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.