), 41
Studi antropologici sui Lapponi (Mantegazza), 38
Studii sull’etnologia dell’India (Mantegazza), 43, 425, 471
Studj sui matrimonj consanguinei (Mantegazza), 32, 33
Suez, 423
‘Sulle virtù igieniche e medicinali della coca e sugli alimenti nervosi in
generale’ (Mantegazza), 8–9. See also On the Hygienic and Medicinal
Properties of Coca and on Nervine Nourishment in General
Surrealism, 10–11
Sweden, 37, 377, 381, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 421
lakes and canals in, 382–5
mores in, 387
physiognomy of population in, 387
science in, 386–7
Switzerland, 382
Synopsis of the British Diatomaceae, A (Smith), 86n

Tamerlane, 462, 462n

Tartuffe, 301
Tartuffe Century, The (Mantegazza), 49, 50
Tartuffian Age, The (Mantegazza), 57
Tasso, Torquato, 124
Tehuelches, 145
Teresa, St, 92
Terre; description des phénomènes de la vie du globe, La (Réclus), 409n
Testa: A Book for Boys (Mantegazza), 57
Testa, ovvero seminare idee perché nascano opere (Mantegazza), 57
Thames, 475n
Theodora, Empress, 160
Thomson, Sir Joseph John, 179n
Thor, 386
Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 380, 380n
Tiber, 475
Tibet, 425n
Tibullus, 263, 263n
Titian. See Vecellio, Tiziano
Todas, 40, 44–5, 433, 434, 438, 438n
features of, 437–8
first reports about, 442
funerals of, 441
future of, 443
houses of, 438–9
huts of, 436
Mantegazza’s encounter with, 434
names of, 440
origins of, 441–3
and other Nilgiris tribes, 437
 racial classification of, 442–3
religion of, 441. See also India
Toenset, 391
Törmo, hospitality at, 394
Tour du monde, 409n
translation as cultural border-crossing, 515–16
Trasformazione delle forze psichiche, La (Mantegazza), 493n
travel: and anthropology, 35
descriptions of, 37
to India, 40–1
and Italian national identity, 35
and Italian
scientific expeditions, 36
to Lapland, 37–8, 38n
Mantegazza on, 377–8. See also India; India; Lapland; Lapps;
Scandinavia; Voyage to Lapland with My Friend Stephen Sommier, A
Tre Grazie, Le (Mantegazza), 57
Tree and Serpent Worship: or, Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India
(Fergusson), 453n
Trent, Council of, 231
Trezza, Gaetano, Epicuro e l’epicureismo, 47
Tromsoe, 405, 407, 414
Trondheim, 408
tuberculosis: death by, 362
and reproduction, 365. See also One Day in Madeira
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 7
Tyrol, 377

Ulloa, Antonio de, 329, 329n

Ulpian, 267
Un giorno a Madera (Mantegazza), 32n
translations of, 56. See also One Day in Madeira
Uomo delinquente, L’ (Lombroso), 29, 30
‘Uomo e gli uomini, L’ (Mantegazza), 36

Valparaiso, 355
Van Düben, 387, 412, 413, 419, 422
Van Helmont, Jean Baptiste, 221, 221n
Vecellio, Tiziano, 105, 488
Venersborg, 383
Venice, 385
Venus, 162, 166, 169, 194, 233, 243, 244, 253, 275, 480
de Milo, 92, 305, 499
Verso la cuna del mondo (Gozzano), 43n
Vesuvius, 356, 357
Viaggio d’inverno in Lapponia, Un (Sommier), 389n
Viaggio in Lapponia coll’amico Stephen Sommier, Un (Mantegazza), 37, 56.
See also Voyage to Lapland with My Friend Stephen Sommier, A
Viaggio intorno al globo della R. pirocorvetta italiana Magenta (Giglioli), 36
Villafane, Mr (friend of Mantegazza and former governor of Oran), 324
Virchow, Rudolf Ludwig Karl, 417, 417n
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro), 468, 468n
virginity: anatomical facts of, 154–5
excessive importance of, 156
and female virtue, 156
and male ownership, 150
and moralism, 151
and naturalists, 152
physiology of, 152
in poetry, 151
 sacrifice of, 153
as value, 157. See also love; Physiology of Love, The; sacrifice
virtues in practical life, 507
Voltaire. See Arouet, François-Marie
voluptuousness, 165, 216, 280, 286, 287
effects of, on body and mind, 177–9
as equivalent to love in men, 222
as greatest sensual pleasure, 159
immorality of, without love, 162
as incompatible with lust, 162
male, as resulting from elevation of women, 170
as origin of passion, 166
and thought, 211
Von Buch, Christian Leopold, Freiherr, 410, 412, 419
Von Höpken, Countess Ulla, 386
Von Platen, Count Baltzar Bogislaus, 382–3, 382n
Voyage dans l’Inde (Jacquemont), 425n
Voyage to Lapland with My Friend Stephen Sommier, A (Mantegazza), 37, 38,
45n
conventions of travel literature in, 38
cultural comparisons in, 39
narrative style of, 38–9, 39n
representation of Lapps in, 38, 40. See also Lapland; Lapps; Viaggio in
Lapponia coll’amico Stephen Sommier, Un
Voyage to South America, A (Ulloa), 329n

Walker, 479, 479n

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 490, 490n
Wolff, Christian von, 484
women: as embodiment of voluptuousness, 163
 influence of, on male artists, 213
influence of, on mankind, 478
Mantegazza’s position on, 18, 21n
as more modest than men, 119
and need for free choice in love, 226
as repository of love, 221–2, 226
and sexual matters, 18
status of, in Italy, 18, 21, 21n
as stimulus to male success, 181–3
Worsoe, 380

Year 3000: A Dream, The (Mantegazza), 52

Yorrick, 430
Yungas, 324, 325, 326, 327
1 Luciano Zuccoli, ‘La morte di un ottimista,’ originally published in Gazzetta di Venezia, 29 August
1910. Repr. in Parvulae, pagine sparse di Paolo Mantegazza (Milan: Treves, 1910), p. v. English
translation mine
2 Angelo De Gubernatis, ed., Dizionario biografico degli scrittori contemporanei (Florence:LeMonnier,
1879), p. 681. English translations mine.
3 Paolo Riccardi, Saggio di un catalogo bibliografico antropologico italiano (Modena: Vincenzi, 1883),
pp. 54–5.
4 Frederick Starr, ‘Sketch of Paolo Mantegazza,’ Popular Science Monthly 43 (1893): 549.
5 Ibid., p. 551.
6 Victor Robinson, ‘Introduction,’ in Paolo Mantegazza, The Sexual Relations of Mankind, trans.
Samuel Putnam (New York: Eugenics Publishing Co., 1935), p. ix. The title of the English
translation, not unlike the titles of several other translations of the work, is misleading in its primary
emphasis on the sexual aspect of Mantegazza’s study, given the much broader scope of Gli amori
degli uomini. Such textual choices have reinforced the image of Mantegazza as a sexologist to the
detriment of the numerous other aspects of his intellectual work.
7 Ibid., p. xii
8 Ardengo Soffici, ‘Firenze,’ Il Selvaggio 5:4, (29 February 1928): 15.
9 Giovanni Papini, ‘Il senatore erotico,’ in Passato remoto 1885–1914 (Florence: Ponte alleGrazie,
1984), p. 91. English translation mine
10 Benedetto Croce, ‘Scienziati-letterati,’ in Croce, La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 6(Bari:
Laterza, 1957), p. 54.
11 Giuseppe Sergi, ‘Paolo Mantegazza,’ Nuova antologia (16 September 1910): 232.
12 Among the comments in the Index, the following give an idea of Mantegazza’s overall reception: The
Physiology of Love is a ‘book of blasphemies against Christianity, Jesus, the Virgin, and Christian
virginity’ because of its physiological reduction of life to mere nutrition and generation; Gli amori
degli uomini ‘narrates with truthful accuracy the loves of people, especially savage ones; it accepts
divorce, free love, polygamy, and even polyandry’; L’arte di prender moglie and L’arte di prender
marito are ‘irreligious’ because they demand free choice for both sexes, with the enlightenment of
reason and the guarantee of divorce. See L’Indice dei libri proibiti. Saggi e commenti, pt 3, ‘Breve
commento di tutto l’indice,’ ed. Giovanni Casati (Milan: Casa Editrice ‘Pro Familia,’ 1939), pp. 243–
4. English translations mine.
13 Additional intriguing scientific accomplishments that bear Mantegazza’s signature are the invention
of the ‘globulimetro,’ an instrument for the rapid measurement of blood red cells; research on
artificial insemination; and experiments on animal grafts.
