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WINUWRI) PRESCOTT
PASSION AND CRIMINALITY
BY
LOUIS PROAL
V *
PASSION AND CRIMINALITY
IN FRANCE
A LEGAL AND LITERARY STUDY
BY
LOUIS PROAL
ONE OF THE PRESIDING JUDGES
AT THE COURT OP APPEAL OP RIOM ( PUY-DE-DÔME)
LAUREATE OP THE "INSTITUT"
TRANSLATED FROM THR FRENCH
BY
A. R. ALLINSON M.A. (Oxon.)
PARIS
CHARLES CARRINGTON
13 FAUBOURG MONTMARTRE
1 90 1
o^o- Sc M
HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
BEQUEST OF
WINWARO PRE8COTT
JANUARY 27, 1933
TRANSLATOR'S FOREWORD.
Few more important Works have been published of late
years than Louis Proal's Passion and Criminality. It
is a book that appeals at one and the same time to the
specialist in Psychology, Ethics, Criminology and Insanity,
and to the general reader.
M. Proal is a well-known authority on all _, . ,
questions connected with Crime, its causes w . .
and motives, its various forms and manifesta- * J[
tions, its frequency and distribution, and its *°
proper punishment, and the author of other valuable and
interesting works, throwing light on these vitally important
subjects. He holds a high position in the legal profession
in France, being one of the Presiding Judges at a French
Court of Appeal, and having previously held very respon-
sible official and judicial appointments in other parts of
the Country, especially in the South. All this has afforded
M. Proal unrivalled opportunities of observation ; and in-
deed the most cursory glance through his books must show
what an enormous mass of invaluable information he has
gleaned from many different sources — from cases in which
he has acted as Advocate or Prosecutor, or presided as
Judge, from confidences made to him as Juge d'lnstruc-
Han, from Reports of Criminal Trials, from Official Records
of Suicides, etc., etc. Moreover, this wealth of detail is
marshalled in the most admirable order, each argument
adduced and each conclusion arrived at being supported
by a series of apposite facts in illustration, the whole set
forth in that clearly ordered and lucid style that seems the
birthright of every educated Frenchman.
Passion and Criminality is a truly wonder- .
ful book. No doubt the reading is often sad lhe Boo « * s
and painful, but it is never dull. No doubt true t0 Lt ' e '
the facts are often distressing and humiliating to our ideals
11 TRANSLATORS FOREWORD.
of what humanity should be, and throw a lurid light on
some of the social arrangements and the boasted civiliza-
tion of modern Europe, but they are authentic. The
impressfon is ever present of a writer of great original
acumen and powers of observation, who is thoroughly
acquainted with all aspects and intimacies of his subject
— a subject of enthralling interest to all concerned with
the progress of mankind, and one displaying some of the
most curious and little realised secrets of the human mind
in health and still more in disease.
Nor is the Statistical side of M. Proal's
or oo or i a b ours unimportant. Every Chapter teems
vt ' with valuable information as to the frequency
and distribution of Passional Crime and Suicide in France,
and supplies quite indispensable data both for the student
of contemporary French life, and for the Comparative
Statistician who would bring into focus the social phe-
nomena of France and those of other countries, in order
to take a comprehensive view of the whole and arrive at
trustworthy conclusions as to the general trend of social
evolution for good or evil. This cannot but be of especial,
and indeed paramount, interest to Englishmen at a moment
when their Country is confronted with the same problem
of a diminishing birth-rate and threatened stagnation of
population, which has for twenty years past caused so
much anxiety to French Politicians and Sociologists.
The Author's Then a g a * n there is the literary side,
Literarv Here M. Proal displays a wide and ex-
Brilliancv tensive knowledge of the Literature of
his native land, especially that of the
great classical period of French poetry and prose, and
again and again aptly illustrates facts and incidents of
criminality and criminology by pertinent quotations from
Corneille, Racine, and the rest Nor is his acquaintance
with more modem writers deficient ; he mentions con-
stantly and quotes freely from Chateaubriand, Lamartine,
George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Théophile Gautier, and
the like, not to mention Flaubert, Barbey d'Aurevilly,
translator's foreword. iii
Guy de Maupassant, Zola himself. At the same time
our Author's own personal bias in favour of thé more
correct and academical writers of the earlier period, as
against the "morbid, anaemic, hysterical " — to use some
of his own epithets — Novels, Plays and Poems of the
Romantic School, is evident enough. All the Works
originating in the impulse of the " Romantic " revival of
1830 and onwards, he clearly regards as without ex-
ception showing more or less manifest traces of nervous
derangement and diseased mental conditions on the part
of their authors. Any way the literary aspect of the book
is far from being the least attractive and suggestive.
M. Proal's discussion of Werther in particular and other
books, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau's, of the same
period and tendency, in their bearing on suicide, being
profoundly interesting, and, indeed, a masterpiece of its
kind.
As throwing light upon contemporary Meaning to
society in France, its special circumstances ., p ,• ,
and peculiar dangers, and involved in these Re der
conditions the future of the French Nation,
apart altogether from the more general aspect of the Work
as dealing with the Psychological, Ethical, Criminal, and
other problems affecting mankind at large, Passion and
Criminality cannot fail to be intensely fascinating to
readers of the present day. In many respects France
leads the van of progress in Europe ; and, to a large
extent, other countries must look to her as the mirror
reflecting their own future development in many directions
of social change and evolution. She is their model in
much that is excellent, their warning as to certain social
perils to be avoided.
From all points of view, Legal, Statistical, y, p ro hu ms
Literary, Social, whether limited to France of Life
or looked at more generally as affecting
directly or indirectly all civilized nations, Passion and
Criminality marks an epoch. It will be read with deep
interest by students, while affording both amusement and
IV TRANSLATORS FOREWORD.
instruction to all who care to be introduced to a wealth
of curious information bearing on social life and problems,
and a profusion of unexpected and often pathetic side-
lights on the dark places of contemporary civilization in
town and country among a neighbouring people.
PREFACE.
The study of Crime as determined by Passion is forced
upon the attention of Moralist and Magistrate alike by the
large number of victims, active and passive, it is responsible
for from year to year. Love, which occupies so consider-
able a place in Life and Literature, claims ever more and
more importance in the Annals of Crime and the Statistics
of Suicide. While Poets and Novelists extol the beauties
and virtues of Love, it is the shame and despair and
criminality incident to the same passion that Magistrates
have every day occasion to note. What is it but Passion
that drives so many men desperate, turns so many into
madmen or murderers ? What else is it brings so many
unfortunate and guilty beings to the Morgue, the Mad-
house, and the Criminal Assize ? In Love's dramas, which
may so easily become dramas of the Law Courts, we may
say with Racine :
" Partout du désespoir on rencontre l'image,
On ne voit que des pleurs et l'on n'entend parler
Que de troubles, d'horreurs, de sang prêt à couler." x
(BÉRÉNICE.)
If Poets do well to represent happy love under the
lineaments of a young and lovely woman, full of life and
joy, not less faithfully may Students of Crime portray
unhappy love in the guise of a dread Fate holding the
Shears, or a Fury with brandished sword in hand. In
very deed Love makes many self-immolated victims, — by
drowning and charcoal fumes, by the rope and the pistol.
Love has ruined many a fine intellect and broken many a
heart Moreover, where unhappy lovers do not resort to
1 ' ' Everywhere we meet the image of despair ; naught is seen but tears,
naught spoken of but grief and horror and blood about to flow."
VI PREFACE.
suicide, or go mad, or die of chagrin, it is no uncommon
thing to see them kill the object of their affections. Who
shall count the cups of poison, the dagger thrusts and
revolver shots Love is responsible for? — who reckon up
the vitriol thrown under its promptings and the nooses it
has tied?
It is no mere collection of crimes of passion I propose
to compile ; my subject is the Psychology of the lover
whom passion drives into crime, of the mistress whom
desertion drives into despair, of the man whom jealousy or
a mistaken sense of honour makes a murderer, or disap-
pointed love a suicide. These studies do but sum up the
long séries of observations I have made, both on the
Bench and in my Chambers as a Juge d'instruction
and Procureur de la République, where I have enjoyed
so many opportunities of cross-questioning those accused
of crimes arising from passion, of studying their character
and the motives of their aberrations, of reading the
documents left behind by suicides, or composed by
murderers in their own defence.
Not a few difficult problems of psychology and moral
responsibility are involved in suicide and crime, the results
of outbreaks of passion. How many questions must needs
arise from the study of those emotions which lead so many
thousands of men and women, young men and maidens,
to madness, suicide and crime !
How comes it that affection may turn to hate, and
lovers become the bitterest foes, — that the transition is so
easy from love to loathing, from the transports of the
most exalted tenderness to the frenzies of the most savage
anger? How is it so fond a feeling may grow so cruel
and lead to the commission of so many barbarous murders
by poison and strangulation, and the infliction of such
appalling wounds? Whence comes the cruelty of love
and the ferocity of jealousy ? Why does the jealous lover
strike the very woman he adores ? Why does he pierce
with dagger thrusts the very bosom on which he has lain,
and disfigure the very features he has just been covering
PREFACE, Vil
with kisses ? Why does the woman whom her lover has
deserted burn out the eyes that moved her soul to love,
and send a bullet through the heart she was so fain but
now to feel beating beneath her hand? How is it
love may grow so venomous as to put knife and pistol
into the hand of lovers and husbands, who after having
sworn eternal affection, tear each other's eyes out at the
domestic hearth, and in the very conjugal bed ? Why
does this passion, capable as it is of producing heroes, so
often manufacture only cowards and murderers ?
To end our string of questions, why does love if unre-
quited make people so unhappy they must needs kill
themselves ? How is it that lovers, who might very well
live together, prefer to die together ?
Such are the chief psychological problems I propose to
study. It appears to me to be an inquiry not devoid of
utility to investigate why love, which should serve as the
foundation of society and family life, so often becomes a
malignant power, destructive alike of the family and of
society.
I hope further that this study of crime as determined by
passion, indispensable as it is to the student of Morals and
Criminality, may also be found interesting by the Critic of
Literature, whose delight it is to verify in the great Tragic
poets the exact portrayal of the passions of humanity.
The object of the Stage being the entertainment of the
spectator by an imitation of life and a mimic representa-
tion of its passions, the depicting of Love, its aberrations
and its crimes, is the main thing aimed at. There are few
Tragedies that do not contain murders and suicides from
love. In the Andromaque for instance there is a murder, that
of Pyrrhus, and two suicides, those of Oreste and Hermione.
In Bajazet there are three murders, — of Bajazet himself, of
Roxane, and of Orcan, and a suicide, that of Atalide. It is
a regular butchery. Most of the heroes of the Stage are
really Criminal Court heroes. Literature copies Crime,
— the crime of passionate outbreaks, just as Crime of the
same type copies Literature. To ascertain therefore whether
Vlll PREFACE,
the literary portrayal of crime and passion is faithful or no,
it is no idle task to compare the love-sick murderers of the
boards with those that appear at the bar of the Assize
Courts. While determining the Psychology of the " woman
scorned," of the jealous lover and murderer, I intend to in-
quire concurrently how far my judicial observations coincide
with the characters of Hermione, Roxane, Phèdre, Médée,
Cléopâtre, Oreste, Pyrrhus, Mithridate and other heroes of
the great Classical Drama of France.
It has been maintained by some that it is useless to look
for psychological truth in Dramatic poetry : " Shall we
never learn," writes M. Stapfer, "Philistines that we are,
vain professors of Morals and History, to taste poetry in
its pure state, in all its complete and unsophisticated ab-
surdity ? " This Critic admires the poetry Corneille has put
into the rôle of Cléopâtre, while holding at the same time
that the character is false, and that no trace of human
verity is to be found in the part. I am of a diametrically
opposite opinion, and believe the chief beauty of Corneille's
and Racine's plays to consist in the psychological veri-
similitude of the characters they draw.
In the course of the present study, I shall frequently
have occasion to show that Corneille's psychology is no
less acute and delicate than Racine's. Corneille is not
only a Politician and a Philosopher, he is a Psychologist
to boot, and one of the most perspicacious. He is stinted
of his due meed of praise by such as are content to admire
the vigour of his thought and the splendour of his verse,
complaining the while of the coldness of his delineations of
Love. Corneille possessed the heroic spirit, but he united
with it the tenderest of hearts, and this tenderness he has
instilled into his Tragedies. "What greater tenderness,"
says a good judge, La Bruyère, "can there be than that
lavished in the Ctd, in Polyeucte and in the Horaces ? "
The Critics are wrong, I maintain, and specially so M.
Larroumet, in attributing to Racine exclusively the gift
of portraying passionate love ; we find it in Corneille too,
equally precise and equally faithful, and it may be, con-
PREFACE. IX
joined with an even more penetrating analysis. Racine is
not invariably as soft and tender as they make out, and
Corneille is more tender and more passionate than he is
described. He married for love at a time when Racine
contracted a union of mere convenience. The poet of
reason and high heroism, he showed himself less reason-
able than his rival, and succumbed to new passions at a
mature age ; his head was ever ready to be turned by love.
I shall show by means of numerous examples borrowed
from some of the less well-known pieces of Corneille that
every shade and delicacy, every refinement and subtlety, of
Passion has been described by him with an admirable truth
and precision unsurpassed by Racine himself.
Those cries of love, anger and revenge that Corneille
and Racine put in the mouths of their dramatis personœ are
not mere "authors' stuff," but veritable exclamations of
Mother Nature ; so true are they to life that I have often
heard the very same in the mouths of persons accused of
crimes of passion. By virtue of the resemblances I shall
bring out between the dramas of Literature and those of
the Law Courts, the fact will once more be made manifest
that the first and highest quality of genius is psychological
verisimilitude. After all that Commentators have written
on the Drama of Corneille and Racine, I trust this new
light thrown on them by the reports of the Criminal Courts
will not be without its interest. It will be seen that simple
Nature suggests to the desperate or jealous lover, to the
forsaken mistress and the wronged husband, though en-
tirely lacking in intellectual culture of any sort, cries of
passion bearing an astonishing likeness to those of Her-
mione, Médée, Roxane and Phèdre, of Oreste and Othello,
in the plays. Their exclamations of grief and love bear a
simpler, a less elegant form, it is true, but also not unfre-
quently one impressed with a more striking and tragic
note, from the very fact that they are not, as in plays and
romances, overlaid with a flood of rhetorical embellishment.
I shall quote numerous examples of this, all proving how
untrue is the criticism of Schlegel on Racine, when he
b
X PREFACE,
writes : " The essence of Racine's muse was gallantry ; the
major part of his Tragedies were composed merely to de-
pict loveable, and above all, loving women." The essence
of Racine's muse was Love, which is ever the same at
bottom among small and great alike ; his heroines are not
invariably loveable and loving women such as Bérénice or
Aricie ; some of them are fierce and passionate beings, a
prey to all the pangs of love and jealousy, such as Her-
mione, Roxane or Phèdre.
But side by side with the Drama of Corneille and
Racine, which is a school of Psychology, exists a Litera-
ture of sentiment and the senses, which glorifying pas-
sion, suicide and crime, its results, is a veritable school of
sensuality, ever teaching the pernicious lesson that suicide
and crime are justified as flowing from an overmastering
emotion. I intend in the following pages to bring home
the responsibility resting on this class of Literature by a
record of the suicides and crimes, literary , romantic and
naturalistic, due to its evil influence.
CONTENTS.
Translator's Foreword
Preface
CHAPTER I.
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
The disease of Love : loss of sleep and appetite
Melancholia, wasting maladies ; the Poet Millevoye's lost bride
Loss of the power of work .....
Observations of Theocritus, Virgil, Goethe, Alfred de Musset
Origin of the pains of disappointed Love : craving after union accord-
ing to St Thomas, Bossuet ....
Plato's myth : mankind androgynous ....
A fixed idea, amorous possession ....
Exclusiveness of Love, and indifference towards friends and relations
Love's illusions : idealization of the beloved object, effects of concen
trating the whole mind on one image .
Despair of unhappy Love .....
Grief due to the breaking off or postponement of a contemplated
marriage ......
Female suicides ......
Number of suicides due to passion ....
Other consequences of disappointed Love : intemperance, dissipation
Religious vocations determined by disappointments in Love .
Cases of suicide to escape an unwelcome marriage
Suicide of mistresses wishing but unable to regain their reputation by
marriage ; suicide of courtesans
Male suicides ; Love without respect ....
Causes of Love's blindness ; Love at first sight
Love of women for men unworthy of their affection
Love of men for unattractive women ....
The age for Love ......
Suicide of young men ; of grown men ....
Premeditated and unpremeditated suicide
Repeated attempts at suicide .....
Various means employed .....
Fashion as affecting the methods chosen
Preoccupation with toilet displayed by women committing suicide
Choice of place ......
Suicides from Love in the Country and in Paris . .
Sentiments and opinions of Suicides and the writings they leave behind
Physiological predispositions ......
PACE
i
v
I
2
3
4
5
6
7
ii
15
16
17
19
20
21
23
25
27
28
30
34
35
36
36
3«
39
41
42
44
46
47
49
50
Xll
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER II.
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
The pain of separation .
Craving for reunion in the tomb
Cleopatra, Abelard, Olinde, Romeo
Preparations for double suicide
Psychical condition of lovers .
Double suicide of soldiers and their intended brides
Double suicide provoked by postponement of a contemplated marriage
Double suicide provoked by incomplete possession
Double suicide provoked by the sense of honour
Double suicide provoked by the opposition of relatives to a contem
plated marriage ......
Suicide and suggestions leading to it .
Double suicide of a married woman and her lover
Double suicide of a married man and his mistress
Instances of suicide suggested by the woman ...
Instances of suicide suggested by the lover
Murder from jealousy under the pretence of a double suicide .
Causes of suggestion, liability to suggestion on the part of persons of
nervous temperament .
Suggestion of suicide between women
Suggestion of suicide in alcoholic households, in households troubled
by jealousy ......
Execution of a double suicide, part played by each of the lovers
Cases of the lover's surviving .....
Premeditation in cases of double suicide
54
55
56
5*
61
62
64
64
65
67
7i
72
73
74
77
78
79'
80
82
83
84
8*
CHAPTER III.
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
Examples of Love and Hate combined .... 88'
The Homicidal Venus ....... co-
Selfishness of Love ....... 91
Love and Hate of the jealous husband, of the deserted wife . 92
An exception ........ 93
Love suicidal and Love homicidal ..... 94
The Cruelty of desire, Exasperation of wounded self-love . . 95
Heroes and Heroines of Racine and Corneille ... 96
Part played by self-love in the violence of working men deceived in
Love ........ 98
Calumny resorted to against the woman who rejects advances . 99-
Pride and vindictiveness of women . . . . 100
Explanations of Hate as incident to Love given by St Thomas, Pascal
and Plato ....... 101
CONTENTS.
Xlll
Love and Hate as exemplified by Hermione, Oreste, Othello, Roxane,
Médée, Pyrrhus . . . . 102
Instances, of crim.es arising out of Love ..... 104
CHAPTER IV.
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
The grief of abandonment .....
Desertion after promise of marriage ....
Desertion after pregnancy of the girl seduced .
Character of the woman who kills herself on desertion
Criticism of the character of Dido as described by Virgil
Character of the woman who kills her deceiver on desertion .
Fury of a woman who has been deserted against her seducer who
marries another woman ....
Vengeance of women deserted during their pregnancy
Corsican girl's revenge .....
Refinements of revenge .....
Female furies .......
Hatred of rivals takes the form of a longing to disfigure them
Premeditation in revenge .....
Struggle between Hate and Love ....
Schlegel refuted ......
Psychological verisimilitude of the Tragedies of Racine and Corneille
Hesitations and changes of mind on the part of women preparing to
exact vengeance ......
State of mind of avenging women, at the moment of committing murder,
and afterwards .......
108
no
III
na
"5
"5
116
119
120
125
127
130
131
132
134
135
136
137
CHAPTER V.
JEALOUSY.
Characteristics of jealousy .....
Brutality of the jealous husband ....
Cases where the wife forgives the jealous husband ; where she takes
an aversion to him .....
Suicide of women to escape the violence of a jealous husband
Causeless jealousy ......
Jealous husbands who doubt the paternity of their children
Moral jealousy determining suicide ....
Physical jealousy determining murder, mutilations
Abelard's jealousy ......
Retrospective jealousy ......
Jealous husband and his threats of death, presentiments of the mur
dered wife
Jealousy in its paroxysm .....
139
141
142
144
144
145
145
146
147
H7
149
150
XIV
CONTENTS.
Physiological condition of the criminal from jealousy at the moment of
perpetration of his crime
Physiological condition of the woman .
Suicide of the murderer from jealousy : Othello, Orosmane, Hermione
Cases where the idea of suicide precedes that of murder
Pretended double suicides ....
Jealousy between friends ; between father and son
Feminine jealousy .....
Jealousy between lawful wife and mistress
Jealousy of stepmothers ....
Suicide of jealous women . . . .
Women jealous of the friends, the books, the personal attractions of
her husband ......
Jealousy -of women advancing in years
Jealousy without love ......
A daughter's jealousy towards her mother, parricide .
Jealousy of fathers having criminal relations with their daughters
Climate as conditioning the violence of jealous passion in Provence ;
in Italy ; .
in Spain ; .....
in the East .....
Character modified by jealousy ...
Number of crimes and offences due to jealousy
Cases where such crimes are premeditated ; unpremeditated
Attitude of mind before and after the commission of crimes of jealousy
152
IS3
154
155
156
156
158
160
160
161
162
162
164
164
166
170
172
174
175
176
177
178
179
CHAPTER VI.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
Increase of adultery in France . . . . .181
Causes of adultery on the part of the wife :
§ 1. Disproportion of age . . . . .183
§ 2. Forced marriage ...... 187
§ 3. Education disproportionate with the social position and
education of the husband . . .190
§ 4. Romantic sentimentalism . * 191
§ 5. Platonic love .*.... 192
§ 6. Ennui . . • . . . . . 195
§ 7. Temperament ; Love of an old woman for a young man ;
Absence of the husband ; Opportunity . . 195
§ 8. Music ....... 201
§ 9. Pride of beauty, love of dress .... 202
§ 10. Bad advice ; Pleasure in corrupting others, wives ruined by
their mothers ; Fortune-tellers ; Adultery and piety . 204
{11. Intemperance . . . . • . . 210-
{12. Faults on the husband's side ; Perils of the marriage night 211
CONTENTS- XV
PAGE
Hypocrisy of unfaithful wives ...... 212
Their artful ruses ; husbands' credulity; threats of suicide ; divorce . 214
Wickidiuss and cruelty q{ unfaithful wives • . . .217
Desertion of children ; maternal and filial love extinguished by
adultery. ....... 217
Hatnd of unfaithful wives towards the husband . . . 222
Husbands spoken ill of to their children; driven to suicide or
murder ; parricides provoked by unfaithful wives ; abortion ;
motives for the husband's murder . 223
Poisoning resorted to against the husband .... 230
Examples in Greece and at Rome ; in the Seventeenth Century ;
in the present day ...... 230
Modes employed in the execution of the crime ; complicity of the
lover ; the wife initiating the crime .... 235
Jealousy on the lover's part, initiative taken by him; double
poisoning . . 239
A crime at Les Baux ; suicide of the husband ; Jacques in George
Sand ........ 241
Madness of the deceived husband ; flight of the unfaithful wife • 247
Expiation ........ 249
Suicide of the unfaithful wife, prostitution . • 250
Regrets on the part of the divorced wife . . .251
Death of Mme. Bovary ...... 252
CHAPTER VII.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE (continued).
THE FORGIVING HUSBAND— THE AVENGING HUSBAND.
Discovery of adulterous relations ; credulity of husbands . . 253
The Forgiving Husband ...... 255
Motives of forgiveness ; relapse of the unfaithful wife into fresh
acts of adultery ; remorse on the wife's part ; confession . 256
The Avenging Husband ...... 259
Conjugal honour ; examples from History of Marital vengeance ;
misconception widely disseminated by books with regard to a
husband's right to kill his wife ; divorce and Marital vengeance ;
conclusion ....... 260
CHAPTER VIII.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
Inequality of the Law as between the Sexes .
Consequences of adultery on the part of the husband
Brutality of the profligate husband
Crime of President d'Entrecasteaux
Sensuality and cruelty ....
270
271
272
*73
274
XV4 CONTENTS.
Adultery of the husband with a servant, a governess .
Means employed in cases of murder between husband and wife
Hypocrisy of the husband . . .
Suicide of the forsaken wife .....
Suicide of the unfaithful husband ....
Revenge taken by the lawful wife
PAG s
275
276
277
278
279
279
Forgiveness extended to the husband, fierce anger against the mistress 280
Feminine rivalry . . . . . .281
"Free Unions" ....... 283
Quarrels, violence, suicide and murder incidental to "free unions"
Lovers more vindictive than husbands . . . 285
Blackmailing after the rupture of relations . 286
CHAPTER IX.
. CAUSES OP THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES AND CRIMES ARISING
OUT OF PASSION.
Frequency of Crimes due to amprous passion . .. . 288
Increase .in modern times of hate and the desire of vengeance . 289
Principal causes ;
§ I. Excessive mildness on the part of Juries . . . 290
. Specially marked in the case of Parisian Juries ; Literary
sophistries relating to crimes of passion, and their evil
effects ; Undue influence exercised by the Counsel for
the Defence ; Motives of this excessive mildness ; Perils
of impunity ; Vitriol throwing contagious ; Habits of
revenge ; Corsican vendetta ; Severity of Swiss Juries . 291
§ 2. Precocity of the young for suicide and crimes arising out of
amorous passion . . . . . .301
Nervous susceptibility of young people ; Precocious alco-
holism ; Theatre - going at too early an age ; Porno-
graphic literature; Corruption of young people by
popular Libraries ; Social dangers of improper read-
ing ; Ill-advised education, maternal indulgence . 304
§ 3, Development of nevrosity . . . . .310
Causes of this development ; Predisposition of neuropathic
persons towards suicide and crime arising out of amorous
passion ....... 312
§4. Inadequate protection of women . . 313
Irresponsibility of the Seducer . . 313
CHAPTER X.
SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION AND THE CONTAGION OF
LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT.
Increased frequency of suicide . . . . . 315
Comparison of the motives leading to suicide in Antiquity and in
modern times . . .316
CONTENTS.
XVII
Mental contagion
Imitation in Literature, Politics and Philosophy
Influence, of early reading
Good and bad books
«Growing influence exercised by Literature over tastes, feelings and
ideas, travelling and fashions in love
Reciprocal action and reaction of society on literature, and literature on
society .
Influence of the heroes of d'Urfé, Mlle, de Scudéry, Corneille, Mari
vaux, Florian, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Influence of Goethe ; origin of his melancholy
His ideas as to suicide
Werther and " Wertherism " .
Suicidal suggestion
Goethe's own opinion of Werther
Jacobo Ortis of Foscolo, Leopardi
Melancholy and suicide in France at the beginning of the Nineteenth
Century ; Napoleon L, Mme. de Staël, Sismondi, Ampère
Suicide of Sautelet, Gros, Leopold Robert, Moine
Chateaubriand's René, and its imitators
Romantic passion ; love of solitude ....
Physiological causes of the melancholy of René, Werther \ the Painter
of Salzburg
Erotic fancies of Chateaubriand
His attempted suicide characterized
His mystic sensualism .
Suicide of A tola, of Velleda
Lord Byron's melancholy
•• Byronism "
Melancholy of Lamartine and Elvire
Mme. de Staël on suicide
George Sand possessed by the idea of suicide, her attempt at self*
destruction
Suicide in her Novels .
Influence of Indiana on the double suicide of Dr. Bancal and his
mistress .....
Suicide in Ancient, and in Romantic Literature
Alfred de Vigny,, suicide of Chatterton
Double suicide in Literature
The lovers of Montmorency, and of Constantine
Glorification of passion
Resemblance between a drama of the Criminal Courts and various
literary dramas .....
Glorification of Suicide and Double Suicide by Literature
Suicide after an orgy, in Byron, Musset, Baudelaire
Atheism, debauchery and suicide
Suicides modelled on that of Rolla
A profligate's weariness of life .
317
3i8
319
320
32a
325
326
327
328
328
329
330
331
331
332
334
335
336
337
339
340
341
342
344
348
349
3SO
351
352
354
355
356
357
359
360
36i
362
363
365
367
xvm
CONTENTS.
Suicides of profligates in Antiquity
Stories of murder and profligacy in Contemporary Literature
Death in erotic poetry and romance •
Profanation of Death .
Motives of suicide since Hamlet
Suicides of women after a feast
Theatrical side of Suicide from passion
Suicides determined by philosophical Pessimism
Suicides of work-girls determined by Romantic reading
Suicide a democratic malady in modern days .
Romeo and Juliet, and Saint-Marc Girardin •
Suicide in Classical and in Romantic Literature ; Molière, Boileau and
Chapelain propose to drown themselves
Moral healthiness of the Sixteenth Century writers
Good sense in the Eighteenth Century
Neurosis in the Nineteenth Century
Théophile Gautier's pessimism .
Sainte- Beuve's pessimism
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's madness
Diseased imagination and sensibility of Chateaubriand
Diseased imagination and sensibility of George Sand ; of Alfred de
Musset ......
Nervous constitution of Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve
of Octave Feuillet ....
of the Brothers de Goncourt, of Daudet and Zola
Well-balanced and morbid genius contrasted .
Results of nervosity in Novelists and Poets
Painful over-sensitiveness, neuropathic pessimism and literary pessimism
Influence of Fiction on young men and women
Modern impressionism in Literature, Painting, Administration of
• Justice, and Politics
Enfeeblement of the reasoning powers by the abuse of stimulants, by
the encouragement of nervous complaints
by the over-stimulation of imagination and sensibility
Goethe on Literary irresponsibility
M. Bourget on Literary responsibility .
Advice to the young with regard to reading, to safeguard them from
suicide .
Co-existence of a physiological predisposition and a literary motive in
i of " literary" suicide
PAGE
36»
369
370
371
372
375
37*
375
376
377
38i
38*
383
385
386
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
401
402
405
405
407
408
409
413
CHAPTER XI.
CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION AND THE CONTAGION OP NOVELS
OF PASSION AS APFECTING IT.
Crimes of Passion resulting from reading books of passion . . 415
Prisoners attribute their criminality to the reading of such books • 41 &
CONTENTS.
XIX
PAGE
Dangers of illustrated tales of the Police and Criminal Courts . 419
Mile. Lemoine and her crime ; her liaison with her coachman deter-
mined by the reading of novels, in which great ladies are in
love with their inferiors . . . .421
Novel reading leads up to seduction ..... 423
Erotic passions awakened by novels 424
Erotic passions awakened by books of mysticism 425
Paul and Virginia a dangerous book for young girls ; examples 425
Francesca da Rimini, and Charlotte in Werther • 426
Ovid, Catullus, Propertius admit the dangers of erotic literature 427
Novels originate fashions in love ..... 429
The lover idealized, the husband caricatured in novels 431
Increase of adultery largely due to the glorification of adultery in
books ........ 432
Rousseau and Chateaubriand pestered by declarations of love from
readers of the Nouvelle He loi se and Atala . 433
Instances of jealousy provoked by reading Boccaccio's and La Fon-
taine's Tales ....... 434
Novels may be harmless for some readers, but dangerous for others 435
Literary intoxication due to novel reading 436
The Right of Love in Literature and the Criminal Courts ; Literary
reminiscences of criminals of passion .... 437
The Right of Love invented by two distinct literary schools , 43&
Criminals and Novelists both invoke the Voice of Nature 439
Romantic mysticism 440
Romantic love . 441
Religion of love according to the Romantic Writers and according to
Michelet, Fourier, Renan ..... 442
Influence of sophistries of passion ..... 443
The Right of Adultery a creation of novelists .... 444
Fatality of love in Literature ...... 445
Sensualistic and determinist Fiction in Stendhal 446
his psychological mistakes ..... 447
Physiological and determinist Fiction in Balzac, Mérimée, Flaubert . 448
Physiological heredity in Zola's novels ..... 449
in those of Dumas fils ...... 45°
Unhealthy influence of the Naturalistic Novel . .451
Crimes inspired by Darwinist ic theories -453
Novels popularize false systems of Philosophy . .456
Dangers of Novels tending to animalizr mankind .458
Corruption flowing from such books in country places . 459
Increase of pornographic literature encouraged by the Revolutionary
Press 460
Glorification of crimes of passion in Novels .... 463
Literary monsters ....... 464
Glorification of the dagger 465
Monsters of the Criminal Courts copy monsters of Literature . 465
Antony and **A n/onism" ...... 466
XX
CONTENTS.
Stendhal's admiration for crimes of passion • . .
Theory of " amorous energy " .....
Admiration of M. Barrés and Saint- Evremond for Spanish love
Leniency in the case of crimes of passion, of political crimes, of crimes
of Common Law .....
Literary Sadism ......
Criminal Sadism ......
A murderer plagiarizes from Lord Byron
Literary vanity of Criminals of passion ; murderers' confessions in
imitation of literary Confessions ....
Fatalistic theory of Lacenaire as to the "born criminal "
Sensibility in Literature and sensibility in murder
Love of animals among Criminals ....
Morbid sensibility developed by. Novel reading
Danger of Novels of Analysis .....
Crimes determined by the investigation and analysis of sensations
Psychological novels of the Eighteenth and of the Nineteenth Centuries
Calumny, and the corruption of society by novels
Imitation and description of exceptional characters as typical, in novels
Balzac's influence ......
Crime of Mme. Weiss, and the mischievous effect of sophistries
Distinction between the aesthetic and the moral sense .
Responsibilities of Novel writers ....
Responsibilities of parents .....
Responsibilities of schoolmasters
Responsibilities of readers .....
Responsibilities of the founders of Lending Libraries .
PAGE
467
469
471
471
472
473
474
475
477
478
481
482
483
485
488
490
491
492
494
495
498
499
500
502
503
CHAPTER XII.
CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION AND THE CONTAGION OF
PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT.
Adversaries and partisans of the Stage ..... 505
Good and bad of the Stage ...... 507
Powerful influence of the Stage ; M. P. Albert's opinion criticised . 509
Instances given by Jules Janin and Philarète Charles . . . 510 -
Passion on the French Stage . . . . .511
Useful and harmful plays . . . .512
The Stage as acting on the passions . . . 514
Euripidomania determined by a Tragedy of Euripides . 515
Infection of Stage-plays ; M. Chevreul's opinion quoted . . 516
Powerful influence of visual impressions . . .517
Differences of theatrical impressions according to age, sex, tempera-
ment, education, of the audience . . .518
Eagerness for theatrical emotions ; Theatrical heroes . . . 519
Crime on the Stage among the Ancients, in Shakespeare, Corneille,
Racine . ...... 520
CONTENTS.
XXI
Theatrical heroines and their vengeance
Reasons for the craving after theatrical emotions
Representation of crimes of passion on the Stage
Love stirred by the sight of its representation on the Stage, according
to Bossuet, Ovid, Xenophon
Effects of the representation of a love drama on the audience
Under what conditions the delineation of love is possible
Delineation of love by the Greek Poets
Delineation of love in Racine ....
in Corneille . .
on the contemporary Stage
in the Romantic Drama
Effects produced by the representation of crimes of passion on the Stage
Admiration of critics for the heroines of criminal love .
Crime of passion due to imitation of a Tragedy of Alfieri
Theatrical pose of persons accused of crimes of passion
Danger incidental to the representation of crimes of passion for the
young .......
Melodramas ; amiable and accomplished murderers
Dramas of the Criminal Courts ....
Lacenaire an imitator of Robert Macaire
Theatrical cynicism of youthful murderers
Indecent songs .......
Laughter, according to Bossuet, Plato, Rousseau
Healthy amusement on the Stage ; dangers of unhealthy witticisms
Marital revenge provoked by the fear of ridicule
Plays in which marriage is attacked, and adultery excused
Women derided on the Stage, and fathers
Witticisms aimed at husbands, and guardians .
Rascally men-servants and intriguing soubrettes
Is the exact delineation of vice sufficient to inspire repulsion ? Must
Crime necessarily be punished on the Stage? Opinions of
Corneille, Racine, Molière .....
Seduction on the Stage ; the Don Juan of Molière, of Byron, of
Musset .....
Love exalted into a virtue on the Stage
Love and Profligacy confounded
Heroines self-respecting, and the reverse
Stage morality in Corneille, in Racine
Rehabilitation of the Courtesan
its results ....
Effect of sophistries of this kind on the verdict of juries
on crimes of passion committed by women
Antisocial passions developed by the Romantic stage
Dangers of fatalism on the Stage
Moral responsibility in Corneille, Racine, Molière
Prisoners accused of crimes of passion copying their defence from the
heroes of plays of Fatalism .....
5*4
526
527
529
530
531
S3»
53S
534
535
537
53»
540
541
542
543
544
546
547
549
549
550
551
552
554
555
556
559
560
562
563
564
566
567
570
s
571
572
573
574
575
577
xxu
CONTENTS.
Fatalism on the modern Stage .....
Differences between Ancient Fatalism and the physiological Fatalism
of the Stage ......
Moral freedom in Shakespeare ....
Physiological Fatalism in Diderot's plays
Absence of free will and sense of remorse on the modern Stage
Excessive compassion for crime leads to the impunity of criminals
Right of Revenge, an invention of the Stage, invoked by persons charged
with crimes of passion ; murderers as special pleaders
Danger of sophistical catch-words on the Stage
Danger of sophistical catch-words in connection with political crimes
and crimes of passion .
Does the Stage purify the passions ? .
The Right of Revenge in Alexandre Dumas fits
A dangerous stimulus to murder
No Right of Revenge recognized on the Ancient Stage
Accused persons invoke the Right of Revenge
Revenge in Emile Augier's plays
Doctrine of Forgiveness ; arguments and conclusions
Advice to parents ....
On what conditions the Stage is justified in depicting evil
Inordinate number of criminals introduced on the Stage
Literary, beauty of noble characters
The Stage and Morality ....
How the Stage may be made a means of good
Alleged nobility of crimes of passion at variance with judicial
experience ......
Criterion of beauty and nobility in Literature .
Is it the sole business of the Stage to excite terror and pity ? .
Napoleon I. and " Head -quarters Plays " ; necessity of an ideal
Danger of paradoxes on the Stage ....
PAGE
578
580
581
582
582
583
584
585
586
587
589
590
591
592
593
593
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
CHAPTER XIII.
RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION.
v Two extremes of opinion ...... 608
v Motives for leniency towards criminals of passion . 609
Motive for leniency towards women . . .610
Physiological reasons accounting for the jealous temperament of women ;
predispositions of the neuropathic temperament . . 611
Leniency of the Ancient Penal Law towards women . . . 612
Severity of modern Law as regards women ; compensating Leniency
of Juries. ....... 613
Diminished responsibility of women incases of seduction . . 614
^ Duty of Jurymen ....... 615
Responsibility and Fatality . . . . . 616
Power of resisting passion . , . . .617
CONTENTS.
XX111
PAGE
Is Love a pathological condition ? Is it an irresistible impulse ? . 618
Responsibility in the case of Degenerates .... 620
Mysteries of the brain ; Specialists disagree • .621
Duty of medico-legal experts ; necessity for an Institution midway be-
tween Asylum and Prison • . . . .622
Difficulties incidental to medical examination .... 623
Marks of pathological love ...... 624
Jealousy in persons of ill-balanced intellects .... 625
Doctrine of partial responsibility criticized .... 626
Physiological predispositions ...... 627
False accusations made by hysterical women suffering under jealousy . 628
Morbid jealousy and its effects ...... 629
Jealousy complicated with hallucinations, and the ' ' mania of persecution " 63 1
Irresistible impulses ....... 632
Twofold danger of medical examination? ; excessive timidity, excessive
rashness, in coming to conclusions .... 633
Readiness to adopt extraneous suggestions in some cases of jealousy ;
non-hypnotic suggestion ..... 635
Distinction between the "mania of persecution" and "suspicious
susceptibility" ....... 635
Pseudo crimes of love ....... 636
Crimes of profligacy ....... 637
The bestial side in man ...... 638
Crimes of passion committed by alcoholic sufferers . 639
Pseudo suicides of passion ...... 640
Increase of alcoholism in Paris . . .641
* Crimes of cupidity under the guise of crimes of passion 642
/Adultery and theft ....... 644
Crimes of passion committed by husbands separated from their wives,
so-called suicides of passion committed by kept mistresses . 645
Cupidity in crimes of abduction of minors, and bigamy . 646
With for notoriety among hysterical prisoners charged with crimes of
passion ........ 647
Conclusion : distinction drawn between voluntary wickedness and
involuntary disease ...... 648
CONCLUSION.
MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIMB DETERMINED BY PASSION,
Different kinds of love ......
Love that leads to crime .....
Consequences of false situations ....
Love without marriage .....
The m/naçe à trois ......
Ovid's advice for avoiding suicide and crime arising from amorous
passion .......
Phocylides' advice ......
650
651
653
654
656
657
658
XXIV CONTENTS.
Marriage without love .
Advice given by. physiologists .
Utility of Religious Sentiment .
Duties of Parents
pAGr
659
660
662
664
Duties of Authors
60S
Frailty of Human Nature
Duties of governing powers
Necessity for legislative reforms
671
674
677
PASSION AND CRIMINALITY
IN FRANCE.
CHAPTER I.
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
" Ariane ma sœur, de quel amour blessée
Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée ?" l
Children are seldom known to die of grief, to kill
themselves or go mad, on the death of their parents,
— irreparable though the loss be. Similarly sorrow
caused by the death of children or of husband or
wife produces but a small crop of suicides and cases of
madness. For instance in the year 1890 there were in all
France only 67 suicides due to the loss of children, of
husband or wife, and of parents. The total of suicides
caused by disappointed love and by jealousy on the
other hand reaches a very much higher figure, — amount-
ing to about 500 annually.
Again to this total of self-inflicted deaths must be
added a not inconsiderable number of lingering deaths
and instances of madness determined by love sorrows.
As the result of an unreciprocated passion for a woman
they have only known a short time, whom very likely
they would soon have learned to hate, had they married
her, whose loss in any case they could supply, we see
unhappy lovers fall into a state of languor and de-
pression, dangerous at once to health and reason.
Their countenance expresses sadness and deep de-
jection ; their gaze is indifferent to their surround-
1 " Ariane, my sister, wounded by what love didst thou die on those shores
where thou wast forsaken?"
2 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
ings, and fixed in a stony stare, either lifted to the
sky or lowered to the earth ; they speak little, eat little,
and sleep less. This state of prostration, checking
nutrition as it does, leads to a rapid wasting away.
Amnon, the son of -David, we read in the Bible (2 Samuel,
ch. xiii.) conceived so violent a passion for his half-sister
Tamar, " that he fell sick " for her ; he refused to eat and
grew thinner and thinner. This sort of dejection is well
described by Racine in Phèdre ; the sufferer can neither
sleep nor eat, and seeks out dark and lonely spots, the
better to weep at her ease, exclaiming :
"Je ne me soutiens plus, mes forces m'abandonnent." l
Her nurse, watching her, sees with terror that she is dying
in her arms of a disease she hides from her, the disease
of love. This disease, so often turned into ridicule, may
indeed be a "sickness unto death." The grief of dis-
appointed love is sometimes fatal, especially in the case
of a young girl. When relatives, noticing her deep-seated
melancholy, ask her the reason, she answers, " she has a
fatal grief." The adjective is no mere metaphor, but the
exact expression of her feeling ; she knows that the
gnawing grief at her heart is leading her step by step to
the tomb. Every sorrow is able to kill, but love's sorrows
above all others. Love then is no idle game, but a stern
reality not to be trifled with.
Not sensual love only, such as Phèdre feels, may bring
about this state of dejection. Love the most pure, if with-
out hope of return, or balked by relations, may produce
the very same despair in the most chaste of maiden
bosoms. Many forms of wasting sickness, resulting in
death, arise from nothing else than an unhappy love
affair. In his notice on Millevoye, de Pongervilie relates
how the Poet sought the hand of a young female relative
in marriage, with whom he was deeply in love and who
reciprocated his affection. The girl's father rejected his
demand, in spite of his child's prayers, unwilling to marry
1 " I faint and fall, all my strength deserts me."
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 3
her to a penniless poet The girl's heart broke with grief,
and she wasted away and died. Her death, which over-
Whelmed Millevoye with sorrow, was the first cause of
Us characteristic melancholy. Another poet, Alfred de
Musset, who possessed a nature of feminine susceptibility,
well understood the influence of grief and disappointment
on a girl's heart :
"Savez-vous ce que c'est qu'un cœur de jeune fille ?
Ce qu'il faut pour briser ce fragile roseau,
Qui ploie et qui se couche au plus léger fardeau ? " '
The greater the purity and tenderness of the unhappy
soul, the more imminent the risk of despair where a young
girl is concerned, when forsaken by her fiancé or when her
relatives are opposed to her union with him. Stricken to
the heart, she is left dizzy and amazed, stunned and para-
lysed by the pain ; her natural craving to love and to be
loved is balked, and her whole being broken. If in place
of the adored being whom in the innocence of her maiden
fancy she had endowed with the most entrancing qualities,
she sees quite another man appear, a hard-hearted, barren-
souled fellow who plays her false, the blow is so heavy
it may easily destroy life or sanity ; the victim dies of love
and grief, like Ariane in the play.
The young man, whose love is balked or not returned,
experiences the same sufferings ; he grows sombre, pensive
and silent, and no longer wears his usual air. A mother
relates how after passing the evening with her son at
the house of friends, she saw him, on leaving, so sad and
preoccupied that she followed him trembling, in dread of
some catastrophe. Suddenly her son kissed her ; then
pushed her away with the words, " Farewell, mother, leave
me alone now," and drawing a pistol from his pocket, drew
the trigger and shot himself dead.
Absorbed in his own thoughts, the unfortunate lover
1 "Dost know the nature of a maiden's heart? dost know how little it
needs to break that tender reed, that bends and droops beneath the lighten
load?"
4 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
loses all taste for work. If he is a working-man, he
neglects his trade; if a man of education, he loses the
love of study. The Poets, those faithful observers of
human nature, have noted this characteristic trait In
his Idyll of the " Harvesters," Theocritus makes one
rustic say to another, " Why ! what ails you ? you cannot
plough a furrow now, as once you could ; you cannot cut
the corn." The other replies, " I have no spirit left to sow
the field before my own door." — A similar observation is
made by Virgil in his Eclogues and in the Aineïd: "Ah!
Corydon, unhappy Corydon, what madness has come over
you ! your vine remains half pruned on yonder leafy elms.
Why will you not to work ? " (Eclogue IL). Dido cannot
sleep or busy herself any more with her usual occupations,
when she sees jEneas is thinking of forsaking her; she
neglects the oversight of her army and the building of her
Palaces. — Werther notices the same thing in himself: "Tis
a fatality, William ; all my activity has degenerated into a
restless indolence. I cannot bear to remain idle, yet I
find it impossible to do anything " (Letter xxxviii.) — After
his rupture with George Sand, Alfred de Musset longs to
set to his work afresh, but has no strength left for the
task; he can do nothing but dream of his faithless mistress,
whose image is engraved in his memory and flesh and
spirit. Unable to work, he abandons himself to his grief,
eating out his heart in sorrow ; watching the blood flow
from his wound, his food bitter thoughts and tender, cruel
memories, he slowly dies of love, he grows indifferent to
life and fame, and lets his genius languish.
I borrow next from various criminal actions sundry
observations of a like kind. A father, whose daughter, a
girl of sixteen, had fled from home to follow a young man,
whom her family would not allow her to marry, said in
reply to judicial interrogatories : " My daughter had no
more heart for her work ; she is a good workwoman, yet
she was obliged to begin what she was doing again and
again." — A master said, speaking of a workman of his
who ended by committing suicide: "He was now quite
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 5
unable to work. Seeing him so pensive and melancholy,
I was struck by his sombre looks and I asked him what
he was thinking about. He replied, " I am thinking of
her." I have myself known a case where a young lover,
being unable to work in consequence of the one idea
that paralysed his energies, was refused the girl whose
hand he had asked for; the latter's family judged him a
hopeless idler and sent him about his business, whereas
the poor fellow's sole and only crime was to be too deep
in love. His despair led to suicide. — " I cannot work any
more," writes another workman who had been disappointed
in love, " my head is half mad ; I must give up my
work." — A young work-girl, who lately committed suicide
at Marseilles together with a young man she wished to
marry, because the latter's mother was opposed to the
itiatch, had struck her companions by her dreamy, dis-
traught and self-absorbed looks. One of her friends,
speaking of her to me, said : " She was wrapped up in
her own thoughts ; if you spoke to her, it was an evident
effort to her to answer, and she seemed to be waking
out of a dream." Finding an account in a newspaper of
a young girl's suicide, she exclaimed, " A happy woman,
that!" Death has no terrors for a girl suffering from
balked or slighted love; it may even be said to have
attractions for her.
Love in fact longs for death, when it cannot satisfy its
craving for union, for complete fusion, for one common life.
I read in a farewell letter to his father written by a student,
driven desperate by his mistress's unfaithfulness, that
death was calling to him, luring him on, and had an
irresistible attraction for him. Corneille has noted the
fact in the lines :
" L'amour au désespoir ne peut craindre la mort ;
Dans un pareil naufrage, elle ouvre un heureux port." l
These pangs of unhappy Love arise from an imperious
1 "How should despairing Love fear death ? In such a shipwreck of the
•oui, death is a happy harbour of refuge." La Toison if Or, Act iii. Sc. 5.
6 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
craving for union that fails of satisfaction. Love is uniiivt
by nature, St Thomas says ; its tendency is towards the
closest union, it desires the most absolute and never-ending
possession of the beloved object, an eternal conjuncture.
Love would fain be one and one only, he merged in her*
and she in him, "The loved one is in the lover," St
Thomas says again, "and the lover in the loved one.
Body, heart and soul, each feels the need to be absorbed
and assimilated in the other." No one has described this
craving for union with more truth and vigour of language
than Bossuet : " In the transports of human passion," he
says, " who does not know that lovers will bite and almost
devour each other, and would fain become incorporate in
each other's bodies in all ways, and as the Poet 1 wrote,
seize even with the very teeth what they love, to possess
the same, to feed on it, be one with it, live in it." 2 This
fierce craving for union being unsatisfied, lovers feel a
sense of aching incompleteness and pain at the enforced
separation.
"To separate lovers is by itself a sore punishment,"
Corneille says. Plato accounted for this suffering of love
separated from the beloved object by a myth, which
contains a deep psychological signification. He says that
Man was at first created androgynous, that is, uniting in
himself both sexes. These were subsequently separated,
and each half is ever seeking to regain the other half from
which it has been sundered. Love is the pursuit of that
part of ourselves which we lack. Man is happy, if he find
his half, unhappy if he cannot find it, or cannot be united
with it. So long as he fails to meet with it and possess it,
1 The poet is Lucretius ; vv. 1072-1081.
8 Meditation on the Gospel, Words of Our Lord during the Last Supper,
first part, 24th day. — This need of union is true of Divine love no less than
of human : " We may say," writes Bossuet in another place, " that the Divine
Spouse, seeing the soul fulfilled with love of him, communicates himself to
it, gives himself to it, embraces and draws it within himself. . . . We may
say further with St Bernard that this embrace, this kiss, this Divine contact
and conjuncture, is not in the imagination, nor in the sense, but m the most
spiritual part of our being. " {On the Union of Jesus Christ with His Church:)
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. f
he is incomplete ; and suffers accordingly till his being is
made perfect.
" Man is an imperfect creature," Pascal says ; " he must
needs find a mate to be happy." It is in this sense the
Bible says it is not good for man to live alone. The people
expresses the same philosophical idea- as Plato, when it
calls the woman man's "better half." I have found the
same expression occurring in the letters of unfortunate
lovers who have killed themselves in despair. "Life is
unendurable to me," wrote one of these, "because I am
robbed of the half of myself." The two parted halves crave
to be rejoined in one whole. To " make but one " is the
aspiration of all true lovers. If they were asked, "What
you crave, is it not to be so closely joined in one as to
make separation impossible, — to make but one?" — they
would answer unhesitatingly in the affirmative. (Plato,
Symposium.)
What specially characterizes the psychological condition
of the lover is this fixed notion ; he dreams only of one
person, whom he longs to possess, he sees only her, he
speaks little, that he may ponder the better of her, if he
does speak, it is of her, — the sole and only object of his
thoughts. The intellectual shrinkage produced by love
leads to a correspondingly exaggerated estimate of the
beloved object
Corneille has very accurately noted this characteristic of
love, how it becomes a fixed idea, a sort of possession.
Pulchérie, "discoursing of her love, says to Justin :
44 Léon seul est ma joie, il est mon seul désir,
Je n'en puis choisir d'autre et n'ose le choisir ;
Depuis trois ans unie à cette chère idée,
J'en ai l'âme à toute heure, en tous lieux, obsédée" l
Falling in love at a mature age with Mlle. Duparc
CorneHle notes in himself this same possession, and seeks a
cure :
1 •• Léon is my only joy, the only desire of my heart ; I cannot, nor I dare
not, choose another. For three years wedded to this cherished thought, my
soul \s -possessed by it at every hour, in every place." Act iii. Sc 2. '
8 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
" Puissé-je, maigre vous* y penser un peu moins,
M'écbapper quelque jour vers quelques autres soins,
Trouver quelque plaisir ailleurs qu'en votre idée,
En voir toute mon âme un peu moins obsédée? x
It is all very well to urge a lover to admire the beauty
of another fair one, bidding him :
" Comparez-lui l'objet dont vous êtes blessé,
Comparez-en l'esprit, la façon, l'entretien,
Et lors vous trouverez qu'un autre la vaut bien ! " -
He is incapable of examining other women, and com-
paring them with the one he loves. The day his mind
finds liberty enough to institute such a comparison, love
will be near its end. But so long as it lasts, he can direct
his thoughts to none but the one beloved object.
A young man, to whom a plan of marriage was proposed
in order to divert him from an unhappy love affair,
answered in these words : " I have a high esteem for the
young lady you would have me marry, but I can never
love her ; the other is ever before my eyes, I am sick of
love for her." — All very well for Charlotte to cry to
Werther: "Cannot you find in the whole world another
woman able to satisfy the wishes of your heart ? " Werther
only answers there is for him in all the world no woman
but Charlotte. — I read in the official account of a suicide
how friends, by way of consoling a comrade who had been
unfortunate in love, would tell him : " Think no more of
her ! there are plenty of other pretty girls in Marseilles."
"Nay!" answered the unhappy lover, "there is but one
girl in all Marseilles I can love, the rest are nothing to
me.
The ill-starred lover rejects all consolation ; he buries
1 "Could I, in your despite, but dream something less of my passion,
escape for an hour to some other preoccupation, find some pleasure elsewhere
than in the thought of you, see my whole" soul something less possessed of this
one idea."
a " Compare with her the source of your wound, compare her wit and mien
and conversation, and lo ! you will find another in no way inferior to your
own beloved !" Corneille, La Veuve, Act ii. Sc 2.
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 9
himself in his grief and would rather not be cured. He
seeks out lonely places that he may concentrate his
thoughts on the loved one ; he finds her image in his
soul and takes delight in a contemplation that only serves
to still further increase his passion. Or else he carries
with him into his solitude the portrait of his mistress,
holding it for ever before his eyes to feed them on her
44 counterfeit-presentment."
The attempt is often made, and rightly, to induce the
patient to travel, in order to distract his mind and help
him to get rid of the one idea that possesses him ; and
this means is sometimes efficacious. 1 But more often than
not, the sick man hugs his malady and refuses to apply
the remedy ; he will not leave home, he would rather not
be cured. A young man suffering from unhappy love
replied to his friends, who begged him to follow Tele-
machus' example in the island of Calypso and sail away :
"No!" he said, "it is impossible for me to leave her; my
feelings simply overmaster me."
Separation from the beloved object is not always
successful in driving away the fond memory by which
the unhappy lover is possessed ; far from inducing forget-
fulness, absence may merely serve, by reason of the pangs
of separation and the tears it sets flowing, to make the
desire of fruition more violent than ever. I have known
victims of this species of possession return from a long
journey without being cured, and presently commit suicide
or kill the loved one who refused to favour their suit.
Year by year we see young soldiers join the Regiment
with sore hearts, because they have left behind in their
native village a girl they love. Separation does not
invariably calm their grief; some of them grow sombre
and silent and avoid their comrades' society. Eventually
1 In his notice on Béranger, Paul Hoi t eau tells how this means was success-
ful in tbe poet's case. The latter, desirous of curing himself of a violent
passion which had attacked him when well on in years, had with his usual
excellent good sense, recognised the fact that separation was the most effectual
remedy, seeing that the presence of the person loved invariably increases the
strength of love.
lO SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
they are found hanged, or drowned, or their brains blown
out by à pistol shot. Love sorrow may survive separation
many years or even to the last day of life. A young
woman of twenty-two, who had wished to marry her
cousin whom she dearly loved, having been married by
her relatives to another man, remained all her life plunged
in so deep a despair that, widowed eventually, she could
find no consolation, and ended by suffocating herself,
crying: "I long to die, I long to die." (January 1897.)
It is a mistake to say Time cures all griefs ; there are
some griefs Time cannot heal. Love sorrows are all the
more difficult- to bear for young people from the very
fact that they are not yet broken in to suffering, and have
no knowledge of the great sorrows of life.
Lovers are themselves aware of their psychological con-
dition, characterized as it is by the presence of one fixed
idea. A young man under accusation, who had killed his
fiancée because she broke her troth, said in answer to
questions: "Her conduct turned me into something like
a madman. Still I cannot say I am mad ; only I had the
fixed idea the girl was to become my wife, and I could not
drive it out of my head. I was urged again and again to
forget her, to dismiss the notion altogether, but it was
impossible." — In another case, the friend of a man who
had committed a murder out of disappointed love, spoke
in similar terms : " His projected marriage had grown into
a fixed idea with him ; he was ready to talk of his passion
to anyone who would listen. Under the fatal influence of
this fixed idea, which would seem to have to some degree
disturbed his intellect, he must in my opinion have made
the murderous attempt he did."
In some instances parents are so alarmed at the change
wrought in their child's character as a result of thwarted
love, that they suppose him to be ill (as indeed he is), and
call in the doctor. In a murder case, where a young man
had killed his fianc/e, who had broken off the engagement,
cross-examination revealed the fact that the accused, -in
the agonies of the deepest despair, used to beat his head,
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. II
crying out : " I have an idea in my brain that tortures me ;
that's where the mischief is." Possessed by the image of
the girl he loved, he could neither sleep at night nor work
by day ; l he was constantly getting up in the night, walk-
ing about his room, getting into bed again, then once -more
rising, unable to find a moment's repose and complaining
of violent headaches. The physician who was called in
by the parents found him to be suffering from congestion
of the brain ; from the first he had a presentiment the
young fellow would come to no good, — and as a matter of
fact he ended by killing the girl. Once a lover in his
despair falls into this condition of prostration succeeded
by exaggerated excitability, anything may happen ; ac-
cording to circumstances and the bent of his character, he
may resort either to suicide or murder, or both. Some*
times we hear these despairing lovers cry out, " This thing
must end ! " — for they feel themselves that this state of
excessive tension cannot last. Friends and neighbours are
conscious of calamity brooding in the air, and the* actual
conclusion is very often suicide or murder or both together,
or else madness.
Among the common people simple folks are still to be
found who firmly believe witchcraft to be responsible for
such like catastrophes. Some few years ago, the Criminal
Court of the Bouches-du-Rhône had to deal with an offender,
who had killed a young woman, because, as he said, she
had made him ill by taking away his sleep, his appetite
and his taste for work ; I have had the " dossier " of
papers connected with the case in my hands. The un- <
fortunate young man was condemned to fifteen years'
hard labour ! — I have also known mothers accuse their
daughters' seducers of having used magic arts to turn
them mad with love ; they believed them to be " be-
witched." Again, the father of Desdemona is quite unable
to explain otherwise than by the intervention of sorcery
the love his daughter, young, beautiful, bashful, proud and
1 Plato has noticed these tortures of unhappy love : •' He cannot sleep by
night, nor stay still by day." {Pkadrus.)
12 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
rich, feels for Othello, a man of years, poor and a foreigner,
and " black as soot " into the bargain. He cannot fathom
the motives that have led her to quit the paternal roof to
follow after this man to all appearance so ill fitted for the
part of a seducer ; he asks him if he has not thrown a spell
over the girl by means of love potions and arts magic.
Even when it is not a disease, love is a passion that is
by its very nature exclusive and absorbing. M. Maillet
holds that Ambition presents a yet more exclusive
character; but I do not agree with him. No doubt
Ambition is absorbing, but not to the same extent as
Love. "The thoughts of my sin so absorb me," said
Ûavid, "that my eye can see naught else." 1 The man
who is deeply smitten with love can think of one thing
only :
" Aimer est tout son but, aimer est tout son bien." 2
Dominated by this one fixed idea, intelligent men grow
stupid. They have only a single thought left, that of
their passion ; to this they make everything else sub-
servient, indifferent alike to fortune and the pleasures of
society, of pride and of ambition :
" Son arc, ses javelots, son char, tout l'importune." 3
All they care for is solitude, that they may ponder
undisturbed over the object of their passion ; they think
only of the individual they are enamoured of, they seek
out every opportunity of meeting and seeing her. Girls
who are pursued by these ardent lovers declare they
1 Masillon's analysis of this state of mind evinced much penetration when
he said, speaking of Love : " It is distinctive of this passion to fill the whole
heart to overflowing. . . . The lover can think of nothing but his love ; it
possesses and intoxicates him to the exclusion of everything else. Every
object recalls its fatal images, and rouses its unholy desires ; society, solitude,
presence, absence, objects the most indifferent, occupations the most serious,
the holy sanctuary itself, the blessed altars of God, the awful mysteries of
Religion, all recall its memory." (Sermon on the " Prodigal Son.")
2 " To love is all his aim, to love is all his bliss."
Corneille, Andromède, Act i. Sc. 4.
1 ' Her bow, her darts, her car, all stir his heart."
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 1 3
cannot take a step without encountering them in their
path. This obstinacy, this possession of all the faculties,
lasts sometimes for a number of years ; no matter how
often shown the door, they return to the attack again and
again, never wearying of the one idea they have in their
heads, their love. A working man of Marseilles who had
asked in marriage a sailor's daughter and had been refused,
commits a series of acts of savage nocturnal violence, for
which he is condemned to four years' hard labour. After
undergoing his punishment at Noumea, he returns to
Marseilles on the expiration of the five years, as fiercely
in love as at the moment of his leaving the place. He
starts out to find the girl, discovers her living as the
mistress of another workman and kills her on her refus-
ing to have anything to do with him.
The ill-starred lover neglects his business, his friends
and even his kinsmen :
" Et quand on aime bien et qu'on voit ce qu'on aime,
Peut on songer à des parents ? " l
Pascal, that profound observer of the passionate emotions,
has also observed : " I entirely agree with the man who
declared that in love we forget fortune and family and
friends. . . . What makes men go so far in love is this,
that they imagine themselves to need nothing else what-
ever but what they love ; their whole mind is full of this,
and there is no room for any other thought or anxiety."
If Love can make children forget their parents, it
also on occasion will make parents forget their children.
Fathers allow their children by a first marriage to be
ill-treated by their second wife or by their mistress; in
their case paternal love is stifled under their passion for
die woman they are enamoured of. I find in a letter to his
second wife from a working joiner who had married again
the following expression : " From one who is ready to die
for you and who loves you better than his life, for I would
have sacrificed my little girl for your sake."
1 " When a man loves ardently and sees what he loves, how can he think
of kinsfolk ? " Psyché^ Act iv. Sc. 3.
14 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BV PASSION.
It is the concentration of every thought on one single
object which makes the joy of reciprocated love so great
and the pangs of unhappy love so poignant The imagina-
tion, entirely absorbed in a single object, pictures under
enormously exaggerated proportions the bliss and the
unbappiness resulting from the possession or the loss of
the person beloved. He is persuaded he could no longer
live without her :
" Hors de votre présence, il doute s'il peut virre." l
And in actual fact, sometimes the lover is made so
miserably unhappy by the loss of the loved one that he
dies of the blow. In the letters of unfortunate lovers
who put an end to themselves, we often meet with this
thought : " Without you life is unbearable. I would much
rather die."
It is this same concentration of thought on one single
object again which accounts for the empire the woman
exercises over the man who is enamoured of her.
There is a large element of illusion in love, whether
happy or the reverse, serving to exalt the merits of the
beloved object by the addition of quite imaginary per-
fections. The lover is convinced there exists no other
woman prettier, or more sweet and lovable, than the one
he loves, — yet she is very often plain. The official reports of
suicides which I have consulted often enclose, along with
letters written by the despairing lover, the photograph of
the woman for whose sake he has done the deed. And
the woman is seldom possessed of any remarkable charms
of person. It is by no means always fine eyes, whether
black or blue, straight cut noses and regular features, that
trouble men's heads and set hearts aflame. A woman
in love is, on her side, no less firmly persuaded of her
lover's superiority. Everybody knows the "loci classici"
in Lucretius, Horace and Molière describing the blindness
of Love, which lends entirely imaginary good qualities to
the object of affection, transforming positive defects into
1 M Deprived of your presence, he doubts if he can live,"
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BV PASSION; 1 5
merits. M Passion spreads a veil over their mistress's faults ;
nay ! does more, it changes them into beauties ; the polypus
on Agna's nose is no defect in Balbinus' eyes."
But let Love be flown, and the lover is astonished he
can no longer find in his former mistress the high qualities
that once charmed him so. It is not that she is changed ;
the alteration is in himself. The ardour of desire as yet
unsatisfied contributes greatly to this process of idealiza-
tion, which often comes to an abrupt end after fruition.
The lover has ever before his eyes the image of the
loved one, which follows him everywhere and never leaves
him. He sees it everywhere ; as Corneille says :
"Tout ce que je voyais me semblait Curiace." *
The presence of the beloved object embellishes Nature,
brightens the horizon, warms the very air he breathes.
The lover lives enveloped by her image, brightened and
warmed by the sunbeams of her eyes. The fond feelings
that swell his heart make him find the flowers more
lovely, the rays of the setting sun and the light of the
moon more beauteous, the songs of the birds more tuneful.
The days of their love-making are those when poets and
painters are able to delineate best and most emotionally
the charms of Nature, the cheerfulness of morn and the
sadness of evening, the softness of night and the silent
peacefulness of the fields. It is just because the image
of the beloved object peoples the world and makes it
beautiful, that when this is lost the world is left desolate,
and seems a desert. After Berenice's departure, the East
appears an empty waste to Antiochus :
44 Dans l'Orient désert quel devient mon ennui ! " 2
The East is but Bérénice personified; Bérénice gone,
nothing is left. For the man who is deep in love, the
universe is but the woman he loves.
44 Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé." 3
1 •• All I beheld, methought, was Curiace."
a •• In the desert East, what weariness of soul is mine Ï *'
* " One being is taken from you, and all is left desolate." — Lamartine.
1 6 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
His horizon is so limited, the World is simply the
dwelling-place of the one he adores; apart from her, it
has no existence, universal Nature is nothing to him.
His love is fortunate, — the World wears a radiant smile ;
unfortunate, — and all Nature frowns. This Earth, which
seems a Paradise to him who loves and is loved again,
becomes a sepulchre or a hell, when he loses the loved one
or is hindered from wedding her. Already frantic with
love, he grows frantic with despair, and longs to quit a
world where he suffers so sorely. The tomb has no terrors
for him, for what is existence to him henceforth but a
living death? When he announces to his friends his
intention to have done with life, these refuse to take his
words seriously, for they have no true conception of his
sufferings. Parents again, who are sometimes admitted
by their sons into the secret of their projected suicide,
attach no importance to the confidence ; having outgrown
the age of love and lost the recollection of the high-strung
emotions of earlier years, they do not realize the young
man's despair and the fatal attraction the idea of suicide
exercises over him. A young girl when disappointed in
love, very rarely lets her parents know of it ; she is afraid
to confide her despair to them, she would like to spare
them the pain of seeing her unhappiness, and carefully
conceals her scheme of putting an end to herself.
A man in pain would be ever asleep, if he could ; in
waking, he regrets the time of respite during which he
ceased to feel his agony. His sum of energy once ex-
hausted, he longs for death as for an eternal sleep, that he
may suffer no more. In the written documents left behind
them by suicides, I have again and again found this same
cry of suffering, this craving for rest : " My pain is more
than I can bear ; I am going to sleep, I am going to seek
forgetfulness of my sorrows in death." It is excess of
suffering that is the determining factor of suicide. " Oh !
fair and cruel girl, who deserve not to be loved," cries a
shepherd in Theocritus, " I am here to make you my last
present, the noose that is to end my days, for I am fain
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 1 7
to encounter your scorn no more, and I am away whither
you send me, to a land where Love can give no further
pain, where is oblivion of all sorrows." — I am mad with
grief," exclaimed an unhappy lover before putting an end
to his life. . . my tears hinder me from writing more." — " I
am sorry to quit this world," writes another in his despair ;
"still I am happy to think I shall find rest in eternal
sleep." — "The eternal repose of the tomb seems infinitely
sweet to me . . . my pain is greater than I can bear," are the
words of yet another ill-starred lover before killing himself.
— A young workwoman, an embroiderer by trade, who had
been unable to marry the man of her choice, wrote before
ending her days : " Life has been for me nothing but one
huge sorrow; may my death be the awakening to true
happiness ! " — " How soundly I shall sleep ! God grant
my hand fail me not ! " writes one desperate man. —
Another unhappy lover prefaces his death with the words :
44 1 am wretched on these shores, and I am away to see
what lies on the other side." — " I admit I am an arrant
coward, but my suffering is more than I can bear, and
I am at the end of my endurance," writes a domestic
servant, who empties two chambers of a revolver into
her body, because she cannot obtain fulfilment of a promise
of marriage that had been made her. — Another woman
whose lover had forsaken her, writes : " My agony is too
great, I can endure my life no longer ; my poor head
cannot bear the pain of desertion any more."
The lover, whose love is not reciprocated, is so terribly
unhappy for this reason, that he has concentrated all his
thoughts, all his desires, all his plans, all his hopes on one
single being. This being failing him, what is left ? " Every-
thing is ended," he cries ; " to live without you is an im-
possibility. My only hope is to find peace and quietness
in a better world." — In her love letters to Bothwell, Mary
Queen of Scots again and again gives expression to this
thought, that she cares for life for his sake only, that his
love is the sole and only stay of her life and that without
him all she could wish for would be instant death. The
1 8 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
instant her passion meets with an obstacle, she exclaims :
" Alack ! would I were dead ! "
Grown-up men know there are greater sorrows in this
world than love disappointments; but young folks imagine
no pangs can be keener than those of thwarted love, or a
projected marriage broken off or even merely delayed.
The fear of seeing a marriage drop through, which after all
is only deferred, may be sufficient to determine an access
of despair ending in self-destruction. To give a recent
instance: a young man of twenty-eight is anxious to
marry a girl he is in love with. The girl's family, without
refusing his suit, require the young man to put in his period
of military service first He consents to this and prepares
to join his regiment, but his parents now raise objections ;
eventually the youthful lover, in despair at seeing his
marriage postponed, commits suicide. — A young workman
without a penny of property, is eager to marry, but his
family urge him strongly to put some money by before
entering on housekeeping, telling him the nightingale does
not begin singing till it has built its nest. He however
is for marrying before having made his nest, and kills
himself because his parents advise him to put off his
marriage.
Talent and genius are no preservatives against suicide
from disappointed love; indeed they may even be de-
scribed as predisposing causes. The greatest writers of
the Nineteenth Century, Goethe, Chateaubriand, Lamartine,
George Sand, Alfred de Musset, etc., all felt the temptation
of suicide. Leopold Robert did put an end to Jiimself
in consequence of ill success in love. Poets, Musicians,
Painters, feel keenly the pangs of unhappy love from the
very fact of their high degree of sensibility.
Women of equivocal character are by no means in-
capable of feeling love sorrows acutely, even to the extent
of leading them to commit suicide. Not a year passes but
the Quartier Latin is the scene of sundry tragedies of the
sort. " I am a poor girl without family or fortune, ,, wrote
a young woman who had been forsaken by a student of
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 1 9
medicine ; " I have had to bear much sorrow and dreadful
suffering ; I am sick of life, and I have made up my mind
to kill myself. I am taking the opportunity of M
being away to take some acetic acid from amongst his
drugs." This she swallowed, lay down on her bed and
so died. When Parisian students at the end of their
course seek to break off connections likely to stand in the
way of their plans of settling down and making a name
for themselves, it is not an uncommon occurrence for the
rupture to provoke a fit of despair leading to suicidal
results.
Then again, there are many women of unstable equili-
brium, mentally incapable of being crossed, who after
making a scene with their lover, suddenly throw them-
selves out of window or jump into the River. Sudden
impulses of this sort towards suicide are of frequent
occurrence among a degenerate type hereditarily, among
hysterical and neurotic subjects. Plenty of examples may
be found in the Works of Doctors Magnan, Legrain,
Dagonnet, Féré, Legrand du Saule, Gamier.
Speaking generally, suicides of women are less numerous
than those of men. There are a crowd of good reasons
to account for the difference. Religious and family feel-
ing, fear of death, tolerance of suffering, avoidance of
excess, dread of scandal, are all sentiments more fully
developed in the female than in the male sex. Besides,
a woman is better protected against the temptation to
commit suicide by the sense of shame, which makes her
dread the exposure of the Morgue and the inevitable
medico-legal examinations. It is well known how an
epidemic of suicide which appeared among the women of
Miletus was stayed by a law ordering that every woman
who killed herself should be exposed naked in the public
Market-place. Nevertheless, under stress of acute dis-
appointment in love, the most timid young girl will put
an end to herself with as much determination as the
bravest man ; grief will make her oblivious of everything,
religion, family, weakness, shame, timidity, fear of death
20 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
itself. " Women," says Plutarch, " have ordinarily nothing
in common with Mars ; but for all this the frenzy of love
drives them to the commission of reckless deeds entirely
repugnant to their natural disposition and to self-sought
death."
While, taking the total number of suicides, the figure
representing those of women is four or five times less than
that of men, we yet find an almost identical number of
female and of male suicides consequent upon thwarted
love. Thus for instance, in the year 1889, of 247 suicides
due to disappointments of the affections, 123 were men,
124 women ; in 1893, of 333 suicides, there were 164 men
and 169 women.
Moral suffering is more especially acute with delicately
organised natures, endowed with keen sensibility and vivid
imagination, — and these are just the qualities in which
women excel. Besides this, Love being the chief business
of her life, she has nothing else to console her disappoint-
ment such as the acquisition of power and influence, the
winning of honours and wealth, — all important safety
valves where men are concerned. For a while she will
struggle against her grief and force herself to take an
interest in the affairs of every day, but this battle against
mental suffering very quickly wears out her strength.
Among young girls and women who are led to commit
suicide by disappointments in love, a certain number of
those who put an end to themselves in Paris come from
the provinces. Forsaken by their lover or finding them-
selves pregnant, they fly from home to hide their shame in
Paris. " I can never get over my grief," cries a girl of
twenty on the eve of committing suicide. " I have come
to Paris. The only favour I ask is to be buried without
inquiries as to my family."
Suicide due to thwarted love was of much less frequent
occurrence in former days. Schopenhauer reckoned the
total at- only half a dozen per annum for the whole of
Europe. "It is not in Novels only that Werthers and
Jacobo Ortis are to be found; every year Europe might
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 21
supply a half dozen of instances." 1 In his Treatise on
Suicide written in 1822, Dr Fabret says that in 181 8 there
were eighteen suicides attributed to the effects of amorous
passion. Now in the year 1893, for example, there were
in Fiance no less than 333 cases of suicide from dis-
appointed love, and this figure must be further increased
by a number of suicides arising out of jealousy. It is
difficult to arrive at the precise number, inasmuch as the
Statistics published by the Ministry of Justice make the
mistake of confounding in a single category suicides de-
termined by jealousy, dissipation and ill living. For
instance in 1892 the total of suicides due to these three
factors rose as high as 1 37.
Why in the society of to-day are there more suicides
from love than in former times? Is it because there is
more love ? Obviously not. The reasons for the increase
must be sought in the non-satisfaction of the craving for love
by way of marriage, which day by day grows less frequent,
in the ever-growing number of irregular liaisons, ending
in eventual rupture, in the precocity of the rising genera-
tion in matters of love and dissipation, in the development
of nervous diseases and of alcoholism, in weakening of
the will power and excessive excitation of the sensibility,
in novel reading and morbid over-stimulation of the
imagination, in the decay of belief in Religion with its
prohibitions of suicide.
To arrive at the exact total of suicides caused by love
and jealousy, we must add in also a certain number set
down to intemperance. Of the 927 cases coming under
this head in 1892, I am convinced that in a very con-
siderable number of instances the real cause of the in-
temperance and consequent suicide was some unhappy
love affair. Despairing lovers very frequently rush into
intemperance to stifle their grief. Men end miserably as
sots, because in earlier days they could not marry the girl
they loved or because they were betrayed by their mistress,
and so tried to drown their sorrows in wine and alcohol
1 Schopenhauer, Reflexions* p. 73 (Paris éd., F. Alcan).
22 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
" To stupify my wits," writes Werther to his friend, " I have
for some time now got into the habit of allowing myself,
starting with a glass of wine, to presently finish off the
bottle" {Letter LXVIL). Intoxication is like sleep, it
brings forgetfulness. We know how Alfred de Musset,
to console himself for his rupture with George Sand,
adopted habits of intemperance. His god-mother (Mme.
Jaubert) having reproached him for his folly, the un-
fortunate and still inconsolable poet wrote to her to
excuse his glass of absinthe,
" Qui pendant un quart d'heure étourdit ma misère ... •
Dans ce verre, où je cherche à noyer mon supplice,
Laissez plutôt tomber quelques pleurs de pitié." J
Again it not unfrequently happens that unhappy lovers
rush in their despair into dissipation, as others take to
drink, to stifle their grief. Not a few girls moreover after
being forsaken by their lovers, hurry out of recklessness,
wretchedness or despair into evil living, yet without being
able to forget their first love. "Since Louis left me to
rejoin his regiment," wrote a young girl who had already
made several attempts at suicide and who ended by
smothering herself with charcoal fumes, " I have been
guilty of numberless follies, which he will never forgive.
Write and tell him of my fatal determination. You will
cut off a lock of my hair and give it him as a remembrance
of me."
Again we find included in the Statistics of the Ministry
of Justice a large number of suicides under the extremely
vague heading of "domestic troubles." For instance in
1890 there were 1097 such. The officials who draw up the
formal reports of suicides make use of this phrase when-
ever they are ignorant of the precise nature of the trouble
which brought about the suicide, and which the family
wish to keep secret. I have devoted special study to these
1 il Which for a brief half hour stifles my wretchedness ... in this glass,
wherein I seek to drown my torment, rather let fall some drops of pitying
tears."
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 23
reports, and I have come to the conclusion that a number
of suicides classed under the category " domestic troubles "
ought properly speaking to be set down to disappointed
and unfortunate love.
We see then that Love unreciprocated or otherwise
balked is responsible for a large number of victims ; this
living principle becomes a principle of death, when it is
left unsatisfied. Nor is it only unfortunate love that leads
to suicide ; the mere craving for love if it fails of satisfac-
tion may bring on a profound melancholy ending in suicide.
A young man of timid, morbid disposition, devoured by
the need of loving and being loved, may suffer so acutely
from the aching void in his heart as to eventually kill him-
self in sheer despair. " I deliberately choose to put an end
to myself; I suffer so, because no one loves me," writes
a young workman, a brass-founder, and consumptive. A
young workwoman of Paris, seventeen years of age, leaves
her father's house one morning as usual on her way to the
workshop, after kissing her mother and brothers affec-
tionately ; her face wears an untroubled look, and there is
absolutely nothing to point to an impending catastrophe.
Yet she has just written a letter to her parents, which she
is now on her way to post, before throwing herself into the
Seine, which runs thus : " My dear parents, — to-morrow
morning you will receive a letter, giving you full particulars
of my death. Courage. I die of want of interest in life,
and this terrible feeling must be my excuse and my claim
to forgiveness. It has been the curse of my life. I felt
myself attacked by a mysterious malady that was bound
to bring me to the grave. Courage, dear parents,— courage,
if for nothing else, for the sake of your dear little ones, who
will have a brighter destiny than their sister. My dead
body will be found in the Seine."
Moreover, every year thwarted love is the predisposing
cause of a certain number of religious vocations, more
particularly among young girls who have been betrayed
and forsaken. These turn to God and wed Him, — for is
not the Religious life a chaste form of wedlock ? God
24 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
becomes " the beloved consort," as Bossuet himself names
Him in his letters of pious exhortation and advice ad-
dressed to Religious Women.
Spouse of God, the maiden who takes the Veil becomes
at the same time mother of the orphaned and the poor.
Nunneries are well worthy the respect of all, inasmuch as
they afford young girls who cannot marry satisfaction of
that imperious craving to love and to be loved which under
other circumstances calls so urgently for marriage and
motherhood. 1 These human feelings, spiritualized by the
Divine Love, beget the marvels of charity, and give happi-
ness to thousands of noble creatures, who but for the
Religious life would miss it altogether. Alfred de Musset
who, in spite of all his loose living, possessed a vivid
intuition of the needs of the human heart, clearly recog-
nized the truth that nowhere else is so much love to be
found as in Religious Houses :
" Cloîtres silencieux, voûtes des monastères,
C'est vous, sombres caveaux, vous qui savez aimer." s
Nor is it women alone that pass from human love to love
Divine, like Mlle, de la Vallière who became Sister Louise
de la Miséricorde ; men of tender and emotional natures
turn priests, when they lose their fiancée, as did the Abbé
de Rohan, Lamartine's friend, or throw themselves enthusi-
astically into the Divine Love, when the age for human
love is over. Enough to recall the names of St Augustine,
Pascal and Racine, to see how easily high-souled lovers
merge into religious mystics. " Racine," Mme. de Sévigné
said, " loves God as ardently as he used to love his
mistresses."
Over and above lovers who resort to suicide because
they are unable to marry the one they love, there are also,
1 Ch. Nodier, writing in 1803 his Méditations du Clottre (Meditations of the
Cloister), demanded the re-establishment of Religious Houses, in order to save
men from suicide.
* " Silent cloisters, vaulted monasteries, 'tis you, ye dark and sombre halls,
that best know how to love."
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 25
exceptionally, young men, and still more young women,
who put an end to themselves in order to escape marrying
against their will ; they prefer death to an antipathetic
marriage. When a girl commits suicide to avoid marrying,
it is because she is anxious to wed another husband than
the one her friends desire her to. At first she appears
resigned to her family's wishes, but as the wedding day
comes nearer and nearer, her heart rises in revolt, her
aversion to the man they would force upon her increases
and on the eve of the fatal day she kills herself. So it is
with Monime in the play, who loves another, and rather
than marry Pharnace or Mithridate is for stabbing herself
to the heart, tries subsequently to hang herself, to
" Faire un affreux lien d'un sacré diadème," l
and after that plans to poison herself, when her previous
attempt fails.
To give one or two examples of suicide on the part of
young women whose inclinations have been thus thwarted.
A girl who had been deeply affected because she could
not marry the man she was fondly in love with, in con-
sequence of her parents' opposition, was plighted by them
to another young man. As the wedding-day came nearer,
she grew more and more nervous and agitated ; compelled
to take to her bed, she showed evident signs of a wish to
put an end to herself. The physician who was called in
gave her a draught to calm her nerves. Left alone with
her sister, she had recourse to various pretexts to get her
out of the way ; not succeeding in this, she went to the
window under the pretext of the room being too hot, and
suddenly springing over the sill threw herself out. —
Another instance : a girl living in the suburbs of Paris,
being on the point of contracting a marriage she disliked
with an officer in the Army, went to town one day to visit
a relative ; she seemed in excellent spirits, and presently
asked her relative to go into the garden to gather her
some roses. Thus left alone in the house, she shot herself
1 "To make an ill-omened cord of a sacred diadem."
26 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
dead. — This type of suicide is very uncommon among young
men, who are much less often constrained by their family
into a marriage contrary to their wishes. Still examples
do occur, such as the following : a Parisian shop-assistant,
in love with a woman of the same place whom he could
not marry, makes up his mind to a provincial marriage.
He leaves the city, but the very day before his wedding,
returns to Paris and blows his brains out, after writing
the following letter : " I choose to end my life by my
own hand. Why? Mystery. No one will ever know.
Farewell, father, mother, family and friends. Forgive me.
Farewell. Louise, forgive me. Be happy." I myself
noted the case of a young man who killed himself, to
escape marrying a cousin, whom he had seduced indeed,
but had now ceased to care for. He was a clerk of
twenty-three, living at Marseilles with an uncle, who was
in business. He had run away from the cousin, leaving
her at her country home in the Department of the Loire
in a condition of pregnancy. The girl wrote to him to
remind him of his promises. This letter he showed to
his uncle, who told him, M As you have deceived the girl,
you are bound to make it good. Go and marry her ; I will
give you the necessary leave of absence." Hearing this,
the young man left his uncle with the words : " Well and
good ! I know now what I must do," and went away to
kill himself. — A working man of sixty-one, who had been
living for years with a mistress, who was now sixty-two
years of age, had at last, yielding to her importunities,
promised to marry her ; when his mistress claimed the
fulfilment of this promise, he hanged himself rather than
keep it
Most cases of female suicide determined by disappoint-
ments in love are those of young girls. Still, instances
do occur of married women, repulsed by men they are
running after, putting an end to themselves, in a fit of
despair. This is what Phèdre does in Racine's play, —
hanging herself because she is scorned by Hippolyte.
Then again the desire for marriage, if remaining un-
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 27
satisfied, may kad to acute despair in the case of women
living under irregular circumstances and suffering from the
fact In Paris especially, where this equivocal form of
ménage is so common, when the mistress begins to see the
number of children increasing fast, she feels an eager
desire to regularize their status, and her own, a desire the
lover does not always share. Hence bickerings, house-
hold differences and much mental suffering, ending in
some instances in the woman's suicide. In very excep-
tional cases also shame at her degraded condition and the
impossibility of escaping it may lead a fallen woman to
commit suicide, even when she has no child, if she belong
to a well-connected family. " My dreams proved im-
possible of realization," wrote a young woman in this situa-
tion, who had hoped to rise above her shame by marrying
her lover ; " I shall be a dead woman when you get this
letter. The man I thought worthy of me has deceived
me, and I die of the blow. Pity and forgive me. Tell
papa and mamma of my death." She then proceeded to
smother herself by means of charcoal fumes. — Another
mistress, before meeting her death in the same way, wrote
to her lover, who obstinately refused to marry her : " All
I ask you is to leave me your photograph, when you bury
me. A long farewell from your loving mistress, who had
hoped to be your wife." Suicides of this kind, of mistresses
anxious to become lawful wives, but driven to despair
because they cannot succeed in restoring their good name
by this means, are of pretty frequent occurrence in Paris.
Such women are hungry for respect and consideration and
perfectly well aware of the fact that a fallen woman's re-
habilitation is worked out not by Love, as the Novelists
would have us believe, but by marriage and the proper
performance of the duties it involves. It is the world's
scorn makes them suffer ; to recover its esteem is the great
object of their ambition.
Women of pleasure also occasionally commit suicide.
Courtesans are capable in very exceptional cases of so
fond an attachment as to lead to their death. La
28 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
Fontaine, in La Courtisane amoureuse, shows how a woman
of this class can still sometimes be susceptible of a dis-
interested love. He represents her as saying with touching
humility :
" Constance vous adore.
Méprisez-la, chassez-la, battez-la,
Si vous pouvez, faîtes-lui pis encore ;
Elle est à vous." *
We give a copy of a letter written quite lately by a
woman of pleasure, who put an end to her own life : " You
know, dearest, that without you my life is unendurable,
above all since I have lost my poor little girl. Farewell,
I loved you true. My wish is that you may be happy."
The sort of mistresses for whose sake men kill them-
selves have little resemblance to those I have just been
describing; more often than not they are creatures only
worthy of contempt. We see intelligent men fall deeply
in love with women quite unworthy of their affection,
which is only increased by the scorn they cannot but feel
for them. Once a man allows his senses to govern him,
the more he despises a woman, the more he loves ; like
the Chevalier Desgrieux, who goes on loving Manon, 2 in
spite, nay! perhaps because of her infidelities towards
him, he says :
"Je t'aimais d'autant plus que je t'estimais moins." 3
Blinded by passion, cheated by the modest exterior and
angel face vicious women often possess, unhappy and
infatuated young men adore to madness contemptible
creatures who drive them to despair. When proofs of
unfaithfulness accumulate, they weep and lament like
children, without having the strength of mind to break
off the connection. If they do try to end the liaison, the
shame of which they feel, they soon come back again, in
1 "Constance adores you, scorn her, repulse her, beat her, do what worse
you can to her ; she is yours in spite of all."
* Matton Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost.
* " I loved you all the more, the less I could respect you."
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 2Ç
the vain hope of inspiring an exclusive attachment in
their fickle mistress's bosom. But this reconciliation is
short-lived, fresh disputes arise, and a final separation
takes place. Instead of looking upon the termination of
so degrading an attachment as a happy release, they feel
the parting so acutely as to come back once more, to beg
another reconciliation ; and if this is refused, they kill
themselves, crying :
" Vous lirez dans mon sang à vos pieds répandu
Ce que valait Pâmant que vous avez perdu.'
i» i
They hope such a proof of love as this will make their
mistress remorseful. But no ! — all the woman sees in her
lover's death is an act of homage due to her beauty ; her
self-conceit is pleasantly tickled at having inspired so fine
a frenzy of despair, and she is much obliged to the unhappy
man for having offered so striking and public a testimony
to the power of her charms, for of course the Papers will
not fail to entertain their readers with this drama of love
and suicide, which will confer a flattering celebrity on the
heroine. There are even coquettes ready to find pleasure
in pushing men who love them to despair, and owing them
a grudge if they do not kill themselves.
Love without respect is common enough. Catullus
loved Lesbia without respecting her. Cynthia's treacheries
failed to cure Propertius of his love. The Emperor Justinian
chose his wife Theodora from a house of ill-fame. Des-
grieux adored Manon; Jean-Jacques Rousseau loved
Thérèse, and so on and so on.
Plenty of men prefer love without respect to respect
without love. Every day we see husbands forgiving their
wives, not out of any magnanimity or philosophical
tolerance, but out of simple weakness. Quite lately in
Paris, a husband, Agent for a Commercial house, surprising
his wife flagrante delicto in a lover's arms, takes steps in
the first flush of his indignation to procure a Separation ;
1 44 You will read in my blood shed at your feet what worth the lover was
that you have lost. " Corneille, I^a GaUrit du Palais,
30 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
yet the day he receives notice to present himself, along
with his wife, before the Magistrate, he feels he has not the
strength of mind, so fondly does he love her still, to see
her again without taking her back, and ashamed of such
weakness shoots himself through the heart. It cost him
less pain to kill himself than to go on living without
taking an adulterous woman back into his arms !
I found one day while examining the report of a
criminal trial an expression, trivial indeed but highly
expressive, which renders excellently at once the violence
and the physical origin of this love which survives all
proofs of unworthiness in the object : " I have you in my
blood, darling, in my very skin."
Women likewise very often separate love and respect ;
they love men they do not respect, while they do not care
for others they do esteem.
"Je vous estimai plus, — je l'aimai davantage." l
Clarissa Harlow in Richardson's Novel loves Lovelace.
Don Juan is loved by Elvira, Charlotte, "a thousand and
three " other women.
If Love is irrational, the reason is that while not without
a psychical side, it is yet closely bound up with the
senses and has a corporeal origin. It is a passion quite
as much physiological as intellectual, capable of being
developed by food, perfumes, temperature, a whole host
of physical conditions. External charms determine it far
more than moral qualities, and this without any conscious-
ness on the part of the lover, who believes himself all the
time to be affected by the mental and moral attributes
only of his inamorata. Deep down lurks the instinct of
reproduction, a fact which lovers plunged in ecstatic
reverie often fail to observe; when their heart is pure,
they have no very clear conception of their real feelings,
and imagine themselves to have none but ethereal desires,
aspirations for the union of twin souls, and the like, while
1 " I esteemed you the more, — I loved him the better." Corneille, Médée,
Act. ii. Sc. 6.
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 3 1
really and truly it is a case of Dame Nature inspiring
them, without their knowing it, with the craving for a
physical union whose object is the reproduction of the
species.
" Ces délires sacrés, ces désirs sans mesure,
Déchaînés dans vos flancs comme d'ardents essaims,
Ces transports, c'est déjà Phumanité future,
Qui s'agite en vos seins." l
Nature in her desire to secure before all else the continu-
ance of the species, has multiplied the motives of sexual
attraction, making Love dependent on the colour of the
eyes, the abundance of the hair, the delicacy of the skin,
the shape of the nose and a hundred other minutiae. . . .
•• If Cleopatra's nose had been shorter," Pascal says, " the
face of the whole World would have been changed." A
mere nothing, a smile, a gesture, are enough to kindle a
passion that stirs the universe." " The eyes," writes Pascal
in another passage, "have the greater share in this." —
"The emanations of beauty," Plato declares, "enter the
soul by the eyes, the most subtle of the organs of sense."
Ex aspectu nascit amor, — " Love springs from the eyes."
A look from them captivates the heart, a smile is the
determining factor of a man's life.
Reason has nothing to do with the blossoming of Love ;
it is some quite trivial motive, something at once futile
and mysterious, that brings passion to a head :
u Souvent je ne sais quoi qu'on ne peut exprimer
Nous surprend, nous emporte et nous force d'aimer." J
As the virtuous Pauline says to Sévère :
" Un je ne sais quel charme encor vers vous m'emporte." 3
The rapidity with which "love at first sight" often
1 "Those sacred longings, those ineffable cravings, let loose within your
frame like eager swarms, those transports of desire, 'tis already the humanity
of a future day that stirs your bosom." — Madame Ackerman.
t4i Ofttimes a mysterious something that none can express surprises us,
carries us away and forces us to love." Corneille, Polyeucte, Act ii. Sc. 6.
a " A mysterious charm once more impels me towards you."
32 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
springs into existence is yet another proof to show it is
not reason that determines it, but certain external qualities
visible at the first glance. Virgil, Racine, Shakespeare,
have all described this commotion produced by a look,
the lightning stroke of love, as it is called :
" Ut vidi, ut pcrii, ut me malus abstulit error." l
Virgil, Eclogue, viii.
"Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue." 2 Racine, Phèdre.
From the instant of the first glance they exchange,
Romeo and Juliet feel they belong to each other. Both
men and women are at times struck down with love, as
one is struck down by a disease. Dr Féré quotes one
case in his book, where the lightning stroke was determined
in the French King, Henri III., by an impression of the
olfactory nerves (U Instinct sexuel, p. 129). 3 The strong
stimulus the sense of smell may exercise over the genital
sense is well known ; and this is why, ever since Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, who was intensely sensitive to the
exciting influence of perfumes, erotic novelists so often
attribute the fall of their heroines in part to the scent of
flowers.
It would appear difficult then to share the opinion of
Pascal, who holds that the Poets have erred in depicting
Love as blind, inasmuch as according to him it is always
reasonable. " It is ill done to have robbed Love of the
title of Reason," he says ; " the two have been quite
unwarrantably contrasted one with the other, seeing that
Love and Reason are but one and the same thing." As
a matter of fact, so little is Love the same thing as Reason,
so near akin is it to Unreason, that we say of a man
deeply in love that he is mad with love, that he loves to
distraction. Love is so subversive of reason, that a man
of sense is recognised to be in love, when he begins to
commit follies ;
1 " I saw, I was undone, in an instant a fatal frenzy carried me away."
2 " I saw him, I blushed red, I grew pale at sight of him."
8 L'Institut sexuel. ("The Sexual Instinct") Evolution. Dissolution.
Paris, F. Alcan.
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 33
44 L'amour et la raison sont ennemis jurés." l — (La Veuve.)
M Vouloir que la raison règne sur un amant
C'est être plus que lui dedans l'aveuglement." 2
The Poets then have not done wrong to represent Love
under the guise of a boy with a bandage over the eyes.
It is this blindness that accounts for the follies, suicides,
murders and crimes of every kind Love is responsible for.
While it costs some their reason, others lose life and yet
others honour. Unless Love brought about a species of
blindness, should we see so many young men ruin, dis-
honour and even kill themselves for the sake of unworthy
mistresses, — so many young girls sacrifice their good name
and expose themselves in unlicensed intrigues to the chance
of a pregnancy that may bring them to shame, abortion,
infanticide or suicide, and hurry them from the arms of
their parents to the bar of a Criminal Court or the slabs of
the Morgue, — so many married women become adulteresses
or even poisoners, — so many mothers forget their children
to fly with a lover, who is often a contemptible scoundrel,
and will forsake them in their turn, — so many men turn
cowards, traitors, swindlers, thieves, forgers, murderers, to
satisfy the caprices of a mistress who will one day betray
them, and maintain at the price of crime a precarious hold
over a woman, neither prettier nor more agreeable than
the rest of her sex ? How many times do the Magistrates
whose office it is to question criminals hear the latter
exclaim : " Ah ! women ! women ! It is the love of women
has been our ruin ! " Some years ago, questioning a young
man of education and intelligence, who had just been con-
demned to death for theft and murder, I asked him how
he had come to such a pass. "Tis love of women has
brought me to this," was his unhesitating answer.
Love blinds men so completely it can render the wisest
of them fools, humble the proudest at a woman's feet, rob
the strongest of their might, the cleverest of their wits, the
1 " Love and Reason are sworn foes."
* "To imagine Reason sways a lover's mind, is to be further gone in blind*
nets than he." Corneille, Andromède.
C
34 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
most prudent of their virtue. The most beautiful and
high-born ladies suffer themselves to be seduced by men
who are both ugly and vulgar.
This insane infatuation was symbolized in Antiquity by
the legend of Pasiphaé, who albeit she had a king for her
husband, became madly enamoured of a bull. The wild
passion Mary Stuart conceived for Bothwell is familiar to
all readers of history, though the latter was ill-favoured
and brutal and often ill-treated her, to the point of making
her wish for death, yet without curing the Queen of her
infatuation. So great was her attachment that she used
to say, " she would give up without a moment's hesitation
France, England and her own country, and follow Bothwell
to the end of the world clad in a white petticoat rather
than be parted from him." * Her correspondence reveals
her submitting to her lover's wishes even to the extent of
doing a crime at his orders. When Bothwell bids her seek
out the King her husband and entice him into a lonely
palace, where it will be easy to murder him, she goes on
the vile errand. Women enamoured of men unworthy of
them themselves recognize this unworthiness, but they say
like Mary Tudor in Victor Hugo : " I know quite enough
all you are going to tell me, that he is a villain, a coward
and a wretch ; I know it as well as you do and blush for
it, but I love him, — what would you have me do ? " These
attachments to vulgar fellows, actors, mountebanks and
the like, often arise from physiological reasons. In all
ages great ladies have been found frantically in love with
men of the people, Bohemians, servants. Already in the
eighteenth century Gilbert wrote :
"J'aurais pu te montrer nos duchesses fameuses
Tantôt d'un histrion amantes scandaleuses
Fières de ses soupirs obtenus à grand prix,
Elles-mêmes aux railleurs dénonçant leurs maris." *
1 Mignet, vol. i., p. 316.
8 " I might have shown you our high-born Duchesses, now shameful
mistresses of an actor, proud of his sighs won at such a price, themselves
denouncing their husbands to the mockery of their lovers. "
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 35
Mountebanks and acrobats, like the gladiators of old,
frequently inspire with a mad passion not only -women of
vicious life, but even virtuous and modest girls belonging
to respectable families. Here is an instance : a certain
Matracia, condemned to death some years ago at the
Assize Court of the Department of the Bouches-du-Rhône
and executed at Marseilles, an acrobat, was already a man
of fifty- four, and a widower, having killed his first wife by his
cruelty (in a scene of furious jealousy he had bitten her
nose off and then exposed her. in a state of nudity at the
window), when he seduced a pretty girl of Marseilles of
twenty-two, belonging to a highly respectable family of
watchmakers. He had carried her off and married her in
spite of all the precautions taken by her family. Some
time afterwards, the acrobat having killed for some quite
trivial motive his mother and sister-in-law, whom he
had never forgiven for the opposition they had shown
to his marriage, his wife who was an eye-witness of
this double murder, still madly in love with him, fol-
lowed him in his flight, all covered as he was with
the blood of her mother and sister, without taking
the time even to raise the unhappy victims from the
ground where they lay dying, stabbed by the ferocious
ruffian.
Beauty is not a sine qua non for the excitation of this
amorous fascination. The Comte de Chamilly, who in-
spired the pious authoress of the Lettres portugaises with
so violent a passion, was so dull and heavy a fellow, " that
to see and hear him," Saint-Simon declares, " no one could
ever have believed him capable of inspiring so extravagant
a love as that which is the soul of these famous Lettres
portugaises."
Plain women may nevertheless inspire violent love. I
have myself seen a curious case of a husband who was
madly in love with his wife who was a hunchback and a
cripple. When the latter ran away from him, he wept
scalding tears like a child and fell fainting under the
severity of the blow.
36 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
" Tout est mystère dans l'amour.
Ce n'est pas l'affaire d'un jour
Que d'épuiser cette science." l — {La Fontaine.)
Love claims its victims at all ages, but more especially
among the young. Love has its age, in spite of what
Pascal says, who holds that " love is ageless, it is always
being born afresh." But in exceptional instances it may
spring up in the heart of a man of ripe years or even in
that of an old woman ; Mme. du Defiant was seventy when
she conceived a violent passion for Walpole. But, except
in rare and exceptional cases, Love is the passion of youth,
as ambition is that of maturity.
When a young girl commits suicide, it is almost invari-
ably owing to an unhappy love affair. Suicides of young
people are very frequent as the result of thwarted affection.
For many years past the number of such suicides has been
on the increase. 2 For instance, in the year 1892 there
were, from various causes, 87 cases of suicide of minors
under sixteen, and 475 of minors between the ages of six-
teen and twenty-one, whereas in 1880 these figures stood at
55 and 267 respectively. Suicides for love on the part of
minors are not classified separately in the statistics pub-
lished by the Ministry of Justice, but since perusing, as I
have done, all the officiai reports preserved in the Bureau
of the Public Prosecutor of the Department of the Seine, I
am convinced that these represent a considerable figure out
of the total number.
The precocity of young people of the present day in
matters of love and licence has produced a corresponding
precocity in suicide. Cases of suicide for love occur at
sixteen, fifteen and even earlier ages. The fierce emotions
of love and jealousy are too strong for children of this
1 " All is mystery in Love. 'Tis not the business of a day to exhaust this
science."
8 The total of suicides which had for a long period followed an upward
course, fell again in 1893. It increased again in 1894, but once more fell in
1895, the date of the latest statistics available. In the latter year it decreased
from 9,703 to 9,253.
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 37
tender age, and shatter them ; unable to bear the pain,
they kill themselves. But persons of mature and even
advanced age also commit suicide from the same motives.
Men of fifty and sixty lay violent hands on themselves
because they are repulsed by young girls whose affections
they try to win. Women of forty and fifty seek a voluntary
death, because they are scorned by young men with whom
they have fallen in love. Quite lately a woman of forty-
two was found hanged on a tree in the Wood of Clamart,
with a letter in her pocket declaring the motives of her
desperate act. It ran as follows :
" I am forty-two years of age, and an unhappy and
desperate woman. My lover has left me. Ah ! if only I
had known him when I was twenty, I should not be putting
an end to myself to-day.
" I wish to be buried just as I am, without being un-
dressed, or exposed at the Morgue, not to shame my
family, which is very respectable.
u 1 was not born vicious, but I had no trustworthy
support to rely upon. I was considered pretty ; the
downward path was rapid, and I followed it only too
quickly. May I be forgiven.
"Alas and alas! I loved him fondly, he has such a
good heart ! Had they not made me appear so vile in
his eyes, he would have rehabilitated my good name.
"Farewell to all my family. Forgive me. Peace to
my ashes. Tis wrong to despise the dead ; they have
paid their debt to society.
" How bitterly I suffer ! I might be already dead."
To make quite sure of success, the unhappy woman had
drunk nitric acid before hanging herself.
