Caresses
No, my friend, do not think any more of it. What you ask of me revolts and disgusts me. It is as if God—for I believe in God—had wanted to spoil every good thing that He made by attaching some horrible thing to it. He had given us love, the divinest thing the world ever knew, but, finding it too lovely and too fine for us, He imagined our senses, shameful, vile, revolting, brutal senses, senses that He seems to have fashioned in malicious jest and linked with the excretions of our bodies; He has conceived them in such a way that we cannot think of it without blushing, can only speak of it in hushed voices. The dreadful thing they do is wrapped in shame. It hides away, disgusts our souls, offends our eyes; despised by morality, hounded down by law, it consummates itself in darkness, as if it were a criminal.
Never speak to me of it, never!
I do not know whether I love you, but I know that your nearness pleases me, that your glance is sweet to me and your voice caresses my heart. From the day you had of me the frailness you desire, you would become hateful to me. The delicate bond that holds us to each other would be broken. An infamous abyss would lie between us.
Let us stay as we are. And … love me if you will, I will let you.
Madame, will you allow me also to speak to you with brutal frankness, without polite euphemisms, as I would speak to a friend who was anxious to take on himself a lifelong vow?
Neither do I know whether I love you. I should be sure of it only after the thing that so revolts you.
Have you forgotten Musset’s poem:
Je me souviens encor de ces spasmes terribles,
De ces baisers muets, de ces muscles ardents,
De cet être absorbé, blême et serrant les dents.
S’ils ne sont pas divins, ces moments sont horribles.12We experience that sense of horror and overwhelming disgust only when the madness of our blood has led us into casual adventures. But when a woman is the being we have chosen, entirely charming and infinitely desirable, as you are for me, the caress of love becomes the sharpest, most complete and supremest pleasure.
This caress, madame, is the proof of love. If our passion dies after that fierce embrace, we have been deceiving ourselves. If it grows, we love.
A philosopher, who did not practise his doctrines, has put us on our guard against this snare of nature’s. Nature desires new life, he says, and to compel us to create it, has set the double bait of love and pleasure round the snare. And he adds: “As soon as we have let ourselves be taken, as soon as the momentary madness has left us, we are filled with a profound sadness, understanding the trick that has deceived us, seeing, feeling, touching the secret hidden cause that has driven us in spite of ourselves.”
That is often true, very often. Then we go away, in utter revulsion. Nature has conquered us, has thrown us against our will into arms that were opened for us because she willed them to open.
Yes, I know the cold savage kisses pressed on strange lips, the fixed burning gaze into eyes that one has never seen before and will never see again, and all that I can’t tell, all that sears our mind with a bitter grief.
But if this hazy cloud of affection that we call love has closed round two human beings, if they never cease to think long of each other, and, when they are separated, to remember one another, all the time, day and night, hiding in their hearts the beloved’s features and his smile and the sound of his voice; if they have been obsessed, possessed by the absent form whose image never leaves them, is it not natural that arms open at last, that lips meet and bodies touch?
Have you never wanted to kiss anyone? Tell me whether lips do not call to lips, whether the bright glance that seems to pierce our veins does not rouse fierce and irresistible desires.
True, you say, that is the snare, the shameful snare. What matter?—I know it, I fall in it and I love it. Nature gives us the caress of love to hide her cunning, to force us—against our will—to perpetuate the human race. Let us therefore will the caress, make it ours, refine it, change it, idealise it, if you like. Let us too deceive Nature, the arch deceiver. Let us do more than she has willed, more than she could or dared teach us. Think that the caress of love is a precious thing taken from the earth in its rough state, and let us take it and work over it and perfect it, careless of the original design, the hidden will of the being you call God. And since it is thought that idealises everything, let us idealise this thing, madame, even in all its terrible brutality, all its most impure forms, its most monstrous imaginings.
Let us love the caress that thrills as we love the heady vine, ripe fruit fragrant on the palate, and all the sharp pleasures of the body. Let us love flesh because it is beautiful, because it is white and firm, and round and sweet, delicious to lips and hands.
When artists seek the rarest and purest form for the chalice where art must drink to ecstasy they choose the curve of the breasts, whose bud is like a rose.
And in a learned book, called the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales, I read this definition of a woman’s bosom, which might have been imagined by M. Joseph Prudhomme turned medical man:
“The breast in woman may be considered as at one and the same time an object of use and of pleasure.”
Let us suppress, if you like it so, the usefulness and keep only the pleasure. Would it have been given this adorable form that calls aloud to be caressed, if it had been designed only to nourish babies?
Yes, madame, leave the moralists to preach modesty, and the doctors caution; leave poets, deceivers that are themselves always deceived, to sing the chaste union of souls and bodiless happiness; leave ugly woman to their duty and rational men to their futile needs; leave doctrinaires to their doctrines, priests to their commandments, and as for us, let us prize more than anything in the world the caress of love, that intoxicates and maddens us, makes us faint and exhausted, and gives us new life, that is sweeter than perfume, lighter than the light wind, sharper than wounds, swift and devouring, that makes men pray and weep and groan and shout and commit any crime and any heroic deed.
Let us love it, with no placid normal legal love; but violently, furiously, beyond all bounds of reason. Let us seek it as men seek gold and diamonds, for it is more precious than they, being beyond price and fleeting. Let us pursue it without faltering, let us die for it and through it.
And let me tell you, madame, a truth that you will not find, I think, in any book; the only happy women on this earth are those to whom no caresses are lacking. These live without anxiety, without torturing thoughts, desiring nothing save the next kiss, that shall be as delightful and satisfying as the last one was.
The other women, in whose lives caresses are few, or unsatisfying or raw, live tormented by a thousand wretched anxieties, by the friction of greed or vanity, and by all the things of life that turn to sorrow.
But women whose lives are filled with caresses, need nothing, desire nothing, regret nothing. They live in a dream, content and smiling, hardly ruffled by what for others would be irreparable disasters, since the caress of love pays all, cures all things, comforts for all.
I could say much more than this. …
These two letters, written on Japanese rice paper, were found in a little Russian leather pocketbook under a prie-Dieu at the Madeleine, on Sunday, yesterday, after one o’clock Mass, by