14 Parvulae, p. 243
15 Paolo Mantegazza, La bibbia della speranza (Torino: STEN, 1909), p. 1.
16 Ibid., p. 2.
17 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (London: John Murray, 1871), 1
18 For a discussion of Mantegazza’s production in the theoretical context of cultural studies, see
Nicoletta Pireddu, ‘The Anthropological Roots of Italian Cultural Studies,’ in Italian Cultural
Studies, ed. Graziella Parati and Ben Lawton (Boca Raton, FL: Bordighera, 2001), pp. 66–88.
19 Sigmund Freud, Cocaine Papers, ed. Robert Byck (New York and Scarborough: NewAmerican
Library, 1974). Freud makes several references to Mantegazza in his ‘Über Coca’ (ibid., pp. 49–73),
but the pioneering achievements of On the Hygienic and Medicinal Properties of Coca and on
Nervine Nourishment in General are also recognized in several sources that Freud consulted for his
own work, such as Theodor Aschenbrandt’s ‘The Physiological Effect and Significance of Cocaine
Muriate on the Human Organism’ (ibid., pp. 21–6). It should also be acknowledged that, while
Mantegazza was discussing the action of the coca leaf, Freud was already experimenting with
cocaine, the drug deriving from it.
20Freud, Cocaine Papers, p. 9
21Unless otherwise indicated, all English quotations from Mantegazza’s works are taken from our
volume.
22 See, for instance, Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writing and Daydreaming,’ in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 9 (London: Hogarth,
1959), pp. 143–53
23 Section 5 of Mantegazza’s essay, ‘Osservazioni pratiche sull’azione terapeutica della coca,’ which is
not included in our volume, reports case histories of individuals who were treated with coca precisely
for those kinds of problems.
24 And it is also significant that, as Antonio Aimi has observed, ethnomedicine and ethnobotanics have
recently reintroduced therapies based on coca leaves precisely for the kinds of situations initially
contemplated in Mantegazza’s essay. See Antonio Aimi, ‘Mantegazza e la coca: una ricerca da
rivalutare,’ in Cosimo Chiarelli and Walter Pasini, eds, Paolo Mantegazza: medico, antropologo,
viaggiatore (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2002), p. 169.
25 These prejudices, by no means the only ones that can be found in Mantegazza’s discourse, can be
connected to similar gendered-based biases in Quadri della natura umana, where Mantegazza
justifies the male’s greater propensity to use nervine nourishments and other stimulants by
maintaining that men have a greater need for enjoyment than women.
26 Paolo Mantegazza, Fisiologia del piacere (Pordenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1992), p. 4. English
translation mine.
27 Ibid., p. 403. English translation mine.
28 ‘Il piacere è il bacio dato dalla natura all’essere vivo’ (ibid., p. 402). English translation mine.
29 ‘Il piacere è l’ondulazione lasciata da Dio alla materia viva nell’escire dalle sue mani’ (ibid., p. 403).
English translation mine.
30 Grazia Misano, ‘Paolo Mantegazza: mito e realtà del “senatore erotico,”‘ in ‘Trivialliteratur?’
Letterature di massa e di consumo, ed. AA.VV. (Trieste: LINT, 1979), p. 308.
31 ‘La piaga cancerosa che corrode la felicità dei viventi’ (Paolo Mantegazza, Fisiologia del dolore
[Florence: Paggi, 1880], pp. 437–8). English translation mine.
32 Atlante delle espressioni del dolore di Paolo Mantegazza (1876) contains 123 pictures of human
expressions of pain, reproducing either real subjects or artworks on the theme of pain.
33 ‘Cosmogonia sensitiva e affettiva’ (Paolo Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell’odio [Milan: Treves, 1889], p.
3).
34Ibid., pp. 63, 84–92.
35 Even though, as Mantegazza’s texts show, the object of study is not exclusively sexual.
36 Ehrenfreund records German, French, Russian, Bohemian, Spanish, and Portuguese translations of
Fisiologia dell’amore between 1877 and 1899. See Erasmo Ehrenfreund, Bibliografia degli scritti di
Paolo Mantegazza (Florence: Stabilimento Grafico Commerciale, 1926), p. 71. For additional details
on the translations of Mantegazza’s texts, see our section entitled ‘A Note on the Texts and Their
Translations,’ below.
37 See Erwin J. Haeberle, ‘Sexology: From Italy to Europe and the World,’ in Sessualità e terzo
millennio. Studi e ricerche in sessuologia clinica, vol. 1, ed. C. Simonelli, F. Petruccelli, and V.
Vizzari (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997), pp. 13–22.
38 Laura Solera Mantegazza (1813–73) was a patriot during Italy’s wars of independence, the creator of
humanitarian institutions in support of illiterate women, women workers, and children, and a
committed promoter of women’s social and political activism. Not accidentally, the 1880 Italian
edition of The Physiology of Love includes the responses of two women to Mantegazza’s volume, one
of whom is Laura Solera. Predictably, the comments of this strong advocate of female emancipation
on her son’s achievement are glowing: ‘I think you have very generously done justice to our sex in all
that is spiritual, noble, and elevated.’ Mantegazza’s mamma, furthermore, in the best Italian tradition,
does not miss the opportunity to recommend that her beloved and successful Paolo be magnanimous
with that portion of the world not endowed with his ingenuity. See Fisiologia dell’amore (Florence:
Bemporad, 1880), p. 12. English translation mine.
39 This section is not included in the English edition of The Physiology of Love that we have adopted
and revised for our volume.
40 This is already evident, as we have seen, in the essay on coca, with its notion of an accelerated life
made up of sensations consumed for their own sake, but it returns with more or less intensity at
different stages of Mantegazza’s intellectual production, as we can gather from the notes of his
academic lectures, Lezioni di antropologia. For a more exhaustive elaboration of this aspect within
the larger framework of late nineteenth-century European anthropology and literature, see Nicoletta
Pireddu, ‘Ethnos/Hedon/Ethos: Paolo Mantegazza, antropologo delle passioni,’ in Pireddu,
Antropologi alla corte della bellezza: decadenza ed economia simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle
(Verona: Fiorini, 2002), pp. 131–84. e
41 During the Italian Risorgimento and in the early life of the Kingdom of Italy, the debate on the status
and the rights of women remained a male prerogative and essentially reinstated female subjection.
However, several initiatives in favour of women’s political and social advancement began to develop
in Italy, among which were Anna Maria Mozzoni’s 1879 league for the promotion of women’s
interests, the National Association for Women (Rome, 1897), and the National Female Union (Milan,
1899). When examined in the larger context of the debates on feminism in Italy and abroad,
Mantegazza’s overall position on the condition of women seems to occupy a middle ground. He is
certainly not as biased as Giuseppe Sergi, who, in his ‘Il movimento femminista,’ written more than
ten years after Mantegazza’s The Physiology of Love, continued to reject the possibility of women’s
emancipation, considering feminism ‘the rebellion of women not so much against the man who
subjected them as against the nature that created them as women.’ See Giuseppe Sergi, ‘Il movimento
femminista,’ in Rivista politica e letteraria (April 1898. Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico della
Tribuna, 1898), p. 3. On the other hand, Mantegazza’s perspective continued to generate dissent
abroad also, as evident, for instance, in the reactions to a series of articles on women and feminism
that he published in the British periodical The Humanitarian between 1899 and 1900, based on
excerpts from The Physiology of Love and Fisiologia della donna. As we read in the reply of one of
his women readers, although Mantegazza shows awareness of the restrictions that have been imposed
on women’s education and seems sensitive to the need for women’s emancipation (at least in the
future), his comparison between male and female intellectual capacity is unreasonable because it does
not take into consideration the ‘numbing effect’ of women’s constant submission to men on women’s
mental status. See Margaret Sackville, ‘Mantegazza’s View of Woman: A Reply,’ The Humanitarian
16 (1900): 88–9.
42 Mantegazza’s Italian expression here is ‘placenta della vita,’ which highlights even more clearly the
physical determinism that turns the woman’s anatomy into her destiny as a mother. See Fisiologia
dell’amore, p. 211
43 Indeed, if not always messianic, Mantegazza’s tone is quite often self-celebratory. However
democratic Mantegazza’s impulse to reach out to the entire Italian population, he often adopts a
superior and self-reflexive attitude that diminishes his ability to instruct the masses. For instance, in
The Physiology of Love he repeatedly states that the populace will be unable to grasp the gist of his
disquisitions. His attitude as an educator seems elitist and almost Nietzschean.