Some further examples. A seamstress of thirty-three,
very respectable and industrious, falls suddenly in love
with a young locksmith of the same neighbourhood ; she
hopes he will come and propose for her, but he never
does, and she poisons herself. — A man of forty, possessed
apparently of everything needful for happiness, excellent
health, a handsome fortune, several country houses, ex-
38 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
périences the most acute grief at his failure to marry a
young lady he is in love with. He never leaves off re-
peating to his mother, who lives with him : " I am terribly
unhappy ! I cannot bear my life any longer ; " till one
evening, after supping with his mother, he goes up to his
room and there kills himself.
Suicide resulting from disappointed love is as a rule
premeditated ; the idea becomes more and more persistent
as the mental agony increases. A struggle ensues between
the longing to escape the pain which has now grown un-
bearable on the one hand and the instinct of self-preserva-
tion and the family affections on the other, motives still
attaching the sufferer to life.
"Jeannette mine, I am going to blow out my poor
brains. Don't think I do so in a moment of temporary
insanity; I have made up my mind long ago. Good-
bye! I have only another quarter of an hour to. live; it
is now a quarter past eight, at the half-hour all will be
over.
" Accept my last kiss.
" I tremble, but I am not afraid."
In a number of letters and documents left behind by
suicides, I find this confession of nervous trembling, which
indeed is manifested plainly enough by the handwriting,
which becomes more and more irregular towards the last
words. The desperate man whose letter I have quoted
just above, fighting against this trembling, declares he is
not afraid ; while others avow the terror to which they are
a prey. Finishing a letter to his parents, a young man
who is on the point of killing himself out of disappointed
love, adds : " I must bid farewell, for I begin to tremble ;
in these my last moments I am afraid, and I believe it is
for the first time in my life." — In some cases there is much
hesitation as the supreme moment approaches, and in-
tending suicides will wander all day long about the banks
of the river before finally throwing themselves into its
waters. — Some women are strong enough to offer a long
resistance to the temptation to commit suicide, and only
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 39
yield to it after several months' time. Others give in
sooner, after a vain struggle extending over weeks or days.
Yet others succumb to a sudden access of despair ; after
some scene of jealousy and recrimination, women of a
nervous temperament suddenly throw themselves from the
window or into the water. Take an example. A young
student was living with a young workwoman, when he
received a visit from a former mistress. A violent quarrel
broke out between the two women, and the student in
order to calm them, told them he loved them both, but
that henceforth, to prevent all jealousy, he would see
neither the one nor the other. So far were these words
from restoring peace, that one of the two instantly declared
she was ready to sacrifice herself and rushed towards the
door to hurl herself down the stairs. The young man
darted after her, caught her up and made her come back
again. But meantime the other work-girl pushed a chair
to the window, climbed over the balcony and threw herself
into space. Suchlike cases of jumping out of windows are
very common in Paris, especially after quarrels between
lovers and on the part of jealous women. These women,
after threatening their husband or lover that they will
throw vitriol in their face, will suddenly turn their fury on
themselves and hurl themselves out of the window.
Suicides by charcoal fumes, by hanging and fire-arms
are more premeditated than those by drowning or jumping
out of window, for they require more preparation beforehand.
At the same time the presence of a weapon within reach
may suddenly rouse the idea of suicide, as in the following
instance. A young man of wealth is anxious to marry a
poor girl, a match his family are strongly opposed to ; to
overcome their objections, he threatens to kill himself,
though without any intention of doing so really, and
flourishes a pistol about to frighten them. In the course
of the interview, he flies into a passion, grows exhausted by
his own violence, and finally quits the room angry and
exasperated at the refusal he has met with. At this
moment feeling the revolver in his pocket, he pulls it out
40 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
and shoots himself. — Suicides of young men are, I believe,
less deliberate than those of young girls ; they are very
often done on the spur of the moment, as in the following
case. A young man says to his mistress : " You wish to
leave me ? " " You really wish to leave me ? " — " Yes ! '*
the woman replies, " I want no more of you." Instantly
the young man takes out a razor and cuts his throat
The general belief is that anyone who survives an
attempted suicide feels no desire whatever to begin again.
Nevertheless we see plenty of instances where unhappy
lovers, even young girls sometimes, when rescued from
death, refuse all remedies, openly express regret that their
lives have been saved, and repeat their attempt at the first
opportunity. They display remarkable energy too in
accomplishing their purpose. One such, after drinking
poison, hangs himself to hasten his death ; the rope breaks,
but he only begins again. These determined suicides
repeat their attempt by the most varied methods or some-
times by the same over again. If hanging or poisoning
fail, they light a brazier of charcoal ; if this fail, they jump
into the river ; if they are rescued from a watery grave,
they try poison again. A seamstress who had twice already
attempted to poison herself, but had been brought back to
life, took poison for the third time and refused to drink an
antidote.
A young shop-assistant who killed himself by means of
charcoal fumes, left the following behind him : " I have
tried to poison myself, but without success ; perhaps I shall
have better luck to-day." — A young girl, who had already
tried to drown and poison herself, makes yet another
attempt, after first writing this note : " When you read this
letter, I shall be dead. This time I do not mean to fail.
I hoped you would return ; I waited till ten o'clock, the
hour at which I am now dissolving the poison I am going
to drink. My sufferings will soon be over; buy flowers
for my grave. Tis my birthday ; good-bye ! " She had
just swallowed the poison, when her lover came in ; show-
ing him the phial she had emptied, she cried : " Look ! I
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 4 1
have kept my word." A few hours later she breathed her
last. — After trying to hang herself in her diadem or head-
band, Monime exclaims in Racine's play :
" D'autres armes sur toi, sauront me secourir. ,, l
A woman of pleasure throws herself into a river, in
despair after a love disappointment. Rescued by a soldier,
she takes him for her lover, but after a while returns to her
intention of committing suicide and puts it into execution.
Intending suicides seek such means of killing themselves
as are most rapid and involve the least possible amount
of pain. Afraid of failure and dreading to survive the
attempt, they sometimes resort to several methods in
succession ; very often they take poison first and then
proceed to smother themselves with charcoal fumes.
The instruments of suicide differ according to sex.
Women who are so ready to avenge themselves on rivals
by disfigurement, dread wounds for themselves which have
the same effect ; they prefer such modes of death as avoid
convulsive spasms at the moment of dissolution and mutila-
tion of the person. Wishing to preserve their beauty even
in death, they generally shrink from using fire-arms, which
disfigure the face.
In 1888, out of 597 suicides by means of fire-arms, 563
were men, and only 34 women. Women prefer charcoal
fumes, drowning, hanging or poison. A woman who
poisoned herself had previously written to one of her
friends, begging her to come as quickly as possible and
see to her funeral, to save her from the inquisitive eyes
of strangers, because she said she hated people to see
her looking ugly.
The charcoal brazier appeals to women as a means of
suicide, as being handy and allowing them to wait death
lying on their bed.
Drowning is another of their favourite methods ;
"Dans la profonde mer Œnone s'est lancée." 2
1 " Other arms you wear may yet avail to help."
9 •' Into the deep sea Œnone has thrown herself."
42 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
In Antiquity, the Leucadian rock from which unhappy
lovers threw themselves into the sea is remembered to this
day. Horace tells us how despairing suicides used to leap
by crowds into the Tiber from the summit of the Fabrician
Bridge. In our day the bridges of the Seine, the Rhône
and other rivers have taken the place of the Leucadian
rock and the Fabrician Bridge for intending suicides who
do not live by the sea. Rivers, the waters of which are
clear and rapid, seem to tempt those bent on self-destruc-
tion more than streams having a slow and turbid current ;
where the choice is open, they select the former. Thus at
Lyons more suicides take place in the Rhône than in the
Saône.
Women who feel a repugnance to water resort to hanging
or poison. Many poets make their heroines die by hang-
ing. In a tragedy of Euripides Leda hangs herself, and
Sophocles describes J ocas ta as perishing by the same
means. In Mithridate, Racine represents Monime as at-
tempting her life by hanging.
" Et toi, fatal tissu, malheureux diadème,
Instrument et témoin de toutes mes douleurs,
Bandeau, que mille fois j'ai trempé de mes pleurs,
Au moins en terminant ma vie et mon supplice,
Ne pouvais-tu me rendre un funeste service ? w l
The motives deciding women to make use of poison are
the same which moved Cleopatra, who after instituting
a number of experiments upon her slaves in order to study
the effects of various poisons, eventually chose the bite
of an asp, on the ground that this was followed neither
by convulsions nor pain at the last moment. Parisian
suicides, both men and women, very often employ cyanide
of potassium, which is used in the workrooms to clean
jewellery with. Opportunity determines the choice of this
poison, the fact that it is ready to the workwomen's hand.
1 *' And thou, fatal web, unhappy diadem, instrument and witness of all my
griefs, fillet that binds my brow and which a thousand times I have wetted
with my tears, — couldst not now at least, when I am ending life and suffer-
ings together, couldst not render me this last dismal office ? "
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 43
There is a fashion in ways of suicide as in everything
else. In Tacitus' day men opened their veins; and the
Roman Historian mentions with scorn the case of a victim
of proscription who had drowned himself in the Tiber.
One form of suicide is deemed noble, another common and
vulgar. For some years now the pistol has been adopted
by women more frequently than it used to be, having been
brought into vogue by several much-talked-of instances of
double suicides committed by this means. But women
always find the disfigurement caused by fire-arms repug-
nant to them ; a girl who killed herself together with her
lover by means of a pistol, writing to one of her female
friends to announce her intended suicide, declared, " The
thing that grieves me, is to spoil my face." Occasionally
after taking poison a woman discovers she has not drunk
a sufficient dose, so lays hold of a pistol to make an end.
I have also verified some cases of suicide by fire-arms
occurring in a carriage. Here is an instance. On October
31st, 1896, a young woman of twenty-five, elegantly dressed
was seen crossing the Pont de Solférino in Paris, her face
exhibiting evident signs of grief ; presently she hailed and
got into a passing cab. The vehicle had barely advanced
a few yards when the driver heard an explosion ; on de-
scending from the box, he found the young woman lying
on the seat of the cab and vomiting blood. She had just
aimed a revolver bullet at her heart, after partly unfastening
dress and stays. " Kill me, put an end to me," she cried
repeatedly to the crowd which had collected ; " put me out
of my pain." She was conveyed to a hospital, but refused
to answer any questions, only saying: "Let me die in
peace; I would rather die." It was not long before she
breathed her last. She was a country governess ; and the
following letter was found upon her : " Dearest, I love you
too fondly, and would have you all to myself. I have
struggled till I can no more. I am ill and broken-hearted.
All reasons urge me to leave you ; love me and forgive
me, farewell ! "
Men hesitate between different forms of suicide, seeking
44 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
the one that will cause them least pain ; some will first of
all determine to drown themselves and direct their steps
to a river, then presently change their mind and go home
and hang themselves. Fire-arms are the weapons preferred
by men, especially by sportsmen and soldiers, who always
have a gun or a revolver handy. Young men often go in
for suicide by shooting after a scene of mad dissipation.
Sailors prefer drowning. In sea-port towns this last
method is common among all classes of society. If a
sailor does choose the pistol, he goes to the sea-shore to
kill himself. The following is a case in point, where the
unhappy lover announced his intention in a letter he left
behind conceived in these terms : " Three o'clock in the
morning. I have slept soundly, and night bringing re-
flection, I have determined to kill myself on the pier,
beside the sea on which I have spent half my life."
Thoughts of dress by no means desert a woman when
she is making her preparations for suicide. A girl adorns
herself for death as for a fête day. When Cleopatra had
resolved to seek a voluntary death, she had her hair
dressed, donned her finest raiment and placed the Crown
Royal on her head. Nor are young work-girls less vain
than the Egyptian Queen ; they wish to be pretty even
in death, in the first place to please themselves, and
secondly, to make the faithless lover sorry for what he has
lost. When a poor girl commits suicide in consequence
of an engagement broken off or a promise of marriage
forgotten, she puts on to die in the costume she had got
ready for her wedding day or fondly dreamed of wearing
on that occasion ; she dons the white frock, which very
often she has embroidered with her own hands, and throws
the veil over her head, then lies down on her bed of death
as on a nuptial couch, fain to be as pretty when dying
as she had dreamed to be fair in church and at the dance
for the man who has scorned her. A girl who was found
dead dressed in a white wedding-dress and holding a book
of devotion in her hands, had traced these lines before
killing herself by means of charcoal fumes : " I want M. G."
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 45
(the man who had jilted her) " to see me as I lie dead." —
Another young girl, who had drowned herself, had been
careful to write down what her wishes were as to the way
they were to dress her and to point out the place where
she had put the wedding veil she had bought. — Another
girl of sixteen went out to get flowers, saying to a neigh-
bour on her return : " Do you see my bouquet ? but you
don't know what it is for." The woman paid no particular
attention to the remark at the time ; but the same evening
when the girl's lover came back from the factory, he found
his sweetheart stretched dead upon her bed, dressed in
white and surrounded by flowers. — Moreover when a
young girl commits suicide, she is filled with thoughts
of her funeral. A work-girl of nineteen finding herself
pregnant threw herself in despair from a fourth floor
window. Throughout the day preceding her suicide the
neighbours were struck by her melancholy looks and
nervous trembling. She spoke repeatedly of death, saying
that if she were to die, at any rate she would have white
funeral trappings. This wish for a fine funeral is con-
stantly found among women under similar circumstances.
I have noted the same thing in the case of a Magistrate,
who confessed to having eagerly desired the red gown
that it might be laid over his coffin, as also in an Officer
of high rank, who before putting an end to himself, took
off his ordinary clothes in order to don his uniform.
In the choice of the garments she assumes for her death,
women are influenced by fond recollections connected with
the articles in question. " I wish them," wrote a work-girl,
" to put on me the hat that lies on my table." — " I wish,"
said another young girl, " to be left in the same clothes
I shall be wearing at my death ; my lace frock, it will be
almost the identical costume I used to wear when I knew
M ; I beseech them to let me keep it on for that
reason." — Virgil had noticed this trait as characteristic of
women who commit suicide from despair at disappointed
love ; he describes Dido as putting on and mournfully
gazing at the garments she had worn when she was happy.
46 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
" Ce lit, ces vêtements si connus à ses yeux,
Suspendent un moment ses transports furieux.
Sur ces chers monuments, ce portrait et ces armes
Pensive, elle s'arrête et répand quelques larmes." *
I found the same tender recollections that moved the
Queen of Carthage, actuating a Parisian workman for
the garments which recalled the best days of his life.
Having lost his wife by consumption, he killed himself a
month afterwards by means of charcoal fumes, and was
found dressed in the clothes he had worn on his wedding-
day. He had placed on his bosom wrapped in newspaper
the necktie and shirt studs his wife had given him on that
day. — A lover deserted by his mistress begged before
killing himself that the ring he wore might be left on
his finger as a souvenir of the faithless one. — "I wish,
Lottchen," writes Werther, when informing her of his last
wishes, " I wish to be buried in the clothes I am now
wearing. Your hand has touched them ; they are sacred."
{Letter LX XVI IL)
Lovers again often desire to have buried with them
objects that have belonged to their beloved, her photo-
graph, the love letters they have received from her.
Women put these letters in their bosom. They ask like-
wise for flowers to be placed on their tomb, a rose or a
bunch of violets in their hands.
Despairing lovers as a rule wish to die on the same
spot where they have loved. I have found this desire
expressed in the letters of simple working-men, so natural
is it The places that witnessed their love remain graven
on their memory, and they love to call up the image of
them.
To kill herself, a woman will choose the spot where she
has been happy, the bed where she has lain beside him
she loved. In Sophocles' play of the Traehiniœ, Deianira
enters the chamber of Hercules to kill herself there ; after
1 " This bed, these garments so familiar to her eyes, suspend for an instant
the transports of her frenzy. Pondering on these fond memorials, his portrait
and his arms, she tarries and sheds some tears."
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 47
throwing her husband's garments on the nuptial bed, she
lays herself on the same spot, crying : " Oh ! nuptial couch,
farewell for ever. You will never more see me rest here."
Like the heroine of the Greek poet, to-day as of old, —
for is not the human heart ever the same? — women often
come to die in the room, on the bed of their lover, in his
absence ; if they find the door locked, they get in if needs be
by breaking it open or climbing in at the window. When
unable to enter the old room they once occupied, they
will die outside its threshold or somewhere near at hand.
" I am dying near you," wrote a forsaken woman, who
had come to a house close to her lover's residence to kill
herself there. ..." I send you a thousand kisses before
I die. I love you still. My last thoughts and my last
tears are for you."
A country girl jilted by her fiancé \ drowned herself in
the fountain which had been witness to the oaths of
eternal affection which they had exchanged, but which
she alone remembered. — Men whose imaginations are less
romantic and their sensibility less delicate, do not attach
the same importance to their choice of the spot where
they propose to lay hands on themselves. Most usually
the unhappy lover prefers to kill himself at the feet or
outside the door of his mistress.
" Le désespoir le fit courir
A la porte de l'inhumaine . . .
J'espérais, cria-t-il, expirer à vos yeux." *
He hopes to melt her heart or stir a feeling of remorse.
But the woman who has ceased to love, after uttering a
scream of physical terror at the horrid sight, steps over the
corpse and away to her pleasures. She has no wish to
weep over a dead man, she much prefers laughing with
the living.
Women who have been forsaken also sometimes experi-
ence the desire to go and kill themselves at the feet of
their faithless lover. " I have many a time told you I
1 "Despair made him hasten to the cruel one's door. ... I hope, he
cried, to die before your eyes."
48 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BV PASSION.
shall never have another lover but you," writes a girl who
has been jilted. I will wait for you at X , and
ask you whether you wish me to come back with you.
If you say yes! you will make me very happy; if no!
I intend to die at your feet." Jealous wives who have
run away or have been turned out again often come to
put an end to themselves before their husband's house;
they wish to make him a witness of their death.
Suicides from love are much less frequent in the country
than in towns. Though the agricultural population is
much more numerous than the industrial, two or three
times more suicides are found among the latter than among
the former. Thus in 1880, 23 cases of suicide resulting
from disappointed love were noted committed by persons
engaged in agriculture as against 66 by individuals belong-
ing to the industrial classes, in 1890, 35 as against 88,
in 1 89 1, 44 as against 139. The reasons are obvious.
Peasants, who read few novels, hardly ever go to the
theatre or hear passionate music, develop their muscles
rather than their nervous system by the manual labour
they accomplish in the open air; they are calmer, more
judicious, better balanced than the men of cities; the
peace of the open country enters into their hearts and is
an anodyne to their sorrows. In large towns on the
contrary the feverish activity there prevalent, the sedentary
life, the abuse of highly-spiced reading, the taste for erotic
music and literature, the habit of theatre-going, the over
refinements of civilization, all tend to develop sensuality
and sensibility at the cost of quiet reasonableness.
Then again in all large cities, Paris above all, the
conditions under which women live are going from bad
to worse, marriage becoming more and more difficult for
them and longer and longer postponed, irregular liaisons
growing more frequent and giving rise to constant ruptures.
Paris has been called the hell of horses, the purgatory
of husbands, and the paradise of women ; x but to judge
1 This was a proverbial saying as long ago as the seventeenth century.
In his Suite du Menteur (Act ii. Sc. 1), Corneille makes Lyse say :
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 49
by the number of the last-named who commit suicide
there, it is more of a hell than a heaven for them. As
a matter of fact, of the whole number of suicides for love
in Paris, the proportion of women exceeds that of men.
Indeed, suicide on the part of women forsaken by their
lovers is growing so common in that city that within the
last two or three years a girl of seventeen, wishing to
poison herself in consequence of a disappointment in love,
begged one of her female friends to get her some poison,
and the latter made no sort of difficulty about doing so.
As the quantity provided was insufficient, the intending
suicide despatched another friend to a druggist's to obtain
some more. The two friends stood by quietly while she
swallowed the poison, looking upon the thing as quite a
matter of course, and calmly watched her dying struggles
without a thought of calling in a doctor. About the same
date (July 1897) four young women stifled themselves all
together in one room with charcoal fumes, saying they
were tired of existence and wanted to be rid of the
troubles and vexations of their life. Among them was
a young workwoman, who was pregnant and had been
forsaken by her lover.
The writings left behind them by suicides deserve par-
ticular attention, inasmuch as they enable us to diagnose
accurately the moral character of suicide and discover
whether it is or is not a form of criminality. According
to some writers on crime, suicide and homicide are to be
referred to one and the same physiological and psycho-
logical condition ; they are, so these thinkers maintain,
only different forms of the same degeneracy, the same
immorality. I believe myself, on the other hand, that
if there are some suicides as guilty as murderers, there
are others that should inspire a profound feeling of
compassion, nay ! even in certain cases sympathy and
" II est riche et de plus il demeure à Paris,
Où des dames, dit-on, est le vrai paradis."
— " He is rich and what is more he lives in Paris, where they say is the true
Pmdise of ladies."
50 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BV PASSION.
esteem, — though without this in any way implying approba-
tion of their conduct Can anyone regard as an act of im-
morality the suicide of a workman who, betrothed to a
girl he loves and who loves him, kills himself on discover-
ing himself to be consumptive, with the words: "being
threatened with tuberculosis and being unwilling to marry
under these circumstances, I think it better to kill myself"?
The motives of suicide are so complex and varied, and
differ so widely in different instances, it is impossible to
judge all cases by the same standard. Some kill them-
selves from cowardice, others from devotion.
Doubtless among suicides are to be found criminals,
madmen, fanatics, men of morbid, nervous, hysterical
organization and weak mind, but also refined and tender
hearts, — hearts too tender, too sensitive. Such as kill
themselves for disappointed love may be of morbid con-
stitution and over-tender susceptibility, but they entertain
none of the anti-social sentiments characteristic of the
criminal ; they are but victims of their unsatisfied cravings
after love and tenderness. This tenderness shines in the
most touching light through all they write ; their letters
are full of delicate, disinterested, lofty feeling, for their
parents and family, their friends, and even for those who
have occasioned their present despair. As a rule they
bear no grudge for the cruelty, indifference and treachery
that have caused them such agony. To the last they
express nothing but love towards those who love them
not, they wish nothing but happiness for those who have
wrought their misery. The woman who is killing herself
because she has been forsaken, cannot bring herself to
hate the faithless wretch who is responsible for her death-.
The lover who is committing suicide because he has been
betrayed, pardons with his last breath the woman to whom
he owes his doom. I have before me a very large number
of letters written by persons who have put an end to
themselves for love ; as I cannot quote them all, I will
copy a few only as examples of the rest :
"My darling Alice," writes a sailor to a girl who had
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 5 1
refused him ; " let me call you so for the last time,
for when you receive this letter, I shall be a corpse.
The heart that beat only for you will be pierced by
a bullet.
" I shall not fail, my hand will be steady ; the grief I
suffer assures me of this, for I shall be rid of this and my
life together.
" All I take with me is a lock of hair and some flowers
— memorials of happier days.
u Be happy, Alice ; this is my only wish for you, and
receive the last kisses of one who loved you so well, he
dies for your sake."
" From the first day I saw you would not be my husband,"
writes a woman who had been engaged in an irregular
liaison of which she was ashamed, " I have had but one
thought, to die ! If I cannot be your wife, at least I will
end my present pain. I forgive you from my heart, and
my last thought will be for you."
Among a thousand letters I have read, I have only once
met with bitter words directed against the faithless lover,
and in that case we must add that the woman had thought
of killing him before putting an end to herself. " If I do
not succeed in killing M ," she writes, " I ask that he
may be confronted with my corpse, if I die. Death inspires
the meanest wretch with sentiments of awe and terror, and
I want him to feel some remorse at any rate for his villainy."
The letters of women deserted and of disappointed lovers
who commit suicide invariably end with words of love and
forgiveness. The only angry expressions occasionally found
are addressed to stern parents who have opposed their union
and so led to their despair. " I shall kill myself within the
hour, and you will have my death on your conscience,"
writes a young man to the father of the girl who had
refused him.
Despairing lovers do not forget their parents when dying
by their own hand ; we constantly find them writing to
aunts or cousins, begging these to come and console their
grief and live with them. A young girl wrote to her friend :
52 SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
4 1 beseech you, directly you hear of my death, hasten to
my father " (she was an only daughter) ; " comfort him, make
him understand it was better for me to die, as L could
never have endured my pain ; if I had lived, I should* have
fallen into some wasting sickness or a brain fever. . . . Let
no one accuse my father or my brother of want of fore-
sight. When M showed too marked attentions to-
wards me, they did say some words of warning, but I
promptly reassured them, for I did not at that time fore-
see myself that the attachment then just beginning would
assume such proportions later on. Both felt confidence
in me, for the past was a guarantee for my future con-
duct; hitherto I had manifested so little susceptibility
to love, they thought me superior to all feminine weak-
nesses ; my cheerful, but at the same time haughty, dis-
position made them feel quite secure." The same young
girl, writing directions for the distribution of various
souvenirs among her female friends asked that one of
these should be given a little frame of black velvet which
hung at her bed's head and contained her mother's hair.
" She can put into the same frame," she writes, " her own
much regretted mother's hair. . . . We both felt the same
fond affection for our dear lost ones ; she will understand
me perhaps better than anyone, for God has tried us both
with the same bereavement."
These two or three letters I have quoted, full as they
are of tender and refined feeling, are amply sufficient in
my opinion to prove that the unhappy beings who kill
themselves for love, so far from being criminals, are more
often than not good-hearted and affectionate creatures,
only too loving and too sensitive. It is the very excess
of their love and tender-heartedness that makes the grief
of not being loved or of not being united tQ the object
of their passion intolerable to them ; it is the craving for
affection, eating out their hearts with unsatisfied desire,
that plunges them in despair and disgusts them with life.
To this excess of sensitiveness they join a lack of sufficient
will power. They feel too keenly and suffer too acutely,
SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 53
without possessing the force of mind to bear the suffering.
They are creatures of too emotional an organization, often
sufferers from neurasthenia and hysteria. A man of sound
organization and strong will may meet with a great
sorrow, but he will bear up against it and not kill him-
self ; a man of ill-balanced temperament, excessive sensi-
tiveness and feeble will, is crushed under the weight of
sorrow and shirks the pain by committing suicide. The
thought of suicide soon becomes a fixed idea, a " pos-
session by the Evil One," in persons of degenerate type
hereditarily ; it is a symptom of mental debility. Notions
of suicide are very common in hysteria, and it is now well
known that hysteria affects men as well as women, and
is not, as was long supposed to be the case, an exclusively
féminine complaint. In one word, a physiological predis-
position must be present over and above a disappoint-
ment in loye to determine suicide.
CHAPTER IL
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BV PASSION.
. " Et jusque dans la tombe il est doux de s'unir." * — Corneille.
The analysis I have attempted of Love in the foregoing
chapter has clearly shown the fact that lovers experience
a craving to be one, "the twain to make one flesh," to
adopt the powerful language of Scripture. Unless this
craving is satisfied, unless they can be united and live
always together, they are so unhappy they prefer death
to separation. Unable to be united in life, they are fain
to be joined together in death ; they say with Corneille :
" Si l'hymen n'a pu joindre nos corps,
Nous joindrons nos esprits, nous joindrons nos deux morts." *
When a lover who has lost his betrothed kills himself,
it is that he may rejoin her in the tomb ; he thinks death
will bring them together once more ;
" Et si dans le tombeau le ciel permet qu'on aime,
Dans le fond du tombeau je l'aimerai de même." 3
To go on living, when she is dead, seems an impossi-
bility to him ; he must follow her even in the grave. This
longing for union in death has been described by Ovid
in the suicide of Pyramus and Thisbé. Pyramus believing
mistakenly that Thisbé is dead, betakes himself to the
tree they had designated for their tryst, carrying with him
1 " Yea ! even in the tomb 'tis sweet to be united."
2 " Though Hymen could not join our bodies, yet will we unite our souls,
our two deaths, in one." Corneille, Œdipe, Act ii. Sc. 4.
* "And if Heaven but suffer Love to flourish in the tomb, in the depths of
the tomb I will love her as fondly as ever."
Corneille, Pulchérie, Act iii. Sc. 2.
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 55
Thisbé's veil, which he kisses and exclaims : " Now, dear
and holy veil, be dyed with my blood too." Thisbé
coining to the trysting place finds Pyramus' dead body,
and kills herself in her turn. " Unhappy Pyramus," she
cries, " the love you bore me has undone you. Ah well !
my arm shall be as brave as yours and my love shall
fear death no more than yours has. I will follow you
to the tomb ; I will be at once the cause and the com-
panion of your death. Alas ! nothing but death could
have separated us, and even death shall not divide us ! "
Separation is the greatest of all griefs for lovers. They
long to be together, and never part ; they want a close, a
lasting, an eternal union ; failing it, they grow despairing
and die together, their craving to be together still express-
ing itself in the wish they formulate in their last written
words, to be buried in the same grave.
This longing for union in the tomb I have found in all
the letters and documents I have examined of those
whom Love has driven to suicide ; they express it under
many difFerent forms, and repeat it over and over again,
in their anxiety to induce their relatives to respect their
wishes. The impossibility of union in this world or of
a complete, final and immutable possession of each other,
is at the bottom of all their grief and despair ; accordingly
they find their only consolation in the thought that their
bodies will lie side by side in the same grave.
A young married woman of twenty-six, who had made
up her mind to die with her lover, but survived the wound
received, told me a short time since that her lover kept
repeating, while engaged in the preparations for their
suicide, how grieved he was to think they would not be
laid in the same grave ; the young woman's relatives
possessing a family vault in a cemetery at Marseilles, he
was afraid they would wish to keep their daughter's corpse
in their own tomb. — When Dr Bancal and Mme. X
were making their plans to die together, they wrote to a
friend of both of them, begging him to unite them after
death on one and the same bier. Mme. X told him :
56 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
" Pray be so good as to come to the house directly you
receive this letter, you will find us dead ... do not grieve
for us, we shall die very happy . . . you must lay us on*
the same bier." Bancal for his part had written to his
friend: "I am most anxious to be beside my dear mistress,
that our bones may mingle together ; the thought of this
gratifies me inexpressibly/'
" La mort môme, à. ce prix, la mort a sa douceur." !
Lovers dying together constantly write to their parents
in such terms as these : " Do not part us ! if you still love
your son a little, I trust you will respect his last wish,
which is to be buried with the woman he loves."
The longing to be joined in the tomb with the loved one
is so natural a one, we see it expressed no less by queens
than by work-girls, by artisans as by princes, and that at
all epochs, — for is not the human heart ever the same?
Cleopatra after the defeat of Antony, in the petition
she addresses to Octavius, begs to be interred by her
lover's side : " Do not refuse me," she prays, " a tomb by
his side, and that dying for him, I may at any rate dwell
with him in Hades." Going to kneel on her lover's
sarcophagus, she cries to him : " Thou wilt not suffer
thy wife to be dragged alive behind the victor's car of
triumph. No ! thou wilt rather hide me by thy side, and
take me to be with thee in this tomb."
Abelard writing to Heloïse, after he has entered the
cloister and made her do the same, concludes his letter
by expressing the wish that she may have herself buried
beside him in the same tomb. "I hope and trust," he
tells her, " that, when you have accomplished the time of
your life, you will be buried by my side." And — for he
is as full of vanity as love, — he adds, " My tomb will be
the more famous for it."
In the Cyropœdia (bk. vii., ch. iii.), Xenophon, describing
the despair of Pantheia at the death of Abradatas, relates
1 '* Death itself, at this price, death has a sweetness of its own."
Delille, Aineid % Bk. iv.
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS (DETERMINED BY PASSION. 57
how she has his body brought in, then stabs herself and
dies with her head resting on her husband's bosom ;
before striking the fatal blow, she had directed her nurse
to wrap in the same shroud her husband's corpse and
her own.
Poets have not failed, when depicting the death of
lovers, to assign them this longing to be united in the
same grave. Tasso in his Jerusalem Delivered represents
Olindo, who dies with Sophronia, as saying : " As thou
hadst to die, it makes me happy to be the companion to
share thy death, since I could not share thy life. I weep
for thee, but not for myself, — for am I not dying by thy
side ? " — When Romeo comes to Juliet's tomb to kill
himself upon it, he cries to Paris : " If you have any
vestige of pity left, open the tomb and lay me by Juliet's
side." This craving to be reunited in the tomb with the
loved one must needs be a cry of Nature's own prompting,
for I have found it expressed in a letter written by a joiner
of Aix who, inconsolable at the loss of his wife, committed
suicide in his despair. Writing to his children, he says :
" I am leaving you to rejoin her I have always loved ;
divide what I leave behind amongst you, as brothers
should ; do not let selfishness make you quarrel ; re-
member what your mother used to say, 4 why be ill-
conditioned ? we have such a short time to be in this
world/ — good words worthy of so good a woman. ... My
last wish, if you can get it granted, would be to put my
body in your mother's grave, that is to say, to take me
from my coffin, open hers and place my body on hers ; I
shall be near her then.
" Farewell, children, farewell all ; in dividing, you will
put aside for my little Jeanne 160 francs.
"Your Father."
In René 1 when Amélie is bidding farewell to her brother,
she says to him : " Ah ! if only the same tomb could one
day reunite us! but no! I must sleep alone." — In the
Elective Affinities, Charlotte has Edward laid by the side
58 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
of Ottilia, although she is not his wife : " They have
suffered enough," she says, " to have won >the right to
rest together." — Quite lately in a criminal case that made
no little noise in the world, we have seen a married woman
consent with a similar generosity to her husband's being
buried beside his mistress, for whom he died.
When a pair of lovers kill themselves, they not only
find consolation in the thought that they are about to be
united in the tomb ; each of them is likewise made happy
by seeing that the other loves so ardently as to prefer
death to separation, — a knowledge that sweetens death.
A girl who committed suicide in Paris on August 31st,
1897, along with a young man she wished to marry, on
the refusal of the latter's family to consent to the match,
wrote thus : " As I have no hope of marrying him, why !
I prefer to die with him. Death will make us one for
ever, and I shall be happy. Above all let no one touch
my engagement ring."
The numerous judicial documents I have consulted as
well as the personal inquiries I have made, all point to
the light-heartedness, the astonishing gaiety of spirits,
with which lovers prepare as a rule for their double
suicide. The mother of a young man, who last April
committed suicide together with the girl he was violently
in love with, told me how her son had been in the habit
for some months before the fatal event of continually
singing snatches of opera composed à propos of situations
analogous to his for heroes of the stage who wish to
end their life.
A young girl told her lady friend of her intention to
commit suicide with a smile on her face ; pointing to an
article of dress, she said : " What a pity ! I shall never
wear it, for I am going to die to-morrow." The Doctor
Bancal mentioned a little above, writing to a friend, said :
" We have not more than six or seven hours to live, but
we are as calm as if we were going to rest to wake up
to-morrow morning in each other's arms." In a letter to
his mother he expressed the same idea : " I look upon
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PA$SIQN. 59
eternity with as much delight as if I were gazing at one of
those fair scenes of Nature I have sometimes enjoyed so
highly." Witnesses who saw them the day before their
suicide were struck by their high spirits ; the butler stated
that when he saw them, he could not help exclaiming :
44 How merry they are to-day ! " Madame X sang
while making her preparations. During the week pre-
ceding their death, the two lovers went every night to
the theatre. — A married woman, who had made up her
mind to die with her lover, but survived the attempted
suicide, assured me she went to sleep quite peacefully,
knowing all the while that during the night her lover
was to kill her and then himself. — Chambige stated that
when on the way in a carriage with Madame Z to
the villa where they were to put an end to themselves,
they were both of them in great spirits, and that he could
not refrain from singing the aria from Faust, "All hail
my latest morn."
In the majority of instances a plan for double suicide
is arranged long before the event ; in several cases of the
sort I have noted that the pistol used had been bought
a month or several months beforehand. In the Bancal
case, already twice referred to, Madame X wrote:
" It is now a month since our plan was determined on ;
we were to have waited till to-morrow, but fearing my
family might succeed in discovering where I was living,
I asked my dear Prosper if he would put it twenty-four
hours sooner. This request he did not refuse, and to-night
we cross Charon's ferry. "
In the papers they leave behind, lovers, more particularly
women, enter into the most minute details, completing all
their preparations with remarkable coolness. Bancal had
had a Iffcrt made lor his mother containing some of his
hair and some of " his darling's/' with a farewell letter in
these terms : " I die as I have lived without knowing what
I ought to believe or not to believe. ... I do not need
your pity, I have lived more in ten days and tasted more
happiness than one man's life can well contain." His
ÔO DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
mistress two days before the suicide had sent off a box
containing articles of dress, etc., for her daughter ; on the
paper in which the things were wrapped up, she had
written : " For Léonie, a black frock, three pairs of gloves,
a locket containing her father's hair, my own and her
sister's, and a silver thimble. , ' She wrote to her daughter's
schoolmistress to ask her to take special care of her:
"Talk to her very often, I beg you, of her father, but
make her forget her mother, if possible." — Only a few
minutes before starting with Chambige to kill themselves
together, Mme. Z wrote a merry letter to a female
relative.
Another thing showing their coolness is that very often
lovers, before killing themselves, sit down to a meal to
which they do full justice. It might be supposed their
appetite would fail at such a moment, but no! they eat
with a surprising gusto and light-heartedness. It is not
unlikely that in some instances they may drink also to
excess to give themselves an artificial stimulus, as is the
case in a great many suicides due to the most widely
different motives. Still I do not think that the mental
condition of lovers who kill themselves together is really
at all like that observed in desperate men who are afraid
of death at the very moment of inflicting it on themselves
and often seek "Dutch courage" in the bottle. Lovers
who commit suicide look death in the face with calmness,
almost with satisfaction.
When the notion of dying together has once entered two
lovers 1 heads, it grows into a fixed idea, absorbing all. their
thoughts and making them forget everything else, — parents,
children, honour, shame. Mothers rush upon death, for-
saking the sweetest of children and giving themselves
up to their lovers with a quite extraordinary cynicism.
Mme. Z , who was a Society lady of the highest con-
sideration, and a mother who loved her little ones, was
found quite naked lying beside Chambige, with whom she
was ready to die after giving herself to him. Yet she was
perfectly well aware that her state of nudity would be
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 6l
noted by the officers of Justice, when they came to draw
up their reports as required by Law. That sentiment of
shame which was so powerful among the women of Miletus
that it arrested the epidemic of suicide, had been totally
obliterated by passion in the case of Madame Z .
Young girls belonging to respectable families and possess-
ing parents whom they fondly love, leave all to fly to the
lover who awaits them, that they may kill themselves
together. The mother of a girl who had committed suicide
along with a young man because the latter^ family were
opposed to the match, told me with tears : " My daughter
had always been a model of filial piety and goodness (this
was true,— impartial witnesses, quite unconnected with the
family, have told me she was a beautiful character), and
had never occasioned me the smallest pain ; gentle, tender,
pious, she was all love and delicate attentions for my
husband and myself; and yet she left us to go with that
young fellow, knowing her conduct would plunge us into
the most horrible despair. She was sincerely religious and
a child of Mary, yet she consented to have intimate traffic
with the villain, for I am certain he defiled her before
killing her."
At the same time the most pure and exalted love may
sometimes exist, especially among girls, without any desire
for sexual relations. Indeed signs indicative of virginity
are occasionally noted in girls who have elected to die
with their lovers. One of these, being threatened by her
parents that they would put her in a nunnery, committed
suicide along with her lover, and at the post-mortem the
doctors ascertained her to be a virgin.
Every year a certain number of young men called to
the colours commit suicide when the time comes for
starting to join their regiment, because they cannot bear
separation from their fiancée or their mistress ; in some
cases they decide to die with them. One R was
engaged to a girl at Lyons when he was obliged to leave
home to perform his military service ; the separation was
extremely painful to him, but he resigned himself for the
62 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
time being. Some months later he obtained a few days'
furlough, which he spent with his fiancée. But when the
moment arrived for returning to the regiment, the two
lovers found they could not bear to part and resolved to
die together. The poor girl was found with two wounds
in the right temple caused by revolver bullets, lying beside
her lover who was dead. She gave the following account
of what had happened : " We had not the heart to part,
when his furlough was expired, and so we determined
to die together. He told me : ' I will shoot you through
the head and then blow out my own brains. You, if you
are still alive, must do as I did/ Léon fired one shot
at me, and two at himself. As I was not killed, I took
the revolver and put a second bullet into my head. I
then fainted away. Regaining consciousness, I lay for
two hours on my lover's body, folded in his arms." The
lovers had previously written a letter to make known
their last wishes. This letter, begun by the young man
and finished by his companion, ran thus : " I am killing
myself so as not to part from my little wife ; I suffer too
much when I am away from her. We wish to be buried
together." The girl had added : " We do not wish our
bodies to be surrendered to the Doctors. We wish to be
buried together, just as they are found."
Another instance occurred some few months ago at
Marseilles. A young man had enlisted in the Marine
Infantry, but when the moment for departure came, so
violent was his despair at leaving his fiancée that he con-
ceived the idea of dying with her, and won her consent to
the plan. He announced his purpose to his parents in the
following letter : " As you are no doubt aware, I have
gone off with Yvonne. Unable to endure separation from
her, I failed to join the colours. At this moment I am
put down on the roster as a deserter. When you re-
ceive this letter, we shall both be dead by our own act."
They went to an hotel, where they supped and spent
the night Next morning they had breakfast at half-past
ten and afterwards withdrew to their room ; a minute or
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 63
two later two explosions were heard. A rush was made
to the spot, when the girl was found stretched dead on the
bed, while the young man lay in the death agony on the
floor in a pool of blood. — When a young soldier asks
leave of absence to visit his family, but really to see his
fiancée or his mistress, he is unable sometimes to return
to the regiment on the expiration of his furlough, pre-
ferring to die with his beloved, whom he induces to share
his determination. " My dear parents," wrote a young
soldier, M we cannot bear to part, and have made up our
minds to die together. We cannot live apart, and it is
to end the pain we feel in separation that we put an
end to ourselves." — Double suicide again occurs some-
times on the soldier's return from military service. The
girl who is left behind by her lover on his departure to
the army, becomes a prostitute ; the lover, ignorant of
the evil life she has been living, takes up with her again,
but the first day he learns the truth, he either breaks
off the connection or else asks her to die with him.
So impatient are lovers in their desires that a mere
delay in the execution of a projected marriage may throw
them into violent despair. Quite lately the corpses of a
young man of twenty-eight and a girl of nineteen were
found in the Seine closely bound together ; they were to
have been married in a short time, but a difficulty having
arisen causing a postponement of the wedding-day, they
preferred to die together. The following letter was found
on the young man, written to him by his fiancée : " My
own L , I love you, and I swear by all I hold dearest
in the world I will be yours for life and for death, — Your
wedded wife that is soon to be."
We even see lovers who have already enjoyed each
other's favours committing suicide, and this not only
when they are in danger of being parted, but merely
because they cannot see each other more frequently,
because their possession of each other is incomplete, and
inadequate to the ardour of their desires. This may
happen when one of the lovers is married, and can only
64 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION;
be with the other on rare occasions. I saw an interesting
example of this at Marseilles not long ago. Here
is the tale as told me by a young married woman of
twenty-five, who had wished to die along with a young
painter of twenty-six but who survived the attempt on
her life : " My husband being very rough and unkind to
me, I fell in love with B , whom I used to see passing
my house, and who manifested a very ardent affection
for me. Our interviews took place at long intervals at
an hotel in the suburbs of Marseilles. These my lover
found much too 4 few and far between'; he longed to be
with me day and night and felt it bitterly when we had
to part. I could see him as he passed before our house,
and this was enough for me and gave me patience. But
it was far from satisfying him, and he felt our separation
keenly, and the rarity of our meetings ; he besought me
to leave my husband and fly with him, but the dread of
shame held me back. At last, in despair at the obstacles
that kept us apart, he proposed that I should die with
him, and I agreed. He was to shoot me and afterwards
kill himself. To this end we met at an hotel and spent
the night together. While I was asleep, he fired a pistol
shot into my temple — where you can still see the mark.
I felt I was wounded and fainted. Presently I recovered
consciousness, to find myself bathed in blood and to see
my lover lying stone dead on the bed. He had shot
himself in two places. I deeply regret he did not suc-
ceed in killing me."
A fortnight later, the same woman, now restored to
calmness, having been visited by her mother and sisters,
and freed from the hold her lover exercised over her,
expressed quite opposite sentiments in an interview I had
with her. She now repented the folly she had committed,
and said : " Ah 1 if it were to do over again, and he asked
me to die with him, I should tell him, if you want to kill
yourself, why ! go and do it, but I have not the slightest
wish to follow your example." All she thought of now
«was her husband, her only wish to be reconciled to him,
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 65
get his forgiveness and have him pay her a visit ; and she
asked me again and again with evident anxiety whether
he would soon be coming to see her.
Schopenhauer could not understand how two beings
who love each other and can find perfect happiness in
their love, do not prefer to break altogether with social
conventions and undergo any sort of shame rather than
forswear life and the bliss of living together. Yet it is
vety easy to understand how married women or unmarried
girls, though violently in love, may still recoil before the
disgrace and shame of eloping with their lover, and how
seeing his consequent despair, they may end by consenting
to the idea of dying with him. In such a case the lover
exercises a sort of fascination over his mistress ; if she
hesitates, he speaks of killing himself only, and succeeds
by means of this threat in overcoming her scruples; if
he dare not ask her in so many words to die with him,
he .lets her guess his plan of killing himself, that she
may conceive the notion of sharing his suicide. Vanity,
jealousy, selfishness, all unite with love to make him eager
far this double suicide ; if she survived him, the husband
or someone else might get her again ; by sacrificing her
life for him, she flatters his pride, for is she not affording
him the very highest proof of affection? In one word,
since he must die, he feels a keen delight in dragging
another along with him to end in his arms life and grief
at once. This state of mind on the part of the lover who
is fain to kill himself and drag along the same road the
woman he loves, because they are kept apart by insur-
mountable obstacles, is the same which Jean-Jacques
Rousseau assigns to Saint-Preux in the walk he takes
with Mme. de Wolmar at Meillerie on the shores of the
Lake of Geneva. Saint-Preux is violently tempted to
hurl himself and Mme. de Wolmar with him into the
waters of the lake below ; this temptation he succeeds in
overcoming, but many lovers yield to it. In suchlike cases,
a married woman, rather than fly and live dishonoured,
prefers to tread the path of death by her lover's side.
66 DOUBLE SUICIDE; AS DETERMINED -BY PASSION.
Again the fear of disgrace decides many a young girl
not to survive her fall, but rather to die with her lover.
Here is an instance I noted some months ago at Marseilles,
completing the information collected by the Commissary
of Police by details I gathered from the relatives of the
unhappy pair. A young clerk of twenty-nine was desirous
of marrying a girl of his own age with whom he was
violently in love, and who was of irreproachable character
and belonged to a highly respectable family. His mother
however, thinking him too young to marry, refused her
consent. The young people continued to see each other
and walk out together, but the girl, who was as good as
she was pretty and charming, remained unsullied in spite
of all her love. More and more eager to marry, the young
man did all he could by prayers and threats to force his
mother's consent, but without avail. He then urged the
girl to consent to an elopement, so as to compel, his
mother to agree to the match. Loving her parents dearly
and fearing the scandal that must ensue, she was long in
making up her mind ; eventually she yielded to her lover's
prayers and left the paternal roof with trembling steps,
scarce able to stand, but hoping soon to return on her
lover's arm. After taking her to an hotel, the young man
wrote to his mother, telling her he had carried off. his
fiancée, that she had given herself to him, that he must
marry her now, and beseeching her to give her consent
The mother refused. He wrote to her again, declaring
that his betrothed, seeing herself dishonoured, was for
killing herself and begged for death at his hands as a
favour, but that he had not the courage to kill her; he
besought his mother for her consent for the last time.
The latter again refused. Hereupon the two loyers, driven
to the alternative of disgrace or death, chose the latter;
the young man first shot his mistress with a revolver and
then himself, both dying the following day. Whçn the
room was entered and the young man asked for an ex-
planation of the tragedy, he repeated several times over,
M It had to be," and these were the only words he was able
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED >BY PASSION. 67
to articulate. Letters written by this pair of despairing
lovers previously to their suicide leave no doubt as to
the reason for their self-sought death ; the girl was
anxious to escape shame and the young man to avoid
scandal. We give the letter she wrote to her family :
"My dear Parents, — Forgive your Jeanne the act she
is about to commit. But, loving without hope of a happy
issue, she prefers to die with him she loves rather than
live without him. I kiss you all ; my last thoughts are
with you.
* Your little Jeanne who loves you dearly and believes
you will forgive her."
Besides this, she had written a special letter to her
mother:
"My good, kind Mamma, — I have waited till to-day
to die. I still hoped, but my darling boy's mother. having
entirely refused to listen to reason, we are forced to die.
Better to die than to live an object of the worlds scorn,
amid the ironical smiles of friends and neighbours. This
would be an unparalleled torture to me, and the fear of
it has largely contributed to my determination to end
nay life. — Dear mother, forgive your child all the pain
she is giving you. How I wish I could have made you
happy; but there, what would you have? No one can
command their fate, and I have always had a presentiment
I should end thus.
" Farewell for ever."
The young man on his side had addressed the following
lines to his family :
"Dear Mother and Brothers, — Forgive me. I die in
despair. I love without hope of a happy issue, and dread
the scandal that threatens me. Pray for me."
He had also composed a letter to the girl's parents to
the following effect :
"You will no doubt curse my name, when you learn the
death of your darling Jeanne ; yet, forgive me, we loved
each other so fondly the idea of separation was too grievous
to be borne."
68 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
Parents are sometimes responsible for the suicide of
their children, because very often they oppose their pro*
jected marriage from motives of worldly interest. The
young man's family do not consider the girl rich enough,
or vice versa. On August nth, 1897, in Paris, a young-
man of twenty and a girl of seventeen who had been
brought up together and loved each other, seeing that the
young man's relations were opposed to the match on die
ground of the young woman's not being sufficiently well
off, simultaneously leave their families, install themselves
at an hotel, and put an end to themselves after writing the
following letters :
a My dear Mother," writes the young man, " we are
about to die by our own hands ; we love each other sa
fondly, we would rather die than see our dearest wishes
balked. Perhaps now you will leave off saying bad things
of one who has never been more than a dear friend to me,
for though we have been three days together now, she has
never given herself to me. Awaiting death that will so
soon have us for its own, I declare once more what I have
so often told you, that she is a good woman. The nearer
we come to our deaths, the more I am convinced you have
treated her unjustly.
" My good mother, I forgive you, for at the bottom of
your heart you loved your son but too well, and would
fain have had him marry a rich wife.
44 We have just addressed a heart-felt prayer to God to
grant us courage and keep our hearts from failing.
44 Your son who has always loved you truly."
The girl also wrote on her side to her mother :
44 My dear little Mother, — when you read these lines, I
shall be already dead ; but you must forgive me, for though'
I have behaved so ill, you love me too well to leave me in
doubt of your forgiveness. It is eleven years to-day since
my father died, and by a strange coincidence, 'tis on the
very same day I am going to rejoin him in another world.
It was not to have been to-day, but on Sunday our courage
failed us. Yesterday death would not have us ; to-day I
DOUBLE' SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 69
hope to die, for it is terrible to live on only to endure never-
ending pain.
" True it is, a good girl should not allow herself ta do
what I h^ve done, but disgusted with my life, loving and
being loved, as every creature longs to be, I forgot myself
so Car as to follow my lover and to. court death along with
him. Forgive me.
u Before dying, we have just been praying to God that
He may to-day give us courage to die; and if I go to
Heaven (for I believe in God), I will pray for you.
u Your daughter who loves you and sends you her last
kisses. Farewell, darling mother."
The sound of shots being heard, a rush was made to
the room occupied by the young couple, when the girl was
found stretched on the bed, the death rattle in her throat
and her head pierced by a pistol bullet, and lying near the
bed the young man with a wound in the head and a prey
to extreme nervous agitation, covered with blood, weeping,
wringing his hands and crying : " Oh ! my father who seest
me; oh! my God, who art with him : is she dead?" On
being questioned a few moments later by the Commissary
of Police, he said : " My companion is named X ; we
were brought up together, she lives near me. We wished
to die. It was with her own hand she shot herself with a
revolver in the head. I was lying by her side. I took the
weapon from her and fired two shots at myself. I felt I
had done it ineffectually ; " both bullets in fact had gone
round, instead of penetrating, the skull and lodged between
the bone and the scalp.
Esquirol cites a case of double suicide on the part of the
son of a French Juge de Paix and a young girl his relatives
refused to allow him to marry. The two lovers sought
the Forest of Saint Germains, where the young man
proceeded to blow out the girl's brains, afterwards hang-
ing himself from a tree with her shawl.
The refusal of parents to consent to their son's marriage
with a girl less rich than himself, was the cause of another
double suicide which occurred in Paris quite lately. The
70 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
parents, in order to disgust their son with the match, had
spoken ill of the girl in question. Learning this, she
wrote to the young man's mother: "To show you I am
not a woman that goes with all men, as you say, I intend
to die with my Léon, for I love him and I could not go
on living without him. . . . You were for marrying him
to a girl he does not care for ; but on Monday, instead of
coming for her engagement ring, she will arrive to see him
dead. Léon is yours no more, he belongs to me now, as you
would not agree to let us be happy together in this world.
u It is to you he owes his death. You can never have
really loved him, to act as you have.
" We both wait for death with the utmost calm. While
I am writing to you, my dear boy is busy stopping up all
the cracks that might admit the air. We have only one
fear, — that we may fail in our attempt"
At the foot of the letter the young man had added*:
"I make a point of telling you that it is not my little
wife you are to blame, if I die ; I asked her myself to die
with me. ... I let you think I would agree to marry
Marie, to get you to leave me in peace. But it is not
Marie I love, 'tis my little Berthe I adore ; she is my wife,
since yesterday, for did I not buy her her wedding-ring
yesterday evening, and I forbid anyone to remove it from
her finger. I think you will respect the last wish of a
dead man." Then he wrote yet another message to his
father, begging him to have them buried together: "I
say this to you, father, for my Berthe, as well as I, loved
you dearly. Farewell, my dear father. With these letters
was yet another, written by the girl to her mother:
" Mother mine, for I'm not afraid to call you so still,
you told me I would never dare to kill myself. Weill
you see now we are not afraid to die together. I write
you these lines as the braziers are being lit."
Men who believe themselves forced into suicide by
illness or want of success in life, persuade their wives or
mistresses to die along with them. In these cases, the
suggestion of suicide comes very near to being actually
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. /I
criminal, as was recognised by a man deeply in debt who
wrote: u Having made up my mind to have done with
life^ I am filled by the wild idea of not leaving this world
alone. I feèl myself as if I were being driven into crime."
— A girl of twenty, who had wished to die with her lover,
but survived the attempt she made on her life, gave the
following account to the Commissary of Police who had
discovered her lying wounded beside her lover's corpse :
''Last Sunday, my lover informed me that, having sub-
mitted to a medical examination, he had been found to
be suffering from a venereal disease, which he had con-
tracted with another woman ; he declared he could not
live under such conditions and that he wished to kill
himself. On Tuesday he was for starting to throw him-
self under the wheels of a train ; I thereupon consented
at his suggestion to join with him in putting an end to
ourselves by means of charcoal fumes. After stuffing up
the doors and windows, we lighted in the middle of the
rooih a little stove we had removed from its usual place ;
we also prepared a decoction of poppies, of which we
drank a glassful. We then retired to bed, and yesterday
(Wednesday) we awoke still alive, having vomited during
the night; we were ill all the succeeding day. At mid-
day to-day we resumed our purpose of suicide. Léon,
who had meantime purchased a revolver, lay down on the
bed next the wall with me outside him nearer the edge ;
he then fired a shot into my head, and I fell fainting.
When I came to, I saw that Léon had shot himself also.
I took- the weapon from his hand, and fired two shots at
myself, but without reaching a vital spot."
A celebrated novelist, who is at the same time a
perspicacious moralist, M. Ed. Rod, in his last romance
le Dernier Refuge (The Last Resort), has shown a married
woman who dies along with her lover long after flying
from her husband's roof. The lovers kill themselves
because Society turns its back on them, because the duties
they have violated take their revenge by making their
life unbearable from remorse, because, especially to the
72 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
woman who has preserved a strong sense of self-respect,
the disesteem she feels herself surrounded by, seems more
intolerable even than death. Double suicide, of married
woman and lover, is the consequence of their false position.
It is not only in novels that we find unfaithful wives
and their lovers driven to double suicide, nor is it solely
in the higher ranks of society that this takes place. Quite
lately a countrywoman, who had deserted her husband
and children to follow her lover to Paris, ended by killing
herself along with him. She announced her reasons :for
coming to this determination in the following terms:
41 Fate has so willed it for both of us ; we must die, death
is our only road to freedom. Dear children, I cannot
draw back now, I dare not break my oath. We have
suffered grievously ; we ask God for pity and forgiveness."
Some few months ago, a married man, who had left his
wife to live with his mistress, killed himself by means of
charcoal fumes along with the partner of his guilt. In the
letter they left behind, the two lovers declare themselves
forced to take this step, adding : " We love each other, and
we would rather die together than part."
" We regret nothing, for what has our love brought us
but unhappiness ?
44 We ask one favour only, — to be buried side by side."
The husband had also written a letter to his wife, begging
her to forgive him.
In the notorious cases of Bancal and Chambige already
referred to, we see married women committing suicide
together with the lover within a few hours or a few days
at farthest after their flight from the husband's roof. The
mistresses of these two men, intoxicated by their guilty
passion, but still alive to their sense of honour, unable to
endure the only alternatives left them in the false position
they have placed themselves in, viz., separation or public
disgrace, abandon themselves to their lover, then seek for
death as the only means of escaping shame and remorse.
According to the account given by the student Chambige,
— a perfectly true one in my opinion, Mme. Z would
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. *] $
seem to have said on the way to the villa where the lovers
put an end to their lives : " I will give myself to you, but
you must swear by all you hold most sacred to kill me
immediately afterwards. . . . Only promise me to place in
my right hand the rose you plucked this morning and then
kiss me." After yielding to his embraces, 1 she claimed
the fulfilment of his promise to kill her with loud cries :
"You are a craven ," she told him again and again, "kill
me at once; you promised to kill me immediately my
dishonour was accomplished." Then with her own hand
she pointed the revolver at her right temple, and thinking
the aim bad, adjusted it afresh, ordering her companion to
draw the trigger.
Madame X 's state of mind closely resembled that
described by Balzac in his Femme de trente ans (A Woman
of Thirty) and by Dumas père in Antony. In the Bancal
case, the two lovers killed themselves some days after
Mme. X 's flight from her husband's house; but the
plan of this double suicide had been settled a month before
that date. Before flying with Dr Bancal, Mme. X had
made him swear to kill himself along with her. Nor had
her conscience been awakened only after the sin had been
committed ; deadened as this was by the intoxication of a
passion which made her find a fierce delight in, courting
ruin, in sacrificing everything to her love, she had yet
enough sense of right and wrong left to dread the scandal
that must inevitably ensue and to prefer to die rather than
survive her sin.
M. Sighele believes that the idea of a double suicide origin-
ates in most cases with the woman ; but this proposition
appears to me to require qualification. It is correct enough
when a married woman is in question, who hitherto of un-
blemished virtue, yields to her lover's wishes on condition
of dying with him afterwards, that she may not survive her
shame. In such a case it is quite true ; the woman seeing
herself disgraced eagerly demands death to cover her dis-
1 Tke subsequent medico-legal examinations clearly established the fact
that repeated acts of sexual intercourse had preceded death.
74 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION,
honour, while the lover, having given his promise to die
only to gain possession of his mistress, regrets his bargain,
once he has satisfied his passion. Returning to a calmer,
state of mind and body, and not having the same urgent
reasons as the woman for wishing to die, he would fain
live on to enjoy the continued possession of his mistress's
person.
Still M. Sighele's statement is true enough where it is a
question of a woman older than her lover, whose affection
she is afraid of losing. This was so in the much-talked-of
attempt at double suicide on the part of Lamartine with
Mme. X , with whom he had fallen in love at Aix-les-
Bains. This lady who was an invalid and married, being
summoned to rejoin her husband, and foreseeing that, ex-
ceeding Lamartine as she did in age, she would soon lose
his affection, moreover, being devoid of any religious belief,
had been the first to suggest the idea of their dying
together.
In another instance of double suicide cited by Dr Brierre
de Boismont and appealed to by M. Sighele in support of
his proposition, it is again a married woman older than her
lover that is concerned, and possessed of great influence
over him. She was thirty-nine, the young man twenty-six,
when they committed suicide, the young man having been
only sixteen at the time when the woman, then twenty-
nine, had conceived a violent passion for him, which she
induced him to share. I have noticed yet another double
suicide of a married woman " of a certain age," who detected
in the very act of adultery with a lover younger than her-
self, not knowing what would become of her, determined
to die with her lover and persuaded him to adopt the same
resolution. — In the Bancal case, again the woman was
married and older than her lover, for Dr Lombroso is mis-
taken when he says Dr Bancal's mistress was a girl. — I»
the Chambige case likewise the woman was the older of
the two ; she had many white hairs. In a recent instance
of double suicide which occurred in Paris, it was again the
woman who first conceived the idea of dying ; she was a
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSH2XNU 75
woman of twenty-four, mistress of a young man of nineteen.
She had already lived for several years with another lover,
who had gone away to perform his military service, leaving
her with a child on her hands. This soldier being now due
to return almost immediately with the intention of renew-
ing his previous connection with his former mistress, the
latter terrified at the prospect and unable to make up her
mind to leave her new lover, with whom she was deeply in
love, preferred to die along with him. She asked a neigh-»
bour to take charge of her little girl, bought a quantity of
charcoal, lit it and lay down on the bed by her lover's side,
where they were both found dead next morning.
When a woman who wishes to commit suicide cannot
induce the man she loves to share her resolution, she calls
him a coward, torments him with reproaches of every sort,
and when she finds he is not going to take the plunge,
arranges her own suicide in such a way as to involve his
death along with her own, without his knowing anything 1
about it beforehand. This is what a woman did lately in
Paris, having kindled a brazier of charcoal without her
lover's knowledge. To remove all suspicion, she showed
herself particularly merry on going to bed with him, kissed
him with more than ordinary affection, and spent half-an-
hour in reading a novel before going to sleep. The lover
awoke in the morning half stupefied, to find his mistress
lying still and cold beside him.
In some very exceptional cases, excessively jealous
lovers cause their mistress so much pain by their con-
tinual suspicions, reproaches and complaints, that at last
the latter, indignant at being doubted, wearied of un-
founded charges and generally disgusted with the wretched
life they lead, proposes that they should die together,
in order to prove to the lover the sincerity of her love.
The lover agrees, and they proceed to kill themselves*
I have noted a case of this kind as occurring lately in
Paris.
When the lover of a married woman, jealous of the
husband, wishes to die along with his mistress, if he does
76 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
not succeed in inducing her to agree to the scheme or
fails to bring her to the point of putting it into -execution,
he usually kills his mistress without her consent in the
paroxysm of his jealous agonies, and then puts an end
to himself. One L , a man of thirty-six, a widower
and , the father of a young daughter, had entered into
criminal relations with a friend's wife, herself the mother
of four children. The lovers were unable to see each
other often, and suffered much at the deprivation. L f
being of a very jealous disposition, became intensely un-
happy, and judged death to be preferable to the life he
was leading. At an interview his mistress accorded him
at his request, he described his sufferings to her and his
wish to die, and besought her to adopt the same resolu-
tion. He succeeded in persuading her and got her to
sign a letter in which the two lovers announced their
intention of committing suicide together. But just as
they were about to carry out their plan, it occurred to
them that the pistol they had provided was too small,
and they went out to buy another of larger bore. Once
in the open street, the woman saw the folly of her conduct,
and changing her mind fled to her own home to escape
from her lover. The latter hurried in pursuit ; finding
the entrance barred, he climbed over the gate, darted up
the stairs, overtook the woman in her bedroom and shot
her with a revolver ; seeing her fall, he fired a second
shot at himself which killed him on the spot. When his
body was raised, it was noticed that he smelt of absinthe,
which he had drunk to excite his courage to the com-
mission of the act he had already determined on. He
had had the strange notion of writing a letter to his
mistress's husband in these terms : " Forgive two unhappy
beings who have long adored each other and who would
rather die than live apart. We are a pair of cowards.
Forgive us, and care for our children." In another letter
addressed to one of his relatives, he wrote : " Being unable
to have lawfully the woman I love, I prefer death to the
life I lead now. Do not blame, only pity me. I am a
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 77
coward to abandon my little girl, but I cannot go on
living ! w
Still, apart from these exceptional cases, I believe the
idea of dying together to originate rather with the: man
than with the woman. The one that imposes his will is
the stronger, the more energetic, the one that yields to
suggestion is the more nervous and impressionable; and
surely it is woman that best answers the latter description,
as it is the man that excels in strength of will power. In
Hemami it is the lover that makes the suggestion of dying
together to the woman: "Weep no more, rather let us
die!" Cases often occur where a man who is ardently
attached to a woman but parted from her by insurmount-
able obstacles, tortured by separation and the fear of
seeing her fall into the arms of another, longs to die
himself and to kill the object of his passion, dissimulating
what really amounts to murder under the form of double
suicide, to which he almost forces the woman to consent.
To give an example : a young girl in the Department of
the Basses Alpes had entered on an intrigue with a work-
man, a hatter ; her family having discovered this, were
anxious to break off the connection. Learning their
intention, the lover in despair at the thought of losing
his mistress, made her sign a paper in which the girl and
himself expressed their determination to die together.
Some days later, he went to see his mistress, and after
kissing her, said : u Thérèse, we must die, the time is
come ; n with these words he fired three shots at her
with a revolver, killing her on the spot, then four more
at himself, but without inflicting any serious wounds.
When young fellows, of idle and dissipated habits, dis-
appointed in their plans and crippled with debt, do like
Tony Auray and Soularue and commit suicide together
with their mistress, it is the lover who driven to self-
slaughter drags the woman along the same road out of
jealousy, to prevent her ever belonging to another man.
M. Sighele cites the case of Tony Auray in support of his
thesis, but it really tells against him ; as a matter of fact,
78 DOUBLE' SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION:
the accused confessed he had killed his mistress before
committing suicide, that other men might never have her:
The- girl in question was only fifteen, and had eloped with
him from her parents 1 house under promise of à ■ brilliant
future. After leading a merry life with her for some
months, when he had exhausted all his resources and
squandered the inheritance his father had left him, he
turned his thoughts, like Rolla, in Alfred de Musset's
poem, to suicide. He shot her five times in the head,
while she was asleep; at the first shot she awoke» and
turning to her lover, called upon him by his name,
" Tony ! " Undeterred, he • fired again and again,' -and
presently a bullet pierced both lobes of the girl's brain.
He then discharged the sixth shot into his own mouth,
wounded himself in five places with a sword-cane, and
finally leapt from the window into the street
In these cases of double suicide imposed by the lover
on the mistress, we ought — if we are to call things by their
real name — to speak of the lover as preluding his own
suicide by what is nothing more nor less than a murder.
But how does a lover having special reasons of his own
for desiring death, succeed in communicating the wish to
his companion, who has not the same motives for thinking
of suicide? The mystery is accounted for by thé com-
munity of ideas and sentiments which exists between two
lovers deeply enamoured of each other, and by the ascend-
ancy the more passionate or the more energetic exercises
over the other. If a mere prolonged and almost exclusive
contact between two individuals, a mere living together, is
very often sufficient to make them think the same thoughts,
desire the same objects, grow alike, how can this inter-
communication of ideas and feelings fail to be yet more
rapid and more intense between two lovers absorbed in
each other? What one wishes, the other wishes, — they
say so themselves in the papers they leave behind. This
is what I find in a letter written by two lovers who com-
mitted suicide together by means of charcoal fumes : " It
is not a case of one dragging the other along with him ;
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 79
it is Jby' common consent we resolve to die together."
When one of two lovers has more ardour and passion
than the other, he easily acquires no small ascendancy
over his companion by the vivacity of his feelings and
the force of his language ; in one word, he dominates the
weaker vessel by sight, word and touch, silences scruples
and hesitations by a combination of prayers, threats and
sophistry, and ends by getting his idea of a double suicide
accepted, representing it to be a noble, sweet and poetical
thing to die together. This form of suggestion produces
an especially powerful effect on nervous, impressionable
natures, such as readily obey other and more dominating
personalities. This suggestibility again is further increased
by the state of exaltation and excessive stimulation of
senses and imagination which is characteristic of lovers
under the empire of passion. I have noted one very
remarkable case where double suicide was suggested by
a man to his mistress, and not without effect, although
the latter had ceased to care for him and was thinking
of marrying another man. He besought her to come and
see him for one last interview, and on her coming expressed
so vehemently his grief at losing her and his fixed purpose
to kill himself, that he actually persuaded her to die with
him (July 1897),
Suicide may also be mutually suggested by women to
each other in virtue of community of feelings and suffer-
ings. The four young women who died together by
charcoal fumes at Paris on the 8th July 1897, thus
mutually suggested the idea to one another, telling each
other they were tired of life and had better all die to-
gether. The first notion of committing suicide came from
the mistress of the establishment ; her sister, who was
deeply attached to her, said, M If my sister dies, I will do
the same." Their two workwomen, one of whom was
pregnant and had been deserted by her lover, determined
to follow their example, after partaking of a meal together,
during which they excited one another by singing songs.
The four girls lay down on the same bed, where they were
8o DOUBLE SUiaDE AS DETERMINED B*T PASSION.
found smothered by the fatal fumes next morning. The
neighbours had heard the sound of loud laughter till one
o'clock in the morning. »
A work-girl of twenty, suffering from the pain of a
broken engagement, attempted to commit suicide, but
was prevented in time. Under the influence of disappoint-
ment and unhappy circumstances, she became the mistress
of a workman of her own age, with whom she went to live
She formed a close friendship with another workwoman
of thirty, who lived in the same house with her lover ; this
woman was ill and disgusted with life, and was often heard
to say she only wished she were dead. Her complaints
found a ready echo in her young friend's bosom. The
two women made up their minds to die together; they
lay down on the same bed and were found dead under
the influence of charcoal fumes, leaving each of them a
word of farewell to her lover : " I kiss you for the last
time," said one; "I love you dearly," said the other, "but
I would rather make an end of it all."
Sometimes a passionate, romantic friendship arises be-
tween young women, which produces the same despair
as love and the same wish to die together. To give an
instance ; a work-girl of eighteen, who had been married
for some months, had formed a close friendship at the
workshop where they were employed with a companion
three years her junior. One day (in May 1897) the
husband on his return home found his wife and her young
friend lying insensible on a sofa, having made an attempt to
kill themselves by means of charcoal fumes. The younger
girl was dead ; the wife was still breathing, and was event-
ually brought round. Questioned as to the motive for
her attempted suicide, she said : " My friend and I were
unhappy. Having lost her parents, she had been placed
in an establishment supported by public charity, but not
liking it, she had been entrusted to the care of an aunt
who put her to work in the same workroom with me.
Many a time she spoke of putting an end to her life.
For my own part I felt myself overwhelmed by a grief
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 8l
I could not account for ; I had left off eating, and was very
often in tears. Then by common agreement we decided
to commit suicide. We chose asphyxiation by charcoal,
and stretched ourselves on a sofa to wait for death. . . .
It is impossible for me to tell you precisely the motives
that drove me to suicide ; my husband is very kind to
me, and lets me want nothing. It was not my friend who
urged me to the step. It was just an act of pure mad-
ness on the part of both of us."
The romantic character of this double suicide comes
out still more clearly in a letter the married woman had
written before her attempt to kill herself: "Unable to
live one without the other, we prefer to die together.
We are happy at the thought.
u I • die of disappointment and life-weariness. Berthe
does not regret her aunt I do regret my parents, and
beg of them to forgive me. I beseech my husband also
to be good to my little girl.
"Before entering on our last sleep, we ask to be buried side
by side. We should love to have flowers on our grave."
Nothing is so contagious as the idea of suicide. It
would seem as though ideas were like fruits; a sound
apple put beside a rotten one does not make the latter
sound, but a rotten apple put beside a sound one spoils
it Similarly morbid ideas are communicated with ex-
treme facility, so much so that semi-madmen and alco-
holic patients very often affect those surrounding them
by way of suggestion. It is notorious that the habit of
alcoholism frequently inspires ideas of suicide ; in fact
many sufferers of this kind end by killing themselves.
Nor is it at all uncommon for them to induce their wives
or mistresses to share their ideas of self-slaughter. For
instance: in May 1897 at Paris, the police found a man
lying dead, smothered by charcoal fumes, beside his wife,
who was still breathing. The latter told the following
tale : u On Sunday my husband spent his whole week's
wages on absinthe. Monday, he showed signs of suicidal
intentions, and would not let me do any work. Next
F
82 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
day he ordered me to buy a bushel of charcoal and
borrow a brazier, which we kindled after papering up the
doors and windows, and writing a letter he dictated." In
this letter they said : " We have but one wish, to be united
in the same coffin. 1 '
A jealous man, who is weary of his life, kills the woman
he is in love with and then himself. The jealous woman
who has ideas of suicide often succeeds in making her
lover share them too, as in the following instance. In
April 1895, a man and a woman were found in a bed-
room at an hotel lying dead from charcoal fumes and
closely embraced in each other's arms. The woman
having recovered consciousness, related how, although
married and the mother of six children, she had been
the mistr.ess of the man stretched beside her, who was
likewise married and the father of a family ; she went
on to say that they had chosen to die together in order
to escape the vexations involved in their false position.
She stated further that the initiative had been taken by
her lover. But as a matter of fact the judicial enquiry
established the fact that it was she who had urged the
commission of the act; jealous of the lawful wife and
failing to induce her lover to break with her, she had
made up her mind to suicide, so great was the pain
this sharing of his affection occasioned her, and had suc-
ceeded in getting her lover to adopt the same resolution.
She had gone to find him at his work and had taken
him to the hotel to die there along with her. It was
further shown by the enquiry that neither the woman,
mother of six children as she was, nor the man, though
father of a family, had felt any hesitation about
abandoning their little ones, and that they were both
happy and content to die. The woman had left the
following lines : " I regret nothing I have done, do not
weep for me ; I only ask one thing — my children's for-
giveness." The lover's letter ran thus : " I ask pardon
with clasped hands of my two children. I quit this
world quite happy and without regret."
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 83
When in the Middle Ages, under the empire of
enthusiastic faith, a call to the religious vocation took
the place of suicide, a man who entered the cloister in
despair at disappointed love sought to draw the object
of his passion there as well. When Abelard decided to
go into a monastery, he forced Heloïse to take her vows
before he had pronounced his own.
M. Sighele is of opinion that, in all instances of double
suicide from love, u the one who decides the other to commit
suicide is hardly ever the actual, material author of his own
and his companion's death ; it is the weaker of the two, the
one that did not originally wish to die at all, but was over-
persuaded to this extreme course, that first strikes down the
loved one and then commits suicide." " Here we have,"
he adds, "an instance of specialization of function; in every
suicidal, as in every criminal, double partnership, one plans,
the other does." I have not myself noticed anything of
the kind ; in almost all cases, the woman, afraid of failing
in her purpose or disfiguring herself, begs her lover to kill
her before putting an end to himself. I have never yet
known a case of double suicide where the woman first struck
down her lover and then proceeded to kill herself. This
only happens when a woman commits a murder out of
jealousy or revenge, and then puts an end to herself from
remorse, but then this is not a case of double suicide at all.
The one who carries out a double suicide with fire-arms is
almost invariably the lover; the reason is plain enough,
and is given by Mme. Z , when she says to Chambige :
41 You will kill me and yourself afterwards ; you are a man,
and should be braver than a woman." The woman does
not possess courage enough to kill her lover with his
consent and then turn the weapon upon herself. In an
exceptional instance, a woman of great energy of character,
who wished to kill herself along with her lover, said :
"The idea that vexes me is that of disfiguring myself;
hut no matter, if Ferdinand's courage fails, I will take
the pistol, place it under my chin and so blow my
brains out. When Ferdinand sees me dead at his
84 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
feet, he will not have the courage to endure life any
longer."
Death by means of charcoal fumes and drowning give
lovers the means of dying together without the necessity
for one of the two to preface his own suicide by the murder
of the other ; after kindling a brazier, they merely lie down
on the bed in each other's arms, or else throw themselves
simultaneously into the water. Instances are also known
where lovers provide themselves each with a pistol, to the
trigger of which is fastened a ribbon ; the young man pulls
the ribbon of the girl's pistol, while the latter does the same
to the man's, both firing at the same moment at a given
signal.
The lover whose hand does not shake at firing several
revolver shots at his mistress, is less firm when he turns
.the weapon upon himself; he does not fail to hit his
mistress in a vital spot, but he often does so in his own
case. Then very frequently the instinct of self-preservation
asserts itself, his excitement cools and he has no» wish
left to start afresh; "We wished to die together," one
lover explained; "but I was unfortunate, I failed in my
first attempt, and I had not the courage to fire a second
shot at myself." It is just because the lover not un-
frequently bungles the attempt on his own life and is
afraid to try again, that Justice, confronted by" the dead
girl and the lover whose attempt on himself has been
ineffectual, requires the latter to give an account of his
conduct. On the other hand, I have known a case where
the lover killed himself, but failed where his mistress was
concerned. — If the woman survives her wounds, she never
forgives the lover who has recoiled at the last moment
for his lack of determination. Lately, a master at the
College of P , though at the time a man of thirty-
seven, married, and the father of a family, had entered
into relations of intimacy with a married lady of thirty-
two, the mother of a little boy. Not being able to con-
tinue the intrigue, the lovers decided to kill themselves,
the man with a pistol, the woman by means of a strong
DOU RLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 85
dose of laudanum. The latter drank the poison, but her
life was saved by the energetic measures taken to counter-
act its effects. Learning afterwards that her lover had
not kept his promise of shooting himself, she conceived
so violent an anger against him that she bought a bottle
of sulphuric acid and threw it in his face.
A woman, even when quite a young girl, when she has
once made up her mind to die with her lover or her fiancé,
is more obstinate in her purpose than a man ; she begins
afresh her attempts at suicide, when the first have failed.
A girl who had chosen to die with her fiancé because her
family were opposed to the match, after receiving a pistol
shot in the head which only inflicted a slight wound,
besought her companion to shoot her again. — But the most
striking example of a woman's extraordinary tenacity of
purpose when once she has resolved to die with her lover
is that of Mme. X , Dr Bancal's mistress ; for seven
long hours the lover was engaged in bleeding, hacking,
poisoning his mistress, giving a dose of poison after using
the bistoury, returning once more to the bistoury after the
poison, without Mme. X expressing a single regret
or manifesting any desire for the butchery to cease; it
seemed as though it were a pleasure to her to receive
death at her lover's hand. Corneille, who has expressed
with such marvellous perspicacity every feeling of the
human heart, makes Creuse say, speaking to Jason :
" Laisse-moi le bonheur d'expirer à ta vue ;
Souffre que j'en jouisse en ce dernier moment." *
Médée, Act v. Se. 5.
The two lovers had selected a strange mode of death,
they had formed the project in fact of opening their veins
and bleeding to death. I copy the account given by
Dr Bancal before the Court of Assize :
" It was during the night of the 23rd, 24th, that L
asked me to end her days, saying : ' We must begin.' I
1 " Leave me the bliss of dying as I gaze on thee ; suffer me to enjoy that
tight at this last moment of my life."
86 DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION.
answered : i We have plenty of time.' She returned :
' But you forget you told me it would perhaps be a long
business ... ; we must begin.' I opened two veins in
her legs, and she lost a great deal of blood, . . . and
fainted away. On her recovering consciousness, I asked
her whether she wished" to go on living, and she said
1 No ! ' I spoke to her of using my bistoury, but she told
me she did not wish her heart pierced with cold steel. I
then asked her if she would drink some acetate of morphia,
which I had brought with me. To this she assented ; I
divided the poison into two portions, of which I gave her
one and swallowed another glassful myself, ... I then
opened the artery in her left arm. While this was doing,
day broke ; I asked her a second time if she wished to
live, and again she said ' No ! ' and begged me to get
done with it ' You spoke to me of a means, employ it/
she said ; ' we must make an end, make an end ! ' I gave
her a cut with my bistoury, but it was not strong enough ;
I gave myself one also. We remained so some moments,
thinking our last hour was come. L presently re-
vived : ' I do not feel myself to be dying/ she said, c we
must begin again; try to make this the final one. . . .'
I struck her a second blow, and she said : ' Ah ! that is
a good one ! ' and pressed my hand. After that, she never
stirred again. I then cut myself three times with my
bistoury ; I lost blood, but I did not succeed in killing
myself. I plunged the instrument three times more into
my open wounds, and turned it round and round, without
any better success." When at last the room was entered,
Mme. X was found dead, and Dr Bancal lying bathed
in his blood. When compresses were applied to his
wounds, he endeavoured to tear them off, declaring he
wished to die ; he would not allow them to remove his
mistress's dead body, crying repeatedly he was going to
join her soon. Some days afterwards, while his wounds
were being dressed, he introduced his finger into one of
them to tear it wider open. Again during the course of
his examination, he twice over tried to kill himself.
DOUBLE SUICIDE AS DETERMINED BY PASSION. 87
The incredible obstinacy with which Dr Bancal strove to
kill his mistress, the courage with which the latter submitted
voluntarily to these murderous operations, are both to be
accounted for by the amorous exaltation which intoxicated
them. A state of amorous, as of any other kind of exalta-
tion, mystical or political, supplies a special energy that
makes pain unfelt It eyen makes it sweet and pleasant
to die by the hand of the person loved.
"Oh ! qu'un coup de poignard de toi me serait doux ! " l HERNANI.
This strange cry, that would seem to be the utterance
of a maniac, is yet a natural enough one in the mouth of
a passionate lover.
It might well seem that if there is one profession more
than another that should cure the spirit of romantic exalta-
tion, it is the medical. Nevertheless, Dr Bancal is not
the only doctor who has chosen to die together with his
mistress. There was a notorious case at Berne in 1864,
in which a Dr Demure and his fiancée poisoned themselves
simultaneously.
In fact no profession is a safeguard against this amorous
delirium, so akin to positive madness, when passion has
once reached its paroxysm, and so closely connected with
suicide, when it is thwarted.
44 Même l'homme du peuple et le moindre garçon,
A qui certes jamais Zenon ne fît leçon,
Même la jeune fille, humble enfant qui s'ignore,
Qui se sentait dresser les cheveux hier encore
Au seul mot de mourir, tout d'un coup enhardis,
Ils vont oser régler ces apprêts si maudits,
Méditer longuement, d'un œil plein de constance,
Le poison ou le fer, leur unique assistance." 2
1 •' Oh ! how sweet would be a dagger thrust from thee ! "
* •• Even the common man, and the meanest lad, whom Zeno certainly never
taught the lesson of Stoicism, even the young girl, poor ignorant child, who
but yesterday would feel her hair rise on end at the mere name of Death, in
an instant grown courageous, are bold to make their dismal preparations for
suicide, and weigh deliberately, with unflinching eye, poison or the steel —
their only hope of aid." Leopardi, translated by Sainte-Beuve.
CHAPTER III.
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
" The only implacable hatreds are those of Love."
Propertius, II. viii. 3.
I have described in the two preceding chapters how
Love frequently paves the way to Despair and Death,
whether voluntary or involuntary. I intend to enquire
in the present one in what ways Love may be changed
into Hate, and how this loving Hate may lead directly to
the murder of the beloved object. " I hate and I love/'
Catullus says ; " you will ask me perhaps how this can be ;
nay ! I cannot tell you, I only know it is so, and suffer in the
knowledge." What is the explanation of this love, instinct
with hate ? Why is it that magistrates, when questioning
women accused of having killed their lover, constantly
hear them plead in excuse : " I should never have killed
him, had I not loved him " ?
La Rochefoucauld was right when he said : " If we
judge Love by the most of its effects, it has more kinship
to hate than to friendship." Love it is, in very deed, that
strikes the savage blow, love that kills by steel and fire ;
the lover knifes the object of his affections, the mistress
shoots her lover or throws vitriol in his face. Thus Love
is very near akin to hate and hate to love. It may even
be said there is ever something of hate in love and of love
in hate. A jealous man loves and hates at one and the
same time ; he is tender at once and brutal ; he over-
whelms the person loved with caresses, longing all the
while to strangle Tier. Tortured by jealousy, lovers quarrel
and make it up again with kisses, love and hate ; a prey
to the most contradictory emotions, they pass from love
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. 89
to hate, and from hate to love. Reproaches, recriminations
and bitter words form part of the tenderest passion, even
when reciprocated, making it at once sweet and bitter.
Love is so near a neighbour to hate, that the lover hates
the woman he adores, if she resist his wishes, nay ! some-
times hates her after she has yielded to his desires.
Amnon, son of David, we read in the Bible, deeply en-
amoured of his sister, " forced her and lay with her. Then
Amnon hated her exceedingly ; so that the hatred where-
with he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he
had loved her." 1 In the love affairs of monarchs, so near
is love to hate, that there is a very small interval between
adoring and murdering the beloved person. The loves of
King Henry VIII. ended in the disgrace of Catherine of
Aragon, the decapitation of Anne Boleyn, the repudiation
of Anne of Cleves, the decapitation of Catherine Howard.
What a strange mixture of love and hate was displayed
in the tragic liaison between the poet Alfred de Musset
and the great novelist Georges Sand ! Loving madly and
hating furiously, they part with screams of fury only to
come together once more with a burst of tenderness. This
torment they renew again and again, finally coming out of
this duel of the affections, mangled and sore with hard fight-
ing, weeping, groaning and broken-hearted, filled with an
imperative need to confide to the public their sufferings
and grievances, in verses dripping tears and novels full of
gall and bitter sobs ! The life these lovers led together
was so grievous, that after the rupture of their relations
Georges Sand wrote to Sainte-Beuve saying she would
rather blow out her brains than begin afresh the existence
she had known with Alfred de Musset. After a reconcilia-
tion which preceded thé final separation, she had already
written to her lover: "Shall we go and blow our brains
out together at Franchard ? 'twill be the quickest way to
end it." And some days later on, Alfred de Musset him-
self, not less weary of the life he led with his capricious
mistress, at once adoring and despising her, reminded her
1 2 Samuel, xiii. 14, 15.
90 HATE AN INCIDENT OK LUvi,.
of this projected suicide, writing to her in these words :
"... If you are for renouncing life . . . remember the
oath you swore me, and do not die without me." l
Simultaneously with the first inception of a passion
arises the possibility of a tragedy, a suicide, a murder.
At the instant a man and a woman engage in an idyll of
love, they very often, quite unawares, are raising a question
of life and death ; and if they were not blinded by love,
they might well ask themselves :
" Mais qui sait ce qu'il doit ordonner de mon sort,
Et si je viens chercher ou la vie ou la mort ? w *
Indeed it is no uncommon thing to see a love idyll
transformed into a tragedy. In his essay on Bajaset, La
Harpe says in the course of a severe criticism of the
piece : " Idylls should not be made the preludes of
murders." But this literary dictum rests surely on an
incorrect observation of the psychological facts; as a
matter of fact love idylls do frequently end in sanguinary
dramas. Love, the principle of life, is often a principle
of death to boot. When Dante in the Inferno goes down
into the second circle of hell, he sees there "more than a
thousand shades . . . that Love hath sent out of life."
It was not without good reason that the Greeks, who
assigned to Venus (Aphrodite) the most pleasing and
poetical epithets, gave her also one grim and horrid title,
that of the " murderous Venus." 3 The records of our Courts
of Law attest the fact that no name can be better justified.
Every day the Correctional Tribunals and the Assize
Courts have before them men who have struck, insulted,
killed women they loved, and women guilty of the same
violence towards their lovers. In several cases of the
sort, I have noted the fact that the lover had killed
or tried to kill his mistress a few moments after having
1 Marieton, p. 194.
- " Yet who knows what may l>e ordained me by fate, and if I am to find
life or death?"
* Plutarch, De Amort. The Romans spoke of Saevtts Amor (Cruel Love).
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. 9 1
bad intimacy with her. It is the most violent affections
that are followed by the most ferocious hatreds.
Without actually resorting to crime, lovers constantly
make each other suffer, as if they were mortal foes. When
still in the period of ecstatic passion, they could not credit
a possible to-morrow of hate and anger ; yet after a few
weeks' time, we often see them tormenting and torturing
one another. Taught by experience, Georges Sand was
so well aware of the truth that love will often change to
hate, that at the very beginning of her new liaison with
Dr Pagello, she wrote to him : " I love you, because you
please my fancy ; it may be I shall find myself forced to
hate you before long."
Why does Hermione have Pyrrhus, whom she loves,
murdered? Why does Roxane cause Bajazet, whom she
would fain marry, to be strangled ? Why does Othello
smother Desdemona, whom he adores? La Bruyère has
supplied a word of explanation to account for this strange
mixture of love and hate that fills lovers' hearts : a lover
longs to make all the happiness, or if this cannot be, then
all the unhappiness, of the one he loves. " To love is to
love oneself; a man loves in order to be happy, for his
own sake, for the bliss he hopes to win from the object of
his affections. The lover loves the loved one, as the
wolf loves the lamb." l The fact is he is more preoccupied
with his own happiness than with the happiness of the
individual he loves, — a truth which has been finely ex-
pressed by Corneille in the following verses :
44 Vous-même qui brûlez d'un amour si fidèle,
Aimez-vous Domitie ou vos plaisirs en elle ?
Et quand vous aspirez à des lieux si doux,
Est-ce pour l'amour d'elle ou pour Pamour de vous ?
De sa possession l'aimable et chère idée
Tient vos sens enchantés et votre âme obsédée. . . .
C'est par là qu'elle seule a droit de vous charmer,
Et vous n'aimez que vous quand vous croyez l'aimer. " 2
1 Plato.
* •* Nay ! you yourself who burn with so faithful a love, do you love Domitia
or but the joys you find in her ? And when you aspire to such fond regions,
92 HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
Happiness on the part of the person loved is a torment,
an insult, for the lover, if he is not the author of it, and
does not share it ; he will cry with Phèdre :
" Non, je ne puis souffrir un bonheur qui m'outrage. w *
What drives the jealous lover mad, is the thought of the
happiness his mistress is about to enjoy with his rival, and
it is to hinder that happiness he kills her.
The same sentiment dominates the forsaken woman ;
she might perhaps resign herself to her abandonment, if
she were not tortured by the thought of her lover's coming
happiness with another woman. She kills him to prevent
his tasting this felicity ; she cannot bear him to be happy
except through herself. The eighth of August 1891, the
Assize Court of the Department of the Bouches-du-Rhône
adjudicated on the case of a married woman of thirty-five,
who had fallen in love with her cousin, a young man of
twenty-five, himself married and father of a child. She
commenced by sowing dissension between him and his
wife, subsequently poisoning her own husband that she
might belong entirely to her lover. Soon however she
began to notice a progressive coldness on the part of her
lover ; he felt regret for having treated his wife as he had
done, and was anxious to make it up with her. She made
desperate efforts to prevent any such reconciliation ; then
presently, when she was convinced her lover was going to
escape her, rather than see him happy with his wife and
child, she poisoned him. The lover suffers positive pain
at the happiness of the loved one when it comes from
another, and longs accordingly to turn it into unhappiness;
he would rather see the woman he loves unhappy or even
dead than happy with another. There are only a very few
lovers of a gentle, timid disposition, individuals in whom
is it for love of her or of yourself? The flattering and tender thought of
possessing her holds your senses bewitched and your soul enthralled . . .
herein alone has she power to charm you, and all you love is yourself, when
you think you are loving her." Corneille, Tite et Bérénice % Act i. Sc. 3.
1 " No 1 I cannot endure to see a bliss that is an outrage to roe."
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. 93
the psychical side of love is better developed than the
physiological, who kill themselves, expressing a wish mean-
time that the girl who has refused to marry them, or the
mistress of whom they are jealous, may be happy with
another. They say like one of the characters in Psyché:
u Vivez, belle Princesse, et vivez pour un autre ;
Nous le verrons d'un œil jaloux,
Nous en mourrons, mais d'un trépas plus doux
Que s'il nous fallait voir le vôtre.
Et si nous ne mourons en vous sauvant le jour,
Quelque amour qu' à nos yeux vous préfériez au nôtre,
Nous voulons bien mourir de douleur et d'amour." l
In the first chapter of the present work, I gave a certain
number of instances of unfortunate or jealous lovers who
die of love and grief or kill themselves in despair, desiring
all the while that the object of their passion may be happy
with another. To the cases there adduced, I may add
another of quite recent date. A young man, twenty-nine
years of age, belonging to a highly respectable family,
being in love with a girl of a coquettish and fickle nature,
tormented by jealousy, but without the courage to break
off the connection, preferred to commit suicide after break-
fasting for the last time with her. After the meal he had
two letters delivered to her, one for her relations, the other
for herself. Then he took a carriage to the Bois de
Boulogne, and quitting it on his arrival, went off and shot
himself dead with a revolver. This is a copy of the letter
he wrote to the girl he loved :
"My Dear Louise,
" Farewell ! I ask but one thing, your forgiveness. My
only fault is to love you too much, my dear ; I am unable
to ensure your happiness. But, dear little woman, do not
be cast down ; you are young and pretty and clever, you
1 " Live on, fair Princess, and live for another ; we shall look on him with
a jealous eye, we shall die at the sight, but by a gentler death than if we had
to behold yours. And if we do not die, while saving your life to enjoy some
love that we see you preferring to our own, yet would we right fain expire of
grief and love." Psycki y Act ii. Sc. 4.
94 HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
have every gift to win love, and you will certainly find
some one less dull than I am, who will understand you
better ; he will not love you so well, but he will amuse you
far more. Then, my dear, two men at once, — 'tis surely
one too many. No doubt, if I saw you indifferent to your
friend the avocat^ I should not grieve, but every time you
mention him, your face is wreathed in smiles. No ! dearest;
he is not indifferent to you, you like him ; well, then ! I am
one too many. So I am dying for you, to make you
happy. Your happiness is all I wish, darling little girl.
In return I only ask your forgiveness. You will know
there is one man on earth who loved you very sincerely,
and he has never played you false. Farewell, farewell,
Louise, you are my only love, and my last Farewell, I
give you a thousand kisses. Excuse my scribble; but
remember my last day is come, and in my present state I
cannot write better. Farewell, I die for you, Louise.
Farewell."
Men who kill themselves to work the happiness of the
woman they love, but who do not love them, are few in
number. No doubt to love is to wish the happiness of the
person loved, but on condition of sharing it oneself, of
being its author, to wish in fact one's own happiness as
involved in the possession of the beloved object » The
natural cry of passion is Médée's : " I, I alone, and I am
satisfied."
The effects of Love vary according to the character of
those experiencing it. All men do not love after the same
fashion, because they have not the same temperament, the
same disposition. There are several sorts of love. The
love that comes more from the heart than from the senses
still remains tender and resigned, if it is unfortunate ; it
suffers " more in sorrow than in anger " ; it is rarely
tempted to resort to murder ; if it dees feel the tempta-
tion, it escapes it by suicide ; it would rather die than kill,
and dies forgiving.
The love that kills and poisons and inflicts pain is sensual
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. 95
Jove. This it is that fills men with hate and spite and
vindictiveness. In brutal natures, physical love becomes
phrenzy at the smallest opposition, and leads to the com-
mission of the most savage acts of violence. The man
grows mad to satisfy his sexual desires ; he seizes the knife
to strike the woman that resists him, just as the male
among brutes uses his claws and teeth to subjugate the
female to his appetites or punish her resistance. In
order to possess a woman who resists or even one who-
merely asks delay before yielding, we see men threaten her
with a knife, level a revolver at her, squeeze her throat till
she is all but strangled. The craving to possess is some-
times so violent, mere delay is cause enough for an
outburst of fury. I knew the case of a young man who-
killed his fiancée because she refused to let him have her
before marriage. The girl's mother having remarked to
him "that he would have her at Easter," he replied,
" Easter is too long, I cannot wait." Another young man
killed the girl he loved and whom he had asked in wedlock
because she answered she was still too young to marry.
Murderers from love express their craving to possess by
the cry, "I must have her." "By force or fraud I must
have her ! " said one murderer of this kind. " I mtist have
her, even if I should go to the scaffold for it," cried another
lover who had been shown the door. So much is this
seemingly trivial phrase the natural cry of sexual passion^
that the greatest of Christian orators, Bossuet, makes use of
it in the pulpit : " Twill perhaps be but a glance," he says.
. . . * But beware. ... A fire darts from vein to vein. He
must have her ; he must win her. But it is adultery ; what
matter for that ? " The phrenzy of the man who murders
the woman who resists him arises from the violence of the
craving, which is impatient to be satisfied and irritated at
every obstacle it encounters.
The ferocity of the murderer from motives of love comes
not only from the violence of his passion, but also from the
exasperation due to wounded self-love. A man who is
repulsed by the woman he is enamoured of, is as deeply
Ç6 HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
hurt in his pride as in his affections, and his chagrin easily
grows into an implacable hate, greedy for revenge. "You
struck this poor girl in the most cowardly and treacherous
way," a judge of the Court of Assize said to a prisoner in
the dock, "you wished to kill her?" "Yes!" replied the
accused, "because she would not love me, because she
scorned me." The Judge : " You wanted to revenge your-
self for her disdain?" The Accused\ "Yes! for her disdain,
which has driven me mad." — The workman Laffargue,
whose crime of passion inspired Stendhal with so strange
an admiration, had some days before he murdered his
mistress, put the following question to an ex-gendarme of
his acquaintance, making as though it were a case that
interested one of his comrades : " What would you do, if
you were attached to a woman, and she would not see you
anymore, but left you in the lurch?" "Why! I would
console myself with another," answered the gendarme philo-
sophically. " You talk mighty fine," retorted Laffargue ;
"that's all very well in theory, but in practice it's not
so easy, I can tell you." "All a mistake," replied the
gendarme ; " if your friend will look close, he will find all
his grief of mind comes from offended self-love." Laffargue
thought a moment, and then exclaimed : " True enough,
self-love does play the chief part in the matter."
Love is more cruel in men than in animals, because,
if vanity increases the pleasure of possession, self-love
wounded by disdain largely augments the pain of rejection
and the desire for vengeance. This simple explanation of
crime as the result of passion, which occurred to the mind
of a plain gendarme, yet escaped the sagacity of Stendhal,
who is accounted by Taine, I know not why, the greatest
psychologist of the Nineteenth Century. Oreste, Pyrrhus,
Hermione, Roxane, Médée are victims every one of them
quite as much of self-love as of love. Racine, who as a
psychologist is of a very different order of penetration to
Stendhal, depicts Oreste as " ashamed to have uttered so
many useless vows," as dreading to become " the bye-word
of Epirus," like the young lover who, rejected by thé girl
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVÉ. Ç?
he wants to marry, kills her out of vexation, exclaiming»
" People will say she would not have me ! " — Hermione is
proud and haughty ; offended and humiliated by the scorn
of Pyrrhus, she boils with rage, when told that Pyrrhus
disdains her:
M Qui vous l'a dit, seigneur, qu'il me méprise ?
Jugez- vous que ma vie inspire du mépris ? n l
She suffers cruelly in her pride from Pyrrhus' disdain.
How this scorn of his will avenge Oreste for the in-
difference she shows to him !
" Quelle honte pour moi ! Quel triomphe pour lui I
Est-ce là, dira-t-il, cette fière Hermione ?
Elle me dédaignait, un autre l'abandonne. 1 ' a
Unable to sit still under the blow of this humiliating
neglect, she thinks that " her repute " requires her to exact
vengeance ;
" Si je le hais, Cléone, il y va de ma gloire." 3
Chimène has the same cry for revenge, and almost all
Corneille's heroines, whose pride impels them to claim
vengeance, and the thought of their wounded honour.
" Il y va de ma gloire, il faut que je me venge," 4
exclaims Chimène ; and again in Pulchérie, Irène declares :
44 Après deux ans d'amour, il y va de ma gloire,
L'affront serait trop grand." u
When Médée is hesitating whether she shall exact
vengeance on Jason or no, it is the remembrance of the
affront she has received and the fear of becoming the
1 •* Who told you, my lord, that he scorns me ? Think you my life inspires
him with contempt ? "
1- * What shame for me ! What triumph for him ! Is yonder, he will cry,
tfce proud Hermione ? She scorned me ; another now forsakes her."
* *' If I hate him, Cléone, 'tis due to my repute I should."
4 '* Tb doe to my repute ; I must avenge myself."
• '* After two years of love, 'tis a question of my good repute, the insult
would be too unbearable. "
ç8 HATE AN INCIDENT OF l.o*-.
laughing-stock of her enemies, that kindle her anger afresh
and reawake the thirst for revenge
" Ah, me ! " she exclaims in Euripides' tragedy of Medea,
" unhappy victim of my untameable pride. . . . Should
I become a mockery to my foes by leaving my enemies
unpunished? Up, up, Medea, prepare your plans. . . .
You must never be a laughing-stock in the eyes of
Sisyphus and Jason."
What is it but pride wounded by Bajazet's indifference
that inspires Roxane with her longing for revenge ? This
Sultana, who calls on Bajazet to marry her, and offers
herself to him, the crown in one hand, the rope in the other,
breathes only vengeance when once she sees herself dis-
dained :
14 Qu'il meure ! Vengeons-nous." 1
The woman who has been forsaken suffers moreover in
her self-esteem at the thought that her enemies and her
rival will laugh at her abandonment. This is the feeling
that stirs Hermione when she says to Pyrrhus :
" Vous venez de mon front observer la pâleur,
Pour aller dans ses bras rire de ma douleur." *
Nor is it only the kings and queens of tragedy that
commit crimes of passion as much from wounded self-
esteem as from disappointed love. The most common-
place criminals, mere working men and women, are not
less susceptible in this direction, not less easily wounded
in their pride by the scorn of the one they love. It is
beyond belief how great is the part played by self-love ir
amatory crimes committed by men of the people ; it maj
be their susceptibility is even more acute than that c
better born folks.
It is now some years ago that I was present at the tri
of one Silvy at the Assizes of the Department of t
Bouches-du- Rhône. He was a young farmer, who had c
1 " Let him die ; we must have vengeance."
9 " You come to note the pallor of my brow, to return to her arms and r
merry at my pain."
HAÏE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. 99
flight made his way into his sister-in-law's bedroom, with
whom he was deeply smitten, and with savage fury dealt
her four stabs with a knife in the throat, the bosom and
the arms, all because the young woman, another man's
wife and the mother of three small children, had refused to
yield to his wishes. Cross-examination brought out the
fact that the young murderer was afflicted with a repul-
sive disease, and had been excessively wounded in his
self-esteem by the disgust he inspired in his sister-in-
law's mind.
It is with this same desire of exacting vengeance for the
scorn of the woman who repels their advances that rejected
lovers do not limit themselves to killing their victim ;
they slander her into the bargain, falsely pretending they
have received her favours, in order to salve their humiliated
self-esteem. I was myself on the bench at the trial in the
Assize Court of the Bouches-du-Rhone of a certain Sicard,
who was for ever persecuting with prayers and menaces a
young girl named Amélie B , the daughter of a popular
and highly respected railway employé. At the instance of
the girl's parents, the Commissary of Police had Sicard
summoned before him and represented to him how unreason-
able were his endeavours to force the girl to listen to his
offers of love. Wounded in his self-love, Sicard answered
to the effect that she had not always scorned him, but had
several times come to see him. This was an odious calumny,
for an autopsy of the girl's dead body, held subsequently,
proved her a virgin. Still under the domination of the
violent chagrin the girl's disdain occasioned him, Sicard
proposed to a printer that he should publish in his paper
some verses he had written and in which he had the
effrontery to allude to the favours he had never actually
received. On the printer's refusing, he flew into a violent
passion and threatened to smash his presses. Anxious at
any price to overcome the girl's resistance, he showed her
a bottle of sulphuric acid and a loaded revolver, threatening
to use them if she persisted in her rejection of him. A few
days later he bought two large-bladed kitchen knives, lay
IOO HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
in irçait for Amélie at the door of the workroom where skt
was employed and called on her to stop. On her refusal
to do so, he gave her three knife thrusts in the back, and
the poor child fell dead, after uttering two loud screams*
The accused in this instance was a common scamp, a
conceited, quarrelsome, dissipated fellow. It was different
with the two elders who calumniated Susannah, in order to
avenge themselves for her disdain ; for they were both
of them Judges respected for their wisdom. The story is
very old, but it might well have happened yesterday, so
striking is the actuality of its details. The two old men,
who had conceived a violent passion for Susannah, used
to be constantly meeting in the neighbourhood of her
abode, but took good care not to confess to one another
the motive that brought them thither, each hoping to
achieve success before the other. One day, however, their
secret slipped out ; after walking a while underneath
Susannah's windows, they went away, each his own way,
to dine. Each made what haste he could to return to
his post of observation, and meeting afresh without an
excuse to account for their presence in the same spot,
they were constrained to mutually avow their passion.