44 We can infer that this education must be, among other things, sexual, as Mantegazza confirms in
Igiene del nido, for instance
45 These claims anticipate the perspective of Fisiologia della donna, where Mantegazza foresees a
‘woman of the future’ who, though not ‘the same as man’ (because she will not lose but rather
reinforce her femininity –this feature, of course, is one that Mantegazza is not ready to relinquish in
the ‘daughers of Eve’), will enjoy economic independence thanks to a professional education
allowing her to become a literary writer, a physician, or a pharmacist. See Paolo Mantegazza,
Fisiologia della donna, vol. 2 (Milan: Treves, 1893), pp. 322–3.
46 See Monica Boni, L’erotico senatore. Vita e studi di Paolo Mantegazza (Genova: Name, 2002), pp.
67–70.
47 For a discussion of Mantegazza’s attitude with regard to the role of marriage in the bourgeois system
of procreation, work, and productivity, see Misano, ‘Paolo Mantegazza,’ pp. 321–4.
48 Paolo Mantegazza, ‘The Perversions of Love,’ in Homosexuality: A Cross Cultural Approach, ed.
Donald Webster Cory (New York: Julian, 1956), p. 248.
49 Ibid., p. 249
50 Ibid., p. 255.
51 Ibid., p. 249. Indeed, with a sense of shock and alarm he discovers that sodomy is not confined to the
most degraded social layers but is also practised by wealthy, educated, and refined individuals whom
he has encountered: ‘a French journalist, a German poet, an Italian politician, and a Spanish
juriconsult, all men of exquisite taste and the highest culture!’ (ibid., p. 259). But Mantegazza at least
makes an attempt to sympathize with some aspects of what he sees as this puzzling reality: ‘Psychic
sodomy is not a vice but a passion. A blame-worthy one, if you like, unclean and revolting, but a
passion none the less. A number of sodomists have written me letters over which I have wept, telling
me of their ardent loves and jealousy’ (p. 261). And even with all his shortcomings, it is Mantegazza
who introduces homosexuality as a subject of scientific inquiry in the debates of his time.
52 In 1928, for instance, Ardengo Soffici mercilessly attacked both scientists as eminent representatives
of the crass stupidity of late nineteenth-century culture. See Soffici, ‘Firenze,’ p. 15
53 For an amusing and informative account of Lombroso’s personal and professional life in the context
of late nineteenth-century Italian scientific culture, see Luigi Guarnieri, L’atlante criminale: vita
scriteriata di Cesare Lombroso (Milan: Mondadori, 2000).
54 Ehrenfreund, Bibliografia, pp. 43–4.
55 Paolo Mantegazza, Studj sui matrimoni consanguinei (Milan: Brigola, 1868), p. 1. English translation
mine.
56 Ibid.
57 See Walter Pasini, Paolo Mantegazza, ovvero L’elogio dell’eclettismo (Rimini: Panozzo, 1999), p.
230.
58 Paolo Mantegazza, Studj sui matrimoni consanguinei (Milan: Brigola, 1868), p. 1. English translation
mine.
59 For instance, Russo argues that One Day in Madeira clearly shows its author’s co-optation of
literature as a vehicle for the diffusion of a well-defined thesis, whereas Portinari emphasizes its
stylistic excesses. See Luigi Russo, I narratori (1850–1950) (Milan: Principato, 1951), p. 130; and
Folco Portinari, ‘Amore e igiene nello scenario esotico delle isole tropicali,’ in Portinari, Le parabole
del reale (Torino: Einaudi, 1976), pp. 129–35
60 Croce, ‘Scienziati-letterati,’ p. 55. English translation mine
61 Adele Lessona, ‘Notizia letteraria. Un giorno a Madera. Una pagina dell’igiene d’amore diPaolo
Mantegazza,’ Nuova antologia di scienze, lettere ed arti 10 (February 1869): 396. English translation
mine
62 For a more exhaustive treatment of the role of scientific travel in the formation of Italian identity, see
Sandra Puccini, Andare lontano. Viaggi ed etnografia nel secondo Ottocento (Rome: Carocci, 1999)
63 Paolo Mantegazza, ‘L’uomo e gli uomini,’ introduction in Enrico H. Giglioli, Viaggio intorno al
globo della R. pirocorvetta italiana Magenta (Milan: Maisner, 1875), p. xvi.
64 Paolo Mantegazza, ‘Trent’anni di storia della Società Italiana di Antropologia, Etnologia e Psicologia
Comparata,’ Archivio per l’antropologia e l’etnologia 31 (1901); In memoria del XXXo anno della
Società Italiana d’Antropologia (Florence: Salvatore Landi, 1901), p. 4.
65 Mantegazza, ‘L’uomo e gli uomini,’ p. 50.
66 Paolo Mantegazza, Rio de la Plata e Tenerife. Viaggi e studj (San Vito: Brigola, 1876), p. 14.
67 Before Umberto Nobile’s 1926 flight over the North Pole in his airship Norge, Italian expeditions to
the Arctic region were rare. Lapland had been depicted since the Middle Ages as the borderland
between civilization and savagery, and, on the basis of their physical features, the Lapps had been
likened to African Pygmies. This vision persisted in the accounts of the few subsequent Italian
explorations, from the seventeenth-century sojourn of the Catholic priest Francesco Negri to
Giuseppe Acerbi’s much acclaimed 1798 journey to the Sami region, although the myth of the good
savage partly redeemed the image of primitive man as a Rousseau: as we will see, primitivism leads
him to ascribe virtues to the Lapps that the rest of Europe has irremediably lost, whilewild beast.
With Mantegazza’s and Sommier’s enterprise a scientific rationale begins to prevail (at least
officially) over the sight-seer’s curiosity. Mantegazza’s accounts, however, are not immune to a
primitivism à la paradoxically he continues to endorse the negative clichés entrenched by previous
explorers. Without overlooking the current resistance of many Samis to the term ‘Lapp,’ now
considered derogatory, we have remained consistent with Mantegazza’s choice of term in order to
avoid confusion.
68 The scattered references to the use of photography in Mantegazza’s travel narrative therefore have an
important cultural and scientific value, well beyond the provision of touristic details. For an
examination of Mantegazza’s pioneering use of photography, see Cosimo Chiarelli, ‘Mantegazza e la
fotografia: una antologia di immagini,’ in Chiarelli and Pasini, Paolo Mantegazza: medico,
antropologo, viaggiatore, pp. 91–113; and Cosimo Chiarelli and Susanna Weber, eds, Etnie. La
Scuola Antropologica fiorentina e la fotografia tra ‘800 e ‘900 (Florence: Alinari, 1996).
69 The ‘we’ employed by Mantegazza refers, first of all, to the presence of his travel companion
Sommier. But its indirect effect is to create a sense of collective experience that fosters the readers’
identification with his party. The dialogical aspect of Un viaggio in Lapponia is evident not only in
the actual exchanges between Mantegazza and Sommier and in their alternating accounts (which
occupy sections of the travelogue not included in our volume) but also in their frequent references to
a wide range of scientific and literary sources that produce a sort of second-hand reconstruction of the
Lapp cultural context. See Sandra Puccini, ‘I viaggi di Paolo Mantegazza. Tra divulgazione,
letteratura e antropologia,’ in Chiarelli and Pasini, Paolo Mantegazza: medico, antropologo, viaggia-
tore, pp. 49–74.
70 We are referring to Edward Said’s discussion of the ideas of the ‘Orient’ in the Western intellectual
tradition. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).
71 For these aspects, see also Puccini, Andare lontano, pp. 22–3
72 Carlo Cattaneo, ‘Dell’India antica e moderna,’ in Scritti filosofici, letterari e vari (Florence: Sansoni,
1973), pp. 880–931
73 The literariness and the particular stylemes of Mantegazza’s Indian travelogue are also probably
behind Guido Gozzano’s letters from India, Verso la cuna del mondo, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s
L’odore dell’India (interestingly, Mantegazza devotes a section of his own narrative to the scent of
India).
74 Not accidentally, Mantegazza would progressively merge the contents of the two texts in subsequent
editions of India
75 Paolo Mantegazza, Studii sull’etnologia dell’India (Florence: Società Italiana di Antropologia, 1886),
p. 48. English translation mine.
76 Ibid. English translation mine.
77 This behaviour is by no means occasional, as we can gather also from A Voyage to Lap-land, where
Mantegazza insistently bargains for a leather chatelaine meant for his museum. At the same time,
however, it is worth remarking that, if the nineteenth-century travelling ethnographers can be said to
have shared a collecting frenzy that drove them to pillage all sorts of material in the exotic places
they visited, Mantegazza is distinguished for his peculiar conceptualization of the museum. He was
the creator of a Psychological Museum that, unlike a traditional ethnographic museum, attempted to
collect material able to illustrate human passions beyond ethnicity. According to this innovative
ordering criterion, the museum was intended to represent the individual variations of psychic attitudes
across national, cultural, and racial boundaries rather than exhibiting self-contained instances of each
people’s thought and arts. For a discussion of Mantegazza’s project, which was only partially
accomplished, and details about the museum’s collection, see Edoardo Pardini and Sandra Mainardi,
‘Il Museo Psicologico di Paolo Mantegazza,’ Archivio per l’antropologia e la etnologia 121 (1991):
137–84; and Sara Ciruzzi, ‘Le collezioni del Museo Psicologico di Paolo Mantegazza a cento anni
dalla sua inaugurazione,’ ibid., pp. 185–202.
78 Paolo Mantegazza, Lezioni di antropologia, 1870–1910, vol. 1, Archivio per l’antropologia e la
etnologia 19, (1989): 119. English translation mine.
79 Paolo Mantegazza, Le estasi umane (Milan: Paolo Mantegazza Editore, 1887), p. 306. English
translation mine.
80 Paolo Mantegazza, Le estasi umane (Milan: Paolo Mantegazza Editore, 1887), p. 306. English
translation mine.
81 Dizionario di sesso, amore e voluttà dagli scritti di Paolo Mantegazza, ed. Adolfo Zavaroni(Milan:
Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1979).
82 Paolo Mantegazza, Epicuro, saggio di una fisiologia del bello (Milan: Treves, 1891), pp. vi–vii: ‘il
vero e savio epicureismo consista nell’amare, nell’adorare e nello studiare il bello; unico Dio che non
tramonta mai nel cielo dell’umanità.’ English translation mine
83 See, for instance, the passage in Epicurus where Mantegazza asserts that ‘the joys the beautiful
imparts to us are among the most democratic’ in that, for instance, natural elements ‘smile with equal
light in the eyes of all who understand the beautiful, and aesthetic wealth is not bought with gold;
rather, it is acquired with study and contemplation of beautiful things. Nature is juster than man and
dispenses the greatest joys in life to all’ (p. 501).
84 Le estasi umane, p. 306. English translation mine.
85 Like the protagonists, the addressees of the book are male. One may wonder whereMantegazza’s
concern for the education of women with a view to the woman of the future has gone
86 See Pasini, Elogio, p. 63.
87 See Alberto Capatti, ‘Prefazione,’ in Paolo Mantegazza, L’anno 3000 (Bergamo: Lubrina, 1988), p.
14.
88 Ehrenfreund, Bibliografia, p. 1. English translation mine.
89 Similarly, no foreign translations exist of Quadri della natura umana. Feste ed ebbrezze, in which
Mantegazza reprinted a large portion of his essay on coca, even though this work was much praised
in numerous European scientific journals.
90 Probably abridged, judging from its small number of pages (147) in comparison to the two-volume
Italian original.
91 Among them a Czech translation of Testa (Hlava, Prague 1936); a Portuguese version of L’arte di
prender moglie (Lisbon, 1952); a 1966 American English edition of Gli amori degli uomini; and a
1975 Chinese translation of Le leggende dei fiori.
92 A symptomatic example of this rediscovery of Mantegazza as a pioneering investigator into spicy
sexual matters is an article by Giovanni Mariotti, ‘“Amore mio, ti ha detto nulla
Mantegazza?”‘L’Espresso 25 (24) (1979): 146–55.
93 See David Jacobson’s ‘Translator’s Note,’ below.
1 As was observed here in the 1894 English edition, both books had since been published, as Gli amori
degli uomini, saggio di etnologia dell’amore and Igiene dell’amore, and had had an enormous sale on
the Continent. Mantegazza ultimately kept the title ‘Pictures of Human Nature’ for a different
volume, Quadri della natura umana. Feste ed ebbrezze. [Editor].
2 The first thing that lives [Editor].
3 Single-celled animals [Editor].
4 A family of algae, made up of microscopic plants found in fresh and salt water. [Editor].
5 A tissue sample obtained with a biopsy. The Rev. William Smith (1808–57) published A Synopsis of
the British Diatomaceae (1853–6)[Editor].
6 Gonium, Volvox: green algae [Editor].
7 A small unicellular organism commonly found in freshwater ponds [Editor].
8 A worm usually found in areas near water [Editor].
9 An intestinal roundworm, one of the most common parasites found in humans. Daniel Frederik
Eschricht (1798–1863) was a Danish physiologist and zoologist [Editor].
10 A Native American tribe [Editor].
11 Movement [Editor].
12 A kind of sea squirt [Editor].
13 Eel grass [Editor].
14 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (London, 1871) – Darwin [Author].
15 The biblical Joseph, the son of Jacob, sold by his brothers and taken to Egypt as a slave [Editor]
16 This coleopteron, whose loves I myself have studied, is the Cincindela sylvicola; but many others
love in the same way, and although wounded and dying they do not abandon the female [Author].
17 An Argentinian town [Editor].
18 Carob trees [Editor].
19 Late deciduous trees, with a short thick trunk and a large top, common in Argentina and other areas
of South America [Editor].
20 Kinds of local birds [Editor].
21 A carrion hawk [Editor]
22 A person in love [Editor].
23 A Blue-green algae [Editor].
24 A lake in Northern Italy [Editor].
25 The Egyptian man to whom the Ishmaelites sold Joseph, in the biblical account. Potiphar’s scheming
wife falsely accused Joseph of trying to lie with her, and Joseph was sent to prison [Editor].
26 A mountainous region of Switzerland [Editor].
27 Or electroplating, the use of electric current to coat a conductive object with a thin layer of metal
[Editor].
28 Love, that releases no beloved from loving. A famous line in Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Canto
V, l. 103), from the love story of Paolo and Francesca [Editor].
29 Veritable love [Editor].
30 The sacred law of the Turkish empire [Editor].
31 Milan, 1870, p. 189 [Author].
32 Mantegazza, Quaopi della natura umana; Gli amori degli nomini [Author]
33 Gauchos (trousers) [Editor].
34 A series of prizes established before the French Revolution by the Baron de Montyon to be awarded
by the Académie Française, the Académie des Sciences, and the Académie Nationale de Médecine
[Editor].
35 As emerges from Mantegazza’s elaboration of the term, the morgincap (a term of German origin
meaning ‘morning gift’) was a gift that husbands made to their wives after their first night together,
either to reward them for their efforts or as a prize for their virginity. The gift consisted of the
allocation of a portion of the husband’s wealth to his wife [Editor].
36 A Gallic leader who occupied Rome but did not succeed in taking the Capitol from Marcus Manlius
Capitolinus. His name is associated with the episode of a Roman citizen’s complaint when the tribute
the Romans had agreed to pay was being weighed. Throwing his sword on the scale, Brennus cried,
‘Vae victis’ (Woe to the vanquished) [Editor].
37 The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived. A saying ascribed to the Latin author Petronius
[Editor].
38 La Marmora, Itinerario in Sardegna, etc., p. 270 [Author].
39 Gibbon, History of the Fall of the Roman Empire [Author].
40 Bible [Author]. Avishag the Shunamite was a beautiful maiden chosen as King David’s bed-warmer
at the end of his life. Hermippus was an Athenian writer, the enemy of Pericles [Editor].
41 Nicholas François Appert (1752–1841) developed an effective method of preservingfood by heating
it to boiling temperature and sealing it in airtight glass jars. Appert wasawarded a prize by Emperor
Napoleon Bonaparte, who would adopt his method ofpreserving food for the French troops fighting in
foreign lands [Editor].
42 In the Italian text Mantegazza writes uomo-femmina, a female man [Editor].
43 Crepuscular politics [Editor].
44 Mantegazza is probably alluding to and misspelling the name of Sir Joseph Thomson (1856–1940),
the British scientist who was making the first modern attempt to construct a theory of atomic
structure, and who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for the discovery of the electron
[Editor].
45 Probably Ary Scheffer (1795–1858), a Dutch-born French painter [Editor
46 An instrument (a brush or a perforated container) for sprinkling holy water, used in Roman Catholic
liturgical rites [Editor].
47 This work would become Epicurus [Editor].
2 See Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. 2, p. 279 [Author].
3 A lady with an exquisite sense of smell once remarked, ‘I experience at times so much pleasure in
smelling a flower that it seems to me I have committed a sin’ [Author].
50 Originally a French word designating a bell used as an alarm, and, by extension, an omen [Editor].
51 We cannot. A sentence pronounced by the pope in rejecting innovations in church doctrine; the
expression has come to indicate inability or unwillingness to honour a request [Editor].
52 A member of the Italian police force [Editor].
53 A Greek courtesan who had different prices for customers according to her feelings for them. Her
real name was Mnesarete, but she was called Phryne (toad) owing to her yellow complexion [Editor].