The sequel is familiar to all. Daniel, who displays all
the acumen of a trained examining magistrate of our
own day, questioned them separately, proved the existence
of contradictions in the accounts given by the two judges,
and confounded the calumniators of Susannah's good
name. Nowadays, no less than two thousand years ago,
the slanderers of a good woman who resists attempts on
her virtue, are often functionaries of high rank, who
having the woman in their service and under their orders,
revenge themselves for her rejection of their proposals
by evil insinuations. In other instances, we find men
who have been repulsed by a married woman they are
enamoured of, intentionally rousing the husband's jealousy
in order to sow dissension between the couple, and so
make the wife unhappy.
Similarly women who see themselves repulsed by men
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. IOI
they love do not hesitate to employ calumny as a means
of revenge for the slight History is full of accounts of
such acts of female vengeance. Racine has not failed to
attribute this trait to Phèdre; as soon as the wife of
Theseus realizes with certainty that she cannot induce
Hippolyte to share her guilty passion, furious at the
affront, she accuses him to his father of having wished
to ravish her, instilling her evil insinuations with an
essentially feminine artfulness:
" . . . La fortune jalouse
N'a point en votre absence épargné votre épouse,
Indigne de vous plaire et de vous approcher,
Je ne dois désormais songer qu'à me cacher." l
When a magistrate questions a woman who has avenged
her lover's desertion of her by murdering him, he often
receives the reply : " I had too much pride to submit to
such an affront ; honour required me to exact vengeance."
The prouder a woman's character, the more exasperated
is she at the scorn she has had to put up with, the more
does she dream of vengeance. A woman who loves
fondly, but has little pride, suffers bitterly at her lover's
defection, but she does not think of punishing him. Such
is the case with Bérénice and Mlle, de la Vallière, women
of gentle, modest, unassuming disposition, ready for
suffering and self-sacrifice. Médée, Hermione, Roxane,
on the other hand, are greedy for vengeance, because
they are full of pride. Even in crimes proceeding from
love, it is true to say with Holy Writ that "pride is
the root of all evil."
The opposite sentiments of love and hate are so in-
extricably commingled in the heart of a forsaken woman,
or of an unhappy and jealous lover, that often they can-
not tell themselves what their real feelings are, and
exclaim with Hermione :
1 '* . . . Envious fate has not in your absence spared your spouse ; un-
worthy to please or even to come near you, I ought henceforth to think of
saaght but to hide my face. "
I02 HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
" Ah ! je ne puis savoir si j'aime ou si je hais ! n l ■■. ■
In very truth, they love and hate at one and the same
time. When a maiden who has been forsaken reminds heï
faithless lover of his promises of marriage and beseeches,
him to keep them, she is a prey simultaneously tô anger
and affection, she curses and covets him all at once, she
menaces him with death, fondly loving him all the while:
The letters she addresses to him are full of tenderness and
violence, of appeals of love and threats of death.
St Thomas and Pascal supply the explanation of these
self-contradictory emotions, declaring, — the former, that
anger is a form of concupiscence, the latter, that concupis-
cence is at bottom only a sort of hate. Plato had long
before noted the fact that concupiscent love quickly gives
place to hate.
Hermione has Pyrrhus assassinated, the man she loves
and hates at one and the same time. Oreste, who in his
conversation with Pylades, had been able to read his own
heart and recognize the truth that his transports of hatred
against Hermione were in essence but an outburst of
feelings of tender love, does not display the same sagacity
in reading the heart of Hermione. He proves himself a
very short-sighted psychologist when, fresh from the
murder of Pyrrhus at Hermione's orders, he comes to
her to claim the promised recompense. Hermione over-
whelms him with reproaches for having executed the very
commands she had laid upon him. She has no recollection
in fact of having ever given him such orders :
" Mais, parle ; de son sort qui t'a rendu l'arbitre ?
Pour quoi l'assassiner ? Qu'a-t-il fait ? À quel titre ? " *
1 " Ah, me ! I cannot tell whether I love or hate ! "
Compare also Rotrou's lines :
" Hélas ! que résoudrai -je en cette peine extrême ?
À peine je la hais que je sens que je l'aime."
( " Alas ! what decision can I come to in this agony of pain ?
Scarce do I hate her but I feel I love her still.' 7 )
2 "But, speak; who made you the arbiter of his fate? Why kill him?
What has he done? What right had you? "
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. IO3
Then, when Oreste reminds her of her injunctions, she
chides him for having failed to read her thoughts, for
having believed in the hate of a frenzied lover's heart
Oreste had showed himself an abler psychologist, when to
the cry of Hermione :
" Ah ! ne souhaitez pas le destin de Pyrrhus,
Je vous haïrais trop," l
he replied with an acumen beyond his wont :
" Vous m'en aimeriez plus." *
Roxane has Bajazet slain only because she loves him
and was fain to marry him. Médée herself, implacable
Fury as she is, cannot refrain from telling Jason, on whom
she is about to exact so terrible a vengeance :
"Je t'aime encor, Jason, malgré ta lâcheté." 3
When Pyrrhus is for wreaking vengeance on Andro-
maque who repulses him by doing her son to death, she
cannot believe in the possibility of such cruelty, and says
to Céphise :
" Crois-tu que dans son cœur il ait juré sa mort ?
L'amour peut-il si loin pousser la barbarie?" 4
Yes, truly! love sore humiliated by the scorn of the
beloved one is capable of inspiring the most barbarous
acts. Is it possible to conceive more hateful words than
those addressed by the son of Achilles to Hector's widow :
"Wed me, or I take your son's life." This revolting
bargain underlies all he says :
"Je n'épargnerai rien dans ma juste colère,
Le fils me répondra des mépris de la mère . . .
. . . Allez voir votre fils . . .
Madame, en l'embrassant, songez à le sauver." 6
1 •• Ah ! desire not Pyrrhus* death, I should hate you too exceedingly."
2 " Nay ! you would love me better for it"
1 4 * I love you still, Jason, spite of your cowardice."
4 "Think you in his heart he has sworn his death? Can Love push its
barbarous cruelty so far ? "
1 " Naught will I spare in my just anger ; the son shall answer to me for
I04 HATE AN INCLINENT OF LOVE.
The most tender and passionate lover turns into the most
implacable enemy of the woman who repulses him; he
declares he cannot live without her, that he loves her* and
her only, that he is ready for any and every sacrifice to
please her ; yet, if she will not assent to his offers of
marriage, he fires pistol bullets at the head and bosom of the
woman he was so eager to wed, and plants a dagger in her
back. In 1887, the Assize Court of the Bouches-du-Rhône
adjudicated in the case of a young shoemaker, who had
murdered under circumstances of exceptional cruelty a
young and charming girl, with whom he was violently in
love, because she refused to marry him, being already
engaged to one of her cousins. The refusal deeply
exasperated the young man. After first writing her a
series of passionate love-letters, which were returned to
him, he ended by sending threatening letters ; he notified
her that he would kill her, adding, " when all is said and
done, I shall only get twenty years." Meeting her one
day, he threw himself upon her, and passing an arm round
her neck, — while the unhappy girl begged him in a broken
voice for Mercy ! Pardon ! Pity ! — he stabbed her in the
back with his shoemaker's knife. As she still continued
her course, running away with the knife buried in her flesh,
he darted after her in pursuit, crying, "What! aren't you
dead yet?" Catching her up at last, he struck her a
second blow, stretching her dead at his feet.
I could tell of a hundred similar crimes. Nor are
suchlike deeds of cruelty committed only by men of the
common herd, whose violent passions, inadequately modi-
fied by education, recall those of primitive savagery. Here
is the account of a crime of love wrought in the full light
of the seventeenth century by two men of the highest
quality, the Abbe and the Chevalier de Ganges, Deeply
smitten by the charms of their sister-in-law, the beautiful
Marquise de Ganges, whose portrait Mignard painted, and
furious at finding their suit rejected, they agreed together
the mother's scorn . . . Go see your son . . . and lady ! as you kiss hit
cheek, think how you may save his life."
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE. IO5
to exact vengeance for the slight she had put» ori. them. 1
They forced their way at night into her bed-chamber,
the Chevalier sword in hand, the Abbé holding in one hand
a pistol and in the other a glass full of poison. , With one
voice, their hearts swelling with rage and their eyes darting
fury, they cried to the Marquise: "You must die! choose
between fire, steel and poison." After vainly beseeching
her brothers-in-law to spare her life, the Marquise, seeing
the Abbé's pistol and the Chevalier's sword pointed at her
breast, took the poison which the Abbé offered her. When
she bad swallowed it, the murderers waited there for some
minutes to give the poison time to produce its effect, and
prevent anyone bringing aid to their victim. These two
assassins, who were condemned to be broken alive on the
wheel, belonged to most exalted society, and were men of
wit and intellect, more especially the Abbé. • Only the
exasperation of disappointed love had turned them into
fiends.
These examples, which I might easily multiply, show
very clearly what we ought to think of that admiration for
crimes of passion which Stendhal brought into fashion.
A crowd of novelists, dramatic authors and even critics
keep reiterating that the man who does not love to the
pitch of crime cannot say he loves at all, that true and
genuine love does not stick even at murder. This piece of
literary sophistry is so widely prevalent as to be found
in the works of two authors, not less sensible as a rule
than witty, Jules Lemaître and Alexandre Dumas fils.
In an analysis he gives of a play of Maurice Bouchor's
called Michel Lando y the famous critic thus expresses him-
self: "Suppose that Michel loves for good and all — in
other words, as true lovers do, to madness and crime ; for
this, as you know, is what genuine love implies." 2 Dumas
fils % who has written so many witty and wise things, and
some rather outspoken ones, about love, says in his turn :
1 The poet Gilbert wrote a " Heroical Epistle " on this tragedy of love,
^bich bad an extraordinary degree of notoriety in the seventeenth century.
*Joutmddes Débats, 4th Jan. 1 892.
I06 HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
" He who does not love like Des Grieux, 1 that is to say,
if need be, to the pitch of committing crime or braving
dishonour, cannot say that he really loves." 2 I am myself
persuaded, on the contrary, that true Love is inconsistent
with criminality, that murder from motives of amorous
passion proves nothing but the violence of a man's cravings
and the exasperation of his wounded self-esteem. That
savage cry of frenzied passion, " She balked my will, I struck
her dead," which always evokes, I cannot téll why, an ardent
quiver of sympathetic emotion in the spectators, even the
female portion of them, of Antony % is habitually the utter*
ance of men in whom the Magistrates of Justice note only
coarse sensuality, monstrous selfishness, excessive excita-
bility, savage cruelty. The love that kills is of the same
type as the love that commits rape ; it is as a rule the
appanage of natures compounded of mud, and blood, and
evil pride. If it were true that the commission of murder
or acquiescence in dishonour were the necessary proofs of
a genuine passion, that none can love ardently without
killing, without wielding revolver or dagger, we should
have to allow true love to be the exclusive prerogative of
scoundrels ; for it is no uncommon thing to find the
criminal record of murderers from love showing previous
convictions for offences against the common law. Indeed»
if it were really needful to riddle a woman with knife
thrusts in order to become a hero of romance, we should
have to award the cobblers the blue ribbon of Love, — at
any rate in Provence, where I have had opportunity to
observe them, — for it is jthey who are most frequently
guilty of crimes of violence from love, just as it was the
shoemakers who, in Paris during the Commune, committed
the greatest number of acts of brutality.
Passionate love does not involve killing either others or
oneself. But if we must compare homicide and suicide
as proofs of true love, I should not hesitate to declare
suicide to be more a mark of deep affection than murder.
1 Hero of the Abbé Prévost's famous noTcl Manon Lescaut.
3 A Dumas fils, Entr* actes, 3rd Series, p. 238.
HATE AN INCIDENT OF LOVE.
I07
Murderers from amorous passion are, as a rule, the most
selfish, the most sensual and the most excitable of men in
love. Lovers who die of grief or kill themselves in despair
are truer and better men than those who turn their rage
on others. The gentle, tender-hearted woman who, like
Bérénice or Attalide, would rather suffer herself than cause
others pain, loves better and more truly than the proud
virago who, like Hermione or Roxane, does not hesitate to
plunge into crime ; so great and noble is her love it
enables her to forgive the very man who makes her suffer,
and to desire for her faithless lover a happiness she can
never share with him.
CHAPTER IV.
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
"Tis sport for you, but death to us."
Desertion involves every form of pain and suffering for
a woman, — loss of the object of her love, scorn . of her
beauty, preference accorded to her rival, public disgrace
made yet more poignant by the dread of seeing her rival
and the world at large mocking her grief. " When I am
in sorrow in my convent," said Mlle, de la Vallière, after
Louis XIV. had forsaken her and showed his preference
for Mme. de Montespan, " I will remember all they have
made me suffer."
The woman who loves and is loved is proud and happy
in the affection she inspires. Her self-respect is flattered
by the passionate feelings displayed toward her ; preferred
to all other women by the man she prefers to all others
of his sex, she sees in this preference a homage to her
beauty, sweetness and charm. The love she inspires
increases her value both in her own eyes and those of all
her friends ; knowing herself loved, she finds additional
reasons for loving herself. On the other hand, when a
woman is forsaken, what heartrending pangs must her
affections endure, what wounds her vanity undergo ! * To
believe herself beautiful and to be scorned, to think herself
beloved and to be forsaken, what agony for a woman's
self-esteem ! To lose the love that was her joy and pride,
that satisfied at once her craving for tenderness and her
1 When Catherine de Médicis laid proposals before Elizabeth of England,
then thirty years of age, of a union with her son Charles IX., a boy of fifteen,
the Queen replied she was too old for so young a monarch, who would neglect
her. "I would rather die," she said, "than see myself scorned and for-
saken." Mignet, Marie Stuart % vol. i. p. 179.
108
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. IOÇ
lust of power, what a bitter downfall of all her dreams f
In very truth, desertion is not only the loss of the object
of a woman's affection ; it means also the scorn of the
lover, and her humiliation in all her neighbours' eyes.
The death of the man she loves would be far less cruel
than his unfaithfulness. If she lost him by death, she
could at least find some consolation in weeping over
his grave ; time would change her sorrow into a gentle
melancholy.
But when the loss of the beloved one is aggravated by
his preference shown to a rival, what " a sorrow's crown of
sorrow " is here ! Her wretchedness is augmented by the
slight inflicted on her beauty, the ingratitude of her faithless
admirer, the triumph of another woman. Her sufferings
are all expressed in the heart-broken cry of Phèdre on
learning she has a rival :
" Œnone, qui l'eût cru ? J'avais une rivale,
... Ah ! douleur non encore éprouvée." l
This bitterness of the forsaken woman grows into rage
and fury at the thought that the being she adores and who
scorns her, loves another, that he is happy with her and in
her affection. She experiences the feeling Racine attributes
to one of his heroines :
" Votre mort (pardonnez aux fureurs des amants),
Ne me paraissait pas le plus grand des tourments." 8
u The bitterest of all torments," Corneille tells us in one
of his less successful pieces, pieces in which nevertheless
many fine lines are to be found :
" (Cest) voir en d'autres mains passer tout ce qu'on aime,
Cest un malheur encor plus grand que le trépas." 3
To these grievous sufferings common to all women for-
1 " Œooné, who could have credited it ? I had a rival, ... Ah ! bitter-
ness beyond all bitterness yet endured ! "
* "Your death (forgive the fierce transports of loving hearts), your death
seemed not to be the bitterest of all torments."
* *• Is to see all one loves pass into other hands ; 'tis a grief even bitterer
tfcaa death itself." Corneille, Agésilas, Act i. Sc. 3.
IIO SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
saken by those they love, must be added yet others in the
case of a young girl who has been seduced and then de-
serted after receiving promises of marriage. Such a one
suffers in her honour no less than in her love, and more
than in her pride ; what drives her to despair, is not solely
the treachery of her fiancé, but the loss of her good name
as well.
A large number of young girls allow themselves to be
seduced under promise of marriage to follow, and are then
abandoned by their lovers. Poetry, novels and the stage
have cast such a glamour over seduction, without giving
a thought to the consequences resulting to the victim add
her offspring, that many young fellows dream only of
winning the aureole of Don Juan, and have no hesitation
in making promises of marriage they never intend to fulfil.
Public opinion, which is extremely hard toward the woman
who has fallen, being on the other hand very indulgent for
the author of her seduction, the employment of this form
of deception is held to be quite a matter of course. I
remember to have read in the report of a trial the following
answer given by a seducer who was asked by the judge if
he had promised marriage : " Of course I promised to
marry her. How else do you suppose one sets about
seducing a girl?" Especially in the country, a sympa-
thetic feeling springs up by reason of neighbourhood and
association between a young man and a girl who work
together or in near proximity to one another. In course
of time the attachment becomes closer and closer, and the
unscrupulous youth, eager to enjoy the girl's favours with*
out incurring the responsibility of fatherhood, promises
marriage, declaring he loves her only, and will never have
any other wife. The girl resists at first, and waits to be
formally asked in marriage, but her lover gives her a string
of different excuses for putting off doing so ; he says his
parents have not as yet made up their minds to give their
consent, that they do not consider her well enough off, but
they are old people, he adds, and when they are dead, he
will be able to fulfil his promise. To overcome the final
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. Ill
scruples of the credulous girl, he talks of his ardent love,
declares how wretched he is, and goes through the comedy
of an intended suicide.
" Il dira qu'il se tue . . .
Mais Clarisse aime mieux le sauver et mourir." '
At last, believing in the sincerity of the love he manifests
for her, she ends by giving way. This proves her undoing,
for she will very soon find herself abandoned, especially if
pregnancy follows. The seducer takes her to a neighbour-
ing town for her accouchement, and there, after slipping a
few coins into her hand, he tells her brutally to " get out of
it how you can. Don't talk to me of marriage. It is all
over between us; so don't rely on me any more." The
unhappy girl may weep, and beg, and pray, demanding
the fulfilment of the promised marriage that is to save her
good name and give her child a father ; it is all to no
purpose. The seducer flies before the threats of binding
him to the marriage he has promised and the onerous
duties of a father; he remains callous to the grief and
shame of the woman he has made a mother, and often
leaves her entirely unprovided for. The period of pregnancy
passes in tears and loneliness. When her child is born, the
poor girl, who is now a mother without being a wife, tries
in vain to touch her betrayer's heart, to rouse in him the
paternal instinct ; she tells him about the child and its
pretty ways and its likeness to its father ; she beseeches him
to come and see it, but he refuses, and speaks of it coldly,
as if he were doubtful of his being its father at all. Some-
times, however, carrying on the comedy, he pretends an
affection for the child he does not really feel, and protests
his purpose of eventually recognizing it as his own and
marrying the mother, but always finds some excuse or
another for putting off the fulfilment of his fine promises.
•* Who makes the child, should provide for it," says an
axiom one of these unhappy mothers without being wives
1 " He will say he means to kill himself . . . But Clarisse would sooner
save him and die herself." Alfred de Musset.
112 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
reproduced almost word for word unconsciously in a letter
written ta her seducer, which I have beneath my eyes:
"As you had the spirit to make it, have the spirit to
provide for it" But your seducer, with all his fine bold
spirit for the first, has no stomach for the second.
In cases where the mother abandons the child she has
borne under such circumstances, it is rare for her to be the
first to Conceive the idea of doing so ; it is the lover who
advises the step, who urges the child's being put in the
Foundlifig Hospital, much preferring to keep his resources
for the supply of his own pleasures.
Of girls' thus seduced and forsaken, some kill themselves
in despair,* others kill their lovers, some do both.
Those who end in suicide invariably forgive their faithless
betrayer ; before their death, they write to bid him farewell
and assure him of their unaltered love for the last time.
" I bear you no grudge," writes one of them ; " I bid you
farewell, my dearest, and kiss you a thousand times over,
and our dear boy as well. I entrust you with the charge
of my dear mother's tomb ; do not neglect it nor mine
either." " Farewell ; be happy ! " writes another forsaken
woman. ° May you not be troubled by the thought of me,
to remind you how I loved you. . . . My dream was to have
been happy with you, but you would not ; you lied to me,
and your lies were my death-blow. I would fain have
lived to love you ; but no ! you would not. I die loving
you fondly. I leave you my hair, which you must keep in
memory of me." — Yet another writes to the man who has
deserted her : " From the first day I saw you would never
be my husband, I had only one thought, to die. If I
cannot be your wife, at least I shall end my pain."
Nothing can well be more touching than these last fare-
wells, replete with tender forgiveness, which they murmur
in the very death agony. I read in a letter written by a
girl to her faithless lover : " I love you still, and forgive you.
Farewell, death is working in me." — Here is another letter
written. by a young woman of twenty-three to her lover, who
had deserted her after making her the mother of a little girl
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. II3
44 My beloved Louis, as your mind is made up about me,
the best thing I can do is to die. Loving you dearly, I
would fain end my sufferings.
•* I send you my little girl's portrait and my own.
Keep them, my dearest Louis, in memory of your Emma,
who loved you to distraction.
" Louis, come to my funeral. I wish the last person to
kiss me before they put me in the hearse to be you, my
darling.
" Take good care of our little girl and kiss her lovingly
for me. If she should ask you what I died of, tell her it
was of loving too fondly.
u I am poisoning myself with cyanide.
41 Farewell, my own Louis ; forgive all the vexation I
am causing you.
u Farewell for ever. My fondest kisses for you and for
our child.
" I would like my grave to be always covered with
flowers ; come and visit it every Sunday with our child."
Even the woman who has been forsaken and driven to
infanticide by her desertion, frequently forgives the villain
who has ruined her ; she cannot force herself to curse the
man she still loves in her heart of hearts. Thus Mar-
guerite in Faust, in prison for the murder of her babe,
still dreams of the lover she cannot help regretting, and
throws herself into his arms when he reappears. Some
unhappy girls under these circumstances go so far in their
beautiful tender-heartedness as to write at the time of
committing suicide to their relatives to make excuses for
the seducer : 4< I pray you do not be angry with him,"
writes a poor girl to her sister ; " it is no fault of his if he
has ceased to love me, while I love him still. I forgive
him from the bottom of my heart." — True we find in some
letters from the victims of desertion complaints and re-
proaches such as these : " Why did you deceive me, why
abandon me so cruelly? why cause me such bitter pain ?"
Yet these same complaints, these cries of agony, invariably
conclude with words of love and forgiveness : " Still I send
H
114 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
you my last and most ardent kiss/' writes a poor deserted
creature before committing suicide by means of charcoal
fumes. In the letter of farewell she addresses to her lover
before killing herself, the woman who has been betrayed
and forsaken will very likely begin by styling him " wretch,"
but she always ends by telling him of her unabated love
and full forgiveness. A young woman, deserted by her
lover who had concealed his new address from her, having
succeeded in discovering the latter, makes her way in his
absence into his rooms and after tearing up his photograph
which she finds on the chimney-piece, sits down to write
the following letter : " Léon, you are a cur ; I have found
where you live at last. I thought till to-day you were
doing it to try me. Still you know I love you all the
time, so I think it best to kill myself. Forgive my
doing it in your house. I love you. I adore you. No
woman will ever love you like me. I kiss you for the last
time." Then seating herself on a chair at the foot of the
bed, she seizes a revolver she had brought with her and
shoots herself through the heart — " Already you have the
death of two women on your conscience ; remember the
17th December 1896" (the day of her suicide), writes
another desperate woman. — Yet another letter: "When
you receive this letter, I shall have ceased to live. I
cannot live without you, still less know that you are with
another woman. I might have been such a happy woman
with you ; but alas ! you would not let me." — " I cannot
live without you," writes a young Spanish woman ; " I bid
you farewell. I give you a thousand kisses, for I have
loved you well. Farewell then, my own G . Forgive
me for giving you the trouble of having me carried to the
Morgue, for that is all I have to expect. Still I should
have dearly loved to die on your bed, my G . If you
love me a little, remember the happy, hours we have spent
together. Ah ! well, as such is my destiny, I am going to
die, your lover still."
This characteristic of the forsaken woman, who forgives
the faithless one and chooses rather to suffer and die than
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. II5
to pain and kill, is depicted by Racine in Bérénice ; she too
forgives, and thinks of ending her own life. Titus has
guessed her intention :
" Vous cherchez à mourir ? et de tout ce que j'aime
11 ne restera plus qu'un triste souvenir." l
As I have never yet found in the many letters I have
read from women who have been deserted and have killed
themselves in despair anything but words of love and for-
giveness for the faithless lover, I cannot but ask the
question whether Virgil is not guilty of an error in
psychology in attributing to Dido, after her suicide,
feelings of hatred towards jEneas, who meets her in the
Shades.
"... Didon garde un farouche silence,
Se détourne en fureur de l'objet qui l'offense,
Et ses yeux, d'où partaient des regards courroucés
Demeurent vers la terre obstinément baissés." *
This persistence in hate on Dido's part seems to me
inconsistent with the character of women who kill
themselves, but always forgive the wrong-doer; nor does
it justify the comparison Racine draws in the Preface to
Bérénice between the Queen of Carthage and the woman
deserted by Titus, inasmuch as the latter forgives, while
the former does not. Dido's character is rather that of
a woman who slays her betrayer than of one who kills
herself, for she is animated by a vindictive fury against
iEneas, and utters threats and imprecations more violent
than those of Hermione against Pyrrhus ; her only regret
is she did not burn all ./Eneas' ships, have all his comrades
massacred, his son slain, and his body served up at a
banquet. The character we have here is more that of
Médée than of Bérénice.
The character of the woman who, when forsaken, kills
1 " You are fain to die ? and of all I love, naught else will remain but a
mournfal remembrance."
3 t4 . . . Dido keeps a grim silence, turning in fierce anger from the loathed
object, and her eyes, that darted angry looks, remain obstinately fixed on the
ground."
il6 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
herself, is completely different from that of the woman who
under like circumstances kills the author of her wrong.
The first is a meek, tender-hearted victim who suffers
in silence, complains with discreet and gentle moderation,
and yielding more and more to the melancholy that over-
whelms her, fades, sighs, and dies with forgiveness on her
lips. The second is a fury, screaming, stamping, tearing
her hair, threatening, striking and destroying. The mother
of a girl who had been deserted and had killed her lover
told the examining magistrate that her daughter during
the two days preceding the murder, had screamed, wept,
stamped, and torn out hair by handfuls. The mother
added that she had used every endeavour to calm her, but
that nothing she said made any impression on her. A
woman in the transports of rage does not appreciate
reasonable advice ; she cries with Phèdre :
" Sers ma fureur, Œnone, et non pas ma raison," '
and with Hermione :
" Tant de raisonnements offensent ma colère." *
The particular prisoner I have been referring to, had
been so annoyed by the persevering efforts of her mother
to bring her to a better frame of mind, that she turned her
anger against her and repulsed her savagely.
The girl who has been forsaken by her lover would often
resign herself to her fate, if the latter did not proceed to
marry another woman ; clinging to the hope of wedding
him some day or at any rate drawing him once more to
her side, she would meanwhile seek consolation in the love
of her child. " Though you will not marry me," she says,
"at least do not wed another; do not compel me to see
you with another by your side." Seeing she is going to
lose him for ever and be left alone, forlorn and disgraced,
while her lover is happy with another woman, frantic with
pain, tortured by jealousy, heedless of life and indifferen
1 "Assist my passion, Œnone, and not my reason."
1 " So many arguments of reason but chafe my anger."
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. II7
to what may become of her, to the suffering she is about
to inflict and the scandal that must follow, she grasps a
revolver or seizes a cup of vitriol in her mad desire of
vengeance.
Some few years ago, vitriol was the favourite means of
revenge among women who had been betrayed. Nowadays
they frequently use the revolver as well, a weapon they
are beginning to wield with great dexterity. Not long
ago at Marseilles a girl said to her lover, who was think-
ing of leaving her in the lurch : " If you were to leave me
for another woman, I would put a bullet in your head."
Instead of one, she put four into his head, as a matter of
fact, exhibiting a remarkable mastery of her weapon.
Often it is after the publication of the lover's marriage
with another woman or even during the marriage ceremony
at the town hall or in church, that the woman who has
been betrayed takes her vengeance. The picture her
imagination draws of the pretty scene, at which she had
dreamed of herself appearing in her white dress, happy,
charming and proud, on her bridegroom's arm, but where
now a hated rival is to usurp her place, brings her passion
to the boiling-point Hermione in the play can contain
herself no longer when she hears Cléone's account of
Pyrrhus' marriage :
u Je Pai vu vers lc temple où son hymen s'apprête
Mener en conquérant sa nouvelle conquête,
Et d'un œil où brillaient sa joie et son espoir,
S'enivrer en marchant du plaisir de la voir." l
In a transport of jealousy, she exclaims :
"Le perfide! Il mourra!" 8
" Directly I heard of my lover's marriage with another
girl," said a young woman of Istres, near Aries, brought
up on a charge of murder, "my exasperation was so
1 " I saw him lead towards the temple where his wedlock is preparing, like
a conquering hero his new conquest, and his eye beaming with joy and hope,
grow intoxicate as he walked with the delight of gazing on his bride. "
" Perfidious wretch ! He shall die."
Il8 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
intense I formed the design of killing him. I loaded a
pistol, disguised myself in men's clothes, and went out one
evening and posted myself at a spot where I knew he
must pass. As soon as he came, I fired my pistol at
him." — In Provence, no less than in Italy, a young girl
will often disguise herself as a man in order to strike a surer
blow at the lover who forsakes her, borrowing her father's
or her brother's clothes. Dr Lombroso, who notes the
fact, is wrong in his explanation of it, believing as he docs
that she finds a pleasure in the masculine disguise. 1 The
girl disguises herself thus simply and solely to escape
recognition, though she but seldom succeeds in doing so,
her voice and gait almost invariably betraying her.
Sometimes it is during her pregnancy that the woman
who has been betrayed and deserted takes vengeance on
her lover, hurling a cup of vitriol in his face with the
words : " I want to leave you a keepsake, as you have
left me one of you." — One woman on trial for this crime,
who had inflicted horrible burns on her lover's face, said
to him, pointing to her belly, " Well ! you've got that, and
IVe got the rest"
If some forsaken women seek secrecy in avenging them-
selves, there are others who exact their revenge in the
full light of day and before all the world. Some years
ago a young woman of Marseilles fired several revolver
shots at her lover in one of the most crowded streets;
on the passers-by running up at the sound of the ex-
plosions, she told them with a quiet, but concentrated
fury : " It's nothing ; I've merely killed my lover."
One of the motives determining a girl who has been
forsaken to employ vitriol as her means of revenge, is the
wish to disfigure her lover, in hopes of making his intended
marriage with another woman an impossibility. "I had
no intention of killing him," said a young woman on her
trial, " I only wanted to disfigure him. My hope was that,
if I spoiled his face, his fiancée would no longer have him,
anil then that he would come back to me and marry me."
1 Lombroso, La Femme Criminelle. ', p. 493 (F. Alcan, Paris).
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. I IÇ
Another young woman from the district of Mireille} who
had burnt out her lover's eyes, gave me a similar answer
in cross-examination : " Now he is blind, my rival will
refuse to marry him ; but I, I love him still, and I will
make him forget everything."
Girls who have been betrayed and deserted do not
always confine themselves to disfiguring the faithless
lover; not unfrequently they kill him, but yet it is but
seldom, when they appear in the dock, that they fail to
win the jury's commiseration by the pitiful tale of their
wrongs and sufferings. A poor child in this plight told
her story in the following words : " In despair at finding
myself repulsed by the man who had made so much of
me in former days, indignant at his cowardice, frantic at
the thought of my pregnancy and his refusal to restore
my good name by marriage, I determined on revenge.
1 bought a pistol ; I started to pursue him, and meeting
him at last, shot at him. I went home again like a mad-
woman, not knowing whether I had hit him, and hardly
aware of what I was doing. ... I know I deserve punish-
ment, but the man has robbed me of everything, good
name and happiness; he has brought shame on me and
desolation on my family, he has ruined all my hopes ;
life is henceforth worthless to me."
Nor is it always young men that seduce girls ; a con-
siderable proportion are ruined by men of greater age, but
at the same time of greater dexterity and boldness, who
«abuse the authority they hold over them as proprietors
of shops and masters of houses, nay ! even by relatives,
uncles, and brothers-in-law. Some years ago I was present
zaX the trial of a case of murder committed by a young
<'orsican girl on her uncle, who had seduced, and then
deserted her, after making her a mother. The whole affair
is so dramatic in its details and offers so much that is of
interest to psychologist and moralist, that I am going to
recount the story in extenso.
1 Maillanne, district of Mistral, is some few miles distant from Saint- Rémy,
«ear Aries. It was to Saint-Rémy that Gounod resorted to compose the
: of Mireille.
I20 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
A military officer of high rank living in Paris with his
fanjily was short-sighted enough, being without fortune,
to inspire his daughter, whom he idolized, with luxurious
tastes, and had had her taught many accomplishments,
such as riding, singing, skating. His brother, a rich
merchant of Nice and a married man without children,
having come on a visit, proposed to take his niece back
with him to Nice for a while, and the father agreed to his
doing so. The uncle started homewards with the girl,
who was pretty, bright and lively, while his wife was
no longer either young or pretty. He was not long in
succumbing to the charm of her youth and beauty, and
fell desperately in love with her. The poor child, spoiled
as she was by her uncle who took care to satisfy all her
luxurious tastes, and appreciating keenly the affection he
showed her, but without understanding its true character,
was defenceless against the assaults made on her virtue.
Finally the uncle, abusing her faith in him and her inex-
perience of life, succeeded in overcoming her last scruples,
telling her he only asked her for the sacrifice of her
modesty, not of her good name, which he would safe-
guard in the eyes of the world. In fact, like Tartufe,
he promised her,
" De l'amour sans scandale et du plaisir sans peur," *
without fear, that is without fear of a child to follow. But
the scandal came, the pregnancy she had so much dreaded
declared itself. Afraid his brother would blow out his
brains for him, he overpersuaded his niece to tell her
father it was she who had made the first advances. * If
you love me," he said, " you should sacrifice yourself for
me ; " and the girl, to save her lover whom she was
already passionately attached to, now her senses were once
awakened, agreed to the sacrifice ; instead of accusing her
uncle of his baseness, she excused him, casting all the
reproach on herself and meekly bowing her head beneath
a father's curse.
1 " Love without scandal and pleasure without fear."
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 121
So terrible was the blow for the latter, who in his double
capacity as a soldier and a Corsican, had the most exalted
ideas of honour, that he was utterly broken down and
overwhelmed by his child's dishonour, and in a very short
space of time was dead of grief. His wife threw herself in
despair from the window of the house where they lived,
and was killed. 1 Some weeks after the death of her father
and her mother's suicide, the girl gave birth to a child.
The uncle at once separated it from its mother and put it
out to nurse in another country, in the neighbourhood of
Turin, using every means to alienate the young mother's
affection from her child. Unable to succeed in this, he
proposed to find her a husband and provide her with a
rich dowry; but the girl refused. Presently quarrels
occurred, and the uncle turned his niece out of the house,
telling her he intended to send the child to the Hospital
for Foundlings. This purpose of his exasperated the
young mother beyond all bounds : " Let him abandon me,
if he will," she cried, " but to abandon my child, — this I
will never put up with." Soon the thought of killing
herself or else the man who was for deserting her and her
boy took possession of her, and she purchased a revolver.
Her uncle knew of this, but made no attempt to take the
ttreapon from her, hoping she would blow out her brains
in a fit of despair. However the wished-for suicide did
not come about After hesitating for a while between
suicide and murder, she decided finally to kill her uncle.
Learning he was staying temporarily at an hotel in
Marseilles, she sought him out there. Then, her hands
behind her, her hair tossed back, her eyes blazing and lips
trembling, the girl advanced on her uncle, challenging
'with words of fire : " Look at what you have made of me,"
she cried ; " you have dishonoured me, taken my all, killed
1 Such suicides of parents as the result of grief and chagrin at a daughter's
«Jahonoor are not uncommon. I have even seen a case of a girl of fourteen
committing suicide by charcoal fumes because she could not bear any longer
to look on at her elder sister's bad life and the pain it caused her parents ; she
died with the words, "The dead are the happiest," on her lips.
122 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
my father and mother with grief; now you abandon me,
and wish to abandon our child. Look me straight in the
face as I look at you." Her uncle only shrugged his
shoulders, telling her she was behaving like a play-actress,
and for his part he did not care for romances. This cold
ironical answer increased the girl's exasperation ; she
drew her revolver and fired several shots at her seducer
who fell to the ground. As he lay there, the Corsican
fired off all the remaining chambers of her revolver point
blank at him, screaming, " Die, die ! " Then in an instant,
when she saw the blood pouring from his wounds, her
anger vanished, and pity and love regained their empire ;
she threw herself fondly on the wounded man, wiping his
brow, covering his face with kisses, pressing his hands and
exclaiming, "Forgive me! forgive me! no! dearest, you
must not die! You are only wounded, I will not have
you die."
However, the uncle did die of his wounds, and the poor
girl was brought up before a jury of the Department of
the Bouches-du-Rhône. While in prison, during the pre-
liminary examinations, she wrote the following letter to
a worthy priest :
"Monsieur l'Abbé, — In the shipwreck of my feelings
and my life, to whom should I appeal if not to you who
are a priest and whose pity should be infinite, like God's ?
Besides, are you not the only person who on hearing of
the terrible event, experienced feelings of pity and for-
giveness ? I know how you alone understood my sufferings ;
you alone were not surprised, for had you not foreseen
a catastrophe. Only it was not what might have been
expected; instead of killing myself, I killed another, I
killed the man for whose sake I had given up and
abandoned everything. You did not reject me, when in
spite of all your prayers, I refused to renounce my guilty
love. 1 . . .
1 In his study on the Romantic Drama {Le Drame Romantique, p. 207) M.
Nebout finds fault with Victor Hugo for having attributed to Blanche a per-
sistent love for the King who has dishonoured her ; is it possible, he says that
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 123
M I am going to entrust to you what I hold dearest in
the world ; this man in dying has carried away all with
him, happiness, the sun, the light of day, but he has left
me a child, my consolation for future days, if I have
strength to go on living. ... If it is my fate to quit my
prison presently, I would accept any form of work, and
my child once more in France and by my side, I might
yet enjoy a relative happiness, for to have the little one
by me is still to have something of his father, whose image
he is. ... If I am condemned to remain always in prison,
or at any rate for many years, I am resolved in that case
to escape my punishment. As then I could be of no
use to the child, it would not be shirking my duty to
have done with life. In this case I leave my child to you.
* You remember, Monsieur l'Abbé, when to wean me from
this affection, you told me to picture him to myself as
dead and decomposed. Then I would not see him other-
wise than as handsome and fascinating, as he was, and
now it is all ended, and I have him continually before
my eyes all bloody and disfigured.
a Ah ! if only I had obeyed you the last time I went to
see you and you begged me to bring you my revolver!
If I had not had it to my hand, I should never have gone
a girl should love the vile seducer who has stolen her honour and should wish
to save him ? Yes ! it is quite possible ; Victor Hugo has not exceeded the
bounds of troth, as we see from the case of this Corsican girl, who, seduced
by an uncle many years older than herself, ended by loving him passionately.
More than this, there are girls, who after being seduced by their own father,
and after at first loathing the foul seducer who has taken advantage of them,
end by loving him passionately. This is a fact I have verified in several
criminal cases. To account for the phenomenon, we must remember that
love springs from sensual gratification when once the senses are awakened.
Alfred de Musset writes :
" Amour, fléau du monde, exécrable folie,
Toi, qu'un lien si frète à la volupté lie.'* . . .
( " Love, scourge of the world, hateful folly, that so fine a tie unites to
lot. . . . ) Of course all girls who have been betrayed do not feel love for
their seducers ; indeed most of them loathe and detest them. Their sentiments
vary according to temperament, education and character. Nothing is falser
Chan rash generalisations.
124 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
so far as I did. You told me, some time ago, how you
never thought so edifying a first communicant as I was
was destined to suffer herself to be led astray by a false-
hearted villain. What would you say now I have a man's
death to lay to my charge?
" Monsieur l'Abbé, pray that I may be acquitted."
Women experience as a rule more pleasure in revenge
than men. The widow Gras, urging her accomplice to
join her in her vengeance, told her, " The cause of my
ruin was one , and I want to revenge myself on the
vile wretch. . . . You see what pain I suffer ; well ! make
him suffer a little of the same, and I think I shall be
better after that."
According to her character, her education and the nature
of her love, she wreaks her vengeance with the most far-
sought or the most perverse refinements of cruelty. She
is quite capable of resorting to suicide, simply and solely
to cause her betrayer remorse. A young woman who had
been forsaken wrote to her lover : " I am capable of any
violence, even of suicide, to cause you remorse and disturb
you in the course of your pleasures." Generally speaking»
anger stirs the most evil feelings of her nature. The very
woman who was good-natured, fond and devoted, when
she was loved, becomes ill-conditioned and treacherous,
when betrayed. She cannot bear the idea of the man who
has forsaken her being happy, respected by society and
surrounded by friends ; she does all she can to rob him of
his good repute and alienate his friends, to make him suffer
in his pride, his person and his feelings ; she studies his char-
acter, in order to strike him in the tenderest place, seeking
out the most cruel and abominable forms of revenge and
the best adapted to wound him deeply. "I love him and I
loathe him," wrote one ; " if he forsakes me, I will dishonour
him, — him and his family." How abominable was Medea's
vengeance! To kill her own children, in order to make
the father suffer cruelly ! Nor is such diabolical vengeance
untrue to nature; a woman's revenge is capable of going
even so far as this. For do we not often see women ready to
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 1 25
wreak their resentment on a faithful husband by sacrificing,
if not the life, at any rate the interest, honour and happi-
ness of their children? To cause their husband pain of
mind, they torture him in his feelings as a father, sowing
dissension with poisoned words between him and his chil-
dren, and stirring the latter to acts of insubordination and
violence against their father. There is a touch of Medea in
all such women.
Torturing the father in order to make the husband suffer
Ls an essentially feminine type of vengeance. Men much
more rarely practise this horrid form of revenge. Still
an instance occurred some months ago, where a certain
Deblonder, in order to punish his wife, who wished to get
a divorce and marry another man, killed their two little
girls by way of lacerating the mother's heart. — This horrid
notion of making a father or a mother suffer in the children
is no mere literary invention imagined by poets, — a char-
acter in Shakespeare, seeking a means to make an enemy
suffer, notes with regret that he has no child, saying he
only wishes he had, that he might punish the father in the
child. I find the same abominable idea in the mouth of a
prisoner at the bar, a woman who had yielded to her thirst
for vengeance; "I wanted to make him suffer, not by
striking him, but his son." Some years since the Assize
Court of the Department of the Alpes-Maritimes tried a
woman who, having become mistress to a young man,
was entrusted with the education of a child her lover had
bad as the result of a previous liaison ; on his forsaking
her, she avenged the father's faithlessness by strangling his
child. — Yet another example. A married woman had
abandoned her husband to live in a foreign country with
a lover. A female child was the result of the connection.
In a short time the mother forsook her lover and the child.
But eight years afterwards, meeting her lover again, she
wished to renew the old life with them ; he refused however,
and to punish him, she determined to make him suffer in
his rôle of a father. She made it up with her husband and
bribed him to claim as his own his wife's child in virtue of
126 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
the maxim of is pater est . . ., and the Courts were obliged
to admit the validity of this legal fiction. The true father,
frantic with grief, refused to have his child torn from him,
and set off with her for America. He was condemned to
three years' imprisonment for contumacy in illegally kid-
napping the child after the Court's decision. — In 1889, in
the Department of Vaucluse, a woman to avenge herself
on her rival poisoned her children. Domestic servants also
have been known, after dismissal, to wreak their spite on
their masters by poisoning their children. Anarchists at
the present day urge domestics to revenge themselves on
their masters by corrupting the children entrusted to
them.
This is nothing less than a return to the ferocious habits
of primitive mankind. The peoples of those days were
accustomed to punish their foes in the persons of their
children ; and attributed the same atrocious form of re-
venge to their deities. In retaliation for an insult of
Niobé, Apollo and Diana slew her fourteen children.
In Corneille's Rodogune, Cléopâtre presents a cup of
poisoned wine to Antiochus and Rodogune, and on seeing
them hesitate, drinks first herself to dissipate their fears,
happy to die along with them rather than miss her ven-
geance. According to M. Stapfer there is no shadow of
truth in the character of the woman who declares :
44 Tombe le ciel sur moi, pourvu que je me venge ! n l
I do not agree with him ; I am certain the craving for
revenge in a jealous, proud and spiteful woman's heart
may be so fierce and so blind as to suggest the idea to her
of making sure of her vengeance by her own death, and
inspiring the cry :
1 " Let heaven fall on my head, if I mar but get revenge ! " This cry
which seems so improbable to M. Stapfer, is the natural exclamation of a
woman eager for revenge ;
" Que je me perde ou non, je songe à me venger "
(" Whether it involve my ruin or no, my only thought is for vengeance'*), says
Hermione, equally indifferent to her fate, if only she may satisfy her
vengeance. Act. iv. Sc. 5.
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 1 27
44 II est doux de périr après ses ennemis." *
Besides, we should remember that Cleopatra is not only
a revengeful, jealous and self-seeking woman, but also an
Asiatic mother, who has had her children brought up far
from her side, and only calls them to her to be the
instruments of her ambition and her anger.
No doubt women who in their desire of vengeance do not
hesitate to kill their own children are unnatural mothers,
Furies. But if all women are not Furies, some are ; thirst
for vengeance pushed to the limit of ferocity is an integral
part of feminine human nature, or rather of some repre-
sentatives of the sex. Médée, Camille, Cléopâtre, the
Queen of Syria, Hermione, Roxane, are Furies ; they
know it in their own hearts, and call themselves by the
name.
44 Tu ne revois en moi qu'une amante offensée,
Qui comme une Furie attachée à tes pas
Te veut incessament reprocher son trépas," *
says Camille in Horace (Act iv. Se. 5).
Roxane, again, addressing Bajazet bids him :
" Ne désespère pas une amante en furie . . .
Dans ton perfide sang je puis tout expier." 3
Hermione also is a Fury ; Pylades advising Orestes to
fly from her says :
44 Quoi ! votre amour se veut charger d'une furie} " *
In fact, anger, jealousy, revenge may change a woman
into a Fury who heretofore seemed entirely incapable of
violence.
The female imagination is every day inventing new
forms of vengeance. A woman of light character, who had
deserted her children, came to ask her husband's permission
1 *' Tis sweet to die after one's enemies."
* " You see in me only an injured lover, who like a Fury dogging your
tteps, will unceasingly upbraid you for her death."
3 "Drive not to desperation one whom love betrayed has made a Fury . . .
'tis easy to avenge all my wrongs in your traitorous blood."
* •• What Ï will your love burden itself with a Futy}"
128 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
to see them again. The latter refused, telling her she was
unworthy to do so ; " you rob me of the sight of my
children," answered the woman ; " well ! when my turn
comes, I will rob you of the sight of them." — " You mean
you will kill me," retorted the doomed husband. — "No!"
she replied, " I will make you suffer worse than that, I will
blind you." And so she did, some days later ; while the
husband was playing with the children, she came in
suddenly and threw vitriol in his eyes. The children
might easily have been injured, for a nurse who was
standing beside them received splashes of the corrosive
fluid, which burnt her clothes. The woman shared the
sentiments of Médée, who said to her children :
" Il me prive de vous et je Ten vais priver . . .
Il ne vous verra plus." 1
To give herself the satisfaction of revenge, the woman
who has been abandoned accepts unflinchingly the scandal
and punishment that ensue upon her deed. A forsaken
woman, maturing the design of blinding her lover, (a design
she afterwards carried out), declared she had no fear of the
penal consequences of the act, that supposing she were
condemned to five years' imprisonment, she would will-
ingly undergo them for the satisfaction of wreaking her
vengeance.
To punish her rival and disfigure her beauty is for such
a one a still keener pleasure. Atalide, aware that Roxane
is even more deeply exasperated against her than against
Bajazet, has good reason to say as she does to the latter :
" Elle aura plus de soif de mon sang que du vôtre." 8
Indeed Roxane is at first for pardoning Bajazet, and
says to him :
" Ma rivale est ici ; suis-moi sans différer ;
Dans la main des muets viens la voir expirer." *
1 " He robs me of you, and I am going to rob him of it . . .he shal
never look on you more."
9 " She will be even more athirst for my blood than for yours."
* " My rival is here ; follow me without delay ; come to see her die at Ùm
hands of the mutes."
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 129
Against her rival is primarily directed her craving for
revenge; when she thinks presently of putting Bajazet to
death as well, she desires to afford Atalide the sight of his
death, to make her sufferings greater :
a Quel surcroît de vengeance et de douceur nouvelle
Que de le montrer bientôt pâle et mort devant elle." *
A jealous woman always seeks some refinement of
cruelty in her vengeance. Thus Phèdre longs to add to
the pleasure of killing her hated rival, the further satisfac-
tion of having her slain before the eyes of Hippol/te :
" Je vais faire expirer ma rivale à tes yeux." *
In Horace, Camille winds up the imprecations she
launches against Rome, which she detests like a rival, by
these verses that will express the intensity of her hate and
the delight she finds in revenge :
" Voir le dernier Romain à son dernier soupir,
Moi seule en être cause et mourir de plaisir." s
Before wreaking her vengeance, a woman relishes the
thought of it in imagination, just as she feasts her eyes on
the sight of it, when it is accomplished. A young woman
of twenty-two, who had just killed her rival with a pistol
bullet, gloated over her death agony, stepping back slowly
from her side with a look of pleasure in her eyes, as if
relishing her revenge ; on her face could be read the satis-
faction she felt at giving her a coffin for a bridal bed, and
she might have been thought to be repeating Médée's line :
" Et pour lit nuptial il te faut un tombeau." 4
This thought of the bridal bed that was not to be for
J^r, had tormented her fancy ; her fury had been kindled
a * the notion of seeing her rival enter it, and she was now
44 What a heightened spice of vengeance and fresh satisfaction, to show
anon pale and dead before her eyes."
* " I am abort to slay my rival before your eyes."
* "To tee the last of the Romans sighing his last sigh,— I to be sole cause
*l>e nation's rain and die of joy at the thought."
* " And for bridal bed you must have a tomb."
I
I30 SEDUCTION, AND DESERTION.
overjoyed at having made this impossible by shooting her
dead.
When a woman who has been abandoned for another,
disfigures her rival, it is not only that she wishes to make
the marriage she abhors impossible ; over and above this,
she takes a tigerish pleasure in robbing her of her beauty,
in making the woman ugly that her lover found prettier
than herself, in covering with horrid sores the mouth that
smiled at him, in burning out the eyes that inspired his
love and expressed her preference. Knowing her rival's
happiness at being thought beautiful and her pride in her
lover's admiration, she longs by spoiling her face to end
the odious superiority she claimed over her. Once dis-
figured, the hated rival will cease to be formidable, she
who was an object of desire will become a sight of horror
and loathing; she will be humiliated, and her humilia-
tion in its refinement of malice will heighten the joy of
vengeance.
There are even women who, whilst disfiguring their rival,
make a point of sparing their sight, so that their victim
may suffer more from seeing her own ugliness.
Revenge in such cases is, as a rule, long premeditated,
Under the influence of despair, the forsaken woman shuts
herself up alone, and concentrates all her thoughts on ha
grief ; losing her sleep, she racks her brain day and night
pondering over the treachery she has met with. Aftei
forming her plan of vengeance, she hesitates to carry il
into execution, especially where she still loves the lover 01
husband who has deserted her. This period of hesitation
is faithfully portrayed in the answers given under examina-
tion by a girl of Saint-Rémy, guilty of throwing vitriol in
her lover's face: "After making up my mind to revenge
I could not finally decide to put my purpose into execution,
. . . One day, whilst I was talking to L , my mothei
came into the room, and said : ' You can see he's onlj
laughing at your tears.' These words kindled my angei
afresh ; I asked my mother to withdraw, and turning te
my lover I said : ' Remember what you promised me j
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. I3I
beware of my vengeance.' As he made no answer, but
began to yawn, I added : ' I see I only weary you ; good-
bye for the last time, I shall not come to see you any
more." Exasperated by his attitude of insulting in-
difference, the girl resumed her projects of vengeance, but
she still hesitated to execute them, not having the heart to
disfigure the man she loved, when some while afterwards
she met her lover in the street and he pretended not to
know her. Then at last, wounded beyond bearing by the
insult, she went home hurriedly, disguised herself in men's
clothes, armed herself with a bottle of vitriol she had
procured long beforehand, and went and threw its contents
in the villain's face.
The notion of revenge is a sort of demoniacal possession,
that little by little fills the woman's mind and more and
more dominates her whole being. According to circum-
stances, this persistent idea that pursues her day and night
is alternatively welcomed and rejected for a certain number
of days, weeks or months. A struggle rages between love
and hate, reason and passion. But gradually her powers
of resistance fail her, as she learns to gloat more and more
complacently over the idea of revenge, till one day after
many falterings and repeated alternations of loathing and
forgiveness, a final incident, a casual meeting, the sight of
her rival, a fresh insult, ends by firing the mine.
I borrow from the diary of a young woman accused of
a crime of this kind, named Marie B , the passages
below showing how in the agonies of desertion, she passed
from the stage of despair and thoughts of suicide to that
of projected murder, and after many delays and hesitations
to its actual realization.
* November. — I think I am going mad. Better a
thousand times to die, but not before I have avenged my
l|rr Ongs. The measure of your iniquities is full. Beware ;
^Hi know not, Léon, what pain and remorse you are
P'^paring for yourself.
** December. — He is thinking of marrying. If I were not
* Christian woman, I should kill him.
I32 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
" AprtL — My little girl is dead. I long to die, but first
to revenge !
"/une. — He has come back, but I can see he does not
love me any more. I mean to kill him.
"July. — I could have killed him, but I did not I am
going to put away my pride once more and ask him to
come back ; but if he refuses, I shall be pitiless, I swear
I shall.
"November. — I cannot bear another woman to be the
mother of his children, and so he must die.
" 13/A December. — I have written to him, and he has
not answered. How insulting !
"I suffer beyond bearing; I would rather die, but he
must die first.
" \gth December. — I have seen him, but I could not get
near him. I shall find my opportunity some day, Léon,
and your life will be the price of the agonies I suffer."
On January 1, she writes on the back of the photograph
of the lover who has forsaken her : L. R. condemned to
death by me, Marie.
Next day, she writes : " He is still alive. My strength
failed me. Twice I pressed the trigger in vain. I had no
blood left in my veins, for in spite of myself I love him stilL
" 3 r d January. — To-day I am going to try for death.
May it overtake us both !
" 5 th January. — All day long I have sat in a carriage
before his door, without gaining anything except the
knowledge that a woman, tall, slender, and wrapped in a
fur cloak, went into his house at half-past five and came
out again at nine.
" I suffer too horribly ; I must have your life, Léon. I
trust I shall do better to-morrow."
On January 7, in the evening about nine, Marie B
carried out the plan of murder she had first conceived
more than a year before, and fired three revolver shots
at her lover, but without doing more than wounding him.
She was arrested, and declared next day she was sorry-
she had not killed him.
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 1 33
In her examination before the "Juge d'Instruction,"
she said : " I am going to tell you the whole truth. Will
you be able to comprehend me? I do not understand
pnyself; You will see how the most different and
apparently the most contradictory feelings fought for the
mastery in my heart.
44 1 love the man, and at the same time I despised him,
and even to-day, after having tried to kill him, I think
I love him still. I am ashamed to talk to you in this
way, but the truth is I am appalled at the injury this
man has done me, by inspiring a love that even con-
tempt has not been able entirely to kill. My head is a
chaos."
The account this poor girl gave of the combination of
love and hate, of tenderness and contempt, that tossed
her heart and made a chaos of her mind, the analysis
she gave of her hesitations and changes of mind, alone
suffice to prove the small amount of psychological per-
spicacity displayed by Schlegel in his criticisms on Racine.
He expresses surprise that Phèdre, after trying to melt
the heart of Hippolyte, should in an instant pass from
the most abject love to the most furious anger, and be
able to declare :
u Je le vois comme un monstra effroyable à mes yeux." *
He cannot understand Phèdre's repeated alternations of
purpose, planning to die in the first act, then abandoning
her intention on hearing of Thésée's death ; in the second
act endeavouring to pierce her heart with Hippolyte's
sword by way of a piece of stage effect, in the third act
again talking of dying without giving effect to her project,
in the fourth returning to the same resolution, and
eventually executing it in the fifth. Phèdre, he says, is
for ever irresolute, she alternates between the most con-
tradictory feelings ; in the fourth act she is on the point
of asking pardon for Hippolyte, then suddenly changes
her mind directly she hears of the lattcr's love for Aricie
1 " I sec him like a horrid monster before my eyes."
134 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
and now breathes nothing but vengeance. 1 These es
lasting changes of mind and sudden breakings of purp
are, according to Schlegel, untrue to nature and moreo
inappropriate in Tragedy. " If tragic necessity ," he ss
" requires us to depict criminal characters while male
them in a certain way interesting, let them at any i
be of heroic mould, and do not let continual feebler
and vacillation render them unequal to the situations
which their own passions have involved them."
It is impossible, I think, to display greater ignorano
the effects of passion. SchlegePs literary criticisms
a tissue of psychological misconceptions. What ra
characterizes the mental state of the woman who has b
forsaken, as it does that of the jealous lover, is the ra
and reiterated change from love to hate, from hope to f
then back again from hate to love and forgiveness» fi
despair to hope, till the moment when, after many hes
tions, this condition of unstable equilibrium ends in
explosion of anger or despair, in murder or suicide,
both these at once.
Not to see that Phèdre, after trying to touch Hippoly
heart and failing, must needs be filled with a sud
passion of anger at the announcement, " Aricie has
heart 1 Aricie has his plighted troth!" is to underst
nothing whatever of the effects of love and jealousy, ;
therefore to show oneself a very poor literary critic,
there can be no real criticism without psychology.
There never yet was a desperate woman frenzied by
indifference and treachery of her lover but is drawn hit
and thither betwixt the desire for revenge and the 1
she still bears him in the midst of her indignation.
" On a peine à haïr ce qu'on a bien aimé,
Et le feu mal éteint est bientôt rallumé." 2
1 Schlegel, Comparaison entré la Phèdre de Racine et celle £Bur\
p. 32. ("Comparison between the Phèdre of Racine and the Phsed
Euripides.")
2 " Tis hard to hate the man one has fondly loved, and the fire but
extinguished is quickly rekindled." Corneille, Sertorius, Act i. Sc* 3.
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 1 35
The female heart, stirred by contradictory feelings,
alternates between one and the other ; hence those sudden
changes of mind and purpose that make the tragedies of
Racine and Corneille so moving, because they are so true
to life. The woman though ready to curse the man she
loves, hesitates at first to make him suffer when she feels
the desire for revenge ; presently, if some fresh affront is
put upon her, her anger reasserts itself and she renews
those plans for murder she had before rejected. In her
famous monologue in the fifth act Hermione expresses
vividly the alternations and hesitations of her wavering
resolution :
** Et prête à me venger, je lui fais déjà grâce." !
Then no sooner has she resolved to forgive him than
her anger returns as she thinks of Pyrrhus* scorn :
44 Non, ne révoquons pas l'arrêt de mon courroux ;
Qu'il périsse." *
Roxane, who has all the fire of the South added to a
Sultana's pride, hesitates long before putting Bajazet to
death. She invents a thousand pretexts for delaying her
veagcance; first she gives up her project, then presently
resumes it» a prey alternately to anger and affection, her
threats of death succeeded anon by exclamations of the
fondest love :
u Bajazet, écoutez ; je sens que je vous aime." *
This is genuine psychological insight
Unwavering characters, consistent throughout, such as
Schlegel asks, are not true to human nature, and least of
ail to feminine human nature.
The special characteristic of passion and particularly
°f jealousy is to destroy consecutiveness of ideas and firm-
ness of purpose, to make the mind inconsistent, irresolute
*nd full of self-contradictions.
1 "And all ready to avenge my wrong, I am already by way of forgiving
* "No ! let us not revoke the resolve of my angry heart ; he must perish."
2 '* Hark, Bajazet ! I feel I love you still."
}$6 SEDUCTION AND DESSRTIOW;
The very same alternations of resolve that Schlegel makes
a ground of reproach against Racine, are found equally in
Corneille's dramatis personce, the reason being they are a
part of human nature. Médée herself whose character is
so powerful, alternatives betwixt vengeance and pity :
" Mais quoi 1 j'ai beau contre eux animer mon audace,
La pitié la combat et se met à sa place ;
Puis cédant tout à coup la place à ma fureur,
J'adore les projets qui me faisaient horreur.
De l'amour aussitôt je passe à la colère ...
Je n'écoute rien et mon âme éperdue
Entre deux passions demeure suspendue." l
What a knowledge of the human heart ! And yet the
literary critics persist in declaring Corneille could not
depict love and analyze jealousy!
Similarly, unfortunate or jealous lovers oscillate» like
women, between love and hate ;
" Tous mes moments ne sont qu'un éternel passage
De la crainte à l'espoir, de l'espoir à la rage,"*
says King Antiochus in Bérénice.
So Pyrrhus is for ever wavering between his love for
Andromaque and his craving to be avenged for the slights
she puts on him ; he is turn and turn about fond and
furious, a humble suppliant and a threatening tyrant Mark
the same vacillation in Mithridate. Frenzied with jealousy
he cries :
" Non, non, plus de pardon, plus d'amour pour l'ingrate . . .
Immolons en partant trois ingrats à la fois . . . ; wl
anon his anger fades away, pity and love resume their
sway:
1 " But no ! 'tis in vain I excite my fury against them ; pity joins fight with
it and drives it back. Then once more giving my wrath its way, I adore the
very schemes that but now made me shudder. From love I pass in a moment
to anger. ... I hearken to no word of reason and my bewildered soul hangs
in suspense betwixt two passions."
8 " All my existence is but an everlasting passage from fear to hope, from
hope to rage."
* "No, no ! no more forgiveness, no more love, for the ungrateful wretch
... ; let us make an end and sacrifice three monsters of ingratitude at
once. ..."
SEDUCTION AND DESERTION. 1 37
u Mais quelle est ipa fureur ? et qu'est-ce que je dis ?
O Monime, 6 mon fils 1. Inutile courroux." '
A woman who has been forsaken and who is for revenge
makes her preparations long ere she strikes the final blow;
She buys the instrument of her crime beforehand, and
studies the time and place most favourable for its execu-
tion ; she abandons her purpose, then returns to it afresh,
traversing a cycle of the most opposite emotions. In
yielding to her anger, which is raised to fever heat by the
desire of retaliation, she thinks she can only recover some
little calmness of mind after her vengeance is satisfied.
And as a matter of fact, at the moment when $he dis-
charges her pistol or throws her cup of vitriol, she does
experience a species of relief and relaxation of tension ;
she is avenged and she relishes her revenge. In the
excessive excitement in which she is, she may occasionally
remain for several hours, or even for several days, without
regretting the wounds she has inflicted, the death she has
dealt. But before long a reaction ensues, and she is
bitterly sorry for what she has done and manifests the
deepest penitence. Marie B said to the "Juge d'In-
struction " : " The day I fired the shot, I experienced, I
confess, a species of satisfaction and relief of mind." On
the day following her attempt to murder her lover, she
said to the Commissary of Police : " I do not know how
serious M. G 's wounds are, but I intend to repeat my
attempt, as soon as ever I get an opportunity. I have sworn
to kill the man, and I shall do anything and everything to
succeed." But some days later her anger subsided, love
and remorse filled her heart, and on the "Juge d'Instruc-
tion " remarking to her that her hatred of her former lover
must have been very deep-seated not to have sooner
yielded to remorse, when she saw the man she had loved
fall by her hand, the accused answered : " I was still
labouring under extreme excitement of mind ; I had
suffered so terribly!" — Another young girl, who had
1 ** But what means my fury ? and what is it I am saying ? Oh t Monime,
oh I my son ! How useless is my wrath ! "
138 SEDUCTION AND DESERTION.
thrown vitriol in her lover's face and had relished her
vengeance at the time, declared some days subsequently :
14 1 feel the most lively regret for what I have done: I
would give my life that it should never have happened."
Goethe, who spent his life in loving and abandoning a
great number of women, without a thought of righfc and
wrong and absolutely callous to the grief of those he
forsook, has none the less drawn in Faust a striking picture
of the agonies of a girl who has. been betrayed, who
believing herself to be on the high-road to happiness, has
rushed headlong into calamity and shame. "Dost re-
member, Marguerite, the days when thou wert wont to
come and kneel before the altar ? Then thou wert full of
innocence. . . . Marguerite, what hast thou done? What
crimes are thine I Dost come to pray for thy mother's
soul, whose death is upon thy head? Seest thou what
blood is this on the threshold ? 'tis thy brother's ; and dost
not feel stirring in thy bosom an unhappy being that e'en
now presages thee fresh pangs?" In that abode, where
of old were only sweet flowers and pious prayers, is naught
now but tears and blood, because the seducer has passed
that way.
CHAPTER V.
JEALOUSY.
** Jealousy feeds ever on suspicion. Tis a passion that is always
seeking after new subjects of disquietude and fresh torments, and it
becomes a form of madness the instant it passes from doubt to
certainty.*— La Rochefoucauld.
The essential characteristic of love is its desire for ex-
clusive possession, its violent disinclination to share its
bliss. So natural indeed is the feeling that it is seen
among savage no less than among civilized peoples. This
universality of the sentiment is a strong argument against
the condition of sexual promiscuity which some writers on
sociology attribute to primitive mankind. Every man is
fain to have sole possession of the woman he loves, and
dreads a rival's robbing him of his privileges. This appre-
hension makes men anxious and suspicious ; tormented
with doubts and fears, they grow sombre and preoccupied,
absorbed in one fixed idea that gnaws their heart. A
prisoner who stood accused of a crime he had committed
out of jealousy, said that " something was always tearing
at his brains."
The jealous lover or husband takes alarm at every trifle,
and spends all his time in manufacturing motives for
suspicion. When he is shown the groundlessness of his
fears, he admits his mistake, but the next moment is at his
old work again, a victim to doubts and apprehensions of
fcvery sort. Tossed about from one notion to another, now
r ^assured, now a prey to fresh anxiety, he knows not what
to think ; he spies upon his wife and employs others to
^vatch her smallest actions. He distorts her most trivial
doings, and puts an ill interpretation on the most in-
significant :
I40 JEALOUSY.
" Un regard, un sourire, un instant d'entretien
(Lui) semble un ennemi qui (lui) ravit son bien." *
I have noted myself in a number of instances of murder
committed from jealousy, that nothing so exasperates a
jealous man as to see the woman he is in love with
laughing with someone else ; her merriment is in his eyes
not only a sign of understanding between the pair, but he
thinks they are deliberately making fun of him.
Corneille who has given a powerful delineation of
jealousy, which he knew well, and this not merely from
observation of others but from his own personal experience,
represents the hero of one of his dramas as saying :
" Tout ce qui l'approchait voulait me l'enlever,
Tout ce qui lui parlait cherchait à m'en priver.
Je tremblai qu'à leurs yeux elle ne fût trop belle,
Je les haïssais tous comme plus dignes d'elle* *
Your jealous man would have no one so much as look
at the woman he loves, or her look at any one. When
Louis XIII. fell in love with Mlle, de Hautefort, "he
would fain," says Cousin, "have had no man speak to
her, no man even cast eyes on her with any particularity."
A jealous husband hates his wife going out of doors and
displaying her beauty to others ; he prefers to keep her
shut up and isolated in the depths of the country. Alceste
who is jealous urges Célimène to retire to the country. A
workwoman whose husband had tried to murder her from
motives of jealousy, told the examining magistrate that
the latter would never let her go out to do her household
errands. At a ball to see a rival's arm encircling the
beloved one's waist, his eyes fixed on her face, his mouth
inhaling her breath, is a veritable torment to a man of
jealous disposition. In society, where savoir-faire, self-
1 " A look, a smile, an instant's talk, he deems a foe that robs htm of his
rights." Delavigne, V École des Vieillards.
2 "AH that came near her seemed eager to take her from me, all that
spoke to her to be seeking to rob me of her. I trembled lest in their eyes
she should appear too fair, I hated all men as better worthy of her than
myself." Corneille Pulchérie^ Act ii. Sc. I.
\
JEALOUSY^ 141
respect, pride, all teach control, the jealous man conceals
his pain and avoids making a scene. But at dances
frequented by men of the humbler classes, who are not
such complete masters of their feelings, jealousy is re-
sponsible for many a scuffle. Not long ago a carpenter
of a jealous nature, seeing his fiancée at a dance, accom-
panied by her mother and her two sisters, required her to:
withdraw ; unable to persuade her, he went away in a
passion, fetched two guns and took ambush till the end
of the ball. Directly he saw the women on the threshold
of their house, laying one gun on the ground, he put the
other to his shoulder and fired at the group. He wounded
his fiancée and killed her sister, a girl of fifteen ; the mother's
life was saved by her daughter who, seeing the murderer
raise his weapon, threw himself in front of her to protect
her with her own body.
The most tender lover, once he is bitten with jealousy,
may quickly turn savage and brutal ; having suffered
himself, he would fain have others do the like, his misery
makes him ill-conditioned, and he proceeds to insult,
threaten and bully the woman he really loves all the
while. In his jealousy he longs to strike her, his hand'
itches to be at her. In the households of working men
in towns, and farm folk in the country, jealousy leads
to a perfect rain of blows. To slap his wife's face is the
first thing that occurs to a jealous husband in the lower
classes. To return the blow is no less natural and in-
evitable on the part of the wife. In a few hours' time
we find the pair taking away the smart of the blows
they have exchanged with a series of fond caresses, certain
all the while very soon to begin the same quarrels and
reconciliations all over again. In higher circles the very
man who would not have dreamt of striking a woman with
a flower, will let jealousy mislead him into beating her
with a walking-cane, or if he does succeed in commanding
his temper, he will regret he cannot copy the habits of
commoner folk who settle accounts with their womankind
by means of a big stick or a resounding slap :
142 JEALOUSY.
" Que vous êtes heureux, vous en qui la nature
Agit sans aucun art et règne toute pure . . .
Gens du peuple, artisans, portefaix et vilains,
Vous de qui la vengeance est toujours en vos mains." l
A jealous lover who suspects his mistress of unfaithful-
ness tries to force her to confess a fault she has never been
guilty of. He threatens her, even strikes her, to tear an
admission from her, promising pardon if she will confess;
then when the woman, who without having been actually
untrue to her honour, admits an imprudence of behaviour
that is open to misconstruction, he seizes on the admission
to beat her worse than before.
Jealousy being in a general way a proof of love f it has
been said that the woman who is its object never fails to
excuse it. Molière makes one of his female characters say :
" Fi ! ne me parlez point pour être vrais amants
De ces gens qui pour nous n'ont nuls emportements. • . .
Un amour si tranquille excite mon courroux,
Cest aimer froidement que n'être point jaloux." '
It is perfectly true that a woman will excuse much in
the man who loves with jealous transport. Mary Queen of
Scots, for instance, always loved Bothwell, who all the time
made her suffer keenly from his jealous temper ; " from the
very morrow of her bridal, she had been for aye in tears
and lamentation, her husband not suffering her to have
liberty to look at any man whatsoever, or for any to
look at her." Jealousy may very well win forgiveness for
the cruelty and pain it is responsible for, when these are
tempered by subsequent reconciliation and an augmen-
tation of tenderness ; but in the majority of instances,
a jealous man does not inspire love, he is harsh and
tyrannical, an unbearable and odious despot The husband
1 "How happy you, in whom Nature acts untrammelled by art and reigns
in entire simplicity . . . common folk, workmen, porters and churls, yon can
always find vengeance in your own sturdy hands."
Campistron, Lt jaloux désabusé.
2 " Bah ! talk not to me, as true lovers, of folks who feel no bursts of
passion. ... A love so uneventful moves my spleen ; 'tis to love coldly never
to be jealous."
JEALOUSY, I43
who at first inspired fond affection in his wife's bosom by
his passionate vehemence, soon loses her love through his
strange suspiciousness and violent temper ; the suspicious
watch he keeps, the doubts he expresses, the reproaches he
loads his wife with, all make him odious. The time comes
when jealousy turns the conjugal home into a hell, and the
unhappy woman, for ever insulted and beaten, grows weary
of such a dog's life and takes refuge with her parents.
"Since my marriage, seven years ago now," a woman
declared in a Court of Law, " not a day passes without my
hnsband picking a quarrel with me out of jealousy and
threatening me with violence. He told me once, C I am
going to buy a brace of pistols, and hang them by the
bedside; I shall kill you and myself afterwards.'" —
Another jealous husband used to keep a great Arab knife
under the mattress of the bed where he lay with his wife.
The latter, driven to desperation by these terrible threats,
ended by going back to her parents. The husband went
after her, and displayed so much regret and affection that
she was touched and returned once more to her married
home. But the former scenes of jealous fury having very
soon broken out again, the woman lost patience and
petitioned for a judicial separation. While the suit was still
in progress, the husband killed her in a fit of resentment.
In another case a poor wife who had been insulted and
beaten by her jealous husband at last took refuge in a
neighbour's house, to escape his cruelties. The husband
attempted to force the door in order to get his wife back,
but finding himself unable to do so, he set fire to the
house, declaring he meant to have her dead or alive. La
Fontaine cites with a rather childish degree of admiration
the similar case of a lover,
44 Qui brûla sa maison pour embrasser sa dame . . .
J'aime assez cet emportement,
Le conte m'en a plu toujours infiniment ;
Il est bien d'une âme espagnole
Et plus grande encore que folle." '
1 " Who burned down his house in order to embrace his lady fair. ... I
144 JEALOUSY,
There is no degree of violence jealousy does not make
men commit. A large number of women are horribly
ill-used by jealous husbands and lovers ; they are kicked
and cuffed on the face, belly and legs, their teeth broken
and their earrings smashed. When justice holds an
enquiry and the woman's body is examined who has been
beaten by her jealous husband or lover, it is often found
black and blue all over with blows. When these jealous
brutes are striking their victims, they forbid them to
scream out or make any complaint, and use any cries or
protests they may make as a pretext for further violence.
Many women are afraid to complain, and if the neigh-
bours notice the marks of blows on their face, they invent
various excuses to account for them. Some, tired out
with being for ever beaten, commit suicide along with
their children ; only a short time since the body of a
young woman was recovered from the Seine, and her
little girl rescued alive, whom she had dragged in along
with her. The following letter was found on her: "My
dear parents, since the day I was married, I have never
been happy ; every day I am beaten. I cannot bear the
life any longer. It is very wretched to be forced to kill
myself along with my little Marie."
When a criminal from jealousy is brought before the
Correctional or Assize Court, we sometimes hear counsel
attempting to disprove the fact of the jealousy, on the
ground that the victim was of unblemished conduct and
afforded the accused no motive for the feeling. But the
entire absence of motive is no reason for denying the
existence of jealousy. A woman's virtue is no safeguard
against suspicion ; a husband may be jealous of the
most virtuous wife. A husband of fifty-nine, intensely
jealous of his wife, who herself was fifty-one and had borne
him ten children, stabbed her in fifteen places with a
dagger, though she had never given him the slightest
cause for jealousy.— The jealous husband is always corn-
like his ardour well, and the tale has always pleased me vastly ; 'tis a true
Spanish soul, great-hearted more than mad."
JEALOUSY. 145
plaining of his wife's indifference ; even when he is loved,
he does not believe he is, and suspects his wife's fidelity
to him on the most trivial pretext. A young woman who
had already been shot at several times by her husband,
told the examining magistrate she had married her
husband for love, but that on the wedding night, having
felt some hesitation about yielding to his wishes, she had
awakened his suspicions and that from that time forth
she had been subjected to his brutality.
The husband who experiences doubts as to his being
really the father of his children, suffers such distress of
mind that he is quite capable of planning to escape his
pain by death ; " All I wish," wrote a husband to his wife,
before putting an end to his own life, is for you to be
happy, as well as the child that bears my name, but about
whose paternity I am not so sure. I love it all the same,
but I have neither strength nor courage to rear it." In
other cases a jealous husband will kill his pregnant wife,
to get rid of the child that is to be born. In i860, in
the arrondissement of Digne, a husband lying in bed by
his wife who was with child, got up, seized a gun, fired
at her point blank and killed her. At the same date, at
Draguignan, a young husband of only twenty-two fired
at his pregnant wife and his mother-in-law, who were
seated on the threshold at the door of their house. The
wife fell wounded and gave birth to a still-born child, the
mother was not hit, but the son-in-law furious at having
missed his aim endeavoured to beat out her brains with
the butt end.
Not that jealousy is confined to the fear of losing the
physical possession of the beloved object I do not
believe it is true to say, "we should readily forgive the
woman we love a thousand adulterous impulses, always
provided they have not been carried to accomplishment." l
He would be a person of little delicacy of feeling who
should be content with his physical possession, but quite in-
different to his possession of the heart. Jealousy is at one
1 A. Dumas fi/s t Affaire CUmenceau, p. 142.
146 JEALOUSY.
and the same time physical and moral, it extends to the
possession of a wife or mistress's thoughts no less than
to the mere possession of her body. However, men do not
all feel jealousy in the same way. In some, a small
minority, it is more moral than physical ; in others it is
rather physical than moral. Moral jealousy may lead
to suicide, but not to murder. Here is an instance. A
man of thirty once was married to a school teacher, whom
he loved passionately ; without suspecting his wife's
behaviour, he did not believe she loved him and thought
another man possessed her heart. The idea caused him
such intense suffering that he ended by blowing out his
brains. This example shows that jealousy is not confined
solely to the dread of losing the physical possession of a
woman, and that the mere doubt of continuing to hold
her affection may drive into suicide a husband who yet
has undisturbed physical possession. I have myself noted
such delicacy of feeling in a plain workman, a leather-
dresser. The man in his early days, before he was married,
had been guilty of a misdemeanour for which he had been
tried and convicted ; this fact he concealed from his wife,
whom he loved to distraction. However the latter at last
found it out and was deeply chagrined by the knowledge.
Hereupon the husband, fearing he had lost her love, killed
himself with a revolver shot in the head.
It is physical jealousy that is responsible for acts of
violence against others. Nay ! more, the character of this
jealousy often shows itself in the very nature of the acts
committed. A husband, after strangling his wife, burned
her sexual parts. Another individual who was brought
before the Courts, wishing to revenge himself on a girl
who would not listen to his suit, enticed her into a trap,
lifted up her petticoats and threw a corrosive fluid over
the lower parts of her abdomen. In his Affaire Clemenceau,
Dumas fils makes the husband conceive the notion of
punishing the lover in the part where he had sinned. 1 The
1 Valerius Maximus cites instances of two Roman husbands who mutilated
the partners of their wives' adultery, Bk. VI. ch. i. no. 13. — Horace mentions
JEALOUSY. I47
very same vengeance which the Canon Fulbert practised
on Abelard, was carried out a few years since in the
arrondissement of Brignoles. By a refinement of cruelty
the husband forced his wife by threats of death to perform
the amputation on her lover with her own hands. In the
Fenayrou case again the husband compelled his wife to
take part in his revenge ; Mme. Fenayrou stated that her
husband, when informed of her infidelity, told her : " I will
forgive you on one condition only, viz., that you help me
in my vengeance ; if not I shall kill you, your children
and you." These threats he repeated every day ; at last
terrified and desperate, I consented " to save my children's
lives." After the lover's murder, her husband returned her
wedding wreath and ring, which he had taken from her,
telling her, " all is now forgotten." More recently a young
Provençal woman, thirsting for vengeance on her lover
who was giving her up in order to marry, gave him a last
assignation, and while they were together performed an
amputation on him with a razor that made him incapable
of marriage.
Moreover the circumstances under which the jealous
person strikes his victim, sometimes reveal his state
of mind and feeling; he kills his mistress after giving
her a last assignation, after passing the night with her.
Tacitus in the Annals (Bk. xviii. § 46) relates one of these
dramas of love and jealousy, which are by no means un-
common in our own day. Octavius Sagitta, madly in love
with a married lady named Pontia, bought her favours
and later on the determination of the husband's rights.
But, once free, Pontia being attracted by the allurements
of another and richer match, refused her hand to Sagitta.
The latter wept tears of despair and disappointment and
threatened the false woman with every punishment ; finally
he asked and obtained the favour of passing some hours
by her side. Then, after giving her proof of his love, seized
similar cases, Sects. 1, 2. — The ancient Hindus and ancient Egyptians had
these guilty of seducing women mutilated. Manu. viii. 352 ; Diodorus
Sialics, Bk. I. § 78.
I48 JEALOUSY.
with a sudden fit of jealousy, he stabbed her to death with
a dagger to prevent her ever belonging to another. — Some
years since, in Provence, a young woman of twenty killed
her lover under almost identical circumstances, because he
was contemplating breaking off his liaison with her, in
order to marry. Masking her anger, she asked for a
final meeting, which was granted her. The pair of lovers
spent the night together. Early next morning, while the
man was still asleep, his mistress struck a dagger into his
body, exclaiming as she did so : " Mine, or the tomb's ! n
Similar crimes are committed by lovers, who strangle their
mistress, that they may suffer from no more doubts about
their fidelity. It is the same sentiment Racine gives to
Mithridate :
" Tu sais combien de fois ses jalouses tendresses
Ont pris soin d'assurer la mort de ses maîtresses." l
The police, especially at Paris, occasionally find women
of pleasure strangled in bed, these crimes having for
motives either theft or jealousy. A child of eleven, sleep-
ing in a room next to that where his mother was spending
the night with a lover, one night heard the death-rattle in
the poor woman's throat ; he got out of bed and saw the
lover seated on the bed, strangling his mistress out of
jealousy. The murderer seeing himself surprised, rushed
upon the boy, carried him back into his own room, locked
him in, and took to flight. Next day the woman was
discovered dead by strangulation. — I myself heard a girl
who had killed her lover, much older than herself, relate
how the latter had made her promise under oath to consent
to a surgical operation on the day when, by reason of
advancing years he should no longer be able to continue
his relations with her. " You are much younger than my-
self, dear ! " he had told her ; " You will still be young
when I am an old man, and I shall be jealous. Give me
your oath then, you will never be another's. I know you
1 "You know how many times his jealous fondness has taken good care to
assure the death of his mistresses."
JEALOUSY. 149
will keep your word ; promise me to submit to an operation
that will destroy the woman in you."
The history of Abelard offers an interesting case of
jealousy and its workings. After undergoing the mutila-
tion, he was left a prey to intense jealousy. Fearing
Héloïse's beauty and her habit of love should make her seek,
or find unsought, a second lover, he made every endeavour
to separate her from the world by giving her to God. He
urged upon her that decorum required her to retire to a
Nunnery to escape the world's curiosity, and found no
peace till he had succeeded in persuading her to enter a
religious house and bind her lips by vows — a consumma-
tion he hurried on by every means in his power. It was
only when he saw his precious treasure behind the lofty
walls of the convent and its barred doors that he adopted
in his turn the monastic life, having taken good care to
remain free so long as Héloïse was the same.
The man who marries a widow or a divorced woman
is exposed to the risk of feeling retrospective jealousy
in regard to the former husband, his pain arising from
the thought of his wife having once belonged to another.
In fact he is jealous of her past life. Her exclusive
possession in the present and the future is not enough
for him ; he would like the same exclusive possession to
have held good in the past likewise. It is no uncommon
thing to see workmen and farm hands marrying young
women who have been seduced by some other man
and who have had a child by him. Nor is it out of
generosity, or from any wish to conform to the ideas of
Mme. Aubry y that they marry them. More attracted by
the dowry than sensible to the point of honour, they
think themselves safe against any possible feeling of
jealousy; yet often after marriage this sentiment awakes
into life. The husband, exasperated by the thought of
the past, cannot look without indignation at the child
that is not his and is constantly reminding him of the
odious incident of former days. I find in the official
account of a judicial case the following declaration by
1 50 JEALOUSY.
a woman suffering from wounds inflicted by her jealous
husband, who afterwards committed suicide: "Jealousy
made my husband completely lose his head. Not long
before I had had my two children fetched from the
country; they are not his, but he had adopted them
when he married me last year. Their being there re-
doubled his retrospective jealousy. To-day on his rising
at 5 o'clock he remained standing by my bedside, caressing
my face and hair. All of a sudden, happening to stretch
out my arm, I touched something cold ; it was a revolver.
Before I could grasp hold of it, my husband fired two
shots at me, then turning the weapon against his own
body, killed himself."
This sort of retrospective jealousy on the part of the
husband with regard to the child of a former husband or
previous lover will sometimes culminate in the murder of
the child by the husband in complicity with the mother.
The child becomes the cause of incessant quarrels between
the pair ; and the mother comes at last to leave off loving
a being that, however involuntarily, makes her suffer so
much. Little by little she goes from indifference to dis-
like and joins in the hatred her husband feels against the
child out of jealousy.
Again marriage with a former mistress is frequently
troubled with scenes of jealousy, for the husband, remem-r
bering the light behaviour of the mistress, cannot help
doubts as to the firm foundation of the wife's virtue.
A young girl courted by a jealous lover, when she sees
the latter gloomy and preoccupied or else furiously
angry and offended at quite innocent words and actions
on her part, does not take the threats he launches at her
seriously. But a married woman, having more experience
and therefore better realizing the gravity of the menaces of
a jealous husband, often has a presentiment of the fate
awaiting her. This she announces to her relations and
friends ; u my husband will kill me," she declares, " one day
I shall be found dead ; " and her prediction is justified by
the event.
JEALOUSY. I 5 I
A jealous man who has lost possession of a woman, or
fears to lose it, tormented by the thought of her lying in
another man's arms, becomes a downright madman ; he
openly utters threats of death against his rival, entirely
unable to control the violence of his words ; " I will cut his
belly open, I will tear his guts out," a husband screamed*
gnashing his teeth the while. Dr Lombroso, and before
him Dr Despine, have cited this absence of all prudence
as a proof of mental obliquity ; these men, they say, who
in their jealousy are entirely unable to restrain their passion
and publicly proclaim their purposes of revenge, are not
made like other folks. But surely these threats are easily
accounted for. The mouth speaks out of the fulness of the
heart ; few men and still fewer women can govern their
anger.
" Tu veux que je me taise et que je dissimule ;
Nérine, porte ailleurs ce conseil ridicule," l
cries Médée, a prey to jealousy and a thirst for vengeance,
incapable either of concealing or dissembling her fury.
No doubt a jealous man or woman who meditates violence,
would be acting more sagaciously if he went about his
preparations in secret ; but passion abhors anything like
prudence and reasonableness.
Passion having once reached its paroxysm, the jealous
man, drunk with vengeance, becomes insensible to scandal
or any other penalty that awaits him ; a veritable frenzy,
an absolute madness seizes him. A jealous husband
brandishing a dagger he meant to use on his wife, was
heard exclaiming he would kill her, kill her, if he had to
go to the hulks for it. Jealous husbands turn into frantic
madmen and go on slashing at their wife or rival till the
knife breaks in their hands. One husband gave his wife
twenty-four blows with a dagger. Another, after killing
his, cut up her body into little bits, the better to assuage
his vengeance. These jealous savages strike their victims
blow after blow on every part of the body, breast, head,
1 •• Yon ask me to be silent and dissemble my wrath ; Nérine, this is no
occasion for so insensate a demand. "
152 JEALOUSY.
arms, trunk, limbs. We see women receive ten, twelve,
fifteen, twenty, knife thrusts. A working-man of forty-six
after a scene of jealousy, seizes a knife and plunges it time
after time into his wife's breast, arms, legs, head, after
throwing her on the floor, then casts himself on the bed
and deals himself five blows in the region of the heart —
Another woman receives fifteen stabs with a dagger in the
back, left breast, right breast, shoulder, belly, wrists. Very
often a jealous husband will grasp his wife by the neck or
hair and deal her a first blow with his knife, while she is
still on her legs ; then on his victim dropping, he will kneel
on her body, gashing her with reiterated stabs.
When a jealous husband is for punishing the lover or
supposed lover of his wife, we see him provide himself with
several weapons, a gun and a dagger, or several guns and
several pistols ; he has never enough weapons to carry out
his murderous purpose with. Often, after emptying his
revolver, he throws himself upon his victim and strikes,
and strikes, till the weapon breaks in his hand. A
husband who had killed his wife's lover, said : " Yes ! I
fired off the six chambers of my revolver at her ; if there
had been a dozen, I should have emptied them all." One
prisoner, who had rushed knife in hand at his mistress,
who had deserted him, and had stabbed her in eighteen
places, said to the Court : " I laid in like a madman, I
struck till I could not lift my hand." The wrong done
him by an unfaithful wife or a successful rival being pro-
digious in his eyes, the jealous husband, intoxicated with
fury, cannot satisfy his craving vengeance except by
striking blow upon blow ; he would like to kill the
offender over and over again. It is not one death he
would make his rival suffer, but a thousand. "Though
she had had as many lives as drops of blood in her
body," Othello cries, "they would not have sufficed to
quench my thirst for vengeance." — " When Aubert fell at
my feet with his face to the ground, after the blow with a
hammer I had dealt him," Fenayrou states in his examina-
tion, " I turned him over and holding him under me, face
JEALOUSY. 153
to face, looking straight into his eyes, I said to him : ' You
miserable thief, you have robbed me of my honour, but I
have got you at last ! You have tortured my heart, and
your own heart shall pay for it ; " and so saying, I plunged
the blade of a sword-stick into his body near the heart,
turning it about to try and reach a mortal spot." — Other
jealous husbands recoil at the thought of murder, not out
of humanity, but in order that their victim, surviving his
wounds, may suffer more long-drawn agonies. One such
told his wife, before striking, " I did not give you life, and
I will not rob you of it, but I mean to maim you for life."
When a jealous man is in the paroxysm of his fury, woe
betide the relative or friend who is for intervening to
protect the victim ; the madman turns his anger upon him
at once. A daughter having endeavoured to save her
mother from the violence her father was going to offer her,
the latter began by striking his daughter twelve times with
a knife, and then threw himself on his wife and dealt her
fifteen slashing blows.
On being questioned after his arrest as to the crime he
has just committed, the jealous malefactor replies that he
was blinded by passion, that he was no longer master of
his actions, that he did not know what he was doing.
These explanations contain a large element of truth, — a
fact however which in no way destroys moral or penal
responsibility, though it may extenuate it. At the moment
of striking his frenzied blows, the offender has the frantic
look of a madman or a savage beast ; an eye-witness said
of a jealous husband who had just fired at his wife, "he
looked like a wild cat." Moreover observation shows that
the man whom jealousy makes a murderer is marked by
a congested condition of the brain, a blood-red face and
«yes starting out of his head. He is described as seeing
red, for he is blinded by excess of blood. An eye-witness
said, describing a husband who had just killed his wife
and afterwards attempted suicide : " His face was purple ;
you would have thought he had a stroke of apoplexy."
Ora tument ira, nigrescunt sanguine venae (" The face is
1 54 JEALOUSY.
swollen with rage, the veins show dark with blood "X
writes Ovid. In another case, a spectator spoke thus of
the murderer : " His face was extraordinarily red, in such
a state as I had never seen before." Another added
further : " The blood had so run to his face, he could not
see; the blood blinded him." — In women under the in-
fluence of jealousy, on the contrary, we do not remark the
same physiological phenomena ; they are pale rather than
red, all a-tremble, and the eyes especially bright. Some
women, after firing a couple of shots from a revolver,
swoon away, while others are seized with a fit of tremb-
ling. A girl who had just fired off two chambers of a
revolver at her lover came all pale and trembling to ask a
neighbour for a drink of water ; so agitated was she, they
had to hold the glass to her lips.
The man who has killed the woman he loves out of
jealousy is happy just at first at having satisfied his anger,
but very soon he bursts out sobbing and crying, " Wretch
that I am ! I have killed the woman I loved ! " — A husband
who had just murdered from this motive the wife he
adored, when arrested and taken to the police office, spent
his time in weeping and lamenting, and covering with
kisses his victim's photograph, which he had drawn from
his pocket. — Another jealous husband, who had struck the
most furious and savage blows at his wife, presently threw
himself on her dead body, weeping and crying out in
despair. — These instances, which I could readily multiply»
show how true the picture is which Shakespeare has
drawn of jealousy in the case of Othello, who fondly
kisses Desdemona before smothering her. The dramas of
the great poets of the world are but reproductions of the
tragedies of the Courts of Law. I read in the report of a
criminal trial how a jealous husband, after firing five shots
with a revolver at his wife, without heeding the supplica-
tions of his victim, who besought him to spare the mother
of his children, afterwards overwhelmed her with marks of
tenderness and led her to an inn, where her wounds might;
be attended to.
JEALOUSY. I55
In the majority of cases, the jealous husband makes
no effort to escape, but surrenders himself as a prisoner r
saying to the police at the gendarmerie, " I come to give
myself up ; I have just killed my wife." Still I have
known a case where the husband denied his guilt and
declared his wife had committed suicide; but the state-
ment was in direct contradiction to the medical evidence,
as well as discredited by the affirmation of a witness who
had heard the wife cry out, " I am killed."
When the murderer from jealousy does not give himself
up to justice, he very often puts an end to his own life.
This is what Othello does, who dies kissing Desdemona
whom he has just murdered ; " I gave you a kiss before
killing you," he cries ; " now that I kill myself, I cannot,
no ! I cannot refrain from dying with my lips on yours."
— The murder of Zaïre is followed by the suicide of
Orosmane. After having Pyrrhus put to death, Hermione
throws herself on his corpse and kills herself; Py lades
tells Oreste how he has seen her
" Un poignard à la main sur Pyrrhus se comber,
Lever les yeux au ciel, se frapper et tomber." l
Nor is remorse the only motive that impels the man
whom jealousy makes a murderer to commit suicide
afterwards. Apart from the wish he entertains to escape
justice, he puts an end to himself, that he may no more
be separated from the one he loves ; she being dead, he
longs to die too. On the other hand, if she survive her
wounds, he wishes also to live. As the by-standers were
hurrying to snatch her revolver from the hand of a woman
who had just fired at her lover out of jealousy, but had
missed her aim, she answered instantly : " Nay ! Never
fear, I shall not kill myself, as I have killed him."
In these cases the suicide of the murderer follows
immediately on his victims death ; it is a suicide of
overmastering impulse. But in other cases, the suicide
1 "A dagger in her hand bend o'er Pyrrhus, raise her eyes to heaven,
then strike the blow and fall."
156 JEALOUSY.
is as much premeditated as the murder. Determined
to avenge her wrongs, the jealous woman forms the
deliberate design of killing herself, after doing the same
to her false lover;
" De ma sanglante mort ta mort sera suivie," *
declares Roxane. — A woman who had shot her lover,
said under examination, " I wanted to kill him, but I was
no less anxious to be rid of my own life."
Very frequently also the idea of suicide will arise in
the mind of a victim of jealousy before that of murder;
he is so unhappy he turns his thoughts to death, but
wishes not to die alone. " I am going to die," said one
such, but first I mean to kill her, I do not choose she
should survive me, and as I cannot be happy with her,
I must sleep the eternjd sleep along with her." — " When
I bought this revolver, it was with the intention of
committing suicide," said another at his trial, u but before
that I wanted to kill my mistress; I was too unhappy
for anything." — Yet another told the same tale, " I long
to die, but I mean her to die first."
The lover of a married woman may suffer so greatly
from the necessity of sharing with the legitimate husband
as to prefer suicide, and in that case he will be moved
not to make the woman die along with him, but rather
to kill the husband before putting an end to himself.
I have myself noted an instance of the sort. A witness
said, speaking of a jealous lover who before killing him-
self, had tried to murder his mistress's husband, "the
fact is he was tired of life." — Again, the husband who is
a prey to jealousy and unhappiness, may be seized with
a disgust for existence and turn his thoughts to suicide as
a relief, but unable to resign himself to the idea of his
wife surviving him, he kills her first and himself afterwards.
A jealous husband who had failed in the attempt on his
own life, after having killed his wife, said : " My wife
never loved me ; I thought it best we should both of us
1 "My bloody death will be followed by yours."
JEALOUSY. I57
die together ; I fired two shots with a revolver at her and
three at myself." — Nay! a jealous husband may actually
push his egoism so far as to kill his wife, if he himself
falls ill and thinks he is going to die. In 1895, at the
Assize Court of the Alpes Maritimes, a prisoner was tried,
who being excessively jealous of his mistress and knowing
himself to be seriously ill, said to her : " I am attacked by
mortal sickness, but before I die, I shall kill you ; " and
a few days afterwards he actually did so. — A jealous lover
who murders his mistress, and then attempts his own
death, will sometimes pretend he only killed her at her
own desire ; he declares it to have been a double suicide,
in fact, whereas it was really a case of murder and suicide.
— Other instances occur where jealous husbands or lovers,
who have been unsuccessful in business, being at the end
of their resources and seeing ruin staring them in the face,
kill themselves and their wife or mistress at the same
time, that they may not leave them behind them
unprotected. — Military men also, sick of the service
and attacked by home-sickness, sometimes kill them-
selves and persuade their mistress to die along with
them.
In July 1895 at Paris an electrician tried to kill his
mistress from jealousy and afterwards committed suicide.
He left letters behind him intended to lead to the belief
of a double suicide : "We made up our minds long ago,
Louise and I t we wished to marry one another, but her
father is opposed to the match, and once said he would
sooner see her dead than married to me ; his wish is about
to be accomplished. How is it all to end ? I cannot tell,
for Louise does not possess the courage to take her own
life, and / cannot kill the woman I love so madly." Some
days later, he adds : " Louise s father having seen us
together, made a terrible scene, and Louise told me she
dared not go with me any more ; so at last we must make
an end." He struck his mistress several blows with a
dagger in the breast and body, then shot himself in the
mouth with a revolver. The neighbours, on running to
1 58 JEALOUSY.
the spot, found the man dead, but the woman still breath-
ing. She was able, before expiring, to relate how her
lover had struck her from motives of jealousy, adding that
she had made all the resistance she possibly could. A
witness confirmed her statement, declaring he had heard
cries of help ! murder !
A jealous woman on the other hand who falls ill and
allows thoughts of suicide to master her, though she
endeavours to induce her husband to share them, does
not as a rule succeed, and lacking the courage to kill him,
confines herself to simple suicide. " Over and over again
in the course of her illness," says one husband, " my wife
expressed the intention of committing suicide and proposed
that I should tie us both up and that we should then
submit to death by charcoal fumes. I agreed to this, in
order to calm her, and for the time being she was satisfied.
Then later on I talked her out of the scheme. However,
yesterday morning, being seized afresh by her suicidal
notions, and perceiving she could not induce me to die
with her, she put an end to her life."
When jealousy arises between friends or relations, it
straightway transforms them into implacable foes. In
i860, in the neighbourhood of Draguignan, two farmers
lived together in the utmost friendship ; they were always
together, and each of the pair had made a will in the
other's favour. Unfortunately they both fell in love with
the same person. One of them won the fair one's favours
and told his friend, who for his part had concealed his
passion. The latter, maddened by the revelation and a
prey to a frenzy of jealousy, proceeded to denounce his
friend to the young woman's father, in order to put an end
to the liaison. The other, on hearing of this piece of
treachery, was violently angry and determined to avenge
himself first and then commit suicide. He lay in wait for
his former friend in the fields and stabbed him with a ^
knife ; this done, he swallowed poison, and death not ^
coming quick enough, wounded himself mortally in the^^
lower part of the body.
JEALOUSY. 1 59
On learning the fact that his son Xiphares is loved by
Monime, Mithridate cries in a passion of wrath :
" Ah ! fils ingrat, tu vas me répondre pour tous ;
Tu périras î ..." l
Nor is it on the boards only that suchlike scenes of
jealousy occur between father and son, who are in love
with the same individual, ending either in the murder of
the son by the father, or in that of the woman. I have
myself known a father, who was jealous of his own son,
fire a pistol shot at the latter. In another case, a certain
R attempted to kill a young girl he was violently in
love with, and whom his son was equally attached to.
The girl, who was merely wounded, gave the following
account before the examining magistrate : " R told
me he loved me with all his might, that in his eyes I was
the most perfect woman in the world, that he had laid hands
upon the photograph of myself I had given his daughter,
my friend, and covered it with kisses every day, that he
loved me madly, wildly, though he knew quite well he
ought to do nothing of the kind. On hearing these words,
I was so much agitated I began to tremble ; he then came
close to me as if to reassure me, but in reality to kiss
me." This father who was so jealous of his son even grew
jealous of the friendship existing between the girl he
loved and his own daughter, whom he treated with such
violence of language that she thought seriously at one
time of drowning herself. He once more renewed his
declarations of passionate love to the young woman he
Was enamoured of, and finally seeing she remained in-
sensible to his ardour, because she loved his son, he fired
^ pistol shot at her. The Assize Court condemned him to
*«i years' imprisonment.
The main part of the observations I have made as to
«"nasculine jealousy are equally applicable to feminine. It
*inay even be said that women are even more jealous than
*men. More even than vanity, more than love of dress,
1 " Ah ! ungrateful boy, you shall answer for all ; you shall die !.. ."
IÔO JEALOUSY.
more than the love of mastery, jealousy is the dominant
characteristic of feminine human nature. Only, in women
jealousy is less often physical than it is with men. On the
other hand, there is still more self-love in feminine jealousy
than in masculine. Unable in the majority of cases to
pursue either honour or power, knowledge or wealth, they
set their pride and pleasure on pleasing, on making them-
selves loved, concentrating every thought on love. * Two
pretty women may scarce be friends," said the great
preacher Fléchier. Steadfast friendship, frequent enough
between men, is rare among women ; they are too jealous
of each other. If jealousy is the main-spring of Racine's
Tragedies, this is merely because Racine applied to the
stage the observations he had made with regard to the
women of the Court of Louis XIV. Hermione is jealous
of Andromaque, Roxane is jealous of Atalide, Phèdre is
jealous of Aricie, precisely as Mlle, de La Vallière is
jealous of Mme. de Montespan, Mme. de Montespan
jealous of Mlle, de Fontanges, and so on and so on.
There is little difference between the jealousy of great
ladies and that of women of commoner clay. True, the
latter come more readily to blows and open insult; but
these battles royal and fierce bursts of passion are not
unknown in the history even of princesses and queens.
Elizabeth of England, learning that Miss Bridges was
engaged in an intrigue with the Earl of Essex with whom
Her Majesty was deeply smitten, had her summoned before
her, overwhelmed her with reproaches and actually struck
her. 1 The same queen, jealous of Lady Howard, whom
she saw dressed out in a magnificent costume, made her
take it off. — The daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, Queen
Christina of Sweden, the monarch who called Descartes
to her side and to whom Pascal dedicated his arithmetical
machine, was not a whit less violent than the work-girl
of to-day who throws vitriol in her lover's eyes. It is
well known how she had her former favourite Monaldeschi
put to death, because he had preferred a rival to herself; ,
1 M. La Ferrière, Deux Drama cf amour, p. 253.
JEALOUSY. l6l
she laughed while they were cutting his throat before her
eyes, and when Mazarin urged her not to come to Paris
after the murder, she replied : " As for the action I have
taken concerning Monaldeschi, I tell you, if I had not
done as I have, I should not go to rest to-night with-
out doing it, nor have I any reason to repent of my
proceedings."
These rivalries between women find expression in
mutual recriminations, fisticuffs, pistol shots or vitriol
throwing. Sometimes the fury animating two rivals is so
great it is impossible to bring them face to face before
the Juge d'instruction or in Court. A married woman, who
had been wounded by her husband's mistress, had an
attack of fever on hearing that the Juge d'instruction was
going to confront her with her rival. When a rivalry
arises between a married woman and her husband's
mistress, it is generally the former who, strong in her
sense of right, strikes her unworthy rival. At the same
time it is no uncommon thing to see the mistress, carried
away by jealousy, seeking a quarrel with the lawful
wife and telling her: "One or other of us is evidently
superfluous."
It is the jealousy she feels with regard to her husband's
first wife which so frequently makes the step-mother harsh
and cruel towards the children of the previous marriage.