54 A collection of 423 Buddhist verses arranged in twenty-six chapters by topic. It is said to contain the
essential teachings of the Buddha, delivered on a wide variety of occasions and for the benefit of a
broad range of human beings. Its title can be translated as ‘The Way of Virtue,’ ‘The Path of Law,’ or
‘The Foundation of Religion’ [Editor].
55 This is not the place [Editor].
56 From the name of Sardanapalus (Ashurbanipal), an Assyrian king famous for his luxurious living
[Editor].
57 Sagen, ‘Sitten und Gebraüche der Munda-Kolhs in Chota Nagpore vom Missionar Th. Jelliughaus,’
Zeitschrift für Etnol. (1871), p. 331 [Author]. The Munda, or Kols, also known as Kolarians, are a
tribe of the Indian Chota Nagpur plateau [Editor].
58 The French peasants’ anti-feudal rebellion, and, by extension, any revolution led by oppressed people
[Editor].
59 Only a woman could write these sublime words: ‘Ah, sans doute que dans les mystères de notre
nature aimer, encore aimer est ce qui nous est resté de notre héritage céleste’ – Mme de Staël
[Author]. Undoubtedly among the mysteries of our nature, to love and love again is that which has
remained of our heavenly legacy [Editor]. 60 The whole woman is her womb. Jean Baptiste van
Helmont (1579–1644) was a Flemish chemist and physician, the first who realized the presence of
gases other than air and who is credited with the coinage of the word ‘gas’ itself. He is renowned for
having taken the melting point of ice
60 The whole woman is her womb. Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1579–1644) was a Flemish chemist and
physician, the first who realized the presence of gases other than air and who is credited with the
coinage of the word ‘gas’ itself. He is renowned for having taken the melting point of ice and the
boiling point of water as standards for temperature, and also for his adoption of medical remedies
specifically targeting a disease, its causes, and the bodily organ affected [Editor].
61 If youth knew how, if old age could [Editor].
62 Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex [Author].
63 An 1863 sculpture by Francesco Barzaghi representing the Greek courtesan Phryne. See p. 206 n53
[Editor].
64 Valeria Messalina, third wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, notorious for her cruelty, lust, and
thirst for power [Editor]
65 A love with a bad personality [Editor].
66 Zaneto, Zaneto, you were not born to make love. From an episode narrated in the autobiographical
writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (‘Zaneto’ means ‘Little Jean’ in Venetian dialect). While in St
Mark’s Square, Rousseau was approached by a man who told him to put women aside and turn his
thoughts to mathematics [Editor].
67 He loves complaining miserably [Editor].
68 Three and four times [Editor].
69 The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes walked through Athens in broad daylight carrying a lighted
lamp, searching in vain for an honest man [Editor].
70 As a cadaver [Editor].
71 A narrow path surrounded by mountains near Benevento, in the Southern Italian region of Campania,
where the Samnites defeated the Roman army in 321 BCE [Editor].
72 Crushed to pieces by a stone be the bones of the one who first taught others to sell their flesh.
Mantegazza misquotes Tibullus’s first line, ‘At tibi, qui …’ [Editor].
73 Take prostitutes out of the world, and you will upset the whole of it with lusts; put them in the place
of wives, and you will defile it with disease and dishonour [Editor].
74 You too, my son? Reputed to be Julius Caesar’s last words, to his younger friend and former ally
Brutus, as Brutus joined with others in stabbing him [Editor].
75 Hygiene, vol. 4, p. 289 [Author].
76 Sir John Lubbock (1834–1913) was a renowned archaeologist, biologist, anthropologist, and
politician, and the author of many scientific works, such as the 1865 Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated
by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (which would become the
most influential archaeological study of the nineteenth century) and the 1870 Origin of Civilization.
He was also the creator of the names Palaeolithic and Neolithic to designate the Old and New Stone
Ages [Editor].
77 The toman was the currency of Iran until 1932 [Editor].
78 Carthage is to be destroyed. The sentence was pronounced by Cato the Censor; Scipio Africanus led
the siege of Carthage and conquered the city [Editor].
79 The Italian criminal court, which is also the highest court [Editor].
80 The subject of a famous painting by Raphael (c. 1518) [Editor].
1 He gave him the burning green herb leaf he was wont to chew. From Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, 1572),
an epic poem by the Portuguese poet and soldier Luis Vaz de Camoëns (1524–80), telling the story of
the explorer Vasco da Gama and incorporating much Portuguese history [Editor].
2 Justus von Liebig (b. 12 May 1803 in Darmstadt, Germany; d. 18 April 1873), one of the most
influential chemists of the nineteenth century. He radically changed the teaching of chemistry, by
shifting from a philosophical approach to an experimental, laboratory-oriented methodology. In the
field of applied chemistry, Liebig remarkably enhanced food production thanks to the development of
mineral fertilizers, as emerges from his two volumes Organic Chemistry in Its Application to
Agriculture and Physiology (1840) and Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Physiology and
Pathology (1842). Liebig was also distinguished for his commitment to the diffusion of the benefits
of chemistry to the lay population, a mission of scientific popularization that Mantegazza would take
on with equal passion [Editor].
3 François Vincent Raspail (b. 25 January 1794 in Carpentras, France; d. 7 January 1878 in Arcueil, near
Paris). He began his professional career as a self-taught botanist and chemist and later became a
nationally renowned hygienist. He wrote the very successful Manuel annuaire de la santé, which was
followed by his Histoire naturelle de la santé (1843). Like Mantegazza after him, Raspail reached out
to people, especially the lower classes, in highlighting the importance of public health measures for a
better life. A supporter of microscopes for the study of tissues, he is considered one of the founders of
cell theory (Essai de chimie microscopique, 1830; Nouveau système de chimie organique, 1833)
[Editor].
4 Obsession with worms [Editor].
5 The constitutional predisposition to illness [Editor].
6 Or ‘red wood’ [Translator].
7 Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru (7th ed. London, 1854), p. 60 [Author].
8 Probably the British physician and pharmacologist Jonathan Pereira (b. 22 May 1804; d. 20January
1853), the author of Elements of Materia Medica and Therapeutics (1839–40) [Editor].
9 A variable Italian unit of 8 to 9 kilograms [Translator].
10 The French naturalist Alcide Charles Victor Marie Dessalines d’Orbigny (b. 6 September 1802; d. 30
June 1857) made contributions in various scientific domains, such as anthropology, zoology, geology,
and archaeology. In 1826–33 he travelled in South America, visiting Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay,
Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. He described his expedition in La relation du voyage dans l’Amérique
Méridionale, much praised by Charles Darwin [Editor].
11 Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (b. 16 September 1704 in Paris; d. 3 February 1779 in Compiègne), a
French scholar who practised medicine and contributed more than 18,000 articles on physiology,
chemistry, botany, and pathology to the Encyclopédie [Editor].
12 The pharmacist Carlo Erba, who operated in Brera, near Milan. He was one of several figures in the
medical domain who, around 1847 in Milan, began to experiment with hashish and marijuana and to
devise therapeutic uses for them. The first Italian pharmacist to sell hashish, he accepted a small
quantity of coca from Mantegazza. For Italian medicine’s discovery of cannabis, see Giorgio
Samorini, L’erba di Carlo Erba: per una storia della canapa indiana in Italia: 1845–1948 (Torino:
Nautilus, 1996) [Editor].
13 Giuseppe Gibelli (1831–98), a professor of botany in Bologna and Turin, a specialist in lichens, and
the author of Compendio della flora italiana [Editor].
14 Antonio de Ulloa (1716–95), a Spanish general, explorer, astronomer, and colonial administrator, and
the first Spanish governor of Louisiana. He published A Voyage to South America (1748), an account
of his scientific mission to Peru in 1736–44. He returned to South America in 1758 as governor of
Huancavelica in Peru and general manager of the quicksilver mines until 1764 [Editor].
15 Probably Abbé Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal (b. 12 April 1713 in Saint-Geniez, France; d. 6 March
1796 in Chaillot), a French writer. His most renowned work is Histoire des deux Indes (1770), a six-
volume account of the European colonies in India and the Americas denouncing the cruelty of the
Europeans toward colonial peoples, consisting mainly, according to Raynal, of religious intolerance
and abuse of power. This very popular work, which had gone through thirty editions by 1789 (most of
them expanded versions with an increasingly radical tone), was placed on the Roman Catholic
church’s Index of Forbidden Books and ordered burned. In 1781, Raynal was exiled from France and
banished from Paris until 1790 [Editor].
16 Jean-Baptiste Bénard de La Harpe (b. January 1683 in Saint-Malo, France; d. 26 September 1765 in
Saint-Malo), a French trader and explorer. In 1718 he travelled in the southern United States along
the Mississippi, Arkansas, Red, and Sulphur Rivers trying to establish trading posts. In 1831, on his
return to France, he published an account of his adventures – Journal historique concernant
l’établissement des français à la Louisiane – which is not considered totally accurate [Editor].
17 Coca user [Translator].
18 A scrub or field of thick stubble [Editor].
19 In Bolivia the natives’ marital honour does not allow the groom to lay down arms for a single
moment the first night after his wedding. Their lustfulness is due more to temperament than
corruption, and some desires are so common among them that, ever since the first years of the
Conquest, it has sufficed to tell one’s confessor, Confeso me mi padre; que me equivoquè [Hear me,
Father, for I have sinned; lit., erred, gone astray (Translator)] for him to understand immediately. The
wedding festival of the llamas is enough to bring tremors to the boldest pen that would describe it
[Author].
20 The fellow’s lost to coca [Translator].
21 Here Mantegazza emphasizes the pioneering nature of his findings and, with his usual far-
sightedness, seems convinced that his contribution will stimulate subsequent investigations and
scientific accounts [Editor].
22 A skin condition characterized by dry scaling or scurfy patches [Editor].
23 St Vitus’s dance [Translator].
24 A resin gum with a strong sulphurous odour, from the dried sap of the stem and roots of the wild
fennel [Editor].
1 Mount Etna, the active volcano on the east coast of Sicily [Editor].
1 Mantegazza here takes a definite position on an issue that continues to keep debates open: although
Denmark partakes of Scandinavian culture, geographically it belongs to continental Europe, and
hence its status makes it more difficult to define Scandinavia precisely [Editor].
2 Magnus Gustaf Retzius (1842–1919), a Swedish physician and anatomist. He pursued extensive
research into the histology of the nervous system and sense organs and was the author of more than
three hundred studies in a variety of scientific fields such as anatomy, anthropology, and zoology.
Together with his wife, Anna Hierta, he founded the Hierta-Retzius Foundation in support of
biological research and socially oriented scientific projects [Editor].
3 A celebrated amusement park in Copenhagen, opened in 1843 [Editor].
4 Bertel Thorvaldsen (or Thorwaldsen) (1770–1844), a Danish sculptor who spent most of his life in
Rome at the time of Canova [Editor].
5 Count Baltzar Bogislaus von Platen (1766–1829), a Swedish naval officer and statesman, became
chairman of the Göta Canal directorate, in charge of the construction of a canal across Sweden. As
Mantegazza here notes, the canal was completed only after von Platen’s death, in 1832. His grave, on
the Göta Canal in Motala, has become a tourist attraction [Editor].
6 Anders Retzius (b. 1796 in Lund; d. 1860 in Stockholm), the father of Magnus Gustaf Retzius (see p.
379 n2), was a Swedish anthropologist and professor of anatomy who made important discoveries
about teeth, muscles, the nervous system, and the human skull [Editor].
7 The Finnish-born scientist and explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld (1832–1901) was exiled from
Sweden in 1857. His most famous expedition took place in 1878–80, when he navigated the
‘Northeast Passage’ from northern Norway to the Bering Strait [Editor].
8 What Mantegazza describes here is an elaborate Swedish smörgåsbord [Editor].
9 The toast is skål in Swedish. In North American English is it usually transliterated skol, without the ‘e’
that Mantegazza has used [Editor].
10 Jens Andreas Friis (1821–96), a professor of Lapp at the University of Christiania and the author of
seminal works on Lapp grammar and mythology [Editor].
11 Stephen Sommier (1848–1922), an internationally renowned botanist and, together with Mantegazza,
one of the founders of the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology. Sommier’s journey to
Lapland with Mantegazza was followed by another expedition to Cape North with Giovanni Cosimo
Cini in 1884–5, during which he collected additional photographic material. The account of this
journey, Un viaggio d’inverno in Lapponia, was published in 1887 [Editor].
12 A kind of lichen [Editor].
13 Dante features prominently in Mantegazza’s imaginations, especially the vivid scenarios evoked by
his Inferno. We find similar remarks in India [Editor].
14 Of uncertain taxonomic position [Editor].
15 A decorative belt, usually made of metal, deriving from the belt formerly worn by the lady of a
manor for holding keys and other tools [Editor].
16 Even in Scandinavia the beasts are growing rarer every day. According to Elis Sidenbladh, there were
killed in Sweden

The wild reindeer is found today only in the most isolated parts of Lapland, and even the elk has grown
very rare. If is it still found to the south of Christiania, that is because the law prohibits killing it. And
this is a country in which the laws are obeyed [Author].
17 Xavier Marmier (1809–92), a French novelist and writer. His passion for travelling inspired
numerous volumes of letters and memoirs. He was a great promoter of Scandinavian literature and
culture [Editor].
18 The Italian, ‘Ai posteri l’ardua sentenza,’ is a clear reference to a famous line in Alessandro
Manzoni’s ode to Napoleon, ‘Il cinque maggio’ [Editor].
19 The French geographer Jean Jacques Elisée Réclus (1830–1905) spent six years (1852–7) in the
British Isles, the United States, Central America, and Colombia contributing to the Revue des deux
mondes, the Tour du monde, and other travel periodicals. In 1867–8 he published the two-volume La
terre; description des phénomènes de la vie du globe, and then he authored the nineteen-volume
compilation Nouvelle géographie universelle, la terre et les hommes (1875–94), which gained him
the gold medal of the Paris Geographical Society in 1892 [Editor].
20 Christian Leopold, Freiherr von Buch (1774–1853), a leading German palaeontologist and geologist.
After studying volcanoes in southern Europe, he spent two years in Scandinavia, where he made the
important observations on its plants, climate, and geology recorded in his Reise durch Norwegen und
Lappland (1810) [Editor].
21 In Lapland live dirty people, / Flatheaded, wide-jawed, and small, / They squat round the fire and
roast one another / Fish, and they scream and squall [Translator].
22 They have dark faces, and of a ghastly pallid colour, short hair, large mouths, hollow cheeks, long
chins, blear eyes. Knud Leem (1696–1774) was a Norwegian missionary who, after working as a
vicar at Talvik and Alta, became the leading eighteenth-century specialist on Sami language and
culture, and collected a large amount of ethnological material [Editor].
23 Dark [Translator].
24 The mouth is smiling, the glimmer in the eye lively and kindly, the forehead high and truly noble
[Translator]
25 Of great strength [Editor].
26 They moved so fast and nimbly that the winds would whistle next to their ears and their hair would
rise [Editor].
27 That smell came from nowhere else but the clothes of those people always in the smoke of huts, and
oil squeezed from the fat of fish [Editor].
28 Bove found that the Chukchi do not wear eyeglasses, although many of them have eyes in the most
parlous condition. The indigenous peoples of the American polar coasts and the Eskimos, on the other
hand, use wooden eyeglasses with a very narrow lengthwise slit that lets in few rays of light [Author].
The Chukchi (from the Russian Cukci) are a people living in the northeastern area of Siberia and
devoted to fishing and reindeer breeding. The Italian explorer Giacomo Bove (1852–87) took part in
Nordenskjold’s 1878 expedition in search of the Northeast Passage [Editor].
29 Ecker, ‘Einige Bemerkungen über einen schwankenden Charakter in der Hand der Menschen’ [Some
Observations on the Varying Character of the Human Hand], Archiv für Anthropologie; Mantegazza,
Della lunghezza relative dell’indice e dell’anulare, Archivio per l’Antropologia e l’Etnologia, vol. 7
(Florence, 1877), p. 19 [Author].
30 Revellents (or revulsives): agents that produce revulsion, that is, a counterirritation aimed at reducing
the inflammation in or increasing the blood supply to the infected part of the body [Editor].
31 See p. 350 n24 [Editor].
32 Rudolf Ludwig Karl Virchow (1821–1902), a German pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, and
politician. Considered the first to recognize leukaemia, he is also the founder of the disciplines of
cellular pathology and comparative pathology. In 1869 he established the German Society for
Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory [Editor].
33 It is worth comparing the character of the Chukchi with that of the Lapps. Even these Oriental
brethren of our good Scandinavian friends are kindly and tender with their families – neither thieves
nor murderers. If you give a child some candy or treat, he will invite his little siblings and friends in
order to divide the gift with them. They try nothing, these children, without first presenting it to their
parents and receiving permission to eat. At the age of seven or eight the poor children begin
following the seal-fishing caravans, at nine or ten years old they already drive a team of seven or
eight dogs; at thirteen or fourteen they already own a harpoon, a lance, and a bow, weapons they will
never set down until their dying day. They are cheerful, happy people. The Chukchi are very
hospitable, and at one time they would offer their guest their wives. This no longer happens, although
it must be said that Chukchi women know nothing of modesty. The Chukchi too show little liking for
music and have no musical instruments but a drum made from a seal bladder and a one-string viola.