The sight of these motherless beings, which should of
rights inspire her with a tender compassion, irritates her
as recalling the memory of one who before her time held
so large a place in her husband's affections.
44 Des droits de ses enfants une mère jalouse
Pardonne rarement aux fils d'une autre épouse." l
In fact the hatred the cruel step-mother exhibits towards
Vhe children of the first marriage is really only jealousy
against the first wife. The same jealous dislike is also felt
Sometimes by men towards the first husband of a widow
1 "Jealous of her children's rights, a mother seldom forgives the sons of
another wife."
1 62 JEALOUSY.
they have married, and the offspring of the earlier marriage.
Pyrrhus experiences it towards the son of Andromaque,
fearing Astyanax may too vividly recall the dead Hector,
and Andromaque admire in the boy " his eyes, his mouth,
and precocious signs of his gallantry." This jealousy on
the part of the step-mother often finds expression in acts
of cruelty. I will quote only one example, taken from a
recent judicial case ; a step-mother strangled her husband's
twelve-year-old daughter by a former marriage, and threw
the body into a well. — Sometimes children resort to suicide
to escape the brutality of their step-mother. I have even
noted the suicide of a young man of twenty, who hanged
himself, to avoid witnessing the ill-treatment his step-
mother practised on his younger brother. — If a step-mother
thus tortures the children of her husband's first marriage
it is because jealousy tortures her, driving her sometimes
even to the point of suicide. One man, who had been left
a widower with a little girl, had placed his child in an
educational establishment and married a second time.
When subsequently the girl, on the completion of her
education, returned to her father's home, tall, pretty and
the image of her dead mother, the new wife who had
replaced the latter, was so filled with jealousy that in a
spasm of fury she swallowed a phial of laudanum.
From the most trivial motives, women of a nervous
temperament, a prey to jealousy, take poison, smother
themselves with charcoal fumes, throw themselves out of
window, because their husband or lover, as the case may
be, has come home late, because he seems careless of their
love, because he refuses a kiss, or praises another woman,
and the like. I have myself known suicides due to every
one of these childish grievances. A jealous woman's
imagination exaggerates every trifle, puts an unnatural
construction on every incident, invents imaginary wrongs
to torment herself with, provokes fits of senseless despair
or baseless anger. The frequent quarrels that break out in
households and end in the suicide of the wife, generally owe
their origin to jealousy. After a more than usually violenta
JEALOUSY, 1 63
-scene, the jealous woman opens a window, climbs over a
balcony railing, and hurls herself into space, or else sets
about her preparations for a death by charcoal fumes, after
writing to her husband, " As we cannot get on together any
longer, farewell ! do not be angry with me. It has to be."
A jealous woman longs to absorb her husband's every
thought ; she cannot witness without chagrin the affection he
bears his friends, — they rob her of a share of the heart she
would have entirely her own. The wife of a man of letters
may feel jealousy towards his books, which deprive her of
a part of his time, and provide him with a happiness
independent of her ; the books are rivals, — she will en-
deavour to draw her husband from his studies, to bring
him nearer to herself, to have him all her own. A jealous
wife cannot bear her husband to experience a single joy
she does not share, she hates to share his heart and his
time with anybody or anything. Jealousy of the kind
is no sign of a tender, loving, passionate heart, it is but
a craving of her pride and spirit of domination ; to fill her
husband's thoughts so that he neglects his friends and his
work, to keep him dominated, subjugated, absorbed by
his love for her, is a delightful satisfaction to her self-love.
A woman may also be jealous of her husband's good looks,
not solely because it exposes him to the chance of other
women being taken with him, but because it gives him a
superiority over her, which humiliates her, and is liable to
make him cold and disdainful towards her. A woman
who felt this jealousy of her husband, said on his being
attacked by small-pox : " I hope with all my heart he may
be disfigured ; he was too handsome altogether."
More particularly in the case of a wife who is older
than her husband and who is now getting on in years, does
jealousy assume an exceptional degree of intensity. To
^ee her hair whitening, her face wrinkling, her eyes growing
«**ui and her teeth failing, while her husband still possesses
J*i^ dark locks, fresh complexion, bright eyes and good
*^«th, and is quite able still to charm other women, gives
-"^t atrocious pain. If to this is added the desertion of
1 64 JEALOUSY.
her husband or merely the dread of this, which alone is
sufficient to cause her horrid suffering, we see her, under
the stimulus of an excessive and abnormal nervous excite-
ment, now beg and pray her husband on her knees not
to forsake her, now threaten to kill him first, and herself
afterwards. Often these scenes of jealousy end in suicide
or else the murder of the husband and the suicide of the
wife. The woman buys a revolver, without precisely
knowing what she means to do with it ; then one day,
after yet another scene, she turns the weapon against
herself or else against her husband.
In periods of Revolution, while men are led by ambi-
tion to denounce those whose place they covet, women
denounce other women of whom they are jealous. Under
the Terror jealousy laid low, as the result of treacherous
denunciations, more than one woman's head on the
scaffold ; and the authoress of the denunciation, the better
to relish her vengeance, never failed to take her place in
the first row to enjoy her rival's punishment.
There are mothers who are jealous of the youth and
beauty of their own daughters, sisters, and sisters-in-law
are jealous of each other. The Memoirs of Mlle, de
Rémusat tell us how jealous the sisters of Napoleon I.
were of Josephine. The mother who makes a match
for her son is often jealous of her daughter-in-law. Nay,
more ! there are mothers who out of selfishness and pride,
would fain monopolize all their children's love and are
jealous of the affection they display towards other relatives
or even towards their father. Lastly, but more excep-
tionally, a woman may push her jealousy so far as to
be angry at seeing her husband showing more attention
to her children than to herself. I have even known
an instance of suicide proceeding from such a motive;
a woman who thought her husband did not love her
enough, noticing that at table he would pass a dish to
his son before offering it to her, cried out in a burst of
senseless jealousy, " Enough of this ! " — and opening the
window of the room sprang out into space.
JEALOUSY. 165
Not that the women who complain the most bitterly of not
being loved are themselves such as love the most ardently.
Not only may there be in feminine jealousy more of
egotism and self-love than of true passion, but there may
actually be jealousy without love at all. Speaking of
Count Almaviva, a libertine from sheer ennui and jealous
out of mere vanity, Suzanne says to the Countess : " But
why so much jealousy ? " — " As with all husbands, my dear,
simply out of pride," answers the Countess. The same
observation applies, in very many cases, to female jealousy.
A woman, though she cares little for her husband, does
not therefore the less desire to be loved. This love flatters
her vanity ; she is irritated and offended, if she has to
go without it, being robbed of it by another woman.
Women who deceive their husband, may yet kill him out
of jealousy. We give an instance A widow of forty
had relations with a young man, who however broke off
with her because he learnt she had not been faithful to
him ; wounded at the slight, she tried to poison him.
The young man taking his meals at an hotel along with
other boarders, she slipped unperceived into the kitchen,
and managed to throw a large quantity of arsenic into
the pot-au-feu. Five persons suffered from vomiting in
consequence. Then constituting herself nurse of the
young man. who was one of the invalids, she attempted
to .give him a poisoned cooling-draught
Jealousy may break out between father and son, mother
and daughters, and lead to these monstrous crimes.
Sons kill their father, daughters their mother, out of
jealousy. Some years since, the Assize Court of the
Bouches-du-Rhône tried the case of a young girl, who
had killed her mother from jealousy, her lover being an
-accomplice in the act. Yet this girl had been brought
up in a convent, where she had attracted attention by
1er peculiar piety. I found among the documents relat-
ing to the case a number of letters written from the
Convent, in which the school-girl in training there described
*^*e happiness she felt in hearing the Church music and
1 66 JEALOUSY.
witnessing the noble ceremonies of Religion. She had
even thought of taking the veil. The Lady Superior of
the convent where she had begun her religious noviciate
wrote in the following terms to her mother : " Marie loves
her dear father and her mother more than I can tell.
When she speaks of them, all her being burns with ardour.
. . . Oh ! my dearest Madam, assure M. B with all
confidence that Marie loves him fondly, and that nothing
but the Will of God is strong enough to extort such a
sacrifice from her. Tell him Our Lord is grateful to him
for having given him his daughter for bride. . . . You
are happy, most happy in never having suffered one im-
pure breath of the wicked world to stain this tender
flower, which has touched the sacred heart of Jesus. And
indeed he loves his little Marie well and makes her very
happy ; she feels never a shadow of regret for having
given up all that young girls desire and hope."
Some months later, having left the convent at her
parents' order, she became the mistress of her mother's
former lover. Jealous of the latter, she conceived a
violent hatred of her. The mother having fallen ill, she
longed for her death ; then, on her recovery, she plotted
with her lover to kill her, jealousy turning her into a
parricide. Her lover asked her hand in marriage, and
was refused ; furious at this, he said to the girl : " Will
you be mine ? " — to which she replied, " Yes ! I will." —
" Well, then ! only one way remains, we must get rid of
your mother." At first the girl made sundry objections,
but soon, dominated by the hatred inspired by her
jealousy of her mother, she agreed to the plan of murder.
" Feeling as I did the most ardent love for Léon," she
declared to the Juge d? instruction, " I experienced a fierce
passion of jealousy towards my mother." We reproduce
the account she herself gave of the murder : " Léon began
by striking her with his fists, and trying to strangle her r
but as she resisted, he was obliged to take a kitchen knife.
The creature would not die; she resisted fiercely am
pushed Léon away, even after she had received two knifi
JEALOUSY. 167
thrusts in the throat He struck her on the mouth and
broke two of her teeth ; then my mother having got
possession of the weapon, Léon called to me to fetch a
big cheese knife ; I got it and gave it him, and he plunged
it in her throat" Further examination revealed the fact
that, while the victim was struggling, her daughter had
kicked her ; and when she was dead, the accused had
trampled upon her body. The two lovers carried the
corpse down into the cellar and set to work to cut it into
pieces, to make it unrecognizable. They divided the four
limbs from the trunk, and attempted to cut off the head,
but without success. Next day they went and threw the
body into the sea. On coming back, they went to bed
and indulged in sexual intercourse. In a letter she wrote
to the Juge dinstruction, the accused added : " I cannot
account for my having done what I have, I who would
not have stayed by a dead person for all the wealth in
the world."
I am bound for the sake of completeness to say some-
thing of the horrible scenes of jealousy caused by fathers
who abuse their own daughters. It is a revolting subject,
yet I cannot pass it over in entire silence. There are
mothers who tremble when they see their husband kissing
their daughters. Some to save their children's honour,
actually give information to the law ; others, terrified by
the threats and violence of their husbands, do nothing to
prevent these monstrous acts, but suffer agonies of grief
at such a state of things. Among the many cases of
this kind I have had before me, I remember one father
who had abused his two daughters and had got them
with child. He would say, " I did not bring girls into
the world for other men to enjoy." The mother, who was
^ iv are of his abominable doings, dared not denounce him
to the police; she only made up her mind to do so when
s ^e saw him beginning attempts on the third daughter,
^'ho was now growing up. Another father told his two
<* blighters : "Though they should send me to the hulks
**>*" it, I am determined to give you each a child."
1 68 JEALOUSY.
These incestuous relations are often accompanied by
jealousy. A father, who had abused his daughter, was
seized with jealousy and endeavoured to get her shut up
in a Penitentiary, laying a false charge of immoral
conduct against her. — Another girl, a victim to her father's
lubricity, was forced in order to avoid exciting his jealousy,
to be always badly dressed, with her hair in slovenly
disorder; her father forbade her to pay the smallest
attention to her toilet. For fear she should attract the
attention of a young man, who came to ask her hand in
marriage, he kept her shut up indoors, prevented her
speaking to the neighbours or leaving the house to look
for work. Eventually however he agreed to her marrying,
on condition of her going on with her relations with
himself. But he became jealous of his son-in-law, and
compelled his daughter to come back to him, taking
her furniture away from her. — A father who abuses his
daughter and becomes jealous of her, invariably oppostik
her marrying. One father who had at last consented to
his daughter's marriage, forced her to submit to him on
her very wedding-day, immediately after she had put on
her wedding costume for the religious ceremony. In
another case, the accused was a retired gendarme, who
exceedingly jealous of his daughter whom he had abused,
had stabbed her with a knife. Some time previously, he
had wished to kill a young man who had given the girl
his arm for a walk. Among girls who are the victims of
these monstrous acts, but dare not complain, some suffer
so terribly they end in committing suicide. I have knompi
the case of one such who killed herself in despair along
with her mother, to escape these incestuous outrages. It
has been said that " every man has in his heart a sleeping
swine " ; and the swine often awakens with horrible results.
We may even go so far as to say there is no brute so foul
and cruel as to rival man in lubricity and cruelty. Fathers .
are found ready to procure abortion in their daughters, to*
strike them, to trample their bodies to bring about this
result. Nor are these monstrous passions only of modenr:
JEALOUSY. 169
date ; they have always existed. Jousse relates how a
President of Commission (" President aux Enquêtes ") of
the Parliament of Paris, Aimar Rauconnet, convicted of
incestuous intercourse with his own daughter, was confined
in the Bastille, where he committed suicide, foreseeing the
sentence of death to be pronounced upon him. De Thou,
who mentions the circumstance in his History (Bk. xxiii.),
says he was a man of much reading and deep learning.
Jealousy depending largely on temperament, and tem-
perament on climate, it is in the South, among the
people of Provence and Corsica, among Italians, Greeks
and Spaniards, that I have noted the most cruel and
outrageous crimes inspired by jealousy. Under a sky of
flame men's passions are fiercer than under one of ice.
Fiery love is more often than not but the outcome of
fiery suns. The heart is hotter in the South, because the
blood is hotter there ; Ut est genus Numidarum, in Venerem
prœups (" As is the race of the Numidians, headstrong in
^ passion "). Love is more ardent and sensual, and pari passu
» jealousy more violent, in Provence, in Italy, in Spain than
in Northern lands. Amongst Northern nations, imagina-
tion and day-dreams often play a greater part than the
senses. Jealousy and the point of honour form the stock-
in-trade of the Spanish stage, simply because these are the
most prevalent and the strongest emotions in Spain. To
fully understand the nature of jealousy among Southerners,
I propose to give a few instances borrowed from recent
trials.
In a comedy entitled "The Shorn Maid," Menander
**rirtgs on the scene a love-sick and jealous captain, who
c ^ts off his mistress's hair in a fit of jealousy. A certain
-M^tracia, brought up before the Assize Court of the
-**^>*iches-du-Rhône on a charge of murder, had practised
***^ same act of jealous violence on his wife, a woman of
Ur ^common beauty ; he cut off" her hair, and exposed her in
* ^tate of complete nudity at a window. In another fit of
-J^^Jousy he bit her in the face, tearing out her nose with
***** teeth.
1 70 JEALOUSY.
Some years since, at Marseilles, the sailors on board
a Greek ship, hearing shouts of pain coming from their
captain's cabin, hurried there to find him stretched on a
bed with a wound in the groin from which the intestines
protruded. His mistress had that moment stabbed him
with a knife, because in the course of the day he had
kissed a Greek woman. Often no more than this is needed
to rouse the jealous fury of a Provençal, an Italian or a
Greek woman. A woman of the South will punish her
lover in the most horrible way merely because she has
seen him talking to another ; for this reason alone quite
lately, at Marseilles, a woman poured a bottle of vitriol
over her lover, as he lay asleep, drenching him from head
to foot ; in spite of the cries of pain he uttered she went
on emptying the corrosive liquid onto his body to the last
drop.
In the neighbourhood of Toulon, a young married man»
by name S , being constrained to break with his mistress*
one R , killed her, that she might never be another
man's. The woman, who resided with her father, was on
her side passionately attached to her lover ; to use the ex-
pression of a witness in the case, she was infatuated with
him and was ready to tear out the eyes of any one who
should stand in the way of her love. Intensely jealous of
the lawful wife, she repeatedly provoked very animated
scenes with her. Outraged by her husband's faithlessness,
the wife complained to her father, beseeching him to put
a stop to it Deeply grieved at his daughter's sorrow, the
father conceived so fierce a hatred against his son-in-law's
mistress that, again to follow a witness's phrase, " his eyes
jumped out of his head " when he spoke of her. As the
result of his representations, he extracted a promise from
his son-in-law to break off the connection and restore to
his wife her peace of mind ; but still dreading a change of* 3
sentiment, he formed the plan of getting rid of the mistress ^^
during a walk by the sea, and proposed that his son-in -
law should join in the plot. The latter rejected the idea^^m
but promised, in order to make the rupture final, to leave^^
.JEALOUSY. 171
the country and take his wife with him ; later still, he
abandoned this design, being now firmly convinced his
mistress would follow him wherever he went. Hereupon
the father-in-law returned to the charge, and ended by
getting the other to see the necessity of killing the
mistress ; the lover acquiesced in the project, because he
wished, when breaking with her, to have the certainty she
would never belong to another man. To strike the blow
when she was in her father's house was plainly impossible ;
she must be enticed into the fields, into some lonely spot
Acting on his father-in-law's advice, S invented a
tale, promising his mistress he would elope with her at
night and quit his wife for ever. R , surprised at this
right about face, felt some suspicion just at first, but this
soon yielded to her love, and she made her preparations
for flight. One night, in the face of a terrible storm, she
left her father's house and joined her lover, who was
waiting for her. Fearing and suspecting nothing, proud
and happy to be flying with him, she allowed him to lead
her to a lonely place where the father-in-law was waiting,
concealed behind a rock. The instant he saw her, he
sprang upon her and stabbed her several times over, but
without killing her. The lover then joined in to help
him finish her. After a terrible struggle with the two
murderers, the woman fell dead, gashed with twenty-four
knife thrusts.
Here is the account of a murder due to jealousy as given
by the accused himself, who was blind. " Exasperated at
roy wife's ill conduct, I made up my mind to kill her ; I
bought a knife, after feeling it well to make sure it had a
^©od point. In the night I grasped my wife by the neck,
(«1^ was sleeping by my side), and planted the knife in
*^x- throat She only gave one cry, for she was only a
^^le wren. 1 I waited by the bedside for two hours, 2 to
. . A Provençal expression signifying anybody as small and frail as a little
The fact came out under examination that during these two hours the
***"<derer sat quietly smoking cigarettes.
1 72 JEALOUSY.
make sure she was dead, and as soon as I felt she was
cold, I came away here to give myself up."
When an Italian workman is bitten by jealousy, he seldom
fails to treat his rival or else the woman who has rejected
him to menaces of death of this kind : " I will tear your
skin off you, I will ! I will cut your throat open ! " — and
he does cut his victim's throat according to promise.
There are Italians who will out of sheer jealousy bleed
women like sheep, or kill a man as readily as drink a glass
of wine ; they have a habit of heating the blade of their
dagger red-hot in the fire, after rubbing it with a clove of
garlic, to give the steel a keener temper. One Barbtéri,
•deeply enamoured of a young woman whom hé wished to
make his wife, although she was ten years his senior and
was engaged to another man, threatened her with death ;
he showed a comrade a shoemaker's knife, telling him it
was poisoned, and saying in a few days' time he would be
the talk of the neighbourhood if the girl persisted in her
refusal. She was the daughter of an innkeeper and obliged
to talk to the travellers and boarders who frequented her
father's establishment ; yet the Italian would look at her
savagely whenever he saw her speaking to other young
men. " Some day or another I shall kill her," he would
say. — "Why! you're mad," a witness told him. — "You're
quite right," he answered ; yet a few days afterwards, he
had his knife sharpened and cut the poor girl's throat —
Another Italian, deeply in love with his brother's wife, fired
several shots at her with a revolver as she was putting her
children to bed ; he wounded her and killed one of the latter.
Murders arising out of amorous passion are frequent
among Italians, just as are political and anarchical
assassinations, and murders where gain is the object
According to the Statistics published by the Ministry
of Justice, there were in Italy in 1890, 3628 persons
accused of wilful murder and of inflicting blows and
injuries resulting in death; in 1891, 3944; in 1892,4408;
in 1893, 4336. Writers tell us that the progress of
civilization has brought about a decrease in crimes of
JEALOUSY. 1 7J
violence ; I fail to verify this decrease from the Italian
statistics.
If the Italian is guilty of a greater number of murders
from motives of jealousy than the man of other nationalities,.
it is not to the " energy " of his character we must attribute
this homicidal fury, but rather to the vindictiveness of his
temperament and his excessive excitability. An Italian
will often kill a man on the most trivial provocation ; to
avenge an insult, a witticism, a slighting remark, he will
strike a passer-by or a companion dead ; in different parts
of the country, he uses knife, razor, shoemaker's knife or
revolver. Three quarters of the murders and assassina-
tions tried before the Assize Courts of the Departments
of the Bouches-du-Rhône, Var, Alpes-Maritimes and
Basses-Alpes, are committed by Piedmontese, Tuscans
and Neapolitans. I have known Italians kill a passer-by
who merely asked them not to sing so loud in the street,
— kill an inn-keeper who turned them out of a drinking-
shop, — kill an awkward dancer who trod on their foot at
a ball, — kill a creditor who claimed payment of his debts,.
— kill a comrade who splashed them inadvertently with
mud, and so on. It is incredible to what a pitch the
Italian workman will carry his excitability. Quite lately
at Toulon a working baker — an Italian — was called a
•stale loaf" by a fellow-workman, with whom he had a
trifling disagreement ; two days afterwards, he shot him
with a revolver to avenge the taunt, and declared in his
examination that the insult he had received thoroughly
deserved the punishment he had exacted. I could quote
a hundred similar instances.
This fierce, murderous vindictiveness has always been
observed as an Italian characteristic, at all periods of
history. Most of the great artists of the Renaissance were
continually taunting each other and fighting it out with
fists and sticks and knives, for some dispute of the work-
room, some rivalry in love, sometimes for even slighter
caiisf* Caravaggio was for killing a cook because he had
sent him up a badly seasoned dish of artichokes. The
174 JEALOUSY,
Italian language has a special word to signify a violent
man, one who is ever ready to take up the knife ; " he is
called uonto di cotello, — " man of the knife."
The Spaniard, like the Italian, is quick to avenge him-
self on a rival or a woman of whom he is jealous, being
no less touchy and proud. Here is a recent instance of
Spanish excitability. Two workmen, shoemakers, one a
Frenchman, the other a Spaniard, were working together;
the Spaniard began to sing; the Frenchman criticized
him ; the Spaniard remarked that Spaniards were as good
singers as Frenchmen, and on his companion making an
uncivil retort, hurled his cobbler's knife at him, which
remained sticking in his side, so that the victim had to
pull it out himself. At his trial, on the judge asking him
why he had given his comrade a wound that might easily
have killed him, the Spaniard answered : " He treated me
with disrespect." When jealousy combines in a Spaniard
with a character of this proud, touchy sort, there is no act
of savage vengeance it may not lead him to commit.
Among the savage peoples of hot countries, jealousy on
the part of the man is so violent that women in some
cases disfigure themselves in order to be less liable to
rouse their husbands' jealousy, who may kill them in a
fit of passion. — In the East, the women are kept in con-
finement, and never go out without veils which hide the'
face, because the men are always suspicious of their fidelity.
The holy Legislator of the ancient Hindus "assigned to
women love of their bed, of sitting still and of fine clothes,
concupiscence, anger, bad inclinations, the wish to do evil
and perversity of temper." {Laws of Manu, ix. v. 17.)
So Manu would counsel the husband to watch his wife
" night and day ... in order to preserve his line," and to«
chastise her, whenever she committed any fault, " always
on the posterior portion of the body." (Laws of Manu—*
viii. v. 299, 300.)— The founder of the Mussulman Faitbfl
had likewise but a low opinion of feminine virtue ; he ask^=
•" whether we must count as God's child a being that grown-
up absorbed in embellishment and dress." (Koran, xliSF
JEALOUSY. 175
17.) In Eastern lands, men despise women, and keep
them confined to the house, where they are strictly watched
by eunuchs. It is notorious how common are dramas of
jealousy in the harems. Such a drama forms the subject
of Racine's Tragedy of Bajazet.
In Switzerland, on the contrary, murders proceeding from
jealousy are, like other crimes of amorous passion, of very
rare occurrence. Two years ago, when visiting the Gaol
of Lausanne, in which are confined the prisoners of the
whole of Canton Vaud, undergoing sentences of more than
a hundred days' detention, I found, out of 208 men and 20
women, only a single prisoner who had committed (fifteen
years before) a crime of passion ; this was a husband who
had killed his wife from jealousy. The Director of the
Prison told me that not a single case of feminine vengeance
had been known in the whole of Canton Vaud for a
number of years. — But every rule has its exception, and we
may occasionally find among Northern peoples tempera-
ments as passionate as any of the South. Christina of
Sweden, daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, known as the
"King of Snow," used to say of herself: " My impetuous
temperament has given me no less marked an inclination for
love than it has towards ambition." Two romantic writers
of the most passionate natures, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Mme. de Staël, belonged to Swiss families.
Jealousy is capable of inspiring the most cruel instincts
in a man of a hitherto good-natured and generous disposi-
tion. An honest working-man, who had strangled his
mistress out of jealousy, said to the Juge d'instruction in
*^e course of some reflexions on his past : " Till now
n °body has ever had anything to say against me, and
to-day I am a murderer ! This is what passion has made
°*~ me." — Othello was good-natured, loving and generous ;
^*^^sio says of him, " He had a noble heart." Ludovico
ac *«ds, breaking in :
" O thou Othello, that wert once so good,
Fall'n in the practice of a damned slave
What shall be said of thee ? "—
1 76 JEALOUSY.
to which Othello replies :
" Why, anything ;
A murderer, if you will." —
A good workman, and a man of excellent reputation» — a
shoemaker once more, brought to trial in February 1892
for the murder of his wife whom he had killed out of
jealousy, thus related the circumstances : " I struck my
wife a violent blow with my shoemaker's knife, as she
was sitting on a chair beside the bed and beginning to
undress. Holding her by the hair with one hand, I struck
her in the throat, from which a perfect torrent of blood
instantly spouted out The blow was so violent, my wife
could not utter a single word and fell from her chair on to
the ground, moving her arms and legs about." — The "Jug*
(f instruction " : " The doctor noticed the fact, and so did
we that your wife's neck had been forcibly constricted by
means of a scarf in which you had made a slip knot" — The
accused : " As my wife continued to move a great deal, in
spite of the enormous quantity of blood she was losing»
being half mad I conceived the idea of cutting short her
sufferings by tying a cravat round her throat. After a few
minutes I found she had ceased to stir." — It came out in
the course of further examination that the following day
the murderer had gone to work at the establishment of a
master shoemaker and there used the very knife with which
he had killed his wife. — Euripides noted long ago how love
may drive men, hitherto good-hearted and generous, into
crime : " Love, indomitable Love," sings the chorus in the
Antigone . . . *' the man possessed of you is a prey to
madness. You even pervert the hearts of just men, to
drag them to their undoing."— To win the hand of
Hermione, Oreste turns murderer. Jealousy will transform
into criminals men who have been honourable and uprights
hitherto ; it puts the fatal weapon in their hand and incite^»»
them to vengeance.
Jealousy leads to a large number of murders, as weU
as of woundings and acts of violence. The total of murders-
JEALOUSY. 177
due to jealousy, as given in the statistics of the Ministry of
Justice, is not complete ; it only includes cases where the
criminal has actually been accused and brought up for trial.
But a large number of such murderers kill themselves after
despatching their victim ; and so prosecution being rendered
superfluous by the death of the criminal, these murders
followed by suicide are not included in the general
statistics. Besides, a large number of acts of violence
inspired by jealousy, without involving death, cause
broken health, serious mutilation, blindness, or the loss
of a limb, sometimes a shock to the brain resulting in
insanity. But all such cases do not come before the
Criminal Courts ; a large proportion are dealt with by
the Correctional Police.
Murders determined by jealousy are sometimes pre-
meditated, sometimes the outbreak of a sudden fit of
the passion. A jealous husband who had strangled his
mistress told the Juge d'instruction that on going to
bed with her in the evening to pass a last night by her
side, he had hidden on a chair the rope he intended to
use next morning ; this he had taken care to rub with
soap to make it more slippery. The mistress noticed
the rope intended for her, but she paid no heed, thinking
her lover had bought it to hang himself with. The man
had in this case long premeditated his crime. Three days
before, in the course of a dispute he had with his mistress,
He took her by the throat, saying : " One day when I hold
you this way, you won't talk quite so much." The quarrel
ended, he was observed to be plunged in a deep reverie,
«nd on being asked what he was thinking about, he
replied : " I am thinking of her ; I have given her three
<fays more to live." And three days afterwards he
strangled her.
On the other hand murders of this kind are often enough
°J*ite unpremeditated ; the thing comes so suddenly the
°^^n is astounded at his own crime, cannot understand
^>v he came to do it, and even finds difficulty in recalling
***^ exact circumstances. Perhaps a husband, catching his
M
178 JEALOUSY.
wife flagrante delicto^ strikes and kills her in a sudden access
of blinding rage. Perhaps a* lawful wife, confronted un-
expectedly with her husband's mistress, cannot contain
herself, and springs upon her hated rival. Or perhaps it
is a husband, who, meeting his wife's lover in the street,
and surprising some signs of mutual understanding between
the guilty pair, on noticing a gleam of love and pleasure
on his wife's face, leaps furiously at the lover and strikes
him down. In other cases, a husband, on receiving from
his wife's lips a cynical avowal of the wrong she has done
him, loses his head and kills her on the spot.
The satisfaction of every passion affords pleasure just
at first, however certain to cause regret subsequently. A
jealous man, like a forsaken woman, finds in .the vengeance
exacted a genuine feeling of content, that makes the most
severe pain a matter of indifference. A husband, who had
killed his wife's lover, on being confronted with the corpse
looked at it with an air of satisfied anger and said, turning
to the magistrate : " / care nothing for the scaffold." — •
Another man, who had killed his mistress in a fit of jealous
fury, exclaimed in his delight at being avenged : " What
care I about going to Cayenne for twenty years ; I was
determined to kill her." — A mother, whose daughter had
been killed by a young man who had wished to marry her,
indignant at the indifference displayed by the murderer in
presence of his victim's dead body, asked him fiercely:
" Are you satisfied now, you monster ? " — " Yes ! " returned
the murderer, " I am satisfied ; 'tis you who are to blame
for your daughter's death, because you would not let her
marry me." — This indifference to pain and suffering is
sometimes kept up by murderers from love till the hour
of their trial, at which they refuse the indulgence offered
them by the Court, and ask for death, that they may
be buried beside their victims. But in such cases this-
indifference to pain springs from love and remorse, which,
have succeeded to the outburst of rage and jealousy.
Some writers on Criminology have supposed this in —
difference to pain and the satisfaction the victim of jealousy
JEALOUSY. 1/9
-experiences, to be proofs of an abnormal moral state. No
doubt the satisfaction of revenge resembles the feeling of
relief a neuropathic patient is conscious of on the accom-
plishment of an act, the idea of which has long possessed
his thoughts; it is a relaxation of his whole being, an
indefinable sensation of relief. But this satisfaction ex-
perienced by a man in the accomplishment of his revenge
does not constitute a moral anomaly; it is so keen a
gratification, it has been called the pleasure of the Gods.
Revenge is so natural a passion that Classical Mythology
attributed to the Gods the most atrocious acts of this kind.
If the Gods were so vindictive, what wonder if men are the
same under the empire of jealousy. Anger strains the
nerves and inspires a craving for revenge, that causes
positive pain so long as it remains unsatisfied. This pain
ceases on the accomplishment of the act of vengeance, it
brings about a discharge of the electricity the nerves were
charged with ; and this relaxation of the nerves constitutes
a real relief. Moreover, if we observe during their confine-
ment criminals of jealousy who have found satisfaction in
revenge, we note sudden reversals of behaviour, changes
of ideas and sentiments, which show them to be constituted
like other people ; the majority display remorse for their
crime. How many husbands who after killing their wives
declared themselves happy in knowing themselves avenged,
l>reak out of a sudden into sobs and manifest the most
lively repentance !
The mistake committed by Drs. Despine and Lombroso
-and the Criminologists of their school, is that of paying
exclusive attention to the language held by persons accused
-of crimes of violence at the moment of their commission ;
they omit to observe criminals after their crime, under
examination, at a time when their attitude and sentiments
Aave widely changed. The very same persons who at the
foment of committing their crime or soon afterwards,
Cynically declared they felt no sort of regret, that they
^ere glad to have satisfied their vengeance and were in-
«lifferent to pain, express very different sentiments under
l8o JEALOUSY.
examination. Then we hear them say: "I now deeply
regret what I have done ; at the present moment I realize
the fact that I have done wrong and am sorry for it, though
at the time I was mastered by my anger." — When the
neighbours came running up at the cries of a woman who
was strangled by her jealous lover, the latter said to them,
pointing to the spot where he had thrown his victim : " She
is yonder ! She is dead, and I killed her ; I am glad, and
now I can die." If they had stopped there, without study-
ing the murderer's character during the days following the
crime, he might undoubtedly have been adjudged differently
constituted from other men and the victim of moral
anomaly. But, a few days later, the same criminal told
the Juge d'instruction : " I am now sorry for what I did ;
if the crime were to do again, I should not do it." — Moral
madmen exist, I am well aware ; but then they are either
insane or degenerate. Doubtless among those guilty of
crime, there are degenerates suffering from moral madness,,
but all criminals are not degenerates.
CHAPTER VI.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
" Happy, peaceful marriages ! Happy the woman, whose bed is
chaste."— Euripides.
ADULTERY, which forms the mainspring of literary dramas,
is not less fertile in judicial dramas ; it is responsible for
countless crimes and suicides. Never a session of the
Court of Assize or a sitting of the Tribunal of Correc-
tional Police at Paris occurs, at which one or more cases
of adultery do not come up for judgment, and one or
more murders resulting from them, — whether murder of
the adulterous woman or her companion in guilt by the
husband or that of the husband by the adulterous woman
or her accomplice. A man, and still more a woman, who
thought themselves to be merely indulging in an act of
folly in committing an adultery, often find themselves
led on to deeds of criminality, which they did not for
*sui instant foresee at the beginning, and the world, that
loves to make merry over conjugal mishaps, soon ceases
"to laugh, when it learns they have ended in an act of
marital vengeance or a murder of passion. — A wife's
adultery is not merely for the husband the heaviest
possible blow to his honour, the shattering of all his
dreams of love and happiness, the origin of painful
suspicion as to the paternity of his children, the beginning
of a scandal or else the resigning himself to a painful
cohabitation with a woman he can no longer trust, it is
often also the declaration of open war between the two
*nd between the husband and the lover, the breaking out
°f a struggle at the domestic hearth, before the eyes of
82 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
:hildren, relatives and servants, fought out with pistol
shots and knife thrusts, followed by a cause célèbre and an
appearance before the Assize Court.
According to Plutarch, adultery was unknown in Anti-
quity among certain peoples. Among the inhabitants
of the Island of Chios " in the space of 750 years, there
is no record of any married woman having ever committed
adultery or of any unmarried girl having been deflowered."
— According to Tacitus, instances of adultery were very
rare among the Germans ; their women lived " enveloped in
chastity. No one among this people makes light of vice;
to be corrupt or to corrupt others is not styled the way of
the world ... a woman is allowed once and once only to
form the hope and vow of being a bride, ... in the being
to whom she unites her lot, it is not so much, as it were,
the husband she loves, as marriage itself."
On the other hand among the nations of the East
adultery was very frequent, and the legislator had so
little confidence in women's virtue as to account her guilty
of adultery on the slightest indications. According to
the Laws of Manu (viii. v. 256) proof of adultery followed J
from the undermentioned facts, " being attentive in little ^
things to a woman, sending her flowers and perfumes, ^.^
toying with her, touching her ornaments or dress."
In modern days adultery and the crimes arising out ^3* wit
of it are growing more and more common. In France ~^*zzx
especially, the number of adulteries has more than doubled ^^^f
in the last ten years, in fact it has almost trebled ; 711 vcw^m- Mn
1883, it grew to 1657 in l8 9i, l 7% 1 tn 1892, 1813 in 1893^=^ j t
1973 in 1894, and 1964 in 1895. l The advance is un-^r^?-
interrupted. Between 1826 and 1830, the average cra>/"
adulteries was 53 a year. The law re-establishing divorc=re
has had the effect of multiplying the number of adultf ri« , j
fivefold.
We are bound moreover to remark the fact that tKae
total of adulteries brought before the Courts is insignifica-iïfc
as compared with the number of those committed. Th^=
1 Report of the " Garde des Sceaux, "Journal Official of 9th Nov. 1897.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 1 83
great majority of these offences remain unknown to the
husbands ; and even where they are aware of them,
the most part refraining from laying any complaint, — in
this following the advice given by Bishop Carnus, the
friend of Saint Francis de Sales, to an unfortunate husband
who consulted him : " Believe me, my friend, it is better
to be called Cornelius Tacitus than Publius Cornelius."
The causes leading to adultery on the part of the woman
are very numerous and very complex. The chief are:
disproportion in age, a marriage reluctantly entered upon,
an education not suitable to the surroundings in which
the wife is called upon to live, ennui, curiosity, vanity,
exaggerated love of luxury and dress, romantic senti-
mentalism, lengthened absence of the husband, tempera-
ment, awkwardness and roughness of the husband at the
commencement of married life, excessive novel reading
and indulgence in sentimental music, bad advice and evil
example of women already corrupted, etc., etc.
§ I. — Disproportion in age.
The man who, being already of mature age, marries a
young girl, wilfully runs a great risk of playing the part
of an unhappy husband. Molière and C. Delairgne have
both depicted the sorrows of an old man wedded to a
young girl ; the Annales judiciaires frequently become the
repository of the fact that such a husband is likely very
soon to regret his infatuation. In the course of judicial
proceedings, adulterous wives sometimes declare in the
most outspoken and cynical terms the reason of their ill
behaviour; a woman, who ended by poisoning her husband,
was in the habit of answering his remonstrances thus : " I
am young, you are old, I have no child, so I take my fling."
I have myself been acquainted with the case of a wife
Who poisoned her husband, now getting old and incapable
of properly satisfying her, that she might marry a younger
itian.
Women married to old men take young men as lovers ;
184 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
these they choose among their daily companions, among
kinsmen, neighbours, among their husbands' employés»
sometimes even among their servants; and it is not on*
common to find them inciting their lover to rid them of
their old husband. I read in the account of a criminal trial
how a woman in bed with her lover urged him in the
following terms to kill her husband, a very old man : " If
you were a man, you would get up this instant, go into the
country where my husband is at present and finish him.
... I shall never be happy till I am rid of him." The
lover went where he was told, and the woman was soon
rid of her old husband.
In another case, a wife accused of murdering her
husband, pleaded as the determining motive of her crime
the disproportion in age existing between her husband and
herself: "My husband," she said, "was twenty-five years
older than I ; we had had no proper connexion with one
another for years." — Women who declare themselves
misunderstood, who find their duties repugnant to them
and declaim against Law, Society and Marriage in the
name of so-called philosophical principles, have as a rule
only grievances of a quite commonplace physiological
nature to reproach their husband with, — grievances arising
from a too marked difference in age.
Still disproportion in age does not invariably prevent
the birth of love and even of very ardent love. I have
myself had occasion to observe in a young woman of nine-
teen brought up for trial an ardent passion for a lover of
sixty. Some few years ago in the neighbourhood of Aix
a Captain of Artillery on half pay, seventy-six years of
age, and his young wife of twenty-six, determined to die
together, utilizing the fumes of burning charcoal for the
purpose, — the husband to escape intolerable physical pain,
the young wife so as not to survive her husband whom she
adored. In a will she had made, the wife begged her
brother to have a little tomb built, "where I long," she
wrote, "to lie beside my dear husband." The pair were
found still breathing, but a few days later the husband
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 1 85
died. Frantic with grief, the young widow went to the
tomb of her septuagenarian husband and there shot herself
with a revolver ; she was found dead, her right temple
pierced by a ball, her face pressed to the ground and
holding in her hand a revolver with five chambers still
loaded. This instance alone is sufficient to show the
critics are wrong, when they reproach the famous novelist,
M. Zola, with describing an impossibility, the love of a
young girl for an old man. Other similar examples I
could quote, prove that M. Jules Lemaître and F. Sarcey
are justified in thinking the dramatic author and the
novelist may without exceeding the bounds of probability
put back considerably the limit of age within which a man
can love. In the École des Maris, Ariste who is no longer
young makes Léonore love him and marry him, paying no
heed to the jests about " an old man's love," of which she is
made the subject. Sometimes also young men are found
stirred by a wild infatuation for quite old women. It is not
long since a married man of thirty-two committed suicide
along with a woman twenty-five years his senior.
But such cases of mutual love between individuals of
disproportionate age are after all exceptional. The love
of a young girl for a man of mature years is very rare and
never lasting. We cannot conceive a septuagenarian, sexa-
genarian, or even quinquagenarian Romeo. 1 A young girl
who marries an old man may sometimes be moved by
the words of love she hears for the first time and mistake
for love what is really only the wish to get married. A
1 Corneille who could not guard himself against love at a mature age, was
ashamed of the fact, when at fifty he became enamoured of Mile. Duparc ; in
Pmlckérie^ he makes the Senator Martien say :
" L'amour dans mes pareils n'est jamais excusable ;
Pour peu qu'on s'examine, on s'en tient méprisable,
Ou s'en hait et ce mal qu'on n'ose découvrir,
Fait encor plus de peine à cacher qu'à souffrir."
(Act ii. Se. 1.)
" Love in men of my age is never excusable. The slightest self-examination
aad yon feel yourself contemptible ; you hate yourself, and the blow you dare
jsoC reveal, fives even more pain to hide than to endure."
/86 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THh
girl of fifteen, who had been induced by a widower of
forty-one to fly with him, told the Juge d'instruction that
the fond words and promises of marriage the man had
addressed to her had made a most profound impression on
her mind. " The idea of marriage," she said, " never left me
now, and under the sway of this overmastering thought, I
ceased to be either industrious in my work or respectful
towards my parents."
More often than not these disproportionate marriages
end badly. History is full of instances of marriages made
unhappy by too great a discrepancy of age between the
contracting parties. Sophie Monnier, 1 who became Mira-
beau's mistress, was sixteen when she married the Marquis
de Monnier, a widower and sixty. When the Duc de
Longueville married Mlle, de Bourbon, " he was old (forty-
seven), she was very young and as lovely as an angel," as
Mademoiselle put it ; the unhappy issue of the match is
familiar to all.
I never understand why we give the name of " marriages
of reason " to these unions (really so unreasonable) between
two persons of disproportionate age. Reason condemns
such marriages. A truly reasonable marriage is a love
match between a pair whose ages are concordant. In
Roman Law, according to the Lex Papia, great discrepancy
of years was a sufficient obstacle to marriage. 3
If husbands too far advanced in life are, as a rule,
predestined to conjugal mishaps, those of too youthful an
age are also sometimes failures. In the first case, adult er y
on the wife's part is to be feared ; in the second, it is
husband's conduct that gives cause for anxiety. The
Marquis d'Entrecasteaux, President of the Parliament o»l
Provence, who cut his wife's throat on the night of the 30tlr:
1 After her liaison with Mirabeau, she was on the point of contracting
marriage with a gentleman of family who was deeply in love with her ;
having taken him from her, she committed suicide.
- Traité du Mariage, by Astruc, Professor of French Law at the University
Toulouse, p. 131. — According to the old Genevese laws, a man who exceeded
sixty could not " take maid or woman in marriage less than half as old as bun-
self." A man of sixty therefore could not marry a woman of less than thirty.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 1 87
31st May 1784, so as to be able to live freely with his mis-
tress, has left a record written by himself of the imprudence
his parents were guilty of in marrying him so young.
" My parents," he wrote from his prison, " married me very
young, for I was wedded at eighteen. . . . This, accord-
ing to what they said, was to protect me against the
passions of youth ; but they failed to consider that these
passions being as yet undeveloped, what they did was to
imprison them up within me in bonds they put upon me,
rather than to guard me against their assaults. The more
closely they were confined, the more violent was their
explosion, and the more terrible their effects." — In these
too early unions the husband is liable to weary very
quickly of his wife, to neglect her or to leave her at home
to seek more adventurous pleasures abroad ; sometimes
even, finding her interfere with his freedom, he endeavours
to get rid of her by criminal means. One young husband
accused of a crime of this sort, had driven his wife from
home at first and afterwards murdered her, declaring when
he dismissed her : " I married too young, I want to have
some fun now ; later on I intend to take my wife back."
— Too youthful a husband cannot rule his house or
govern his wife, he is feather-brained, reckless and jealous.
Here is an instance taken from the records of the Law
Courts. A young workman of nineteen married a girl of
his own age ; before long he quite wore out his wife with
his fits of jealousy and brutality. At last the girl losing
all patience returned to her mother's house and petitioned
for a divorce. Then the husband, broken-hearted at her
leaving him, and exasperated by her action, besought his
wife to come back to him ; on her refusing, he bought a
pistol, waited his opportunity, and stretched her dead by
a shot from a revolver, after which he turned the same
weapon against himself.
§ 2. — Forced Marriage.
When a girl cannot marry the young man she loves or
fancies she loves, but is forced by her parents to marry
1 88 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
someone else, this marriage seldom turns out happy. The
young woman always regrets the man she would fain have
married, and often gives herself to him, when circumstances
bring them together. In Polyeucte, Pauline who has been
unable to wed Sévère, the man she loves, and has been
obliged by her father to take Polyeucte as a husband,
succeeds by virtue of sound sense and right feeling in driv-
ing away the memory of " that perfect lover," who once filled
her heart, and thoughts and aspirations, and to love her
husband from a sense of duty and from admiration of his
noble character. But Paulines are rare. Corneille'*
heroine even hesitates to see Sévère again at her father's
orders declaring :
" Mon père, je suis femme et je sais mes faiblesses . . .
Il est toujours aimable et je suis toujours femme." 1
She trembles for her virtue, for she already feels her old
predilection awaking afresh :
" Dans le pouvoir sur moi que ses regards ont eu,
Je n'ose réassurer de toute ma vertu." *
Of less heroic mould than Pauline who has strength to
master her desires, many a woman, married against her
wishes by her parents, cannot bring herself to love her
husband ; she becomes the enemy of the man they have
made her marry, 3 and her relatives are responsible for any
faults she may commit.
" Et qui donne à sa fille un homme qu'elle hait
Est responsable au ciel des fautes qu'elle fait." 4
At the same time even a love match does not invariably
safeguard a woman against adultery. After six months
1 " Father, I am a woman and I know my weakness ... he is still loveable^
and I am still a woman."
V In view of the dominion his looks have over me, I dare not be confident
of all my virtue."
s Hostis ett uxor invita qua ad virum datur. — " The wife who is given an
unwilling bride to a man is his enemy." Plautus.
4 " And he who gives his daughter a husband she detests, is responsible to
heaven for the faults she commits. Molière, Tartuffe.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 1 89
of marriage, Mary Stuart was disgusted with Darnley,
whom she had married for love. — Mme. Weiss, who tried
to poison her husband, had married him with the utmost
enthusiasm : " It was," she tells us, " with an exquisite joy,
an ineffable tenderness, I learned his intention to marry
me ; I spent the night on my knees in an outpouring of
gratitude to God." Her family setting their faces against
the marriage, she followed the man she loved to Algeria,
and was married to him eighteen months later ; after
giving him two children, she gave him a dose of poison.
Women of fickle disposition and high-strung imagination,
readily forget their first love, and answer, when their
husband reminds them of former days : " You want me
to love you still ? What would you have ? I cannot do
it, I don't love you any more." A husband's calm and
monotonous affection is not enough for them, they crave
a new love, something ardent and passionate. — A doctor,
who had seduced a young girl and then married her out
of love, was abandoned by her, after she had made him
the father of eight children. " I loved the woman fondly/*
he declared, "she possessed every means of charming,
beauty, amiability, wit, artistic susceptibility ; her voice
was adorable, her intelligence of a high order. I was
dazzled and subjugated the first time I saw her."
A woman who previously to marriage deceived her
i^latives is very likely later on to deceive her husband.
Rosine, who allows herself to be seduced by Lindor, once
raade Comtesse d'Almaviva, listens to Chérubin's suit and
becomes a "guilty mother." A man, who had abducted
**is wife from her parents' house and had cause subsequently
*° regret it, said during his trial to the examining magis-
tr ^te : " What are you to expect from a girl who ran away
fr Om her family?" — The advice of Desdemona's father to
^fchello was similarly conceived : " Watch her well, Moor,
^^cp an open eye on her outgoings ; she hath deceived
**^t father, and may well do the like to thee." The ex-
^^Tience of the Courts of Law confirms the observation
***" the great English psychologist ; among adulterous
1ÇO ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
wives, who do not stick at crime to rid them of their
husbands, we find women who have married for love
and deceived their parents and relatives to run away
with the object of their choice.
§ 3. — Education disproportionate to the Social Condition
and Education of the Husband
Not only ought the ages of married people to be well
suited, but their tastes, sentiments and education must
be well matched also. A wife whose education is superior
to that of her husband, feels an inevitable repugnance to
the tie which binds her to a man who is her inferior ; the
love her husband shows her does not touch, it only annoys,
her. Vanity plays an important part in every woman's
love; to love her husband, she must be proud of him,
find satisfaction for her vanity in his wit, his talents, his
social position. The most solid qualities of heart and
character are not enough to ensure a husband's being
loved ; if he wounds his wife's self-esteem by want of
personal distinction or vulgarity of manner, if his wife
finds him common, coarse, unworthy of her, she is not
far from being unfaithful to him, and indifference and
contempt lead by a rapid transition to downright dislike.
It is extremely difficult for a woman to love a husband
whose manners and conversation make her blush. It is
not long ago that the Assize Court of the Department
of Corrèze had occasion to condemn a woman who had
put the muzzle of a revolver to her husband's ear during
his sleep, and pressing the trigger with a firm hand had
lodged a bullet in his head. The motive for her act was
simply a deep dislike she had conceived against him. He
was a good and worthy man, but she despised him, and
had deceived him, being his superior in intelligence, educa-
tion and family standing.
Mere external qualities are often better appreciated than
moral ones by women of small intelligence. To a husband
possessed of a good heart and a sound brain, they will prefer
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 1 9 1
a silly, chattering drawing-room fop, the sort of insipid,
sugary creature who gives much thought to his clothes and
i* great at small talk. If they receive attentions from a
man of distinction, holding a brilliant position or possessed
of the aristocratic affix, they will fall straight into his arms
from sheer silly vanity, — like Mme. Bovary in Flaubert's
novel, who, married to a village doctor, is flattered at the
idea of being M. Rodolphe de la Huchette's mistress. The
aristocratic "de" and titles of nobility simply fascinate
them. A provincial beauty of middle-class origin and a
vain disposition, living in a country village, has a poor
chance against the assaults of a gentleman from Paris, who
seems to her everything that is distingué. This distinction
often consists in a woman's eyes simply and solely in the
good cut of a man's clothes. In a trial for murder, where
a husband had killed his wife's lover, I heard the woman
with my own ears admit she had been seduced in the first
instance by a common bully's fine clothes.
§ 4. — Romantic sentimentality.
Women who expect too much from marriage, who
imagine in the exaltation of their fancy it is going to
bring them infinite happiness, heavenly bliss, experience
inevitable disillusionments that are liable to lead to no
little mischief. Dreamers of impossible dreams, they are
astonished to find their husband does not possess all the
perfections they fondly imagined ; expecting a bliss the
mere thought of which draws soft tears from their eyes,
they are shocked that marriage does not ensure unlimited
happiness, and conceive a grudge against husband and
marriage generally for their disappointment. They feel
wretched with a husband they think too grave and cold ;
failing to understand their companion, they consider them-
selves "misunderstood" by him, and look out for some
"hero of romance" to appreciate them and bring them the
happiness so fondly desired. These dreams of infinite love
and perfect happiness, so irreconcilable with the stern
I Ç2 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
realities of life, are suggested by the reading of too many
novels or a mystical sentimentalism that overstimulates the
fancy. From mystical reverie to amorous exaltation is
but a step. In fact the two states may be said to lie so
near each other as to be practically indistinguishable;
romantic souls make love into a religion, while mystics
turn religion into amorous ecstasy. One and the same
phraseology serves to express love and sensuous mysticism.
Mme. de Staël, relating the double suicide of a German
lady and her lover, an officer and a poet, which occurred in
1811 at an inn at Potsdam, tells us how the two lovers, in
the letters and documents they left behind, compared their
reciprocal murder to the Sacrament, and had left a Service
Book of the Lord's Supper open beside them. The woman»
who had forsaken her little girl to join her lover, had
written saying she would watch over her from on high.
I have had occasion in several different legal cases to note
the fact that women guilty of crimes of passion had in
their earlier years undergone crises of mysticism. The
same observation had already been made by Flaubert in
Madame Bovary ; he declares the adulterous heroine had
when a girl based her religious feelings on a high-strung
mysticism, small acts of pious devotion, and the pleasure
of attending imposing ecclesiastical ceremonies and hearing
beautiful church music.
§ 5. — Platonic Love.
Religious feeling is a safeguard against adultery, buf"
always on condition it is genuine and does not degenerate
into sensuous mysticism ; for sentiment leads a woman to
Platonic love, and Platonic love to another and less
ethereal sort. No matter what illusions it may flatter
itself with, love craves possession, and possession of the
heart alone is not sufficient. It cannot remain for ever
intellectual, and anyone who yields to it, thinking to
continue master of his senses, may aspire to be an angel,
but is on the way to becoming a devil instead. His heart
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 1 93
may be full of high and noble aspirations, but he soon and
inevitably drops into very prosaic realities.
Romantic women are very apt to be seduced by the
illusion of Platonic love. Lord Byron, relating the
Platonic love of Julia for Don Juan, — a quaint tale that
ended in a very commonplace way, — exclaims very wisely :
" Oh ! Plato, your accursed fancies, your system, assigning
an imaginary virtue to the undisciplined heart of man,
have paved the way to more immorality than all the long
list of Poets and Romance writers." How many women
have been caught in the snare of protestations of Platonic
love, such as one I find among the documents in connec-
tion with a criminal case, addressed by a young man to a
married woman: "I would prove I pay you a worship
more pure and holy than ever maiden rendered to her
Madonna. . . . Does not such humility then deserve one
kiss as its reward ? — a sister's kiss, if you will, a kiss on
the brow." We know pretty well what comes of this sort
of kisses.
Again romantic women are often seduced by the
melancholy of dark heroes of melodrama who recount
their sorrows to win consolation at fair hands. When
Wieir sadness is genuine, they exaggerate it, well knowing
its power over the sex, and that pity leads to love. This,
for instance, is what the student Chambige did with Mme.
^3C , a romantic spirit, who found life sad and repulsive,
though she had the happiness to possess fine children, and
^*ho marvelled at the resignation the friends of her own
sex displayed in face of the dreary conditions of life. He
told her a long story about his mental griefs, a story that
touched the young woman's heart, and soon led her from
pity to a tenderer emotion. To stifle her scruples of
conscience, she told him she would be no more than a
sister to him, but before long, after a fainting fit he had,
she declared her love for him in less fraternal terms,
telling him she loved him because he had felt and loved
deeply. Indeed two hearts that have suffered much feel
themselves naturally drawn to one another. Here is a
194 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
letter I found among the papers of a woman who com-
mitted suicide in consequence of a love tragedy: "He
suffered, and I suffered, atrociously ; behold the mystery
that brought us together ! " — A man who was brought to
trial for having fired off a revolver at his former mistress
out of jealousy, told the Juge d'instruction it was the
woman's sad, woe-begone look that had first attracted him.
Pity for undeserved misfortunes is often the prelude to
love. Confident in the propriety of so generous a feeling
the woman thinks she may yield to it without remorse,
but little by little the sentiment grows more tender and
grows into passionate love. Virgil and Shakespeare, those
two excellent observers of the human heart, have depicted
this transition from pity to love in the hearts of Dido and
of Desdemona. The account yEneas gives the Queen of
his battles and disasters makes a profound impression on
her. She owns as much to her sister :
u Quelle intrépidité ! Quels revers ! Quels combats
Ont éprouvé son cœur, ont signalé ses bras ! . . .
Mon âme en l'écoutant se sentait alarmée. . . ." *
In the same way, it is while listening to the adventures,
combats and hardships of Othello, that Desdemona is
first stirred to pity, and then to love. " I told her all my
story," says Othello . . .
" Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth 'scapes i* the imminent deadly breach,
And often did beguile her of her tears
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer' & . . .
She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I loved her that she did pity them."
{Othello, Act i. Sc. >)
1 " What gallantry ! What calamities ! What encounters have tried his
heart, and signalized his arms I ... My heart, as I listened to his tale, felt
itself alarmed. ..."
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. Ï95
§ 6. — Ennui.
Ennui constitutes a grave danger. The woman who is
its victim is tempted to seek some stirring emotion, some
adventure, by way of distraction, to find amusement in
unlawful love. Virtuous hitherto, she begins to regret
stme has always been so. Licensed affection seems insipid,
guilty love poetical, 1 while weariness of the austere
pleasures of family life, curiosity, the wish to extend her
knowledge, libido sentiendi (Pascal), the hope of a happi-
ness greater than any she has experienced heretofore,
a^wake in her a craving for unknown and untried pleasures.
Slme feels herself tempted to give ear to those who, seeing
hi^r sad, are eager to offer consolation ; at first she listens
o^»t of mere coquetry, from the want of anything better
to do, to cheat the ennui that is eating her heart out,
Presently she is caught in the trap and one fine day finds
**^rself assailed by the same passion she has inspired.
Solitude, good for people who love the country, is bad
" c>r those who are only bored there. Few women really
° v e the country, while many are in the latter case. A
^°Qian wrote in a letter addressed to the Juge dinstruc-
***** : " Idleness and the ennui I feel in the country,
^*<ied to the bad advice of one of my female friends,
er « my undoing." It is ennui, and nothing else, that
'Ows the Queen into the arms of Ruy-Blas.
§ 7. — Temperament.
A, romantic woman, who seems dominated by the
^^ging to find a twin soul, is ready enough to put
^°Wn to an impulse of the heart what is really only
*** impulse of the senses. When she yields to the
**Scination youth exercises over a woman of mature age,
An American lady caught in the act of stealing in one of the big Parisian
****P», at the very moment she had 70,000 francs in her pocket, when
^atkmed as to the motive for such apparently unaccountable behaviour, (for
** was perfectly well able to have bought the articles she stole), made the
*°*^wing reply: "There is such an exquisite pleasure in stealing," — the
P^tore, in fact, of forbidden fruit.
1 96 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
she dissimulates her love under the cloak of fraternal or
maternal sentiment ; she lavishes on the youth she is
enamoured of, a store of advice and counsel, directs hisw
conduct, calls him her dear boy, and likes him to address-
her as his little mother. 1
This love of a woman of ripe age for a man younger
than herself has been often represented on the stage ; we
find it in Henriette Maréchal by the brothers Goncourt, in
La Crise by Octave Fruillet, in Les Effrontés by Emile
Augier. It is seen again in the case of some famous
women — for instance in that of the Duchesse d'Albany,
who was fifty-one at the date of Alfieri's death, whom she
replaced by the painter Fabre, a much younger man than
herself, — in Diane de Poitiers, who after being the mistress
of François I., held the position with his son, — in Queen
Caroline of England, who was proved to have committed
adultery with the courier Bayami, and in many other
instances. Magistrates often meet in the course of their
duties in connection with civil or criminal trials with cases
of adultery on the part of the farmer's wife with a young
farm labourer, of the shop-keeper's with one of ha —
husband's employés, of the notary or barrister's wife with at»
clerk, of the superior officer's wife with a young subaltern,
of the Procureur or Judge's wife with her husband's Substi-
tute, and so on. I once had occasion to prosecute a young
labourer who from motives of jealousy had burnt his
mistress's crops, a rich widow whose lover he was. He
might have applied to himself a bad verse of Racine's on
Pyrrhus :
" Brûlé de plus de feux que je n'en allumai." *
It is a physiological craving far more than any impulse
of tenderness that as a rule urges a woman to adultery
1 Such was the case with George Sand, who was thirty at the beginning of
her liaison with Alfred de Musset, then twenty-three, as also of Mme. de
Warens with Rousseau. G. Sand used to style Alfred de Musset her son,
while he spoke of himself as her darling boy. This combination of matera*]
sentiment and sensual love is a sort of incest, and G. Sand touched the truth
when she wrote to de Musset : " You are right, our kisses were incestuous.*'
a " Myself consumed with more fires than I kindled."
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 1 97
^ith an inferior, an employé of her husband's or a domestic
servant. Empresses, like Theodora and Messalina, gave
their favours to athletes. In Roman Law there were
special enactments against women who surrendered them-
selves to their slaves. Old French Law punished with
v ^ry severe penalties adultery committed by a valet with
«*3 mistress, or with his lord's wife. Muyart de Vouglans
9**otes a decree of the Parliament of Paris condemning a
5e r-vant to be hanged for having committed this crime with
^•^ mistress, in spite of the fact that the latter had lured
**im on by indecently exposing herself before him.
^Viurnel cites the case of a lady of quality, who caught in
^iultery with a waggoner, was condemned to the gallows
*** 1567, along with her accomplice. Another jurisconsult,
Pruneau, mentions a magistrate's wife who was convicted
**ff adultery with her farm tenant, and another lady of
Quality convicted of the same offence with her husband's
cleric
Female Don Juans are to be found as well as male.
There are women who fly from one intrigue to another
with the greatest ease, feeling no repugnance for difference
of education and social position ; in pursuit of an ideal
they never attain, under the spur of sensual inquisitiveness
and the love of variety, they are for ever seeking new
experiences, and disciples rather of the naturalistic than
the idealistic, indulge in ever fresh adventures as fancy
prompts them. Seducers are not all of the sterner sex.
Plutarch tells us that the Romans in returning from a
journey, used to warn their wives of their near arrival to
avoid the risk of exposing them to an unwelcome surprise.
I have had occasion myself to note in several criminal
cases, that the husband who remains too long away runs
the danger of being forgotten and betrayed. Just at first
the wife who is left behind alone, indignantly rejects the
solicitations addressed to her, but little by little as the
time draws out, her resistance weakens ; and before very
long the husband's letters are not welcomed with the same •
delight, her replies become less frequent, less warm and
I98 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE-
less affectionately worded. In proportion as her heart
grows cold towards the absent one, it warms to the sighs
of the suitor on the spot.
Husbands who are compelled by their calling to remain
away from home for months at a time, are exposed to the
risk of finding on their return their wife to be pregnant or
the mother of a child that is none of theirs. I have just
been looking into a case against a woman named Marie
Bapt, who having become enceinte during her husband's
absence, poisoned the infant she gave birth to, because her
husband refused to rear it. " I am a great criminal," she
declared to the Juge d'instruction in reply to his ques-
tions, " and I deserve to be punished ; but I was driven ta
the crime, for my husband would not keep the child he
was not the father of."
Other cases of adultery arise out of convenience of oppor-
tunity, a fine audacity on the seducer's part, a sudden
surprise of the senses :
"Une femme d'honneur peut avouer sans honte
Ces surprises des sens que la raison surmonte." '
All women however do not possess Pauline's coolness-
in getting the better of these surprises, which indeed may
overtake even women who love their husband ; taken
unawares by an audacious, unforeseen assault, paralyzed by
stress of feeling, they yield actually against their inclina-
tion, and when their shame is consummated, cannot account
for a weakness they bitterly regret. I have myself seen
in an assize trial how a woman who really loved her
husband yielded to a sudden surprise of this sort, and
afterwards experienced such violent remorse for her sin»
that her health gave way under the strain. Day after day
she bewailed her fault in secret, shutting herself up in her
room to weep the more freely. One day her husband
discovered her in tears and asked what was the reason of
her distress ; on this she confessed everything, ready to
1 " An honest woman may avow without shame these surprises of the
which reason masters."
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. I99
expiate her offence and even finding a certain solace in the
admission of her guilt and the craving she felt to suffer
punishment for it. So terrible a blow was this revelation
to the husband that he fainted away on hearing it ; when
he came to his senses again, he burst into tears, first cursing
his wife, then presently forgiving her. After several days
of cruel torture for both, he turned her out of the house,
and she went back to her parents. A month later, he
finally forgave her and took her back. Then, still a prey
to fierce anger against his wife's betrayer, he started out
to kill him. — In another murder trial where the husband
had killed his wife's lover, the woman confessed she had
given herself repeatedly to a friend of her husband's, though
she loved the latter all the while, and was quite unable to
account for her weakness. This is the cruel enigma M.
Bourget has analyzed in a novel bearing that title, and in
the criminal case I have mentioned the riddle was even
more cruel than in the work of fiction, for it involved a
woman hitherto of unblemished virtue, while the book
deals with one who is the mistress of several lovers. A
strange riddle indeed, — the conduct of a woman who loves
her husband, feels remorse for her offence, and yet repeats
it ! A woman may feel remorse, have right feelings towards
her husband, and yet yield to the promptings of the senses;
she is sorry for her fault because of its consequences and
the grief it causes her husband, yet she does the same
again. So in Homer, Helen is wasted with weeping, but
all the time she never dreams of leaving her lover and
going back to Menelaus.
When a husband is incapable of satisfying the passions
of a Messalina, he runs not merely the danger of being
replaced, but of being put out of the way into the bargain.
Some years since the Assize Court of the Bouches-du-
Khdne tried the case of a woman of thirty-seven, a veritable
Messalina, who had debauched all the men of the hamlet
where she lived, married men and bachelors alike. 1 She
1 The passion of a dissolute woman is "a madness never reached at their
coupling time by savage creatures and brute beasts." Aeschylus.
IE
X) ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
'as married to a man of advanced age, who finding
limself powerless to curb her ill-behaviour, had made up
iiis mind to put up with it ; yet she had conceived a
violent grudge against him in spite of the fact that he did
not interfere with her pleasures in any way. After two
unsuccessful attempts to poison him, she had him murdered
by one of her lovers at a country farm where he had gone 1 fi
to spend some days with his brother, to get in the olive 1*
harvest. Handing her lover a kitchen knife and a gun, li
she despatched him to the farm in question at dusk, giving |i
him a detailed plan as to how the crime was to be done ;
" Now is the favourable moment," she said, " there is
no moon ; you can start without anybody seeing you*
When you reach your destination, you must knock at the
door under some pretence or other, and my husband
or my brother-in-law will open it; you must lie down Jn-
a short while beside them, and as soon as they are asleep
again, you must strike ; then you will set fire to the house, M*^*
and so an end." The lover started, and carried out the
double assassination in exact accordance with his mistress's
instructions. The latter awaited his return all night with
feverish impatience; at five o'clock in the morning, she
went to his house and learned to her satisfaction that " all
was finished," that her husband and brother-in-law had
been murdered and consumed in the burning house.
Nothing was found among the still smoking ruins of the
farm except the calcined remains of the two corpses.
When these bones were collected and placed on a cart to l^^i
be carried to the cemetery, the woman, wishing to seize
this opportunity for bringing home some of the farm
produce, had two bags of olives loaded on the waggon,
side by side with the chest containing the mortal remains
of her husband and brother-in-law, mounting her thirteen-
year-old boy on the equipage to drive. Under examina-
tion the lover related how he had bled the two old men to
death, like a shepherd cutting beasts' throats.
The weakling husband of a depraved woman may fall
sick, die of vexation or commit suicide as in the following
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 201
instance : " My son," a mother says, " was married three
months ago; it is now a fortnight since his wife went back
to her own country ; she is the cause of my boy's suicide,
because he could no longer satisfy her, — she was so
passionate. As late as yesterday he told me he felt
exceedingly ill."
Still we must beware of generalizing from these isolated
cases of insatiable sexual appetite in women ; the number
of Messalinas in the world is far from being as great
as novelists would have us believe. Sexual desire is much
less powerful in women than in men ; the sexual passion
is at once more violent, more aggressive and more brutal in
the male. He it is who attacks and provokes, while his
choice is determined more by physical than by moral
qualities. Women on the other hand are, as a general
rule, rather coquettish and vain than really sensual, more
appreciative of tenderness, little attentions and acts of
homage, loving looks and the like, than of manifestations
of brutal passion. Her love is more psychical than
physical, her choice governed rather by moral and
intellectual gifts than by physical endowments. If she
is guilty of adultery, she is more to blame than a man,
because her sexual organization makes virtue easier to
her than to him.
§ 8. — Music.
Danger lurks everywhere for a woman, — in the dissipa-
tions of society, in idleness, pleasure, parties, injudicious
country walks, dances, operas, duets with music teachers
or amateurs. The Romans feared the effects of music and
dancing on women ; Scipio jEmilianus called them dis-
honourable arts. No doubt this antique austerity was
excessive, but are we not nowadays fallen into the
opposite extreme, leaving women and even young girls
freely exposed to the intoxication of love songs and erotic
music ? Sometimes a young woman practising music
'with her teacher suffers what happened to Heloïse when
Abeiard was entrusted with her education. "The books
202 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
were open before us," says Abelard, " but we talked more
love than philosophy, and kisses were more frequent than
sentences, my hand wandered to her bosom more often
than to our books." Like Uncle Fulbert, the husband
sees nothing, and the teacher cannot sufficiently admire his
innocent simplicity.
§ 9. — Pride of Beauty, Love of Dress.
The love of pretty clothes is an essentially feminine
passion. Rivalry in dress is often the cause of keen
jealousy between women. Corneille, whose psychological
genius I find pleasure in drawing attention to, has not
failed to notice this trait in the psychology of Creuse, who
is jealous of Médée's robe :
" Après tout cependant, riez de ma faiblesse . . .
La robe de Médée a donné dans mes yeux ;
Mon caprice à son lustre attachant mon envie
Sans elle trouve à dire au bonheur de ma vie." '
There are women ready to find consolation for the
mourning they must put on in the thought that it will suit
their complexion. In several criminal cases, I have seen
the woman, taken red-handed in adultery and having
narrowly escaped being shot, resume almost instantly her
extreme preoccupation with matters of dress. This love
of finery is responsible for the ruin of a large number of
women, who let themselves be seduced, like Marguerite in
Faust) by the offer of jewellery. When a vain woman,.
possessed by the longing to wear pretty frocks, has not
the wherewithal, she seeks it in adultery. This forms the
subject of Emile Augier's Lionnes Pauvres. The married
woman descends to the level of the prostitute, or really
lower.
When a vain woman is condemned to imprisonment, the
1 " Yet after all, — laugh at my weakness, if you will . . . Medée's robe
has dazzled my eyes ; my fancy, attaching my envy to its gloss, has other
reasons too to find fault with the happiness of my life."
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 20J
necessity of donning the gaol uniform which makes her
look plain is more painful to her than the shame and
disgrace. The loss of her beauty, and above all the
cutting off her hair, sometimes occasions a degree of
despair that ends in suicide.
The desire for elegance and becoming clothes, which is
the natural appanage of every woman, is still further
augmented by the habits of our own day. The passion of
vanity has made the same strides among women as that of
equality has among men. Just as every man busies him-
self with politics, and supposes himself quite capable of
being a Counsellor General, a Deputy, a Senator, a
Minister of State, without ceasing to be a hatter or a
hairdresser, a mason or a street porter, so every woman,
small shopkeeper's wife or working man's or what not, is
fain to be dressed with as much elegance as the great
ladies of society. Just as we find grocers, tailors, bakers,
fishmongers, asking for posts out of all proportion to their
claims, so we see women without a penny contract habits
of luxury and expensive dress.
Beauty is another danger by attracting men's admiration»
but poets and moralists have greatly exaggerated this risk.
According to Propertius, " inconstancy is the attribute of
every pretty woman." Ovid is of the same opinion : " Why
take a beautiful wife, if you wanted a virtuous one ? Virtue
and beauty cannot go together." — " When a wife is faithful,
'tis a sure proof she is ugly," writes Seneca in his turn. 1
There is a great deal of exaggeration in these maxims ;
beauty and virtue are frequently found together, and a
want of beauty is not the best guarantee of female virtue.
Plain women are not less inconstant than pretty ones ; if
they are less sought after, they are all the more sensible to
such homage as they do receive, and their self-love is more
easily flattered. Receiving little admiration, they are all
the more eager for it, and devour it greedily ; bitterly
jealous of their fairer sisters, they seek to prove in this
way they are not so entirely their inferiors, and think they
1 De Ben* fiais, iii. § 16.
204 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
are besting nature, that seemed to have refused them the
gift of pleasure by denying them beauty. Seneca con-
tradicts himself and refutes what he has said in the De
BeneficitSy when he declares in his De Matrimonii* that a
plain woman will always throw herself at the head of the
first comer. The world is apt to suppose the heroine of
a love drama must always be a woman of remarkable
beauty. This is quite a mistake ; very often she is of very
ordinary good looks, often rather plain than otherwise. I
have again and again observed this to be the case.
§ 10. — Bad Advice,
To the causes of depravation I have so far pointed out
must be added bad advice on the part of women already
corrupted, who take a malicious pleasure in communicating
the taint to others. Just as a poor man is naturally jealous
of a rich, and an unfortunate man of a prosperous one, so
a ruined woman is jealous of the consideration an honest
one enjoys, and cannot forgive her her good name. She
longs to bring down to her own level the woman who now
has the right to despise her, and so escape her contempt ;
she wishes to humble her more virtuous sister, who crushes
her with her airs of superiority, — a superiority that stirs her
envy and dislike, and is a constant source of humiliation
to her. It is by poking fun at marriage and making the
husband appear ridiculous, by veiled confidences as to her
own situation and its happy conditions, by excuses and
sophistries she suggests, and instances she quotes, by meet-
ings she contrives, and romantic novels she puts in her
hands, that the woman of light character gradually weans
her friend from her husband. Mme. d'Epinay relates in
her Memoirs how this work of corruption was tried upon
her by Mme. d'Ette, mistress of the Chevalier de Valory.
A woman, who hitherto has remained true, is at first
shocked by what is said to her ; but little by little under
the influence of the mischievous sophisms she hears, her
indignation diminishes, her reason is perverted, her scruples
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 205
disappear, the attraction of the forbidden fruit awakens in
her troubled fancy, and she ends by thinking perfectly
natural a breach of her marriage vow that in the first
instance revolted her beyond words. How often do magis-
trates hear this cry from women on their trial : " It was
bad advice was my ruin ; my friends alienated me from
my husband, telling me, one that he was too old for me,
another that he was so plain and unfashionable, and so on.
I cannot understand how I came to listen to them, for my
husband was a kind, devoted, and loving man."
To sow discord in a household is an essentially feminine
amusement. The woman of light character desirous of
fomenting discord between her friend and the latter's
husband, scarcely ever fails to persuade her that her
husband is courting another woman. This she does to
rouse her jealousy and get her to follow his example ; for
a woman stung by jealousy is tempted to avenge herself
by throwing herself at the head of the first comer. It is
no uncommon thing moreover to see one or other of the
husband's male friends employ the same tactics, telling the
wife of real or supposed infidelities on the part of the
husband, in order to stir her resentment, and then profit
by it Sainte-Beuve, as is well known, pursued this line of
conduct with the wife of a famous friend. I have myself
seen in a criminal case this treachery on the part of the
husband's friend provoke the wife's adultery and this
adultery bring about the murder of the false friend at the
husband's hands. A certain A , a married man, was
the bosom friend of one C , also married. The house-
holds lived in the same house and saw a great deal of each
other ; A , taking advantage of his friend's absence
from home, used to come in sometimes in the afternoon to
chat with C 's wife, and informed her that her husband
kept mistresses, and did not care for her at all. Mme.
C , who loved her husband, refused at first to believe
these calumnies, but one day she was convinced and in a
spirit of resentment and revenge gave herself to the author
of them.
206 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
Nor is this sort of bad advice given only by friends and
companions ; women are often led astray by their female
cousins, their sisters, or even their mother. From jealousy
and dislike of their son-in-law, we see mothers-in-law
countenance their daughter's adultery; they discover all
sorts of defects in their son-in-law, and tell his wife of them.
They say he is plain, undersized, ill-mannered, badly be-
haved, and express regret they did not give their child
a more eligible husband, one like so and so, whose merits
they point out specially and in detail. All this tends to
turn the wife against her husband. Other mothers-in-law
go even further ; they directly encourage their daughter to
take a lover, or at any rate refrain from blaming her, if
they discover she has one. Juvenal long ago noticed the
complaisance sometimes shown by mothers-in-law towards
their daughter's lover. 1 have observed instances of the
same thing myself. A retired officer in the Army, who
had been guilty of serious violence towards his wife, when
questioned as to the motives of his behaviour, gave the
following reply : " Thinking to marry a well-brought-up
girl, I found myself in presence of a second-rate actress,
who took lessons in elocution from a former Associate of
the Comédie-Française, and who had the most immoral
instincts. More than this, her mother, who wished to keep
her beside her, stirred her up against me to such a degree
that even if I could have succeeded in combating my wife's
natural propensity to behave badly, my efforts would have
been continually thwarted by my mother-in-law's inter-
ference." — In another case, it was proved in evidence that
a mother was in the habit of advising her daughter to take
care of her beauty and not have too free intercourse with
her husband, telling her, " You are much too good for him t
my dear." — When a husband complains to his mother-in-
law of his wife's bad behaviour, saying, " I am a good
husband and father, you have nothing to bring against me ;
yet your daughter dishonours my name," the mother-in*
law only answers with a smile. — The Governor of the
Prison of Saint-Lazare told me he had often heard mothers
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 207
say to their daughters who were in confinement there :
" Make haste and get well, so and so is waiting for you." —
I have even known a mother advise her daughter to poison
her husband, telling her by way of encouragement that
she was herself no less determined to kill her own, and
pointing out to her how free and happy a double widow-
hood would make them. " As soon as your husband is
dead," she told her, " I will kill mine too, and we will go
away and live together." Some days later, she came again
to inquire whether her daughter had begun to administer
poison to her husband. On the girl's telling her, " I dare
not do it ; if it came out, I should be undone," — " You are
a fool," her mother replied, " no one will ever know ; what
is there to be afraid of?" Some time afterwards, coming
once more to see her daughter, she told her, " You are very
stupid not to have given anything to your husband yet, I
am sure ; well ! if you don't begin, I shall" Spurred on
by these reproaches, the girl went out and bought poison
and gave her husband some. During several days the
mother came regularly to ask after the invalid and inquire
how the poisoning was getting on. She considered her
daughter was giving the poison in too small doses, and so
prolonging the sickness unduly ; she was impatient at the
long time her son-in-law took to die, and asked her
daughter repeatedly, " Come ! when am I to see you
in mourning ? " She urged her to increase the quantities
administered, and begged her not to let herself be moved
to pity by her husband's sufferings. Finally, she did not
forget, when his last moments were approaching, to have
a notary called in and get her son-in-law to make a will
in her daughter's favour.
Again, women of the lower classes are led to commit
adultery and even to murder their husbands by ill advice
given them by fortune-tellers and witches they consult. A
young woman, whom one of the former, a woman who told
fortunes by the cards, had recommended to poison her
husband, so as to be more free, eventually after much
hesitation followed her advice, the woman having assured
208 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
her that if only she burned a candle to the " Good Mother"
to secure the divine protection, her crime would never be
found out.
These fortune-tellers, who abuse the confidence of
women, girls and country folk, do an incalculable amount
of harm, sowing discord in families, and facilitating seduc-
tion and adultery. I cannot understand why the Law does
not endeavour to get rid of this social plague-spot; it
could easily be done in many cases by applying Article 405
of the Penal Code dealing with the offence of " obtaining
money by false pretences." Certain of impunity, these
women ply their trade at markets and fairs in country
places, while in towns they advertise their addresses in the
newspapers. They have always been very numerous in
Paris. In the Seventeenth Century, a sorceress was arrested
by La Reynie who declared there were more than four
hundred witches and magicians in that town, "who ruined
great numbers of people, especially women and of all ranks
of life." (Le Drame des poisons, p. 105.)
Adulteresses are always ready to combine dissoluteness
and devotion. The Roman ladies used to visit the Augurs
to consult them about their lovers. "Tell me, Janus . . .
but dost answer suchlike questions? Have the Gods
nothing more serious to attend to in heaven yonder?
Truly your Olympus can have but little to do! One
woman consults thee for a comic actor, another recom-
mends to your divine care a Tragedian," writes the satirist
Juvenal (Sat. vi.). — Women calling themselves Christians
pray to heaven to secure the success of their guilty love.
Aveline wrote to her lover, "This week I visited Notre
Dame des Victoires, and had a candle burnt for the
realization of our plans. — Mary Queen of Scots, writing to
Bothwell, her lover, says : " Each of us is united with a
faithless mate. Pray the Devil separate us from them, and
God join us twain together for aye. . . . This is my con-
fession of faith, and I am ready to die in the same. ... I
ask naught else of God Almighty, but only that you under-
stand what I have in my heart, the which is yours." When
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 20Ç
the Queen was planning her elopement with Bothwell, she
wrote to him : " I pray the good God we may soon see one
another in joyfulness." l — In a fit of despair occasioned by
the breaking off of her liaison with Alfred de Musset,
George Sand appeals to God, writing thus in her private
diary : " Ah ! give me back my lover, and I will be a pious
woman, and my knees shall wear out the church floor." —
The wife of a rich merchant of Marseilles, having become
the mistress of the youthful vicar of a suburban church,
listened anxiously in the morning for the sound of the bell
to tell her whether her lover's morning mass had taken
place at the usual hour. The sacring bell not having rung
till later, she cried : " Yes ! he is a saint ! he would not say
his Mass before he had been to confess." When the
accomplice of an adulteress is a priest, he will urge her to
fulfil all the customary outward acts of devotion, but
dissuade her from going to another priest for confession,
when she wishes to do so, in order to be able to com-
municate on some Holy Day; he dreads lest confession
to a priest of the district may lead to the discovery of his
guilt
Sometimes adulteresses go yet further, and unite piety
and crime. In Mme. Gras' prie-Dieu were found filthy
books and a box of hashish compounded with cantharides ;
she appeared in Court with a huge rosary on her arm and
wrote hymns in prison. — A young wife who wished her
husband dead, on noticing that he had fallen ill, cried joy-
fully, "Ah! if only God would. . . ." But God having
shown Himself unwilling to rid her of her husband by a
natural death, she helped on his sickness by poison, praying
God to make it act as she wished and promising Him her
deepest gratitude in case of success. " If only God could
have pity on me," she cried, " how I would bless His Holy
Name ! When he (the husband) groans, I praise the Lord
from the bottom of my heart. Yesterday he was very ill ;
I really thought God was beginning to help me ! "
1 Teulet, SuppUnunt au Recueil du prince Labanoff, pp. 17, 18, 58.
O
2IO ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE;
§ ii. — Intemperance.
Intemperance in women is the prelude to adultery. The
Romans long ago noticed the fact and used to say that
"any woman who makes immoderate use of wine shuts her
heart to every virtue and opens it to every vice." Valerias
Maximus relates how a husband beat his wife to death to
punish her for her intemperate habits, adding that "ail
men held she had justly expiated by an exemplary
punishment her violation of the laws of sobriety." l We
moderns are very far from such severity ; our habits and
laws are favourable to alcoholism, which has made
alarming strides. Just as we very largely attribute to the
progress of alcoholism the increase in the number of
criminals, madmen and suicides, we are justified in holding
intemperance responsible for the adultery of a certain pro-
portion of women, especially among the working classes.
Drunkenness, especially in Paris, works havoc in not a few
households. In the Eighth Court of the Correctional
Tribunal of the Seine, of which I was a member, we had
every sitting to judge 8, 10, 12, 14 persons arrested on
charges of drunkenness, and among these were women and
even girls of 15, 16, 17 years old, who had already con-
tracted habits of intemperance and were living a life of
prostitution. The three other Correctional Courts of the
Seine have an equally large number of cases before them.
Drunkenness makes a woman, just as it does a man,
violent, lustful and ill-conditioned. The married workman,
who is a drunkard, beats his wife and children, and makes
them endure all sorts of hardships, even including hunger ;
if a bachelor, he grows idle, dissipated and sometimes
" bully " to some fast woman ; he beats his parents, robs
them and refuses to go to work. The workman's wife
who gives way to drink, neglects her household duties,
deserting her husband and children to indulge in a life
of riot.
Alcoholism at the same time abnormally over-stimulates
1 Valerius Maximus, Bk. XL, ch. iii., No. 9.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WÏF£\ 211
the sexual passion and diminishes the victim's powçr of
resistance.
§ 12. — Defects on the husband? s side.
Again, a wife's adultery is sometimes due to physical
defects on the part of the husband or by a coarseness and
want of delicacy that inspire her with disgust. The re-
pugnance Mary Queen of Scots felt towards her first
husband, Darnley, arose from that nobleman's bad breath ;
she writes herself to Bothwell, " He hath well-nigh killed me
with his breath, for 'tis stronger than that of your relation
you speak of." Accordingly, whenever Darnley urged
the Queen to share his bed, the latter, that she might
pass the night alone, made a point of complaining of a
pain in the side ; " I never go anigh him," writes Mary
Stuart, "but the pain of my sick side doth seize me, so
grievous is he to my senses."
Brutality on the part of the husband in the first days
of married life is often enough to occasion in a woman of
delicate susceptibilities a permanent dislike and repugnance.
This is shown in the following extract from a judgment
delivered by the Tribunal of the Seine : " Whereas the
defendant X admits that from the time of her marriage
with the plaintiff, she has consistently refused to fulfil her
conjugal duty, alleging that from the very first her husband
showed himself too impatient and did not employ all neces-
sary precautions to spare the susceptibilities of a young
woman absolutely ignorant of the obligations of matri-
mony." l Not a few husbands compromise their domestic
happiness for ever by their impatience and coarse brutality
on the marriage night. — Specialists in mental disease have
even noted instances of insanity being induced in delicate
women by the first conjugal assaults, which were more
like rape than anything else. 2 — The wife who is disgusted
by her husband's roughness shuts her bedroom door against
1 Gauttedes Tribunaux, ioth Jan. 1892.
1 Paul Moreau de Tours, Les aberrations du sens génésique, p. 174.
Pierre Janet, Névroses et idées fixes, vol. ii. p. 291. (F. Alcan, Paris.)
212 ADULTERY ON TIW PART OF THE WIFE,
him, but it is not long before she opens it to a lover, who
displays more tact than the other and spares her delicacy.
Such is the situation Alexandre Dumas has described in
Jane de Simérose in his L Ami des femmes.
A coarse, ill-looking man is liable to suffer the fate of
Vulcan, who was abandoned by Venus, because he was
lame and dirty. Nevertheless, when husband and lover
appear side by side in Court, we often find that merely
from the physical point of view the former is in no way
inferior to the latter, and that all lovers are not Adonises.
Bothwell, who inspired so lively a passion in the breast of
Mary Stuart, was an ugly man ; what seduced the Queen
was his martial look, his bold bearing and energetic char-
acter. Helen of Troy, who left all to follow Paris, husband,
child and country, said, speaking of her husband, "that
she had no fault to find whether with his heart or his
beauty."
Hypocrisy the concomitant of adultery, — The whole life
of an adulteress is one tissue of falsehood, trickery and
hypocrisy. Often she will profess the most religious
devotion, in the hope her husband and the world at
large will conclude so pious a woman to be incapable
of anything wrong. The woman Fenayrou, after making
up her mind to commit the crime she was brought to
trial for, went to Confession and took the Sacrament.
To cajole her husband, such a woman will simulate
jealousy and charge the poor man with all sorts of
imaginary wrongs ; she will avert his suspicions by hypo-
critical displays of fondness and tearful scenes of tenderness;
Comedy and Tragedy are equally within her scope, and like
a consummate actress she can assume every mask at will,
the mask of conjugal affection, of jealousy, of melancholy, of
piety, she can laugh and cry, melt with love or burn with
anger, and at any moment sham a convenient attack of
nerves. Not without reason the adulterous woman has
been compared in character to the feline race, — the same
apparent gentleness, same suppleness and grace, same
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 2IJ
treacherousness and even same cruelty, for the velvet paw
is always ready to disclose its claws. To prevent her
husband suspecting her lover, she will falsely accuse an
innocent man of pursuing her, complaining of his marked
attentions and declaring she has found means to recall him
to proper sentiments, and the husband, touched by these
confidences, cannot sufficiently admire his wife's goodness.
These false charges against a man who has never gone out
of his way to pay her the least attention, may easily lead to
murder. Acting on the false information given him by his
wife, a man demanded satisfaction from one of his friends ;
when the latter refused to fight, the husband fired at him
three times with a revolver. — To mask her guilty con-
nection with a lover, a woman of this character will some-
times endeavour to get him married to a relative of her
own, a cousin or niece, or else she will falsely accuse a
perfectly innocent woman and make her out to be her
inamorato's mistress. — In order to be free, she makes her
husband acquire tastes that keep him away from home,
and induces him to undertake useless journeys, the para-
mount importances of which she insists upon. Such are
some of the wiles these unfaithful wives adopt to hide their
guilty loves and mystify their husbands, and which form
the staple of a thousand farces. The husband may watch
his wife, invent secret locks and cunning chastity belts, buy
a watch-dog to scare away enterprising lovers, — all is in
vain ; no precaution is of the slightest avail against
feminine trickery. The woman never fails to find a way
to meet her lover, to keep her secret and flout her lord and
master. Comic writers, from Aristophanes and Molière
down to the authors of contemporary farces, have only to
observe real life to make their public laugh at the expense
of Georges Dandin, bringing out the contrast it exhibits
between the husband's unsuspiciousness and the woman's
cunning.
When women are surprised by their husbands the moment
after they have hidden a lover away somewhere, they will
put on the most natural air in the world of astonishment
2J4 ADULTERY: ON- THE PART OF THE WIFE.
and; Indignation at the suspicions they meet with, and
fly into a passion with the man» calling him a madman to
have dared suspect so virtuous a wife. In a case tried
before the Assize Court I have known a woman, surprised
by the husband, when the lover actually lay concealed in
the bed, utter exclamations of astonishment and anger at
the ridiculous jealousy of her husband, up to the instant
when the latter pulling off the bed clothes sent the other
scampering from the couch. — A woman who had poisoned
her husband, a crime she admitted subsequently, threw
herself with a pretence of the deepest sorrow on the man's
body, when the Law ordered its exhumation. She screamed
and tried to shed tears, putting her hands before her face,
that the bystanders might not see her dry eyes.
Nuns in charge of female offenders in penitentiaries
have often told me of their astonishment at the girls'
falseness. One of them said to me: "The most abandoned
are just the ones that affected the most virtuous sentiments ;
they act their parts so well, I am constantly deceived.
Then when I see I have been made game of, I declare 1
will be less simple another time ; but there ! they are
always able to cheat me again. 11
A married woman, afraid of her lover's giving her up
and playing the comedy of a pretended suicide to keep
him by her side, made a show of hanging herself, after
writing him the following pathetic letter : " How you
have made me suffer ! I have sacrificed all to you for the
last two years" (she had sacrificed her husband to him,
having poisoned the poor man)-, "but I forgive you in
memory of our love. You have been very cruel to me ;
you might have prevented my death and saved my
children, but you would not. God's will be done ! Pray
Heaven you may not repent some day of your unkindness !
Give one thought to a dying woman. Farewell! farewell !"
She had written another letter to her aunt : " Before
going back to God, (for indeed I think He will forgive me
this desperate act), I entrust my children to you. . . .
Poor little things, my heart bleeds for them, but it must
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 21$
be done, I must be strong for their future happiness.
Alive, I could not help them as their father (whom she
had poisoned) would have done ; if I die, everyone will
pity them. ... Be sure and tell them my last thought
was for them, that I love them above all else, for I sacrifice
my life for them." Eventually, the woman admitted under
examination that she was simply acting when she wrote
these letters, and that her attempted suicide was all a
pretence.
We may apply to such women the verses composed by
Alfred de Vigny after his betrayal by Mme. Dorval, who
had been his mistress:
" Une lutte éternelle en tout temps, en tout lieu,
Se livre sur la terre en présence de Dieu,
Entre la bonté d'Homme et la ruse de Femme ;
Car la femme est un être impur de corps et d'âme." l
No doubt an adulteress, in the majority of cases, plays
some ingenious farce to hide her fault ; yet at times we
see her animated with such hatred of her husband that
she takes no pains to hide it ; she proclaims her sin with
her own lips with surprising effrontery, like the woman
who after trying to poison her husband, told a neighbour
on becoming enceinte : " You may tell my husband that,
if I have a child, it will most assuredly not be his."
A woman who wishes to break off her marriage in order
to wed her lover, lays snares for her husband to bring
about divorce ; she tries to make him insult or beat her ;
she refuses to let him fulfil his marital duties, in the hope
that he will enter into some irregular liaison that will
give her a pretext to claim separation. In a case tried
1 •' A never-ending struggle, at all times and in all places, is fought out in
the world before God's eyes, between Man's good nature and Woman's wiles ;
Ux indeed a woman is a creature impure of body and soul alike." — But de
Vigny made the mistake of generalizing from one woman as if her baseness
were predicable of the whole sex, and summing up women in the cruel and
unjust line :
11 La femme, enfant malade et douze fois impure."
" Woman, that sickly child, foul with a thousand impurities."
2l6 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
on November 19th, 1895, lt came out in the course of the
hearing that within a month after marriage, the woman
kept her favours for her lover and began to lay traps, for
her husband. The latter was informed by the agency
employed, that his wife had given orders to have him
watched.
Divorce is favourable to adultery, as supplying a means
of breaking off one marriage and entering oh another*
Very frequently an adulterous woman makes her lover
promise to marry her if she becomes free, and she is not
long before she finds a pretext for divorce. Of course the
Law does not allow an adulteress to marry the accomplice
with whom she has been caught sinning, but all she needs
is to avoid being surprised flagrante delicto. Not long
ago were found on the body of a married woman, killed
by her husband, the rough drafts of letters addressed to
a cousin, telling him she was going to appeal for a divorce.
— It is not long since we had to adjudicate on the case
of a husband who had fired two revolver shots at his wife^
whose evil life was notorious; the woman's answer was:
" I was going the pace, the sooner to get a divorce." — As
soon as a married woman has taken a lover, she goes
(often paying out of her husband's money) to consult a
lawyer as to the best way to procure a divorce. Before
cheating the Law, she begins by deceiving her lawyer,
telling him a string of falsehoods about the wrongs she
alleges herself to have suffered at her husband's hands. —
Clever women succeed in deceiving the Police and in
making them believe them to be the victims of their
husband's brutality, when all the while the real victim is
the husband himself. In the criminal records relating to
various women guilty of murdering their husbands, I have
found old Police reports describing them, as the result of
false information supplied by the women in question, as
victims of marital cruelty. To gain credence for the
brutalities they alleged, they would shout "murder" with-
out any reason for doing so, so that the neighbours might
hear and report the matter to the Police.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 217
To obtain a divorce, women will get false charges
brought against their husbands of crimes against morality.
Some years since, a lady living in a country house near
Tours, induced her former governess to accuse her
husband of a purely imaginary rape ; this calumny she
disseminated by means of the newspapers, so as to put
pressure on the members of the Bench at Tours, who
hesitated to prosecute the husband at her instigation.
Above all it is among those of her own sex that an
adulteress seeks compliant witnesses ready to trump up
false charges against her husband and so lead to a divorce.
One individual, who was urged to " bear false witness " in
this way, but refused to consent, drew down on herself
the following retort : " You're not half a woman, if you
stand up for my husband."
Malevolence of women guilty of adultery ; desertion of
their children. — Novelists tell us "the voice of nature"
always appeals to a mother's heart and teaches even bad
women love and devotion towards their children. It is
quite true many adulteresses continue to love their children
when they have ceased to love their husbands. But it is
no less true to say that " the voice of nature " does not
always make itself heard by the woman who adopts a dis-
solute course of life, and that frequently an adulterous wife,
on losing her love for her husband, feels her maternal affec-
tions diminish concurrently with her conjugal. Clytaem-
nestra, once guilty of adultery, ceases to love her daughter
Electra. Mme. X , who was ready to die along with
her lover, the student Chambige, noticed the alteration
that had occurred in her sentiments : "lam quite changed
from what I used to be ; I no longer think all day long
of my children, I only think of you ; it is horrible ! "
Absorbed in this delirium of her passion, the guilty woman
has no time left to think of her children and attend to
their health and education ; if she is well-to-do, she hands
them over to the care of servants ; if poor, she leaves them
to run the streets. I read in the report of a trial this
2l8 aekjlterV on the part of the wife.
pathetic statement by an unfortunate husband : M My little
boy of five died of a sore throat, having caught à chill
while his mother was away keeping an assignation."—
In another case I find this statement made by the children
who were called as witnesses after a domestic tragedy:
"Since his marriage, our father never had a moment's
happiness, owing to our mother's bad behaviour ; she used
to neglect the house, and father, after his day's work was
over, was obliged to look after domestic matters."
An adulterous wife soon loses her children's respect
Often she does not hesitate to let them see her faux pas,
and makes use of them to carry letters sending the father
out of the way and summoning the lover. Sometimes we
even find a mother compromising her own daughter, so as
to use her as a cloak for her adulterous doings. — Like
maternal affection, paternal love is also frequently destroyed^
by adultery ; a father who keeps a mistress no longer \
the same respect for his children, nor the same fondne
He also will sometimes employ them to deliver his lov -
letters, and is ready to ruin his children to satisfy h^S
mistress's caprices. Passion may even quench the sen^^
of pity ; fathers who are widowers have been known befo*-^
now to allow their mistress to domineer over and tortim*?
their children.
Speaking generally, a woman loves or hates her husband
in her children ; these are more or less cherished accord-
ing as the wife loves or hates her husband. 1
1 In the case of a large number of women, maternal love also increases or
diminishes, according as the mother has or has not suckled her children
herself. The preference a mother often shows for one of her children often
arises from the fact that she has suckled this one and not the others. I
have known the case of a woman who killed her little girl by her unkind
treatment, and who admitted she could not love the child because she bad
not suckled it ; the same mother adored another child she had reared herself.
These facts prove that, with a large number of women, in whom education
and religion have not modified the original disposition, maternal love is rather
instinctive than intellectual, coming more from the womb and bosom than
from the brain and heart, contrasting herein with paternal affection, which is
more intellectual than instinctive. For the same reason the mother pays
greater attention to her children's bodies than to their minds, and feels their
misconduct less acutely than the father does.— Very often too a man loves or
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 210
Just as the wife who loves her husband is happy in
liscovering his likeness in the features of her children and
xclaims with Andromaque :
44 Voilà ses yeux, sa bouche et déjà son audace ;
Cest lui-même ; c'est toi, cher époux que j'embrasse," *
o the wife who has ceased to love her husband finds no
Measure now in tracing his resemblance in her children's
aces. Such a resemblance in fact becomes odious to her,
nd she loves her children less, because they remind her of
heir father. I have heard a mother tell her son, "Go
way! you are so like your father." If a woman who is
nfaithful to her husband has a child by her lover, this is
tie one she prefers.
As a rule mothers think their own children pretty and
lore attractive than anyone else's.
44 . . . Mes petits sont mignons,
44 Beaux, bien faits et jolis sur tous leurs compagnons," 2
ays the owl of its young ones. But the adulterous wife is
n unnatural mother and no longer deems her children
>retty. I find in the records of a criminal trial a character-
stic remark made by a mother to one of her neighbours.
> peaking of her daughter, she said, " You think her pretty,
lo you ? well ! for my own part I cannot bear to look at
lates his wife in his children ; thus the hatred the "Ami des hommes" bore
owards his son Mirabeau arose mainly from that he felt against his wife.
[*he working-man very readily cuts the connection with his children, when he
its been divorced. Still on the whole paternal love seems to me less
lependent than maternal on that between husband and wife.
1 ** Look ! his eyes, his mouth and already his gallant boldness ; 'tis himself;
tis you, dear husband, that I kiss."
Médée expresses the same sentiment when she says to Jason :
" Souffre que mes enfants accompagnent ma fuite,
Que je t'admire encore en chacun de leurs traits,
Que je t'aime et te baise en ces petits portraits."
"Oh ! let my children go with me in my flight, let me admire you again
i each of their features, let me love and kiss you in these miniature
tcsimiles."
* M . . . My little ones are sweet, handsome, well-made and pretty above
U their companions. "
220 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
her." Another mother said of her daughter, " I cannot
endure the sight of her ; when she cries, I want to kill
her." — Yet these unnatural mothers, who bully and even
kill their children, lavish the geatest care and fondness on
their pet animals, their cats and dogs. It is notorious that
children are often treated cruelly by step-mothers and by
their father's mistresses, who deprive them of food, air, and
sleep, and beat them unmercifully. The same atrocious
offences are also occasionally committed by adulterous
wives upon their own children. Such women have really
ceased to be either wives or mothers ; they have neither
heart nor reason left, nothing but their sensual appetites ;
they are no longer human beings, but brutes, resembling
those animals that desert their young, beating and killing
them to give themselves more freely to fresh embraces. I
myself prosecuted a woman who had abandoned her three
little children in a shed, in order to indulge in dissolute
courses ; she merely came once a day to toss them some
bread through an opening in the wall. When I visited
the spot with the Juge cTinstruction I found the children
almost naked, lying in filthy straw stained with their
excrements. Hunger, cold, confinement, the hardships of
every sort they had endured, had reduced them to a state
bordering upon idiocy ; one of them had his feet gangrened.
" The voice of nature " is silenced in the hearts of women
that have succumbed to sensual, bestial passion. Adul-
teresses are found ready to go on with their guilty amours
while their children are on a bed of sickness. In one case
I saw tried, a mother gave an assignation to her lover
on the very day her daughter died. — Another adulterous
wife, when reproached by her husband for her conduct,
threatened to kill her last born child, if he dared to have
her watched.
" Soevus amor docuit natorum sanguine mat rem
Commaculare manus . . .,
Nunc scio quid sit amor." x
1 "Cruel love taught the mother to embrue her hands with her children's
blood ...» now I know what love can do." Virgil, Eclogues, viii.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 221
If death surprises the sick child while the mother is
hastening to a criminal rendezvous, the latter finds speedy
consolation for her loss ; the deep mourning she must
assume, with its long black veil, annoys her, so she leaves
it off at the earliest possible moment or contrives to
combine it with an elegant toilette. The same indifference
or positive dislike the adulteress sometimes feels towards
her children, is also occasionally experienced by young
women who are mothers without being wives. To obtain
greater freedom for their vicious propensities, they will
strangle their children, poison them, dash in their skulls,
throw them into ponds, rivers, the sea, or down privies, —
and this not always directly after their birth, but at one or
two years old, just when children are so charming, loving
and loveable.
Filial piety may be stifled by habits of debauchery no
less than maternal affection. I have known an adulteress
hurry away to an assignation while her father was in the
very pangs of dissolution. I have just been reading in
some criminal records a number of letters written by her
lover to a married woman, who had been obliged to leave
Paris for the country to attend her mother who was
dangerously ill ; she complains in every one of them how
long her mother takes to die, thus preventing her from
getting back to Paris, — in fact, she wearies for her mother's
end, that she may the sooner see her lover again. " What
a horrid trade," she writes, "a sick-nurse's is!" — Once a
woman has lost her sense of shame, she quickly grows
capable of anything. "Amissa pudicitia, mulier nihil
abnuerit " (" Shame lost, a woman will stick at nothing ").
This sentiment in a woman is the thread that keeps together
the pearls of a necklace ; cut the thread, and all the pearls
are lost ; do away with modesty, and all the female virtues
fly away, conjugal affection, maternal love, filial piety, all
disappear. And the process of deterioration is a rapid
one. Looseness of conduct leads quickly to crime, abor-
tion, infanticide, poisoning. I have known the case of a
young woman who had won a prize for good conduct when
22 2 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE,
a girl, yet within a few years' time appeared before a Court
of Justice charged with adultery and poisoning her husband.
The notorious Mme. Fenayrou had been quoted as a
pattern of virtue in the boarding school where she was
brought up; but taking to dissolute courses some years after
her marriage, she very soon developed into a criminal.
Hatred of the adulterous wife towards her husband ; her
calumnies on his conduct. — For the adulterous wife, the true
husband is the lover ; she speaks of herself as " his wife,"
while the husband is the obstacle, the stranger, the enemy.
But every obstacle must be removed, and every enemy
hated ; in proportion as the woman's love for her lover
increases, her hatred of her husband augments. One
woman on trial, relating how adultery had led her on
to poisoning, told the Juge d'instruction : " Yes ! I am
guilty of the crime I am charged with ; my adulterous
connection with X was the cause of it all. When he
first asked me to be his, I rejected his proposal with scorn,
but I ended by yielding to his prayers ; I very soon
conceived a strong aversion to my husband." People
always hate those they have wronged ; the fault the
wife commits inspires her with an invincible repugnance
towards her husband. Under these circumstances, the
more gentle and affectionate the husband is, the greater
his wife's loathing and detestation.
An adulterous wife's hatred of her husband often
expresses itself in calumnies against his character,
calumnies uttered even in the presence of her children.
Feeling herself despised by her husband, she is jealous
of the respect and love the children show their father,
and she does all she can to deprive him of this consolation
by means of insidious slanders ; she complains to her
children of having been made unhappy all her life by
her husband's misconduct, painting him in the blackest
colours, and falsely accusing him of the most atrocious
vices. In some instances, I have known her accuse her
husband of wishing to kill her, to poison her, and she
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 223
sheds copious sham tears to move her children to pity
her wrongs. To make out the victim of her wickedness
to be a villain, to pose as a victim herself, when she is
the true villain all the time, to rob the father of the esteem
and affection of the children he adores, what a fine satis-
faction for an evil-natured wife ! The worst of it is, these
false-hearted misrepresentations almost invariably attain
their object, either because the husband is unsuspicious or
because he shrinks from confounding the woman's calumnies
by revealing her real character, out of consideration for his
children and a dread of wounding their feelings. This
confidence and generosity she takes advantage of to make
her husband suffer in his affections as a father, having
already tortured him in his love as a husband. I have
known such a one make her daughter believe her father
was suffering from a skin disease, in order to deprive him
of his child's caresses. All means are utilized to sow mis-
understanding between father and children. If she cannot
render the father odious in his children's eyes, she makes
a point of turning him into ridicule before them ; when
she cannot get them to fear him, she incites them to laugh
at him. Her spite discovers a thousand perfidious ways of
wounding the husband in the father.
The unhappy husband, exasperated by these perfidies
and mockeries, sometimes ends at last by losing his head
and giving way to serious acts of violence, which call for
the intervention of the Law. A wife who had succeeded in
getting her husband to strike her and having him thrown
into prison in consequence, told her daughter: "Your
father has gone into prison with a black beard, he must
leave it with a white one." In another case a husband,
who driven to desperation had given his wife a blow which
proved fatal, exclaimed sadly : " She scorned me, and made
my children do the same ! "
The husband tortured by suchlike calumnies, and in
despair at losing his children's love, the only consolation
left him, ends sometimes by committing suicide. To give
an instance, — a man of business in Paris poisoned himself
224 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE,
in the year 1895 with nicotine, after writing the following
letter : " Not satisfied with dragging my name through the
mud by her public liaison with M. X , my wife has fled
from home taking with her 3,500 francs and has instituted
proceedings for a divorce against me. Now she forbids
my son coming to see me, setting him against me by
every kind of shameful falsehood and slander. 1 could
bear everything till to-day, but I cannot endure the grief
the loss of my son's affection causes me. I forgive my
boy, who is young, and I think he will forgive my act of
despair. But I hold my wife and her lover responsible for
my death. She has robbed me of all, — my honour, my
money, and the love of my son which consoled me for
everything else." Other husbands, exasperated by their
wives' persistent evil speaking, are filled with a fierce
hatred that explodes some day and translates itself into
murder; they go mad with anger. Some years ago in
the neighbourhood of Tarascon, the wife of a farmer
cultivating his own land was found murdered in her bed.
She had been suddenly attacked in her sleep, the husband
striking her with an iron pitchfork which was left sticking
in her head. He declared to the Juge d'instruction that
he had been driven beyond all bounds by his wife's
calumnies, which had forced him to kill her. 1
It is also by calumny that an adulteress avenges herself
on any of her husband's relatives who say anything to her
about her conduct. When her father-in-law or brother-in-
law give her warnings of this kind, it is no uncommon thing
for her to try to punish them by informing her husband
they have endeavoured to seduce her.
" Que ne sait point ourdir une langue traîtresse,
Par sa pernicieuse adresse ! n 2
1 In this case it was a dog that led to the detection of the criminal. The
Law had been unable to discover who was guilty, till one day the Police were
put in possession of the blood-stained clothes of the murderer, which had been
buried in a neighbouring field and covered over with stones. It was the man's
dog that attracted attention to them by scratching up the ground at the spot
and howling. This discovery forced the husband to confess.
3 " What calumnies will not a perfidious tongue invent out of its malignant
cunning ! "
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 225
Provocation to commit parricide. — But the adulterous wife
does not invariably stop short at calumniating her husband
and sowing discord between father and children ; she
sometimes goes further, provoking acts of violence between
them and even inciting the children to kill their father.
In 1893» the Assize Court of the Bouches-du-Rhône
adjudicated on a case of this kind. A married woman»
Vial by name, whose husband was a farmer near Aix and
a hard-working, honest man, quitted her home again and
again, forsaking husband and children to go after various
lovers. The husband, who was weak and good-natured
forgave her every time, out of consideration for his children,
and agreed to take her back again. Far from showing
gratitude for his clemency, the woman at each act of
forgiveness only redoubled her hatred of her husband, and
persistently spoke ill of him to the children, in order to
alienate their affection from him. He was really in-
dustrious and saving ; she made him out to the children
to be idle and extravagant, and presently succeeded in
making a quarrel between them. One of the sons, a
baker's apprentice, wished to buy an oven for himself on
too hard terms, and his father did not approve the plan ;
this occasioned the young man very keen vexation, which
his mother took care to keep up and embitter still more.
At her instigation he had a violent scene with his father,
and threatened to leave his house, taking his mother and
brothers with him. A few days later, he put this threat
into execution, and Vial on returning from his work in
the fields, found his home abandoned by his wife and
children, who had carried away everything with them.
He then made his way to their new dwelling to get back
the bed-clothes which they had carried off from his bed.
His wife and son turned him out of doors and went up to
a first floor window to hurl insults at him. The son took
his stand at the open window holding a pistol in his hand,
and his mother behind him, urging him to use his weapon.
She was heard to shout " Fire ! " and at the same moment
the son discharged two shots at his father. The latter
226 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
was wounded and took to flight, but his son, still at the
invitation of his mother, rushed in pursuit, caught hkn up
and fired at him twice again almost point blaafc. The
unhappy father received two balls, one in die left thigh,
the other in the dorso-lumbar region. In examination it
was proved that the murder was premeditated on the part
both of wife and son ; the son had bought the pistol with
the intention of using it against his father, and the mother
had given him the money for the purchase.
I have seen another case of parricide provoked by an
adulterous wife, a woman of forty-seven, who, abusing the
empire she possessed over her son of twenty, pursued him
with continual solicitations to kill his father, whom she
painted in the blackest colours for his benefit The young
man resisted for some time, the idea of such a crime fill-
ing him with horror, but at last his mother succeeded in
overcoming his scruples ; she procured him a gun to shoot
his father with, and contrived means for his meeting him
alone in the fields. Following his mother's directions, the
son came suddenly upon his father engaged in felling a
pine-tree ; he took aim and stretched him stone dead at
its foot.
It is often the best husbands that become the objects of
dislike. The husband who possesses every possible good
quality when he is loved, is found to have every possible
defect when this is no longer the case. Just as love trans-
forms defects into merits, hatred changes merits into de-
fects. If the husband is gentle and patient, his adulterous
wife calls him a weak fool ; if he is careful and saving, she
sets him down as a miser. In the great majority of in-
stances of the murder of a husband by an adulterous wife^
I have found the husband to have been a good, hard-work-
ing man, devoted to his family, while the wife was lazy,
greedy, extravagant and profoundly selfish. I find among
the documents relating to the poisoning of a husband by
his wife this declaration made by one of the daughters:
"My father used always to say, that when a man had
children, he ought to save, and my mother would reply :
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE, 227
4 1 think more of myself than of my children.' " What a true
confession ! The adulteress really and truly loves neither
husband nor children but only herself; in her abominable
selfishness, she prefers pleasure to the family honour ; she
thinks only of herself, lives only for herself, — " I, I come
first," she says, " the rest nowhere ! " 1 This is why, if she
has no children, she does not want any, and would rather
be barren. She rejoices over her sterility, and if an
incipient pregnancy declares itself, she plans to get rid of
it Alexander Dumas fils has noted this trait in the
character of the adulterous wife in La Femme de Claude ;
in the novel mentioned Césarine desires to procure abortion.
The midwives, who suppress as many infants as they bring
into the world, do not limit themselves to giving assistance
to unmarried girls who have been seduced ; unfaithful
wives also frequently have recourse to their treatment. In
1891, the Assize Court of the Var condemned on a charge
of abortion Mme. de J , wife of a naval officer, and for
complicity in the matter her lover, the Mayor of Toulon.
Even when the husband, finding himself unable to put a
curb on his wife's misconduct, makes up his mind to bear
it quietly, the latter may still continue to cherish against
him a dislike so violent as to make her desire and provoke
his death. I have myself noted the case of a village
Messalina who tried to poison her husband, and failing
this, got her lover to kill him, although he was an old
man, good-natured and quite resigned to his lot.
The ferocious hate an adulterous wife feels towards
her husband finds an exact expression in the narrative
Clytaemnestra gives in Aeschylus of the murder of
Agamemnon ; she recounts how " his dying convulsions
send the blood spurting from his wounds ; and the red
dew of murder falls on me in dark gouts, dew as sweet to
my heart as is the rain of Zeus to the fallows." Cassandra's
* This selfishness is found even, more often than might be supposed, in
mothers of families who are not adulteresses, but who, merely in order to
satisfy their love of luxury and dress, sacrifice the interests of their children.
There are even married women who have a horror of the duties of maternity,
and do not wish to have children.
2 28 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
murder, which followed that of Agamemnon, was likewise
for the adulteress, " a soft, voluptuous joy that even yet
gives zest to the delights of my love."
Other motives inciting the adulterous wife to the murder of
her husband. — Hatred however is not the only motive that
urges the adulterous wife to kill her husband ; she wishes
besides to put an end to her marriage, in order to live
freely with her lover. A young woman of eighteen, who
had been married against her will and who deeply re-
gretted having been unable to marry a young man she
loved, said cynically to two witnesses : " I left a suitor in
the lurch who cried finely on my marriage day; but I
mean to give my husband an eleven o'clock broth, to finish
him off, so that I can then marry my old lover." What
she wants is to bind the lover to her by marriage ; and to
do so, she must make herself a widow.
In most instances, before conceiving the idea of getting
rid of her husband by poison, an adulterous wife begins
by merely wishing for his death, without any notion as
yet of causing it ; if only her husband were to disappear,
carried off by some accident or disease, she would be free !
Free ! a widow ! what joy in the thought ! When the Law
seizes the letters an adulteress has written her lover, this
homicidal sentiment is constantly found expressed : M 0h!
how I long to be free! how I long to be rid of him!"
She hopes some convenient sickness will come and give
her her liberty, and if her husband falls ill, the homicidal
idea that had already crossed her mind takes firm hold
of her imagination and never leaves her : " If only he were
to die," she tells herself, " I should be free to marry my
lover." A great many adulterous wives content themselves
with wishing for their husband's death, but others go
further than this ; they begin very soon to weary of the
care they bestow on him, and if the sickness is prolonged,
after noting with pleasure the progress it is making, they
are tempted presently to hasten on its termination, which
is to assure their freedom. At first they only desire the
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE, T2Ç
patient's death, anon we find them preparing it, if it is
too long in coming of itself. When once the thought of
murder, long-cherished in the fancy, takes hold of an
adulterous wife's mind, it grows into a fixed idea, an
obsession of the intellect, which never again leaves her,
and sometimes betrays itself by compromising speeches
she cannot refrain from uttering. A husband whom his
wife had tried to poison, making a statement later on
before a Court of Justice, said the accused had been un-
able any longer to hold her tongue as to her wish to see
him dead, and had had the cynical effrontery to tell him
of it M It was a fixed idea in her mind," he declared. —
In another similar case, a witness reported this cry of
impatience as uttered by an adulterous wife desirous of
her husband's death : " Will he never give out, the
creature ! " * In connection with another criminal case, I
have even known a woman say to her daughter, speaking
o£ the tatter's father, who was the best of men : " Ought
not a man like that to be shot and stretched dead on the
floor ? " — " What would you do, if he were dead ? " returned
the daughter. — " Why ! then I should be my own mistress,"
was the mother's answer.
. In some instances we find the mother-in-law sharing her
daughter's hatred against her husband so entirely as to
become her accomplice in the murder of her son-in-law.
Some years since in the arrondissement of Digne, a wife
plotted with her mother to poison her husband, and they
gave him a drink mixed with sulphur and phosphorus.
The attempt to poison in this way having failed, the woman
procured a gun and discharged it at her husband as he
1 It is not alone in dramas of adultery that we see the criminal, watching his
victim lying on a bed of sickness, pass insensibly from wishing a natural death
to supervene to planning a violent end ; it is a psychological observation of
general application. Before killing the widow Boyer, Vitalis seeing her struck
down by illness, began to wish for her death. " If the good God would only
take her ! " he said more than once to the girl who became his accomplice
later on. — **Ah! yes," answered the latter, who had at first refused to
entertain the idea of committing the crime, but who afterwards felt the same
wish, and ended by helping her lover to second the disease in its effects.
23O ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
slept ; the shot carried away one of his ears without
killing him.
The idea of killing her husband in his sleep often
suggests itself to a woman's mind. When the sisters of
Psyché persuade her that her husband is a monster, they
bring her a lamp and a dagger to stab him with as he
sleeps. Some few years since, in Provence, a woman,
threatened with desertion on the part of her lover, took
advantage of his slumbers to force a pair of scissors into
his temple, using a flat-iron to drive them in with.
But poison is the means an adulterous wife most usually
adopts when she wishes to get rid of her husband. This
has always been the chosen weapon of such women;
"adultéra, ergo venefica" ("an adulteress, therefore a
poisoner"), the Romans used to say. When Medea passes
in review the different ways of avenging herself that occur
to her, it is poison she chooses, "Many means," she
soliloquises, "are open to me of doing them to death. . • «
Should I set fire to their nuptial palace or plunge a
sharpened sword into their heart? . . . Better to assail
them by the direct road we women excel in and kill them
by poison."
The Roman women, like the Greek, were skilled in the
use of poisons. If we are to believe Livy, not a single
case of poisoning came up for trial at Rome for many
years. 1 But, after the submission of the Latins, the
number of poisonings committed by women was so large,
that the mortality among husbands was set down to an
epidemic. The foremost citizens of Rome were dying
fast, all of similar maladies and almost invariably with the
same symptoms. A slave woman eventually came forward
to reveal the fact to the Consuls that the city was being
decimated by the perfidy of the women, and that a number
of Roman matrons were manufacturing poisons. Acting
1 Livy^ bk. viii. — However the laws of the Twelve Tables contain a clause
punishing the crime of poisoning. — Valerius Maximus records that Publida,
wife of the Consul Postumius Albinus, and Licinia, wife of Claudius AseUus,
convicted of having poisoned their husbands, were strangled in virtue of
a sentence passed by their parents and relatives. (Bk. vi., ch. iii., § 8.)
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 23 1
on this information, they caught some women in the act
of preparing noxious drugs and discovered poisons hidden
in several spots. Discoveries of the sort were made in the
houses of twenty matrons, two of the number being ladies
of patrician rank ; a hundred and seventy women were
arrested in all.
According to Juvenal, whose Satires chronicle all the
scandal of his day and are veritable judicial records, there
were many women guilty of adultery and poisoning among
his contemporaries. " Here we have," he writes in his first
Satire, " a rich matron, who handing the mild Calene wine
to her thirsty husband, mixes snake poison in the cup,
and a second and more artful Locusta, teaches her less
experienced neighbours how to carry the livid corpses of
their husbands to burial undeterred by ill-report and
thronging crowds." In his famous Sixth Satire the same
author tells of other poisonings committed by adulterous
wives : " Patrician or plebeian, all," he declares, " are alike
depraved. . . . More destructive than the sword, luxury
has burst upon us and avenges the world enslaved. . . .
To-morrow, at break of day, each quarter of the city will
have its Clytaemnestra. The only difference is that the
daughter of Tyndarus, in frenzied desperation, brandished
her murderous axe in both hands, whereas in our day the
matter is quietly arranged with a small bit of a poisonous
toad's intestine. Still the steel is there all the time, if
the cautious Agamemnon has provided himself with an
antidote in time."
Poisoning, common in Italy in the sixteenth century
extended to France in the seventeenth. Nor was it only
to open the way to inheritances that Brinvilliers and La
Voisin kept open shop for the sale of poisons, it was likewise
to end unwelcome marriages and pave the road to others.
These women dealt in love potions as well as in poisons
for inconvenient relatives. In July 1682, Louis XIV.
published an edict for the punishment of poisoners, pushing
severity so far as to regard as accomplices all who, possess-
ing information " of anyone's having manufactured poisons
2 $2 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF TtlE WIFE.
or been asked for and delivered such," Tailed to denounce
such persons to justice. A special Court was instituted to
exterminate the whole class of men and women who dealt
in poisons. But the King was so horrified at the appalling
revelations that ensued that he stopped the proceedings
and had a number of documents burnt, notably those con-
cerning the case of Mme. de M on tes pan, convicted of
having asked La Voisin for powders to win her the
King's good graces and kill Mlle, de la Vallière, and fetter
on to destroy Louis XIV., who had by that time deserted
her, and Mlle, de Fontanges, her successor in the Royal
favour. The latter died at twenty-two, firmly persuaded
she had been poisoned. Among women found guilty of
poisoning were even magistrates' wives. Louis XIV. con-
nived at the flight of a large number of great lords and
ladies compromised by these revelations. When Mme.
Tiquet, wife of a Counsellor of the Parliament, was con-
demned in 1699 to be beheaded for having killed her
husband, her family earnestly besought the King's mercy ;
" However, the Archbishop of Paris represented to the King
that the impunity this crime enjoyed was by way of making
it extremely frequent ; that husbands depended for the
safety of their lives on Mme. Tiquet being punished ; that
already poisoning was very common and the Grand
Penitentiary had his ears filled with continual confessions
of women who accused themselves of having attempted
their husbands' lives. This remonstrance decided the
King to make a great and terrible example." When
Mme. Tiquet was executed, her head after being severed
from the body was left for some time on the scaffold, " no
doubt in order that the sight might make a deep impres-
sion on the minds of the married women present at the
said execution."
A case of wholesale poisoning, which compromised
several women and was tried in 1868 before the Assize
Court of the Bouches-du-Rhone, revealed the existence
at Marseilles of regular manufactories of poisons for the
use of adulterous wives. A fortune-teller and a herbalist,
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 233
a man named Joye* kept this establishment. They were
consulted v bj|r women as to their lovers' fidelity and the
best means of ensuring "their continued affection ; by
husbands as to the fidelity of their wives and the means
of making these love them ; by mothers in search of a
son-in-law ; by the owners of sick animals as to the way
to cure them by some charm or other. These swindlers
would begin by proposing to married women to rid them
of their husbands by throwing a spell over them. " You
must go to the churchyard," Joye declared ; " take a nail
out of a coffin and invoke it in these words, * nail, I invoke
you, hoping my husband will die.'" The woman would
hesitate at first, but before long she would come to see
the herbalist again and take the poison he handed her.
As soon as the poison had taken proper effect and ridded
the woman of her husband, Joye would call on the widow
to claim "the price of her work." — The fortune-teller on
her part, in order to try the woman's mettle who came to
consult her, would say : " The cards announce that some-
one very nearly connected with you must die soon, and
that his death would suit you very well." When she saw
that this notion was welcomed with satisfaction, she would
add more to the same effect, and finally slip the poison
into the woman's hand. She sold large quantities of it.
To obtain it, women of the lower classes often went so
far as to sacrifice the whole of their little belongings.
It was the professional rivalry existing between the
herbalist and the fortune-teller that eventually led to the
truth coming out. The herbalist having more customers
than the fortune-teller, the latter became jealous and angry
at his interference with her profits and denounced him
to a woman named Marino, whom another, Ville, her
husband's mistress was desirous of poisoning. This Ville,
who had already poisoned her husband, was now planning
to do the same to her lover Marino's wife, so that she
might marry him herself, quite resolved also to kill her
lover in the same way, if he should refuse to marry her.
Marino, being informed by his wife of the statements the
234 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
fortune-teller had made to her, wished to verify ît, and
went to see the herbalist, leading him to believe he was
aware of his mistress's design and approved of it " I am
Ville's lover," he told him, "and I know all that has
occurred. But you have only done half the business. I
want to be able to live at my ease with Mme. V ; can
you rid me of my wife ? " On hearing these words, Joye
looked the other steadily in the eyes, to make sure whether
he was speaking sincerely; then after casting a glance
around, he whispered putting his lips to his ear, " Are you
a man?" — " If I were not," returned Marino, "I shouldn't
be here. But I warn you, I don't wish my wife to suffer
as long as M. Ville did." These words reassured the
herbalist, who putting on a smiling aspect, added : " It was
not I who looked after M. Ville, it was that cheating
baggage Louise, who's hardly good enough to shuffle the
cards and tell a fortune, yet must mix herself up in things
she knows nothing about. She could not succeed in
finishing M. Ville. So I came to the rescue, and with my
white powder, settled his hash in a few days. Leave me
alone, follow exactly the directions I'm going to give you,
and your wife won't give you much more trouble." l
To avoid arousing suspicion a wife who wishes to
rid herself of her husband by poison, gives him small
doses ; she poisons him slowly, but surely, dealing him his
death drop by drop with a smile on her lips. When the
unfortunate man, parched with the poison asks for a drink»
she administers yet another dose in the cooling draught
she gives him, quite regardless of his horrible sufferings.
To baulk the doctor's skill, she will sometimes employ
turn and turn about drugs that produce exactly opposite
effects. If the medical attendant succeeds by appropriate
treatment in re-establishing the invalid's health, the woman
will begin her attempts afresh, doubling the doses this
time.
1 Joye was condemned to life imprisonment with hard labour. After his
condemnation, he asked for his diploma as a herbalist and a book of prayers,
which had been taken from him.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 235
Sometimes it is when in robust health that the husband
is seized by a sudden, unaccountable sickness, at others it
is in the course of an ordinary illness that his wife gives
him poison, hoping that its effects will be confounded with
those of the disease. It has been proved that cases of
poisoning are more frequent during epidemics of cholera,
because women take advantage of this and try to put down
the symptoms really due to the poison to the account of
the prevalent disease. This also gives them a pretext to
at once get rid of the evacuations, so as to avoid their
being analyzed.
It is no uncommon thing for a wife who poisons her
husband to take advantage of the lengthened period of
his illness to get the man she is slowly murdering to make
a will in her favour. Indeed more often than not the
husband never suspects his wife. Occasionally however
he sees that his illness is no ordinary one, feels he is not
nursed lovingly, that he is a burden, and that his death is
a thing hoped for. If the woman notices these suspicions,
she strives to remove them by acting a play of pretended
love and wounded feelings ; she lavishes marks of fond
affection on her husband and complains bitterly of his
unjust suspicions, making such a to-do that the poor victim
ends by excusing himself and asking pardon for having
even suspected her. But the husband's relations, friends
and children, struck by the wife's attitude and manner, are
more clear-sighted ; they form suspicions, watch the woman
and keep her away from the sick man's bed. It was to his
friends' perspicacity, who had him removed and carried to
an hotel that in a recent case the husband owed his life.
A child whose father was poisoned by his mother, told his
uncle " that he noticed how for some time his mother was
not the same towards his father, that she did not seem to
look after him well." Struck by her indifference, the child
watched his mother in terror, and surprised her putting
something suspicious in his father's medicine. Not daring
to say anything, he determined to keep on the alert all
night, but was overcome by sleep. He was awakened by
236 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WlfrE.
the complaints his father was making to his mother about
the draught she had just given him and which he declared
had a bad taste.
In some instances the husband who feels his wife does
not love him, has a presentiment of the fate awaiting him.
" I shall die poisoned/' he says to his family and friends ;
"if I do die, have a post-mortem made, to make sure I
have not been poisoned." He avoids taking drink and
medicine from his wife's hand, and is observed to sit up in
bed to examine the phials on the table by his bedside.
When the poison acts too slowly to accord with her
wishes and the husband's health holds out, the adulterous
wife, impatient to be left a widow, will sometimes forget
all prudence and hasten on his death by large doses ; she
wants to get done, and would rather run the risk of dis-
covery than live any longer with her husband. She
wearies to be free, and able to marry her lover, and in
her blind impatience gives vent in spite of herself to her
real feelings before the bystanders. "The thing must
end ! " exclaimed one such woman to a neighbour, unable
longer to contain herself, " I would rather die with my
lover than go on living any longer with my husband."
However, suchlike outbursts of annoyance and impatience
are the exception ; more often the adulterous wife who
poisons her husband masters herself sufficiently to hide
her criminal acts under a veil of consummate hypocrisy.
To prepare those about her for her husband's death, she
makes a display of excessive grief, says she is broken-
hearted, that science is powerless to save him. In her
impatience to see him dead, she declares recovery to be
impossible at a time when his condition is not yet by any
means desperate. Finally, when the poor invalid does
die, she manifests the deepest sorrow, crying, groaning
and pretending to weep.
The accomplice. — The unfaithful wife will sometimes
poison her husband without feeling any positive dislike
to him, simply and solely in order to regain her freedom
ADVJLTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE, 237
and be able to marry again. Mme. B > recently con-
demned by the Assize Court of the Seine for an attempt
to poison her husband, did not hate him, indeed she used
to call him her "big brother," " her great boy." Nor did
he interfere with her pleasures, but left her perfect liberty.
Still she wished him out of the way, that she might marry
afresh. Nor was it enough for her to get a divorce ; she
had already been divorced once, and a second would have
been a point against her, as a widow is more courted than
a divorcée.
The wife accomplishes the crime by herself, when the
lover refuses to join in the plot for murdering the husband.
But most often the poisoning is carried out with the com-
plicity and co-operation of the lover. When the husband's
death is carried through by the wife and her accomplice
together, sometimes the idea of the crime originates with
the woman, sometimes with the lover ; now it is the
woman induces her lover to kill her husband, now the
lover that incites the wife to commit the crime. Chateau-
briand relates in his Memoirs that one of his ancestors,
having become the lover of a married lady, Jacquemine
de Boysirioult, killed her husband at the instigation of his
mistress, who had promised him her hand as the reward
of the crime. Three months afterwards, he married his
victim's widow, but prosecuted for murder and found
guilty, he was beheaded on a scaffold at Rennes in 1574.
When it is the woman that urges her lover to kill her
husband, she resorts to every kind of ruse to suggest the
act to his mind, to rouse him to its accomplishment and
to overcome his last scruples. If the husband is to be
shot down with a gun, it is she who studies the locality,
stations her lover in ambuscade in a favourable position,
and entices the husband thither to be shot at. On the
day fixed for the deed, she lavishes her caresses on her
husband to lull his suspicions to sleep, on her lover to
excite his courage, encouraging her accomplice by her
words and picturing the happiness awaiting him when
once her husband is dead ; if he hesitates, she reanimates
238 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE,
him by fresh caresses. In a case tried by the Assize
Court of the Bouches-du-Rhône, — it has been made into
a novel, like so many other judicial dramas, — the ex-
amination established the fact that the adulterous wife
had posted her lover armed with a gun at a spot where
he could conveniently take aim at her husband, and that
seeing him hesitating to pull the trigger, she kissed him
passionately to induce him to make up his mind.
In the course of the interviews that take place where
an adulterous wife and her accomplice are confronted be-
fore the Juge cP instruction, how often we hear the lover
declare to his mistress : " It was for love of you, to obey
you, that I have brought dishonour on my name ; you have
made me a murderer."
A lover who at his mistress's instigation had killed the
latter's husband and was on trial for the crime, told the
Juge ([instruction : " Yes ! it was I who did it, but she
forced me into it . . . We gave him poison not once,
but ten times over. The man's soul was nailed into his
body. After that she badgered me to strangle him, to
throw him under a waggon ; last of all she gave me gun-
powder to shoot him with." The murderer added that at
the instant of firing, his mistress came up and kissed him,
to give him courage. — When the widow Gras, after dress-
ing in grande toilette to go to the Opera, hid her accomplice
in the dressing-room, where he was to await his victim, she
kissed him again and again, making him admire her pretty
costume and repeating : " Look how fine I am ! " and
promising to marry him as the price of his crime. — I have
even known a country woman make a will in favour of her
servant in order to decide him to kill her husband ; passion
not being a strong enough motive to make him a murderer,
she kindled avarice in his heart as well. The lover threw
himself by his mistress's orders on her husband during his
sleep, to beat him to death, but the latter succeeded in
freeing himself from his hands and in felling the aggressor,
who prayed for forgiveness and promised to leave the
country. The husband, a good-natured man, promised for
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 239
his part, so as to avoid scandal, not to lay any information
with the Police. But the wife, furious at having failed,
incited her lover to make a fresh attack on her husband.
When the lover, at his mistress's instigation, becomes
the husband's murderer, the chief reason is always that he
is jealous of him. To share his mistress with another man
makes him suffer cruelly in heart and body and self-esteem. 1
The material picture of the other taking his share possesses
his imagination, torturing and exasperating him beyond
all bounds. He would have the woman belong to himself
and himself only, and to put an end once for all to this
odious partnership, which he cannot bear to think of, he
yields to his mistress's instigations or himself takes the
initiative in planning murder. " Be mine ! " he cries, " and
mine alone, and for this become a widow." A woman who
had poisoned her husband, at her lover's instigation, told
the Juge ^instruction : " One evening as I was walking
with my lover, he said to me, ' Loving each other as we do,
if it were not for the fear of compromising ourselves, we
would get rid of those two obstacles, I of my wife, you of
your husband.' These words stuck persistently in my
mind, and finding an opportunity of committing the crime,
I did it so as to be his, to live with the man I loved so
well, the man I loved better than myself."
With eyes fixed on the happiness awaiting them after
the husband's death, hypnotised as it were by thinking ol
it, the adulteress and her accomplice make plans for the
future, while the poison is slowly but surely producing its
effect. At the very time when she was poisoning her
husband, Mme. Weiss was thinking over the furniture of
the rooms she would occupy with her lover after her
husband's death. The lover on his side, before his
mistress had become a widow, sent her a railway ticket
from Spain, so that she might come and join him there
1 This jealousy of the lover towards the husband, when it does not translate
itself into murder, may lead to suicide, so great is the pain of sharing the
loved one's favours with another man. I have noted several cases of the
sort.
240 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WJFB.
directly it was all over. Nay ! more, actually before the first
dose of poison had been administered, he had ordered the
cards that were to announce his marriage with the widow,
and had already completed all the civil formalities necessary
for the marriage. — In another case, an unfaithful wife, who
was getting a revolver sent her from Paris to kill her
husband with, ordered a black dress at the same time for
mourning. — The impatience the lover experiences to be
rid of the husband often shows itself in imprudent acts*
which later on become pieces of presumptive evidence
against him ; during the husband's illness and its final
stages, he is seen wandering about the house and even
pushing his way indoors, to find out if the man is going to
die at last and make room for him.
When the adulterous wife's lover is himself a married
man, a double crime becomes needful to enable him to
marry his mistress, — the murder of his mistress's husband
and that of his own wife. To regain their freedom, the
lovers resort to a twofold crime to get rid of the obstacles
standing in the way of their union. The lover kills his
wife, and the mistress her husband, or else the lover him-
self undertakes both crimes. Some years since, at Saint-
Nazaire, near Toulon, a man of sixty-seven, being eager to
marry his mistress, a married woman of forty, began by
putting his wife out of the way. This once successfully
accomplished, his mistress, equally impatient to regain her
liberty, said to him : " Well ! you have your riddance ! . . .
Now, when shall I get rid of my husband?" A few days
later, she did "get rid of him," as she put it. — In other
instances the lover commits both murders, as in the
following case : A miller, after drowning his wife, not
without suspicions on the part of his children, who all but
caught him in the act, did not hesitate a few months
later to kill his mistress's lover, in order to install the
latter at his mill.
If the lover, after murdering his mistress's husband,
hesitates to go further and kill his own wife, the mistress
is far too jealous to let her live. When Mary Queen of
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 24 1
Scots formed the project in conjunction with her lover
Bothwell to assassinate her husband, the Earl of Darnley,
she claimed of her lover as the price of her complicity,
" for this my painful labour," the right to take the place
of his lawful wife ; " the feigned tears (of Lady Gordon,
Bothwell's wife) ought not to be of so great a weight," she
writes to him, " as the trusty labours I do undergo, to the
end I may deserve to come into her place."
Among crimes of poisoning committed by adulterous
wives, I have had occasion to note one of peculiar atrocity
carried out with the complicity of a priest, the Curé of Les
Baux in Provence. 1 " I am guilty of the crime laid to my
charge," the woman involved told the Juge d'instruction ;
"it was my criminal relations with the Curé D that
led me to it. When he first asked me to give myself to
.him, I indignantly refused, but I ended by yielding. I
soon came to hate my husband. . . . When he was ordered
elsewhere, the Curé said to me : ' What will become of
you ? Your husband cannot keep you ; get rid of it all/
•But ifs not so easy,' I replied. Seeing I was inclined
to listen, he added : ' If you were to give him a dose of
poison, it wouldn't be out of the way/ ' But/ I objected,
1 I have the profoundest respect for Religion ; yet I do not hesitate to give
an account of this odious crime committed by a priest. Anyone acquainted with
human weakness is not surprised to find some priests unworthy of their
caDiiig, — was there not a traitor among the twelve Apostles ? There are bad
priests, just as there are bad magistrates and bad soldiers. Fléchier, re-
counting in the Grands jours cC Auvergne the crimes of some wicked priests,
said quite justly that Religion is in no way affected by the unworthiness of
some of its ministers. What I do not understand is the excessive indulgence
of the diocesan authorities towards bad priests ; instead of expelling them
altogether, they are often content to remove them elsewhere. This Curé of
Les Baux had previously earned an evil reputation in the post he had held
beiore coming into the South, but all that was done was to send him to
another. When a priest is denounced for evil behaviour to his Bishop, the
latter makes enquiries among the neighbouring clergy, who being good men,
cannot bring themselves to believe in their colleague's criminal conduct, and
the Bishop for want of sound information cannot himself credit an accusation
the actual truth of which he has never verified. The Bench of Magistrates
are the only persons aware of the real facts through information received from
the Gendarmerie, the " Juge de Paix " and the Police.
Q
242 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
4 the chemists won't sell it.' The Curé retorted : ' Bah I
you're a goose ; doesn't every grocer sell vitriol and rat
poison.'
" On my declaring I should never dare to come to Con-
fession with such a crime on my conscience, he said at
once, ' I will give you absolution.' Still I could not make
up my mind to commit the crime; I told him again I
should never dare to go to Confession, and he promised
me absolution a second time. From that date my
husband's death was a thing decided. The Curé warned
me not to put in too much poison, to prevent a sudden
death arousing suspicion. At his advice I scented the
mixture with orange flower water. On the 6th of February
I gave my poor husband his first dose of poison. My
husband complained of wind and pain in the stomach and
colic, but he went to bed and fell asleep. Next day I
visited the Curé to tell him what I had done ; I said my
husband was not very ill, and he exclaimed, * The wretch
has a stomach of iron. . . .' When finally my husband
died, the Curé told me if they exhumed his body, I must
make great demonstrations of grief in order to divert
suspicion." The Curé admitted he might have felt a
certain attachment to the woman, but always within the
limits of a godly affection, declaring she had never had the
honour of being his mistress, though he was quite aware
she might have wished to be. The woman answered:
"I was attached to you, it is true; but you loved me
too, passionately." She stated that the Curé had pro-
mised her that so soon as her husband's death should
have been forgotten, he would summon her to join him
in his new place of abode and to take her again into his
service, representing her if need be as his cousin. She
gave, moreover, this curious detail as to the beginning
of their adulterous relations ; all the time the curé D
was trying to inspire her with disgust at her husband, he
kept urging her to lavish attentions on him so as to divert
suspicion, and was constantly giving her money that she
might be able to give him good things to eat ; " Now
ADULTERY ON THE TART OF THE WIFE. 243
go and buy the beast a nice cutlet," he would tell
her.
When the priest was confronted with his accomplice,
the interview was fertile in startling incidents, and Molière
might have learnt fresh traits of character from it to com-
plete his portrait of Tartufe. The accused woman said to
the Curé : " You are the reason for my being here." — The
Abbé D : " Unhappy woman ! how dare you say such
a thing. Jesus Christ . . ." — The accused : " Yes ! you
talk about Jesus Christ now, but you didn't think of Him
that day you threw me down on the sofa." — The Abbé :
"It is not true! I have not the smallest immorality to
reproach myself with in connection with you. Look, what
a position you have put one of God's ministers in ! " — show-
ing her his prisoner's dress. — The accused : " Don't talk of
God ! You are unfit to wear a priest's robes after what
you made me do to my poor husband. He was not ill-
natured ; but for you I should never have dreamt of killing
him." — The Abbé, turning to the crucifix : " God is still
my master, and Him I adore ; He knows my innocence
and purity." — The accused : " You, innocent ! . . . You know
very well it was by your advice I poisoned my husband.
You loved me, and I loved you ; you wanted to carry me
away with you and I wanted to go, — that's what undid us !
. . . You deny it all, because you always told me one
should deny everything and stick to it, no matter what
proof they could bring against you. We are both of us
guilty ; the only difference between you and me is that I
confess my crime, while you deny it insolently." — The
Abbé : " I pray God for your husband and for you,
Madame." — The accused : " The day you left for your new
post, you told me with tears, ' My poor Pauline, we shall
never see each other more ! ' and I cried bitterly too. If
only you would speak the truth, you must admit all this
is perfectly true." — After the interview the Curé said to the
officer who was taking him back to prison : " Poor woman,
if I could only talk to her alone in private for one minute,
she would withdraw what she says. I find she is still in
244 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
love with me." The Curé was right ; the woman loved him
still. To melt her heart, he gave vent to groans and
moans in the night which were heard even in the women's
cells, and she got up to listen and was moved to tears.
The Curé then got a message conveyed to his accomplice;
with the object of misleading justice, he accused another
perfectly innocent man of the husband's death. On the
day of the trial, the woman repeated her confession, giving
the most precise details as to the priest's guilt; then at
the very end of the hearing, she asked permission to speak
and to the amazement of all declared she was alone to
blame. The Advocate-General, who was prosecuting,
having gone to the prison to ask her explanation of this
change of front, she told him she had wished to secure
the Cure's acquittal, because she loved him still.
Marie Broyer, during her examination, wrote letter after
letter to the Juge d'instruction, to exculpate her lover
from a theft he was accused of.
As a general rule, the accomplice of an adulterous wife
endeavours to extenuate his own guilt by throwing on her
the chief share of responsibility. On the other hand it is
no uncommon thing to see the woman, more generous than
the man, assume against all truth and likelihood the whole
guilt of the crime and exculpate her lover entirely in order
to secure his acquittal.
Suicide of the husband — To rid herself of her husband,
an unfaithful wife does not always need to murder him ;
she kills him with sorrow and chagrin, more slowly but
not less surely than if she had poisoned him. When the
husband is a man of a resigned disposition, he will sometimes
quietly die of grief. If the pain and indignation he feels
are too excessive for him to bear, he ends it all by suicide»
On the body of a house-painter found drowned in the
Seine in August 1896 was found the following letter:
" My death is the result of the grief my wife's misconduct
causes me." — Another husband, before killing himself»
wrote to his wife : " You always knew it, I have told
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 245
you'over and over again, I am ashamed, bitterly ashamed,
of your behaviour." — The number of husbands who commit
suicide cursing, nay ! rather still loving in spite of all, their
unfaithful wife, is greater than people suppose, even among
the Parisian working-men. To give a few examples. A
journeyman butcher, thirty-three years of age, in despair
at the misconduct and desertion of his wife, throws himself
into the Seine, the following letter being found upon him :
"My dear Jeanne, you have quite misunderstood me, I had
forgiven you, but you chose to begin again ; I wish you
well, but you will repent your conduct some day, — when
it is too late. Farewell, farewell, — from one who loves
you and has always loved you/ 1 Another workman,
rendered miserable by his wife's misconduct, commits
suicide after writing to her : " As you cannot behave
reasonably, and you make me pass in the house for what
I am not, I prefer to die. Kiss my little Madeleine for
me fondly, I shall never see her more. I have cried
bitterly thinking of her. What will become of her?" —
A day labourer writes : " I am killing myself because of
my wife's unfaithfulness. I beg my brother to take care
of my little girl and be a father to her. I have not
strength to write more, my powers fail me, for it is hard
for an honest man to come to this ; I must be brave."
— The working-men of Paris have many faults, but they
have also many high qualities, and notably much delicacy
of feeling and a highly developed sense of honour. You
would scarcely believe how many good husbands there
are amongst them, whose honour is so deeply wounded
by their wife's unfaithfulness as to lead them to commit
suicide. In a great number of judicial reports on cases of
suicide, I read statements like the following : " X was
a good workman ; for some time past he had had frequent
scenes with his wife, reproaching her for her loose be-
haviour ; he loved her dearly and was ashamed at her
light conduct, and had declared he would kill himself
some day." — "Dear little wife of my heart," writes another
unhappy husband, who had been deserted by his wife,
246 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE;
"these two or three lines will be the last you will ever
receive from me, for I am going on a journey none ever
return from. Think of me a little, and from the bottom
of the tomb I will thank you for your thoughts. . Farewell ;
your husband who has never ceased to love you and who
kisses you for the last time." — I have myself noted the.
case of a husband who, on his wife's deserting him, deter-
mines to kill himself by means of charcoal fumes. While
he is engaged in his preparations, his wife rings at the
door ; but he will not open, for he loves her still and fears,
if he sees her again, he will forgive her. Whilst awaiting
death, he writes her a letter, urging her to reform.
The character of Jacques in George Sand's novel* who
commits suicide to make room for another man, has been
adversely criticised. Such a case is obviously exceptional ;
but it does occur, as I have seen myself. A husband, and
the father of one child, put an end to himself, after writing
to tell his wife he was killing himself, because he could not
win her love, and to enable her to marry again. He ended
his letter with recommendations to bring up his child welL
The despair experienced by a husband deserted by his
wife may lead to madness. To give an instance. A«
certain R , a farmer and an honest hard-working man,
was married to a woman whom he loved passionately, but
who left him to go off with a lover. So great was his-
despair that his whole character underwent a change ; he
was a different man, his neighbours said of him ; he gave
up working, and had only one idea left, one subject of
conversation, his wife's unfaithfulness ; he would burst out
crying at meals and leave the table without being able to
eat, tossing the plates in the air. His state of nervous
tension was extreme : " I am undone," he would exclaim,
"I am a dishonoured man." Presently, from excessive
loquacity he passed into a condition of prolonged taci-
turnity ; not a word could be drawn out of him, and he sat
hour after hour silent and preoccupied, buried in his own
thoughts. Little by little the idea of vengeance took hold
on his mind. Unable to wreak this on the young man
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 247
who had carried off his wife, he determined to punish his
father by burning his crops. He was brought up for arson
before the Assize Court, but acquitted by the jury.
It is notorious that the insanity with which Auguste
Comte, the famous founder of Positivism, was attacked in
1826, was due to overwork, and still more to the grief
caused him by his wife's bad behaviour, who forsook him
to go off with a lover. 1 Quite recently, a prisoner who
had tried to kill his wife, admitted to me that the shock the
discovery of the tatter's adultery had given him had shaken
the balance of his wits ; indeed it was proved in the course
of the trial that as the result of this mental disturbance he
had fallen sick, refusing either to eat or drink and remain-
ing plunged in the deepest despair. There is no doubt
great moral suffering may lead to mental aberration.
Nor does an unfaithful wife, when abandoning her
husband and children to follow a lover, content herself
with disgracing them ; she robs both husband and children
and strips the house, carrying away money and even the
very furniture of the rooms. I have known a woman,
abandoning her husband and four girls, remove his
furniture and the bed the children slept in, — and another
who actually made off with the bed-clothes from her
children's bed. The husband, left along with his young
family, struggles to overcome the grief and shame that
stifle him, in order to hide their mother's wickedness from
them ; to console them and himself, he redoubles his
tenderness and devotion towards his children, but often
sinks exhausted under the weight of sorrow and debt
combined. One despairing husband writes : " I married,
a bachelor myself, Mile. , a widow; she left me on
four several occasions, each time without money and in
debt To pay these I sold part of my furniture. I mean to
have done with it all ; this will make her for the second time
a widow." Another husband writes: "Cheated and deceived
by my wife, who has carried off my all, and unable to meet
my obligations, I find myself forced to put an end to my
1 G. Dumas, Revue philosophique \ 1 898, p. 33.
248 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
life."— Often the flight of the unfaithful wife involves the
ruin of the family ; the lover is not in all cases satisfied ..
merely to gratify his passion, he urges the woman to empty^
her husband's strong-box and carry off his savings. Having^
taken the wife, he makes no scruple about taking tb^^
injured man's money too. All these reasons focussed i^^
one, shame, grief, ruin, drive a certain proportion of ui^^
fortunate husbands to suicide. The fact that their children ^
still remain with them does not always suffice to preserv^^
them from despair. A stone-cutter, thirty-five years ^f
age, on being abandoned by his wife, commits suicide ksy
charcoal fumes, after writing to his two children who live*/
with him : " Farewell, children, forgive me ; but I cannot
live without your mother." — I have myself noticed the
case of a working-man, who being abandoned by his wife
and separated from his child whom the latter had taken
away with her, was found dead, holding his child's photo-
graph in his hands. — Lastly, the workman who has been
abandoned by his wife, saddened and discouraged, often
loses all his love of work, takes to drinking to drown his
sorrow, and so comes to poverty and wretchedness. A
working printer, forsaken by his wife and who a short
while since tried to put an end to himself by means of
charcoal fumes, gave the following answer to a Police Com-
missary who questioned him as to the motives leading to
the rash attempt : " The act of despair I have been guilty
of is due to the many griefs my wife has caused me ever
since our marriage, and to extreme poverty as well."
To taste the happiness offered her by adultery, a wife
breaks her husband's heart, sacrifices her children's honour,
yet when she thinks she has it, — this bliss bought with
the tears of her nearest and dearest, — often the cup of joy
is dashed from her lips. The day comes when the woman
who has forsaken her husband is in her turn abandoned
by her lover, and having quitted the hearth and home
where she was honoured and loved, she now finds herself
without a home at all, and must choose between suicide
and the life of an adventuress, if her husband refuses to
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 249
*^te her back again. She writes to him to express her
^Horse and wish to resume their old life together ; if her
L ^isband makes no reply, she renews her prayers and
applications, and ends by putting an end to herself in
despair. I have noticed quite lately the case of a school
beacher of the South- West of France, who having forsaken
lier husband, a worthy man, a master carpenter by trade,
and two children of tender age, in order to follow her lover
to Paris, was in her turn abandoned by him and killed
herself m a cab with a revolver.
A wife who leaves her husband to go off with a lover
is particularly exposed to the risk of being in her turn
forsaken when she is older than her lover; here again
suicide is very often the epilogue to adultery. " My wife
left me on the 28th of January," a husband told a Police
Commissary, who was inquiring particulars of her suicide ;
"she deceived me with a young man, who in due course
left her in the lurch. I am not surprised at her having
poisoned herself, for she had made three attempts pre-
viously to put an end to her life with petroleum or
phosphorus."
But a large number of unfaithful wives come to a less
tragic end ; they finish by becoming prostitutes. Cest le
premier pas que coûte in adultery, as in other things. A
woman rarely stops short at the first offence ; she always
goes on from a first to a second, from a second to a third,
and so from one lapse from virtue to another, soon arrives
at prostitution. Among "gay " women on the Police register
are a considerable proportion of married women.
When an adulterous woman is not forsaken by her lover,
she herself will look out for a successor to him. Adultery
has its disillusions no less than marriage, and these set
a woman longing for revenge; then, anxious to make
a better choice this time and find at last the ideal man of
her dreams, after playing her husband false for a lover,
she plays this lover false in favour of another. It is easier
for a woman to have no lover at all than to have only one.
Like the drunkard who seeks intoxication in bottle after
25O ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
bottle, the adulteress is unfaithful to the lover that she=™
may be faithful to Love.
A small minority of unfaithful wives are able to keejrz^
free of promiscuous gallantry, but even these very seldom^
find the happiness they had hoped for; instead of es
periencing a more generous love than their husband showc
them, they frequently meet with an affection at once mot
selfish, more suspicious and more brutal. The lover cam^Mi
feel but small confidence or respect towards a woman whs*?
has deceived her husband, so he is jealous and makes bis
mistress miserable. I have known cases where the woman
was so unhappy as to commit suicide.
Nor is it always an easy thing for an unfaithful wife who
has quitted her husband's roof to break the connection that
has' now grown hateful. The lover opposes her departure,
telling her she belongs to him and has no right to leave
him, and going so far as to bully her and even threaten to
murder her. This is the beginning of the adulteress's
punishment ; her irregular liaison becomes a torment^
aggravated by regret for her lost good name, and disgust
and disappointment with herself and the world.
Some years ago, the Assize Court of the Alpes-Maritimes
adjudicated on the case of a young woman of twenty-one»
who finding herself unable to break off her connection with
a lover who now only inspired her with dislike, ended by
ridding herself of him by stabbing him with a knife, as he
lay asleep by her side.
Moreover, there comes a time when the wife who has
forsaken her husband's roof, begins to turn her thoughts to
the man she has left. The husband who at close quarters
was indifferent to her or even odious, regains his attractions
when viewed from a distance ; she appreciates him better
now she has left him, and finds to her great astonishment
she no longer dislikes him. I find among the official,
reports of suicides filed and classified at the Public*
Prosecutor's office of the Department of the Seine two :
letters from two women who had left their husbands, and
were so deeply sorry for what they had done as to kill
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE, 2$ I
themselves in consequence. The first, after trying in vain
to poison herself, ended her life by means of charcoal
fumes, leaving the following lines behind : " It is six
o'clock. My wits are wandering, and my sight troubled.
Death is not far off now. I always loved him. Since our
divorce, I have not had one happy day." — The other who
had also abandoned her husband, shot herself with a
pistol, after writing to her mother : " I am going to die.
Better leave this world than turn out ill. I declare to you
it hurts me sadly to die; I am young, and I might perhaps
have been happy some day. But it is so dismal to live
always alone, without a friend. Bury me near my father,
I shall feel less lonely. 1 send you a big kiss, our last.
Think of me sometimes, and when you have time, bring a
few flowers to lay on my tomb. You will find my room in
great disorder, but for some time I have taken no interest
in anything."
Adultery may likewise become a torment and a punish-
ment, even in cases where the wife has not left her
husband's roof, if the lover, whose unworthiness she has
realized, is determined to remain her master. Such a
master is a far harder one for a woman, a far more selfish
one, than the husband she used to complain of; he orders
her about like a slave, and she obeys him for fear of
causing scandal. She used to picture herself reigning a
sovereign queen over a generous heart, and lo ! she finds
herself crushed under the most humiliating yoke. Sick of
suffering, 1 she sometimes chooses as the lesser evil to
avow everything to her husband, declaring : " Come what
may, I will confess my sin and expiate it ; my husband
must do what he likes with me. Anything is better than
the torment of continuing my connection with an unworthy
being!"
These, the usual consequences of adultery, viz., the wife's
suicide, the family's ruin, poverty, drunkenness and death
of the husband, are all touched upon by Flaubert in his
1 This situation, as we all know, has been put on the stage by E. de Girardin
and Alexandre Dumas fils in their play entitled Le Supplice d'une Femme.
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CHAPTER VIL
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE {continued).
"Thou shalt not kill."
The Forgiving Husband. — The Avenging Husband.
"The husband is always the last to hear of his wife's mis-
conduct. He feels a natural confidence in the woman he
has chosen, while his own self-esteem will not allow him
to doubt of her faithfulness ; besides, he believes the
mother of his children incapable of an action that must
dishonour them. But before long an anonymous letter,
some speech of an indiscreet friend, the discovery of a
letter, makes him aware of his calamity. In dramas of
adultery as represented on the stage, authors frequently
employ the machinery of letters which are lost and subse-
quently discovered by the husband to give rise to strik-
ing situations. And in so doing, they only follow what
actually happens very often. Thus, for instance, I have
myself come across a case like this : a woman writes a
letter to her lover, but afterwards tears it up and writes
another, throwing the fragments of the first into the grate ;
these the husband collects, puts together again and dis-
covers in this way the proof of his wife's unfaithfulness.
In another case, the wife on starting with her husband
for a journey had left in her lover's hands a number of
envelopes directed by a servant whom she had left behind
in the house, in order that the husband, recognizing the
maid's hand-writing might feel no suspicions. But the lover's
letters came so frequently in the servant's envelopes, that
the husband became suspicious, opened a letter and dis-
covered the truth.
When a husband suspects his wife's fidelity, he often
254 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
makes use of a subterfuge in order to catch her, whichr^l
almost always succeeds. He pretends he has to go oir^v
a journey, gets his wife to accompany him to the railwa^^
station or the railway omnibus, so as to make her frrfc
sure he has really started, then gets out at the first statio-^c^
and returns to his house, where he discovers his wife i^fi;
company with her lover.
The accomplice of the unfaithful wife is often t£»f
husband's bosom friend ; and novelists and play-writeyy
are perfectly accurate in representing it so. Opportunity
makes the thief, with lady-killers as with cutpurses.
Sometimes the would-be seducer constitutes himself the
husband's friend for the express purpose of getting over
his wife; he insinuates himself into the home circle, the
more easily to attain his unholy purpose. Similarly it is
often by her most intimate female friend that a married
woman is betrayed, and it is the friend of her heart who
robs her of her husband's love.
So long as he does not actually surprise his wife in
flagrante delicto^ the husband hesitates to credit his
calamity, invites his wife to justify herself, readily believes
her protestations of innocence and allows himself to be
melted by her tears. Quick to take alarm, he is equally
quick to cool down again. Molière, who pokes so much
fun at the unfortunate husbands who are duped by their
wives, himself played the part, by his own admission, of
a duped and acquiescent mate. Being informed of his
wife's uncontrollable passion for the Comte de Guiche,
he made up his mind to upbraid her; "but her mere
presence," he tells us, " made me quite forget my résolu*
tion, and the very first words she said in her defence left
me so entirely convinced my suspicions were ill-founded,
that I asked her pardon for having been so ready to
believe evil of her." — I give an extract from the records
of some legal proceedings, being part of a letter written
by a married woman to her lover : " After blows and
silly accusations come caresses and excuses, accompanied
by the offer of a new frock." — Mary Queen of Scots,
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 255
ariting to her lover Bothwell, tells him how her husband,
though he undoubtedly had the gravest reasons to suspect
her, would regain perfect confidence at the smallest mark
of hypocritical fondness she displayed towards him. " Of
a sudden I do make him two or three pretty speeches,
whereat he is right glad and fears no more." Not that
it is out of generosity a husband is so forgiving ; the fact
is he is smitten with his wife's beauty and a slave to his
own senses, because he is of a weak character and in-
capable of proper pride. Love does not as a rule shine
much in dignity ; the great idea is, at all costs, to keep
possession of the person loved. Few men are able to
kill love by contempt ; in most cases love survives in spite
of it. I find among the records of a trial the following
letter from a married woman to her lover, showing very
clearly the weakness of disposition of some husbands and
their never failing readiness to forgive: "I got home
yesterday evening, and found the poor old boy half asleep
and half awake. He had eaten nothing all day long.
The moment he saw me, he began crying like a child,
and said, ' If you have been deceiving me, confess, and
I will forgive you.' I swore I had never deceived him
in my life."
Not a few husbands are like the Emperor Claudius, who,
writes Tacitus, "at one time would be furious at his wife's
immoralities, at another softened and tender-hearted at
the thought of their relations to one another and their
young children." He would undoubtedly have forgiven
Messalina, if Narcissus had not made haste to have her
executed ; he had spoken of her as " poor Messalina,"
giving orders that she should appear before him to plead
her own justification. Narcissus understood these and his
other words to imply that the Emperor's anger was cooling
and love was about to reawake, for when a husband invites
his wife to justify herself, he is already half-way to forgive
her and to credit her excuses and regret for the past.
There are husbands so feeble-minded that, after turning
their guilty partner out of doors, they will go and beg
256 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
her to return to their roof. Others, after taking an oat!
to punish the faithless wife who has left them and utterim
terrible threats of what they will do, are only too cage
to welcome her back, the moment she returns home ; tk
mere sight of her appeases their anger instantly.
When an unfaithful wife who has been driven from 1*
husband's house wishes to obtain pardon and forgivenfc
she tries to slip in again and take refuge in the marif
bed, so as to lead up to a reconciliation. It was becaxi
he " feared the coming night and with it the association
of the conjugal bed," that Narcissus, to forestall a pardon
on the part of Claudius, gave the order to kill Messaiina
without a moment's delay.
A more respectable motive for forgiveness on the part
of the husband is the fear of bringing scandal on his
children. Just at first, on learning his wife's unfaithfulness
he cries in a fury of rage and indignation, " I must kil
her, I must kill her ! " But the remembrance of his childrei
soon occurs to him and he restrains his passion. Husband
who have actually bought a dagger or revolver to ki
their guilty wife with, will renounce their purpose for tl
sake of their children. I have even known the case of
husband who, though knowing himself to have tx
poisoned by his unfaithful wife, had yet refused to
nounce her, preferring to die without a word rather t
provoke a scandal that would be certain to recoil on
children. In some judicial proceedings I have just 1
examining, I find the following declaration made
wife : " My husband having left me for a time to pn
his trade of a knife-grinder in the country, I had rel;
with G . Having become pregnant and dreadir
husband's return, I wrote to him to say that I had y
in a moment of light-headedness, and that I besoug
to forgive me. When my husband came home, I
myself into his arms crying bitterly and asked
giveness. He reproached me sternly, but ended
daring he was willing to keep me for the sake
two children, refusing however to let me lie in at 1
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 257
Or to rear the child I was about to give birth to." — Another
husband, P , who killed his wife's lover and was brought
to trial for the crime, had forgiven the woman, telling her
that "if henceforth she would behave like an honest
woman, looking after her children carefully and managing
her house well, though he was quite certain three out of the
five were the lover's, yet he would love them all and make
no difference between them, seeing it was no fault of theirs
if three of them did belong to another man."
When a husband forgives his wife, in the interest of his
children, in order to avoid scandal, he very seldom gets
any reward for his generosity ; for, as a rule, an adulteress's
repentance is very much what a drunkard's oath is. One
lapse from virtue leads to another. Penitence soon wears
off, and bad habits resume their sway ; the mud she has
once fallen into calls her back irresistibly to wallow in
the same again, and no mere ephemeral remorse can wash
away the effects entirely. The forgiving husband can by
no means rely on his wife's remorse, or confidently expect
any reformation. In many judicial cases where an un-
faithful wife had been murdered by her husband, I have
ascertained that the latter had already forgiven a first
offence, which had then been very speedily followed by
a fresh one of the same sort.
The great majority of adulteresses are incapable of
appreciating the generosity of forgiveness ; all they see in
it is a sign of weakness, and they think they can do with
their husband what they please. A wife detected by her
husband the moment after she had given him a poisoned
draught, said to him : " You have forgiven me so often ;
forgive me this once more."
Besides, many women are of such a heedless disposition
and fickle character that anything like real repentance is out
of the question. The Assize Court of the Department of
the Seine adjudicated some few years ago on the case of a
husband who had killed his wife after surprising her in
Hagrante delicto ; it came out in the course of the proceed-
ings that he had already forgiven her once. His wife,
R
258 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
falling on her knees before him and weeping scalding tears^^.
had promised to reform her conduct ; but the very nexto»
day she was out buying " pencils " to paint her eyebro w^
with and only thinking of the most attractive toilet t*^
please her lover. We see wives who have just escaped a*^_ ^
attempt on their husband's part to shoot them almo^^
immediately returning to their vicious mode of life. /
remember observing the case of a woman who, after being-
caught in flagrante delicto with her lover by her husband
who fired several shots at her with a revolver, proceeded
only a very few minutes afterwards to attend to the cares
of her toilette with a calm and precision that astounded
a police inspector, well used as he was to extraordinary
sights. She plied her powder-puff, gazed in the looking-
glass, and arranged her hair, as if she had entirely forgotten
the awful drama that had just occurred.
The majority of adulterous wives stifle their conscience
and feel but little remorse, or even if they do feel it, go on
indulging their passion notwithstanding ; they may regret the
consequences of their wrong-doing, their husband's anger, the
scandal that ensues and the reprobation of public opinion,
but without experiencing any very keen sense of guilt or
any very deep desire to alter their conduct. It is chiefly
when their passion has cooled that they first begin to be
really penitent. True, in some women of more delicate moral
susceptibility, remorse may be deep enough to affect their
health injuriously ; but this is exceptional, though I have
known instances. An unfaithful wife may fall ill of
remorse, as the result of spending her days and nights in
tears. I have also known the case of a woman of this
sort who poisoned herself on learning that her husband
had discovered her offence ; she left on the dining-room
table a letter to the following effect : " Regretting to find
my husband is aware of my wrong-doing, I prefer to dis-
appear, that he may excuse my fault. I hope he, his
family and mine, will forgive me." — Another married
woman who had fallen from virtue, discovering that her
husband was aware of her unfaithfulness to him, put an
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 259
end to her life, begging that she might be buried far away
from the village where she had done wrong. — Dr Frend
speaks of an adulteress who, tortured by remorse and
unable for an instant to forget the sin she had committed,
which filled her whole mind with morbid persistency, used
to wash her hands and genital parts a hundred times a
day ; l like Lady Macbeth, she longed by this washing
and physical purity to regain the moral purity she had
lost.
An unfaithful wife who is a prey to remorse is urged by
her conscience to confess her sin to her husband, to humble
herself before him, to ask his forgiveness and do penance
for her offence. This confession is the first act of expiation
and relieves the strain of her feelings. But it is seldom the
avowal does not lead to some catastrophe ; either the
husband drives the traitress from his house and starts off
to challenge the lover, or else he forgives the penitent.
But such forgiveness is never lasting, and the house
remains divided against itself. Sometimes the discord
arising between man and wife as the result of the latter's
confession of her sin, ends in the woman's suicide. Here
is an instance. A wife had been guilty before her marriage
of a lapse from virtue which her husband, a man of a very
jealous disposition, at last forced her to confess. From
that moment reproaches and recriminations rained upon
the poor woman, alternate quarrels and reconciliations
followed each other unceasingly, and life soon became so
unbearable that she poisoned herself in sheer despair. She
had but just time before expiring to say one word to her
husband: "Kiss me."
Some writers, Beaumarchais in particular in La mère
coupable, have pictured the unfaithful wife as fainting with
grief and shame at the moment of making confession of
her fault to her husband. Such a thing may happen, but
I have never seen it 1 have known the case of a husband
who swooned with grief on receiving his wife's avowal of
guilt.
1 Revue H€uroiogiqM4 % 30th January 1895.
2ÔO ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
The husbands vengeance. — When a husband, informed o ^
his wife's unfaithfulness, gives a rein to his anger, he fc^
affected in different ways. Sometimes he thinks only c^^
killing the erring woman, without paying much attentio%^
to the lover ; sometimes he turns his whole fury upon tlr^
lover, and spares the wife he still loves; sometimes b^|
wreaks his vengeance on both of the guilty pair. In ** ac =sr 4
of discovery in flagrante delicto, as a rule he strikes tZ^fc
woman at the same time as her paramour.
Schopenhauer maintains that " honour requires only the
punishment of the woman and not that of the lover. 1 On
the contrary honour seems rather to demand the tatter's
punishment We say of a husband who strikes down his
wife's lover that he has avenged his honour. His honour is?
outraged at least as much by the lover's act as by that of"
the guilty woman. It is the thought of his honour that
kindles in his heart an imperious craving for revenge against -
his wife's accomplice. " I will have his life," cries the ^
wronged husband, "or he shall have mine. I must kilL4
him ; he has dishonoured me."
Othello, when he has killed Desdemona, exclaims ad- —
dressing his friends : M Call me, if you will, a murderer -«
but for honour's sake; I did everything for honour ancf
naught for hate." Whenever, at various periods of history,
husbands have ceased to hold their honour compromised
by their wives' unfaithfulness, marital vengeance has been
unknown. At the end of the Roman Republic, adultery
on the part of the wife was accepted with complete
indifference by the husband. " Lucullus," Montaigne
writes, " Caesar, Pompey, Antonius, Cato, and other noble
Romans, were all cuckolds, and knew it without making
an ado ; there was only one silly fellow, Lepidus, in those
days, who died of the pain of it." 2 The most famous
Patrician dames of the period lived adulterous lives» —
Mucia, Pompey's wife, Servilia, mother of Brutus, Valeria,
sister of Hortensius, Claudia, wife of Lucullus, Tertiella,
1 Schopenhauer, Aphorisms > p. 91, F. Alcan, Paris.
a Montaigne, Essais, Bk. iii. , ch. v.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 26 1
e of Crassus, etc. ; yet, according to Ovid, "never an
llterer. pierced by the husband's sword dyed with his
od the waters of Styx." 1 At the same time . this in-
gence towards adultery is not so much a mark of
itleness of character as of contempt for women. The
laviour of Cato of Utica with regard to his wife Martia
characteristic; he lent her to his friend Hortensius,
have children by her, taking her back again after his
rod's death, because the latter had made her his heiress,
trtensius, before procuring Cato's wife to be lent to him,
1 previously asked him for his daughter, who however
s also already married, telling him : " it was honourable
i useful to the common weal that a fair and honourable
ing woman in the flower of her age should not remain
e, letting her natural aptitude to conceive children go
naught, nor yet that she should trouble and impoverish
• husband by leaving him more children than he had
/ use of." Such being the state of public morality,
sbands did not think of killing their unfaithful wives,
ry were content to repudiate them. This is what the
•man Emperors, as a rule, did ; thus Scribonia was re-
lated by Augustus, Livia Hostilia by Caligula, Plautia
gulanilla by Claudius, Domitia by Domitian, Flavia
lpitiana by Pertinax, etc. — In the Middle Ages the
itiment of conjugal honour grew more awake, and this
nbined with the violence of contemporary manners
de acts of marital vengeance frequent. In the six-
mth century too husbands were prompt to stab unfaith-
wife and accomplice together. After commending a
tain number of ancient emperors and kings for having
t away their adulterous wives without killing them,
antôme 2 adds : " Nowadays none of our great folks
the like ; but the smallest punishment they do inflict
their wives, is to put them in perpetual confinement on
?ad and water, and there they do them to death, poison
Ovid, Ars A mûris.
Dames Galantes, First Discourse. See Brantôme, "Fair and Gallani
lies," translated by A. R. Allinson, M.A. — C. Carrington, Paris, 1901.
2Ô2 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
them, kill them whether of their own hand or by the Law.' fc «
He quotes a large number of kings, princes, lords, who hac^a
stabbed, poisoned or even strangled with their own hand^ ^
their guilty wives ; he protests against these butcheri e^^.
and urges unfortunate husbands to be content with
pudiation, because, he says, God forbids murder,
because women "are creatures more near resembling th^^ (
divinity by reason of their beauty." In the seventeen*^}
century manners were less brutal. In the eighteenth, rmot
only were they still further softened, but indulgence on
the husband's part became mere cynicism ; not merely did
he excuse, he actually authorized his wife's unfaithfulness.
The fashion of the time was not to love one's wife, to make
light of her fidelity and leave serious marriage to the
people and the Protestants.
In our own day, acts of marital vengeance have grown
very common. There are, it is true, and especially in the
Capital, husbands ready, like Cato, to lend their wives;
there are even more husbands who live on their wives'
unfaithfulness than die of their misbehaviour. Suchlike
complaisant husbands were numerous at Rome ; " In this
way," Ovid writes, " a man may readily obtain great credit
at this price . . . and your house will be filled with fine
things that have cost you nothing" (Elegy, iv. 3). Nowadays
the feeling of conjugal honour has penetrated all classes;
and the fear of ridicule unites with the former sentiment
to kindle the wrath of the outraged husband. In several
cases before the Courts, I have known the husband relate
how after the discovery of his disaster he thought every-
body, as he passed in the street, was looking at him with
malevolent curiosity, and that his rival was mocking his
dishonour. In fact, the dread of being the object of
public ridicule was an important factor in exasperating
his anger.
When a husband first acquires proof of his wife's un-
faithfulness, he either breaks out in fierce threats, or else
constrains himself to hide his resentment under a forced
calm, which is only the more menacing for the concealment.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 263
His anger is concentrating, accumulating in his heart, till
it finally explodes in furious rage ; —
" La douleur qui se tait n'en est que plus funeste." 1
The frequency of these acts of marital vengeance may
further be attributed to the increased frequency of adultery
in modern times, as well as to the mistaken belief that a
husband possesses the right to kill his wife, if caught in
the act The number of persons accused of adultery
before the Courts rose in 1895 to a total of 1964. In his
last report on the Administration of Criminal Justice,
the "Garde des Sceaux" (Chancellor) writes: "Adultery
still continues its continually progressive increase." 2
Among legal misconceptions prevalent among the public,
none is more widely spread than that which attributes to
the injured husband the right to kill his wife and her
accomplice, if caught in flagrante delicto. I have myself
seen a husband who had murdered his wife's lover and
tried to kill her, state under examination that he had the
right of life and death over them. This strange mistake,
the cause of so many murders, has been disseminated
by Ithe majority of writers, novelists, dramatic authors,
critics, moralists, preachers, doctors of medicine, who have
written on the subject of marriage. "The Law," says
Dr Despine, "permits homicide as an act of vengeance
to the injured husband." 3 Dr Letourneau commits the
same mistake in the Preface he has written for a work of
Dr Lombroso, L'Homme criminel. George Sand is guilty
of the same error in her Histoire de ma Vie (5th Part, ch.
x.). In his book De L Amour et de la Jalousie, Stendhal
denounces the savage tyranny of this barbarous code
which secures to the injured husband the right to become
a murderer without fear of consequences, and the same
sentiment is repeated word for word in his work entitled
UAmour. Proudhon states his approval of the right
1 " Indignation that is hidden is only the more deadly for its silence."
* Journal officiel, 9th November 1897.
* Despine, La Science du cœur humain, p. 98.
264 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
granted to the husband to kill an adulterous wife, though
at the same time refusing the lover the right to administer
so much as a fillip of the finger to his unfaithful mistress;
on the ground that the latter is free. 1
Where is this mistake not to be found? It occurs in
the Indissolubilité et Divorce of the Père Didon, in the
Annales médico-psychologiques of May — June 1891, p. 441.
Not a week passes without my meeting with it in some
newspaper, review or book. In an article of the Semaint
littéraire of Geneva of October 23rd, 1898, M. Henry
Bordeaux expresses his indignation at the Code's accord*
ing the husband the right of vengeance, and in the Éclair
of November ist, 1898, M. Emile Bergerat does the same.
Saint-Marc Girardin, who was a Professor at the Sorbonne,
and a member of the French Academy, also believed the
Code to legalize marital vengeance ; in his Cours de
Littérature dramatique, he wrote : " But then ! suppose
the husband were to do what has often been done in
the world, a thing the Law has not thought good to
punish, — if he were to kill the lover?"
Above all it is our dramatists, anxious to reform the
Law without possessing any precise acquaintance with its
provisions, who have given most prominence and devoted
most vehemence to their protests against the supposed
ferocity of the Code in this particular. "Without going
into fuller detail," says the author of Les Tenailles, Mons.
P. Hervieu, " I think I am justified in maintaining that a
contract . . . which, in almost express terms, gives one of
the contracting parties and one only the right of life and
death over the other . . . cannot and ought not to be the
last word of Civilization, of Christian Morality and Social
Wisdom." 2 Taking his stand on this supposed right
granted by the Law to a husband to kill his wife,
Alexandre Dumas fils claimed the privilege of divorce ;
he could not understand how the Law should permit the
husband to kill and yet refuse the right of divorce.
1 Proudhon, La Pornocratie, pp. 203, 208.
* VÊclair, August 14th, 1898.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE, 265
^"Poor Law," he said, "which is reduced, not daring to
free man and wife by a divorce, to allow them by implica-
tion to free themselves by murder." " Can anyone con-
ceive," he goes on, " such a contradiction, such an incredible
deviation from justice, logic and common-sense, a law
showing in one direction all the indifference and scepticism
of the most corrupt nations, and in the other all the cruelty
of the most barbarous peoples and savage tribes, actually
below the law of the Quajaz, among whom a woman is
put to death only on the second act of adultery." Further,
with a really surprising illogicality, the same writer who
declares the law ferocious, cruel and inconsistent, because
as he holds it legalizes revenge, actually encourages the
husband to employ this very right. In Le supplice d'une
femme, Emile de Girardin and Alexandre Dumas fils are
guilty of the same mistake ; in this play Dumont (the
husband) says, addressing Alvarès (the lover) : " I have
questioned the Law, and asked what means it afforded me ;
I can kill you both, you and her." Similarly the dénoue-
ment of Diane de Lys depends upon the mistaken idea
that the husband possesses the right to kill his unfaithful
wife and her accomplice, when caught red-handed. In
Scene 13 of Act iv., the husband refuses to fight the lover,
declaring: "Why fight with you, when I have the right
to kill you?" So saying, he slays the lover, invoking
his supposed right to do so. In La Femme de Claude,
Alexandre Dumas again represents the murder of the
adulterous wife as an act of justice accomplished in the
name and with the sanction of the Law.
Not only are these two last mentioned plays founded on
a misconception of the Law, but the same error was at the
bottom of the campaign Alexandre Dumas conducted
against the indissolubility of the marriage tie. Inasmuch
as the Code, he argued, grants the husband the right of
Freeing himself by murder, why should it not accord him
the right of gaining the same end by means of divorce ? It
is surely contradictory to give the husband a right to
dissolve his marriage by the revolver, and yet refuse him
266 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
the privilege of ending it by divorce. But this contra-
diction which the famous writer saw in the Law, existed
only in his own imagination. As a matter of fact, far
from recognizing any right on the husband's part to kill
his wife caught in the act of committing adultery, the
Law punishes such a murder by from one to five years'
imprisonment
The mistake committed by Dumas and the authors who
have followed him arises from the fact of their having
misinterpreted through ignorance of legal phraseology the
terms of Article 321, § 2, of the Penal Code, which runs
as follows : " In the case of adultery provided against by
Article 336, the murder committed by the husband on his
wife, as also on the accomplice, at the moment when he
surprises them in flagrante delicto in the conjugal domicile,
is excusable" Dumas, assigning to the word excusable the
meaning it bears in ordinary parlance, supposed it to be
synonymous with "justified," "legitimate." But in the
language of the Law we must distinguish between an excuse
and a justifying circumstance. An " excuse " diminishes
culpability, a "justifying circumstance " abolishes it So,
for instance, provocation is an excuse, while lawful self-
defence is a justifying circumstance. When the existence
of an excuse is proved, says Article 326, if it is a question of
a crime carrying the penalty of death or of life imprison-
ment with hard labour, the penalty shall be reduced to
imprisonment for from one to five years.
Thus the contradiction Alexandre Dumas drew between
the civil and the penal law has no actual existence, — excepts
in his own writings. There we find it ; the very man who^
revolts against the cruelty of the Code, which, according"^
to him accords the husband a right to kill his wife, him —
self exhorts the husband of an unfaithful wife to murdei "
urging him in so many words to " kill her." In L % Affaùr&~*
Clemenceau and La Femme de Claude, the husband kill —
the adulterous wife with a beautiful calmness ; you woul^^
say he was fulfilling a sacred duty, an act of piety *f*
putting her to death. The dramatic author, so indulgent
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 267
towards the courtesan, recognizes only one punishment
for the unfaithful wife, — death. The husband, in his
plays and novels, kills his wife as if she were a rabbit
or some form of contemptible vermin.
It is on the faith of this supposed, but purely imaginary,
contradiction between the penal law permitting, as they
fancied, a husband to kill his wife and the civil law
forbidding him to break his marriage under any circum-
stances, that many Deputies and Senators voted for the
re-establishment of Divorce. M. Eugène Pelletan has
himself been guilty of this common mistake ; the husband,
he writes in his book entitled La Mère, p. 309, " can still
kill his wife, and her lover; the Penal Code gives him
the right to do so." In view of the very small majority
by which the re-establishment of Divorce was passed, the
question may well be asked whether the vote was not due
in part to this prevalent misconception.
The body of writers who with Alexandre Dumas pro-
posed the re-establishment of divorce hoped that this
measure would put an end to acts of marital revenge. Now
that the husband, they maintained, will be able to re-
pudiate his guilty partner, why should he resort to violence ?
"aving it in his power at any moment to serve her with a
c ki'm for divorce, he will no longer feel called upon to serve
^ with pistol bullets in the head. Practical experience
^Mrever has not justified these expectations. The law of
"'Vorce has not saved unfaithful wives from the knife and
'^olver of their injured husbands. The total of divorces
'ureases every year, 1 while no diminution is observed in
ÏHrect claims for divorce continue to advance in a regular progression,
J*f^*«» the Minister of Justice in his Statistics for the year 1894, published in
**^5. From 3190 in 1886 they rose to 8673 in 1894. Of these 8673 claims,
^^1 were initiated by the husband, 5682 by the wife.
"ï*he number of applications for legal separation declined at first after the re-
r**%bJishment of divorce; it rose again however from the year 1890, in which
^ reached a total of 2041, subsequently rising by progressive stages to 2059,
***94* 2171» *nd finally 2405 in 1894.
It is among the working-class population that divorce is most common. It
* lest frequent among the commercial and industrial classes, but is making
progress among persons of private means and those practising the liberal pro-
268 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE.
the frequency of marital reprisals. Husbands are more
and more in the habit of getting rid of an unfaithful wife
and her paramour by violent means, in spite of the facilities
they now possess to end their marriage by divorce. Quite
lately at Marseilles, in broad daylight, in the open street,
an injured husband planted a knife in his wife's bosom.
Another threw his out of the window.
True, juries constantly acquit husbands who have killed
their unfaithful wives, but the Law is not responsible for
these acquittals ; the Law decrees a punishment for the
murder of an adulterous wife ; it is for jurymen to apply it
Moreover, juries do sometimes condemn the husband who
murders his wife under such circumstances. Here is an
instance arising out of an affair that occurred at Cannes
some years ago, at the very time Alexandre Dumas was
residing there. A married couple, the D s, lived on
bad terms with one another, a consequence of a strongly
marked divergence of tastes ; the husband disliked society,
while his wife was devoted to evening parties, "at homes"
and theatre-going. The chance of social intercourse in-
troduced Mons. A to their acquaintance, and he soon
became intimate. His marked attentions soon awoke
Mons. D 's suspicions, who before long acquired actual
proof of his wife's unfaithfulness. The pair separated, but
subsequently renewed their married life together and came
to spend the winter of 1892 at an hotel in Cannes, where
Mme. D occupied a bedroom and sitting-room on
the entresol, while her husband, his mother and children
were lodged on the first floor. On Feb. 17, the husband
having found Mons. A 's name on the hotel books,
became suspicious ; he went and listened at the door of
his wife's rooms, and thinking he heard his former rival's
voice, went upstairs to fetch his revolver, and begging the
manager of the hotel to go with him, threw open his wife's
fessions. It is also increasing in the rural districts. And nevertheless to make
divorce still more frequent, writers of talent, Paul Hervieu in Lis Tcnailks,
Paul and Victor Margueritte in their novels, propose to grant divorce by
mutual consent or even at the wish of one only of the married couple.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE WIFE. 269
door. Inside he saw Mons. A trying to hide himself
behind a sofa and fired three shots at him with his revolver
at point-blank range. Mons. A was carried to his
room mortally wounded and died next day. Arraigned
before the Assize Court of the Alpes-Maritimes, the
husband was condemned to a year's imprisonment 1
Divorce is as unavailing to put an end to marital reprisals
as it is to feminine revenge, for it cannot prevent jealousy
and passion. At Mme. Panckouke's trial for firing three
revolver shots at her husband's mistress, the Presiding
Judge asked her : " Why did you not follow up your
application for a separation ? " " Because what I wanted,"
answered the accused woman, " was neither separation, nor
divorce; what I wanted was my husband." During the
course of proceedings in divorce, and after their termination,
murderous dramas are not unknown ; when a husband,
even after divorce, sees his wife in another man's arms,
indignation and jealousy will sometimes master him so
violently as to drive him irresistibly to acts of violence.
After first advocating the murder of unfaithful wives,
the plays and novels of the day are now preaching the
doctrine of forgiveness. Midway between murder and
forgiveness (which may well make the husband ridiculous),
lies a solution of the difficulty, more accordant at once
with the husband's dignity and the respect he owes his
partner's life, viz., separation with scorn :
" Ne peut-on se venger à moins qu'on n'assassine?" 2
Yes ! a man may avenge himself by scorn.
1 His wife retired to a convent, whence she wrote numerous letters to her
husband, asking for his forgiveness, and this was not refused. She was not
bug in forgetting her lover's tragic end.
1 " Cannot a man avenge his wrongs without resorting to downright
murder ? " Corneille, Attila.
CHAPTER VIII.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
Basing their contention on the statistics of crime, som<^^
writers have maintained the thesis that women shoi^*
themselves more often guilty of adultery than men; ii^cn
1886, for instance, 865 women were prosecuted and onl^y
822 men ; in 1887, 883 women and 843 men. But in thi^s,
as in other things, statistics do not reveal the whole truth. ;
they must be used with discretion and duly comparerez
with the provisions of the Penal Code. In fact, we rnusf
never forget that men and women are not, from this point
of view, on a footing of equality, — and never have been
so. According to Manu, the Legislator of the Hindus a
woman ought to go on reverencing her husband as a god,
even when he showed himself guilty of adultery (vi. 54,
Laws of Manu). — Roman Law and old French Law did
not allow the woman under any circumstances to charge
her husband with adultery. — At the present day, according
to Article 336 of the Penal Code, adultery on the husband's
side only constitutes an offence if it has been committed
with a concubine kept in the conjugal domicile. An
isolated act of adultery does not constitute the keeping of
a concubine ; to do so, it must take place under th^
conjugal roof. If these two conditions are not fulfilled*
together, a husband's adultery remains unpunished; w&
may therefore say with truth that the majority of acts of
adultery done by the man do not come under the sur-
veillance of the Law at all. While quite recognizing th*
fact that adultery on the wife's part involves consequences
altogether more serious than the same offence when com-
mitted by the husband, we may admit that the impunity
accorded the husband in most instances offends against
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 27 1
* r ^lity and the ideal of the equality of the sexes before
5 I— *iw. Women are not entirely without justification in
^^g that, the laws being made by men, it has happened
r Hore than one respect that they have been framed in
^*Vs own interest, without much heed being paid to the
^*ality of the sexes. Cicero, who cannot be suspected of
^V leaning to feminism, observed even in his day that the
^x Voconia had been passed in the interest of the male
^>c, and was full of injustice towards women. 1 — Con-
^mporary law-makers are applying themselves to the task
*f abolishing this inequality formerly set up by the Law
^tween adultery on the part of women and of men.
\ocording to the new Penal Code of the Netherlands,
the penalty is imprisonment for six months at longest
or any married person committing an adultery " (Article
£41), this body of law making no distinction in this
espect between man and woman.
Adultery will lead a man to commit the same acts of
rowardice and cruelty as it will a woman. Dissipation
extinguishes family feeling and destroys paternal affection.
Fathers will ruin their children to satisfy a mistress's
:aprices, or desert them to follow a concubine, leaving
their offspring in destitution. I have known the case of
a father, who having lost a little girl by smallpox, forsook
his two other daughters attacked by the same disease, to
go off with his mistress. Abandoned to her own resources,
the mother was forced to sell or pawn almost the whole
of her furniture in order to nurse her sick children. On
being reproached for his abominable behaviour, the un-
worthy father merely answered : " I have done extremely
wrong, I admit; I was bewitched by my mistress."
Another husband, a working-man, deserted his wife, leaving
her the task of rearing seven young ones. The eldest
boy, the only one able to work, helped his mother to
supply the needs of his little brothers and sisters ; but
one of the latter having fallen seriously ill, he was so
heart-broken at the misfortunes of all kinds and the
1 Cicero, De Republican iii. $ 10.
272 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
grinding poverty which had burst upon the unhappy
family as a result of the father's desertion, that he put
an end to himself. Meantime the father remained entirely
insensible to all the calamities he had brought about by
his ill-conduct
In other cases fathers let their children be made
martyrs of by their mistress. Valerius Maximus relates
how Catiline, being desperately in love with Aurelia
Orestilla and seeing that the son he had by a former
wife was an obstacle to his marriage with her, did not
hesitate to get rid of the youth by poison. " It was at
his very funeral pyre that he kindled the hymeneal torch,
and he offered as a wedding gift to his new wife the
crime that abolished his paternity." 1
The unfaithful husband is often rough and brutal
towards the wife he no longer loves; he is for ever
finding fault and ill-treating her. When a married
woman is delivered of a still-born child, it is occasionally
the husband's rough usage that is responsible for the
catastrophe. A certain number of women ill-treated by
their husbands commit suicide in despair.
The husband who forsakes his wife takes pleasure in
deriding her grief; he listens to her reproaches with in-
difference, irony or even positive satisfaction ; he is not
at all sorry to see her tears, the sight of them is an amuse-
ment. If he does seem to be softened, it is because they
awake in him a passing caprice of amorousness. Don
Juan for a moment finds something piquant in Elvira's
sorrow, but at heart he is purely indifferent to her suffer-
ings. Alfred de Musset, who is partial to Don Juan, docs
not fail to note his cruel character :
" Vous le verrez tranquille et froid comme une pierre
Pousser dans le ruisseau le cadavre d'un frère
Et laisser le vieillard traîner ses mains de sang
Sur des murs chauds encor du viol de son enfant." 2
1 Valerius Maximus, Bk. ix., ch. i.
9 " You will see him calm and cold as a stone push into the kennel a father's
corpse, and let the greybeard drag his bleeding hands over walls yet warn
with his child's ravishment."
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 273
Adultery less often drives the husband to homicidal
ts than it does the wife ; it is less liable to make him
te her. At the same time it is no uncommon thing
see unfaithful husbands load their lawful wife with
suits and humiliations, and even end by murdering her,
as to be enabled to marry their mistress. Wives the
st, the most gentle and patient, are often victims of
eir husband's brutality. The Duchesse de Choiseul, who
is murdered by her husband, was a woman of admirable
ntleness and goodness. The Marquise d'Entrecasteaux,
lose husband, President of the Parliament of Provence,
t her throat with a razor during the night, was of so
ild and gentle a disposition she was known among her
ends by the name of Sister Angelica. Before gashing
r throat three times with a razor, her husband had
•eady tried twice over to poison her, besides throwing
r down on the stairs of his house, at the time when she
is with child. The Marquise, who was aware of his
rempts to poison her, besought her physician not to
ralge the facts: "Most excellent Doctor, the fearful
rments I endured made you say I should have died of
e effects of poison if you had not come promptly to the
scue. You said loud out, in my presence, that my
isband was at the least very remiss not to try to find
e guilty party. Do not say this again. I know the
ind that was for destroying my existence, but to name
to you would be both needless so far as you are con-
rned and blameworthy on my part As your habits
observation may have led you to guess the truth, I
seech you in your mother's name and by all you hold
ost sacred, never to reveal the things you saw and heard
iring the past night You will not refuse this favour,
ar and worthy sir, to an unhappy and dying woman,
10 must needs have much at stake to write you these
les by stealth and from her sick-bed, — to one who
11 for ever call herself your grateful and devoted well-
sher, the Marquise d'Entrecasteaux, née de Castellane,
arquise de Grimaud."
s
274 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
I have just instanced a President of the Parliament of
Provence and a peer of France, of whom adultery made
criminals. Adultery leads to murder in all classes of
society. Just as adulterous Queens, like Mary Stuart and
Jeanne de Provence, have not recoiled at the murder of
their husbands, so Kings guilty of the same offence, such
as David and Henry VIII. have done to death their lawful
wives or the husband of the woman they coveted. When
once a priest makes himself the accomplice of an adul-
teress, he becomes quite capable of helping the woman to
poison her husband. When a husband murders his wife^
we may say, almost for certain, that adultery is what has
driven him to the crime. Sensuality makes men crueL
When Henry VIII. had Anne Boleyn beheaded, — and he
had loved her fondly, — he had the moment of her execution
made known to him by a cannon shot ; this signal he
awaited with impatience, and on hearing it hurried at once
to Jane Seymour's lodging, to tell her the joyful news.
Elizabeth of England, daughter of Henry VIII. and Anne
Boleyn, gave a similar example of cruelty towards the Earl
of Essex, who had been her favourite ; she had a conceit of
music on the day of his execution. History attests on its
every page the connection existing between cruelty and
dissoluteness. La Voisin declared under torture, " that a
great number of persons of all conditions and ranks had
applied to her to procure the means of putting many
individuals out of the way, and that dissoluteness was the
leading motive of all these crimes." Dissolute kings have
nearly always been monsters of cruelty, like Tiberius and
Nero. In India voluptuous orgies were habitually ac-
companied with human sacrifices. In fact there is a close
association between voluptuous passion and cruelty. Men
affected with Sadism experience an irresistible craving
to add cruelty to the other pleasures of debauchery.
Criminals kill the women they have violated, not merely
to suppress the evidence they might give against them, but
still more because they find pleasure in shedding blood
This Sadism, a combination of cruelty with bestial de-
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 275
auchery, is sometimes committed on animals. To give an
xample. At Barles, in the Arrondissement of Digne, a
inner noticed again and again the death of a certain
umber of ewes, which, while perfectly well the night before,
'ere found dead next morning in his fold. Thinking a
pell had been cast over his flock, he went to the curé and
sked him "to exorcise the spell" by his prayers. The
lortality however continuing among his ewes, a neighbour
f greater penetration than himself urged him to apply to
le Public Prosecutor ("Procureur de la République").
\y the advice of this magistrate he had his sheep-fold
atched at night-time by the "garde champêtre" (rural
oliceman), and this latter, himself carefully concealed, saw
young shepherd, a tall, sturdy young man, enter the
(aiding, seize a ewe by the neck and strangle it, while
erforming acts of bestiality upon its body. — Vacher, who
lurdered such a number of women, used to cut their
treats after ravishing them.
Often it is with the domestic servants, or with his
lildren's governess, that a husband has immoral relations.
jnong farmers in the country it is suchlike relations with
le farm-maid that are most to be feared by the lawful
ife. The maid, proud of her triumph, does not always
ave the mistress in ignorance of it, and to make it more
ecided still, tries to get rid of the latter altogether. In
wrns, among families of a higher social position, it is a
milar connection between the husband and the governess
lat is apt to endanger the life of the mistress of the house.
he wife, feeling a presentiment of the fate awaiting her,
light of course escape it by leaving her home, but she
innot bear to forsake her children and make way for a
val in her husband's affections.
Sometimes the husband is forced by his wife to turn
le concubine out of the house, but he is not slow to find
leans to see her again ; his passion for her increases with
>sence, while his dislike to his wife grows in equal pro-
>rtions. Then presently the notion of getting rid of his
ife and taking back his mistress enters his head and
276 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
becomes firmly lodged there. His words betray his secret
thoughts in spite of himself, till his wife guesses them
and questions him in terror as to what he means to da
" If you have no pity for me," she adjures him, " at any
rate have some for our children." Finding his intentions
suspected, the husband we might suppose would give up
his ideas of murder ; but it is seldom as a matter of fact
that he draws back, and one day the wife is found dead,
who only the day before was sound and well.
Not unfrequently the husband who has just killed his
wife betrays himself by his own imprudence and the haste
with which he calls his mistress to his side or proposes
to marry her. His wife's dead body is hardly cold before
he sets about marrying again. The mad passion urging
him to this second marriage is such at times that, even
if his crime is discovered, he feels no regret, provided
he can get his new wife to follow him to New Caledonia
or Guiana, our French convict stations. The Marquis
d'Entrecasteaux, in the account he gave of his crime,
declared that his passion, "far from being extinguished
by the crime it had led to, seemed only to have gained
fresh strength from it" Compelled to fly from justice and
horrified at the ignominy he was involved in, he had
several times thought of killing himself, but had always
been dissuaded from the attempt by the hope of seeing
his mistress once again. "The love that had made me
a criminal and that even now doubled my torments, this
same love prevented my ending them once for all. The
hope of one day seeing again the woman who is the object
of my passion could not indeed stifle my remorse, but
it enabled me to bear all its horrors."
Each sex has its favourite means of carrying out its
criminal intent. I have shown in an earlier chapter how
women more usually resort to poison, while men as a rule
prefer the knife or fire-arms. Still, just as we sometimes
find a wife murdering her husband with pistol balls, so we
occasionally see a husband making use of poison to rid
himself of his wife.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 277
The instruments employed vary likewise according to
profession and occupation, as the criminal has a natural
tendency to use the weapon he finds under his hand. Thus
the druggist will employ poison ; the waggoner will crush
his wife under the wheel of his cart ; the farmer will beat
out her brains with a spade ; the hairdresser will use a razor,
the cook a kitchen knife. When it is a King who wishes
to be rid of his wife, he does not kill with his own hands,
but employs subordinates ; if he desires to put a husband
out of the way in order to take his wife, he despatches the
unfortunate man to some post of danger. When David
wished to get rid of Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba,
he wrote to one of his generals : " Set ye Uriah in
the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from
him, that he may be smitten, and die. 1 ' (2 Samuel, ch.
xi)
Men are less clever actors than women. Still, even
a man will play the deceiver in love, lavishing promises
to gain the favours he covets, and then his passion once
satisfied, forgetting them every one. He will cajole his
best friend, to steal away his wife, his daughter or his
sisters; cheat his wife, be she the best of wives and
mothers, to hide his adulterous amours from her ; play the
comedy of tenderness, tears and protestations of devotion,
at the very time he is planning her death. — An old man
who is desirous of seducing a young girl resorts to the
same artifices an old woman employs towards a young
man ; he poses as a father to her, in order to mask his
love and avoid awakening her distrust. He endeavours
to dissipate his wife's suspicions by surrounding her with
fond attentions; if he decides to kill her with the blow
of some heavy weapon, he entices her into an ambush
artfully prepared beforehand ; if he gives her poison,
he displays the liveliest signs of affection in the very act.
If he succeeds in killing her, he parades the profoundest
grief. A husband who had just poisoned his wife, said
to bis mother-in-law, pointing to his face: "Behold the
mark of my tears."
278 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
Suicide of the wife forsaken by her husband. — Nor does
the husband, any more than the wife, invariably need to
kill his partner, when he wishes to be rid of her ; in many
cases it is enough for him to make her miserable and so
drive her to a lingering death of grief or a sudden act of
despair. The number of women forsaken by their husbands
who die of sorrow or commit suicide is greater than is
generally supposed. In my examination of the official
records of suicides in the Department of the Seine, I
have come across a not insignificant number of instances
where married women have put an end to themselves
when deserted or slighted by their husbands. 1 The letters
left behind by them to explain their motives all revealed
the deepest grief, but no trace of anger against the
husband ; generally speaking, they forgive him, because
they love him still, reserving all their indignation for the
mistress, who has robbed them of their husband's love.
One poor woman, deserted by her husband who left her
to go off with a mistress, wrote thus before ending her
life by her own act : "I am not angry with him ; on the
contrary, I wish him every possible happiness. But I curse
the name of the bad woman who has taken him from me.
He little knows what grief his desertion causes me. He
cannot know how much I loved him. My last thought is
for him. Ah ! if only I had died a year ago, what suffer-
ing I should have been spared!" — "My dear parents,"
writes another unhappy wife, "I am disgusted with life.
My husband has left me. I know he will never come back.
I loved him dearly. He has behaved badly. I would
rather have done with it right off." — Women thus deserted
1 Still the number of these suicides of wives forsaken by their husbands *
smaller than that of suicides of husbands deserted by their wives, just as there
are more suicides of widowers than of widows. Men find it harder to bear
domestic griefs than women do. There are husbands (I have known such
myself), who commit suicide to escape the continual quarrels due to their
wives' ill-tempered disposition. " Unable to resign myself to live in constant
variance with my wife," writes a working printer to the Commissary of Police,
" I prefer the repose of death to such a life, which is a veritable helL" Death
has fewer terrors for them than a woman who is always angry.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 279
by their husbands sometimes put an end to themselves by
means of charcoal fumes or else drown themselves along
with their children. — I have myself known the case of a
wife who, finding herself no longer able to please her
husband owing to illness, committed suicide by charcoal
fumes in dread of his suing for a divorce.
Nay ! more, a wife who without being actually forsaken
by her husband, yet sees a mistress better loved than her-
self, may experience a grief profound enough to lead her
to commit suicide. An instance is afforded by a married
woman, and the mother of a little girl, who suffered so
bitterly from the knowledge that her husband kept a
mistress that she wrote a letter to her parents to inform
them of her intention to put an end to herself: "My dear
parents, I am going to cause you great grief, but I cannot
bear to live any longer. Life is a hell upon earth to me.
Take great care of my little Julie. Tell her my last thought
is for her. Be very good, little Julie, and think how sadly
your mother suffered."
Just as a certain number of adulterous wives who have
quitted their husbands are in their turn abandoned by
their lover and end in suicide, so there is a small propor-
tion of husbands who, having forsaken wife and children to
go off with a mistress, who after a while leaves them in
the lurch, are eventually driven to self-destruction. In
their case remorse at having ruined their lives and
sacrificed their family is added to the suffering caused
by their mistress's unfaithfulness, and tends yet further
to make them disgusted with life. — Some husbands, who
have forced their wives to ask for a separation or divorce
by reason of their ill behaviour, suffer so keenly from their
loneliness as to choose death in preference. Such cases
are rare, but still I have seen some. " I cannot bear up
against the extremity of my suffering," writes a school-
master separated from his wife. " But you must know my
last thought will be for you. Perhaps I am partly to
blame ; in any case, I shall have been well punished, and
you will forgive me."
280 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
Vengeance of the married woman. — Acts of vengeance
on the part of married women upon an unfaithful husband
are much less frequent than those committed by women
who have been forsaken by a fiancé or a lover. " Suppos-
ing your husband were to deceive you/' asks one of the
characters in a novel of a wife, " what would you do ? n —
" I love him so ardently," answers the heroine, " I believe I
should kill him and myself afterwards ; for to die after
wreaking such a vengeance would be preferable to living
a true wife with a faithless husband." Many wives hold
suchlike language, but very few carry their threats into
execution. Some in the first crisis weep and lament
loudly and go almost mad with grief; others, less violent
but more deeply smitten, silently languish away in melan-
choly and disappointment; others again, more high-
spirited or because they have no children, claim a separa-
tion or a divorce. But the majority dread any public
scandal ; more exasperated against their rival than against
their husband, whom they still love, they await his return,
seeking consolation meantime in the love of their children
and in religion.
A married woman is more ready to forgive her husband's
unfaithfulness than a husband is to forgive his wife's. For
the latter, in spite of the pain it gives her, realizes that the
offence in his case does not involve the same consequences
as in hers. Moreover, she is anxious to spare the father of
her children and avoid scandal.
It is chiefly against her husband's mistress that a married
woman's anger is directed. Médée herself in Racine's
tragedy, — and a strong substratum of love underlies her
fury, — has no thought at the first but of punishing Creuse
her rival. Jason she would fain spare ; she says to Nérine:
" Jason m'a trop coûté pour vouloir le détruire,
Mon courroux lui fait grâce . . .
Qu'il vive et, s'il se peut, que l'ingrat me demeure,
Si non, ce m'est assez que sa Creuse meure." 1
1 " Jason has cost me too dear for me to wish to destroy him ; my anger
spares him. . . . Let him live, and if he can, let the thankless wight be
thankless still ; if not, 'tis enough for me that Creusa dies."
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 28 1
As a rule a wife's anger is concentrated on the rival who
is eager to supplant her in her husband's affection, and
this anger, so ready to turn to downright fury, kindles the
desire of vengeance. Then the married woman, no less
than the girl who has been seduced and forsaken, will be
ready to throw vitriol in her rival's face, to disfigure her
for life. Then will she endeavour to catch her husband
and his mistress in flagrante delicto, so as to make a
marriage between them impossible, in the event of her own
divorce ; for by the terms of Article 298 of the Civil Code,
"In the event of divorce allowed in Law by reason of
adultery, the guilty husband shall never be permitted to
marry his accomplice." Some few years ago now, in Paris,
a lady of society, desirous of annulling her marriage in
order to marry her lover, who was the husband of one of
her bosom friends, had initiated a petition for divorce,
alleging acts of violence as having been committed upon
her by her husband. On his own side the lover was ready
to make every effort to break off his marriage and marry
his mistress. Informed of their designs, the lover's lawful
wife succeeded in surprising her husband and his mistress
in flagrante delicto, with the object of rendering the
marriage they were aiming at impossible ; she shot her
rival five times with a revolver, besides stabbing her again
and again in various places.
Examination before the Juge <t instruction brought out
the fact that the lawful wife's fury was raised to white
heat by this remark of her rival's, " Your husband ! is he
yours ? " This question, so strange and cynical in seeming,
is explained by a well-known effect of love, which makes
lovers believe themselves to belong to each other, even
when by law they really belong to others. The beloved
object seems to be the lover's actual property. Though
Charlotte is married, Werther looks upon her as belonging
to him ; " You are mine," he writes in a letter to her ;
44 yes! mine, Lotchen, for ever. What of it if Albrecht is
your husband ? This is but in the world's eyes, . . . you
are mine, mine, yes ! Lotchen, mine." The mistress of a
282 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
married man in the same way claims that he, though another
woman's husband, belongs to her and reproaches the law-
ful wife with stealing him from her, while he too holds she
belongs to him, though he is not her husband in actual
fact. Mary Stuart (who must often be quoted in psycho-
logical studies such as our own dealing with passion) when
Darnley's wife, says, writing to her lover Bothwell, himself
married to Lady Gordon, that he belongs to her and she
to him, " for I may of a surety call you mine, who have
won you by myself in true love;" she charges him "to
keep himself for her to whom alone you do of rights
appertain." Woe for her and for Bothwell if her lover,
like a new Jason, should make of her but " a sweetheart of
the second place," and force her to play the part of another
Medea. — Love claims primary possession of the beloved
object not only as against the husband but also against
the father. When Agamemnon asks Achilles :
" Et qui vous a chargé du soin de ma famille ?
Ne pourrai-je sans vous disposer de ma fille ?
Ne suis-je pas son père ? Etes-vous son époux ? n l
the latter answers, in the name of his great love, like a
hero of romance :
"... Non, elle n'est plus à vous . . .
Je défendrai mes droits. . . ." 2
However it is between two women, each claiming to
defend her rights and contending for a man's heart, that
the most violent and tragic scenes occur. 8 This is why
dramatists so often choose the rivalry of two women as the
motive of a play. It is on her rival a married woman
practises the most refined and humiliating acts her
vengeance can suggest. Women of the lower classes have
1 " And who charged you with the care of my family? Can I not, without
your interference, dispose of my daughter's hand ? Am I not her rather ? Are
you her husband ? "
2 " . . . No ! she is yours no more ... I will defend my rights. . . ."
* Homo komini lupus ; mulier mulieri lupior, — "Man is a wolf to man;
but a Woman is more wolfish to a woman," says the proverb ; and if this is so,
ealousy is the reason.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 283
been known to apply manual chastisement to a rival, after
pulling up her frock as if she were a baby, while society
ladies have before now had a husband's mistress defiled
by their footman, while they feasted their eyes on the
spectacle of her humiliation. The rivalries of Queens,
which have provoked so many wars between nations, are
often nothing but rivalries between two jealous women.
Sometimes we find a married woman, to avenge her
husband's unfaithfulness, being unfaithful herself; "an eye
for an eye," she says, " and a tooth for a tooth ; you de-
ceived me, and I deceive you." Then in her blind anger
she will throw herself at the head of the first comer, be he
who he may, to make the author of her pain suffer in turn,
to render him ridiculous, and possibly also to bring him
back again to her side by rousing his jealousy. Corneille,
who has expressed with no less penetration than Racine
the feelings of the female heart, has faithfully represented
the thoughts of the woman who practises this form of
revenge in the following lines :
"Je veux qu'il se repente et se repente en vain,
Rendre haine pour haine et dédain pour dédain . . .