The few songs they know are sweet and monotonous. Only the girls dance, alone, and their dance
consists of little jumps to left and right, and they roll their eyes horribly, groaning and panting like
their very beasts and cetaceans. There are many external similarities between our Lapps and the
Chukchi. The latter also wear two furs in winter, one on the outside, the other on the inside. They too,
when they rest, pull in one or both arms from their sleeves, the better to warm themselves. They too
never give up their knife, their pipe, or their tobacco pouch. Our Bove more than once saw Chukchi
women chewing tobacco, and their babies give up their moth-er’s nipple to suck on a pipe [Author].
34 Rationabile obsequium, reasonable service [Editor].
35 The Lapps, like the rest of mankind, are afflicted by their own vices, but actually these are few and
infrequent [Editor].
1Golconda is one of the most spectacular fortresses in India, located close to the city of Hyderabad. The
city it originally enclosed was renowned for the diamond trade. The Ko-hi-noor diamond is said to
have come from there. Nabobs were provincial governors of the Mogul empire in India, and the word,
by extension, designates people of great wealth or prominence. Bayadères are Indian professional
female dancers [Editor].
2Ernst Heinrich Philip August Haeckel (b. 16 February 1834; d. 8 August 1919), a German biologist,
physician, and philosopher responsible for popularizing Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in
Germany. He is remembered for his much debated ‘recapitulation theory,’ according to which
ontogeny (the development of form) reca-pitulates phylogeny (evolutionary descent), as well as for
his ‘biogenic theory,’ which, by seeing the development of races as parallel to that of the individuals,
implied that so-called primitive races corresponded to the infancy of civilization and hence needed
supervision by more advanced societies. [Editor].
3Victor Jacquemont (b. 8 August 1801 in Paris; d. 7 December 1832 in Bombay), a bot-anist, natural
historian, and traveler. He sailed for America in 1826, visited Haiti and two years later, having
returned to France, left on a scientific mission to India, where he explored the Himalaya region,
penetrated into Chinese Tartary, the Kashmir region, and Tibet. After returning to Bombay, he died of
cholera. The journal of his Indian experience, Voyage dans l’Inde (1836), edited posthumously by
Guizot, is rich in geological, geographical, botanical and zoological information, and offers equally
interesting details about the institutions, traditions, and languages of the countries he visited. His
chief claim to fame, however, is probably his epistolary exchanges with family and friends during his
travels (Correspondance, 1833), which were appreciated for their lively style and detailed
observations [Editor].
4‘Studies in the Ethnology of India’ [Editor].
5A term deriving from the Hindi kul. Coolies were unskilled labourers or porters usually from the Far
East, hired for low or subsistence wages [Editor].
6A term deriving from the Persian Pars, meaning ‘Persia.’ It designates a Zoroastrian descended from
Persian refugees settled principally at Bombay [Editor].
7Terzo piano [Editor].
8In India’s cities, money is English although Indian-coined. The unit is the rupee, which is worth
between 2.10 and 2.50 lire, depending on the exchange rate, and the rupee divides into the ana,
corresponding to one and a half English pennies. The ana in turn breaks down into the pais, a copper
coin. Gold pieces are not coined, since the Hindus would take them out of circulation to use as
jewellery. Higher than the rupee, however, there is paper money, with the same value as silver coin;
but as it is issued by various banks, it can often be lost by the traveller moving from one part of India
to another. One can only hope that, with a single government ruling India, there will be a single form
of money throughout the country [Author].
9The conversation is in English in the original text [Translator].
10In English in the original text [Translator].
11A silver coin used in Italy, and varying in value in different areas, until the end of the eighteenth
century [Editor].
12The coffee-rat or Golunda ellioti, an insular variety of the Mus hirsutus identified by Sir Walter Elliott
in Southern India. Sir Walter Elliot (b. 1803 in Edinburgh; d. 1887) joined the Indian Civil Service in
Madras in 1821 and worked in that city until 1860. In addition to zoology and botany (Flora
andhirica, 1859), his interests spanned Orien-tal studies, archaeology, and numismatics (Coins of
Southern India, 1884). A scholar of Sanskrit legal literature, in 1844 he began publication of The
Crescent, reputedly the first Hindu periodical in Madras [Editor].
13The city of Hyderabad, lying on the Deccan (Dakkan) Plateau, was founded in 1591 and ruled by the
Qutb Shahi dynasty until it became part of the Mogul empire in 1687. After gaining independence
from the Mogul emperor in 1724, the Hyderabad prov-ince experienced a period of cultural and
economic growth and became the largest princely state in India under the Nizam rule, which
remained in power even during British control. The Hyderabad state preserved its own currency,
postal system, and mint. It became an Indian state only after Indian independence, when it was
divided among several linguistic regions. [Editor].
14James Wilkinson Breeks (1830–72), an administrator in India and an anthropologist, took over the
administration of the Nilgiris as its first Commissioner. He is the author of An Account of the
Primitive Tribes and Monuments of the Nilagiris [sic] (1873), and he photographed the Kota,
Kurumba, and Toda people of southern India in the early 1870s [Editor].
15A light two-wheeled vehicle drawn by a horse, commonly found in India [Editor].
16The British anthropologist William E. Marshall, the first to establish contact with the Todas, to whom
he devoted the study A Phrenologist among the Todas; or, The Study of a Primitive Tribe in South
India (1873) [Editor].
17Mantegazza is here making an analogy between the second-largest hill station in the Nilgiris and a
picturesque village in the Italian Apennines, close to the Tuscan city of Pis-toia. As often in
Mantegazza’s travel narratives and anthropological writings, new places are described and classified
in relation to standards belonging to the author’s domestic culture [Editor].
18Man is a wolf to his fellow man. A Roman proverb attributed to Plautus and later used by Thomas
Hobbes to describe what for him was the savage egotism and violence of the state of nature in which
man lived before the creation of society [Editor].
19Mortal beauties pass and fade. The title of Sonnet 190 in Francesco Petrarca’s Canzo-niere [Editor].
20In English in the original text [Translator].
21Various Nilgiris tribes [Editor].
22Because of its temperate climate and rich vegetation, the Nilgiris district became a sanatorium for
convalescing British troops beginning in the 1820s [Editor].
23 John Shortt, an ethnologist, who provided important information on the Todas’ bodily features in An
Account of the Tribes of the Nilgiris (Madras, 1868) [Editor].24 The ratio of the maximum width of
the head to its maximum length, multiplied by 100. This parameter was first introduced by the
Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius in the mid-nineteenth century, for the racial classification of
ancestral populations. Its useful-ness was disputed in the early twentieth century by Franz Boas
[Editor].
24 The ratio of the maximum width of the head to its maximum length, multiplied by 100. This
parameter was first introduced by the Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius in the mid-nineteenth
century, for the racial classification of ancestral populations. Its usefulness was disputed in the early
twentieth century by Franz Boas [Editor].
25 Friedrich Metz, a Swiss missionary considered the only Westerner to speak the Toda tongue at the
time. He was the author of various studies on the Todas’ vocabulary and on other Nilgiris populations,
resulting from over twenty years spent among them. He also assisted Marshall in his research on the
Todas [Editor]
26 Mount Kanchenjunga, a Himalayan peak now in Nepalese territory, the world’s third- highest
mountain. Throughout the text we have retained Mantegazza’s spelling of this name, as of most other
names [Editor].
27 Several times in his travelogue, Mantegazza transcribes notes from his notebook with-out following a
precise chronological order [Editor]
28 A generic term used in Northern India to refer to rough, uncultured people from the area of Nepal
[Editor].
29 The warrior caste. Mantegazza spells the term as ‘Chattri’ [Editor].
30 The louse [Editor].
31 botia [Editor].
32 tostino in the original text [Editor].
33 The well-known Buddhist mantra, variously transliterated but often found as Om Mani Padme Hum
[Editor].
34 The Indian name of a plant known in English as the East Indian screw tree (Helicteres isora)
[Editor].
35 In English in the original text [Translator].
36 See p. 212 n54 [Editor].
37 From James Fergusson’s Tree and Serpent Worship: or, Illustrations of Mythology and Art in India
(1868) [Editor].