Et pour le punir mieux,
Je veux même à mon tour vous aimer à ses yeux." *
The wife who avenges her wrongs in this headstrong
fashion is false to her husband while loving him all the
while, yet gives herself to the first comer without any
affection for him at all.
M Free Unions." — The large amount of sorrow, shame
and crime that are to be found in family life, and some
of which I have been recounting above, have inspired
certain Utopian thinkers with the idea of abolishing
marriage, in order to put an end to them once for all.
Adultery, they declare, and marital vengeance and murder
between husband and wife, would all disappear, if only
1 " I would have him repent, and repent in vain, I would pay him back hate
for hate and scorn for scorn. . . . And the better to punish him, I would fain
in my turn love you before his very eyes."
284 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
union between the sexes were free. The argument is on
a par with that of other theorists of the same kidney who
propose, in order to put an end to theft to abolish property
altogether.
If marriage has its victims, free unions have far mort
to show; in fact they are seldom peaceable and happy.
The poets who have extolled free love in their verses
have rarely known the joys of peace and quietness them-
selves. Ovid used to beat his mistress ; Propertius longed
for one who should show a gentle and peaceful disposition;
the finest of Alfred de Musset's love songs are cries of
despair.
To abolish marriage would not be enough to make
lovers happy, for in "free unions" more quarrelling and
violence take place than in lawful wedlock. It would
seem at first blush that, in free unions, each of the lovers
possesses a primary and inherent right to claim his or
her liberty, so soon as ever life in common has become
unbearable, that this rupture may be made by common
consent, that a mistress's unfaithfulness, not involving the
same serious consequences as a married woman's treachery,
ought not to occasion the same despair, and that murder,
under such circumstances is an absurdity, seeing each
can recover independence without needing to resort to
poison or pistol. But practice differs widely from theory.
Passion does not stop to argue; and freedom in "free
unions " exists more in appearance than reality. If one
of the lovers wishes to recover freedom of action, the other
does not ; he thinks the being he loves belongs to him
and will not allow her liberty to leave him. Such lovers
usually have long quarrels before arriving at a final rupture;
they part, come together again, and once more part How
many letters have I read like the following, which I borrow
from the documents relating to a case of suicide : " It was
after an argument with my lover," writes a young woman,
"that I took the revolver and fired a shot at myself,
which caused the wound you see near my eye ; already
the night before I had made up my mind to have done
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 285
I life and started out with the resolve of drowning
«If." How many ruptures of such relations are the
r ace to scenes of violence and even of murder and
:ide, under circumstances resembling those recounted
a young woman, anxious to regain her liberty, in the
>wing terms : " ' As you will not be mine, you shall
er be other men's/ my lover declared ; with these
ds he seized me by the hair and fired several shots
ne with a revolver, which however only wounded me.
II to the ground ; then thinking he had killed me, he
i a shot at himself which stretched him stone dead."
t is not between married people only that love often
s in mutual enmity and continual quarrels, without a
sibility of finding an escape in a rupture restoring
*iom to those concerned. There are galley-slaves of
: love quite as much as there are of marriage. Just
here are married women who poison their husbands to
>ver their liberty, so there are mistresses who poison
ir lovers with the same object. I find the following
stion and answer recorded in the records of a criminal
e as passing between the Juge d instruction and a woman
used of having poisoned her lover : " But why did you
adopt the simpler plan of leaving him ? " — " I knew
1 to be very violent," was the reply; "he had often
eatened he would kill me if I left him ; I went in terror
lis vengeance."
Similarly mistresses keep their lovers by their side by
king them believe them capable of throwing vitriol in
ir eyes, if they dare to leave them ; lovers are afraid
break off the liaison from terror of their mistress's
«isals.
Jnfaithfulness on the woman's part is more prevalent
"free unions" than in lawful marriages. How many
[uettes keep several affairs going at once, taking a
ight in making their slaves feel their mastery by
initiating tasks and exciting rivalries that often end
fatal quarrels! A young man, the lover of such a
man, who was killed in a duel with a rival, far from
286 ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND.
lamenting his death, exclaimed in his dying moments:
" I am killed, I am going to die, but I am very happy!"—
so grievously had he suffered from his mistress's fickle
whims and the jealousy her other lovers caused him.
Domestic servants who are at the same time their
employers' mistresses not unfrequently follow the example
set them by unfaithful wives and poison their protector.
Once they have contrived to get a will made in their favour,
they are tempted to get rid of the testator, so as to many
and enjoy their legacy with a younger man.
Forsaken lovers more frequently revenge themselves
on their mistress's unfaithfulness than do husbands in the
like situation, and the deserted mistress is likewise more
vindictive than the lawful wife. Besides, how many love
affairs end in the Police Court! how many times is the
Law called upon to bring former lovers to account for the
vilest of all offences, blackmailing. 1 How often do love-
letters preserved by discarded mistresses prove in their
hands effective instruments of extortion ! Each lover has
his portfolio in the boudoirs of some of our frail beauties.
Last of all, the birth of a child, which tightens the
affection of a married pair, more often than not only
brings discord into "free" households, where the desire
is to remain childless. The lover shrinks from fatherhood,
and does not always resist the temptation to procure
abortion. If a child, that joy of the properly constituted
family, does appear in an irregular ménage, it is received
with indifference or even aversion on the part of the father,
who curses it for the responsibilities and expenses it
involves him in. Not only does he, to escape the burden,
very often force his mistress to submit to treatment to
procure abortion, but we even see him on occasion kill the
woman who is with child by him in order to get rid of
the offspring of her womb.
1 This practice of levying blackmail has assumed appalling proportions. I
have actually tried and condemned a priest for roguery of this sort, who after
seducing a girl belonging to one of the most respected families of Vaucluse,
had subsequently extorted considerable sums of money from her relations by
threatening to make public the love letters he had received.
ADULTERY ON THE PART OF THE HUSBAND. 287
From this brief résumé of the acts of shame and
criminality often occurring in "free unions," something
else than the abolition of marriage is needed to bring
about the suppression of crimes of passion.
Suicide, moreover, is much more common in "free
unions " than under the conditions of legalized marriage.
Far more acts of despair are found to occur among women
forsaken by their lover than among married women de-
serted by their lawful husband.
CHAPTER IX.
CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES AND CRIMES
ARISING OUT OF PASSION.
" This passion hath won so great force and so much honour that
they who should clip its wings ... are the very folk that magnify it
the most and idolize it. w — Plutarch.
Crimes of passion have always existed. Among all
peoples and under every latitude, love, jealousy, anger,
revenge, stir men's hearts ; and everywhere like passions
result in like crimes. In every country of the globe arc
to be found Clytaemnestras and Hermionés, Roxanes and
Phèdres, Othellos, Romeos and Werthers. In the Ancient
world as in the Modern, unfaithful wives have poisoned
their husband with their lover's complicity, outraged
husbands have killed their guilty wife, maids seduced and
wives forsaken have wreaked vengeance on lover or faith-
less mate, and unhappy lovers have died of love or killed
themselves in despair.
Such crimes then are no novelty ; what is new is their
frequency. And the disquieting thing from the point of
view of public safety is the indulgence juries show towards
this type of crime.
De Tocqueville expressed a hope that the progress of
democracy would bring about greater regularity of morals
and that disorders and crimes arising from amorous
passion would go on decreasing in frequency. 1 His
prognostications have not been verified. In former days
magistrates had to note only a small number of crimes
of this nature. For instance, in 1864 there was not a
1 Democracy in America, 3rd Part, ch. xL
a88
:auses of frequency of suicides and crimes. 289
ingle case of feminine vengeance in the whole Depart-
nent of the Bouches-du-Rhône ; at the present time
vithin the same limits there is an average of eight to
en every year. It is the same everywhere. If energy
:onsists, as Stendhal professed to believe, in burning out
lie eyes of a fickle lover, stabbing to death a woman who
►hows too much, or too little, resistance, France can never
lave counted so many men and women "of energy" as
n our day. In his last published Report on the ad-
ministration of Criminal Justice, the "Garde des Sceaux"
[Chancellor) of France states that "crimes of violence,
hatred and extravagant living have undergone a numerical
increase." x This generation is witness to a recrudescence
of hate, in love as in politics. Platform and press alike
celebrate the beauty of hate ; " Of all hatreds," says M.
Barrés, " the most intense, the most sublime, the queen of
queens, is that exhaled by civil strife." 2 The spirit of
enmity breathes everywhere ; furious hate is the fashion
of the time, even in love.
Stendhal was wont to reproach the upper classes of his
day with their nervous dread of scandal, their excessive
care for the proprieties and the externals of morality. He
could hardly say the same to-day. The higher classes now
compete, revolver in hand, with hairdressers, shoe-makers,
coachmen, cooks and chamber-maids, in acts of passionate
violence. It is past counting the number of Othellos and
Hermiones, Orestes and Roxanes, that nowadays appear
before the Assize Courts and Police Courts, in all classes
of society. The society of to-day boasts of its tender
sensibility, yet never before has passion been so vindictive,
never has love stabbed so many breasts, broken so many
beads, disfigured so many faces, blinded so many eyes.
The arrows Mythology attributes to Cupid are in these
days veritable poniards, keen knives, loaded revolvers,
which are far from wounding hearts only metaphorically ;
blood flows in streams from the wounds they make, and
1 Journal officiel, 10th May 1896.
3 Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, p. 85.
T
2ÇO CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
the spectator of these murderous dramas of love may well
cry with O reste :
" Dieux ! quels ruisseaux de sang coulent autour de moi." l
Nor yet at any previous period have so many suicides
and double suicides for love been known. At Marseilles,
in one single month and in the same arrondissement, I
have myself noted no less than three double suicides due
to amorous passion.
The chief reasons for this frequency of crimes of passion
are : the excessive indulgence shown by juries towards this
kind of crimes, the precocity of contemporary youth in the
direction of dissipation and alcoholism, the depravation of
mind due to the sophistries invented and disseminated
by modern novels and plays, the increase of nervosity, and
the inefficiency of the Law for the proper punishment of
seduction.
Merciless to the thief, the modern jury is indulgent to
the criminal of passion and, speaking generally, to all who
are guilty of offences against morality, — often to the pitch
of excusing such altogether.
All crimes for which love is responsible are readily
forgiven now, though in former times judges were not
nearly so indulgent in these cases. Tacitus recounts as a
strange and shocking crime a murder committed out of
jealousy by a Tribune of the People, Octavius Sagitta, and
says the author of the crime in question was prosecuted by
the Senate under the law dealing with murderers. 2 — Dante
places in Hell the husband who killed Francesca da
Rimini. — In the sixteenth century manners were rough
enough, and yet De Thou tells us that, when Baleins,
Governor of Lectoure, stabbed an officer who had violated
his sister, the King of Navarre was horrified at Baleins*
audacity and the enormity of his crime (Bk. ii.). The
juryman of to-day is less horrified than was the King
of Navarre at the audacity of murderers from love or
1 "Ye Gods ! what torrents of blood flow round me."
3 Tacitus, Annals, bk. xiii. § 44.
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 2ÇI
jealousy; in proportion as he shows himself more and
more severe against theft, he grows more and more
indulgent towards crimes of amorous passion. Juries in
the Department of the Seine above all have an infinite
compassion for forsaken women who punish their deserter
by means of vitriol or the pistol. The women know it,
and when they have a possible choice of exacting their
vengeance in the provinces or in Paris, they always select
the latter. The woman Panckouke, who might have
killed her rival in the country, if she had so wished, waited
till she had returned to Paris before striking the fatal
blow. " Country juries," she declared, " are so stupid ;
Paris is the place where I will kill her." She did as
she said she would, and just as she had foreseen, a
Parisian jury acquitted her.
How comes it that juries are so ready to forget the
suffering, wounds, even death of the victim, and constantly
give verdicts of acquittal in favour of persons accused of
crimes of passion ? The reasons are manifold. So many
novels and dramas have been written extolling the beauty
of crime where Passion is the motive, descanting on the
great-souled heroism of the murderer for Love, maintaining
the sacredness of Prostitution and the rehabilitation of the
soul by Affection, that public opinion has been led astray
by these literary sophistries. A jury after all only reflects
public opinion. If society at the present day is utterly
anarchical and has even lost the power to defend itself,
it is because politics and fiction (whether in novels or
plays) have scattered sophistries broadcast on the world,
and while diminishing the number of the duties incumbent
on men and women, have correspondingly multiplied their
rights. While revolutionary socialism claims the right of
insurrection for the citizen, the right of work, the right of
credit and capital for the working-man, the right of enjoy-
ment for the poor man, our modern Romance, Poetry and
Drama have invented the right of suicide, the right of love
the rig/it of adultery, the right of vengeance for forsaken
lovers and outraged husbands, the right of abuse and the
292 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
right of board and lodging at the public expense for poets.
Every day we behold new claims made upon society.
Authors and composers demand the right of representation^
advocates the right of unrestrained libel. Not long ago
at a sitting of the Eighth Chamber of the Correctional
Tribunal of the Seine, I actually heard some milkmen
claim the right of watering I 1
The claims urged to all these manifold rights have the
effect of relaxing all social ties and abolishing all duties
The so-called right of insurrection does away with the duty
of respecting " the powers that be." The right of credit
dispenses with the duty of so acting as to deserve credit
The right of suicide cancels the duty of bearing the trials
of life. The right of capital abolishes the duty of saving.
The right of maintenance frees the poet from the duty of
earning the price of his writings according to the ordinary
law of supply and demand. The right of love releases
from the duty of being true to the marriage vow. The
right of revenge abolishes the duty of respecting the life
of other men.
Sophistry is contagious, and readily impregnates a jury.
Novels and plays have so extolled the nobility of crimes
of passion and so eloquently justified revenge, that juries,
quite forgetting the duty they have been summoned to
fulfil, fail entirely to defend society, and pity, not the
victims, but the authors of crimes of this nature. The
French, less attached than the English, to their nationaV
laws, institutions and traditions, are more accessible tc^
literary sophistries ; they worship talent to the pitch c^l
idolatry. They forgive everything to the talent of thm^t
author in vogue at the moment, even when he puts in^^fcc
circulation paradoxes that are ruinous to society itself;
the very same individuals who refuse their respect to tfce
1 Anarchism completes the Rights of Man by claiming the right of theft stud
the right of murder. — Dostoievsky in one of his Novels makes a member of the
Secret Societies of Russia say : " Crime is not a form of madness, as LJttré
defines it, but a sound doctrine, almost a duty, in any case a noble act of
protest."
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 293
it social institutions, will not venture on the smallest
ism of the fashionable Novelist of the day.
ien again, the impassioned appeals of the Defence
:ise an enormous influence over half-educated persons,
know nothing of the tricks of oratory and fall ready
ns to every theatrical effect and moving incident
aired beforehand to stir the Court. Sometimes we
dly see the jury, carried away by Counsels' eloquence,
*t their judicial functions altogether and join the public
>plauding, just as if they were at the Play. An
aent advocate, practised in the art of moving the
t of juries and putting their reason to sleep, can
1 a doubt into their minds as to the most positive
, call up interest and sympathy for the author of the
e, cause all the victim's sufferings to be forgotten, as
as all the claims Society has to be defended against
doers. 1 He carries an acquittal by storm. The power
letoric over untrained minds is such, that men accused
srfectly well-established crimes, listening to the sad
of their unfortunate lot drawn by their Counsel, end
lemselves entertaining doubts of their guilt. A con-
said to Dr Lauvergne : " Nothing in this world ever
lished me so much as my advocate's speech for the
ice : I was all surprise, on returning to my cell after a
lg of the Court, to believe myself an honest man.
sir, my Counsel had convinced me of the fact" Since
summing up has been done away with, which interposed
nterval between the speech for the defence and the
ict and so allowed the jury to calm down and recover
• common^sense, the decision is given under the
ence of emotion produced by heated eloquence of a
ial pleader. Juries transfer to the Palais de Justice
ts formed in the theatre. The public for its part
3 to the Assize Court with as much eagerness as to the
is this seduction exercised by rhetoric over the multitude that accounts
e ever-increasing number of advocates who are elected deputies. The
•jan alone can rival the advocate in popularity, particularly when he pays
rits gratuitously.
294 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
theatre, bringing the same attitude of mind to bear and
seeking the same gratification, — the titillation of its 1 =S
emotions. The Counsel for the defence and the Public I *
Prosecutor strive to impress the jury, the former by ■ °
theatrical effects, by showing the children, the parents of | **
the accused, the latter by displaying the victim's blood-
stained clothes and exhibiting various articles connected
with the crime, the murderer's knife, or revolver, or what
not. Criminal justice is nothing if not theatrical This
craving to dramatize everything, justice no less than s
politics, comes from our passionate addiction to the play- a
house. The theatre is often a criminal court, and con- 2
versely, the criminal court is a theatre.
We can readily comprehend that a jury's feelings are
stirred, when they have before their eyes a young girl,
seduced by promises of marriage, forsaken by the lover
who has made her a mother, carrying an infant in her
arms, and speaking to them in the same sort of words as a
poor child brought up for trial on a criminal charge used
to the Juge <t instruction of Aix : " I feel the keenest
regret for what I have done ; but think of the state of
mind I was in. After being seduced by my lover, who «
had neglected no means to bring about my fall, not only a
do I see myself abandoned by the man who had sworn to n
marry me, and who broke all his promises, but he was now
on the point of destroying my last hope by marrying
another girl. Nay ! more, not content with dishonouring
me, he is trying to overwhelm me with infamy by making
out my child is not his. ... I am not the first this wretch.
has ruined. I have learned since that he deceived another
girl Marie B , whom he abandoned after making he«"
a mother as he did me."
It is both humane and just to consider every point that*
may mitigate the guilt of an unhappy woman who has
suffered bitterly. When Dante met Francesca da Rimixi/
in Hell, he said to her : " Francesca, thy calamities fill me
with sadness and pity; they make me weep. . . . Alas/
how many gentle thoughts and soft desires have brought
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 295
to this mournful pass ! " A jury then is equally in the
to compassionate the misfortunes of a poor girl who
been seduced and forsaken, and who, bodily strength
:ourage alike exhausted, pinched with cold and hunger,
>ut means to feed and clothe her child, is tempted in a
lent of despair to an act of violence upon her seducer,
now refuses her all help and threatens to have her
ted. At sight of this wife who will have no husband,
child who will have no father, pity is but natural,
1 the poor girl in the dock tells the jury : "lam now
rly sorry for having entertained the fatal idea of
ging my wrongs on Louis R . I pity his present
ition, but if he is unhappy, I am deserving of com-
ion too. He dishonoured me. I am driven from my
:r*s house ; my parents have told me plainly they will
r Jsee me again. When I come out of prison, I shall
ithout refuge or resources, I shall have a child to feed,
I shall be reduced to begging my bread."
it it is not merely young and inexperienced girls that
tjvengeance on the seducer who refuses to give them
the honour he has robbed them of; women who are
lers without being wives, widows possessed of more
vledge of the world than virtue, claim the right to
ge themselves on young men they have themselves
astray. Even loose women who have had children
re entering into relations with the young lover who
equently abandons them, or who simply give their
ursjat the first meeting in the streets or at a public ball,
the revolver or throw vitriol over their lovers of the
lent, — and still an indulgent jury acquits them. I will
e, by way of example, a case lately adjudicated by the
ze Court of the Bouches-du-Rhône, which ended in a
ict for the accused. A Corsican girl had come down
i her village to Ajaccio, to prepare for an examination,
the first year she conducted herself wisely, but during
second she began to frequent the public balls. When
îr examination for admission to the Post-Office Service,
ivas caught copying and struck off the list of candidates.
296 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
Instead of going home to her friends, she remained at
Ajaccio, on the look-out for adventures. She made the
acquaintance at a public ball of an employé in the Post-
Office and became his mistress; later on after a series
of similar liaisons, a pregnancy declared itself. Her
brother and uncle arrived to hunt up the lover and called
upon him to marry his mistress. But in view of the proofs
given them of the girl's general looseness of behaviour,
they did not press it. Soon afterwards, the Post-Office
official mentioned left Ajaccio, came to Marseilles and
proposed to marry. His former mistress having heard of
this bought a pistol, and practised the handling of the
weapon ; then she came to Marseilles and killed her lover
with a brace of pistol-shots. The jury acquitted her,
although it came out as the result of cross-questioning
that the girl was living a life of prostitution.
Suchlike unjustifiable acquittals increase the frequency
of crimes of passion. Intending throwers of vitriol, before
attacking their lover, inquire into the general result of
prosecutions against other women who have done the like.
If the verdict was in their favour, they are heard to declare :
" Well, well ! if all I have to expect is a few days of
preliminary confinement, I may surely give myself the
gratification of punishing my false lover." Women are no
longer satisfied now with throwing vitriol at the lover who
has actually deserted them ; if they have reason to believe
they are going to be left in the lurch, they resort to the
vitriol bottle. In one single Department, that of the
Bouches-du-Rhône, I find sixteen cases of vitriol throw-
ing coming before the Assize Courts in the year 1879.
Other cases of the same description, not resulting in any
serious consequences, are dealt with by the Correctional
Police. Nor do women deserted by their lovers limit
themselves to throwing vitriol over the latter on their
refusal to marry them; there are some who, to punish
the parents who withhold their consent, act in the same
atrocious way to them. Some years ago at Sisteron, a
woman so deserted threw vitriol over her lover's mother.
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 2Ç7
Women who throw vitriol take very little heed of people
anding near their victim, they just pitch it broadcast.
hey do not injure merely the man they wish to punish ;
ie passers-by also often get splashed with the corrosive
lid.
It is a mistake to say that vitriol throwing was brought
to fashion by the crime of the Widow Gras in 1896; it
is long been practised in the South, especially in Provence,
had myself to deal with a case of vitriol throwing as long
jo as 1870. The same year, in the same Department,
îother young woman, who had thus treated her lover,
>ld the Juge d'instruction : " Realizing that I was not
rong enough to knife him effectually, I made up my
tind to throw vitriol in his face ; I had heard them say
tat other girls who had been abandoned had used this
leans of revenge." Next year, another act of the same
arrid sort took place in the neighbourhood of Aix. A
Mtain G had had, before his marriage, relations with
servant in his father's house ; his parents having noticed
lis, dismissed the girl and married their son. On his
lbsequently losing his wife, he renewed his liaison with
is former mistress, who bore him a child, but some time
Fterwards he gave her up and proposed to marry again.
he woman then determined on revenge, and threw a
ottle of sulphuric acid right in his face. The victim lost
is eyesight after enduring atrocious agony. The acid had
?en thrown in such quantities, that his clothes were partly
Limed off him and the stones forming the framework of
ie door disintegrated. The jury acquitted the woman.
The example of these female vitriol throwers has proved
mtagious ; men have taken to following it. Young men
iake use of this means of forcing the girl who rejects their
Idresses to become their mistress or wife. " If she will
ot do what I ask, if she will not marry me, I will burn
er eyes out," is their cry. Sometimes they make use of
ie same threats towards the girl's parents. One young
lan, who was seeking the hand of a girl of his acquaintance,
irious at being repulsed, told the young woman's father :
2Ç8 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
" Think well ! marriage or death ! Think well, there will
be two funerals." He bought a gun and began by point-
ing it at the girl. She begged for mercy in vain ; he blew
out her brains with the words : " Next comes your father's
turn." — Lovers who have been sent about their business
revenge themselves on their mistress in the same terrible
way. — Men who have tempted married women from their
duty, threaten to throw vitriol in their faces, when they
express a wish to return to their husband's roof. A man
named Marais had enticed a young married woman from
her home, but it was not long before she was sorry for her
sin and sought to win her husband's forgiveness. Marais
set himself against his mistress returning to her lawful
husband and told her, " If you leave me, I will spoil your
face," — and he carried out his dreadful threat
Habits of retaliation have become only too common.
Girls are sometimes so terrified by the threats of vengeance
addressed to them as to marry men they do not love, but
who inspire them with fear. I have seen an even more
extraordinary thing. A young workwoman wished to
leave her lover in order to get married; but her lover
declared he would kill her if she left him. Not daring to
carry out her proposed marriage and not having the heart
to remain with a man she no longer loved, she put an end
to herself.
If juries continue to fail to support the Law and do
not insist on human liberty and life being respected,
people will more and more get into the habit of taking
justice into their own hands, and we shall return to a state
of savagery. It becomes a more and more common thing
to see debtors wreak vengeance on creditors who sue theta
for payment, — robbers and poachers on police and keepers»
— to see soldiers who have been punished use outrage and
violence towards their officers whom they think over harsh,
servants who have been dismissed punish their masters,
and working-men their employer. A judge of the Tribunal
of Aubusson was killed by a litigant, and another of the
Tribunal of Apt wounded, while a Juge d'instruction of
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 299
Tribunal of the Seine was not long ago shot in
face by a woman calling herself a victim of the Law.
archists blow up the houses inhabited by magistrates
whom they wish to wreak their vengeance. Actors,
I still more frequently actresses, who have been hissed,
enge themselves on their critics. A sculptor, J. F ,
ioyed at the report given by an expert in a commercial
pute, sprang upon the latter, a graving tool in his hand,
I wounded him very seriously in the chest and abdomen,
the Court of Algiers a former Préfet was condemned to
trtn of imprisonment for having struck the Headmaster
the School, after a heated interview in consequence of
son not having passed an examination. Artists admire
" noble attitude " of anarchists hurling bombs to avenge
mselves on the "bourgeois." Those who dare not at
sent wreak their vengeance for fear of the Law, wait
a revolution to take reprisals on society. For some
rs past magistrates have been liable to receive a boot
heir head from the prisoner in the dock in revenge for
penalties inflicted on the latter.
levenge is the most antisocial of all passions, the one
t causes most blood to be spilt It is for mutual revenge
t political parties proscribe each other. It is revenge
t in times of revolution sets the blood of priests, nobles,
zens flowing. The men of the Terror used to call the
illotine the people's vengeance. Politicians inspire hate
tween different classes. Catholics persecuted the Jews
avenge on their descendants the crime committed by
rir ancestors in crucifying Jesus Christ. Protestants
rsecute Catholics in revenge for the revocation of the
lict of Nantes. Each party, as it triumphs in turn, is
' exacting reprisals on the beaten faction. Always hate,
fays the spirit of revenge.
The manners and customs of Corsica show a tendency
become acclimatized on the Continent of Europe,
:ause crimes of revenge are not repressed with adequate
f crity. Now it ought to be recognized there is no
fcion more difficult to eradicate than that of revenge,
300 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
when once it has become part of the habits of a nation and
grown into their nature. 1 The vendetta is kept up to this
day among Corsican families ; the banditti of that country
are actually utilized in elections. We saw quite lately at
Aix a remarkable instance of this persistency of the
vendetta. A young soldier was found assassinated ; the
criminal was a compatriot, who had travelled to Aix on
purpose to avenge a family feud dating back several
generations. His mother and sisters had accompanied
him to help and encourage him in his act of vengeance»
while a priest, who was a kinsman of the family, had
come in person from Corsica to Aix to hire a lodging
for the others. At the trial the sister of the murdered
man stated that out of her four brothers, three had been
killed and the fourth was in hiding in the maquis. This
is the condition of things we should come to, if through
excessive indulgence for crimes of passion, the right of
revenge should ever become part of our moral code, — to
the profit of the husband outraged by his wife's adultery,
to the profit of the woman forsaken by her lover who
says, "marriage or death," to the profit of the young
lover pursuing the woman he loves with the threat, M Be
mine, or I kill you ! love or death."
In Switzerland, on the contrary, juries are extremely
severe, too severe even, towards crimes arising out of
amorous passion. The only prisoner for a crime of this
kind I found, in 1896, in the prison of Lausanne, was a
husband who had killed his wife from jealousy. In France
he would have been acquitted; in Switzerland he was
condemned to life-long confinement, and this only because
the death penalty has been abolished in the Canton Vaud
Yet there were a number of extenuating circumstances
telling in favour of this husband driven wild by jealousy,
— his good antecedents, his penitence, the ill-behaviour of
1 Lacenaire was ready to admit that all his crimes arose from the fact tint
he had never been able to overcome his craving for revenge. "Yes, my dor
M. R ," he said to his teacher, " I have at last overcome all my evil passu»*
except one, — revenge."
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 3OI
his wife. Between this Draconian severity and absolute
acquittal, there is surely room for a judgment tempered
with mercy.
Another cause of the frequency of suicides and crimes due
to passion is the precocity of young people of the present
day in dissipation. For instance, in 1892, there occurred
87 suicides of children under sixteen, and 475 of young
people of both sexes of between sixteen and twenty-one.
Now the majority of such suicides are determined by love
disappointments, jealousy or dissipation. From 1835 to
1844, the average was only nineteen of suicides of minors
under sixteen years of age. 1
Never before has youth been so precocious as now in
the matter of suicide and crime resulting from amorous
passion. We hear girls of fifteen and sixteen exclaiming :
" Ah ! how weary I am of it all ! how sick I am of my
life ! I wish I were dead." This overwhelming weariness
of spirit arises nearly always from some disappointment in
love. Such suicides on the part of young girls are of
common occurrence among working people. The parents
start in the morning for their work, leaving their little girl
still asleep ; on their return they find she has hanged her-
self or killed herself by means of charcoal fumes, and on
enquiring into the reason for so fatal a despair, the exist-
ence of which had quite escaped their notice, they find
it is disappointed love that has made death seem preferable
to life to their child, who was playing only yesterday with
her doll. The parents of a girl of fifteen find on coming
home from their work that the child they had left the
same morning quietly asleep in her bed is dead ; question-
ing the neighbours, they are told how she was seen during
the day making her way with a chair to the spot where
she was afterwards found hanging dead, walking slowly
with drooping head, deeply buried in her thoughts. The
motive of her despair was a passion she had conceived for
a young man who had fixed his affections elsewhere.
We even see boys of sixteen or seventeen kill themselves
1 Annales médico-psychologiques > 1855, p. 61.
302 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
along with their mistresses, who are younger still. "A
fortnight ago," says a father, " my boy (seventeen) told me
he loved Maria V , and that he was going to commit
suicide with her. I paid no attention to his remark. Last
Wednesday he left his home." The father of the girl
makes a similar statement : " I learned," he says, " that my
daughter used to go with a young man and that she
declared she would commit suicide."
Quite young girls manifest the same precocity for murder
arising out of amorous passion. The Courts have girls of
fifteen brought before them for vitriol throwing.
Lads of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, commit suicide from
disappointed love or kill their mistresses from jealousy.
This extraordinary precocity in suicide and murder arises
from their equally extraordinary precocity in amorous dis-
sipation and alcoholism. Taking mistresses as they do at
an age when reason and will are as unformed and unripe
as is their physical development, the violent impressions
of love and jealousy are too powerful to be governed.
Impotent to endure the disappointments of love, which are
not of their age, they kill themselves. Impotent to master
the transports of jealousy, they kill others. Little scamps
of fifteen have mistresses of fourteen, and even sometimes
more mistresses than one. We had to adjudicate in the
Eighth Chamber of the Correctional Tribunal of the
Seine on the case of a prisoner of sixteen who had two
mistresses, one of fourteen, the other of fifteen. One of
these childish mistresses having taken a ride on the wooden
horses of a merry-go-round, he told her in a furious passion
he "would cut her head off"; another time he gave a
rendezvous in these words : "If you miss meeting me,
I'll down you;" and the girl having failed to keep the
assignation, he punished her by firing a revolver at her
point blank. — Similarly, young girls still under age have
on their side several lovers at once ; hence quarrels arising
out of jealousy, which end in suicide or murder. In the
official report of the suicide of a lady's-maid, I find the
girl had three lovers, a house-painter, a paviour and a
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 303
later. One of her lovers having refused to let her into
is room, she fired two revolver shots at herself outside his
oor. Girls who act as artist's models are as a rule very
epraved ; corrupted themselves by the loss of their
atural modesty, they do their best to corrupt their young
:>mpanions.
Children displaying such precocious passions are extremely
ervous and irritable, incapable of enduring the slightest
Anoyance. At the smallest disappointment of affection,
r the gentlest rebuke on the part of their parents for their
1 behaviour, they commit suicide. I give several instances
iken from the official records of cases in the Courts of the
department of the Seine. A girl of eighteen was seen
liking to a young man in the street by her uncle, who re-
îarked upon it to her and threatened to tell her father ;
day or two afterwards the girl shot herself with a revolver.
Lnother still younger girl, of sixteen, on being scolded by
er father for the same thing, immediately left her home
nd went off to drown herself. — " My daughter," declared
1 another case a woman subjected to examination by the
'olice Commissary, " my daughter had for some time been
luch with an employé of the Telegraph. I remonstrated
'ith her and begged her to break off the connection ;
îthin a few days from that time she went out and jumped
lto the Seine." — The father of another girl of sixteen
lakes a similar statement : " Discovering the fact that my
aughter was keeping up a correspondence with a young
lan, I took occasion to reprimand her, as was only my
uty. After dinner, I kissed her, as if nothing had
appened, taking no notice of her tears. I started for
iy afternoon's work, and on my return home was informed
lie had thrown herself into the river." I have noted a
urge number of suicides on the part of young girls pro-
eeding from a similar motive ; they will not give up
iese precocious liaisons, and rather than submit to their
arents' rebukes, they give up life instead. A certain pro-
ortion, still more deeply corrupted, desert their parents'
x>f at fourteen, fifteen or sixteen to have fun, as they put
304 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
it, with men, and when the parents try to rescue them from
a life of prostitution, or they suffer a disappointment in
love, they put an end to their life by charcoal fumes or
go off to drown themselves, declaring they are sick of
living. A laundress of fourteen, who had formed a con-
nection with a soldier, on being expostulated with by her
parents, wrote to them in these words : " After the scene
you have made, I see there remains only one thing to d<^
to have done with life altogether. My mind is quite made
up this time ; if you want to recover my body, you will
find it in the Seine. Now, before dying, I only ask you
one favour, not to hold X responsible for my death;
he has nothing to do with it, it is I that have enough of
life."
The precocity of young men, or rather boys, for suicide
is still greater, for to habits of dissipation they add those
of intemperance. The number of very young men who
give way to drink is appalling. As long ago as the end
of the Second Empire, V. Sardou, in his Famille BenoiUm,
drew attention to this tendency towards alcoholism in
Farfan whom he shows on the stage intoxicated with
absinthe. Since that date habits of alcoholism have greatly
developed among young men. In a considerable pro-
portion of official reports of suicides of young men I find
included statements on the part of parents attributing
their act to habits of intemperance and profligacy. "My
boy, after a course of dissipation, put an end to his life
by means of charcoal fumes," writes one father. Another
states : " As the result of his heavy drinking, my son had
grown very irritable and unable to endure a word of
blame." Youths of the sort, who have fallen into habits
of drunkenness and profligacy, cannot bear reproof or a dis-
appointment in love. " I am bound to have a scene with
my father, so I have made up my mind to have done with
my life altogether," writes a youth of sixteen to his
mistress. He was seen writing this letter with a smile on
his face ; a moment later he shot himself with a revolver.
Schoolboys forsake their parents, after robbing them, and
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 3O5
:ecp gay women, only to kill themselves later on, when
hey have exhausted their resources, or when their mistress
eaves them for somebody else ; jealous in an instant,
iter some words with her or with a rival, they take a
evolver and blow their brains out. I have noted the
uicide of a little lad of fourteen, who killed himself
«cause a young danseuse he wanted to elope with had
efused to agree. At an age when they ought to be
till playing marbles and prisoner's base, children kill
bemselves or even kill others in passionate despair. The
Vssize Court of the Department of the Aude tried a
trocious young scoundrel of eleven, who having failed
o violate a little girl of his own age, struck her on the
lead and stabbed her. He confessed his crime with all
he cynicism of a hero of melodrama : 4i Yes I it was I
irho killed Marie. She would not let me have my way,
© I struck her on the head with a hammer. The hammer
lipped through my fingers, and I drew a knife out of my
>ocket, and stabbed her twice in the throat." Two years
igo, at Marseilles, a young man of nineteen emptied four
hambers of his revolver at his grandmother, because she
rished to dismiss a young maidservant he was in love
nth. Two youths who had murdered a young girl de-
lared : " Though barely fifteen, we already loved women
nd loved them passionately, — so much so that, had we
«en obliged to live apart from them, we should have died
f ennui and vexation." x On September 21, 1897, a young
tudent committed suicide in Paris, after writing to his
amily to say he was killing himself, because having tasted
Jl the pleasures of life, he could not expect any more
atisfaction out of anything. Another young man put
n end to himself, after enjoying the favours of a young
ousin of his, with whom he was smitten. In the letter
te left behind giving the reasons for his suicide, he writes
hat from the very day his cousin gave herself to him, he
onceived a deep disgust for her and life in general. He
ays that, had she resisted him, she would have secured
1 Gazette des Tribunaux, 30th September 1 886.
306 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
his happiness, but that having once yielded to his desires,
she might do the same to others, and from that moment
he had taken a disgust at life.
This precocious development of the passionate impulses
among young people of the present day arises from a too
early familiarity with the theatre, from an immoderate read-
ing of novels depicting Love (for the delineation of Love
awakes the corresponding feeling), from the effeminate sen-
sual education they receive. Parents allow their children to
see, and read, and hear everything. A mother, whose son
committed suicide at Marseilles, after killing the girl he
was in love with, admitted to me she had been to blame
in letting him read novels of every type and taking him to
the theatre at too tender an age. The reading of fiction
and theatre-going combined had, by exalting his imagina-
tion and sensibility at the expense of his reason,
predisposed him to a romantic and tragic passion re-
sembling those described and depicted in romances on the
stage. To witness the representation of a Love drama is
not an amusement for a child ; it cannot but over-stimulate
the senses and imagination of a youth, just when the
essential part of education is to fortify the reason and will,
and delay the development of the passionate impulses.
There is far too much hurry nowadays to treat children
as if they were grown up, to initiate them much too early
in the knowledge of good and evil. There is no sort of
need to hasten by means of love scenes on the stage the
awakening of passion in youthful hearts; Nature looks after
all this. A crime of passion seen on the boards by children
may even awake criminal instincts in them. Physicians of
experience recommend keeping children and women apart
from persons affected by nervous disorders, for these are
contagious. Similar precautions should be taken to spare
them the sight of persons under the empire of inordinate
passion, that they may not be affected prejudicially by
their example. Youthful brains should not be excited by
the representation of high-strung sentiments, for fear they
retain an impress capable of leading to the repetition on
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 307
>wn part of the same excesses. The sight of a person
; or drinking wakes the desire to eat and drink. The
icle of a person intoxicated with love awakes the
of experiencing a like passion. The high-strung
lentality of plays and novels is communicated to the
j reader and still more to the precocious theatre-goer,
is not true to say children may read everything
ut risk, as Goethe maintains. " Even in the case of a
child," he says, " there is no need to be too anxious
the influence a book or a play may exercise over
1 On the contrary, I am of opinion myself that parents
t be too anxious as to the influence books have over
:hildren. Men of mature age can defend themselves,
h not always even then, against literary sophistries
mpure pictures ; but young people, boys and girls,
t Vicious doctrines vitiate their mind, foul pictures
I their imagination, depraved books deprave their
:ter. Criminals often confess to having been ruined
ihealthy literature. One Aubin, who was condemned
ath and executed at Douai in 1877, said when giving
:ount of his past life after his condemnation, that his
:ious depravity had been due to reading bad books.
;pite of my parents' wishes, who confiscated and
d I do not know how many immoral and irreligious
of mine, I was for ever feeding on such literature,
xperienced an irresistible craving to follow in the
eps of these heroes of romance, whom I then looked
as the leaders of elegance and high tone."
; young people of the present day are poisoned
ie air they breathe; newspapers, novels, operettas,
ar songs of the café-concerts, everything they see,
:ad, and hear, presents to their eyes, ears and imagina-
nages of too free a kind, all tending to stir precocious
>n. I have before me the catalogue of a People's
ry, in which are included, by way of forming our
en's character, the Pucelle of Voltaire, Les Amoureuses
ris, La Nonne amoureuse, Les Viveurs de Paris, Filles
1 Conversations of Goethe and Eckermann, p. 268.
308 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
Lorettes et Courtisanes, L'Amoureux de la Reine, Les Dran
galants, Une Femme de feu, Une Affolée d'amour, and
hundred other books of the same sort. I have seen gmrk
of fourteen and fifteen come for these books to the library
in question, which was founded by the most influential
politician of the district, without the Inspector-General of
Libraries finding a word to say against the choice of boob
forming the collection. Surely it would not be inopportune
to remind this official that it is not in the school of obscene
literature the youth entrusted to his care will learn the
virtues it so much needs, that bad morals make bad
citizens and bad soldiers, and that when the Roman armies
were beaten by the Barbarians, obscene books were found
in the possession of the vanquished soldiery. 1 A noble
poet, H. de Bornier, who rightly believes that one of the
greatest dangers a country can run is found in immoral
reading, has written a play called Le Fils de fArétin, to
combat this peril. In it Bayard, well aware of the havoc
wrought by profligacy and obscene books among soldiers,
says :
" Maudites soient du ciel les œuvres de débauche ! . . .
Moi soldat, je le sais, je sais que tel ouvrage
En abaissant l'esprit, abaisse le courage ! " a
I have read somewhere that Prince Bismarck thought
the same, and did all he could to keep the Prussian army
from the danger of immoral reading.
If Society has a large share of responsibility for the
deterioration of the young people of the day and the con-
sequent frequency of suicide and crime arising out of
amorous passion, parents are no less responsible in many
cases, through their culpable weakness, for this precocity
in profligacy and criminality. By accustoming their
children to yield to every caprice, parents, and above all
mothers, little know how utterly incapable their weak
indulgence is making their children of resisting the
1 Plutarch, Life of Marcus Crassus.
1 " Cursed of Heaven be the works of profligacy ! ... As a soldier, I know
that such stuff by degrading the mind, degrades the courage too ! "
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 309
emptations of passion. " An effeminate education," Plato
^ays, "undoubtedly makes children peevish, ill-tempered
md always ready to get angry for the most trivial
easons. 1 In the Vladimiroff trial, as in others, it was
>roved that the extreme nervous excitability of the
luthors of crimes of passion was due in part to the
>ad education they had received from weak and foolish
nothers. Such maternal weakness arises not merely from
excess of affection, but from defective intelligence and a
>erverse spirit of opposition against the father's authority
md a regular piece of selfish calculation, so as to win over
:he children's love by a course of indulgence. Maternal
weakness, producing as it does spoiled children, peevish,
selfish creatures, unfit to bear the slightest cross and
jreedy only for pleasure, is rearing beings directly pre-
disposed to such forms of suicide and crime as result
From passionate impulse. Young people are never taught
to endure ennui, disappointment or pain ; they must be for
ever having amusement and enjoying themselves. But, to
live one's life out, a man must know how to bear weariness
md grief and pain.
" Savoir souffrir la vie et voir venir la mort
C'est le devoir du sage et tel sera mon sort." a
Young people often resort to suicide and crime of the
ype that forms the subject of the present work, i.e. suicide
md crime arising out of amorous passion, from the most
trivial motives, being incapable of tolerating the smallest
-esistance to their wishes. The Assize Court of Algiers
Tied a young man of nineteen, who being engaged to a
jirl of seventeen, killed her because she would not let him
ciss her and generally showed too much self-restraint
where he was concerned. I have heard women on trial for
various crimes curse their mother's weak indulgence which
lad ruined them by gratifying all their caprices, and
•ecognize the fact, when it was too late, that they would
1 Plato, Laws, bk. vii.
* " To know how to endure life and see death's approach, this is the duty of
he wise man, and such shall be my lot." Gresset, Edward III.
3IO CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
still have been good and happy women, if only they ha^d
listened to their father's good advice, which had formerly
seemed too harsh to them on account of the contrast it
presented to their mother's indulgence.
Further, I attribute the frequency of crimes and suicides
of passion to the development of nevrosity. Diseases of
the will and the nervous system are more frequent than of
old. We have grown more sensitive, more impressionable.
The reasoning powers are lowered, the will weakened,
while sensibility has grown more acute. A host of
different causes have determined the advances made by
nevrosity. Modern life is more agitated than in former
days, especially in our large towns, while the country is
more and more deserted, where life is calmer, and the open
air gives rest and refreshment to the mind. The excite-
ment incident to life in large towns is further increased by
the preoccupation of the struggle for existence, becoming
every day more severe. In a study I published in the
Revue des Deux Mondes of May I, 1898, on suicides due
to extreme poverty in Paris, I showed by means of the
documents in the Public Prosecutor's Office of the Depart-
ment of the Seine that a certain section of the Parisian
population lives in constant dread of not being able to find
work and so pay its rent. This anxiety shatters the nervous
system. Poor women, too weak to endure the privations
and hardships of life, are exposed to nervous disorders
through excess of suffering. Excessive indulgence in
pleasure, worldly preoccupations, long evenings in theatres
and drawing-rooms, where the air remains unchanged, a
luxurious, agitated yet idle life makes women of the world
intensely nervous. On the other hand men equally find
concentrated in the great towns every cause of fatigue and
nevrosity, — keenness of competition, eagerness of pro-
fessional rivalry, anxieties of business, and along with all
this overtaxing of the moral and intellectual powers,
everything conducive to physical over-excitement.
Again, work is not always carried on under conditions
satisfactory for the nervous system. Sewing machines,
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 3II
electricity as applied to industry, the vibration of various
nachines, produce nervous disorders. Young women who
vork in badly ventilated workrooms, with insufficient food,
toon become anaemic and nervous. The female staff in
elegraph offices and telephone exchanges is specially
iable to nervous troubles.
Reading for examinations and the overwork it involves
eads to many cases of nerve weakness or neurasthenia.
Failure often produces profound discouragement, fits of
lespair and even madness and suicide. I have myself
teen some cases of this.
The alarming progress made by alcoholism in the last
wenty years is well known ; and we know that the children
>f alcoholic parents are often nervous, irritable and badly
balanced.
In the higher classes of society, the abuse of pleasures
tnd of erotic music, the strain after over-wrought emotions,
he craving for refinements of luxury and the table, weaken
he will and unduly develop sensibility and sensuality at
he expense of reason. In very many contemporary novels
he heroines are neuropathic, just like the society ladies
rho have served the authors as models.
The great wars of the empire, in which so many of the
strongest and most vigorous men of the nation died on
he field of battle, yet further contributed to the enfeeble-
nent of the public health and the nervous exhaustion of
subsequent generations.
The mighty political and social commotions France has
jone through during the last hundred years, Revolutions,
he War of 1870, 1871, the Siege of Paris, the Commune,
iie progress of Revolutionary Socialism, losses of fortune
ind employment following on changes of Government, have
shattered the nervous system of a large number of men
ind women who lived for years in the midst of terror and
ierce emotions.
Such then are the chief causes that have made nervous
lisorders more common than formerly. But nervous
patients are naturally predisposed to the commission of
312 CAUSES OF THE FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES
suicides and crimes of passion, because nevrosity rendei*
passion irritable, morbid, uncontrollable, weakening at tic
same the will which alone could hold it in check.
Diseases of the will have increased in direct proportion
as nevrosity has advanced. We note in many women a
brilliant imagination, a bright and agreeable wit, but along
with all this, a poor, weak will and a lack of vigour to
strive and react against temptations in adverse circum-
stances. Want of will power becomes more and more
frequent among men, even men of talent; a "strong man"
is a more and more rare phenomenon. Such weakness
shows itself everywhere in the management of the family,
no less than in that of the Government. No one now
understands the art of commanding, — or of obeying.
General Jarras, Chief of the Staff in the Army of Metz, has
left it on record that it was weakness of will, even more
than want of intelligence, that made the Commander-in-
Chief an incapable officer. He writes, " He possessed in
no sense the energy necessary for command ; he did not
know how to say ' I will ! ' and to be obeyed. To give a
plain and precise order was an impossibility for him."
Enfeeblement of character was an equally marked trait of
Roman society at the period of the Decadence of the
Empire. Such relaxation of will power is mainly due to
two things, sensualism and scepticism ; to be strong, the
will requires to be based on a sense of duty. It is the
same spirit of scepticism and sensualism that makes passion
morbid, irritable, liable at a moment's notice to be carried
away into suicide or crime.
The insufficient provisions of our Law for the protection
of girls against seduction is another determining cause of
acts of feminine revenge. Young girls are not adequately
protected in France. At thirteen, she is presumed to have
given a free consent ! — at thirteen ! The Law takes no
sufficient account of the consequences of seduction.
Merciless towards the victim, public opinion is very in-
dulgent towards the seducer. In every literature manuals
of seduction exist for the use of profligates.
AND CRIMES ARISING OUT OF PASSION. 313
If these villains were compelled to repair the wrongs
they do towards the girls they seduce and the child they
are, — or rather ought to be, — responsible for, they would
be less eager to make " conquests," which might in time
become burdensome. Prudence would impose some self-
control on them, which Conscience is by itself powerless
to dictate. Then, if there were fewer poor girls seduced,
there would be fewer throwers of vitriol, fewer desperate
women charged with abortion and infanticide.
True, the Law awards damages to the girl who has
been seduced and become a mother, in reliance on a
fictitious promise of marriage, but the reparation is in-
adequate. We must go further; what is wanted is a
modification of the Law forbidding inquiry into the
question of paternity. This reform is demanded by MM.
Lecointa, Bérenger, Beaune, Poiton, Beudant, Rodière,
Laurent, that is to say by magistrates and lawyers
possessed of the practical spirit ; it is no mere Utopia.
—Again, why not modify the law requiring the recogni-
tion of a natural child to be made by an authentic act ?
Why regard as null and inadmissible the letters in which
the natural father, writing to the girl he has seduced,
acknowledges his paternity? Our code is old-fashioned,
it wants reforming. While other nations are better at
making reforms than revolutions, we French are best at
the latter ; we find it easier to overthrow a government
iian to modify a law. Our lawyers hate all innovations.
No doubt the problem to be solved is a delicate one.
I cannot here enter into the merits of the case ; I must
se content to point out the necessity for a reform which
bas already been accomplished by the legislators of other
:ountries. In a body of law where every offence causing
prejudice to another person involves a responsibility,
whether penal or civil, it is not right that the seducer
done should be irresponsible, and suffered with impunity
:o turn out mother and child on the streets without succour
>r assistance. The man who makes the child should rear
t. It is incomprehensible that the Law should punish
3 14 CAUSES OF FREQUENCY OF SUICIDES AND CRIMES^
with death the crime of infanticide committed by 3
mother driven to sin by shame, want and despair, a^^y
at the same time acquit of all civil responsibility whatever
the moral infanticide t;he profligate father is guilty of by
forsaking his child. In a society where animals are pro-
tected, and very rightly, it is surely inconceivable that
the victims of seduction and their illegitimate children
should not enjoy the like privilege.
CHAPTER X.
SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE CONTAGION
OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT.
" Les premiers poètes, les premiers auteurs rendaient sages les
hommes fous ; les auteurs modernes cherchent à rendre fous les
hommes sages." 1 — Joubert.
Mme. DE STAËL, writing down her reflections on suicide
in the year 1812, declared that suicides were rare in France,
and that in any case they could not be attributed either
to melancholy of disposition or exaltation of ideas. The
French character has changed greatly since that date ; it
has become melancholy :
" Gaieté, génie heureux, qui fut jadis le nôtre,
Rire dont on riait d'un bout du monde à l'autre,
Esprit de nos aïeux, qui te réjouissais
Dans Téternel bon sens, lequel est né français,
Fleurs de notre pays, qu'êtes- vous devenues ? n 2
A host of reasons, social, political, religious, economic,
physiological and literary, have transformed the National
character. Suicide has become very common at all ages.
The number increases in an alarming ratio :
From 1827 to 1830, there were on the average 1739
suicides a year, that is to say f*ve suicides for every 100,000
inhabitants of the country.
From 1876 to 1880, the average number was 6259 yearly,
seventeen suicides for every 100,000.
1 " The poets and authors of an earlier day made fools into wise men ; our
modern authors do all they can to turn wise men into fools."
* " Bright spirit of happy gaiety, that once was ours, laughing at all things
laughable from one end of the earth to the other, merry soul of our ancestors
that gladdened you with unfailing good sense, the native heritage of every
Frenchman, fine flowers of our land, what has become of you? "
3«$
3l6 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
In 1887, there were twenty-one suicides for every ioo,o^#
of the population.
In 1895, the total rose to 9253, including 7288 men aut/
1966 women.
Suicide has become the disease of the century.
Not only are suicides much more frequent than among
the peoples of Antiquity, but the motives determining
them have changed. With the Ancients suicide was re-
sorted to chiefly from political and patriotic motives, or on
the termination of a war to avoid falling into the hands
of the conquerors. 1 Suicides from love were not numerous.
Nowadays suicides, which have become much more
frequent, are determined by habits of intemperance, dis-
appointed ambition, loss of money, extreme poverty,
jealousy, dissipation, love sorrows. Few kill themselves
out of patriotism. In his book on Waterloo, M. Henri
Houssaye relates how a French officer, in despair at being
defeated, put an end to himself after blowing out his
horse's brains; but instances of the sort are extremely
rare.
Imaginative literature contributes not a little to increase
the number of suicides, and we hear of literary suicides
carried out in imitation of characters in fiction and plays.
In chapter x. of my book on Le Crime et la Peine, I
have already treated in a general way of the influence of
imitation on morality and criminality. I have shown that
the tendency to imitation is an instrument of moral
education on the one hand or of corruption on the other,
according to the examples given. I propose here to
point out the influence of the examples provided by novels
and plays, which utilize suicide as a mainspring of their
action.
I have repeatedly noticed that members of the same
family have put an end to themselves in the same house,
1 In this way the Teuton women, after praying Marius to send them to Rome
"asa gift to the Vestal Virgins, declaring they would renounce all intercourse
with men," but having failed to obtain the favour, hanged themselves the
following night. If their husbands, writes Valerius Maximus, had had the
same courage as their wives, Marius would never have won the day.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 317
on the same spot, by the same means, with the same
weapon and sometimes actually on the same day of the
year and at the same hour. Often in the written state-
ments they leave behind them, they themselves declare
their suicide is an imitation of that of their father, mother,
or some other relative. I read, for instance, in a letter left
behind by a suicide, whose mother and an uncle had both
put an end to themselves : " I do as my mother did." We
see husbands announcing that they will kill themselves
under the same circumstances as those surrounding their
wife's suicide.
This fatal repetition of the same terrible acts can only
be accounted for by the extraordinary power of the
tendency to imitation, by the suggestions arising from the
example and words of the previous suicide and the spot
where the deed was carried out. All this proves there is
such a thing as mental contagion, no less than physical
and nervous contagion.
Mental contagion is also demonstrated by the inter-
communication of ideas and sentiments that takes place
among men in habitual intercourse with each other, by
conversation between relatives and between friends ; men
reciprocally act and react on each other in the way of
suggestion by their doings and words. It is in this
contagious imitation that the explanation is to be sought
of those epidemics of suicide that break out, particularly
among women and soldiers in barracks, — that is to say
among persons who by their sex and youth are specially
impressionable.
After this, how can anyone doubt as to the influence
exerted by author over reader, by literature over morals ? *
To be convinced of its reality, it is enough to remember
how Writers mould their readers in their own image,
how they make them participate in their own ideas,
1 Still this influence is denied by some eminent critics, by Cuvillier-Fleury
{Dernières Etudes historiques et littéraires, vol. i. p. 174), by M. Jules
Lem&ftre {Les Contemporains ; 4th Series, p. 165), by M. Faguet (La Revue
Bleue, 25th Feb. 1893).
3l8 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
passions and sentiments. Voltaire made men Voltairian
Goethe Wertherians, Byron Byronics, Leopardi Leopardist$
Lamartine Lamartinian Romantics, Hugo Worshippers
of the great Victor, George Sand Sandists, Murger
Bohemians, Baudelaire Baudelairians, Tolstoï Christian
Socialists.
Philosophers have their disciples and school of imitators,
— Saint Thomas Aquinas the Thomists, Luther the Luth-
erans, Calvin the Calvinists, Rabelais the Rabelaisians,
Descartes the Cartesians, Spinoza the Spinozists, Kant the
Kantists, Hegel the Hegelians, Renan the Renanists,
Lacordaire the Lacordairians.
Everywhere we find imitation, in politics as in literature.
In politics, some copy Brutus, some Caesar, this man
Catiline, that Robespierre, that other Danton ; even Marat
has had his imitators. The historians and orators of the
Republics of Athens and Rome have made republicans,
even under the ancien régime at the end of the Eighteenth
Century, and thus paved the way for the French Revolu-
tion. "Guard carefully," says Condillac addressing the
republican youth of his day, " guard carefully those early
feelings inspired in you by the perusal of Ancient History."
Forgetful of the fact that political laws should be adapted
to the character, traditions and temperament of each
several people, the makers of constitutions have more
often than not been mere plagiarists ; at one time it is
the English Constitution they make an awkward copy of,
at another they draw their inspiration from the Republics
of Antiquity, at another they sit down to reproduce the
institutions of Switzerland or the United States. It is
this mania for imitation that has compromised in France
the establishment of a form of government really adapted
to the genius of her people.
National literatures again imitate one another. Our own,
for instance, has been, turn and turn about, a copy of Latin
literature, of Greek, of Italian, of Spanish, of English
and German literature ; at the present moment it copies
Russian. And these literary imitations are invariably
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 319
ccompanied by a corresponding imitation of tastes and
nanners. Whenever it has copied such and such a foreign
iterature, our literature has at the same time imbued
he mind of its readers, and inoculated Society generally
rith such and such a feeling and sentiment, — the senti-
aent of order and discipline in connection with Roman
iterature, that of grace and beauty with Greek literature,
rit and finesse with Italian, heroism with Spanish, melan-
holy with English and German, pity with Russian.
The books children read, and above all the books they
ead first, leave an ineffaceable impress on their minds.
Nothing is more impressionable than a child's brain. We
peak of it as being of wax, and receiving impressions as
bough graven on a soft surface ; and these metaphors
epresent an actual physiological truth. First impressions
re ineradicable; they become essential notions of the
dind and lead to the actions of the future. The influence
f early reading often lasts a lifetime and sometimes de-
ermines the direction of a man's whole career. Books of
ravel inspire boys with the taste for exploration; Jules
feme makes many travellers. Lives of navigators and
ooks written by naval officers rouse in young readers a
iste for the sea ; Pierre Loti makes many sailors. We see
hildren of twelve, thirteen, fourteen, after reading a book
f travels that has enchanted them, leave home and start
way to visit the country that attracts their fancy. The
act has been noticed in the newspapers, and I have
bserved it myself in the course of my official duties, as
cing by no means uncommon. The central offices often
>rward at the request of parents to country police stations
lie description of children who have run away from home
3 see Paris, Russia, the coast of the Mediterranean, or
ome other country of which they have read fascinating
ccounts in some book.
The biographies of great Captains inspire a taste for
rar. The account of a fight described in the Iliad led
dexander the Great to throw himself into the career of
nns. A man grows brave, a Roman of the Romans, as
320 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
he reads Plutarch's Lives of Famous Men. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau tells us how, when quite a child, fired by the
tales of Plutarch, reading one day at table the story of
Mucius Scaevola, he put his hand on a chafing-dish and
kept it there, to represent the hero's noble deed. The
history of Napoleon I. has led thousands to adopt a
military career. The admirers of his genius, Béranger,
Bathèlemy, Méry, and above all Victor Hugo, have made
Napoleon popular and prepared the way for the Second
Empire. The Tragedies of ^Eschylus fired the Greeks
with patriotism and hatred of their Persian foes. M Every
man," says Aristophanes, " who had ever read the Seven
against Thebes burned to march forward to the fight"
Tyrtaeus* war-songs roused the martial spirit of another
section of the same people. The Marseillaise breathed
the very spirit of heroism into the men of the Great
Revolution. Pious works are called edifying, because
they edify, or build up, the moral man.
Every man, Bacon says, is born a debtor,— debtor to his
father and mother, to his teachers, to the writers who have
formed his mind. No one who has read and re-read
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Descartes and Maine de
Biran, will ever say he owes nothing to books, or that
Literature exerts no influence on morals ; he would be
basely ungrateful if he did. Saint Augustine tells how a
book of Cicero's, now lost, changed his heart 1 " Are you
vain," says Horace ; " then read thrice with respect such
and such a little book and you are cured." ... Do
you feel some evil passion occupying your heart ; defend
yourself against it by reading some good book that elevates
the heart. " There are words and magic phrases, the
virtue of which will soothe this frenzy and remove much
of the evil." 2
A good book does infinite good, just as a bad book may
do an incalculable amount of harm. The greatest bene-
factors and the greatest enemies of mankind are books.
1 Confession of Saint Augustine , bk. iii. ch. iv.
2 Horace, Epistles, bk. i. Ep. i.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 32 1
One little book, the Gospel, has renewed the face of the
world. By its instrumentality, the poor have been suc-
coured, the sick better tended, women more honoured,
children more kindly treated, marriage has been purified,
new virtues practised, the equality of men and the fraternity
of nations proclaimed. Another book, the Koran, it is
which preaches sensuality and cruelty to thousands of
mankind, and is the greatest obstacle to the progress of
civilization and the Mussulman peoples.
If there are books that inspire courage, patriotism and
the sense of honour, there are others which predispose the
soldier to cowardice, contempt of discipline and disgust
with the conditions of military life.
A good pen is as powerful a weapon as a good sword.
The word of a single man may avail more than a whole
army. Francis I. admitted freely that the Bishop of Sion
had done him more hurt than all Switzerland with its
armies. 1 Louis XVIII. recognized that Chateaubriand's
pamphlet against Napoleon I. had been more useful to
him than a host of men. — There are pens sharper than
daggers, styles more deadly than stilettos, inks that burn
more fiercely than vitriol.
The influence exerted by Literature is greater in our
own days than formerly, because it no longer finds the
same counterpoise in social influences which were formerly
more powerful than at present. The active effects of
Religion have diminished, especially amongst the lower
orders, the power of government is greatly weakened, and
besides is not invariably on the side of traditional ideas,
paternal and marital authority have less vitality from day
to day. On the other hand, the influence of books,
newspapers and the stage is continually growing greater.
This influence of Literature is particularly marked in the
case of persons of nervous temperament, who gifted as they
are with more than average sensibility, sympathize more
readily with the writers. Nevrosity creates a special
aptitude for mental contagion.
1 Bayle, Dissertation sur Us libellas diffamatoires.
32 2 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Books then are the most powerful agents of civilization
or corruption. With each of us there are certain authors
(it may be one, or it may be more), who inspire our pre-
dilections and feelings. We make their thoughts our own,
and model ourselves on them; our behaviour is based
upon the ideas and images their books suggest, on the
doctrines and examples they set before our eyes.
Books again it is that have taught us to love Nature,
the woods, lakes and mountains. Peasants who live in the
country do not as a rule appreciate its beauties ; it is
readers of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, Lamartine, George
Sand, who feel its charm the most. So great is the power
of descriptive writers that they give a vogue to the par-
ticular district they delineate with loving care. Rousseau
has done this with Switzerland, Clarens, the Lake of
Geneva, the neighbourhood of Chambéry and the woods
of Montmorency. Bernardin de Saint- Pierre has made all
the world in love with the landscape of the Tropics»
Chateaubriand has discovered the glories of the Virgin
Forest and Savannahs of America, the beauties of Greece
and Judaea. Balzac has taught us to admire Touraine,
George Sand Berri and Brizeux, Chateaubriand and Renan
Brittany, Flaubert and Maupassant Normandy, Mistral
and Daudet Provence and Languedoc, Pierre Loti Iceland
and Japan. Few of us can understand Nature without the
help of the writers who have depicted her. Most people
see her only through their recollections of what they have
read. Watching a storm, Charlotte in Goethe's Werther
exclaims : " Oh ! Klopstock ! " — because she remembers
to have read a description of one in that poet. Tourists
sailing at evening by moonlight on the Lake of Bourget,
cannot refrain from crying on the name of Lamartine, and
singing stanzas of his poem Le Lac. In a cultivated
intellect literary reminiscences are associated with the
events of everyday life, even under the most tragic circum-
stances. A desperate man (I have seen an instance), will
start out to commit suicide, singing the air from Faust:
" All hail ! my latest morn." In a case of murder, I found
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 323
that the murderer had gone to the spot where the crime
was to be committed, singing the air from William Tell:
"To my good right I boldly trust." The better to adapt
the verse to the means he proposed to employ, — his
intention was to knock down his victim with a vigorous
blow, he had added the word arm to that of rights and
sang : " In my good right arm I boldly trust ! "
Clavière, one of the Girondists, repeated this couplet
of Voltaire's, as he made his preparations for suicide :
" Quand on a tout perdu, quand on n'a plus d'espoir,
La vie est un opprobre et la mort un devoir." J
Lucan, after opening his veins at Nero's command,
proceeded to recite the lines in which he had described
a wounded soldier bleeding to death like himself.
Travels in the East were brought into fashion by
Chateaubriand, Byron and Lamartine. Venice owes a
part of its popularity to Lord Byron, George Sand and
Alfred de Musset. We think of Mérimée, when we visit
Corsica, of Théophile Gautier in Spain, of Victor Hugo
on the banks of the Rhine.
Nor do literary reminiscences serve only to express pre-
existing sentiments; they are capable of creating new
ones, of originating predilections and ideas we did not
previously possess, of suggesting new lines of action. It
may be questioned whether Nero, who was an artist run
mad, (his dying words were " qualis artifex pereo y — Oh !
the loss to Art! the loss to Art!") did not burn Rome
down, moved by a literary reminiscence of the burning
of Troy, for Tacitus tells us that according to a rumour,
M but one universally believed at the very time when his
capital was in flames, he had mounted the boards of his
theatre and sung the destruction of Troy." The infamous
Gilles de Rays, Maréchal of France, who was executed in
1440 for a long series of rapes and murders done to
children, confessed that it was after reading Suetonius'
account of the orgies of Tiberius and Caracalla that
1 "When all is lost, and hope is gone, life is a disgrace and death a duty. 1 '
324 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
he conceived the idea of enticing children to his castle,
polluting them and killing them afterwards. 1
Lakes and seas have also their painters and poets. The
Scotch poets have made men love the Highland Lakes,
Byron the Lake of Geneva, Lamartine the Lake of
Bourget, Victor Hugo the Ocean, Joseph Autran the
Mediterranean.
Infidelity and Christianity are turn and turn about
literary fashions. In the seventeenth century it was the
proper thing to begin with love and end with religion. In
the eighteenth, Voltaire brought hatred of revealed re-
ligion into vogue ; while Chateaubriand in the nineteenth
made a drawing-room Christianity once more fashionable.
Feelings of sadness or gaiety, outbursts of passionate
love or cries of despair and disappointment are often
literary reminiscences. When youthful poets, believing
themselves to be dying, asked a willow to be planted on
their tomb, it was the recollection of an elegy by Millevoye
or a poem by Lamartine that inspired the thought.
Authors themselves copy each other, even to the par-
ticular turn of phrase and the words used. For instance,
in La Nouvelle Héloïse, Saint-Preux writes : " Seated at
the feet of my beloved, I will pull hemp, and will wish for
nothing else, to-day, to-morrow, the day after to-morrow,
all my life long." Goethe borrows the sentiment, as well
as its mode of expression, when he makes Werther say:
" With you I wished in the old days to gather currants
and shake plum-trees, to-morrow, the day after to-morrow,
all my life."
Love being an instinctive, intensely personal passion,
depending on the temperament and character of each in-
dividual, literary imitation would seem impossible in this
case; yet books do actually originate fashions of making
love. At all periods of history we find lovers accom-
modating their actions to the fashion of love-making then
in vogue in literature. A poet, a philosopher, or still more
1 Jacob, Curiosités de P Histoire de frame ; Krafft-Ebing, Psyckopatkit
sexuelle, p. 80.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 325
often a novelist, creates a type of love which serves society
for a model. Plato created Platonic love, Sappho Sapphism,
Theocritus, Virgil, d'Urfé made pastoral love popular, the
Troubadours chivalrous love, Petrarch and Dante mystic
love, while Mlle, de Scudéry brought preciosity into vogue,
Corneille invented heroic, Racine passionate, Rousseau
romantic love, Chateaubriand, Goethe and Lamartine in-
troduced melancholy, the Romantics frenzy, the Naturalists
realism into love, and the Marquis de Sade Sadism.
In the Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, Théophile
Gautier calls the man a fool who says literature influences
morals; "books," he declares, "are the fruit of morals,
good or bad — precisely as peas come in spring, without
anybody's thinking of saying the peas make the spring
come ; Boucher's little shepherdesses were painted and
bare-bosomed, because the little Marquises of his day were
the same." Doubtless pictures are painted from models,
but in turn they become models themselves. Literature,
I admit, is, if not the exact image of Society, at any rate
a reflection of its manners, morals and aspirations; but
Society in its turn becomes the image of Literature. There
is a mutual action and reaction of Society upon Literature
and Literature upon Society. Society acts upon Literature
by providing it with models ; Literature reacts upon Society
by giving it types which in their turn are copied. There
is a reciprocal exchange of ideas between writers and the
public. Imaginative writers, who as a matter of fact exer-
cise very little imagination, seek their types in the world
at large, while in their turn readers seek their models in
books. Young men and women in especial feel in the
highest degree the influence of novels and romances. The
fair readers of Astrée adored shepherds, planned sheep-
farms, longed to buy a flock to drive a-field in the
meadows. In the coterie of Mlle, de Rambouillet, love
was conducted after the fashion of the characters in Clélie
and Cyrus. After the Cid,
" Tout Paris pour Chimène eut les yeux de Rodrique ; " l
1 " Ail Paris for Chimène had the eyes of Rodrique."
326 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
all the young men were in love with Chimène, — they
would fain love like Rodrique, and the women like
Chimène. As a reaction against the free delineations of
love Brantôme, Régnier, Marot had brought into vogue,
d'LJrfé, Mlle, de Scudéry and Corneille purified love and
made it chivalrous. Doubtless the manners of society
were not so pure as the maxims of Clélie and the Ctd, but
their ideal was to approximate to them.
With the licentious Romances of the Eighteenth Century,
Love grew frivolous. Marivaux teaches women to tnari-
vaudize, as Petrarch had taught them to petrarchize. With
Florian, pastoral life came into fashion again, and once
more great ladies might be seen dressing as shepherdesses»
building dairies and florianizing, as it was called.
After the publication of the Nouvelle Héloïse, every
woman wished to be Julie, and every man Saint-Preux
Notwithstanding all his genius which, one would think,
should have saved him from imitating others, Napoleon I.
borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau the expression of
his love, as he had in his youth borrowed his republican
ideas from him. He too in his early days was an imitator
of Saint-Preux. He copied Rousseau's style, borrowed his
expressions and turn of phrase.
Goethe brought in the fashion of dreamy, melancholy
love. This melancholy, which Goethe communicates to his
contemporaries and indeed all his readers, was by his own
admission an echo of the melancholy of Shakespeare's
heroes. 1 The youth of Germany was at that time deeply
penetrated by the charm of gloomy reading and a
passionate love of English literature, " the melancholy,
sombre impress of which affects the minds of all who
cultivate it . . . Hamlet and his soliloquies were spectres
1 Memoirs of Gottht, p. 203. — Montesquieu is mistaken in attributing the
"spleen" of Englishmen exclusively to the dismal and foggy climate of their
country ; in other countries as foggy as England, for instance Holland and the
Lyonnais, the same tendency to melancholy and suicide is not observed. It
is rather to Literature, to the imitation of Hamlet and other heroes of Romance
and the Stage, that English " spleen " must be attributed.— It is from English
Literature also that Voltaire seems to me to have borrowed the theory of
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 327
hat haunted all men's brains." Young men in Goethe's
lay would recite on any and every occasion the chief
>assages of Hamlet, which they knew by heart, and
urrogated to themselves the right to be as melancholy as
he Prince of Denmark, though they had neither father to
ivenge nor guilty mother to bear with, and had never seen
1 £host in their lives. Werther only put into words the
norbid condition affecting the youth of Germany, misled
>y a silly imitation of Hamlet, himself a morbid character,
rimost a madman, haunted with the idea of suicide ; the
nine was ready, it was Goethe's Story that fired the spark
ind brought about the explosion.
It is well known that in Werther Goethe has described
in episode of his own youth and that the tragic end of the
lero of the romance was borrowed from an incident ol
vhich he was a witness. One of his friends, Jerusalem,
leeply smitten with love for a married woman, killed himself
n despair. The friend in question was a victim of his
-eading; on his table was found a copy of a tragedy of
Lessing's, Emilia Ga/otte, a circumstance Goethe did not
ail to reproduce in the history of Werther. According
to Kestner, Jerusalem " used to devour great numbers of
novels and admitted himself there was hardly a romance
he was not acquainted with." His suicide deeply im-
pressed Goethe. M. E. Rod refuses to believe he ever
really thought of killing himself; still he has himself put
it on record in his Memoirs that he tried to commit suicide.
He pondered long as to the form of death he had better
choose, passing in review in succession, hanging, drowning,
fire-arms, the opening of a vein ; " after much reflection,"
he writes, u on different kinds of suicide, I found none more
suicide he has developed in his Orphelin de la Chine. Idame proposes to
Zanti to die with him, declaring :
• ' Les mortels généreux disposent de leur sort. . . .
• Un affront leur suffit pour sortir de la vie,
Et plus que le néant ils craignent l'infamie. "
" High-minded mortals are masters of their fate. ... An affront is enough
to make them quit this life, and more than death they fear dishonour.'*
328 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
noble than that adopted by Otho, Emperor of the Romans."
Every night he would lay a very handsome poniard by his
bed-side, and before extinguishing his candle, would try to
drive it into his breast; unable to succeed in this attempt,
he ended by laughing at himself, and to complete his cure,
resolved to embody his feelings in a romance. He got
relief by turning reality into poetry. Unfortunately his
friends "supposed themselves bound to turn poetry into
reality and now and again put a bullet through their
heads." Werther led to a veritable epidemic of suicide,
which we may call Wertheritis. So many were the victims
of the Tale that a Protestant pastor spoke of Goethe as a
murderer. Mothers wrote to the author to reproach him
for having driven their sons to suicide.
The son of a woman of letters, Mme. von Hohenhausen,
shot himself at Bonn after reading Werther, several
passages of which he had underlined. His mother in
despair wrote a letter to Goethe, which all writers might
well take to heart : " Ye men whom God has gifted with
genius," she told him, " men who should of rights be the
teachers of the human race, God will require an account
of the use you have put your talents to." At Halle a
copy of Werttier was found in the pocket of a shoemaker's
apprentice, who had committed suicide by throwing him-
self from a window into the street Mile, von Lasbergof
Weimar believing herself to be deserted by her fiancé,
threw herself into a river ; she had a Werther on her at
the time. 1
To realize the extraordinary influence this Romance
exercised over a great number of readers whom it led on
to suicide, we must remember the fact that the notion of
suicide is essentially infectious, that it is disseminated
with great rapidity by the sight or merely by the account of
acts of a similar kind, and that it is readily communicated
by young people to one another. Here is a recent instance
of suggestion in the direction of suicide taken from the
official records of a case preserved in the Central Police
1 Merièrcs, Goethe expliqué par ses ouvres.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 329
Dffices of the Department of the Seine. A young man
employed in a merchant's office, indignant at a scolding
lis master had just given him, conceives a sudden disgust
or life and starts off for the Seine to drown himself. On
lis way thither he meets two of his friends, clerks like
limself but in another office. He tells them of his deter-
nination, and paints in the blackest colours the miseries
>f life. His comrades listen to him at first with interest,
wesently with a more lively sympathy ; little by little, as
le goes on, they realize and approve his resolution and
inally make up their minds to adopt it too. Then all
hree proceed to throw themselves into the river. I leave
he reader to draw for himself the psychological conclusion
rom these facts and to understand how little man, quite
ightly defined by the Idealists as a free being endowed
rith reason, is reasonable in practice, and how he is really
obbed of his freedom by the influence of a word, a sug-
gestion. To give one more example. A girl of seventeen
lecides to drown herself for some trivial reason; before
tatting to carry out her intention, she writes the following
ines : " I am going to kill myself, because I am tired of
ny life; finding myself superfluous in the world, I am going
o find my lost sister who drowned herself like me last
rear, in the month of May." Her sister had drowned
lerself in May 1896, so she is going to drown herself in
flay 1897!
When once the notion of suicide has sprung up in the
>rain, and has not been instantly rejected, it makes a
odgment there, grows into a fixed idea, a possession
>f the spirit, to struggle against which becomes more
md more difficult. Here is a recent instance, again
arrowed from the official report of a case of suicide, to
rhich I find the following letter appended : " I am so
/eary of life, a notion has come to me to destroy myself;
ver since that day I have been troubled in mind and
mable to get rid of the idea ; on the contrary, the further
have gone, the heavier has it grown to bear. I went to
ee a priest at the Jesuits' College, and he said a mass
330 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
for me on several occasions. I have taken to wearing
the scapulary, and my Confessor has given me much good
advice, but God alone knows what is to become of me.
I have lived for the last six years in chronic disgust at
the life of my kind ; I have sought to distract my mind
in every way, and have done whatever my companions
did, but my heart was not in it Unable to continue in
such a state, I now make up my mind to end it all." — To
give another instance. A young man of twenty shoots
himself through the heart with a revolver, after writing
a letter to his parents in these terms : " My dear parents»
forgive me the sad resolve I have adopted, but life has
been a burden to me for a long time. I have always been
subject to black thoughts that make my life unbearable.
I have struggled against them till now, but at last I bave
lost all hope and have made up my mind to die."
If the temptation to suicide is so difficult to resist for
neuropaths, whose number is so great, when it takes root
in their mind without any of the prestige of poetry, it is
easily comprehensible how forcibly the fancy of young
people must be struck by the perusal of a novel, in which
suicide is depicted in the most attractive colours, as an
act of heroism, a sign of passionate and romantic love.
Goethe told Eckermann towards the end of his life, that
he re-read Werther only once and had taken good care
not to look at it again, because its perusal made him fed
ill at ease, and he feared a return of the mental agonies
he had described in that work ; he compared it to a
battery of fire-bombs. 1
Werther was translated into all languages, and fired
the fancy of young people not only in Germany, but
in neighbouring countries as well. When Bonaparte
started for Egypt, he took with him a copy of Werther.
The disease became epidemic. It spread to Italy, naturally
1 M. Ed. Rod, who published not long ago in the Revue des Deux Memk*
a remarkable study on Goethe, appears to me to have made a mistake in
stating that Goethe always had an undoubted predilection for this Romance
of his early days. Mme. de Staël had, on the contrary, written long before
in L Allemagne, — and rightly, — that Goethe attached little value to the book.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 33 1
the land of gaiety rather than of melancholy. Foscolo
wrote the Romance of Jacobo Ortis, in which subject, form
and catastrophe are similar to those of Werther. The name
Jacobo Ortis % under which the book was published, was
that of a young man who had committed suicide at Padua.
Foscolo's hero, like Werther, kills himself in consequence
of disappointed passion ; he loves a married woman, and
unable to be hers, plunges a dagger in his heart, firmly
persuaded he has a right to destroy himself. Murders,
it is true, are frequent enough in Italy, but suicides are
rare, and we may well look upon the suicide of Jacobo
Ortis as a literary imitation of Werther.
Italians, lovers of life and its pleasures, whom the
beauty of climate and sea invite to enjoyment, are little
given to melancholy; yet they have had a great pessi-
mistic poet in Leopardi, —
" Sombre amant de la mort, pauvre Leopardi." l
But it was above all in France that Werther spread the
shadow of its melancholy. Napoleon was touched by it
in his young days and dreamed of suicide. "One day,
leaving the crowd of my fellow-men," he wrote on May 3rd,
1788, " I enter the house to dream alone and give myself
up to all the keenness of my melancholy. Which way
does it point to-day? The way to death. In the dawn
of my days, I can still hope to Hve long; what frenzy
leads me io desire my own annihilation ? Doubtless the
question, — what to do in this world ? As I am bound to
die, is it not all the same if I kill myself? " A host of
poets celebrated "divine melancholy." M. Legouvé re-
presented it under the guise of a pensive maiden, "a
cypress before her and Werther in her hand"; Mme. de
Staël in L'Allemagne penned an enthusiastic panegyric of
Goethe's Romance, and commended suicide in her work on
the Influence of the Passion (L Influence des Passions) ; 2
1 •* Gloomy lover of Death, poor Leopardi."
* At a subsequent date she regretted this panegyric and wrote her Reflections
m Suicide (Réflexions sur U Suicide) to counteract it. In this latter treatise
332 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Sismondi wrote a defence of self-destruction, which
others applied in practice. Suicides became so frequent
that Charles Nodier wrote in 1803: "The pistol of
Werther and the headsman's axe have decimated us."
He too, after he had intoxicated himself with the perusal
of German Romances, wrote Le Peintre de Salzbourg, "a
diary of the emotions of a suffering heart," and a poem
entitled Le Suicide et les Pèlerins, in which he prays "the
Father of Nature " to forgive the man who seeks to find
a refuge in death.
In 1818, several young men, united by the bonds of a
very close intimacy, Ampère, Sautelet, Jules Bastide,
Albert Stapfer, used to meet to read Werther, René,
Obermann and Manfred together. When circumstances
separated them, they used to exchange the impressions
made on them by this melancholy reading. Ampère
writes to his friend Bastide : " Alas ! there are times when
I feel, like Werther, that God has turned away His face
from man, and given him up to misfortune, without help
or stay. Man is put on earth only to bear weariness and
pain." In another letter he describes the bitter, fierce
despair that filled him on reading Byron : " My dear Jules,
all last week the sense of a curse was upon me, round about
me, within me. I owe this to Lord Byron ; I have read
Manfred through twice running in English. Never, never
in all my life, has any work crushed me like this. It has
made me ill." Ampère cured himself of this mental sick-
ness by Science and Faith ; but his friend Sautelet, a
favourite pupil of Cousin's, died of it at thirty. He wrote
to one of his friends : " It is hardly possible to live a
double life, to act and to think at the same time ; I feel,
as I said I did in the summer, that man is set in the world
for action, and yet I cannot abandon the other. You have
she explains how the Germans, having no political life but being trained
mainly by books, derive from these circumstances a habit of analysis and
sophistry, a predilection for the far-fetched, that is injurious to masculine
directness of conduct. She hopes Germany, recovering her national in*
dependence, may be able to get rid of her morbid sentimentality and her
literary suicides.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 333
no idea of the bad thought that just now flashes through
my mind ; it is, that I should like to blow out my brains,
to put an end to my doubts. If in a year or two life does
not look clearer to me, I will end it. I will carry out this
idea I have had of my Werther de la vérité, or The True
Werther** (a work he was contemplating). " Perhaps this
would be a piece of folly, perhaps a great action. I leave
/ou to judge." *
We cannot play with suicide with impunity, any more
:han we can with love or madness. We may bring on
madness by pretending we are mad, and we may end by
killing ourselves, if we go on coquetting with the idea of
suicide. This is precisely what happened to Sautelet.
For eighteen months he had amused himself by saying
aughingly he was going to kill himself; his friends
haffed him about it, and he joked about it himself.
Then, he left off talking about it, and six months later,
le destroyed himself on the night of 12th, 13th May 1830,
iter attending to a number of minute details of type-
etting and printing for the number of the National that
ras due to appear next day, and of which he was editor
ind proprietor. 2 Armand Carrel states that a large
lumber of other suicides took place at the same time
\s Sautelet's.
A few years later, two famous painters committed
►uicide, Gros in consequence of disappointments, Leopold
Robert through an unhappy love affair. A sculptor,
Antoine Moine, a compatriot and friend of Jules Janin,
ilso put an end to himself. " Disillusion seized him/ 1
ays Jules Janin, "and with it weariness of everything;
le ceased to care for the art that was his very life, he
brgot all, even the young wife, who loved him so dearly,
1 I borrow this letter from the Preface Sainte-Beuve prefixed in 1833 to the
econd edition of Obtrmann. He added to it the following remark : '* How
nany episodes like that we have just sketched, how many poems, dim, un-
leard of, involved in a strange fatality, occur every moment round us in the
ives of noble beings ! "
* On May 14, 1830, the National was signed A. Thiers, Editor-in-Chief,
: signing the journal provisionally in place of M. Sautelet, deceased."
334 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
even his son, who already shadowed forth the high hopes
he realized later on, and he died as Leopold Robert had
died. Surely it is a crime and a great one to give such
examples to survivors. Gros gives example to Leopold
Robert, Leopold Robert points the way to Antoine Moine.
Cannot they understand, these impatient spirits, that all
men are jointly responsible for one another?" 1 The
same author, Jules Janin, gives an account of another,
very curious, suicide, that of a wig-maker of Courbevoie,
by name Molard, who had been thrown off his balance
by reading the Preface to Cromwell. He committed
suicide by means of charcoal fumes, after penning the
following note : " Farewell, my friends in Politics and
Literature. . . . Farewell, all good neighbours, . . . down
with the Vêpres Siciliennes (Sicilian Vespers) and long
live Cromwell V^
René contributed quite as much as Werther itself to
propagate the melancholy that leads to self-destruction.
In his Défense du Génie du Christianisme, Chateaubriand
states that he originally wrote the Story to combat "the
special tendency of young men in this Century, the
tendency leading straight to suicide," with the idea of
inspiring repugnance " for these criminal fancies " ; but
contrary to his intentions, he only disseminated the disease
more widely, which he had meant to stay. Renés swarmed
everywhere. Chateaubriand was in despair at the effect
his Romance had produced on young people and was
sorry he had ever written it. " If René did not exist,"
he said subsequently in the Mémoires d outre-tombe, a I
would not write it now ; if it were possible to destroy it,
I would do so. A whole tribe of Renés in poetry and
prose has sprung up. . . . There is never a lad leaving
school but dreams himself to be the most unfortunate of
mankind ; never an urchin of sixteen who has not already
exhausted life. ... I do not know what the Renés who
have followed me have found to say to get into closer
1 Jules Janin, Histoire de la Littérature dramatique^ vol. L, p. 34.
2 Ibid.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 335
touch with insanity." By way of repudiating some of his
responsibility, Chateaubriand added truly enough that he
was not the first who had inspired young men with the
taste for morbid melancholy. "Jean-Jacques Rousseau
was the first to introduce among us these dreams, at once
so culpable and so disastrous. By separating from his
fellow-men and giving himself up to his own thoughts,
he has led a host of young men to think it a noble thing
to throw oneself into the dim abyss of life. Subsequently
the story of Werther further developed the same poison.
The author of the Génie du Christianisme, feeling bound
to include in the scope of his apology some pictures to
strike the fancy, has made a point of denouncing this
new form of vice and depicting the fatal consequences of
an inordinate love of solitude."
By developing among young men a taste for dreaminess
and solitude, the literature of imagination has inspired
them with a disgust for action and a consequent disgust
for life Solitude, an excellent thing for the philosopher
and the man of religion, is often perilous for a young
man, because it allows him to concentrate his thoughts
on himself. "Solitude is bad for a man who does not
share it with God," Father Louis says justly to René ; " it
doubles the powers of the soul at the very time it robs
them of all opportunity for their exercise." In places of
religious retreat contemplative souls find " in God where-
with to fill the void they feel within themselves," but young
men who without faith plunge into solitary meditations,
"will mistake hatred of mankind for the elevation ot
genius, will repudiate all duty human and divine, will feed
the isolation on the idlest fancies, and will sink deeper
and deeper into a scornful misanthropy, the sure end of
which is madness or death." l
Werther, René and similar books have been bad models
for young people, and have inoculated them with morbid
melancholy and suicidal mania. Seeing this same melan-
choly has inspired Goethe, Chateaubriand, Byron, Lamartine,
1 Chateaubriand, Défense du Génie du Christianisme.
336 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
and George Sand with the finest literary productions of the
Nineteenth Century, we feel almost bound to think the
reasons for the sentiment must all spring from elevation
of soul and nobility of heart.
But melancholy often arises from very prosaic causes,
sometimes even physiological ones, especially with the
young. That a grown man who has known the great
griefs of life should be sad and melancholy is natural
enough ; we should be surprised if he were not. But in
young men who like René, Raphaël, Werther, conceive
a disgust for life and dream of suicide, the weariness that
consumes them and which they dignify with the name of
melancholy, comes only from want of work to do, from
repugnance for action in general, or for some trade or
profession they deem unworthy of their genius, from in-
ordinate self-conceit, and above all from an ardent desire
for love that is not yet sated. The void they complain
of is nothing but the wish to press a woman in their arms;
Werther who can analyze his own feelings, has no difficulty
in discovering the cause of all his sadness. "Alas I "he
exclaims, " this void, this terrible void I feel in my bosom!
I often think ... if you could once, only once, press her
to your heart, you would be cured." The reason for the
melancholy afflicting the hero of Charles Nodier's Peintrt
de Salzbourg is the same as in Werther's case ; like
Werther, he is in love with another man's wife and his
pain, comes from the impossibility of enjoying her favours.
No less does the melancholy of René proceeed from
the vivacity of his amorous desires. " Having never yet
loved, I was overwhelmed with a superabundance of
vitality. At times I would blush unexpectedly and feel
as it were torrents of red-hot lava coursing through toy
veins ; at others I would utter involuntary cries, and night
was divided between restless dreams and sleepless watch-
ings ! Something was wanting to fill the abyss of my
existence; I would go down into the valley and climb
the mountain, summoning with all the strength of my
aspirations the. object of a future flame. . . . Ah ! if I
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 337
could but have made another partake the transports I
experienced ! Oh ! God, if Thou hadst but given me a
woman according to my desires. If as to our first father
ITiou had brought me an Eve, a part of myself. . . .
Celestial Beauty ! I would have fallen down and worshipped
Thee i But alas ! I was all alone ! " It was above all else
this craving of unsatisfied desire that threw him into a
secret languor, a profound disgust with life, and inspired
him with the determination to escape his weariness and
disappointment by a self-sought death.
René is Chateaubriand himself, who was attacked in his
youth by a deep-seated melancholy. The lonely life he
led at the Château de Combourg, the severe education he
received there, his habit of walking and dreaming in the
woods, the misfortunes of his boyhood, the contemplation
of the crimes of the Revolution and the overthrow of
society, exile, poverty, all undoubtedly contributed to his
melancholy, but these causes are not sufficient by them-
selves to account for it. Chateaubriand possessed in the
highest degree the sensibility and imagination belonging
to the artistic temperament, and these qualities made him
eager for happiness, love and fame, and left him for ever
dissatisfied with the reality, because his dreams so far
surpassed it in allurement.
The chief cause of this precocious melancholy arose
from the intensity of his craving for love, which sprung up
in flames of fire in his ardent temperament and high-strung
imagination. " For lack of an actual object for my affec-
tions," he tells us in the Mémoires d' outre-tombe, " I evoked
by the magic of my vague but fierce desires a phantom
that never left me. I combined a woman of my own out
of all the women I had ever seen. . . . This enchantress
followed me everywhere invisible to all eyes; I used to
converse with her as with a real, living being. . . .
Pygmalion was less fondly enamoured of his statue. . . .
This delirium lasted for two whole years, during which
the faculties of my nature reached the very highest point
of exaltation. ... I showed all the symptoms of a violent
338 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
passion; I grew hollow-eyed and thin, and could not sleep;
I was absent-minded, sad, ardent, and shy. My days
passed in a strange, wild, senseless fashion, that yet was
full of delicious pleasures. . . .
" The gales of Boreas only brought me sighs of
voluptuous desire, the murmur of the rain invited me to
slumber on a woman's breast. The words I said to this
woman would have given back sensibility to a greybeard
and warmed the marble of a tomb. Knowing nothing,
knowing all, at once virgin and a lover, Eve in innocence,
Eve after the fall, the enchantress by whom came my
madness was a wild combination of mystery and passion.
I raised her on an altar and fell down in adoration before
her. The pride of being loved by her yet further increased
my love. Did she walk, I threw myself on the ground to
be trodden under her feet or to kiss their imprint. I
trembled at her smile, the sound of her voice stirred my
heart, I shuddered with longing if I touched what she had
touched. The air breathed from her wet mouth penetrated
me to the marrow of my bones and circulated in my veins
in place of blood. ... I knew not which existence was
real and which not ; I was a man and not a man ; I
became a cloud, a wind, a sound. ... I stripped off my
very nature to melt and be absorbed in the maiden of
my desires.
" Of a sudden struck with my own foolishness, I would
throw myself on my bed and roll about in my agony,
watering my couch with bitter tears that no one saw, and
that flowed In sorrow for an empty abstraction." Then
Chateaubriand would rise and go wandering through the
woods a prey to senseless agitation nearly allied to despair,
feeling neither the chill nor the damp of the night, but
plunged in gloomy reveries, until at dawn he heard the
bell that rings for departed souls. At this he would ask
himself for what he had been sent into the world, and if
it were not better to leave it in the freshness of morning
than to finish out the day's journey under the burden and
heat of the day.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 339
" The red of desire," he goes on, " arose in my cheeks ;
le idea of ceasing to exist grasped my heart with a
jdden joy. . . . The last glimmer of reason escaped me.
. . I had a fowling-piece the old and well-worn trigger of
hich often went off at half-cock. This gun I loaded with
iree balls and went to a spot retired from the main avenue,
cocked the weapon, put the muzzle in my mouth, and
nocked the butt on the ground. I repeated my attempt
everal times, but the gun would not go off, and now the
ppearance of a game-keeper prevented my carrying out
iy resolution at any rate for the present. It was a fatality
nwished for and mysterious, and I came to the conclusion
iy hour was not yet come." *
Rene's attempted and Werther's actual suicide are not,
s they have often been called, philosophical suicides ; they
re suicides determined by passion. Werther kills himself
«cause he loves a woman who is another man's wife ; René
/ishes to die because he presses in his arms only the
than torn of a woman. 2 Never has the madness of love
nspired more burning pages than these of Goethe and
"hateaubriand ; in both Writers love assumes a sensuous
.nd mystic character we find again in the authors of the
tomantic School, and suicide puts on a poetical and
eligious guise that makes its delineation most dangerous
or young people.
1 Mémoires d outre-tombe, 1st Part, bk. iii. — It is impossible not to compare
liis morbid state of the imagination in Chateaubriand with the nervous
isorder his sister Lucile (the Amélie of René) suffered from. She too had a
igh- strung imagination and a morbid sensibility. She went mad eventually
nd killed herself. Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, vol. iii. p. 19. Chateau -
riand states in the Mémoires <T outre-tombe that his sister was afflicted with
be mania of persecutions ; " She had besides," he writes, " the same form of
aania as Rousseau, without being proud of it like him, — she thought every-
body was conspiring against her."
* Sainte-Beuve writes : " René begins where King Solomon finishes, with
atiety and disgust." {Chateaubriand et son groupe, vol. i. p. 354.) It seems
o me, on the contrary, that René begins with the most ardent desire, and that
lis melancholy arises chiefly from the thirst which consumes him, and which he
rould fain satisfy. It is unsatisfied sexual desires that tempt him to suicide.
Physicians who have written on sexual psychopathia have noted the association
>f the sexual cravings at the age of puberty with a voluptuous inclination to
;aicide. (See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexua/is t p. 80.)
340 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Chateaubriand so clearly felt the danger himself, that he
adds in his Mémoires d outre-tombe \ "Any who may be
troubled by these pictures and tempted to copy these
extravagancies, any who may cling to my memory by
reason of my empty fancies, should remember they are
listening but to the voice of a dead man."
Nor is it in René only that Chateaubriand has described
the suicide of passion; in Atala, in the episode of Velleda
in Les Martyrs, we find the same picture repeated. In his
Romances, the most ardent love is always associated with
the idea of death, and assumes a character at once sensuous
and mystic. This mystic sensuousness of Chateaubriand
recalls that of Solomon, who " spake three thousand
proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five," says the
Bible, 1 and who, nevertheless," loved many strange women,
together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the
Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians and Hittites ;
. . . and he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three
hundred concubines." Seven hundred and three hundred
make as nearly as possible Don Juan's thousand and three.
In Chateaubriand as in Rousseau and Goethe the need
of loving was so strong, it was even directed to the fictitious
beings he had himself created ; he loved them as if they
had been real. So Rousseau was in love with Julie. While
writing Goetz von Berlichingen, Goethe was smitten with
Adelaide's charms ; he tells us so himself in his Memoirs.
At the end of his Vie de VAbbé de Rancé Chateaubriand
relates how he spent all his life in company with Atala,
Cymodocé and Velleda. Balzac in the same way, by dint
of describing the " splendid " courtesans of his Novels, fell
under the spell of their charms ; while from living con- -
stantly in thought in the society of the great ladies of the^=
Seventeenth Century, Cousin had at last become theiiHH
devoted lover and admirer.
In Atala, Chateaubriand has conceived the strang-^^
notion of depicting a Christian suicide; a young girl kilfct.5
herself to escape violating the vow of virginity her mother
1 1 Kings, ch. iv. 32; xi. 1, 3.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 34 1
had sworn for her. Her language, Christian though she is,
resembles Phaedra's, " feeling as it were a divine being that
stayed me in my awful longings, I would fain," she says,
" this divinity had been annihilated, if only clasped in thy
arms, I might have fallen from abyss to abyss amid the
ruins of God and the world ; even now . . . must I say
it ? even now that Eternity is on the point of absorbing my
being, at the moment when I am to appear before the
inexorable Judge, when, to obey my mother, I see,
and see with delight, my virginity destroy my life, alas!
alas ! by a horrible contradiction I bear with me the regret,
the pain, that I have never been thine!" 1 The whole
motive of this Romance seems to me false. A Christian
maiden poisoning herself that she may not yield to love,
is an impossible, a chimerical creation ; if she is a true
Christian, she cannot contemplate suicide, which her faith
forbids her to commit ; if she feels the fierce temptation
Atala expresses, she yields to it.
Atala's suicide is not likely to find imitators among
the fair readers of the story. There is little fear of this ;
Atala will tempt none to suicide. I cannot say as much
of Velleda's. The idea of a proud and passionate woman,
who destroys herself after yielding to love rather than
survive dishonour, is romantic in the highest degree, and
has seduced many writers of Romance who have imitated
it in fiction, and without a doubt many women too who
have copied it in real life.
1 Joubert has written on this subject: "Chateaubriand assigns to the
passions he describes an innocence they do not possess, or have only possessed
once. In Atala the passions are muffled in long white veils." I do not agree
with Joubert ; it seems to me that Atala's love is not an innocent passion, but
a sensual one, in no way resembling Virginie's. Nay ! more, in Atala as in
René, love is complicated with incest ; Atala is the daughter of Lopez, adop-
tive father of Chactas. The imagination and the senses of the two lovers are
fired when they discover they are brother and sister. Atala " was seized on
her side with confusion and delight ;" Chactas after exclaiming, "Oh ! my
sister ! oh ! child of Lopez ! daughter of my benefactor ! " adds, " Twas too
much for our hearts, this fraternal bond that came to us and united its affection
to our love." ..." Atala no longer offered anything but a feeble resistance,
and I was coming very near the moment of my happiness," when a storm
sprung up very opportunely and the lovers were met by Father Aubry.
342 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Chateaubriand had felt the influence of Rousseau and
Goethe ; m his turn he exercised a considerable influence
over Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, George
Sand and even Byron, whose genius had more than one
point of resemblance with his own. Byron like Chateau-
briand loved the woods, the sea, travel, independence,
solitude, he would copy the wolf that dies without a cry,
he compares himself to the desert lion, " The lion is alone,
and so am I," he exclaims in Manfred '; like Chateaubriand,
he bewails the shortness of life and the necessity of death:
" To die, ah ! me, to die ! to go the way all have gone
and all will go one day ! To go back to the nothingness
I was before I was born to life and the pain of living ! " In
the notice he published on Byron, Sir Walter Scott depicts
him " sad, melancholy, smiling externally, heart-torn within,
letting a shadow of gloom mingle even with his wildest fits
of exultation." Alfred de Musset calls him " That great
inspired prophet of melancholy." I have no wish to deny
the noble side of this melancholy :
" Les cris du désespoir sont ses plus doux concerts ; " l
but at the same time it is impossible not to recognize that
its causes are not all of them impersonal or of a very
elevated nature, that his despair is made up largely of
wounded pride smarting under his critic's attacks, of a
spoilt child's peevishness, whining at his inability to satisfy
all his caprices, of his never satiated thirst for pleasure,
of the bitterness he finds in every enjoyment, of the
hostility shown him by the society in which he lives and
which drives him into voluntary exile, of his politicals
disappointments, and above all of the humiliation he felMta
so keenly of dragging his club foot about with him. Si
Walter said, after reading Childe Harold \ "A poem c — z
great merit, but one that does not give one a high opinions;
either of the heart or the character of the writer. ViWzre
should be a little more humble, and needs impuden'cre
almost as great as the talent possessed by the noble Lord
1 " Cries of despair are its least harsh accords."
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 343
to seriously ask us to pity him for the weariness and
disgust of life he has contracted in the society of his boon
companions and his mistresses."
Sick of life and eaten up with ennui, Byron as every-
body knows sought a heroic death ; he would have nothing
to say to suicide, but longed for a soldier's death, as he
declares in some fine verses written a few days before his
end:
"If thou regret'st thy youth, why live ?
The land of honourable death
Is here : — up to the field, and give
Away thy breath ! M l
" So lived and died this great, but unhappy man," writes
Taine ; " the malady of the Century has had no more
illustrious victim. Around him like a hecatomb lie the
others, wounded by the grandeur of their talents and the
intemperance of their desires, some drowned in stupor
and intoxication, others exhausted by pleasure and labour,
these hurried headlong into madness or suicide, those
crushed down in impotency or laid low by sickness."
There was no small admixture of affectation in Lord
Byron's melancholy, and a good deal of literary imitation ;
a great admirer of Goethe, his wish was to unite in himself
the two types of Faust and Mephistopheles. He posed
as a combination of Don Juan and Satan, doubting and
making mock of everything in heaven and earth. If I were
writing a purely literary study, it would be my business
to bring out the nobler side of his poetic genius, but in
a Work in which I am merely inquiring into the effects of
imaginative Literature on manners and morals, I am bound
to record that Byron's influence over young men was far
from beneficial. Spending his life in the search for volup-
tuous and gloomy emotions, he has been the accredited
prophet of that cult of self, which has found so many
disciples in literature and so many imitators in society;
he has represented sceptical doubt and wilful perversity
1 From lines headed "On this day I complete my Thirty-Sixth Year," and
dated Missolonghi, Jan. 22, 1824.
344 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
as being signs of intellectual superiority, contempt for
humanity and ordinary life as the inevitable result of
experience. Young men, women, poets, all who live by
the imagination, were enraptured with Byron, and young
men adopted him as their model, even in costume, and
poets copied him. After the publication of Lara, Childe
Harold, Manfred, a host of writers Byronized, just as a
number were found to Wertherize after Goethe's Romance
first saw the light. Byron complained bitterly of this
spirit of imitation ; " what will ruin our glory," he wrote
to Moore, "is admiration and imitation. . . . The rock
of danger for the coming generation will be the number
of models and the easiness of imitation." Byronism
became a literary fashion, and passed into the manners
of the time.
Lamartine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, all felt
Lord Byron's influence. The perusal of the Corsair, Lara,
Manfred, made a profound impression on Lamartine,
stirring his imagination to its depths. "This poetry
intoxicated me," he declared, "it was a second Ossian
for me." He composed a Second Canto of Childe Harolds
Pilgrimage, and Musset addressed him in the following
verses :
" Vous avez lu Lara, Manfred et le Corsaire,
Et vous avez écrit sans essuyer vos pleurs ;
Le souffle de Byron vous soulevait de terre,
L'Écho de son génie en vous avait gémie." l
In one of the finest of his Méditations, Lamartine, while
admiring Byron's genius, protested against his scepticism
and blasphemous expressions, but he had not yet reached
that condition of religious resignation, when he too was
seized with disgust of life and a craving for death under
circumstances I will recount directly. — George Sand was
even more impressed than Lamartine by the pessimistic
poetry of Lord Byron. — Alfred de Musset fell under the
1 You have read Lara, Manfred, and The Corsair, and you have written
without drying your tears ; the inspiring breath of Byron lifted you from your
feet, the echo of his genius had resounded in you."
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 345
same influence, for all his protests against the slur of
plagiarism :
" On m'a dit Pan passé que j'imitais Byron,
Vous qui me connaissez, vous savez bien que non ;
Je hais comme la mort l'état de plagiaire,
Mon verre n'est pas grand, mais je bois dans mon verre." 1
Quite true ! Musset does drink from his own glass ; the
glass is pretty enough, but the liquor he pours into it is
in very truth a Byronic vintage, at any rate in his earlier
poems, flavoured with Parisian wit. Franck, Rolla are
close kinsmen of Manfred.
Among the psychological causes of this suicidal type
of melancholy it remains to name the abuse of analysis
and reflection. " I have thought too long and too deeply,"
says Byron, " until my brain labouring and boiling in its
own vortex became an abyss of flame and fancy." Stenio
says, addressing Lélia : " Do you not personify, with your
beauty and your melancholy, your world weariness and
your scepticism, the excess of sorrow wrought by thought?"
It is a piece of sophistry to say with Rousseau that " the
man who thinks is an animal spoiled." Thought is the
noblest attribute of man, the chief cause of his superiority
to the brutes. It is the man who never thinks that is an
animal, yes ! and an idiot or an imbecile. But, if we must
think, we must act as well, and the man who is entirely
absorbed in his thoughts, loses by degrees all taste for
action and active life, he deems himself a superior being,
because he scorns practical duties ; his misanthropy comes
simply from his pride. Father Souël then was quite right
when he said to René : " I see a young man obstinately
devoted to chimeras, who hates the world and who has
thrown off the burdens of society to give himself up to
xiseless dreams. A man is not superior to his fellow, my
dear sir, merely because he views the world under an odious
light. People hate their fellow-men and life in general
1 " I was told last year I imitated Byron ; you who know me, are aware this
is not so ; I hate like death the sin of plagiarism — my glass is not a big one,
bat 'tis my own I drink from. "
346 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
only for want of seeing far enough. Extend your view a
little, and you will soon be convinced that all these evils
you complain of are pure fancies." From the day when
the melancholy dreamer experiences a real sorrow, which
delivers him from his imaginary griefs, he thinks no more
of suicide. "Strange circumstance," says René, "I no
longer desired to die, from the moment I was really un-
happy. My grief had become a preoccupation that filled
all my days."
Another abuse we must mention in addition to this of
reflection and reverie, is the abuse of books, which supply
a false experience in anticipation of the real, and explode
too soon the illusions of youth. " The large number of
examples before our eyes," writes Chateaubriand, "the
multitude of books that treat of man and his sentiments,
make young people clever without experience. They are
disabused before they have enjoyed ; desires remain, but
all illusions are gone. . . . They are left to live with a
full heart in an empty world, and before they have made
good use of anything, they are completely disillusioned. 01
A prey to this disgust with life and all it has to give, a
young man seeks only solitude, and loses his energy in
useless reveries.
It is impossible to say how many young men fell victims
to the Romances of Goethe and Chateaubriand and the
Poems of Byron.
" Ils ne mouraient pas tous, mais tous étaient frappés"
— " All did not die, but all of them were smitten" — with
the malady of the Century. • Some, like Mole and de
Tocqueville, found healing in politics, others, like Ampère,
in science, others again, like Ballanche and Senancourt,
in religious faith. Study, hard work, the practice of a
profession, belief, are the best specifics against melan-
choly. But amongst artistic souls, that live in reverie
without any diversion from external everyday occupations,
melancholy made worse ravages. Under the influence of
1 Chateaubriand, Le Génie du Christianisme t 2nd Part, bk. iii. ch. ix.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 347
Werther and René and Byron's poetry, the greatest poet
of the Nineteenth Century, Lamartine, and the greatest
novelist, George Sand, were attacked by a gloomy
melancholy that drove them both to the length of
attempting suicide.
" I remember," Lamartine says, " to have read and
re-read Werther in my early days, and the impression
this work produced on me has never been effaced or
cooled. My mind was inoculated with the melancholy
of the great passions by this book." 1 Like Goethe, he
was no less moved to enthusiasm by Ossian. All imagina-
tions of the time, including even Napoleon's, had been
stirred by this influence, and Lamartine spoke of it thus
in Jocelyn :
" Ossian ! Ossian ! lorsque plus jeune encore
Je rêvais des brouillards et des monts d'Inistore,
Quand tes vers dans le cœur et la harpe à la main,
Je m'enfonçais l'hiver dans des bois sans chemin." 2
From Literature this love for Ossian was passed on to
Painting, and the only subjects delineated were melancholy
figures of men and women holding a harp by the banks
of a torrent or sighing among the heather. It was from
Ossian Lamartine borrowed that love of his for the woods
and of solitude which has inspired several of his finest
Méditations and Harmonies, The emptiness of the life he
led in the country, the impossibility of finding nourishment
for his heart and activity, the perusal of the great writers
of melancholy, the ennui that consumed him, threw him
into a profound sadness. He says himself : " The narrow
limits within which my moral life was compressed in this
aridity and isolation of my surroundings, the intensity of
my thoughts for ever exploring within me the void of my
existence, the throbbings of my heart consuming away
without real nutriment and revolting against the cruel
1 Lamartine, Entretien^ exxi., p. 9.
* "Ossian ! Ossian ! when in younger days I dreamed of the mists and
***oantains of Inistore, when thy verses in my heart and my harp in hand, I
Plunged into the trackless woods of winter."
348 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
deprivation of the air and light and love I was athirst for,
ended by crippling me, wasting not my mind only but even
my body, and producing languors, spasms, despondencies,
disillusions, cravings after death, which I took to be
sicknesses of the body, but which were only symptoms
of the unhealthy condition of my soul."
Such was Lamartine's state of mind when he met
Elvire in Savoy and was smitten with her charms. She
was older than he, and fearing she would quickly lose his
love and restrained by no religious belief, she proposed to
the poet that they should die together, and the author of
the Méditations and the Harmonies fell in with the wild sug-
gestion with a weakness surprising in such an intellect
One day when walking with Elvire by the Lake of Bourget,
the latter said to him: "Oh! let us die; yes! let us die....
Look at the pure waves, so clear and deep and silent, that
prepare a bed of sand for us, where none will come to
wake us and cry * Away ! ' . . . Oh ! let us die in this
intoxication of soul and nature, which will make us fed
naught in death but its voluptuousness. . . . Oh ! let us
die, and stifle the doubtful and gloomy future in a last sigh
which will surely leave on our lips only the unmitigated
savour of complete reunion." These words produced so
deep an effect upon the poet that he replied : " Yes ! let
us die," — and with this purpose knotted the ends of a
fisherman's net eight times round the young woman's
body and his own, " closely pressed together as in a
winding-sheet" He then lifted her in his arms to throw
her along with himself into the waters, but just as he was
about to take his leap, he noticed that her overwrought feel-
ings had made his companion lose consciousness; this sight
restored him to his senses and he gave up the mad project.
This determination of Lamartine's to throw himself
into the waves of the Lake of Bourget with the woman
he loved would seem to be a reminiscence of the Nouvdli
Helotse ; in that book Saint-Preux is also tempted to hurl
himself into the Lake of Geneva with Mme. de Walmar, to
end his life in her arms. Lamartine, like Saint-Preux>
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 349
is in a false position ; El vire was, like Julie, a married
>man, and was only for the time being away from her
sband, who was to summon her to rejoin him in a few
reks' time. At the end of his life, which was so cruelly
ed, Lamartine again had thoughts of suicide on more
an one occasion, but was kept from carrying out his
rpose by his religious beliefs. " I should have died long
o a thousand times over in Cato's fashion, if I were of
ito's religion, but I am not; I adore God in His all-wise
rposes. ... To die is to desert, and I cannot be a
serter." Amélie said the same to René in the novel to
ssuade him from suicide : " For a man of your character,
is so easy to die ! Believe your sister, it is more difficult
live!*
From these facts which I have borrowed from the lives
Lamartine, Byron, Chateaubriand and Goethe, we see
*arly that literary imitation has played an important rôle
their melancholy and even in the attempts at suicide
ade by some of them. The two female writers who have
railed these great authors in talent, Mme. de Staël and
eorge Sand, likewise felt the fascination of suicide in
keir youth, under the influence of melancholy reading.
ji enthusiastic admirer of Werther, Mme. de Staël
Tote an apology of suicide in the fourth chapter of her
fork on "The Influence of the Passions on Happiness"
V Influence des Passions sur le Bonheur) ; in it she
eveloped the doctrine that a man should not survive
ie loss of love. "It is only men," she writes, "capable
killing themselves that can with any shadow of
Udence try this great road of happiness. . . . Passionate
Uls that surrender themselves to Nature's promptings
Ust needs keep this resource in their mind's eye, that
*y may not be undone by calamity and even more in
^ midst of their efforts to avoid it" George Sand in
*r turn derived from her perusals of the romances and
>ctry of melancholy a similar disgust of life and longing
r death ; she wrote that man is superior to the animals
ttause it is in his power to kill himself. " I read Ren/"
350 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
she says, " and was singularly moved by it I felt myself
crushed by disgust of life. ... I caught through my
imagination all the maladies of the soul described in that
sad, sad poem. Then came Byron directly afterwards to
deal a still ruder shock to my poor brain. . . . Shakespeare's
Hamlet and Jaques finished me. . . . My melancholy
became gloom and my gloom a fixed sorrow. From
that to settled disgust of life and longing for death is but
a step. ... I fell into a very serious mental malady,—
the fascination of suicide."
The thought of suicide became with George Sand a
fixed idea, which obstinately possessed her mind, and as
she said herself, "bordered very close at times on the
confines of monomania." Water attracted her with a
mysterious charm ; she would follow the banks of a stream,
stopping before the deep places and telling herself with a
feverish gaiety, " How easy it would be ! I should only
have to take a single step ! " The sight of water magnetized
her; "the nervous phenomenon, for I cannot define the
thing more precisely, was so marked, that I could not so
much as touch the parapet of a well without a strong
trembling and a painful effort before I could move away in
the opposite direction. After long struggling against this
possession by suicidal thoughts, she at last thought herself
cured, when one day she was obliged to cross a ford on
horse-back ; in the very middle she was seized with the
giddiness of death and roughly urged her horse towards a
deep place, to drown herself there, with a nervous laugh
and a cry of delirious exultation. But the horse carried
her to the bank and saved her life in spite of herself; she
got off with a wetting. This momentary immersion in the
river freed her for good of her longings for a watery grave,
though the fascination of suicide still persisted under other
forms. At one time she would feel a strange emotion
in handling weapons and loading pistols, at another the
laudanum bottles, which she was constantly touching when
preparing lotions for a sick grandmother, gave her fresh
fits of dizziness. Eventually she cured herself of her
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 35 1
mania by taking more sleep and by the reading of the
Greek and Latin classics. 1 Still the cure was not definite,
for after her rupture with Alfred de Musset, she was again
haunted by the idea of suicide. M. Rocheblave, who has
published George Sand's diary and her letters to Musset
and to Sainte-Beuve, says her correspondence furnishes
many and singularly convincing proofs of the existence of
these suicidal tendencies. That she did not yield to the
temptation is due to the fact that she grew out of the
absolute scepticism into which she had fallen in her youth,
after a first period of mysticism, into a belief in God and a
future life. " Now that I no longer feel those bitter doubts,"
she writes, " under whose influence the perilous thought of
annihilation comes to be one of an irresistibly voluptuous
attractiveness, now that I have proved the eternal rest I
spoke of just now to be illusory, in one word, now that I
believe in an eternal activity beyond this life, the thought
of suicide is but a momentary temptation and one easily
overcome by a little reflection." 2
A large number of George Sand's Novels bear traces of
her preoccupation with ideas of suicide. Suicides are
plentiful in her books, — of lovers, of husbands, of married
and unmarried women, even of maidservants. Stenio kills
himself, Juliette, in Leone Leoni y throws herself out of a
window, Jacques destroys himself. The particular form of
suicide George Sand assigns by preference to her heroes is
death by drowning, the one she had chosen for herself.
In Lélia, Stenio throws himself into a lake. In Indiana,
Noun, the lady's-maid, commits suicide, 8 and Indiana
herself, by dint of pondering on Noun's death, makes " an
abortive trial of the voluptuous delight of suicide " ; she is
on the point of throwing herself into a river, but is saved
by Ralph who drags her back. Later on in the book,
Ralph himself has his fancy haunted by the idea of suicide;
1 Histoire de ma vie, 4th Tart, ch. vi.
f George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 5th Part, ch. viii., p. 30a
1 The scene which precedes Noun's death deeply impressed Alfred de
Monet. The Revue des deux Mondes of Nov. I, 1878, published a copy of
\ he composed after reading the scene in question.
352 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
he begs Indiana to die with him ; he asks her if she has not
a preference for some other form of suicide than drowning;
for himself, he knows no spot where suicide would be finer
than in a waterfall. Indiana consents, putting her hand in
Ralph's to seal the bargain ; they start on a long journey
to find a place where they may drown themselves in the
waters of a cascade.
Of all pictures, that of double suicide is perhaps the
most dangerously seductive, firing as it does the imagina-
tion of young men and women always ready to admire and
copy acts and sentiments that rise strikingly above the
commonplace. Indiana has not only made many a wife
unfaithful, but has suggested to lovers the notion of dying
together. It was George Sand's Novels, and above all her
Indiana, that suggested to Dr Bancal the mad idea of
killing himself along with his mistress, Mme. X , a
married woman. An album was found upon him, into
which he had copied quotations from different novels, and
particularly the passage in Indiana where Ralph expresses
the wish to die with the woman he loves. The Doctor,
who attempted to kill himself after killing his mistress,
was brought to trial before the Assize Court, and the
report of the case has been published in the Gazette des
Tribunaux, From the examination I have made of this
report there appears to be proof positive that this double
suicide, or to speak more exactly, this murder followed by
attempted suicide, was copied from Indiana, down to the
smallest details. Thus, just as Indiana grasps Ralph's hand
to seal the bargain, when she agrees to the project of dying
with him, so Mme. X presses Bancal's hand as a sign
of consent and to show her willingness to die at the Doctor's
hand. In George Sand's Romance the hero and heroine
unite love and mysticism together; immediately before de-
stroying himself, Ralph gives utterance to pious sentiments.
" This supreme hour," he says, addressing Indiana, "is one
for religious meditation and prayer. The action we are
about to commit, not being the result of any crisis of
momentary aberration, but the reasoned outcome of a
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 353
ietermination arrived at with feelings, of calm and de-
iberate piety, we should bring to it the holy absorption of
I Catholic in presence of the Sacraments of his Church."
This association of love and mysticism was an imitation
x>rrowed from German literature and German suicides.'
Sancal and Mme. X , copying Indiana, imitated its
nystical phraseology as well. Bancal wrote to his mother :
I I see Eternity open before my eyes with as much calm-
less and delight as if I were watching one of those fair
tpectacles of Nature I have sometimes been privileged to
tnjoy." Both the Public Prosecutor and the Counsel for
he accused were at one in recognizing that the main
letermining motive of the crime was to be found in the
vildness of ideas and sentiments Bancal had derived from
■eading the Novels of the Romantic School. The charge
iet forth how Dr Bancal's head had been turned by " that
listracted type of Literature in which disgust for active
ife, contempt of ordinary duties, negation of all simple
ind modest virtues, are extolled as so many evidences of a
strong and peculiarly favoured organization." Bancal's
idvocate sought to diminish his client's responsibility by
browing some of it on Romantic Literature ; " If I am to
00k," he said, " for the source of these wild, eccentric
lotions, shall I not find it in Romanticism, in those anti-
ocial books and dramatic representations that lead the
magination astray ? "
This wish to die together experienced by lovers when
hreatened with separation, a thing* more cruel to them
ban death itself, is a sentiment deep-rooted in the human
teart We find it in Plautus. — " Oh ! might we die
agether!" exclaim in one play of the Latin poet two
overs at the moment of enforced separation. Indeed the
ame longing to die together is sometimes expressed by
lelancholy lovers apart from any fear of coming separation.
ivcn consummated love is not always gay.
" Medio in fonte leporum,
Surgit amari aliquid," l
1 " In the mid fount of love's delights there rises a bitter drop."
Z
354 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
says Lucretius (bk. iv. 8, 1 127). Some men take love in
melancholy wise, just as others take their wine sadly. This
type of sentimental melancholy, so dear to the Novelists
and Poets of the Romantic School, 1 is found long ago in
Tibullus, but it has developed into a veritable disease of
the imagination among the Romantics. " In the days of
my youthful indiscretions," writes Chateaubriand in his
Mémoires d Outre-tombe, " I have many a time desired not
to survive my present happiness ; there was a degree of
felicity in the first flush of success that made me long for
annihilation."
Suicide for love was a rare phenomenon among the
Ancients, and was looked upon as an act of feebleness and
despair; it is so described by Sophocles, Euripides and
Virgil. In the Antigone of the first-named poet, Haemon
kills himself on the tomb of his destined bride, without
cursing either the gods or his fellow-men ; his father
inveighs bitterly against his weakness. In the ALneid Dido
destroys herself under the empire of the grief and despair
that overwhelm her. With Werther, and the Novels
generally of the Romantic School, suicide becomes argu-
mentative and philosophical ; it is ennobled, extolled as a
sublime act, as a sign of moral superiority ; lovers claim
the right to kill themselves, and deliberately defend
suicide as justifiable. "When a man's life is dis-
advantageous to some, a burden to himself, useless to
all," says Jacques in George Sand's story, "suicide is
a perfectly lawful act." " Let us quit life together," cries
Ralph to Indiana. *' Let us return to God. . . . The God
we adore, you and I, has never destined man to so many
miseries, without giving him the instinct to escape them;
and truly what makes, to my idea, the chief superiority of
man over the brute is his knowledge where lies the remedy
for all his woes. This remedy is suicide."
These sophistries are repeated in the Romances of
Eugène Siie and Frédéric Soulié, who have always had
and still have many readers. Suicide is depicted as the
1 We find the same also in Leconte de Lisle and in Sully- Prudbomme.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 355
ogical outcome and termination of a love drama. Even
irith Novelists like Stendhal of a somewhat hard and cold
ype, the hero dwells complacently on the idea of suicide
ind is intoxicated with its fascination. " Again and again,"
»ys the author of Rouge et Noir y "the idea of suicide
presented itself to him. The thought was full of charm,
ind brought a delicious sense of repose." * These writers
»eem to think love inseparable from suicide, that a hero of
omance is bound to kill himself when love fails him, that
Love is the sole end and obligation of life, that suicide is
it once a right and the supremest gratification of amorous
desire.
With Chatterton, this type of suicide was combined with
hatred of society and literary vanity. " I possess the right
to die," cries Alfred de Vigny's hero. ..." I swear it before
pou and I will uphold it before God." Lamartine, who
was on terms of close intimacy with de Vigny, tells us that
the author of Chatterton regretted later on ever having
written this play; 2 "he only forgave himself this glorious
error after having courageously expiated his fault. Great
poets are bound to choose their subject heedfully. Werther
had led to suicides of imagination ; Chatterton was re-
sponsible for suicides of scepticism." Not to mention the
furious onslaughts in society found in the Play, how
disastrous must have been the impression produced on
the younger members of the audience by this invocation
to death : " Oh ! Death, angel of deliverance, how sweet is
thy peace ! I had every reason of old to adore thee, but
not strength enough to win thee. ... If only men knew !
if only they knew what bliss I feel . . . they would not
hesitate so long." And to duly depict the bliss of dying,
Chatterton throws into his face a look of holy abstraction
and divine happiness. 8
1 Lt Rouge et le Noir, ch. xlix. — •• I was saved from suicide," says Stendhal,
M by political curiosity, and also no doubt by the fear of hurting myself."
* Lamartine, Entretien, xcv. p. 329.
* A. Barbier states that the author of Chatterton, who depicts in such lively
colours the happiness of dying, had personally a profound terror of death, and
relates how the day before his end he cried out to his friends, who had come to
35Ô SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Novelists and Poets have so often described the bliss of
dying with the one beloved, that by dint of extolling this
imaginary felicity, they have set the fashion of double
suicides. " To die with the object of my love had long
been the dream of my imagination/' were the words of
Dr Bancal, whose crime I have spoken of above. Alfred
de Vigny celebrated the death of two lovers who killed
themselves at Montmorency in these beautiful lines :
" Qui passèrent deux jours d'amour et d'harmonie,
De chants et de baisers, de voix, de lèvre unie,
De regrets confondus, de soupirs bienheureux,
Qui furent deux moments et deux siècles pour eux." l
But in doing so, he little thought his description would
stir to madness the fancy of a young student half a century
afterwards ; yet here are the facts, admitting of no doubt
as to its being so.
On January 25th, 1888, a young man of twenty-three
and a woman of thirty, married and the mother of several
children, got out of a carriage at the door of a villa in
the suburbs of Constantine. Two hours later, two shots
were heard, followed by two more and a loud scream.
Some of the neighbours ran up at the noise, burst into the
house and found themselves confronted with an appalling
sight. Half undressed, propped against a sofa near the
bed, lay the young man, with a shot wound through the
cheek and throwing up torrents of blood ; he still held
in his hand a five-chambered revolver, four chambers of
which had been emptied. His whole body was shaken by
see him, "Do not let me die." Undoubtedly Alfred de Vigny is a poet of
high and noble character. His pessimism arises not merely from personal
grievances ; he felt keenly the nothingness of life, the cruelty of Nature, the
physical and moral ills that crush humanity. But to these more general motives
of pessimism were added also personal ones, — poverty, a woman's treachery,
disappointed ambition, all of which made him suffer cruelly. If he wrote the
antisocial drama of Chatterton^ this was due to the chagrin caused him by the
Revolution of 1830, which forced him to resign his post under Government.
1 " Who passed two days of love and harmony together, of songs and kisses,
voices and lips joined in one, of regrets intermingled and happy sighs ; two
days ! — two moments, nay ! two centuries for them. "
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 357
a ftervous trembling, and he kept asking for a weapon or
a dose of poison to put him out of his pain, screaming
and calling "Madeleine! Madeleine!"
In front of him on the bed was stretched the young
woman, dead, her right temple pierced by two balls. The
expression of the face was calm, as if she were asleep ; the
eye showed nothing of that fixed terror-struck look almost
always observed in cases of death by violence.
The young man was a student of Law, intelligent and
well-educated, of whom M. Paul Bourget and M. Funck-
Brentano have given good reports. " I can see him now,"
M. Bourget said, " that young fellow, with his bright eyes
and his mobile, clever face, such as he used to be when he
attended my chambers two years ago. He used to bring
me critical essays, fragments of novels, which showed good
hope of a fine talent in the future." But incoherent,
feverish, ill-regulated reading had sown disorder in his
mind. After displaying in early years profound religious
feeling, he fell into the most absolute scepticism. Uniting
the study of the Positivist philosophers with a passionate
love of Poetry, he became at one and the same time a
sceptic and an enthusiast, a romanticist and a pessimist.
The condition of moral negation into which he had fallen
overwhelmed him with sadness and inspired him with
thoughts of suicide. Believing nothing and seeking
emotions only to taste and analyze them, he lost, in the
midst of his dreamy reveries and physiological and psycho-
logical analyses, all healthiness of soul, rightmindedness
and strength of will. Imagination and sensibility alone
remained ardent and still greedy after fresh excitement.
It was while in this state of mind that he met Mme.
X , a virtuous mother of a family till then, but
romantically inclined. He applied himself, like a hero
of psychological romance, to set the strings of passion
vibrating in her heart, and succeeded in his endeavour.
Then, after beginning in a mere spirit of curiosity, he
ended by getting caught himself and found his own breast
fired by the love he had kindled. Next he proposed to
358 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Mme. X to fly with him, but the scheme not having
taken effect, they formed the plan of dying together.
When the Presiding Judge at his trial pointed out to
the prisoner the odiousness of his conduct, his answer was
that double suicide for love was not disgraceful, but heroic
" When passion is extreme, it becomes hallowed by its
very intensity. ... I had often told her how the Lovers of
Alfred de Vigny were admired, who died together, how
beautiful it would be to die like that and what wonder and
admiration we should excite. We came at last to look
upon our death as hallowed by the mere fact of our
passion for one another. — 4 The one thing that afflicts
me/ she kept saying, ' is the disgrace.' — ' Why ! we shaH
be admired for it,' was my emphatic answer." It was by
suchlike sophistries drawn from Plays and Novels that
the young student perverted his own sense of right and
wrong and the unhappy lady's at the same time.
Ever since the Nouvelle Heloïse, passion is glorified,
hallowed in Novels and Plays. Love is depicted as a
virtue, and lovers think themselves more virtuous in
proportion as they are more fondly enamoured.
Mme. de Staël declared Rousseau made a passion of
virtue ; it would be truer to say she made a virtue of
passion. A disciple of Jean Jacques, Mme. de Staël
admires passion as if it were a virtue, and exalts love
into a duty, a sublime self-sacrifice. In Delphine she
makes the hero of the Romance say: "Your true and
highest duty is to love me . . ., believe me, there is
virtue inherent in love, virtue even in that absolute
surrender and sacrifice of oneself to a lover you condemn
so strongly. In her Lettres sur les écrits de /. /. Rousseau,
Mme. de Staël also proclaims that love is the origin of
virtue ; " when the object of worship is virtuous, a lover
soon grows to be virtuous too."
In the Romances of George Sand, passion instantly
ennobles the lover, even when it is a guilty love in the
eyes of society. In the Preface to the famous Dame aux
Camélias, Alexandre Dumas writes : " I do not deny the
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 359
existence of these fatal, irresistible passions, that no law
can combat, no reasoning overcome. Love at this height
of power is almost identical with virtue."
The Student of Constantine referred to above told the
Court on his trial that Mme. X asked him to let her die
with him, when she noticed the butt of a revolver project-
ing from his pocket, which he had bought to kill himself
with. A similar situation is found in Balzac's La Femme
de trente ans ("A Woman of Thirty"): "You would wish
to kill yourself under my roof?" asked Mme. d'Anglemont
of Lord Grenville. — " Oh, no ! not alone," he answered in a
soft voice. — "What then! perhaps my father?" — "No! no!"
he cried in a half-strangled tone. " Have no fear ; my fatal
resolve is gone. The instant I came in, as soon as ever I
saw you, I felt brave enough to say no word, to die alone."
At these words Julie rose and threw herself into Arthur's
arms, who through his mistress's sobs, could distinguish
two words charged with passionate emotion, "to know
happiness and die," she cried, " Oh, yes ! oh, yes ! " l
In Alexandre Dumas' Play, Antony speaks in a similar
vein : " I would fain have our two hearts beat in concert
at the last, our last sighs mingle. Dost understand? a
death as soft as sleep, a death happier than any life?"
To which Adèle replies : " Yes ! yes ! to die with thee !
an eternity within thy arms ! have pity, and kill me ! "
In Christine, Dumas makes another hero of the drama
declare :
" Que je serais heureux si j'expirais ainsi ;
Si je pouvais mourir alors que je la touche
D'un poison lentement épuisé sur ta bouche :
Et passer dans tes bras et les yeux sur tes yeux,
Du sommeil à la mort et de la terre aux deux." 8
1 Another point of resemblance. The heroine of the judicial drama and
the heroine of the literary drama are the same age, thirty. In the course of
the proceedings a friend of the prisoner's told thc/uge dCinstruction that the
accused had been deeply impressed by reading Balzac's Novel, La Femme de
trémie ans,
* " How happy should I be, could I die so ; if I could die draining a poison
slowly drawn from thy mouth, and pass within thy arms and my eyes on thine,
from sleep to death and from earth to heaven."
360 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
The Play of Hernani ends with a double suicide. Dofla
Sol poisons herself, and hands the half-emptied phial of
poison to Hernani, with the words :
" Ne te plains pas de moi, je t'ai gardé ta part . . . l
Je suis bien pâle, dis, pour une fiancée ?
Calme-toi, je suis mieux. — Vers des clartés nouvelles
Nous allons tout à l'heure ensemble ouvrir nos ailes.
Partons d'un vol égal vers un monde meilleur." *
Over-excited by the burning phrases that hallow passion
and suicide, young men and women yield more frequently
than they used to the fascination of death and are literally
intoxicated by Novels and Plays inspiring them with a
taste for Death. In former days double suicide was a
rare crime in the South of France ; now it is common. I
have noted no less than three double suicides at Marseilles
in the course of a few weeks, and I have found the chief
cause to be the terrible state of over-excitement induced
by romantic reading. In one case, the young woman
having survived her wounds, I was able to question her.
I asked her if she were not in the habit of reading a great
many Novels. She told me with a smile, as of one who
sees her thoughts guessed, that her lover battened upon
them. In another case, the lovers were both dead, but the
young man's mother told me how her son used to read a
fresh novel every day, and was constant in his attendance
at the Theatre. The Opera of Lucia di \Lamnurmm %
which he had witnessed three evenings running had
intoxicated his imagination ; during the three months
immediately preceding his suicide, his mother heard him
for ever singing passages from the opera in question
relating to Lucia's death and Edgar's suicide.
1 Joseph Chénier, in one of his dramas, represents a woman whose lover
has just taken poison as saying :
*' Pour ton Elisabeth tu n'as rien réservé" — " For your Elizabeth you hate
kept none back."
3 " Nay ! grudge me not, I have kept your share intact. . . . I am pale,
very pale, am I not, for a bride? Fear not, I am better now. — Toward new
splendours we are soon, and together, to spread our wings. Let us away and
fly side by side to a better world."
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 36!
In former days the man who died with his fiancée, as a
rule rçspçcted her virtue. At the trial of one Ferrand, a
youth of eighteen, who desirous of dying with the girl he
loved, killed her but failed to kill himself, it was brought
out in evidence that she was a virgin. The same statement
could not so often be made nowadays.
Young profligates who end in suicide are not simply
and solely victims of their own evil passions, Romances
and Poetry are often in part responsible for their ruin,
drawing as they do a seductive picture of suicide as the
finale of an orgy. Great Poets, no less indeed than Byron,
de Musset and Baudelaire, have extolled this type of
suicide. Byron sang the beauty of debauch, and himself
lived a Don Juan life at Venice. Death which by right
should awake only serious thoughts is mixed up by him
with scenes of wild dissipation. He was fond of drinking
from a skull and used to coquet with death as he did with
love.
Following Byron's example, Alfred de Musset continued
to mingle in his poems love and impiety with murder and
suicide. Don Paez, after assassinating a rival, poisons
himself along with his mistress and dies in her arms, and
the piece ends with a declaration of absolute disbelief. In
Portia, Dalté kills his mistress's husband, kicks the corpse
out of the way and goes for a sail in a gondola with the
object of his affections. Rolla, after a life of dissipation,
poisons himself and dies in the middle of an orgy. Paul
Bourget has described in Le Disciple the fascination
exercised over young men by the Poetry that idealizes
wild profligacy and infidelity.
Musset clearly realized the bond existing between in-
fidelity, profligacy and suicide. He had suffered not a
little from the anti-religious education he had received,
and showed the ravages it might commit in the souls of
young people in his Confession dun Enfant du Siècle. His
earliest reading had been in the licentious Romances of
the Eighteenth Century, which initiated him into the
mysteries of profligacy and free thinking. "I devoured
362 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
them," he says, "with unspeakable bitterness and grief,
with a broken heart and a smile on my lips. • • . Yes!
you are right, I cried, you only have the courage to declare
the only true thing is debauchery, hypocrisy, vileness. Be
my friends." ..." Who will ever dare," he says in another
place, "to tell all that went on in schools and colleges?
Men doubted every truth, young men went further and
denied every truth. It was a sort of universal denial of
all things in heaven and earth ; we may call it disenchant-
ment, or if you will hopelessness." Musset suffered more
than is generally supposed from this eclipse of hope. No
doubt it was a result of his mistress's faithlessness that,
unable any longer to believe in love, he conceived a disgust
for life and society in general, but this was not the sole
and only reason for his melancholy. Young people read-
ing his poems see only an expression of love, its aspirations
and disappointments, in them ; grown men find a more
noble sorrow there, a sorrow caused by the Poet's loss of
Faith. In a great number of passages the Poet notes as
a deep poignant pain the loss of all belief in higher things.
" Une croix en poussière et le désert aux deux." l
Not only has he cursed Voltaire in Rolla, he has cursed
Goethe and Byron too, reproaching them bitterly with
having destroyed hope in him. He cries : " Forgive me,
ye mighty poets, who are now a handful of ashes and lie
beneath the soil ! forgive me, ye who are demigods, and I
only a suffering child. But while writing all this, I cannot
help myself but curse you." He cursed Byron and never-
theless imitated him ; for he confessed himself, " my greatest
defect was my copying everything that struck me, not
because of its beauty but because of its strangeness." 1
M. Faguet and M. Jules Lemaître do not understand
1 M. Jules Lemaître assures us Priests admire Musset ; and I have observed
the fact myself. A good and excellent Priest and a man of much good sense,
who had read Musset for the first time when sixty years of age, told me he
had been charmed with him.
1 La Confession cCun Enfant du Siècle, 2nd Part, ch. iv.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 363
how Musset can reproach Voltaire with Rolla's suicide :
" Think what we may," says M. Faguet, " of the doctrines
of the Encyclopaedists, they can justifiably enough answer
in this case that they are only responsible for the mistakes
of men of sense and not for the calamities of mere nin-
compoops." * Rolla a mere nincompoop ! Musset says of
him:
" C'était un noble cœur, naïf comme Penfance,
Bon comme la pitié, grand comme l'espérance . . .
Jacque était grand, loyal, intrépide et superbe. • . ." *
Certainly I cannot profess to agree with much of this
panegyric. But Rolla was not a mere nincompoop, he was
a proud-hearted profligate, to whom Musset lent his own
powers of imagination and his own sensibility.
Musset is perfectly justified in charging infidelity with
leading to debauchery and eventually to suicide ; he has
told us himself that debauchery was the " first conclusion
from those principles of death " which he had acquired
from the hopelessness derived from "a corpse-like and
loathsome literature." He was right again when he says
in his apostrophe to Voltaire :
" Penses-tu cependant que, si quelque croyance,
Si le plus léger fil le retenait encor,
Il viendrait sur ce lit prostituer la mort? . . ." 3
All who have studied the causes of suicide, whether
physicians or magistrates, know that religious beliefs do
preserve men from this crime. 4 Rolla asks himself why
he is going to die :
1 Faguet, Études littéraires sur le XIX* siècle, p. 269.
* " Twas a noble heart, simple as childhood's self, gentle as pity, lofty as
hope. . . . Jacque was great and true-hearted, intrepid and superb. ..."
* " But think you, if any faith, if the slenderest thread of belief yet held him,
he would come to this couch to prostitute death ? "
4 See the Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales of Dechambre under Suicide ;
Nouveau dictionnaire de médecine of Jaccond, under same. — Doctors, them-
selves free-thinkers and materialists, recognize as an indisputable fact that
religious feeling is the best safeguard against suicide.
364 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
" Vous qui volez là-bas, légères hirondelles,
Dites-moi, dites-moi pourquoi vais-je mourir ?
Oh 1 l'affreux suicide 1 oh ! si j'avais des ailes,
Par ce beau ciel si pur je voudrais les ouvrir." 1
He would fain rise to Faith, but dissoluteness of living has
broken his wings.
Rolla has won disciples and imitators ; the fictitious tale
of his suicide has provoked not a few real suicides. I
have myself seen several modelled on the pattern of that
of Mussèt's hero.
Rolla kills himself because he is ruined, because he is
too indolent and too proud to work, and because he is
without belief in anything.
" Quand on est pauvre et fier, quand on est riche et triste,
On n'est pas assez fou pour se faire trappiste ;
Mais on fait comme Escousse, on allume un réchand." s
Idlers give themselves up to dissolute living, declaring
they will kill themselves when their money is exhausted
To give an instance. A young man who lived with a
mistress commits suicide ; the woman on being questioned
as to his motives for the deed, answers as follows : " I was
living at Sens, in a ' maison de tolerance/ where I made
the acquaintance of C , who has just committed suicide.
C took me from the public establishment where I was
an inmate and brought me to Paris, where we stayed at an
hotel. C , who would not work, told me repeatedly that
as soon as he had spent all his resources, he would blow
his brains out ; and so he did." This suicide would seem
to be modelled on Rolla's in Alfred de Musset's poem.
1 " Light- winged swallows that fly yonder, tell me, tell me, why I most
confront death. Oh ! hideous suicide 1 Had I but wings, I would spread
them wide in this bright heaven so pure and free."
These lines would seem to be the echo of a personal recollection. Musset
relates how once in a moment of despair he opened his window and looking
at the sky exclaimed, " Is it true then that you are void and empty? . . .
As I stood with arms extended and eyes lost in space, a swallow uttered a
plaintive cry."
3 t« when men are poor and proud, when they are rich and sad, they are not
mad enough to turn Trappist ; they do like Escousse, and kindle a brazier of
charcoal."
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 365
Here is another example, showing even better the in-
fluence of literature throwing a halo of poetry over suicide.
In January 1885, a young man was picked up in a street
at Saint-Etienne, by name Tony Auray, who had thrown
himself from the second floor of an hotel ; he was only
bruised by his fall, but before jumping out of window, he
had fired off a revolver into his mouth and stabbed himself
in the chest with a sword cane. In his room was found a
girl of fifteen, stretched dead on the bed, her head pierced
with revolver bullets ; she had evidently been killed in her
sleep. The young man in reply to questions stated that
his mistress and he had deliberately wished to end their
lives, being drawn to suicide " by a sort of poetical feel-
ing." On his trial he repeated the same declaration. " I
cannot make you understand," he said, " the sentiment of
poetry that urged us to wish for death ; these things are
felt, but can hardly be explained." The accused was a
student in pharmacy, who had conceived a disgust for life
and had made up his mind to die, after being loved by a
woman who, to use his own phrase, should have been all
his, and have never been any other man's. After inheriting
his father's modest fortune, he came to Lyons and met at
the Theatre a working-man's daughter, whom her father
had been imprudent enough to take to the play. To
seduce her, he passed himself off as belonging to a very rich
family, pressed his suit eagerly for some days, and ended
by inducing her to leave her home. After living a life of
pleasure with her in Paris for some months, he determined,
on finding his resources were at length exhausted, to kill
himself and his mistress too, to prevent her ever belonging
to another.
Profligates are ready enough to put an end to them-
selves, talking with a laugh of "cracking their brain-box."
There is nothing to restrain them, they are as sceptical as
Rolla and absolutely without belief. They care nothing
for their parents and family, calling their father the "old
boy " ; considering he gives them too little " tin," they wish
him dead so as to inherit his money. Don Juan says to
366 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THB
his father, "Die! die! soon as ever you can." I have
heard a father say, speaking of a profligate son, "He!—
he would like to stick a knife into my back ! " In fact
there is no single good feeling left to turn the profligate
from the idea of suicide. Besides, the constant abuse of
pleasure inspires a feeling of disgust towards life. Two
mere boys, scarcely fifteen years of age, but who had
already indulged in a life of dissipation, confessed when
on trial for a criminal offence that the abuse of pleasure
had made them conceive a disgust at existence generally. 1
Then again, indolence and pride co-operate with dissipation
in urging the profligate along the road to suicide. He hates
work, and thinks he does not hold a position in society
commensurate with his merits ; then if with these ideas
in his head, he lets himself be intoxicated with a poetical
picture of the bliss of non-existence, he is irresistibly drawn
towards suicide. This was exactly the case of Tony Auray,
profligate, indolent, disappointed in his schemes of ambition,
too proud to work, who forms the design of self-destruction
after dissipating his patrimony and taking toll of life's
enjoyments, like Rolla :
" Il prit trois bourses d'or et durant trois années,
Il vécut au soleil sans se douter des lois . . .
Le monde souriait en le regardant faire,
Et lui qui le faisait, disait à l'ordinaire,
Qu'il se ferait sauter quand il n'aurait plus rien." J
Tony Auray did not take three years however to dissipate
his little patrimony ; a few months were enough. Alfred
de Musset's hero wishes :
" Ressaisir la vie
Au manteau virginal d'un enfant de quinze ans." s
1 Gazette des Tribunaux, 23rd September 1886.
3 " He took three purses of gold and for three years' space he lived in the
sunshine without a thought of the laws. . . . The world smiled as it watched
his ways of life, and he the while was wont to say, he would end all with a
pistol when he should have nothing left."
8 " To get a fresh lease of life, grasping the maiden robe of a fair girl of
fifteen."
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 367
Similarly it is a girl of fifteen that Tony Auray seduces
md entices from her father's custody. De Musset makes
tolla a sceptic ; his apostrophe to Voltaire is no work
>f supererogation. Tony Auray also was an absolute
inbeliever. 1
These suicides of weary profligates were also known in
\ntiquity; learned and literary men of the Roman de-
adence deemed them poetical and induced others to do
he same by their example. While Seneca's disciples
vould end their days like Zeno the Stoic, while perusing
1 treatise of morality or talking philosophy with their
riends, the followers of Epicurus would kill themselves
ifter an orgy. Excess of indulgence, satiety of pleasure,
r ear of pain, will lead to suicide just as effectually as melan-
:holy. The highest good consisting for the Epicureans in
'pleasure," when this failed, they would kill themselves.
In Cleopatra's day, at Alexandria, there was even a Society
Formed of " Companions of the Tomb " or " Inseparables in
Death," whose members, after exhausting all the pleasures
rf life in a series of orgies, were in the habit, when lassitude
supervened, of putting an end to their lives. — These suicides
af literary affectation and blasé profligacy were equally
:ommon among the Romans of the Silver Age. Petronius,
the most licentious poet of the Court of Nero, voluntarily
quitted life, when he began to fear his influence with the
Emperor was at an end. He was the recognized arbiter
Df elegant society and its pleasures ; " he devoted the day
to sleep, the night to the duties of society and pleasure."
Having excited the jealousy of the other courtiers by sur-
passing them all in the arts of wanton and luxurious
living, he was denounced, and fearing to lose the Emperor's
favour, and unwilling " any longer to bear this load of fear
and hope," he opened his veins, the fashionable mode of
suicide at that time, and calmly awaited death listening
to the recitation of pleasant songs and merry verses.
A certain witty indecency has always been one of the
1 Byron wrote at Venice : " I will use up the mine of my youth to the last
fthred of its ore. And then . . . good-night ! I have lived and I am satisfied."
368 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
characteristics of the French mind and above all of the
Parisian. Gay and blithe with Brantôme, Marot, Rabelais,
Régnier, La Fontaine, Voltaire, Diderot, Désaugiers,
Béranger, it has grown melancholic and turned to de-
bauchery in contemporary literature. Poets have thought
to assimilate the genius of Byron and Musset by giving
philosophical airs to profligacy and displaying a morbid
preference for scenes of lust and blood. The mere titles of
Baudelaire's Poems, V Amour et le crâne, La Fontaine de
sang, Un Voyage à Cythère, Le Vin de [assassin? etc, are
enough to show this predilection for tales of blood and
wild dissipation. He was right in naming his poems Les
fleurs du mal, for indeed they are morbid and unhealthy
enough. For him,
" La débauche et la mort sont deux aimables filles." 2
In the Middle Ages also death formed a subject for
poetry and painting ; to intensify the impression produced
by means of contrast, poets and painters set side by side
in their books and pictures scenes of gloom and scenes of
licence. These contrasted effects enshrined a moral
purpose; they were intended to remind the favourites of
fortune that life is fleeting, that death lay in wait for them
and that they must prepare to die. It was in the early
years of the Renaissance that the idea of Death grew into
a refinement of sensual enjoyment and a motive of erotic
poetry. Boccaccio prefaces the Decameron with a descrip-
tion of the Plague of Florence, — another way of saying.
Vita brevi fruamur ("Life is short; come let us enjoy *).
Thoughts of death are salutary for believers but perilous
for doubters, only stimulating in the sceptic a thirst for
immediate enjoyment. The Epicurean and Freethinker
throws himself with savage impetuosity on pleasure, be-
cause he sees it will soon elude his grasp. During the
Plague of Athens and again during that of Florence, a
1 "Love and the Skull," "The Fountain of Blood," "A Journey to
Cythera," "The Murderer's Wine."
fl " Debauchery and Death are two sweet maids."
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 3O9
feverish pursuit of pleasure was observed. 1 This is why
«rriters, who seek sensations, for the sake of trying to
describe them afterwards, bring the idea of death into
dose connection with that of licentious enjoyment. In a
recent book entitled, Du sang de la volupté^ et de la mort
("Blood, Lust and Death"), M. M. Barrés writes: "My
imagination is stirred by this atmosphere of death and
ephemeral joys of the flesh. ... A marvel that is in
process of disappearing, this is the feature that adds a
feverish delight to every pleasure. To be perishable, this
is the supreme grace. To see our mistress within our
arms waning away each day, this rounds the pleasure we
have of her with an incomparable melancholy. No
intensity of sensation is adequate in which is not inter-
mingled the idea of Death." 2 " A fig for Love without the
spicy condiment of Death," says a character in Renan's
Abbesse de Jouarre.
By this profanation of Death, turning it into a refinement
of sensuality, Literature has developed morbid tastes
among the reading public and provoked not a few suicides.
In fact, it is even more dangerous to coquet with Death
than it is with Love ; such trifling always ends badly.
Here is an instance in proof of what we say. Not long
ago while examining the official reports of suicides for the
Department of the Seine, I found appended to one of them
the following printed advertisement : " To all who are dis-
appointed, disillusioned, sceptical, — a new sensation offered
by the magnetico-spiritualistic visions of Death in his
cave." The prospectus was illustrated with pictures of
skeletons and death's heads and similar horrors, which
"disillusioned sceptics" were invited to come and see.
The particular "sceptic" in question on receiving this
curious document, had visited the show in search of a
1 Physicians have noted that venereal diseases are more common during
troublous times following on great public calamities, because at such periods
populations abandon themselves to every kind of excess, to escape the terrors
weighing upon them. See Nouveau dictionnaire de médecine of Jaccond,
under word '* Syphilis."
* M. Barres, Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort, p. 124.
2 A
370 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
stimulant to his blasé imagination; once there, he had
been bitten by the fascination of death, and had ended by
committing suicide.
This poetry in which Death, Lust and Wanton Living
are extolled is fit only for neurotic patients and men of
half disordered intellect, and appeals only to ill-balanced
minds, taught by it to associate the ideas of voluptuous-
ness and death together. I have myself known students
whose heads had been turned by reading these erotic and
pessimistic poets and who had attempted to destroy them-
selves in consequence.
M. Bourget, discussing in his famous Novel Le Discipk
the effects of unhealthy reading on Robert Greslou,
specially mentions Les Fleurs du niai, Rolla and Stendhal's
Romances, as having upset his conscience. The hero of
the story is himself a copy of the hero of a Novel of
Stendhal's, Julien Sorel. The criminal of Constantine,
already more than once referred to, is more nervous than
Julien Sorel, less master of himself, but he is like him,
inquisitive of new sensations, and intermingles the idea
of death with that of love. Stendhal's hero plans to kill
himself after a last kiss. " I give her," he says, " one last
kiss . . . and I kill myself . . . my lips will touch her
cheeks before I die." *
The motives leading to suicide have since Hamlet and
in the period from Werther to Rolla gradually lost every
note of elevation and become more and more contemptible.
We understand how Hamlet was profoundly sad after his
father's murder and his mother's marriage with the
murderer, how he was driven distracted by these fearful
discoveries, and how crushed under his load of pain, he
becomes a victim to hallucinations and pretending to be
mad in order to secure vengeance for his father's death,
he goes mad in very truth. But Werther and René have
not the same reasons for being weary of life ; their sorrows
come merely from their disillusionment and their amorous
dreams. When we come to Chatterton, disappointed love
1 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir, ch. xlir.
ONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 37 1
o longer the sole motive for suicide ; it is combined
i sentiments of hatred against society and wounded
ary vanity. In Rolla t it is simply the natural termina-
of a life of debauch.
y throwing a glamour over dissipation and Bohemian-
Romance and Poetry are responsible for the existence
. host of profligates and Bohemians, who supposing
Café and the Brothel to be the road to fame, have
d their way to wretchedness, disease, the hospital and
dead-house. By dint of continually hearing a pre-
dion for debauch and a love of idleness extolled as
itic tastes and enemies of the "bourgeois" spirit,
e literary and artistic charlatans come to a bad end,
•ving all the while that a life of dissipation must
luct them to success, that true elegance must be found
never-ending search after new and violent sensation,
verve in the stimulation of strong drink. All they
ally find, to use Lucretius' expression, is " a life bowed
»r an ignominious yoke, ruined fortunes, crushing
s t duties forgotten, and honour sick and staggering
ts fall," 1 — and, I may add to Lucretius' catalogue,
ilth undermined, a mind distracted, a heart weary and
and longing only for death. The unhappy poet who
his part also sought intoxication in a great number
flagons," left his genius behind in the wine cup :
"J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie
Et mes amis et ma gaïté ;
J'ai perdu jusqu'à la fierté,
Qui faisait croire à mon génie." 2
e curses the dissipation he had not strength of mind
ght against :
" Ah l malheur à celui qui laisse la débauche
Planter le premier clou sous sa mamelle gauche ! " s
ucretius, Bk. iv. v. 1115 and following.
I bave lost my vigour and my life, my friends and my gaiety ; I have
yen the pride that made me believe in my genius."
Ah ! ill-starred the man who lets debauch plant the first nail under his
reast!"
372 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
In another place, speaking of the prostitute, he declares:
" Deux anges destructeurs marchent à son côté,
Doux et cruels tous deux, la mort, la volupté." l
Young men who are too ready to believe in the poetry
of debauch and idleness and the efficacy possessed by
alcoholic stimulants in supplying literary inspiration, may
also recall with advantage the regrets Baudelaire has
expressed in his Œuvres posthumes for the ill use he had
made of his time, and his too great devotion to intoxicants.
Women are nowadays beginning to destroy themselves
no less than men. Generally so timid, they have ceased
to have any fear of death ; on the contrary, it attracts
them and the thought of everlasting rest flatters their
imagination. Young women end their life after dining
merrily with their girl friends ; they tell each other of
their intention, see to the necessary preparations together,
go out and buy the charcoal at the same time as the
provisions required for their farewell meal, and sit down
to table laughing and singing. I read in the Official
Report of a case of suicide how the " concierge M (house-
porter), was obliged to get up in the night to silence a
party of women who were supping together and singing
at two o'clock in the morning. Next morning " the songs
had ceased," and the " concierge " found the women dead ;
they had asphyxiated themselves by means of charcoal
fumes.
Literary vanity often forms one of the motives leading
to suicide. Speaking of a Poet who killed himself along
with a married woman in 1811 at Potsdam, Mme. de Staël
makes a judicious remark applicable to more than one
suicide : " Does not the man seem rather like an author,
who lacking genius desires by means of a terrible catas-
trophe to produce the effects he cannot attain in Poetry ?"
The suicide of passion is often enough theatrical, and
desperate men rehearse like actors the part they are
1 " Two Angels of Destruction march at her side, sweet and cruel both of
them, Death and Desire ! "
NTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 373
to play! Mme. P *s death being very slow in
lg, almost seven hours, Bancal wrote down hour by
each incident of his victim's death agony, and the
tions he himself experienced. Before killing Mme.
-, the Student Ch read her a copy of verses he
vritten for her. Before destroying himself, Werther
a Tragedy of Lessing's. Escousse, author of a
a played at the Porte Saint-Martin Theatre, carefully
ges his suicide with Lebras, as if it were a piece
were going to play, such as the melodrama he had
x>rated with his friend in writing for the Gaïté. He
id him to repair to the place fixed for their suicide,
as he might have summoned him to a theatrical
sentation. "I expect you at half past eleven," he
liim ; " at that hour the curtain will rise ; l mind you
, that we may hurry up the catastrophe." Before
>orating in this funereal piece, he had prepared this
;raph for insertion in the newspapers : " I wish the
papers which announce my death to append this
ment to their notice : — ' Escousse killed himself,
ise he felt he had no place here, because he lacked
ir every step he took forwards or backwards, because
rf fame did not sufficiently dominate his soul, if soul
is. 9 " He had likewise prepared some time previously
tw of his death, some verses he wished to pass off as
►osed impromptu at the moment of his death. They
found later among a heap of old papers, scored with
res and corrections. We give them for what they are
1:
" Adieu, trop inféconde terre,
Fléaux humains, soleils glacés 1
Comme un fantôme solitaire,
Inaperçu j'aurai passé ;
Adieu, palmes immortelles,
Vrai songe d'une âme de feu,
L'air manquait, j'ai fermé mes ailes,
Adieu." 2
lis phrase appears to be a reminiscence of Werther, who says: "The
rises, we pass over to the other side, and that's all ! "
r arewell 1 too unfruitful earth, human scourges, icy suns ! Like a
374 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
By sanctifying passion, dissipation, the cult of self, the
search after super - refined sensations and scepticism,
Literature has disseminated the taste for death, for egoistic
feelings are always incapable of attaching human beings to
life. The dreamy, sentimental melancholy of Romanticism
became yet more bitter and gloomy among the writers that
followed Flaubert, Leconte de Lisle, Pierre Loti, Mme.
Ackerman, because it has ceased to be consoled by any
sort of belief and augmented by a deep sense of the
sadness and sorrows of life. The general impression left
from the perusal of these pessimistic writers is that life is
not worth living, and I have myself had occasion re-
peatedly to notice this scorn of life expressed in the letters
of students and teachers. A short time since one of the
latter, before committing suicide, wrote the following lines:
" I die by my own act, for I have come to the conclusion
that life is not worth the trouble we take to enable us to
live it Time to smoke a cigarette, and all is over. Is
life worth as much as a good cigarette ? " When teachers
have such an idea of life, is it surprising if their pupils
share it? "I wish to be buried without religious rites,"
writes a lad of sixteen. " I die an atheist, having never
believed in a God, and refusing to believe in immortality.
After death, annihilation. (Feb. 1897.)" Underlying all
this despair that leads to suicide is the idea that life is
a poor business, and annihilation preferable. The same
notion it is which nowadays induces parents who commit
suicide to kill their children at the same time. Yet this
pessimistic view of life is quite reconcilable with a love
of life's pleasures. Schopenhauer managed quite well to
make his pessimism go along with the cultivation of
sensual gratifications. On the contrary, other pessimists,
convinced that life is not worth living, end it once for alL
As the result of reading Schopenhauer's works, Mainlànder
turned pessimist and hanged himself on March 31st, 1876.
lonely phantom, I shall have passed away unnoted ; farewell ! laurels of
immortality, true dream of a fiery soul ; air failed me and I closed my wings»
farewell 1 "
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 375
Any book expressing contempt for life and vaunting the
advantages of death may inspire a disgust for existence
and a preference for death. The Philosopher Hegesias
demonstrated with so much eloquence that life is an evil»
"that King Ptolemy, they say, forbade him to treat of
this question in his public teaching, because several of
his hearers killed themselves in consequence." (Cicero,
Tusculan Orations^ Bk. L, § 34.) The same fact is re-
corded by Plutarch [Of Love and Natural Charity) and
by Valerius Maximus (Bk. VIII., ch. ix., § 3). Underlying
the thought of suicide is always a comparison between the
advantages of life and those of death, and a conviction
that the latter outweigh the former. Every pessimistic
conception of life, if unaccompanied by faith in God and
a future state, provokes despair and leads directly to
suicide. The duty then of all Writers is to make their
fellow-men love life rather than despise it, and to make
life loved they must give it a moral aim.
Nor does suicide find its victims exclusively among
persons of cultivated mind. Novels, by filling girls of
the lower classes, working girls and domestic servants,
with romantic ideas, inspire them with disgust at their
modest position in life, and from that to disgust at life
itself is but a step. From novel reading they acquire a
habit of indulgence in impossible dreams ; they too would
fain be heroines, they are humiliated by their subordinate
situation and the necessity of living with coarse and un-
educated relatives, and when they do not take to evil courses,
generally end in suicide. It would hardly be credited how
many melancholic servant maids there are and working
girls afflicted with the spleen. Laundresses, shoemakers'
daughters, by no means escape the curse of the Century.
" My daughter/' a shoemaker told a Police Commissary,
in reply to his questions as to the motives of the girl's
suicide, " my daughter was a great reader, and this gave
her melancholy thoughts. She envied the lot of those
who are no more. She considered Death a deliverance,
though she had nothing whatever to complain of in the
37*> SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
life she led. We are well off; she was an excellent work-
woman and gained an ample livelihood." The unhappy
father, while recognizing the fact that novel-reading gave
his child sad thoughts, could not account for her having
shot herself with a revolver on retiring to bed ; he failed
to see that she was suffering from being only a shoemaker's
daughter.
Everything grows democratical in these days, — suicide
included. Saint-Marc Girardin wrote in his Cours de
littérature dramatique: "Suicide is not a malady of simple-
minded, simple-hearted folk, but of the highly educated
and philosophically inclined." M. Caro in his Études
morales says the same. Both are wrong. It is quite a mis-
take to think it is a special malady of the highly cultured
reflective classes ; it is equally a disease of working men,
coachmen, locksmiths, carpenters, stone-masons and the
like. I am acquainted with very few cases of suicide
among contemporary philosophers. Suicide is supposed
to be frequent among those who practise the liberal
professions ; but for myself, I have always found the
opposite to be the case. Instances of suicide on the
part of Advocates, Magistrates, Engineers, Priests, are
very rare. In 1896, out of 1549 suicides in Paris, I only
find seven committed by persons exercising the liberal
professions. Some of these were (I have read the official
reports) determined by illness or madness ; amongst others,
an Advocate destroyed himself from grief because he was
compelled to put his wife, who had become insane, in an
asylum. Suicides of workmen, of girls of the lower classes,
of young clerks and shopmen and of domestic servants are,
on the other hand, very frequent. Suicide is not, as it was
at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, an aristocratic
vice; it has become a popular one, with the diffusion of
novel-reading.
To give a few examples :
A young maid-servant destroys herself by means of
charcoal fumes, after writing, " I am terribly weary of
existence in this world. My life is gloomy and useless.
AGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 377
cilling myself to escape its vexations." — Another
eighteen throws herself under the wheels of a
ive, which crushes both legs, without killing her.
uestioned as to the motive of her act, she answers,
ed to destroy myself, because I have had enough
it is too sad altogether." — In a large number of
Reports recording the suicides of young servant
10 have destroyed themselves by hanging, inhala-
charcoal fumes or drowning, I read how they
it degrading to serve others, how life was a
to them. They had repeatedly proclaimed their
n of killing themselves, and bid farewell to their
and friends with a host of sentimental phrases
d from Novels and Romances. A young maid-of-
:, hating her position, leaves her place and prepares
n end to herself, writing a long letter to her father
him to distribute souvenirs to her relations and
she concludes the letter with the following words :
ask one favour, dear father, that you place flowers
tomb and on my coffin. I should dearly have
>me for my death, but as I did not wish to be seen
treets about here, I have foregone this last pleasure."
ovember 2, 1893, at six in the morning, one Nizolli,
j Italian workman of twenty, cutter in a shoe-
at Marseilles, the son of a school-mistress, at-
l to commit suicide. A witness, who had run in
sound of the shots, found him lying dressed on his
unded in four places with revolver bullets ; one
vas near the breast-bone, two below the left breast,
ourth in the groin. He was an industrious work-
jular in his conduct and affectionate towards his
and relations. His day's work finished, he used to
his evenings to reading Novels and Poetry, often
himself of sleep for the purpose. His aunt, a
cacher at Marseilles, told me all this reading had
him very greatly and had made him conceive a
for life and a hatred of society. In his room were
opies of verses which he had composed and two
378 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
letters. In one of these addressed to his aunt, he asked
her forgiveness for the pain he was about to cause her,
prayed her not to think harshly of him, and told her that
the small sum of money he left behind, which she would
find in his purse, would serve " to pass Charon's boat with,*
In the other letter, addressed to his parents, he explained
the motives of his suicide. It runs as follows :
" My dear Parents, — It is books have been my ruin.
Seeing man is bound to slip in the mud, why make him
acquainted with the mountain summits? why inspire him
with hopes of a life full of enchantment ?
" Cursed be all books ! Ah ! if only the makers of novels
knew the harm they do ! . From my earliest years, I have
thought possible a life consecrated to all that is true and
noble, I have dreamed of a life such as we read of in
Romance. Now, disgusted and exhausted, I see I can
never attain the chimaera my youthful brain set before
it as its aim ; but now, I cannot, I cannot slip into the
mud. And as man is a brute with instincts more vile than
any other animal, as life is a hell upon earth, I prefer to
find rest in the tomb. Forgive me the pain I am going
to cause you. I would not give it you, if I could help it,
but I am only twenty and life is a burden to me.
" I kiss your hands fondly.
" Farewell for ever ! "
The young Italian in question survived his attempted
suicide. On leaving the hospital, where he was cured of
his wounds, he sold all his novels, for which he had con-
ceived a horror, used the money in buying a bicycle, and
started for America.
Called upon to account for her son's suicide, — he was
apprenticed to a gilder on leather, and sixteen years of
age, — his mother stated to the police : " Our son was
gloomy and often told us he was sick of the workshop ;
he lost his temper at the most innocent remark. Two
days ago he flew into a passion and declared we should
never see him again after a week's time. He was in the
CONTAGION OF LITERATyRE AS AFFECTING IT. 379
habit of reading a great many Novels, and these probably
turned his head. Yesterday evening he came home from
work more gloomy than ever. After dinner he retired to
his room. We thought he had gone to fetch a book, but
a moment later we heard a shot ; we rushed into the room
and found our boy stretched on the floor with a bullet
through the right temple." The same fate had befallen
these two young workers in leather l as befell Don Quixote,
whose head was turned by reading books of Chivalry.
u Our Hidalgo buried himself so deep in books ; he spent
the whole day in reading from morn to eve and the night
from eve to morn ; and so by dint of reading and watching
he dried up his brain to such a degree that he presently
lost his wits. His imagination was filled full of all he
read in the books, — enchantments, disputes, challenges,
battles, wounds, declarations of love, degradations." To
abolish the cause of Don Quixote's madness, they burned
his books; to recover his reason, the young Italian we
have spoken of sold his collection of novels, bought a
bicycle and started for America. When parents notice
their son entertaining gloomy thoughts pointing in the
direction of suicide, they should find out what he reads,
discover if he is not in the habit of perusing Novels and
Poetry of a melancholy, romantic type, and if this is so,
locking up his bookcase and turning him out into the
fields. A little travel would be all that is required very
often to restore health and sanity to many a young victim
of melancholia. But parents, absorbed in their daily tasks,
have no notion as to the reason of their child's sadness,
till one day, to their profound astonishment, they learn
that he has committed suicide. Such was the case with
a Paris bookseller, who in February 1895 found his son,
a lad of seventeen, with a pistol bullet through his head.
Questioned as to the motive for the suicide, the unhappy
1 Working shoemakers as a rule profess very advanced political and social
opinions. This revolt against society I attribute to the disproportion existing
between their position in life and the one their ambition would have them fill ;
Moreover, all sedentary occupations are provocative of dangerous day-dreams.
380 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
father told the Police Commissary: "My son, who has
never been away from home, had everything he needed to
be happy ; but he suffered from melancholy, he had the
spleen."
Of course all the young people who put an end to them-
selves are not imitating Werther or copying Indiana.
Many of them do not so much as know the names of
Goethe or George Sand ; they are driven to suicide solely
by the working of the passions and their own neuropathic
constitution. But there are others, who finding themselves
similarly situated to Werther, are so deeply impressed by
reading the Novel as to be irresistibly drawn to imitate
the hero's suicide. Side by side with physiological and
psychical suicides, there are also literary suicides, deter-
mined by a morbid sentimentality derived from Romances
which defend and draw a seductive picture of suicide.
The play of Romeo and Juliet again is well calculated to
inspire a young man with a longing not to survive the
dear being he would fain have made his bride. Literature
has so widely disseminated this idea, that two lovers ought
to die together when they cannot live together, that M.
Saint-Marc Girardin approves Romeo's suicide: "Which
of us," he says, "would consent to see Romeo survive
Juliet or Juliet Romeo ?" Literature has yet further con-
tributed to spread the mania of suicide by representing a
voluntary death not merely as a poetical but as a religious act
u I am about to rejoin my Father and your Father," Werther
declares ; " I will carry my sorrows to the foot of His throne,
and He will comfort me till you come. Then, I will fly to
meet you, I will seize you and will be for ever united with
you in presence of the Eternal, in kisses without end."
Literature would be better inspired not to teach men
these lessons of contempt for life and love of death.
Human reason is too weak to bear shaking with sophistries
in excuse of suicide. Life contains enough sadness with-
out Novelists and Poets increasing its intensity by instilling
a morbid and precocious melancholy. It is no part of
their duty to make lads of twenty despair of life, to add to
:ONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 38 1
I sorrows the weight of imaginary grievances, and make
n melancholy before their time. To tell young people
is not worth living is to destroy their illusions and
n them into useless whimperers, — and seeing contempt
life often ends in Epicureanism, — very often to make
m selfish Epicureans.
*o such reproach can be levelled at our Classical
rature. No one has ever dreamed of holding Corneille,
Hère, La Fontaine, Boileau or Racine responsible for
suicide of their readers. While some of the most
îbrated authors of the Romantic School, Chateaubriand,
roartine, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve,
éophile Gautier and others, have either made attempts
suicide or have been constantly assailed by thoughts
ding in that direction, no Classical writer has felt, or
any rate succumbed to, any such temptation. True
Hère, Boileau and Chapelain on one occasion conceived
mad idea of jumping into the Seine, but this was after
inner where the wine had been flowing freely, causing
emporary aberration of reason. Voltaire has denied
authenticity of the story, but there is no doubt about
it is related by Racine fils himself in the Memoir he
>te of his father. "This famous supper," he says,
credible as it may appear, really occurred. Happily
father was not there. The wise Boileau, who was,
npletely lost his head, like the rest. The liquor having
duced in all the guests a fit of the severest moral
juisition, their lucubrations on the miseries of life and
maxim of the Ancients which declares that 'the best
tpiness is not to be born, and the second best to die
n/ caused them to adopt the heroic resolution of
rting off at once to throw themselves into the River,
ither they promptly repaired and were very near carry-
their purpose into effect, when Molière represented to
m that so noble a deed should not be buried in the
kness of night, but deserved to be performed in open
\ At this they stopped short, and looking at each other
:ulated, ' He is quite right' To which Chapelain added :
382 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
* Yes! gentlemen, don't let us drown ourselves till to-
morrow morning, and meantime suppose we go finish the
wine that's left.' Next day they looked at it in a different
light, and thought it best after all to go on bearing the
miseries of life." l With the exception of this one youthful
folly, which also goes to prove the influence exercised by
literary memories during intoxication, our great Classical
writers have never felt any temptation in this direction.
Neither is any defence of suicide to be found in Virgil,
who assigns those who have attempted their own life a
place in Hell :
" Proxima deinde tenent mcesti loca, qui sibi letum
Insontes peperere manu, lucemque perosi
Projecere animas. Quam vellent aethere in alto
Nunc et pauperiem et duros perferre labores ! ns
What especially characterizes the Classical writers is
their good sense, their " sweet reasonableness," the balance
of their faculties. These great minds are of a sound and
healthy genius, well balanced, of a robust and vigorous
moral constitution. Nor did they show any lack of
sensibility or imagination, as the Romantics have alleged.
Who had a more tender heart than Racine ? Who possessed
a more brilliant imagination than Corneille? Are not
Pascal, and Bossuet himself, as remarkable for the force
of their imagination as for the depth of their sensibility?
Are they not at one and the same time poets, orators and
philosophers ? Who can deny the most graceful gifts of
fancy and the most exquisite endowment of sensibility
1 Andrieux wrote a Comedy based on the incidents of this famous sapper
under the title of Molière avec ses amis ("Molière and his Friends"). He
made La Fontaine one of the party, but as a matter of fact he was not there.
1 " The next in place, and punishment, are they
Who prodigally throw their souls away ;
Fools, who repining at their wretched state
And loathing anxious life, suborn'd their fate.
With late repentance now they would retrieve
The bodies they forsook, and wish to live,
Their pains and poverty desire to bear,
To view the light of heaven, and breathe the vital air."
From Virgil, Aineid, vi. 11. 434-437. Dryden's translation.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 383
La Fontaine and Fénélon? But these great writers
>trusted sensibility and fancy as regular guides, they
eferred the sure government of reason. Boileau was
ver weary of telling the poets :
" Aimez donc la raison. . . ." l
One of his friends, finding him one day absorbed in the
arch for a rhyme, advised him to go and get a Rhyming
ictionary. "No! no!" was Boileau's answer, "rather
t me a Reasoning Dictionary ; " he thought far more of
e justness of the sentiment than of the sonority of the
>rds or the perfection of the rhyme. How many poets
d romance writers of the present do just the opposite ;
>o much the worse for the sense!" Flaubert used to
y, "rhythm before everything!" Corneille, Descartes,
Lscal, were so enamoured of reason they made it part
id parcel of love ; " Love and reason," Pascal was wont
say, " are one and the same thing." The modern view
that love and unreason are one and the same thing ;
yl more, that love is proved by suicide and even by
ime, that he is no lover who is not ready to kill himself
others. Good sense, now deemed a vulgar, common-
ice quality, was admired above all else by the great
liters of the Seventeenth Century, who declared good
nse to be master of the house of human life, and
agination the " foolish virgin " of the establishment.
" Que toujours le bon sens s'accorde avec la rime," *
is Boileau's axiom. Corneille claimed with satisfaction
his Preface to Otho to have endowed his characters with
opriety of conduct and displayed good sense in all their
ntiments. In this school the young men and women of
e Seventeenth Century learned to love reason and distrust
e enticements of sensibility and imagination. Suicides
passion were rare at that period. When women had
ye disappointments, they entered a Convent and never
1 "Love reason therefore. ..."
1 M Let good sense ever chime in with the rhyme."
£84 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
dreamed of throwing themselves into the Seine. They
sought consolation in listening to the sermons of Bourdaloue
and Bossuet. Sound reasoning faculties exercised the
same fascination over Princes as grace and beauty. It was
by her prudence and rectitude of mind that Mme. de
Maintenon seduced Louis XIV. ; it is well known how
the King would ask her advice in the words, " What thinks
your reasonableness of the matter ? " In the Seventeenth
Century good sense was more admired than wit ; and the
same is true of the greatest writers of Antiquity ; there is
more wit in Ovid and Martial than in Virgil or Lucretius.
Louis XIV. himself preferred good sense to wit; the
fanciful, brilliant wit of Fénélon frightened him. At the
present day, on the contrary, to how many books and
plays may Gresset's line be applied :
" De l'esprit, si Ton veut, mais pas le sens commun!" 1
Quite forgetful of Boileau's advice :
" Il faut même en chanson du bon sens et de l'art,"'
modern Literature, no great admirer of Boileau, has put
plenty of art into its Novels and Plays, but not so much
common sense.
But if
" Raison sans sel est fade nourriture,
Sel sans raison n'est solide pâture," s
as Jean Jacques Rousseau puts it.
The Eighteenth Century, sensualistic as it had become
both in theory and practice, yet remained in Literature
faithful in its preference for good sound reason. A critic
having reproached Gresset with wanting wit, the latter who
was not really at all wanting in this quality, replied: "I
had rather lack wit than good sense." A modern writer
on the other hand would far rather want good sense than
wit; the reasonable author is thought a commonplace,
1 " Wit, if you will, but no common sense 1 "
9 " Even for a song good sense and art are needful."
* " Reason without salt is vapid stuff; salt without reason is not solid food."
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 385
mediocre creature, a "bourgeois" mind, a Philistine.
Novelists like to see a small spice of insanity in their
readers and do their best to insinuate it into their minds.
What a contrast the fine sound sense in Voltaire, Buffon,
d'Alembert, Montesquieu ! J. Chénier agrees with Boileau
when he writes : —
" Qu'est-ce que vertu ? Raison mise en pratique.
Valeur ? Raison produite avec éclat
Esprit ? Raison qui finement s'exprime.
Le goût n'est rien qu'un bon sens délicat,
Et le génie est le raison sublime." 1
Nowadays, according to the latest theories, genius is a
nervous complaint and virtue the same, men of talent and
saints are victims of degeneracy, hysteria, neurasthenia or
epilepsy. In former days health of body and mind was
the object aimed at, — "mens sana in corpore sano," "a
healthy mind in a healthy body." Now the way to fame
is through nervous disease, a disordered imagination, an
inordinate sensibility.
In the school of the great Classical authors of the Seven-
teenth and Eighteenth Centuries, all with the exception
of Rousseau, men of sound and sensible intellect, writers
run no risk of stultifying their judgment with apologies
for suicides of passion ; by contact with them reason is
fortified, sensibility moderated, imagination cooled. Jean
Jacques Rousseau is the only great Writer of the Eighteenth
Century who approves of suicide. True, it may be urged
that the defence he makes of suicide in the Nouvelle Helolse
is followed by a refutation ; but in a letter to Voltaire, on
the occasion of his Poem on the Earthquake of Lisbon, he
allows that man has a right to kill himself. D'Holbach is
of the same opinion in his book Le Système de la Nature.
On the other hand suicide is condemned by Voltaire
{Dictionnaire Philosophique, under "Cato"), by the Encyclo-
1 " What is virtue? Reason put in practice. What is valour? Reason
displayed under brilliant circumstances. Wit ? Reason gracefully expressed.
Taste is nothing else but a delicate good sense, and genius is reason at its
snblimest height."
2 B
3.86 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
paedists and by Montesquieu. The last-named, it is true,
had written its apology in the Lettres Persanes (Letter 76),
but he condemned it in the Esprit des Lois (bk. xiv. cL x.);
he even approves of the Law branding suicide as a crime,
except always in England, where he believes this form of
death to be the result of a disease due to the climate!
Nay ! more, not only do the Classical authors avoid any
suggestions of suicide ; they are actually a cure for morbid
cravings in that direction, as I have shown by the example
of George Sand. But beginning with Jean Jacques
Rousseau, Literature has changed its character; imagi-
nation and sensibility have come to the front at the
expense of reason in Romance and Poetry ; l inordinate
sensibility, morbid imagination, false sentiment, there you
have Rousseau and the Literature he inspired. The most
famous writers of the Nineteenth Century, Chateaubriand,
George Sand, Victor Hugo, all have too much imagination
and not enough good sense. Their style is too full of
tropes ; some of these are superb, but others again are in
bad taste. Sainte-Beuve relates how Bernardin de Saint-
Pierre, when asked his opinion of Chateaubriand, answered
that his imagination was too strong for him. 2 Not a doubt
about it, imagination and sensibility are fine faculties,
the primary preconditions of Poet and Novelist ; an author
must himself feel deeply to move readers or spectators
But exaggerated sensibility and over-strung imagination,
uncontrolled by reasop, are prejudicial to literary sanity
1 These reflections do not apply to the Historians, Moralists, Literary Critics
or Philosophers of the Nineteenth Century. We have bad historians of the
▼ery first rank ; A. Thierry, Guizot, Thiers, Mignet, — Micbelet himself, in
spite of many whimsicalities of imagination, may be set side by side with the
historians of Antiquity. Cousin, Roger-Collard, JourTroy, Caro, J. Simon are
all Philosophers of distinguished merit. Our literary critics, Villemain,
Sainte-Beuve, D. Nisard, Saint-Marc Girardin, Caro, Patin, Boissier, J.
Lemaitre, Brunetière, Faguet, Larroumet are not less remarkable for the
acuteness of their powers of moral observation than for the justness of their
literary judgments. In all these writers imagination and sensibility are duly
controlled by reason ; one only ! Michelet, has allowed his fancy to run away
with him and thereby spoiled his great talent.
8 Chateaubriand et son groupe^ p. 203.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 387
no less than they are to bodily health. To be convinced
•of the fact, it is only needful to visit a lunatic asylum and
read the works of Doctors Magnan, Dagonnet, Ball, Féré,
on the causes leading to mental complaints. Before their
time a Theologian (Theologians haye many points of con-
tact with specialists in insanity), Malebranche, had pointed
out the dangers of inordinate imagination in La Recherc/ie
de la Vérité. " It is no defect," he writes, " to possess a
brain . adapted for picturing things rigorously and receiv-
ing distinctly very clear and very vivid images of the
smallest objects. . . . But when the imagination dominates
the soul and, without waiting for the orders of the will,
its impressions are called up by the mere action of the
brain as affected by external objects, ... it is then
manifestly a bad rather than a good quality, and indeed
almost a form of insanity." Men who are slaves of their
imagination do not see things as they really are, they
«exaggerate and overestimate them, and consequently fail
to appreciate them at their true value ; they are subject
to illusions, visions and hallucinations; they are restless,
agitated, unstable, eccentric, irritable, the genus irritabile
vatum ("the irritable tribe of bards") ; they lack delibera-
tion, balance, judgment.
Literary health, just like physical, is a matter of the
-equilibrium of the faculties ; it implies a due compromise
between imagination and reason, sensibility and good
taste. This accord of the faculties is found in Classical
literature ; it does not exist in Romantic, which is marked
by the predominance of imagination and sensibility over
reason. Thus Goethe himself used to say, " I call classical
whatever is healthy, and romantic whatever is morbid."
Romanticism plumed itself on being in opposition to
common sense ; it sought out by preference the ex-
ceptional, the odd, it poetized melancholy, consumption,
and suicide and crime arising out of amorous passion.
In his notice on Gérard de Nerval, who went mad and
hanged himself from the bars of a vent-hole of one of the
old Parisian street lamps, Théophile Gautier tells us how
388 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
his wild extravagancies appeared quite matters of course
to the other members of the early Romantic school, his
friends. " In those days," he says, " of literary eccentricity»
among the paroxysms of originality, the voluntary or in-
voluntary outrages on propriety that were every day occur-
rences, it was extremely difficult to appear extravagant;
every folly seemed plausible, and the least eccentric among
us would have been deemed a fitting occupant for a cell
in a lunatic asylum." Théophile Gautier himself, who
ended in Epicureanism, began as a pessimist; in early
years his sick imagination craved,
" Dans l'immobilité savourer lentement
Comme un philtre endormeur l'anéantissement" *
He longed for annihilation like a disciple of Buddha, or
a precursor of Schopenhauer ; he composed the Comedy of
Death, taking delight only in mournful images and associ-
ating with them, as often happens in like circumstances,
the most voluptuous fancies. At twenty he had arrived,
he declares, " at such a degree of surfeit as to be no longer
tickled by anything that was not out of the way and
difficult ; " 2 he was already enamoured of a literature
highly-spiced, gamey, decadent, in preference to healthy
writing, he had already contracted morbid tastes, in spite
of the pure surroundings amid which he lived. " I rotted
away," he says, " little by little of my own inward corrup-
tion, without a sign being visible externally, like a medlar
on straw ; in the bosom of that worthy, pious, saintly
family, I was idle to the pitch of downright wickedness."
Sainte-Beuve, who later on became a genial Epicurean
like Gautier, likewise began by being a disciple of Werther,
" an amateur, radical Werther," to use M. Guizot's phrase.
Before developing into the judicious critic, so replete with
delicate appreciation and sound sense, of the Causeries
du Lundi and the Nouveaux Lundis, he was the morbid-
minded poet, whom he has described in the book entitled,
1 " In immobility to relish annihilation languorously, like a philter that lulls
to slumber."
2 Mademoiselle de Maupin, ch. v.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 389
Vie, poésie et pensées de Joseph Delorme. " His soul," he
says, " presents henceforward only an inconceivable chaos,
where monstrous fancies, vivid reminiscences, criminal
visions, great thoughts strangled in their birth, wise re-
solutions followed by mad actions, pious aspirations
succeeded by blasphemies, dance and toss confusedly
against a background of despair." Remembering in later
years this early period of storm and stress, Sainte-Beuve
delivered the following judgment on the Romantic School,
where he had learned the art of groaning, lamenting and
despairing at twenty : " In this school, to which I belonged
from the latter part of 1827 down to July 1830, nobody had
any sound judgment whatever, — neither Hugo, nor Vigny,
nor Nodier, nor the brothers Deschamps ; I did more or
less what all the rest did during this period, I put my judg-
ment in my pocket and gave free play to my imagination."
The want of taste, so frequent among the Romanticists,
is nothing but a want of judgment. Is it not, for instance,
a defect of taste and judgment on the part of Chateaubriand
to recount his own sister's incestuous passion, on the part
of Lamartine to describe in minute detail his own mother's
physical charms ? Does not the flood of Confessions, which
since Rousseau has inundated Literature, point to a lack
of tact, of judgment ? "If it is a fault to talk often of
oneself, it is a piece of effrontery, rather a form of insanity,
to be praising oneself at every instant " (Malebranche).
And not only were the Romantic writers, notwithstanding
the great talent and genius of some of their number, want-
ing in judgment, but not a few of them were affected by
nervous complaints and even mental infirmities. Jean
Jacques Rousseau, who was the true promoter of the
Romantic movement, suffered from the " mania of perse-
cution," particularly during the last years of his life.
Several of his books show manifest traces of insanity ;
Voltaire drew attention to the fact. When Rousseau
published La Profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard (" The
Savoyard Vicar's Confession of Faith"), one of his best
works, Voltaire exclaimed, in mingled astonishment and
390 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND TIIE
delight : "Oh ! Rousseau, you write like a madman and
act like a scamp, but you have just spoken like a wise man
and a good one. Read, my friends, and let us greet truth
and morality wherever they show out, even amid ill
sentiments and aberration of mind." Rousseau's insanity
has been described by Dr Môbius, Dr Châtelain, Dr
Krafft-Ebihg ; 1 there is no room left for doubt.
Nor was Rousseau the only Romantic writer touched
with mental disease; Byron, also an Author of a high
genius, was as ill-balanced in mind as he. Taine declares
he was half mad. As a boy he used to fight with his
mother, and the pair of them, after a furious quarrel, would
run to the chemists, each anxious to discover if the other
had not been there to buy poison to commit suicide with.
One day he seized a knife from the table to stab himself
in the breast, and it had to be taken from him by force.
His wife believed him mad and had him examined by the
doctors ; and he himself entertained the dread of " dying at
the top," like Swift. 2 In a letter written in 1811 he says,
" I think I shall end by going mad." Stendhal, who knew
Byron personally and lived several weeks with him, de-
clares that on some days he was actually mad.
Of course I do not maintain for a moment that all the
writers of the Romantic school were victims of insanity.
But notwithstanding my admiration for the genius of some
of them, I am bound to allow the existence in several of a
diseased imagination and morbid sensibility predispos-
ing them to suicide. In Chateaubriand, who resembled
Rousseau in so many respects, imagination and sensibility
were undoubtedly diseased, and, as we have said, he made
an attempt at self-destruction in his early days. — George
1 See also an article by M. Brunetière on La Folie de J. /. Rousseau in the
Revue des Deux Mondes of February 1st, 1890. Sainte-Beuve believed, but on
insufficient grounds, that Rousseau had put an end to his own life in a fit of
madness {Chateaubriand et son groupe % p. 107). As a matter of fact, Rousseau
died of an attack of serous apoplexy.
2 The "Great Dean" had dreaded for years the fate of insanity which
eventually overtook him. " Young . . . tells how he once heard Swift say,
* I shall be like that tree : I shall die at the top.' " (Translator.)
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT, 39 1
Sand too had troubles of sensibility and will, she says so
herself. " I was, I am perhaps still," she writes, " a victim
to excessive sensibility, refusing all restraints of reason,
especially at its crisis."
In more than one passage in the Histoire de ma vie are
to be found traces of actual mental disorder. As a girl
she had hallucinations and had conceived the fancy of an
imaginary god she called Corambo, whom she adored as an
actually existing deity, and paid regular worship to on a
rustic altar. She was possessed for many years with the
idea of suicide ; I have related above how on one occasion
she tried to drown herself. Dr Brissaud, Professor in the
Faculty of Medicine in the University of Paris, who has
made a special study of mental and nervous diseases, and
with whom I have discussed the psychical condition of
George Sand, assured me of the existence in her case of a
nervous disorder, giving me details I think it better not to
repeat out of respect for the woman and her genius.
Alfred de Musset, for all his brilliant talents, did not
escape a degree of nervous disorder that at times bordered
close on actual dementia. His Nuit de Décembre leads me
to believe he suffered from hallucinations and the nervous
phenomenon known by the name of " duplication of self" :
"Du temps que j'étais écolier,
Devant ma table vint s'asseoir
Un pauvre enfant vêtu de noir,
Qui me ressemblait comme un frère. . . " l
Again it would seem to be the result of a fit of intro-
spection when De Musset wrote :
" Mais n'est-il pas un heure dans la vie,
Où le génie humain rencontre la folie?" s
(La Coupe et tes Lèvres.)
1 In the days when I was a schoolboy, there came and sat at my desk a
poor lad clothed in black, who was like me as a brother. ..." If we are to
believe Dr Moreau of Tours, the same nervous phenomenon would seem to
have been exhibited in Goethe's case also. He is said one day to have seen
his own " double " coming to meet him.
9 " But is there not an hour in life, when human genius is near akin to
madness ? "
392 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
On more than one occasion during his life the Poet was
tempted to commit suicide. In La Confession dun enfant
du siècle ("Confession of a child of the Century "^ he
relates how he conceived a longing to kill his mistress
and himself afterwards, and how he concealed a tabic
knife under the pillow for this purpose. In his Lettre à
Lamartine he says he twice over put a weapon to his
naked breast. More than once he wished to kill himself
along with George Sand. "If you renounce life," he writes
to her, " remember the oath you swore ; do not die without
me." In a letter of George Sand's to Dr Pagello, the
companion of the Poet declares she has fears for Alfred de
Musset's reason. " Once," she writes, " three months ago,
he was like a madman all night long, seeing phantoms all
about him, and at the present moment he is complaining
of a nameless and causeless malady, and declaring he is on
the point of death or madness." De Musset was endowed
with a nervous organization of so fine and feminine a
delicacy, that it threatened to break down under the
strain of disappointed love; so impressionable was his nature,
he declares, that the sight of a woman set him trembling,
and he suffered from very serious nervous crises. He is so
well aware of the want of energy that characterizes him
that he has said himself in his Poems :
" Mes premiers vers sont d'un enfant,
Les seconds d'un adolescent,
Les derniers à peine d'un homme." l
Less nervously constituted than Alfred de Musset, and
uniting to the highest lyrical genius much sound sense,
even in Politics, 2 Lamartine had yet been so impression-
1 " My first verses area child's, my second a youth's, my last hardly those of
a man." — De Musset is not the only poet who had this childish nature. The
character of poets whose imagination and sensibility are not counterbalanced
by reason, closely resembles the childish character of women of a nenroos
idiosyncracy. Coppée says of Verlaine that he was a child all his life
(Preface by Coppée prefixed to the Selected Poems of Verlaine).
2 Before M. Thiers, Lamartine had pointed out in his Entretiens that
Italian Unity would lead to German Unity later on, and that this would be
disastrous to France.
NTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 393
in his younger days as to have many times turned his
fhts to suicide. When he was sent to school at
is, "my impressions were so keen and so unhappy ,"
rites, "that ideas of suicide, a thing I had never
I spoken of, assailed me strongly. I can remember
ng whole days and nights pondering by what means
ild be done with a life I could no longer endure." l
ays of Raphaël, who is no other than himself, that
assessed " a sensibility so exquisite it came near being
;ase."
the period when Sainte-Beuve was publishing the
is of Joseph Delorme, Lamartine said of him : " He
a young man, pale-faced, blond-haired and delicate-
ng, morbidly excitable, a poet with all a poet's tearful
tiveness." Sainte-Beuve too had felt the temptation
icide, — by drowning, like Lamartine and George Sand :
" En me promenant là, je me suis dit souvent :
Pour qui veut se noyer la place est bien choisie ;
On n'aurait qu'à venir un jour de fantaisie,
À cacher ses habits au pied de ce bouleau,
Et comme pour un bain, à descendre dans Peau." *
:tor Hugo was never possessed like the other great
; of the Nineteenth Century with the idea of self-destruc-
for all his prodigious imagination, which exaggerated
rthing and was prejudicial to justness of judgment,
/as safeguarded against the temptation by the family
e led and the love he bore his children. Nevertheless,
ing by an Ode in Book V. of the Odes et Ballades,
he would seem to have on one occasion conceived
mrpose of dying after a disappointment in love :
" Tu m'oublieras dans les plaisirs,
Je me souviendrai dans la tombe." 3
imartine, I*s Confidences ', bk. vi.
Walking there I have often said to myself, for any who wishes to drown
f the place is well chosen ; he would only have to come some day of
to hide his clothes at the foot of yonder birch, and as if for a bathe to
to the stream."
You will forget me in a life of pleasure, I will remember in the tomb."
394 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Nor are the celebrated Novelists of the Nineteenth
Century less sensitive and emotional than the Poets»
We learn from the entrancing Memoirs of Mme. Octave
Feuillet how excessively nervous her famous husband
was. 1 Almost all the heroines delineated in his Romances
are nervous women. If their story often ends in suicide,
this is not, as M. Brunetière points out, because suicide
" is the highest manifestation of human will," but because
women of a nervous temperament, incapable of bearing
the pains of disappointed love, kill themselves by a sudden,
unforeseen impulse that leaves little room for deliberate
volition at all. In some very rare cases, suicide maybe
"the highest manifestation of human will," but with
nervous women it is on the contrary a manifestation of
weakness of will and of morbid over-excitement of the
nerves, frequently an unpremeditated, almost automatic,
act. 2 Moreover, in spite of the decency and elegance of
style of Octave Feuillet's Novels, I cannot think his fair
readers' reason is likely to be fortified by the delineation
of these hare-brained heroines of his who kill themselves
out of disappointed love. The painter of these fierce and
desperate passions, who was yet at bottom, like Racine, a
Christian moralist, lavishes over-much admiration on these
society ladies with their reckless loves, who hide under an
aristocratic exterior very vulgar passions. I think it is a
mistake to call him, as some do, "a Musset for family
reading " ; he might more appropriately be described as a
Racine among Novelists. There is the same grace of style,
the same pictures of passionate womanhood, the same
tragic catastrophes of crime and suicide.
Nor are the naturalistic Novelists one whit less nervous,
as a rule, than the great idealistic author I have just
1 An ill-natured article by Jules Janin "occasioned a veritable disturbance
of his health." The temporary failure of his Belle au Bois Dormant ("Sleep-
ing Beauty") "came near killing him." The sight of Rubens* Descent frm
the Cross impressed him so deeply it nearly made him fall down from exec»
of emotion and caused him hallucinations. He used to say the view of a hifft
mountain seemed to weigh down his brain.
9 Dr Magnan, Les Dégénérés, p. 144.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 395
named. Guy de Maupassant said of Flaubert: "Ever
on the quiver and impressionable to a degree, he used
to liken himself to a skinless man, through whom the
slightest touch sent a shudder of pain. . . . Sometimes
he reached such a state of nervous exasperation he would
have liked to destroy the whole human race." It is well
known how excessively nervous the brothers de Goncourt
and Alphonse Daudet were. "Our work," wrote one of
the de Goncourt brothers, "and this I suppose is the
heavy price it has to pay, is based on nervous disease. . . .
Critics may say what they please, they can never prevent
my brother and me being the Saint John Baptists of
modern sensibility {Journal des Goncourt ', vol. vi.). In
his medico-psychological study on Emile Zola, Dr Toulouse
writes: "There exists then a certain nervous want of
balance, an exaggerated susceptibility to emotion, which
provokes, under the influence of very slight excita-
tions, altogether disproportionate and painful reactions." 1
Maxime du Camp has shown us that Flaubert was
epileptic. The latter's nephew, Guy de Maupassant, who
made an attempt at suicide, died of general paralysis,
that is to say a mental disease, and one that must not be
confounded with forms of paralysis resulting from cerebral
haemorrhage.
I do not believe with some physiologists, Dr. Moreau
(of Tours), Dr. Lombroso, M. Jules Soury, M. Max Nordau,
Dr. Charles Richet, that genius is a form of nervous
complaint or of epilepsy. According to them the man of
genius is a diseased, an abnormal being, an epileptic^
•it is very seldom," says M. Richet, "that on studying
near at hand the life of any large number of superior
men, we do not find in their mental organization and
intellectual processes something defective, morbid, patho-
logical, bringing them into connection with the insane. . . .
I will never advise a woman to marry the son of a man
of genius. . . . The great and powerful genius of inventors,
discoverers, creators and disseminators of original ideas,
1 Dr Toulouse, Emile Zola, p. 166.
396 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
is not consistent with irreproachable intellectual sound-
ness. ... In the types of intelligence characterizing the
insane, we meet with certain psychological peculiarities
common at once to madmen and men of genius." l M. Jules
Soury in his treatise on Le système nerveux central ("The
Central Nervous System"), p. 225, — a work by-the-
bye more remarkable for erudition than for accurate
observation, — goes so far as to record this monstrous
opinion, "everything great that has been done in the
world, and to speak quite plainly, everything whatever
worth doing, is the work of these victims of epileptic or
vesanic degeneracy." No doubt as Dr Magnan* said
to me, there have been epileptic geniuses, just as there
have been rheumatic, gouty or tuberculous geniuses.
But epilepsy never produced the genius. Lunatic asylums
are crammed with epileptics, but we do not notice men
of genius amongst them. It is quite true, ill-balanced
geniuses are to be found, even learned idiots, superior
degenerates^ such as Dr Magnan has described in his
Recfierches sur les centres nerveux^ 2nd series, p. 248. These
"superior degenerates," these ill-balanced geniuses, have
extraordinary aptitudes, limited to one art, or one science,
and present immense lacunae no less from the moral
point of view than from the intellectual. But, if there
are geniuses rendered morbid by the exaggeration of one
faculty at the expense of the others, we need only
remember the great Classical writers, Greek, Latin and
French, to be assured there do exist healthy, well-balanced
geniuses too ; we need only think of the most illustrious
of the learned men who have cultivated Letters and
Philosophy, of Hippocrates, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Buffon,
Cuvier, Flourens, J. B. Dumas, Claude Bernard, J. Bertrand,
Pasteur, — notwithstanding the irritability of the last-
named, an irritability provoked by the unjust criticism
1 Preface by M. Charles Richet prefixed to V homme du genie ("The man
of genius ") by Dr Lombroso.
3 It was Dr Magnan who at the Congress of Criminal Anthropology held it
Paris demonstrated by facts the falsity of Lombroso's theory as to the physical
•characteristics of the Criminal.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 397
welled against him. At the same time I am compelled
> recognize that amongst the poets and novelists of the
fineteenth Century, there are a certain number who have
lone more by brilliancy of imagination than correctness
f thought. Solid good sense was not lacking in the
ase of Lamartine (notwithstanding his extreme sensi-
veness), Béranger, E. Augier, Ponsard, Jules Sandeau,
«aprade, Autran, who were not ashamed to belong to
lie school of good sense, nor is it wanting to many contem-
orary writers, M.M. Legouvé, Coppée, Sully-Prud'homme,
lardou, de Bornier, Theuriet, René, Bazin, etc. But,
seing reason and good taste are not infectious, or are
luch less so than passion and disordered imagination, I
m bound to admit that judicious authors exercise less
ifluence over readers than do writers of passion.
Without for a moment pretending that the talent of the
, oet and Novelist is solely and entirely the result of a
ervous organization, it is an undoubted fact that nervosity
lays a great part with men of imagination. This physical
nd moral sensitiveness, which is at any rate one of the
onditions of their talent, leads them to exaggerate the
«pressions received, to make too much of the sufferings
>f life, I will not go so far as to say with Lamartine :
" La sensibilité fait tout notre génie." l
Jut I will say that it contributes a great deal to the
oetical nature and makes poets the specially favoured
titerpreters of sorrow :
"... Tout génie est martyr. . . .
Nos pleurs et notre sang sont Phuile de la lampe
Que Dieu nous fait porter devant le genre humain." f
It is a true saying that to tell one's woes is often a con-
olation ; at the same time a man of inordinate imagina-
ion and painful sensitiveness will often increase and
1 '* *Ti$ sensibility makes all our glory."
* •• . . . Every genius is a martyr. . . . Our tears and our blood are the
J of the lamp that God gives us to carry in front of the human race."'
amartine, Prtmiirts méditations, bk. xxx.
398 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
•embitter his pain by the same means. Poets, Novelists
and Artists in general complain very bitterly of the
miseries of life, because they feel them more deeply
than other people on account of their sensitiveness. In
the Official Report of the suicide of a poet that occurred
some four years ago, I find the following evidence given
by a neighbour: "He always appeared to me to be very
highly strung ; he used often to talk to me in an animated
strain of the miseries of life ; but I merely looked upon
his laments as the expression of a poetical spirit Possess-
ing senses more delicate than other men, being more
sensitive, more imaginative, more impressionable, poets»
artists, suffer much more keenly; this sensibility, which
is one of the conditions of their talent, is the torment of
their life unless they know how to moderate it by the help
of judgment Besides, yielding naturally to the pleasure
of developing exclusively the faculty that is the cause
of their superiority, they lose the proper equilibrium and
harmony of the faculties. But directly a faculty becomes
unduly exaggerated, it produces irritability and nervous
troubles. "Whatever is excessive, is faulty," Lamartine
says with remarkable scientific precision ; " whatever is
not harmony, is disorder in our organization. ... If there
existed equality, equilibrium, harmony among all their
faculties, if sensitiveness were counterbalanced by reason,
imagination by judgment, enthusiasm by good sense . . .
these men strong and able in a single faculty would
become strong in all, and their special superiority, which
now constitutes their misfortune, would be changed into
a universal superiority that would make the glory of
humanity." 1
There is in every man, and still more in every woman,
a tendency to self-pity, to an inclination to accuse fortune
of cruelty, to curse life, — which is indeed often exceedingly
hard. Religion and spiritualistic Philosophy, schools of
good sense as they are, preach resignation. " Blessed are
those who suffer," they repeat, " for one day they shall be
1 Lamartine, Entretien, xcii. , on Tasso.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 399
:onsoled." But young men and women, who neglect
religious consolations, to feed on poetry and romance of
1 melancholy type, quickly lose the faculty of resignation.
These poems and tales flatter what Plato calls " the part
of our soul, thirsty for tears and lamentations, that would
Tain surfeit itself with these." x This tearful part of our
loul must be kept in check and not suffered to contemplate
for too long the tears and lamentations of the poets, for
w the sentiments of others infallibly become our own, and
often encouraging and fortifying our sensibility with the
sight of other men's sufferings, it is very difficult to
moderate them in the case of our own." The melancholy
poetry of the Nineteenth Century has killed resignation
and largely increased the number of suicides. The best
means whereby to moderate our griefs is not to heed
them overmuch, to get out of ourselves, to try and think
of something else, to avoid becoming absorbed in con-
templation of the sad side of life and the reading of
pessimistic poets who, as a matter of fact, while affecting
in their writings a sombre despair, by no means despise
the pleasures of life, like that gay pessimist Schopenhauer.
Maladies of imagination and sensibility being essentially
infectious, it is obvious that young men and women, already
so impressionable naturally, will become still more nervous
when brought into contact with writers having an excess
of these very qualities and constitutionally predisposed to
neuropathic troubles. It is impossible to compose a book
of History, Philosophy, Ethics, Literary Criticism, without
a healthy judgment. But what is impossible to a Historian,
Philosopher, Moralist or Critic, is possible for a Poet and a
Novelist. Imagination and sensibility may be very highly
developed while the judgment is exceedingly feeble, and
inasmuch as imagination and sensibility are what Poet
and Novelist need above all else, they may preserve their
talent unimpaired, even when their reason has gone astray.
In their case reason may falter without their talent being
lessened. To name dead authors only, Tasso, Rousseau,
1 Plato, De Republican bk. x.
400 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Edgar Allan Poe, Gérard de Nerval, Maupassant, have
been noteworthy writers, when they were all the time
sufferers from cerebral disorders. Atrophy of the reasoning
faculties does not hinder a Poet's or Novelist's play of fancy
or their keen sensibility, or prevent them from strongly
impressing their readers by the exercise of these faculties.
We may even go further, and say that with some writers
the fancy seems to gain added vigour in proportion as the
judgment weakens. In Rousseau's Confessions, in his
Dialogues, in the Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire, we
find pages of entrancing charm side by side with others
giving clear evidence of the author's mind being affected
by the " mania of persecution." " There is no doubt the
mental equilibrium of de Nerval," writes Théophile Gautier,
" had long been disturbed, before any of us were aware of
the fact. It was the more difficult to guess, as never was
style more clear and limpid, in one word more reasonable,
than that of Gérard. Even when disease had incontestably
attacked his brain, he still preserved intact all the high
qualities of his intellect. No fault, no error, no blunder
betrayed the disorder of his mental faculties. To the
last he remained impeccable. He was thus long able
to hide a condition no one thought of suspecting. Dark
sayings now and again would make us open our eyes in
wonder, but these he would explain in a fashion so in-
genious, learned and profound, that our admiration of his
genius was only increased." Just as fever will give a
keener vividness to the glance, a diseased nervous system
gives increased brilliancy to the imagination and sensibility
of the Novelist and enables him to exercise a more lively
influence over his readers who are dazzled and stirred by
his flights of fancy.
Seeing then how in Novelist and Poet talent may be
allied with nervous disease or even mental aberration, 1
1 Among musicians nervous and cerebral troubles are even more fréquent,
because their talent has an even more sensuous origin. Schumann vtt
attacked by lypemania (melancholy madness) and attempted suicide ; Pfcguiai
died of general paralysis. Chopin was morbidly nervous. I myself knew
personally the specialist in mental disease who attended Gounod.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 4OI
we may readily understand how dangerous the reading of
works of imagination, when it becomes exclusive, is for
young people and women who read nothing else; the
inordinate, sometimes morbid, sensibility of the Writer is
communicated to his readers. For an educated man,
who is acquainted with maladies of the mind, the morbid
character of neuropathic Authors is obvious in their works ;
but youthful readers fail to notice this and readily fall
under its pernicious influence, for it is through imagina-
tion and sensibility that literature acts upon them. A
tiigh-wrought writer works them to the same pitch of
exaltation as himself. A fiery imagination fires them in
turn. An emotional sensitiveness stirs the same emotions
in them and inflames their fancy. Whence comes the pro-
digious influence Jean Jacques Rousseau has exerted over
tiis innumerable host of readers, if not from the passion-
ate character of his writings ? "I could never write," he
declared himself, " except by virtue of passion." Wisdom
bores the majority of mankind, and good sense sends
them to sleep, while paradox and passion enchant them.
Under the influence of Rousseau and his disciples
Literature has become passionate. With a large number of
Romance-writers and Poets, to think is to feel, to write is
to note down sensations ; like Byron's Manfred, they think
to enlarge the domain of their intellect by increasing the
rage of their sensations, declaring with him, "a new
sensation is revealed to me, it has enlarged the domain
of my thoughts." George Sand, copying Manfred, makes
Lélia say, " I was ever increasing my powers from day to
day, and heightening my sensibility beyond measure."
In the Seventeenth and even in the Eighteenth Century,
writers formed collections of thoughts, maxims, reflec-
tions ; Pascal composed his Pensées, La Rochefoucauld his
Maximes, La Bruyère his Caractères, Vauvenargues his
Réflexions et Maximes, Duclos his Considérations sur les
mœurs. Nowadays it is collections of sensations that
are published. Novels, poems are but analyses of sensa-
tions ; meditations are quite out of fashion. With the
2 c
402 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
one exception of M. Sully-Prud'homme, who composes
philosophical poems, thinkers are rarœ aves among Poets.
Works of literary Criticism, books of Travel and even of
History, are nothing now but books of impressions, sensa-
tions. Thus we find such titles as Idées et Sensations by
the brothers de Goncourt, Sensations d histoire by Barbey
d'Aurevilly, Sensations d'Oxford, Sensations d'Italie by
P. Bourget, Sensations de littérature et d'art by Byvanck.
A critic, who nevertheless possesses the gift of moral per-
spicacity and might well carry on the tradition of our
great Moralists, M. Jules Lemaître, yielding to the fashion
of the day, gives us his Impressions de Théâtre. It seems
as though the part of the Writer is no longer to set men
thinking but feeling. It is no longer to reason he addresses
himself, but to the senses and imagination. Sensation
takes the place of sentiment, and fancy of reason. Litera-
ture becomes painting, music, photography. "I would
have described Sodom very willingly and the Tower of
Babel with enthusiasm," says Théophile Gautier. " I am
not working for the " prix Montyon " of virtue, and my
brain performs to the best of its ability its function of
41 dark room." * Novelists and Poets are ready to describe
all sensations, and particularly those of physical, love
and smell !