38 Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (b. 30 June 1817 in Halesworth Suffolk; d. 10 December 1817), a
supporter of Darwinian theories. He was an English botanist and traveller and the first to accomplish
organized trekking in the Darjeeling area, in the 1840s. Of his numerous expeditions (from Antarctica
and the South Seas to Morocco, Palestine, and the United States), the one to the northern frontiers of
India (1847–51) was among the most adventurous and fruitful. Although, together with his friend
Archibald Campbell, he was detained in prison by the raja of Sikkim, he succeeded in collecting
crucial geographical and botanical data from hitherto unexplored regions. His botanical findings
(Flora of British India, 1897) laid the foundation for subsequent research on Indian flora, in particular
on the rhododendron of the Sikkim Himalaya [Editor].
39 A smoking pipe consisting of a long flexible tube that passes through an urn of per-fumed water
designed to cool the smoke as it is drawn through the tube [Editor].
40 Mantegazza is probably referring to the Nimbu warrior caste, from the Nepalese moun-tain ranges
[Editor].
41 The Lepcha are the aboriginal inhabitants of the Kingdom of Sikkim, which was annexed by India in
1975. Since Sikkim is now a part of India, located between the king-doms of Nepal and Bhutan, the
Lepcha have become a minority in their own tribal homelands [Editor].
42 Legend has it that Tamerlane, the ruler of Tartary, wishing to become master of the entire world,
conquered cities and kingdoms but was ultimately defeated, and thereaf-ter wandered alone trying to
escape from his enemies. One day, while meditating on his misfortunes, he saw an ant carrying a
grain of wheat and trying to climb the trunk of a tree with that heavy load. After numerous failed
attempts, the insect finally succeeded in getting to its home with the grain. Tamerlane learned a lesson
in courage from the ant’s perseverance in adversity, and resumed his plans for conquering [Editor].
43 A reference to the sixth circle of Dante’s Inferno, where the Heretics are punished. The Epicureans
are among them because they pursued pleasure in life, believing that the soul would die with the
body. The chastisement suggested to Mantegazza by the Indian place follows Dante’s law of the
contrappasso, which in this case condemns the Epicure-ans to a punishment that is the opposite of
their original sin [Editor].
44 A vessel of porous earthenware, popularly known as a ‘water-monkey,’ used for cooling liquids by
evaporation from the exterior surface. Usually enveloped in a light cord net, the vessel, once filled, is
suspended in a draught of air [Editor]
45 Temples to the Hindu god Shiva [Editor].
46 A non-anthropomorphic symbol of Shiva, referring to that which is invisible but omni-present
[Editor].
47 A structure used in Parsi death ceremonies. Attendants carry the body into the Tower of Silence,
perform rituals, and then withdraw. The body is left to vultures, which strip the flesh from it, and is
left exposed to the sun and natural elements until bleached and dry. The bones are then collected and
deposited in the central well to deteriorate fur-ther. After the body is placed in the Tower, ceremonies
held outside it conclude the funeral [Editor].
48 The story of this white phantom of Benares should not be considered a photograph but a lyrical
intermezzo. Perhaps the lady I saw on the banks on the Ganges was not the same one I later saw in
the temple that evening, but permit me to trace the outlines of a white, vaporous figure that appeared
to me to be, in that Indian Rome, like an angel of religion drifting amid a vast, abandoned cemetery,
like a winged spirit of the ideal, wending her way amid ruined tombs and crumbling temples, trying
to rekindle the fires of an already dead faith [Author].
49 Literally, ‘Thus do ye, but not for yourselves.’ This expression, used to refer to people by whose
labours others have unduly profited, corresponds to the beginning of each of four verses by the
Roman poet Virgil. Caught in a dispute with Bathyllus over the authorship of the lines, Virgil alone
was able to complete the verses and confirm himself as the legitimate author [Editor].
50 Etites, or eagle-stones, are soft, argillaceous stones, of variable size and form with a rough surface,
consisting of concentric layers and often containing a central movable kernel. In antiquity they were
called eagle-stones from the belief that eagles took them to their nests to facilitate the laying of eggs
[Editor].
51A relatively small amount of money for services rendered [Editor].
52 Sir William Hunter (1840–1900), a member of the Indian Civil Service and a prolific scholar of
Indian culture with a broad range of interests from the religious to the phil-ological. In addition to
compiling the Gazetteer of India and the Annals of Rural Bengal over many years, he authored A
Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia, with a Dissertation (1868) and A
Guide to the Orthography of Indian Proper Names, with a List Showing the True Spelling of All Post
Towns and Villages in India (1871). The 20 vol-umes of his Statistical Account of Bengal were
published between 1875 and 1877 [Editor].
53 Translated from the Italian (English original unavailable) [Translator].
54 In general, the colour is blacker in the lower castes; among the Brahmans and the princes of the
highest social stratum, the skin can present the colour of very light coffee with cream. An Indian
proverb says, Don’t trust a black Brahman or a white pariah [Author].
55 Translated from the Italian (English original unavailable) [Translator]. Brian Hough-ton Hodgson (b.
1 February 1800; d. 23 May 1894) was an English civil servant, ethnol-ogist, and naturalist. An
official of the British East India Company, he went to Katmandu, where he studied and published on
Nepalese languages, literature, and reli-gion. He also investigated Nepalese zoology, and discovered a
new species of antelope and more than a hundred species of birds. In 1845 he settled in Darjeeling,
where he pursued research on the peoples of Northern India [Editor].
56 He loves me a lot, because he beats me a lot [Translator].
57 A roll of betel leaf with betel nuts [Editor].
58 A secluded house or part of a house allotted to women [Editor].
59 Purdah, i.e., veil or screen [Editor].
60 Objects that provide joy [Editor].
1 The beautiful comes from humanity, and the sublime belongs to the universe [Translator].
2 Being, the Beautiful, the absolutely True are limits. The poet and the artist gain immortality in striving
to attain them [Translator].
3 Perfection is the harmony of difference [Translator].
4 Eurhythmy is beauty’s foremost element. [Translator].
5 True beauty is in the intelligent adaptation of things to their ends [Translator].
6 Beauty for the toad, is his lady toad [Translator].
7 Mellowness [Translator].
8 Mengs, Pensées sur la beauté et le goût dans la peinture, translated from the German[Author].
9 The widowbird [Editor].
10 In L’elezione sessuale [Author].
11 Translated from the Italian (English original unidentified) [Translator]. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–
1913), a British naturalist, evolutionist, geographer, anthropologist, and humanist, formulated a
theory of evolution by natural selection that preceded the publication of Darwin’s own contributions,
but, like Mantegazza, he disagreed with Darwin on the role of sexual selection in evolution. The
Duke of Argyll (George John Douglas Campbell, 8th, 1823–1900) was an important politician and
publicist on issues of evolution and economics, opposed to Darwinism [Editor].
12 The first that is born; the last that is dying [Editor]; Mantegazza, La trasformazione delle forze
psichiche [Author].
13 Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912), a Dutch-born English classicist painter, famous for his
representations of the life of ancient Greece and Rome [Editor].
14 The judgment is difficult [Editor].
15 Last resort [Editor].
16 Aesthetic weakness [Editor].
17 You have multiplied the people, but not the joy! [Translator].
18 The English version of the Aboriginal word Caribberie. Corroboree was the term used by the early
European invaders to describe the song and dance ceremonies of the Australian indigenous
populations [Editor].
1 Lucius Licinius Lucullus Ponticus (c. 110 bce–56 bce), a Roman general notorious for his extravagant
way of life [Editor].
2 Large Italian pork sausages studded with peppercorns [Editor].
1 The reference is to Molière’s play Tartuffe, written to expose the hypocrisy of seventeenth-century
France [Editor].
2 In addition to The Neurosic Century and The Tartuffe Century, Mantegazza had planned a third
volume, The Sceptical Century, which was never written [Editor].
3 The sharecropping system (mezzadria) characterized Italian rural life. Tenants would work a piece of
land in exchange for a portion, usually half, of the crops or the revenue destined to the landowner,
who, in his turn, would provide accommodation for the tenant and his family on his property (podere)
[Editor].
1 The Italian Chamber of Deputies [Editor].
2 The first and largest circus built in ancient Rome [Editor].
3 The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) introduced a system of naming and classifying
organisms which he regarded as ‘artificial’ rather than natural, in that it did not consider all the
similarities and differences among the elements being examined [Editor].
4 The historic building that has hosted the Italian Parliament since 1871 [Editor].
5 Agostino Depretis (b. 1813; d. 1887), an Italian politician and early supporter of Giuseppe Mazzini’s
revolutionary and republican ideas who later became a supporter of monarchy and, after Italy’s
unification, a leader of the moderate left in parliament. Appointed premier three times (1876–8,
1878–9, 1881–7), he created moderate coalitions according to his policy of trasformismo. Depretis’s
reputation was that of an opportunistic and manipulative politician; he is considered by many the
cause of the widespread disenchantment with Italian politics toward the end of the century [Editor].
1 Highly concentrated aromatic substances [Editor].