Succeeding impressionist literature, we have impressionist
painting, not to mention impressionist justice among juries
and impressionist politics among deputies. The sensations
of a juryman have been written already, and there is
nothing to prevent the sensations of a deputy being issued
before long, for just as the modern jury bases its verdict
on the impressions of the trial, the Chamber keeps Ministers
in office or turns them out according to the impressions of
the sitting. Authors, painters, jurymen and deputies, all
blindly follow their impressions without ever checking them
by reason. Paris has grown as impressionable and hyper-
sensitive as a nervous woman. With many people who
call themselves Christians, religious sentiment itself is
1 TA. Gautier, by E. Bergerat.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 403
only a craving for religious emotion, and even some
formal apologies for Christianity consist rather of a series
of aesthetic and mystical impressions than of arguments
and reasons.
To augment their sensibility, we see writers resort to
drink as a stimulant. This method had already been tried
in Antiquity. " The poet iEschylus," Plutarch says, " used
to compose his tragedies by the help of drink, when he
was sufficiently warmed with wine. And Lampias our
grandfather always showed himself more eloquent, incisive
and fertile in invention after drinking." * To excite their
faculties, novel writers and poets of our own day have
had recourse not to wine only, but to alcohol, absinthe,
opium or hashish. Hoffman had hallucinations, which he
systematically provoked by stimulants, and which helped
him to write his Contes fantastiques, " His poetry was a
disease," Heine said of him ; and Heine himself was a
neuropathic subject and suffered from locomotor ataxy.
Edgar Allan Poe used to drink to rouse his imagination,
and arrive at the visions and hallucinations he turned to
account in writing his Tales of Mystery. He was picked
up in the street suffering from delirium tremens, and carried
to a hospital, where he died. Baudelaire who took him
as his model and translated some of his works, sought
inspiration in opium and hashish, and died of general
paralysis. In 1845, the "Club of Hashish-eaters" ("Le
Club des Haschidins") was founded in Paris, frequented
by literary men in search of hallucinations. Dr. Maurice de
Fleury, who knew Guy de Maupassant personally, tells us
that the famous Novelist in question had for years given
himself up to the abuse of artificial stimulants of thought,
whereas he of all men ought to have refrained from such
things, having several insane persons among his ancestors
in the direct line. 2 The Doctor having complimented him
on the talent he had displayed in the delineation of
1 Plutarch, Table-Talk.
9 Maurice de Fleury, Introduction à la médecine de r esprit, p. 138. F. Alcan,
Paris.
404 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
jealousy in his Novel of Pierre et Jean, the Author
informed him he had not written a single line of it without
first intoxicating himself with ether. Maupassant has
utilized his hallucinations of hearing in Sur teau % and
those of sight in Horla.
Needless to say it is not enough to drink coffee, alcohol
and ether to have talent. But in the composition of such
works as demand only imagination and sensibility, the
temptation is great to resort to artificial stimulants to
obtain a further accession of these qualities.
No doubt such habits of artificial stimulation are far
from general, but they are less uncommon than is generally
supposed. Moreover we find Novelists cultivating their
passions for purposes of analysis, and even encouraging
their nervous disorders as subjects for observation. A
distinguished writer, M. M. Barrés, proposes to borrow
from the bolder resources of treatment and medicine " fresh
means of developing and intensifying sensibility, in order
to arrive at the consummate adoration of ego ! " And
what he fears is to reach the final limit of the sensations
he is capable of and so remain far from God, who is for
him " the sum-total of self-conscious emotions." x
It is not to be wondered at, if in the school of these Writers,
who number their readers by tens of thousands, reason is
far from being at a premium. 2 In authors possessed of
remarkable gifts of imagination and sensibility, the judg-
ment is so weak that, while some believe in spiritualism
and table-turning, others consult somnambulists and pro-
fessors of palmistry ; there are some who do not believe
in God, but do believe in the Devil ; dupes of their own
imaginations, as credulous as children and uneducated
women, many see presages of luck or disaster in the most
insignificant things. Théophile Gautier, for instance, relates
how Gérard de Nerval was entirely upset by the sight of a
1 M. Barrés, L homme libre , pp. 54, 157.
2 Specialists in mental disease even hold that novel reading may produce
melancholic delirium in women by helping to sow disorder in their imaginations
and disturbing their mental and emotional faculties. {Nouveau DùtiûMtoàn
de Médecine of Jaccond, under Lypêmanie (Melancholy Madness).
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 405
black beetle resembling those Egyptian scarabaei that
carry the globe on their head, and there are many similar
cases.
It is perilous to take as guides ill-balanced intellects,
lacking in solid judgment, to prefer fiction to history,
decadent literature to philosophy and science. 1 The
thinker, the man of science, does not seek to find in
artificial stimulants an accession of acumen. Neither
coffee, nor alcohol, nor opium helped M. Guizot to write
the Histoire de la civilisation, or M. Thiers to compose the
Histoire du consulat et de F empire. Their talent is based
on excellent good sense and perfected reason, enlightened
by a ripe experience of men and things.
I have frequently discovered in the documents left
behind them by suicides from disappointed love traces
of literary reminiscence, bearing witness to the constant
perusal of poetry and novels calculated to stimulate the
imagination. For instance, in a letter I copy from an
Official Report relating to the suicide of a lady's-maid, we
read : " Best beloved, before I knew you, my youth was
like a dead woman, buried in a deep coffin, nailed down
by the weight of my sorrows ; it was your love woke it
and raised it from the tomb. Oh! youth mine, I had
buried you but ill." These lyric accents, which one is
rather surprised to find flowing from the pen of a lady's-
maid, show plainly that the poor girl's head had been
turned by reading Musset and Murget, whose books had
intoxicated her imagination ; her suicide is a piece of
literary imitation no less than her style.
What romantic, high-flown dreams, that end so ill, are
stirred in poor girls of the working class by these novels,
newspaper stories and poems, repeating on every page those
entrancing words, — love, intoxication, passion, pleasure,
1 A certain proportion of decadent writers display the phenomena of
"colour hearing "and "auditive tasting," that is to say, sounds give them
sensations of colour, and sensations of taste make them hear sounds. The
decadents consider that the French language has been framed by writers of too
hen 1 thy a habit of body and that it needs to be remodelled by neuropathic
authors.
406 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
delight ! To be the object of a young man's affection, a
young man elegant and high-born like a hero of romance,
becomes the longing of novel-reading workgirls as much
as it is of society young ladies. Their thoughts turn away
from the working-man who might marry them, because of
his dirty clothes, his horny hands and his face blackened
by the grime and coal dust of the factory. Novels create
in these poor girls a romantic, nonsensical state of mind
that is their undoing, for they never say anything of
the beauty of family life, of household joys, and the
happiness of working together for a common end ; instead
of throwing a halo of poetry over the poor and toiling folk
of humble life, writers (excepting Coppée and René Bazin)
prefer to idealize the follies of idle libertines of the great
world. Seduction and suicide are the end of these silly
dreams of love and luxury and pleasure.
If the number of suicides has so largely increased as it
has in the last hundred years, this is in great part due to
the fact that the number of novel-readers has been much
augmented. In former days Novelists wrote for a small
number of readers. Now Novels circulate everywhere, in
the work-room as much as in the drawing-room, in the
garret no less than in the boudoir. I have quite lately
read in the Official Report of a case of suicide how an old
woman wishing to leave a remembrance to a neighbour,
made her a present, before proceeding to kill herself by
means of charcoal fumes, of a big bundle of newspaper
novels for her daughter. A fine present truly ! I heard
the other day a peasant woman say to her husband, who
was going to the market town, "Bring me back Crime
d'amour " (" A Crime of Love "). To read her feuilleton
the cook lets the joint burn, the lady's-maid neglects her
ironing, the housewife forgets her duties. Year by year,
and month by month, we see hundreds, thousands of new
Novels published, while the old ones are re-edited. No
Newspaper is without its feuilleton, no Review but has its
Serial, and God knows there are enough Newspapers and
Reviews. The feuilleton is what makes the success of the
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 407
paper, and the Serial Story that sells the Review. There
are even some Newspapers and Reviews that publish
several feuilletons and several Serials running concurrently.
It is a well-known fact that suicide is much more un-
common in the country than in towns. One cause of this
difference arises from the circumstance that country women
read few Novels, while women in the large towns read a
great many. In a Report addressed to the Minister of the
Interior, the Préfet of the Department du Léman states
that in 1812 "melancholia is much more common at
Geneva than anywhere else n in Switzerland, and assigns
as the chief cause of this the excessive reading of romances
which Jean Jacques Rousseau had brought into fashion. 1
Refusing to work for the Montyon prize of virtue, modern
Novelists are working for the Morgue. In their eagerness
to find subjects for picturesque description everywhere,
they have written up and embellished everything, adultery,
profligacy, drunkenness, low life, seduction, suicide, crime
and amorous passion ; everything has been idealized and
made to look poetical, — except good health, hard work,
conjugal love and family affection.
While admitting that Werther had been the determining
cause of a great number of suicides, Goethe maintained it
was not right to make the writer responsible " because one
of his works, misunderstood by narrow intellects, has,
when the worst is said, purged the world of a dozen or
so fools and rascals, incapable of anything better than ex-
tinguishing altogether the feeble remains of their wretched
light." 2 This Olympian scorn for the readers of Werther
who have put an end to themselves seems to me far from
being a satisfactory or sufficient answer. In the first place,
suicide is not always a mark of folly and weak-mindedness,
seeing that Chateaubriand, Lamartine, George Sand and
Goethe himself, all made attempts at suicide. Besides, if
it were permitted to Writers to purge the world of narrow
intellects and extinguish the light of life in scantily
1 La folic de J, J, Rousseau, by Dr Châtelain, p. 151.
* Entretien de Goethe et <f Eckermann, p. 267.
408 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
illuminated minds, great heavens ! what hecatombs of
sacrifice should we be authorizing!
To escape the responsibility of his book and its fatal
effects, Goethe said on another occasion to Lord Bristol,
who had vividly reproached him with the latter : rt If you
speak so of poor Werther, what tone will you adopt
towards those great men who, by a stroke of the pen, send
a hundred thousand men into the field, eighty thousand
of whom will cut each other's throats and mutually excite
each other to murder, fire and pillage? " Without denying
the responsibility of fighting men, how can anyone com-
pare with the glorious deaths of soldiers defending country
and flag these aimless and useless suicides of a set of
young lovers with sore hearts?
M. Paul Bourget, who to begin with, threw doubt on
the influence exercised by Literature, on conduct, took
a juster view of an Author's responsibilities after the
occurrence of the double suicide of C and Mme.
G , of which I have spoken above, and has shown
clearly the evil books may do to young people, in his
admirable Novel Le Disciple, which is nothing else than
the history of the C in question. This responsibility
of the Writer is affirmed in his later Novels with a pro-
found conviction and an anxiety for the future of the
rising generation that prove how startled he was by the
share of responsibility falling upon Literature in the crime
of passion committed by the student of Constantino
" These great Writers you envy," he makes the Abbé
Taconnet say in Mensonges, "do you ever think of
the tragic responsibility they have assumed in sowing
broadcast their own individual wretchedness? ... Do
you suppose that in the pistol shot René has just fired at
himself, there was not something of influence emanating
from those two apologies of suicides, — Werther and Rollat
Do you know, it is a terrible thing to think how Goethe
is dead, Musset is dead, and yet their work is still able
to put a lethal weapon in the hand of a suffering child."
Yes! the Writer's responsibility has no limits in time
)NTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 4O9
»ace. It is not merely in his lifetime that he acts upon
eaders' minds ; his influence survives him, defunctus
tur y — " though dead, he speaks." Nor does it make
felt only in his own immediate neighbourhood, it
nds far and wide through the most distant lands.
1 the facility of intercommunication we now possess,
the multiplication of libraries and reading-rooms,
innumerable Reviews and half-penny Papers appear-
continually, and all publishing one, if not more,
Utons, literary sophistries penetrate to all and sundry,
îe remotest depths of the country, to the ends of the
1, with astonishing rapidity.
I might be allowed to add a few words of advice to
t given by the author of Le Disciple to young people,
uld tell them : " Literary activity, divorced from action,
become a danger, if it is badly directed, if reading is
ued without method and devoted mainly to books
ulating sensibility and imagination, which are often
gulated at your age. Reason and will power are
: you should develop above everything in your-
îs, and to that end beware of unhealthy Literature.
>u wish to keep a straightforward mind and a sound
t, do not indulge in too much reading of Novels and
ctions of poetry, very often written by badly balanced
is. Avoid physiological naturalism and mystical
ralists, the combination of dreamy reverie with
aal longings, and sceptical idealism ; love good sense,
y of mind, equilibrium of the faculties, and to attain
î go back to the great writers of the Seventeenth
ury, those healthy and robust intellects of an earlier
> back to the Ancient authors. All you know of
1 at present is in translations of a few isolated and
lated passages, the memory of which, associated as
with your school lessons, is not over and above
eable. Read as a whole jEschylus, Sophocles,
pides, Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle and Plutarch in
/ot's exquisite version. Read again Virgil, Lucretius,
410 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
Horace, Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, with the commentaries
of MM. Boissier, Patin, Gréard, Berger, Nisard, Martha,
and you will be surprised at the pleasure and profit you
will derive from the task. If as the result of some
disappointment in love, the idea of suicide crosses your
mind, remember how a woman, George Sand, cured
herself of the temptation to suicide that possessed her
by a perusal of the Greek and Latin Classics.
Love the Poets, but those only who have given more
heed to loftiness and correctness of thought than to
sonority of words and splendour of imagery ; prefer gold
to tinsel. Reject erotic and mystic verse; prefer that
which elevates the soul, philosophical and religious
poetry. Never forget that the greatest poets of France
are still those of the Seventeenth Century, Corneille, Racine,
Molière and La Fontaine ; read them, re-read them, they
are never wearisome. But do not read without due pre-
caution the pessimistic poets and novelists of the Nineteenth
Century, who endowed with an abnormal sensitiveness and
a morbid imagination, feel too vividly the sadness and
sorrows of life and express their dismal convictions with
a heart-rending emphasis that kills all proper resignation.
To read their despairing outcries makes life a vale of tears.
To enjoy life, or at worst to endure it, a literature that
inspires hope and courage is indispensable.
Do not despise the Moralists. I know they are not
generally appreciated at your age, and are reserved to
be read in old age. But never be frightened at their
grave title of Moralists ; you will find their works full of
charm, you will not experience a single instant of weariness
with Montaigne, Pascal, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld,
Vauvenargues, Joubert Montaigne is as delightful as
Plutarch, Pascal is heart-stirring, La Bruyère entrancing,
Joubert charming. Among contemporaries, you have
literary critics, who are at bottom moralists full of wit
and good sense, D. Nisard, Saint-Marc Girardin, Bersot,
that tender heart and character of antique mould, Caro so
odiously vilified, Jules Lemaître, Brunetière.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 4I I
Read also the Historians, who are almost all men of
weighty and judicious intellect. What marvellously
balanced geniuses, — Tacitus, Bossuet, Montesquieu ! His-
tory possesses the merit of taking us out of ourselves,
making us forget our private griefs, carrying us into the
mighty past, interesting us in the sufferings and the
advances of humanity.
In the society of these chosen spirits you will run no
risk of catching the "disease of the century"; you will
find them a tonic to reason and will. They too have
known sadness in its nobler aspects ; they too have felt
pity for the sufferings of humanity and above all for its
moral infirmities ; they too, in spite of their religious faith
or philosophic creed, were terrified by the awful mysteries
of life. What weight have the declamatory outcries of
Werther and René, tormented as they were by sexual
craving, beside the melancholy utterances of Pascal and
Jouffroy ? Who has felt tenderer pity for the sufferers of
the lonely and poor than Racine and Fénélon, who ex-
posed themselves to disgrace in order to draw Louis XIV.'s
attention to them? Who has had more compassion for
animals than La Fontaine, and who has better appreciated
the charm of solitude ? These great men, being men of
sense, did not rise in revolt against God, because He has
made life so short and so full of wretchedness. If they
had love disappointments, they did not turn their thoughts
to suicide, like those melancholy, love-sick beings who blow
out their brains when they fail to seduce their friend's wife ;
they realized there are sufferings more noble and more
poignant than any due to a woman's indifference or the
unsatisfied cravings of passion :
" Les beaux chagrins que les chagrins d'amour,
Nous passons tous par là, c'est l'affaire d'un jour." l
Do not take too seriously the melancholy of our modern
poets and novelists ; often it is more literary than real, the
1 "Oh ! a fine sorrow truly, — disappointed love ! Why, we all go through
it ; 'tis the affair of a day." Victor Hugo, Ruy-Blas.
412 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE
origin of their despair is sometimes only a check in love
or a wound to their self-conceit. Nothing is nobler than the
melancholy of a thinker, a Lamartine, an Alfred de Vigny,
a Sully-Prud'homme ; but the melancholy and despair of
a poet tricked by his mistress have less dignity. Besides,
great griefs are dumb, they do not flaunt themselves before
the public. Remember this, many of these melancholy
poets, who pose so romantically and urge other men
to suicide, were jolly fellows really, who left all their
melancholy behind in their books ; remember their
misanthropy did not include women and that while
they hated them in verse, they loved them particularly
well in everyday life. 1 At the very time when simple-
minded readers of Werther were blowing their silly brains
out, Goethe was consoling himself for a first love dis-
appointment by giving his heart successively to Frederika,
Lili Schoenemann, Christina Vulpius, Minna Herzlieb.
Never forget that the prophets of suicide are often
afraid of death, just as those poets who are most
bellicose in their verses are often the most peaceable
of men in their lives. 2 Writers themselves are the first
to make fun of readers who copy literally the characters in
their novels and kill themselves by way of imitation. If
melancholy seems poetical to you, go and visit in the
asylums the unhappy patients who have lost their reason
as the result of disappointed love and have attempted to
kill themselves, to escape the sorrows of life ; you will see
that gloomy melancholy is a veritable mental disease, a form
of deterioration with nothing poetical about it, that good
spirits, or at any rate equable spirits, are marks of energy
1 This is precisely what Sophocles said long ago of Euripides in somewhat
coarse terms, which the reader will find, if he wishes, in Bayle's Dictionary*
article "Euripides."
a A friend of Béranger tells us that the poet, who sang the Great Napoleon's
Wars and deemed the Bourbons too peacefully inclined, had escaped military
service by deceiving the authorities as to his age, thanks to a very precocious
degree of baldness ( Vie de Béranger, by Paul Boit eau, p. 38). Dumas pert,
who assigns to Antony a look of fate, an eye of gloom, a diction of despair,
had nothing whatever fateful, gloomy or despairing either in his person or his
way of life.
CONTAGION OF LITERATURE AS AFFECTING IT. 413
and conditions of health no less for the mind than for
the body.
In fact, follow the advice Rene's sister used to give
him : a Seek something to do. . . . Perhaps you will find
in marriage the consolation of your griefs. A wife and
children will fill your days."
To accurately determine the degree of responsibility
resting upon Literature in connection with the frequency
of suicide, I must now answer an objection I foresee will
be made. All those who read Novels, Poems and Plays
glorifying suicide, do not kill themselves ; therefore I shall
be told it is evident such reading cannot determine suicide
by way of imitation. No doubt literary suicide is not
determined solely by imitation of books ; over and above
this the reader must have a physiological predisposition
in that direction. Deeply convinced as I am of the
existence of Free Will, for reasons I cannot well state at
length here, 1 I believe none the less in a very considerable
influence being exerted by temperament. All who suffer
unhappiness, who have to mourn broken hopes and
ambitions, or grieve for disappointed love, do not resort to
self-destruction. Wretchedness, disillusion, disappointment
are not enough by themselves to bring about a voluntary
death; besides all this, there must be a temperament of
a nature that these motives can act upon. Except in
cases of actual insanity, a physiological predisposition,
apart from any external cause, is not enough by itself
to determine suicide ; and an external cause without a
predisposing temperament is equally insufficient to lead
to such a catastrophe. It is the combination of an ex-
ternal motive, wretchedness, jealousy, or what not, and
a physiological predisposition, that brings about a fatal
result. The same thing is true of physical maladies. All
who are attacked by the same microbes do not die ; some
resist the infection, while others succumb. The microbes
kill only those whose organism cannot struggle against
them successfully : yet no one will say microbes are harm-
1 I have pointed them out in my book Le Crime et la Peine.
414 SUICIDE DETERMINED BY PASSION.
less, because some organisms have made a victorious
resistance to their attacks. Similarly some minds, mort
sensible than others, resist the perusal of Wertfur % of René,
of the Plays and Novels that defend suicide ; but we cannot
therefore declare these books to be innocuous. I believe
I have proved by incontestable evidence that they have
actually determined, among readers predisposed to succumb
to their teaching, no small number of self-sought deaths.
CHAPTER XI.
CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE CONTAGION
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT.
"Songeons à cette épouvautable communication de crimes qui
existe entre les hommes, complicité, conseil, exemple, approbation,
mots terribles qu'il faudrait méditer sans cesse. ... Où sont les
bornes de la responsabilité ? " l — T. de Maistre.
(Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, 3* édition.)
WHEN in 1848 scenes of Revolution were being re-
enacted in Paris, a Historian, looking on at a parody
of a Revolutionary procession defiling past, exclaimed :
44 Look ! my History of the Great Revolution passing
before my eyes." Investigating as a Magistrate the
motives of crimes of passion, I have in the same way
frequently had occasion to observe how these crimes are
imitations of Romances, nothing more nor less in fact than
Literature in action.
In August 1 88 1, the Assize Court of the Seine ad-
judicated on the case of a young man, Bernard by name,
whose mother was " concierge " to M. L , a member of
the French Academy ; the individual in question, whose
head was turned by Novel reading, had tried to penetrate
at night into the room of Mile. D , his master's grand-
daughter, to kiss her in her sleep. The girl's mother, who
slept in the next room, awakened by the sound of his
steps, got up, and was stabbed by Bernard with a knife in
several places.
The questions of the Juge dinstruction elicited the
fact that the young man was in the habit of lying in bed
] " Only think of the appalling intercommunication of crimes existing between
man and man, — complicity, advice, example^ approbation^ terrible words we
should never cease to ponder over. . . . Where are the limits of responsi-
bility?"
415
416 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
part of the day reading Novels, accounts of crimes ar*</
famous trials. In his room were found the Idiot, the
Péché dune Vierge, the Assassinat dune fille, the Crime dt
la Comtesse, the collected numbers of the Tribunal illustré,
besides poems entitled Visions, Peines de cœur, Renaissance
de r amour. 1 Questioned about his favourite reading, he
said he was very fond of love stories. It was shown that
he had a great repugnance for manual labour of all kinds,
and that when he was not reading Novels, he would do
nothing but talk about the stage, actresses and so forth,
or enlarge on the love he felt for Mlle. D . During
the preceding year he had stolen a petticoat belonging
to the child and had carried it with him to his sleeping
room. Bernard was not recognized by Mme. D at the
moment of his attempt, but was driven subsequently to
confess his guilt, which however he tried to account for
by saying he had done what he had in a fit of somnambul-
ism, urged on by an irresistible impulse. This statement
was found to be untrue ; he had never been a somnambulist,
though he described exactly the phenomena of sleep-
walking. " I had read all about it in my books," he told
Dr. Lassègue, who examined him and found him to possess
a highly nervous temperament, an intellect at once subtle
and exceedingly weak, and a morbidly excitable imagina-
tion. It is on suchlike nervous temperaments, combining
a too excitable imagination with weak powers of mind,
that romantic books make a deep impression. And many
children and many young people display this type of
physical and moral organization.
In 1886 the Assize Court of the Pas-de-Calais had to
deal with two young men, belonging to a well-to-do
peasant family of that Department, Henri and Clément
Muchembled by name. His imagination fired by romantic
reading, Clément fell violently in love with a girl of the
neighbourhood of his own age. Having quarrelled with
her, he made up his mind to punish her and took his
1 The Idiot, A Maiden's Sin, A Courtesan's Murder, The Countess's Crime,
Illustrated Police News, Visions, Pançs of the Heart, Renaissante 0/ Love.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 417
cousin Henri into his confidence. The two youths, who
had read a great many novels and used to call each other
fcy the names of Flying Stag and Great Serpent, borrowed
from Fennimore Cooper's stories, determined to murder the
girl and then start for America, the land of The Last of the
JHohicans. They bought big knives, which they wore for
several days in leather sheaths, very proud, they declared,
at feeling themselves armed. Surprising the poor girl in
a wood, they stabbed her with their knives in seventeen
places.
Examination brought out the fact that before starting
for the ambuscade they had prepared, the lads had drawn
up under the title of A Terrible Drama an account of the
crime they were about to commit ; in it they described
themselves as victims to melancholy, weary of life and
disgusted with the world, and after recounting the girl's
murder, they proceeded to describe their own suicide.
In July 1881, the Assize Court of the Department of
the Seine had before it a youth named Lemaître, fifteen
years of age, who had murdered a little boy of six. He
had taken him up into his bedroom, tied his hands behind
his back, thrown him full length on the bed, then cut his
throat and opened his abdomen. At first blush this crime
seems the act of a madman ; but Drs. Motet and Legrand
du Saulle, who examined the youthful criminal, found no
symptoms of mental derangement. Dr. Legrand du Saulle
protested in his report against " the sort of literature that
familiarizes the public with Crime and raises a kind of
pedestal for those who appear before the Criminal Courts."
The lad Lemaître had devoured this species of literature ;
of good abilities he had attracted notice at the Communal
School by his quickness, but also by his conceit. He used
to keep himself apart from his schoolfellows during play-
time, and at night was for ever reading in his own room
novels and dramas of the Criminal Courts. On leaving
school, he ran loose in the streets and in places of ill
repute ; placed in various employments, he robbed his
masters to buy novels and theatre tickets. The Judge
2 D
41 8 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
having asked him how he spent his days, he replied: "I
used to read a great deal, lying on my bed ; I went to the
theatre, where I saw the Chevaliers du Brouillard played
My afternoons I used to spend in the Jardin des Plantes,
taking a book with me there, the Dame de Montsoreau or
the Orphelins du Pont-Notre-Dame!' l The Judge : " What
theatre used you to frequent? — The Prisoner: "I took
stalls at the Opéra Comique, the Ambigu or the ChAtikt.
I used always to choose the best seats."
When in prison, he asked " whether the Papers spoke
of him and if his photograph was on sale the same as
Menesclou's was." On his trial, he struck a theatrical
attitude, describing his crime without a trace of emotion,
unmoved and looking the spectators quietly in the face.
He said a Somnambulist had prophesied he would be
famous.
Penitent criminals very often confess that their fall was
due to bad books. A certain A , son of a Captain in
the Custom-house service, who was condemned to death
for murder, said : " I want to tell young men the causa
that have undone me, to make them see how, going from
bad to worse, I have come at last to the foot of the
scaffold. . . . Youthful profligates, believe a dying man;
I began like you by being merely a loose liver, but from
sin to sin I have become a murderer. Bad books have
been my ruin." Not a Governor or Chaplain of a gaol,
not a Magistrate, but has received similar avowals.
"It is the reading of novels more than anything else
that has brought me here," said the youth Ronat, who
murdered the forewoman at his place of employment. . . .
I had been warned of the harm these books might do
me, but I did not believe a word of it ; yet this was the
beginning of all my ruin. They made me see life as
something quite different to the reality ; I indulged in
altogether impossible fancies."
Lachaud who defended the murderer Tropmann, said in
1 The Knights of the Mist, The Lady of Montsoreau, The Orphans of iki
Bridge of Notre Dame.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 419
e course of his speech in which he drew a sketch of the
cused's character and examined into the motives of his
me: "His head was turned by bad books, a kind of
iding highly injudicious and dangerous for him ; his
eference was for dismal* stories, crammed with calamities
d where horror is piled on horror. He told a witness
loved to read the Juif Errant (" Wandering Jew ") of
agene Sue. Tropmann admitted to the Abbé Crozer
at novel reading was at the bottom of his profound
moralization. "By dint of living in this imaginary
>rld, he had lost all notion of justice and honour, and
is fairly enamoured of those gallows-birds who regain
e advantages of a virtuous and reputable existence by
/ishing about them the fruits of a life of crime, and die
the odour of philanthropy after making a handsome
come by the judicious use of knife and poison." 1
In the Gouffé case, it was proved that novel reading of
certain kind had done much towards depraving the
aracter of the girl Bompard.
Criminal Court stories giving an account of famous
imes are exceedingly popular; they are published in
iilleton form by the small halfpenny Papers and pene-
ite to every corner of the country. Advertised by big,
loured posters representing a scene of murder or orgy,
ey familiarize the minds of children, girls and women
th ideas and pictures it would be wiser to keep them
ignorance of. On every dead wall in Paris we see
urdered men, tortured children, women taking part in
snes of wild revelry ; and these pictures one and all are
graved on the minds of the passers-by.
All who know the susceptibility of a child's brain
impressions and the powerful effect a moral shock may
oduce, must recognize that a lascivious picture may
ofoundly stir the imaginations of young people, and
pecially of girls at the period of puberty. I have drawn
tention in the preceding chapter to the great influence
erted by the first books read ; still deeper is the mark
1 Souvenirs de la petite et de la grande Roquette^ vol. ii. p. 228.
420 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
left by the first pictures seen, they make a far profound»
impression than words do. If in Schools, in the Streets,
were displayed fine pictures representing historical, patriotic
and religious subjects and scenes of country life, children's
minds would be imbued, almost 'without an effort, merely
through the eyes, with really moral lessons. Instead of
this, pictures are flaunted on every wall, in the street
kiosks and in booksellers 1 windows, representing crimes
of hate and crimes of wantonness, constituting a genuine
offence against morality and youthful modesty. Such
things are engraved on the memory and leave ineffaceable
traces behind ; they corrupt the imagination and may
easily lead to the commission of analogous acts.
Novels and Plays are written based on the crimes of
Fualdès, the Courier of Lyons, Tropmann. The repro-
duction under various forms of Tropmann's notorious
crimes brought such fine pickings to the Press, that the
director of one paper, wishing to let his staff share in these
advantages, gave them a magnificent dinner, which wound
up with drinking the murderer's health.
In the execution of his crime the murderer frequently
copies the methods he has read a description of in a novel.
The youth Lemaître, referred to above as having cut a
little boy's throat, said : " I read numbers of novels, and
I found in one of them a description of the scene I carried
out." Of course the description of a criminal action is
far from inspiring everybody with the wish to reproduce
it, but it has this suggestive effect with a certain proportion
of children, girls and young men of an impressionable
nature and a nervous and morbid disposition. In a
pamphlet he wrote on the subject of Obsession du Meurtri
^Predisposition to Murder") Dr. Ladame relates how a
woman killed her children as the result of reading about
a similar crime, and how yet other women, struck by the
details of this murder, were in their turn pursued by an
almost irresistible impulse to kill. Dr. Aubry gives similar
instances. Murder is infectious, just as madness is, and
suicide, and political excitement. Victor Hugo writing to
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 42 1
artine, on September 7. 1830, says : " In this whirlpool
engulfs us and makes us dizzy, I have found it im-
ble to bring together three thoughts of poetry and
Iship. A feverish excitement turns every head, and
is no way to blockade oneself against external im-
ions ; the contagion is in the air, and infects you
her you will or no."
was as a result of her excessive devotion to romantic
tture that Mlle. Lemoine, a young lady residing with
nother at a château in the Department of Indre-et-
ï, became her coachman's mistress and subsequently
her mother's assistance killed the child resulting from
llicit connection. Having read many novels, particu-
those of George Sand, in which she found great ladies
g inferiors, she wished to do as they did and ac-
ingly surrendered herself to her coachman, declaring
vas happy in lifting him to her own level. In George
Is Valentine, as is well known, a peasant's son loves a
itess's daughter; in André, it is a Marquis's son that
and marries a work -girl. In the Compagnon du tour
wnce, Yseuit de Villepreux wishes to marry the cabinet-
ir Pierre Huguenin. — Similarly in the Eighteenth
ury Novelists and Poets had recommended dispropor-
te marriages with servant-maids or with working men.
>seau married a servant, and everybody knows how
ppy the union made him. Voltaire, in Nanine, makes
3ount say :
" L'éclat vous plaît ; vous mettez la grandeur
Dans les blasons, je la mets dans le cœur.
L'homme de bien, modeste avec courage
Et la beauté spirituelle, sage,
Sans biens, sans nom, sans tous ces titres vains
Sont à mes yeux les premiers des humains." l
may be the part of a wise man to look for greatness
Display delights you ; you look for greatness in blazoned arms, I in the
Goodness, modesty and courage, spiritual beauty and wisdom, albeit
it wealth or name or any of these vain titles, are in my eyes the first of
1 qualities."
422 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
of heart in preference to greatness of birth, but it is not
so wise to imagine a good heart is more likely to be found
in a servant-girl than in a young lady of birth and breeding.
Novelists are merely misleading their readers' judgment
when they advise young men to look for a wife in the
kitchen, and girls to choose their fiancé from the stable
or the workroom. Already in Astrée we have seen great
ladies accepting the love of their inferiors. "How,
Madam," says Léonide to Galatée, " should you ever love
a shepherd? Do you not remember who you are?"—
" Oh ! yes, Léonide, I remember," she returns, " but you
must also know that shepherds are men as much as Druids
or Knights." If we find dependents lifting their eyes to
their masters' daughters and the latter not scandalized by
the audacity of the " earth-worm in love with a star," it
is often to the reading of romantic literature we must
attribute the fascination. At the trial, the presiding Judge
said, addressing Mile. Lemoine : " You used to read a
great many novels?" — The accused: "Yes! sometimes,
but without my mother's knowledge." T lie Judge : "You
told the Juge d'instruction your mother did know."—
The accused: "Oh! no ; she knew I was in the habit of
reading stories appearing as Jeuilletons in the papers, but
I always hid the others from her." Urged to declare how
she had received her coachman's offers of love, she replied :
" F is the first man who ever spoke words of love
to me ; I was unfortunate enough to believe him, and
abandoned myself to him. . . . Afterwards, I was divided
between shame at having sacrificed my honour to a
servant and the happiness of having raised to my own
level a man who, according to social conventions, was in
an inferior position to mine." Becoming pregnant, she
was not at all affected by the scandal of the thing, hoping
to force her mother to consent to the wished-for marriage
with the coachman. " This was the only means," she said,
"of bringing my romance to a fitting termination. I
wished to make a man happy, as my mother had made
my father." However, her mother on discovering her
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 423
daughter's condition, dismissed the coachman, and after
vain attempts to bring about abortion, ended by killing
the child before birth.
The "Procureur General," who prosecuted, and M.
Lachaud who was Counsel for the defence, were agreed
as to the fact that the young woman had been ruined by
reading novels. " I see with regret," the former declared,
"how the Drama and the Novel are making themselves
felt in judicial cases." In a recent trial at the Assize
Court at Paris there was another girl, of mournful celebrity,
who had to defend herself at one and the same time
against a crime and a passion described as being un-
bridled. To prove the reality of the latter, and doubtless
in the hope of interesting and softening the Court, her
letters were read aloud, their ardent style painting the
force of this irresistible passion. Well! these passionate
epistles were not the girl's own at all ; she had copied
them in the most barefaced way from a not over-decorous
Play of the period. Like her predecessor, Angelina
Lemoine plagiarised, in order to lend a halo of poetry
to her infatuation.
I have often noted in criminal proceedings how seducers
are in the habit of lending novels to girls they are trying
to lead astray, and how they very soon attain their ends
by this means. On August 24th, i860, the Assize Court
of the Bouches-du-Rhône tried for abduction of a girl
under age, a certain Treuil, a commercial traveller, a
married man of thirty-seven, who had enticed from her
home a girl belonging to a highly respectable family of
Marseilles. To pave the way to seduction, the man had
made her read a number of trashy novels. — Vitalis, a
retired bookseller, who was condemned to death and
executed at Marseilles, was ruined himself (he admitted
as much) and had ruined his accomplice, Marie Boyer, by
persistent reading of novels. In Marie Buyer's bedroom
were found a host of novels, conspicuous among the number
being Vierges folles, Mlle, de Maupin % Mœurs galantes de
Marseilles.
424 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Novelists who have described the methods of seduction
have not failed to note how profligates take advantage of
books to attain their end. In Bourget's Novel Le Disciple^
Robert Greslou, anxious to make Charlotte fall in love
with him, takes care to ply her with sentimental literature.
The day the girl comes to ask his advice as to what to
read, he feels he has her, as much as ever a sportsman
does when he has a bird at the end of his gun ; " I too,"
he exclaims, " I held my human prey at the end of my
gun. When she came to ask me to direct her reading,
was not Charlotte putting herself of her own accord within
reach of my weapon ? " Then with a perverse ingenuity
he begins by making her read tales and poems likely to
stir her fancy without startling her.
Depraved women desirous of ruining a virtuous friend,
start by lending her novels to read. " Dear friends who
are for trying her mettle and attempting to shake her
virtue," Michelet writes, "do not fail to lend her on the
sly something of George Sand's." 1
The famous Huet, Bishop of Avranches, held the read-
ing of romances a necessary part of a girl's education, to
teach her to distinguish true love from false. But he quite
forgot that a girl does not read a romance in a critical
spirit, that the delineation of love intoxicates her, stirring
her heart and rousing her imagination. Specialists in
mental disease are aware that erotic passions may even be
awakened by the perusal of novels which, while perfectly
inoffensive and indeed instructive for a grown man, are
extremely perilous stuff for young girls. 2
Here, for instance, is what I find in Dechambre's
Dictionary of the Medical Sciences, under "Nervous
Diseases " : " Who does not know the enervating effects
of erotic books and plays and of some forms of social
entertainment, which overstimulate the senses prematurely,
excite the imagination unduly, and expose young people
1 V Amour i p. 275.
* P. Moreau (of Tours), Les aberrations du sens génésique> p. 176 ; Dr.
Magnan, Obsession criminelle morbide ; Dr. Bourgeois, Les Passions.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 425
to all the aberrations of romantic reverie, when they do
not directly lead to a hysteric diathesis."
Among books liable to awake erotic ideas, I do not
hesitate to include works of mystical devotion, in which
the love of God is assimilated to human love. Mon-
seigneur Dupanloup had a horror of them, and wished to
see a return to the books of piety composed by Bossuet,
Fénelon and Bourdaloue. Extravagant mysticism, like
romantic sentimentalism, contains a great deal of latent
sensuality.
The best Novels, which may be read without danger by
married women, may be perilous for young girls, because
they serve to overstimulate their romantic sentimentality.
I have heard a moralist declare, a man of the finest intellect
and most judicious mind, M. C. Martha, that Paul and
Virginia was for a girl a more dangerous book perhaps
than a modern naturalistic novel. Nor is it without good
reason that Flaubert mentions the reading of Paul and
Virginia by Madame Bovary in her early days as one of
the causes conducing to her romantic excitability and
leading up to her fall. Again we are justified in sup-
posing it was to bring to an earlier head the outbreak of
passion in the heart of Graziella that Lamartine made his
heroine read this work. As he says himself, after reading
its pages, "you would have said a sudden revolution had
changed the beauteous marble into flesh and blood and
melted it into tears. The girl felt her soul, asleep till
then, revealed to a consciousness of itself in the soul of
Virginia. She seemed to have ripened by six years of
growth in half an hour." — Dr. Magnan has recorded how
the lover of Mile. Van Zand, who long pursued her with
his sentimental addresses, and ends by getting himself
confined in Sainte-Anne Asylum, always attributed his
romantic and high-strung passion to the perusal of Paul
and Virginia. A famous authoress, the writer of some
celebrated novels, says : " I will not pretend that novels,
even the purest, do not do harm ; they have taught us
far too many of the deepest secrets of our nature. There
426 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
is no feeling we can experience without a sort of recollection
of having read about it somewhere; all the veils of the heart
have been rent asunder. The Ancients would never have
made their soul in this way a theme for fiction ; they kept
it as a sanctuary into which even their own eyes would
have feared to pry." l La Fontaine, by way of apologising
for the light-heartedness of his tales, said very justly: "If
there is anything in our writings likely to make a deep
impression on men's minds, this is certainly not the light-
hearted gaiety of these tales, which only touches the
surface of things. I should be much more afraid of a
gentle melancholy, into which the most chaste and modest
of romances are likely enough to plunge us, and which goes
far towards paving the way for love." 2
It was the reading of a Tale of Romance that proved
the undoing of Francesca da Rimini. " If you so greatly
desire," she says in the Inferno, "to learn what was the
first root of our love, we were one day reading by way of
pastime the adventures of Lancelot and how he was
smitten with love ; we were alone and quite without
distrust. Again and again the words made our eyes
encounter and our faces change colour. . . . The book
and he who wrote it were for us another Galahad (pandar);
that day we read no more." — It was by reading sentimental
books with Charlotte that Werther strove to touch her
heart. "Ah! my friend," writes Werther . . . "how many
times in the middle of some passage in an enthralling book
have our hearts, Lotta's and mine, understood each other I*
It was while reading with Werther some of Ossian's songs
that Charlotte came very near giving herself to him, like
Francesca da Rimini in Dante. Their hearts were melted;
Werther interrupted the reading and threw down the book,
then seized Lotta's hand and bathed it in tears. Lotta
rested her head on the other arm and covered her eyes
with her handkerchief; the agitation of both was extreme
They felt their own wretchedness in the hero's destiny,
1 Mme. de Staël, De V 'Allemagne, 2nd Part, ch. xxviii.
2 La Fontaine, Preface to the second edition of the Contes.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 427
they felt it with one heart, and their tears intermingled.
. . . Their burning cheeks touched. The whole world
disappeared from their eyes ; he took her in his arms and
pressed her to his heart. . . ." Charlotte had strength
of mind enough to recover herself, and running to her
room barricaded the door ; — but she was only just in
time.
Old Brantôme, not an author likely to be suspected of
prudery, says in his Vies des dames galantes, that he would
be a very rich man, if only he had as many hundreds of
crowns "as there be fair women, whether of the great
world or ladies of religion, the which the reading of
Antadis hath undone." He goes on : " How many young
maids in the schoolroom have been undone by reading this
same tale (of Teiresias) I have but now related, and that
of Biblis, of Conus, and many more of like sort writ in the
Metamorphoses of Ovid."
Who can tell the number of imitators fathered by the
history of Abelard and Heloïse ? Even in their lifetime
young lovers took them as a model ; " our follies," writes
Abelard to Heloïse, " have penetrated even to the holiest
places ; our sin has scandalized a whole kingdom, the tale
of it is read and delighted in. We are the consolation of
young folk that go astray as we did, and whoso offends
after us, deems his offence so much the less."
The three Latin poets who have applied their genius to
the delineation of love, Ovid, Catullus and Propertius, them-
selves recognize the danger inherent in their erotic strains.
" Touch not the poets of love," Ovid says in the Remédia
Amorisï . . . Who can read unscathed your verses,
Tibullus, or yours, sweet singer whom your fair Cynthia
alone inspired." — Catullus is himself conscious of the
aphrodisiac effects his verses possess : " My verses," he
says, "are spicy and gay, they stir desire." Propertius in
his Sixth Elegy devotes to the infernal gods the man who
first filled Roman homes with obscene paintings.
Forgetting how powerful is the impulse to imitation
found among young men and women, particularly in
428 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
France, 1 M. Jules Lemaître, usually so perspicacious in his
psychological analysis, holds the influence of novels over
the female mind to be nil, and says any women who may
have fallen after reading Indiana must have been already
ripe for ruin, and would possibly but for this work have
fallen lower still. 2 The famous critic should remember
novels ripen women. " Moral ruin is a long process,"
Nicole declares with his usual sagacity and clear-sighted-
ness; "it involves preliminaries and gradual processes. It
is the delineation of vicious passions and the false glamour
that is thrown over them, that by slowly progressive stages
leads up to a lapse from virtue." Dumas fils is at one with
Nicole ; speaking of the motives conducive to adultery
with women, he signalizes besides a carnal curiosity dis-
guised under the name of sentiment, an imagination
"disordered by bad talk, bad books and bad example *
( Visite de Noce).
Ovid long ago expressed M. Jules Lemaîtres thought in
other words, when he said : " Love verses only corrupt
those that are already ripe to be corrupted." No doubt
erotic poetry and fiction remain without effect on firm,
vigorously constituted minds. But how many such
characters are there, removed above all weakness? The
most part of young men, of women, and even of grown
men, oscillate betwixt good and ill ; fickle and inconstant,
they change conduct and predilection according to the
persons they live with, the books they read, the examples
they see before their eyes. " I have yonder," says Dante,
" a niece by name Alagia, and who of her own nature is
good, provided the example of our house does not make
her bad."
A certain maturity of mind and real force of character
are needed to react successfully against the influence
exerted by surroundings, example and literature. Constant
reading of an author is just like habitually frequenting a
1 Caesar observed long ago how highly developed was the impulse to Unit*
an among the Gauls. {Bellum Gaificum, bk. vii. ch. xxii.)
* Jules Lemattre, Les contemporains, 4th series, p. 165.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 429
on's society, and tends to produce a resemblance,
mg men and women gradually mould themselves a
it like that of their favourite heroes and heroines of
on ; they think and feel like them, and identify them-
es with their personality. The girl who reads the
welle Heloïse comes to imagine herself beloved by
it-Preux ; she feels the same emotions Julie experiences
:he tale, and receives the same kisses. If she reads
rther, she identifies herself with Charlotte and envies
the happiness of being loved by a man capable of
ng himself for despairing love. If she is fascinated by
1e hero of romance, who roars like a lion and coos
a dove, she seems actually to hear these roarings
cooings, which set her heart-strings vibrating.
r oung men are equally ready on their side to copy the
y of romance in fashion for the moment. According to
novels in vogue, they love like Saint-Preux or like
relace, like Werther or like the Chevalier des Grieux.
er René, Adolplie and Obermann, drawing-rooms
rmed with dreamy, melancholic young men, disgusted
1 life before they had lived, and with love before they
w what it was. Later again, after Antony, their
ughts were all turned towards elopements and romantic
entures.
Leaders borrow from their chosen heroes of fiction
juage, sentiments, tastes, habits, na'mes, costume, even
ir favourite scents. In more than one case of proceed-
5 for judicial separation, I have seen women's heads
led by imitation of Diana Vernon, the heroine of one
V\r Walter Scott's Novels ; like her they wanted to ride
[ hunt, scorning the domestic virtues and dreaming only
romantic adventures. Ossian's poems brought into
^ue the names of Oscar and Malvina, while Mme. de
ël's novels suggested to many women the idea of
ning their children Delphine, Corinne, or Oswald.
Consumption no less than hypochondria has been a
rary fashion. Voltaire used to write hymns to Health, 1
1 Poem addressed to the President Hénault.
430 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
but under the reign of Romanticism it became a disgrace
to be well and hearty. The canons of Romantic literature
decreed that a woman should be pale, "pale as a fair
evening of Autumn," while for a young man it was poetical
to be as white as a consumptive. Either would have
blushed to show a fresh, rosy face. 1
Fiction has repeatedly brought into fashion particular
modes of dress and particular colours. After Werther,
young men adopted the sky-blue coat and yellow breeches
the hero of Goethe's story wore the first time he danced
with Lotta. Byron, liking to have his neck free, wore no
cravat, or if he did left it untied ; and his devoted admirers
followed suit. After d'Urfé, pale green 2 became the rage.
George Sand made olive-green universally admired, the
colour she gave to a Creole beauty in one of her Novels.
If the hero of the Novel a young girl reads has blonde
hair, she longs for a fair husband ; if he is dark, she prefers
a dark man. Mme. Laffarge tells us in her Memoirs how,
after reading a Novel as a young girl the hero of which was
a deaf-mute, she had been silly enough to long to be loved
by a deaf mute. "A story written with considerable
feeling and talent," she says, " impressed me vividly. In
this interesting work, the hero Anatole follows the
woman he loves wherever she goes, saves her life, surrounds
her with the tenderest marks of a passionate affection,
writes to her, gets' her to love him, without making an
attempt to come near her. At the end of five or six
hundred pages, after Anatole has won the adoration not
only of the object of his affections, but of all his fair
readers as well, he is discovered to be deaf and dumb."
While she was reading the Novel in question, Mme.
Laffarge, a girl at the time, used to be followed in her
walks by a mysterious young man, who only succeeded
in expressing his admiration at a distance by means of
1 Ovid gave the same advice long ago in his Ars Anwris ! " Palleat omnis
amans," he says, — " Every true lover should be pale."
* In French céladon, the name of the colour being derived from Céladoo,
the sentimental swain who is the hero of Astrie. — (TRANSLATOR.)
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 43 1
burning glances ; very soon she found herself hoping this
unknown lover would turn out a deaf-mute like Anatole,
she longed for this infirmity and eagerly looked for traces
of it in his face, his melancholy mien and sad eyes.
I quote this case to show to what a degree a girl may
be impressed by romantic books. We can now readily
understand how her mind must be stirred by romances
where the lover is always handsome, amiable, witty, high-
born, tender, passionate and elegant, while the poor
husband is depicted in the blackest colours. While the
lover has every good quality, every merit and every
distinction, the husband is represented as plain, common-
place, tiresome, always full of his work at providing the
household expenses. All these flattering portraits of the
lover, these grotesque caricatures of the husband, are a
bad training for a girl in realizing the beauty of marriage
and family life ; while they set the woman who is married
but misunderstood by her husband dreaming of this ideal
adorer, who will know how to appreciate her, if others do
not, and console her for the vulgarities of a husband's
affection. An ideal love with a high-born and dis-
tinguished adorer, one to match with a hero of romance,
this is what she craves. She longs for such a lover, lets
her curiosity play round him, and would fain know him
in more than fancy. She is unfaithful in her thoughts,
till she can become so in very deed and act.
In Novels love is the one and only business of all the
characters ; so the fair readers of such books are shocked
if their husband fails to spend all his time in adoring them
and busies himself primarily about his proper business.
At the least disappointment, on discovering the smallest
defect in their husband, they conclude he is quite different
from the ideal lover, a man quite incapable of a noble
passion.
Tacitus, drawing a picture of Roman decadence under
the Empire,. described "the very Capitol burned by the
hands of citizens, sacred things profaned, adultery in the
noblest families." We too in France have seen the Hôtel de
432 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Ville burned, not by the enemy, but by the hand of French
citizens, we see sacred things profaned every day, family,
country, army insulted, adultery spreading in all ranks
of society. This increase of adultery I attribute very
largely to the reading of countless novels, all defending
adultery. By making adultery poetical, novels do what
the tales of Mythology did in ancient times, sanctifying
as they did the passions. In a Comedy of Terence, a
young profligate encourages himself in vicious courses by
the example of Jupiter seducing Danaë. "Why!" he
exclaims, " what a mighty god did, should not I a weak
mortal do? Yes! truly, I have done it, and with right
goodwill." Adultery cannot be a crime, as it is only
copying from divine beings. "What man," says Plato
not without reason, "will not excuse himself the evil he
has done, once he is persuaded the heroes do and have
done the same things ? . . . These reasons constrain us to
abolish all these fictions, for fear they give young men too
great a facility for doing wrong." Notwithstanding his
admiration for Homer, Plato is obliged to allow that the
description of Jupiter's amours is not of a kind to inspire
young people with a wise moderation. Imitation of evil is
a much more rapid process than that of good. Without
holding themselves bound to imitate what is good, men
make bad examples their warranty for imitating what is
evil. " The example of Alexander the Great's chastity,"
Pascal says, " has never made so many men continent, as
that of his drunkenness has made intemperate " It is no
disgrace not to be as virtuous as he, while it seems
excusable if we are not more vicious.
Inasmuch as Novelists write especially for young people
and women (husbands and fathers having but little time
for reading and preferring History to Romance), they
always assign the contemptible rôle to these latter, to
gratify their favourite audience. Parents are all Gérontes
and Orgons, husbands all Sganarelles and George Dandins,
ready-made dupes. In Novels every husband and father
is a tyrant who is for safeguarding his wife against
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 433
ltery or his daughter against seduction. When Saint-
ux, abusing the hospitality offered him and the con-
nee reposed in him, is waiting for his pupil in her
room to dishonour her, he thinks he hears a noise and
ing to see his enterprise fail exclaims : " Can it be
x cruel father?" (Letter \\v.) In the Preface to the
ivelle Heloïse, Rousseau does not dissemble the fact
t he wrote the Romance particularly for women, and
invites them all, respectable and disreputable alike, to
d it " This Collection," he says, " with its Gothic tone
5 women better than books of Philosophy; it may
n be useful to some who, in an ill-ordered life, have still
served some love of honourable living." He admits
irl is undone if she reads a single page of this Novel,
he encourages her to go on at once with its perusal ;
she has begun, she had better finish, she has no more
:s to run." — Rousseau who professed that when he
iposed the Nouvelle Heloïse as a book for women, he
\ writing a work of morality, nevertheless acknowledges
his Confessions that its perusal had hardly tended to
ke them more moral. He declares that " women were
intoxicated by the book and its author, there were few
hem, even in the highest circles, I could not have made
onquest of, if I had tried." On the publication of
ila, Chateaubriand was like Rousseau overwhelmed with
linine attentions and declarations of love.
Vives who torment their husbands with scenes of
lousy often derive their over-excitability from Novels
acting men unfaithful to the marriage vow; finding
bands deceiving their wives in books, they instantly
b to the conclusion their own is doing the like to them.
his book on La Folie lucide (" Lucid Madness "), Dr
ilat relates how a husband, complaining to him of the
nes of furious jealousy his wife used to indulge in,
•ibuted this entirely to her novel reading propensities.
ne fault I always had to find with her," the husband
tared, " was finding novels lying about in every corner
. these books unduly excited her imagination." — The
2 E
434 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
same Dr. Trélat also gives instances where furious jealousy
on the husband's side was awakened by novels describing
the adultery of wives. The husband, naturally prédis*
posed to jealousy, when he comes to read romances in
which he finds the wife deceiving her husband, believes
his fate to be the same. The Tales of Boccaccio and La
Fontaine, which make bachelors laugh, often make husbands
thoughtful and sad. One wife, whose husband had become
furiously jealous, said that for two days running she had
seen Boccaccio's Tales in her husband's hands and that he
was for ever studying them.
By providing a stimulant to their sensibility and im-
agination, without providing any nourishment for reason,
novels over-excite and enervate young readers, especially
those of the weaker sex. They set them dreaming and
prevent their thinking, carrying them away to the land of
chimaeras instead of developing their critical powers and
correcting the want of exactitude and precision which so
often characterizes them.
In his pamphlet dealing with the Chorinski trial, the
famous specialist in mental disease, Morel (of Rouen)
states that the accused, a brilliant young officer in the
Austrian service, who poisoned his wife in complicity with
the elegant Canoness Julia von Ebergegny, had debauched
his mind by the reading of romances of passion. The
Doctor, having gone to visit him in prison, the accused
wanted to tell him the story of his life, which surpassed,
he declared, anything he had ever read in novels of wild
adventure, his favourite form of reading.
For a romantic writer like Jean Jacques Rousseau, who
joined a most highly-strung imagination to a temperament
of fire, and who, to use his own expression, " simply adored
the sex," to write a Novel is only an indirect way of
making love. In the same way for young people of
either sex, at the age when love is the main preoccupa-
tion of the mind, to read a Novel is only another mode
of the same thing. Novels intoxicate young people, be-
cause they set fair-faced, flattering phantoms dançipg
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 435
re their eyes, phantoms with brown hair or blonde, and
of black or blue.
im ready to admit that Novel-reading is not exclusively
delight of young people and of women. "Beside a
ty fire and by a flickering light," says Chateaubriand,
e of being undisturbed, we melted in pity over the ficti-
; woes of a Clarissa, a Clémentine, a Heloïse, a Cecilia,
els are the sacred books of the unhappy and unfor-
te ; true, they feed us on illusions ; but after all are
î more numerous in them than in real life ? " Bishop
t of Avranches used to declare Paradise was without
>ubt "reading a novel in a lounging chair." Saint
tcis de Sales was extremely fond of d'Urfé's novels ;
>in the philosopher delighted in the perusal of those
lie. Scudéry. But there are Novels and Novels. The
ion of to-day bears but little resemblance to that of the
rnteenth Century, which formed the delight of Bishop
t and Saint Francis de Sales. Nor have their fair
ers much in common with the women of the same
jry, who fed on Nicole and would have enjoyed
ing Bourdaloue's sermons to steep, the better to
nilate them. Reading the romances of Mlle. Scudéry
Mme. de Lafayette was a pleasant and harmless enough
sèment, so long as the fair readers' solid reason re-
îed mistress of their imagination, — the " foolish virgin "
le establishment. The conditions are altered nowa-
, when both in Novels and Life, imagination en-
:hes dangerously on reason.
îe Literature of imagination has its raison dêtre, pro-
i always we do not limit our diet to it. Novel-reading
ce dram-drinking, it is a liquor which taken in a small
gives an agreeable fillip, but which on too frequent
tition produces intoxication and becomes a veritable
m. There are too many Novels ; we are inundated
them. Those capable of reading them without risk
no time to read them at all, while those who would
oing better to read something else, read nothing but
>n. The majority of Novel-readers, male and female,
436 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
are complete strangers to the study of History, Philosophy
and Science. What a scourge are these Lending Libraries,
where nothing is given out to read except Novels, and such
Novels ! These depots for the sale of unhealthy literature
do as much mischief as those where adulterated liquors are
retailed. Girls, youths and women poison their souls, just
as working-men do their bodies with alcohol. Literary
intoxication with bad novels is as fatal in its effects as
alcoholic intoxication. Intellectual poisons kill with as
much certainty as physical. Some works of this kind are
like aphrodisiacs and excite the senses, inflame the blood
and set the nerves quivering. Others, by making out love
and virtue to be identical, put the conscience to sleep
like narcotics. Others, veritable antisocial pamphlets
these, may be compared to explosive substances that
threaten to send all the fabric of society flying. Still
others are like corrosive acids, slowly and surely destroy-
ing all scruples and delicate refinements of the soul.
Lastly, the fatalistic doctrines that permeate many novels
are a sort of intellectual forcemeat, that stirs the feelings
and sends the will to sleep. Those who write novels, and
those who sell them, maintain that they are always harm-
less. Yes ! from their point of view they are, — and indeed
useful, but it is not so in the case of young men, whose
judgment they warp -and whose hearts and imaginations
they disturb and over-stimulate, or for unmarried girls
whose souls, to use Michelet's words, may be tarnished,
stained and soiled by such reading, which robs them of
all natural freshness and purity.
Young people who read many Romances presently wish
to have a romance of their own. When " Mademoiselle*
(Mademoiselle de Montpensier, grand-daughter of Henri
IV.), whose head had been turned by novel-reading, fell
in love with Lauzun, she longed for a romantic adventure,
and was for ever repeating the lines from La Suite du
Menteur about hearts predestined for one another by the
mandate of Heaven. Victims of love are very often really
victims of romance.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 437
To begin with, in Novels love is the sole and only pre-
occupation of the characters ; to be in love, a condition
eading to the commission of a thousand extravagances
n real life, is always represented as being a virtuous act,
he mark of a great soul, both a duty and a right. What
ollows ? Why ! that readers wish to put these sophistries
n practice. I have myself heard persons brought up on a
rharge of striking women who had withstood their advances,
ippeal to this supposed right of love ; they attempted no
excuses for their conduct, but rather accused the woman
vho had dared to repel their efforts to seduce her. One
H , a retired non-commissioned officer, whom it was
Tiy duty to try, had noticed a pretty grocer's wife at
Marseilles, happily married and a highly respectable
voman. Every day for a fortnight he went to the shop
:o make different purchases, as he pretended, in reality to
:ry to seduce her. Invariably repulsed and furious at his
rebuffs, he demanded a rendezvous ; on this being refused,
tie seized a knife and struck the woman in the breast.
He was arrested and confronted with his victim ; in reply
to questions he said : " I admit having struck the witness»
but it was pure passion that made me commit the act ; I
was furious because the woman repulsed all the flattering
proposals I made her." At his trial, instead of trying to
find excuses, he reproached the woman for not having
consented to give him an assignation. " She should have
agreed," he declared, " to meet me, as I asked her." The
fellow was in fact merely the echo of the authors who have
invented the so-called right of love.
Two distinct literary schools have proclaimed this right,
— the sensualist or naturalistic school and the romantic.
Taking their stand on the supposed irresistible character
of physical love, which constrains mankind to assure the
perpetuity of the species, sensualistic writers maintain that
lovers belong to one another by natural right "When*
ever a man and a woman experience a violent passion for
each other," says Chamfort, "I hold that in every case, no
matter what the obstacles that divide them, husband,
438 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
parents or what not, the pair belong to each other by a
law of nature, by a right divine, spite of all human enact-
ments and conventions." This right of love, and right of
adultery, are allowed by Schopenhauer, as a consequence of
the natural duty of reproduction. The German Philosopher
argues that women are vaguely conscious that while be-
traying their duties towards the individual, they are the
better fulfilling those they owe the species, which has rights
of infinitely superior stringency. 1 A husband who revolts
at his wife's unfaithfulness to him is merely an egoist
selfishly preoccupied by his own paltry individual interests.
But passion, representing the interest of the human species,
is rightly paramount over the egoism of the husband. If
onlookers at dramas of passion are so indulgent as they
are towards amorous extravagances, this is because,
Schopenhauer tells us, they feel that the destinies of the
species take precedence of those of the individual.
Stendhal, repeating this sophistical argument of Cham-
fort's, writes : " A woman belongs of right to the man who
loves her and whom she loves better than life itself." The
right is conferred by Nature, and no social convention can
abrogate it. Stendhal belongs to the sensualist school of
the Eighteenth Century. 2
Inspired by suchlike naturalistic theories, Michelet has
claimed the right of love even for fishes, — their natural
right to love before coming to the frying-pan : " Let them
love, — and then come what may ! If we must kill them,
kill them. But let them have lived first." s
Romanticism, notwithstanding all its lyrical aspirations,
ends by coming to the same conclusions as Naturalism.
It too, with pathetic accents glozing over a coarse sensual-
1 Schopenhauer, Méditations. (French Translation, A lean, Paris, pp. 1Q3»
1230
9 Stendhal expresses his own true sentiments in Le Rouge et U Noir wb«
he puts these words in Julien Sorel's mouth: "There is no such thing •»
natural right ; the word is nothing but a piece of old-fashioned foolishness. . . •
Before law, there is no natural right whatever but the lion's strength or the
need of the creature that is hungry, or cold, — in one word need, necessity"
* Michelet, La Afer, p. 341.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 439
ity, appeals to the right of love, and even the right of
adultery; it proclaims that passion must be obeyed, as
being at once the voice of God and involved in the order
of Nature, declaring " there can be nothing criminal, where
sincere love finds place." * The Abbé Prévost 2 began by
making love a right ; Rousseau constituted it a duty and
a virtue ; it was left to Romanticism to consecrate it a
Religion. All these writers have persuaded women they
may love without being blameworthy, that in doing so
they are only following the Laws of Nature. Accordingly
we find this excuse based on the " Laws of Nature," con-
stantly recurring in the letters and in the mouths of
adulteresses. Mme. Weiss, who deceived her husband and
afterwards poisoned him, wrote to her lover : " Crimes
against human laws I do not heed ; it is only crimes
against Nature that revolt me. I adore Nature!" The
Abbé Grégoire states that the licentious clergy of the
Eighteenth Century were not backward even at that date
in invoking in the same way the Laws of Nature. Nature
is the enemy of morality and the laws ; it is to hold Nature
in check that moral and social laws are made. And so
Novels, which recognise no other rights but those of Love,
are always urging their readers to follow the Laws of
Nature.
The Ancients said : "There is a husband Fate reserves
for each woman." 8 Romanticism declares: "There is a
sister-soul Providence reserves for each woman, and this
sister-soul is seldom the husband's. If the woman finds
it under the features of a lover, she belongs to him of right.
'Tis God Himself who commands love, brings lovers
together, predestines them one for the other. Did not
that Supreme Providence, that is everywhere, in spite of
man's conventions, preside over the union of Benedict and
Valentine?" If love runs low, if the heart is seized by
another passion, again it is God that calls it to another
vocation, and by consequence inconstancy is an act of
1 George Sand Va /a<yittj. * Author of Manon Lescaut.
3 Fragments of Euripides.
440 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
submission to the Divine will ! When George Sand
forsakes Alfred de Musset, to contract another unhallowed
tie (alas ! even more ephemeral) with Dr. P , she cries :
" Yes ! I can love again ; if they say the contrary, they lie
Only God can say, * thou shalt love no more,' and I feci
He has not said so yet. . . . To be happy for a year, and
then die. This is all I ask of God and of you. I willXovt
you in spite of all and in spite of myself. You have con-
strained me, and God too has willed it so." * The Romantic
School has borrowed from the Crusaders their rallying cry
of " God wills it ! " That is, God wills that a woman pass
from lover to lover with reckless rapidity ; each new lover,
in turn, will seem great as a god to her, especially if he is
strong as Hercules.
Just as mystical piety borrows the language of profane
love, so romantic Literature in turn borrows the language
of mystic piety, to express the sentiments of profane love
This same romantic mysticism is simply a thinly veiled
form of sensuality. Sainte-Beuve admits as much in his
Volupté: " I cultivated mystical illusion in myself, to give
colour and variety to my Epicureanism." His religious
aspirations in fact were merely a refinement of sensuality.
In this mystical and sensual language, sexual gallantry is
poetized under the name of love's religion, the caprices of
the senses adorneel with the title of fancies of the heart,
while physical union is veiled under the expression — union of
souls ; it is a communion, a sacrament, of which the lover is
the high-priest. A woman's self-abandonment in her lover's
hands is not a culpable weakness, it is a sublime sacrifice.
In Balzac's Lys de la Vallée, Félix exclaims, " Yes ! this is
the first, the blessed communion of Love. Truly I have
but now shared your pain, and my soul has been made
one with yours, even as we are made one with Christ, when
we partake of the Divine substance." — According to George
Sand, Love is "modelled on that which Jesus Christ felt and
manifested for men, it is an outcome of the Divine charity,
and obeys the same laws." 2 — Again, in Lamartine Love uses
1 Marieton, Une histoire d'amour, p. 112. 2 Luerctia Fhriani.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 44 1
the language of religious devotion. It is God who kindles
love in the hearts of lovers. Love is a religion, it is the
path of Heaven, it is the origin of our belief in God. The
lover falls on his knees before his mistress, as before an
altar; God and his lady are so mingled in his spirit, he
can no longer distinguish them ; God is the loved one, and
the loved one is God! he adores the Divinity through her
image ; he says like Tartuffe:
" Et je n'ai pu vous voir, parfaite créature,
Sans admirer en vous l'auteur de la nature." '
"Oh, Love," cries Raphaël, "... you are the High
Priest of this world of ours, the proof of Immortality, the
fire of God's altar."
In romantic literature, the lover invokes God before
embracing his mistress ; after embracing, he thanks Him
for having created a being so perfect. Brizeux exclaims :
" Aimer Dieu, n'est-ce pas aussi nourrir son âme
À l'humide baiser de quelque jeune femme ?
Dans cette femme aussi, n'est-ce point ici-bas,
Aimer visiblement le Dieu qu'on ne voit pas?" 2
Alfred de Musset, even in spite of his habitual vein of
mocker>% associates Religion with love and even with
profligacy : " Though you were with a courtesan," he
says, "yet are you accomplishing His great work. . . .
Stay not the prayers that rise to your lips during the
sacrifice ; these are the altars where he is fain to be under-
stood and adored." 8 This strange comparison he repeats
again and again :
•' O femme, étrange objet de joie et de supplice !
Mystérieux autel, où dans le sacrifice,
On entend tour à tour blasphémer et prier." 4
1 "And I could never look on you, His perfect creature, without admiring in
you the Author of Nature."
1 " To love God, is it not also to feed one's soul on the moist kiss of a girl ?
And in her love, is it not, in this world below, visibly to love the God w e
cannot see ? "
* Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle.
4 "Oh ! Woman, strange object of delight and punishment! Mysterious
altar, where in the sacrifice, we hear alternate blasphemies and prayers."
442 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
After all this sort of language is nothing new, it is
Tartuffe's likewise, who uses the very same metaphors:
"J'aurai toujours pour vous, ô suave merveille,
Une dévotion à nulle autre pareille." *
Tartuffe prides himself on not copying mere worldly
lovers :
" Dont la langue indiscrète, en qui l'on se confie,
Deshonore Vautel, où le cœur sacrifie." *
This religion of love has not only been celebrated by
Poets and Romance writers, it has also been preached by
a Historian, Michelet, by the Socialists, Fourier and
Enfantin, and by a Philosopher, Renan. In his naturalistic
and mystical style, Michelet makes woman at one and
the same time a sick patient and an " altar," and love a
" communion." " What is Woman," he asks, " if not our
living temple, our sanctuary, our altar, on which burns
the fire of God ? " — Fourier, similarly exalting love into a
religion, regrets that the Philosophers have not established
priests and pontiffs of this Cult. — Renan for his part writes,
that we are wrong to lament the weakening of religious
beliefs, for he says, beliefs change shape and we shall always
have the religion of love. In this religion of love there are
likewise sacraments, a communion, a priesthood. The lover
of the Abbesse de Jouarre is represented as a messenger from
Heaven, a priest ; if the nun repulses him, she is offending
God; by remaining virtuous, she fails in nobility of conduct
" You will miss a woman's true greatness," they tell her,
"... the true God will be angry with you, even if the
monks' God is glad . . . proud virtue is a vice in a woman;
1 "I shall ever have for thee, thou sweet and tender marvel, a devotion
like unto no other."
a "Whose indiscreet tongue, unworthy of its trust, dishonours the altar,
where their heart makes sacrifice" — Molière would seem to have borrowed
these expressions from Corneille, who says in Théodore (Act v.) :
" Et je n'ai pas moins qu'elle à souffrir d'un supplice
Qui profane l'autel où j'ai fait sacrifice."
— " And 'tis my lot no less than hers to suffer a punishment that profanes
the altar where I have made sacrifice."
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 443
you think to enter into Eternity more nobly with your
inflexible attitude ; a mistake, believe me ; you will be
less noble." The Abbess yields to please God ; and her
brother absolves her, with the words : "It was a Sacrament,
and the most august of all, the mystery of that night, when
you accepted his love an hour before dying."
This language, stranger than Tartuffe's, only makes a
man of sense smile, but its effects are by no means harm-
less on the minds of young men and women ; by confusing
love with virtue and piety, it warps their mind. But, as
we know, perversion of heart is often the result of per-
version of mind ; sophistries, clothed in brilliant phrases,
are the most powerful agents of corruption. Two great
Writers, who have disseminated many sophistries by their
books, Jean Jacques Rousseau and George Sand, have
themselves been the first to allow that Sophistry is often
more dangerous to society than Crime, because it may be
the father of an endless series of bad actions. In the
Nouvelle Heloïse, Claire says to Julie : "I hate bad maxims
even more than bad actions." 1 George Sand, deploring
the faults into which her inordinate love of independence
had dragged her, cried : " Cursed be the men and the
books that have helped me on in this by their sophistries." 2
If she was right in cursing the sophistries of other Writers
who contributed to lead her astray, she would not have
been far wrong in regretting likewise the sophistries she
disseminated in her own Novels. I have already instanced
several crimes, that of Dr. Bancal and that of Mile. Lemoine
amongst the number, that were in great part inspired by
Novel reading. Who can tell the number of women who
have fallen into adultery as the result of reading Indiana,
Jacques, Valentine, Lélia? It is no squalid and disgraceful
adultery that we read of in romantic Novels, but a proud
adultery that walks with head erect and a picturesque
aureole around the brow, trampling underfoot the narrow
1 La Nouvelle Hcloïse, 1st Part, Letter xl.— In Part 3, Letter xviii. is
devoted to refuting the sophistries that are made to excuse adultery.
* La veritable histoire cTEiie et Lui, by M. de Lovenjoul.
444 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
prejudices -of a bourgeois society. In a series of Novels,
which are merely pieces of special pleading against
marriage, George Sand maintains that, if a wife fails to
find in marriage the love she has a right to, she is justified
in seeking it elsewhere. The Right of Adultery is a logical
sequence of the Right of Love. George Sand would seem
to have borrowed this theory from Pierre Leroux, who
putting a false construction on the nature of the pardon
accorded in the New Testament to "the woman taken
in adultery," on account of her penitence, argued that such
forgiveness was a proclamation of the right to commit
adultery, in a society organized on wrong principles. " Why
does Jesus forgive the sinful woman? Because she hath
loved much. And why does He not condemn the
adulteress? Because it is a woman's nature to love,
and the adulterous woman possessed the right of adultery
in an adulterous society." l
If the wife has the right of being unfaithful to her
husband, she has the duty of being faithful to her lover;
" what constitutes adultery," George Sand writes in faeçues,
"is not the hour she grants her lover, it is the night she
goes back afterwards to pass in her husband's arms." 2
If anyone ought to doubt the legitimacy of adultery,
we should think it would be the husband. Yet we find in
Novels husbands so full of indulgence as to excuse their
wives' unfaithfulness as the effect of an overpowering and
inevitable fate. Jacques in George Sand's story is the
most perfect type of these good-natured husbands; he
actually kills himself to avoid interfering with the love
of his wife and her lover. " They are not to blame," he
says, " they love each other. There can be no crime where
true love is found. They are selfish, and perhaps they are
all the better for it." (Letter xcvi.) In order that his suicide
1 Revue indépendante, Aug. 1832.
2 The Anarchists who are in favour of abolishing marriage go to George
Sand's Novels to find arguments to support their views. An Anarchist
pamphlet which appeared lately to denounce "the immorality of marriage,"
quotes the following sentence from George Sand on its title-page: "What 1
stupid and wretched business is a wedding-day ! "
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 445
may not be a cause of grief and reproach to his wife, he
takes all sorts of precautions to make it believed that his
death must be attributed to an accident. Jacques' obliging-
ness surpasses Menelaus' leniency.
A less good-natured husband might object that his wife
swore to be faithful to him. But in George Sand, the
husband knows very well that that oath is quite valueless ;
it is Society forced the woman to enter into this absurd en-
gagement, and he recognizes that female fidelity is an
impossibility, a flying in the face of Nature, an absurdity,
an abomination. Who can answer for a heart's caprices ?
Mother Nature is to blame, and it is society we must
curse. Far from blushing for her weakness, a woman
has a right to find fault with the constitution of society.
"One Literature, and one Literature alone, viz. the
Romantic, has honoured, magnified, poetized, glorified
and deified adultery." l
Modern Novelists have likewise encouraged adultery by
supplying it with the excuse of fatalism. Rousseau did
not fall into this mistake ; one of the finest pages of the
Nouvelle Heloïse is where Saint-Preux tells Milord Edouard
of the combat that raged in Julie's breast at Meillerie;
"these incidents," he exclaims, " have convinced me better
than all arguments of Man's freewill and the excellence
of virtue." It was Goethe who first began to represent
passion as an irresistible force. The author of Werther
and Faust was a disciple of Spinoza, he states as much in
his Memoirs. By this channel the fatalistic spirit was
introduced into Romantic literature. Mme. de Staël very
clearly noticed this tendency in his works : " There is to
be observed in his writings a certain scornful philosophy,
which says to good as to evil, — it must be so because
it is."
From Stendhal to Zola, all the Novelists almost of what-
ever school, whether romantic or naturalistic, are déter-
ministe Mme. Bovary's husband, on learning his wife's
unfaithfulness, says to her lover : " Fate only is to blame."
1 Brunctièrc in Revue des Deux Mondes, Nov. 1, 1892.
446 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
This fatality of passion is at the bottom of George Sand's
first novels. " What have I done here below either good
or ill?" cries Stenio in Lélia, ..." I have only obeyed the
organization given me." If man is obliged to succumb to
his organization, if he cannot resist passion, the fault is not
in him ; "the fault is God's, who allows humanity thus to
go astray," says Lélia, who is a fatalist. Pretty nearly all
the heroes of romance are the same. So soon as Nature
speaks, they haste to hear her voice, because they know
they cannot do otherwise ; and in this they are only
yielding to the irresistible impulses of heart and tempera-
ment
In the Novels of Stendhal, Balzac, Mérimée, Flaubert,
Dumas fils, Zola, the same mischievous doctrine of fatality
is found. According to these authors, there is nothing
beyond certain physiological fatalities ; adultery is nothing
more nor less than a matter of opportunity, of circumstance,
of a sofa handy! Heart, and still more temperament,
have sudden calls, which nullify at once all moral responsi-
bility. The heroes of romance are victims of their nerves,
of the current of their blood ; they are no longer their
own men, they are the slaves of the passion that devours
them and the appetites that master them. Fatality crushes
them to the earth ; passion is with them as irresistible
as the cravings of hunger and thirst. In these sensual and
determinist Novels, the greatest weaknesses are pre-
cipitated by the smallest physical causes, by a storm, by
an excess of electricity in the atmosphere, by penetrating
odours. Odours, perfumes! what a part they play in
feminine frailty ! The analysis and influence of odours
fill a large place in the poems of Baudelaire and the
Novels of Zola. Baudelaire is the Poet, Zola the Novelist,
of sensations of smell. Nor is it always the delicate per-
fumes only that are made the subject of their analysis.
Stendhal explains mankind exclusively by physiology.
His philosophy is that of Helvetius, d'Holbach, La Mettrie,
who derived all the faculties from sensation. For him
soul is temperament ; " there is no such thing as morality."
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 447
In his eyes Free Will is a contradiction, is an absurdity. 1
The aim of life is the cultivation of sensations, and Love
itself is merely one of these. When Mlle, de la Mole, in
Rouge et Noir, takes count of the love she feels for Julien,
what does she find in it? why! a group of sensations!
" I have the bliss to be in love, she said to herself one day,
with a transport of incredible joy ; I am in love, in love,
no doubt of it ! At my age, where should a girl, young,
pretty and clever, find sensations, if not in Love?" 2 — "In
all her life, never had a sensation so purely delightful, so
deeply moving, stirred Mme. de Rénal." — Julien looks upon
his love for Mlle, de Mole simply as a means of tasting the
keenest pleasures, which the most elegant civilization has
united in her person. — Sensualist to the core, Stendhal is
a determinist as well. According to him, women are
incapable of virtue; the resistance they offer is only a
farce ; when they make laments at having been ravished,
it is a lying pretence. How many young men, corrupted
by these sophistries, which are psychological mistakes,
have endeavoured to put in practice this theory of seduc-
tion, and have ended as criminals ! Stendhal may say
what he pleases, but there are women who resist so firmly
that they will let themselves be murdered rather than yield.
Such women are met with even among savages. 3 I have
seen cases myself where a young girl, who had been
violated, fainted away with grief and shame. It is im-
possible to recount all the cases of rape I have become
acquainted with as a Magistrate ; I will content myself
with quoting two. A girl of eighteen, having gone on
board ship at Gaëta to cross to Marseilles, was ravished
on the voyage by the Mate. To save his comrade, the
Captain made the sailors all swear to say nothing, and
the girl herself not to divulge the violence that had been
offered her. — In another case, a lady, who had been the
1 De rameur, ch. v. — See also VArt et la vie de Stendhal, p. 406.
* Le Rouge et le noir, ch. xii.
* Livingstone, Exploration of the Zambesi, p. 153. Cameron, Across
Africa, p. 58.
448 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
victim of an attempt at rape, conceived so fierce a passion
of indignation against her assailant, that she killed him
some days afterwards. — This reminds me of the heroism
of the wife of a Gallic chief, who was ravished by a Roman
Centurion, and had him murdered in consequence ; before
embracing her husband, she threw down the Centurion's
head at his feet. 1 Women resist so stoutly, that it is shown
by judicial investigation that their bodies are covered with
bruises and injuries. Indeed prisoners charged with rape
sometimes admit the vigorous resistance they have en-
countered. History is full of stories of women who have
killed themselves to escape violation or shame.
The influence exerted by Stendhal on contemporary
Literature and public Morality has been considerable and
pernicious; and it still continues. Balzac, Mérimée,
Taine, Bourget, Zola 2 have all been bitten by this Writer's
psychology, and have copied from his Novels. M. Bourget
has borrowed of him the expression " state of soul," which
occurs so frequently in his books. Nevertheless, in spite
of his admiration for the Author, he admits freely he has
known Le Rouge et le Noir " produce under certain circum-
stances in the brains of young people an incurable intoxi-
cation." 3 He has recovered himself, but how many other
readers have remained fatally affected, unable to eliminate
from their minds the poison of suchlike sophistries!
Among the causes leading to the degradation of mind
and heart in Robert Greslou, Bourget specially mentions
the influence of this book Rouge et Noir,
Balzac's Novels, like Stendhal's, are sensualistic and
determinist. He too has put a great deal of bad physi-
1 The incident is related by Livy, lxxxviii. § 24, and by Valerius Maximus,
Ivi. ch. i. No. 2.
2 Balzac said, speaking of the Chartreuse de Parme, that it was a book in
which the sublime is conspicuous on every page. Stendhal was the master of
Mérimée, who wrote a highly appreciative notice of him. Taine, who
borrowed from Stendhal his theory of heredity, and environment in place
and time, calls him " the greatest psychologist of the present and of preceding
centuries."—" He is our father, the father of all of us, like Balzac/* Zola
writes.
3 Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, p. 309.
OF NOVELS. OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 449
ology into his books. In his Physiologie du Mariage, he
draws his inspiration from Broussais and recommends the
use of mustard-plasters and the application of leeches to
make women virtuous. If Balzac really supposes female
virtue depends on the application of leeches, it follows
he believes women not to possess Free Will. 1
A similar vein of sensualistic and determinist phil-
osophy is found in Mérimée. It is his belief in the
fatality of passion and temperament that makes him relate
with cool irony the outbreaks of ferocity and lubricity of
the human animal.
Belonging to a family of doctors, Flaubert explains the
moral solely and entirely by the physical ; he discredits
the possibility of human beings reacting effectively against
physiological influences. The heroes and heroines of his
Novels are mere playthings of physiological necessity.
A disciple and a nephew of Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant»
is likewise a believer in physiological fatality. The love
he describes in his Novels is primarily physical love ; and
he accounts for female adultery on purely physiological
grounds.
Again it is mankind from the physiological side that
M. Zola studies in his books. His ideas are revealed in
the very titles of some of these. In the Bête Humaine, he
sits at the feet of Dr. Lombroso. In the Rungon-Macquart
series, he is inspired by Dr. Prosper Lucas, the author of a
very remarkable treatise on heredity. Only, whereas Dr.
Lucas reconciles heredity with free will, Zola rejects the
latter doctrine altogether. 2 Considered exclusively from
the physiological point of view, men and women cease
to be moral beings, free and responsible ; they are mere
animals, male and female, with their young ones. And
these very words are continually occurring in the pages
of the great Naturalistic Novelist.
It may cause some surprise if I include George Sand
1 Physiologie du Mariage, p. 129.
3 In Cosmopolis, M. Bourget also exaggerates the part played by heredity in
suicide, believing that eren the form it takes is hereditary (p. 449).
2 F
450 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
among Novelists who believe in the fatality of passion
and the all-powerful influence of physiological inheritance.
Still, when she is recounting her frailties in the Mémoim
dé ma vie, she finds excuses for her conduct in heredity,
telling us of her mother's lapses.
It might be thought that the grave problem of moral
freedom and the reconciliation of its existence with physio-
logical heredity should not intrude in these light Works,
written as they are merely to amuse. But, seeing how the
ideas and preoccupations of a period penetrate every-
where, and that the problem of Free Will and Heredity
very largely arrests the attention of contemporary society,
we find this most serious, complicated and important sub-
ject treated in Novels, on the Stage, even in Newspapers,
and by no means always by the most competent hands.
Alexandre Dumas fils, who pays much attention to
moral and social questions, is too fond of seeking their
solution in physiology ; he admits as much in his Preface
to L'Ami des femmes. Not a few of his books are dedi-
cated to doctors. He has small belief in Free Will ; he
thinks that virtue and vice are in the blood and that
education can do nothing against physiological fatality.
In L'Affaire Clemenceau, the hero of the story claims to
find justification in the transmission of a blood naturally
inclined to sensual love. Dumas is convinced that beings
exist of fatally perverse tendencies, whom society should
"kill in a corner like mad dogs." The Court a shambles,
the judge a butcher, the brand of justice a pole-axe, this is
the determinist theory in matters of Criminal Law. He
delights in exhibiting the animal side in men ( Visite de
noces), and in women (La Femme de Claude). Read the
portrait he draws of the sensual woman, you might
imagine yourself reading that of the female criminal by
Dr. Lombroso. He loves to strip woman bare, to wash
her dirty linen in public, to show the seamy side of her
nature, to account physiologically for Love, Jealousy and
Adultery. He concludes his delineation of the sensual
woman with the words, " Here we have the animal ! "
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 45 1
Physiology has led the Novelists of the Naturalistic
School to Pathology, the portrayal of alcoholic dementia,
epilepsy, and hysteria, — all of them studies of intense
interest, when carried out by competent scientific men,
such as Drs. Charcot, Magnan, Féré, Motet, Brouardel,
Gamier, Dejerine, Ballet, Brissaud, etc., but entirely
without scientific value, when pursued in fanciful tales of
fiction, apart from clinical or any other form of direct
observation of the patients. But if these claims of the
Novel to treat of Physiology and Pathology are useless to
Science, they may easily disturb readers' consciences, by
representing exceptions as the general rule, and by setting
forth as scientific truths what are nothing more than
hypotheses rejected by the best qualified savants. Thus
Dr. Lombroso's theory of the "born Criminal," which
Zola has reproduced in La Bête humaine, is rejected
by MM. Tropinard, Manouvrier and Magnan. While
Novelists are crying that Science repudiates moral respon-
sibility, the greatest scientists, Pasteur, Claude Bernard,
J. B. Dumas, Chevreul, Armand Gautier, and so on,
believe in human freedom of choice, which they find
perfectly reconcilable with the doctrine of heredity.
Novelists who are the victims of nervous diseases have
actually encouraged these, in order to be the better able
to describe them, and because they were sick themselves
have believed all humanity sick, incapable of governing its
passions, and bound hand and foot to the fatality of its
own instincts.
Such advances have this idea of fatality made of late
years, that one Author, M. Henry Rabusson, in his Novel
Raman dun Fataliste, recently published in the pages of
the Revue des Deux Mondes, has made his chief character
a Magistrate of determinist convictions. The Magistrate
in question is well aware of the opposition existing between
his theories and the duties he has to perform, and I will
not contradict him when he thus pronounces judgment
on himself: "I shall always remain a bad Magistrate."
At the present day, when Novelists of other countries
452 CRIME DETERMINED BV PASSION, AND CONTAGION
wish to imitate works of the French School, they never
fail to introduce sensualism and determinism into their
books. For instance, this is precisely what the Dutch
writer Couperus has done in his Novel entitled Destiny.
The influence exerted by these Novels of Physiology
and Determinism is unhealthy. What a fine excuse for
every weakness is this Determinism ! What an encourage-
ment for every vice ! What a convenient handle for men
of violence, for profligates, for adulterers, this belief in the
fatality of crime ! While both believe in human responsi-
bility, a father may cry out indignantly at his son's bad
behaviour, like Don Juan's father : " Ah ! how base your
conduct! Do you not blush to fall so far below your
birth?" To these reproaches, which he] feels to be
deserved, Don Juan can find nothing better to answer
than this piece of coarse insolence: "Sir, if you would
take a seat, you would find it more convenient for
talking." But if only he had been acquainted with the
determinist theories of the present day which Novels sow
broadcast everywhere, he would not have failed to reply
to his father : " You throw in my teeth the seduction and
desertion of Elvira, the murder of the Commendatore, but
are you not aware that scientists nowadays, speaking
in the name of Physiology, Biology, Anthropology
and Sociology, tell us murder and other crimes are
natural or social phenomena, in no way distinguishable
from physical phenomena? It is not the father who
has a right to blame his son for his behaviour, it is the
son who is justified in reproaching his father for the
vicious propensities he has transmitted to him. The
guilty party is you, my father. Read the Savants, and
the Novelists who popularize their theories, they will
tell you that Crime is hereditary, that the passions are
matters of fatality, that the son is his father's victim, that
c the fault is none of his ; it is rather his parents', who have
transmitted a vicious blood to his veins,' 1 that the son
is but the summing up of ancestors, nurse, up-bringing,
1 George Renard, V homme est-il libre ?
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 453
nourishment and clothing. 1 Thus you see, sir, it is not
I who should blush for my conduct, but you who ought to
be ashamed ; or more properly speaking Science dispenses
you from any obligation to blush or feel remorse at all."
In the Middle Ages women of evil life were known as
44 girls of little self-government." Now how are parents to
hinder their children from becoming "girls of little self-
government," if they allow them to read novels which
teach the fatality of passion and hereditariness of crime ?
A wife whose mind is perverted by suchlike theories,
will be very likely to take a lover and poison her husband,
saying like the heroine of M. Octave Feuillet's story : " I
longed for a great passion, a life of luxury, pleasure and
elegance, spent amidst society fêtes and functions. I felt
I had received from chance all the gifts capable of making
me enjoy all this in its fulness . . . and I must renounce
it for ever! An opportunity occurred, I loved the man
and I knew that if he were free, he would marry me, and
then ... I did what I did ! A crime ! Bah ! 'tis only
a word ! . . . Really and truly the code of human
morality is to-day no more than a blank page, on which
each writes what he pleases, according to his intelligence
and temperament. Individual catechisms alone are left
binding. Mine is simply what Nature teaches me by her
example ; she eliminates with a selfish impassivity what-
ever stands in her way ; she suppresses whatever forms an
obstacle to her aims ; she crushes the weak to make room
for the strong. . . . My advice to you, Uncle, is: read
your Darwin through again." 2
The dangerous nature of these Darwinian theories is
shown by the crimes of Abbadie and Lebiez, when
scientists are for applying them indiscriminately to human
society equally with animal communities. I have already
noted the influence exerted by Darwinism over these
two murderers in my book Le Crime et la Peine ; and
there is no need to repeat what I have there said. 1 will
1 Moleschott, Circulation de la Vie, vol. ii.
2 Octave Feuillet, La Morte, p. 254.
454 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
give instead some other instances of crimes committed
under the same influence. A few years since, I was
present at the trial before the Assize Court of the
Bouches-du-Rhône of one Cornou and saw him con :
demned to death. He had insured his young servant-
maid's life and afterwards killed her to get hold of the sum
insured, 100,000 francs (£4000). The prisoner in question,
a retired tramway conductor, had read with passionate
interest a large number of works of Darwinian philosophy.
Transferring to social life the zoological laws of Darwinism,
he became convinced that Society, no less than Nature,
was governed by the laws of the Struggle for Life and
Natural Selection. After his sentence, on being visited
in prison by the Protestant pastor, he told the latter he
had wished to put these doctrines in practice and that he
had been beaten in the struggle for life that he had had to
sustain. " I recognize the fact," he said, " that Society is
stronger than I am and strikes me down ; I am one of the
defeated in life's struggle." Previously, during the trial,
just as the sentence of death was pronounced, I had seen
him approach the Advocate General and say to him : "No
ill-feeling, sir ! we have fought, and you have won ; I bear
you no ill-feeling ! " When the Pastor, wishing to awake
his remorse, spoke to him of his conscience, he replied:
" Conscience ! Conscience is a mere product of education
and heredity. ,, — "But," added the Pastor, "have you no
conscience of right and wrong ? " — " Right and wrong,"
returned the condemned man, "are only relative notions;
what is right in France, is wrong in China, and what is
wrong here, is right there." Intelligent, but at the same
time extremely vain, he loved to display the extent of his
reading, which had been the means of his ruin. Literary
vanity showed in all he said. Before sentence, he declared:
" My Counsel and myself have prepared a scheme of
defence which defies refutation." After his condemnation,
while anxious to do justice to his Counsel's abilities, he
said he was sorry he had not read the notes he had himself
prepared, as he was persuaded they would have produced
OF NOVELS OF PASSION • AS AFFECTING IT. 455
a greater effect When his appeal was refused and he
realized that the death sentence would be executed, he
threatened he would make a scene on the day he should
be led to the scaffold, adding : " I'll make some talk in the
records of Justice."
Another instance of the rapidity with which the
Darwinian theories of the Struggle for Existence and
Natural Selection penetrate amongst working-men is
afforded by the trial of the Anarchist Ravachol. The
Presiding Judge said to the accused: "There was pre-
meditation in your case. You said under examination
on June 9th : ' I wish to succeed and triumph over all
obstacles. The hermit was the obstacle ; so I put him
out of the way.' " The prisoner replied : " Yes, sir ! that
is so." The Judge : " Subsequently you saw the coachman
again some days later, on June 26th, and took his con-
veyance once more; what was your object?" — Ravachol:
u I wished to find out whether he had given any informa-
tion to the Police ; if he had told, I had a dagger and a
revolver, and my intention was to put him out of the
way." — The Judge: "It seems you put anybody out of the
way who annoys you, very readily ? " — Ravachol: " Yes ! it
is a necessity with us, it is a necessity of existence, of
everybody's existence." This and all the prisoner's answers
revealed no less corruption of mind than perversity of
feeling ; his intellectual depravity was obviously due to the
books he read. The Judge having said to him: "You
commit murder to satisfy your passions ; what can you
expect Society to do for a man who displays such senti-
ments?" — u It is I who have a claim on Society," was the
answer ; " Society ought to keep me. It is no wonder
men use any and every means to be happy, as Society
abandons us. ... It is all the fault of Society ; it is a
phenomenon arising as the result of the situation of
workers, who are dying of hunger in the midst of the
wealth they have themselves produced." The phenomenon
the man spoke of was the murder of an old man, whom he
had killed in order to rob him. These are the terms in
45^ CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND COWTAGIOM
which Ravachol described the murder: "I put my hand
over his mouth ; death not coming quick enough, I shoved
my handkerchief between his teeth. . • . Then, as he still
continued to struggle, I got oh the bed and rested my
knee on his chest ; he died very soon." The accused
showed no signs of remorse ; he had committed murder
because he wanted money, it was Society's fault for not
having made him rich and happy. " If I killed him," Ik
said again, " it was to satisfy my personal necessities."
These personal necessities were numerous, they included
good living, little work and the luxury of several mistresses
In fact the accused was merely putting in practice the
socialistic doctrine of " every man according to his needs."
This doctrine is an echo of the philosophical systems of
the Eighteenth Century, which deny right, basing it as
they do on need. Helvetius derives the right from the
desire to be happy. Destutt de Tracy from need, Volney
from the instinct of self-preservation, Hobbes from force,
d'Holbach from general utility. These theories are taught
at the present day with greater brutality and cynicism by
German philosophers, Stirner and Nietzsche, who make
a systematic defence for selfishness. The echo of the
same thing is to be found in those Novels which teach
the cultivation of the passionate ego, in other words, a
refined " egoism."
The sophistries of the Philosophers reach the people by
way of Novels and Newspapers with incredible rapidity.
Naturalistic novelists disseminate the doctrines of sensual-
istic and materialistic thinkers. Stendhal is a disciple of
d'Holbach and of Helvetius ; Théophile Gautier an admirer
of Fourier and his "attraction of passion." The gospel
preached by a large proportion of Novels is simply that
pleasure is the be-all and end-all of life. Eugène Sue
complaisantly describes the seven deadly sins. Another
Novelist, Théophile Gautier, regrets there are not more than
seven deadly sins and proposes to establish a "prix
Montyon," an order of merit, to reward the man who shall
invent a new pleasure.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 457
Nor has the naturalistic novel done less harm in
spreading among the people exaggerated ideas as to
physiological fatality and the heredity of vice and crime,
by confounding the hereditary transmission of tendencies
with that of positive acts, and by forgetting that hereditary
tendencies are capable of being counteracted by education,
free will and religious feeling. So freely are these difficult
questions of determinism, heredity, atavism, irresponsibility»
discussed by our Novelists, that Dr. Lombroso consoles
himself for his failure to win the approval of scientific men
by saying he possesses that of a number of novelists and
especially of M. Zola. 1 Let us not pretend then that
metaphysical speculation offers no dangers in France,
as so many Philosophers wrongly imagine. " Among the
Germans," says M. Bersot, "nothing is less innocuous
than a system of metaphysics ; they have the simplicity
to practise what they believe ... ; but we are not in the
least like Germans. With us thought is one thing, practice
another." 2 I do not share this opinion myself; in France,
quite as much as in Germany, and perhaps even more,
men are found who bring their acts into conformity with
their doctrines. It is seldom a Communist is not at the
same time atheist, materialist and determinist by con-
victions. In all ages false systems of philosophy have
produced criminal consequences. In 1847, for instance, the
jury of the Department of the Seine tried an association of
Materialistic Communists, as they called themselves. The
end they aimed at was the abolition of private property
by theft, arson and murder.
The Restitutionists complete Proudhon's famous sophism,
" la propriété c'est le vol " by the further addition of " le
vol c'est la restitution." 8
The Anarchists refuse to Society the right to act as
judge, because they are materialists and determinists.
Vaillant addressing the jurymen, told them : " Whatever
1 Dr. Lombroso, Les Applications de C Anthropologie criminelle,
* Bersot, Essais de philosophie et de morale, vol. i. p. 510.
1 " Property is theft,"— 14 theft is restitution."
458 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
be the penalty you inflict on me, it is of small concern to
me, for looking on this assemblage with the eyes of reason»
I cannot help seeing you as mere atoms adrift in matter,
reasoning away because you possess a prolongation of the
spinal marrow, and cannot bring myself to acknowledge
any right in you to Judge your fellows." 1
The Anarchist Etiévant when before the jury of the
Department Seine-et-Oise read aloud a formal statement,
in which he repudiated moral responsibility, and this state-
ment was lavishly distributed by his companions amongst
working-men.
Taine likewise believed for a long time in the innocuous-
ness of metaphysical theories, but in the latter years of
his life, taught by experience, he was in the habit of
saying : " I ought never to have written philosophy except
in Latin for the initiated ; the risk is too great of hurting
one's fellow-creatures." 2 If Taine acknowledges we may
do harm with books of philosophy, what havoc must not
be wrought by novels, where man is represented as being
an irresponsible animal ! No doubt there is a wild beast
in every man, and we must remember to muzzle it But
nothing is more dangerous than to wantonly display the
bad sides of human nature without at the same time
showing what constitutes its greatness. If a man thinks
of himself as an irresponsible brute, he will act the brutes
never fear. If, on the other hand, he conceives a high
idea of his own nature and destiny, if he feels and realizes
his responsibility, he will respect himself and be afraid of
deteriorating and growing like the " beasts that perish. n
The Novelists of the Naturalistic school who are so fond
of poking fun at spiritualistic beliefs, are even teady to
repeat Pascal's saying : he who would play the angel, often
plays the beast. True alas ! that to aspire to a too lofty
ideal does not prevent woeful backslidings. Still, the man
who from playing the angel falls to playing the beast, has
at any rate been an angel for a while ; and even in his
1 Gazette des Tribunaux, nth Jan. 1894.
- Les Débats of 6th March 1893, article by M. du Vogué* on Taine.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 459
degradation regrets his former high estate and would fain
recover it. But he who believes himself pure animal and
nothing else, makes no effort at all to reach a higher plane ;
he goes peacefully to sleep in the mud, and there is no
awakening for him. Novels which animalize man are
degrading ; robbing him of all sense of his dignity, they
corrupt his very nature.
Unfortunately, these novels of the physiological and
determinist type have penetrated everywhere and dis-
seminated even in country districts a degrading con-
ception of human nature. Their evil influence now
makes itself felt among peasants no less than amongst
workmen. The following saying was quoted to me the
other day as coming from a Provençal peasant : " A
peasant," he said, " is a machine, who opens the ground to
put manure into it, till the day when he lies down in it to
become manure himself." We have long been in the habit
of contrasting the corruption of great cities with the
innocence of the country. But with the wide diffusion of
naturalistic romances and revolutionary journals, the
corruption of peasants will soon be greater than that of
working men in the towns, if it is not so already. Brutal
passions no longer finding a counterpoise in religious faith,
but on the contrary being encouraged by novels that bring
man down to the level of the beasts, do actually produce
veritable brute beasts. Pornographic tastes and habits of
drunken debauchery have greatly developed in country
places. Parents sing obscene songs before their own
children. A friend of mine one day said to a peasant, a
married man and the father of a family, who made it his
amusement to seduce girls : " You have a daughter your-
self ; if someone were to seduce her, would you like that?"
—"Of course not," the man replied, "but there! what
matter, if she did not make me a young 'un ! " If crimes
against morals are more frequent in the country than they
used to be, I believe this may be partly attributed to the
influence of pornographic novels. The profligacy thus
provoked leads to sterile marriages, practices to procure
460 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
abortion, attempts at seduction and even infanticide
Numerous criminal trials, particularly those of Dis.
Boileux and La Jarrige, show how lovers take their
mistresses to the " abortionist's " as readily as to the
dentist's. Wives and mistresses tend more and more to
adopt the practice of preventing pregnancy, not only to
avoid the burden of maternity, but also to preserve their
beauty, "to spare the belly a few wrinkles." "Nunc
uterum vitiat quœ vult forniosa videri" (Ovid) — "Now-
adays she cheats her womb, the woman who is fain still to
look fair."
The revolutionary and anarchist Press helps to dis-
seminate naturalistic stories by publishing them in the
form of feuilletons. Between their doctrines and the class
of novels which animalize mankind there exist a close
affinity. On the occasion of the anarchist murderer
Anquillo's execution he was allowed to say a word, and
he uttered the name Germinal, the title of one of Zola's
novels. What is humanity? asks Backounine, — and his
answer is, animality endowed with the faculty of abstrac-
tion and generalization. . . . The sovereign law of the
animal is appetite; this law leads to the struggle for
existence. . . . All species of animals exist only by
destruction. . . . The history of humanity is nothing but
the continuation and development of this animal fight for
life." If cruelty assumes among the Anarchists propor-
tions hitherto unknown, it is because they desire to behave
conformably with these zoological theories, like animals
having no law but appetite. The revolutionary journals
disseminate the Novels in which man is assimilated to the
brute, because they know that with such doctrines the
wild animal in man is unchained and social revolt pre-
cipitated. They know too that by the propagation of the
taste for obscenity all good sentiments are weakened,
patriotism and family affection and all the rest. Bad
books make bad lives, and bad lives make bad soldiers.
Revolutionaries have always encouraged debauchery.
Dostoiewski, the celebrated author of Crime and Punish-
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 46 1
ment, who knew the Russian agitators at close quarters,
makes Verkhovenski, one of his characters, speak thus :
' We shall encourage drunkenness . . . and a degree of
profligacy hitherto unexampled. We want an upheaval,
[t is for us the leaders of the movement to bring this
ibout"
Pornography has become a lucrative profession. Aretino
used to say that with a quire of paper and a pen he could
Mum 3000 crowns a year ; and Aretino has his imitators,
svho make even more than he did at the same trade.
There has come about in Literature and in Journalism a
return to nastiness, like that in the Eighteenth Century.
In an Epicurean society, where pleasure is the chief thing,
the most successful books are those which flatter the love
af smut An enormous number of smutty books, magazines
uid papers are disseminated among all classes of society,
and are distributed to boys at the doors of schools, to
wrork-girls outside factories, to travellers at railway stations
ind to passers-by at street corners. Booksellers publish
* select libraries," the volumes of which are selected from
amongst obscene books. The "Select Library," says
M. Jules Lemaître, " is a truly wonderful collection. The
low prices charged appeal directly to the general public.
Vet on going through the list of works so far published,
[ find out of thirty-three volumes, no less than eighteen
that are either downright indecent, or at any rate distinctly
suggestive and smutty. Brantôme's Dames Galantes,
Casanova's Mémoires, Grécourt's ribaldries, (and pretty
well all the rest are in keeping), such is the fare offered
by our publishing booksellers to working men, young
sempstresses, small clerks and shop-boys." 1 There are
even Novels, which I prefer not to name, that instruct
the people in malthusian habits and unnatural vices.
Booksellers put in their windows Voltaire's La Pucelle and
other filthy books, on purpose to tempt young people.
In August of 1897 the Eighth Chamber of the Correctional
Tribunal of the Seine, of which I was an official, tried a
1 Jules Lemaître, Impressions de théâtre, 7th Series, p. 63.
462 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
young workman who had stolen from a bookseller's shop-
front, a copy of this very book (Voltaire's La Pucelie), the
title of which had enticed him. Men of mature age and
of a cold temperament can read without risk the erotic
verses of Voltaire, Ovid, Catullus, Martial, and find in
them pleasant strokes of wit and interesting pictures of
life and manners ; their age and disposition are a sufficient
protection. They experience, says Bayle, " what physicians
and surgeons find, who by dint of handling sores and
being exposed to evil smells form a habit of not being
incommoded by such things." But for young people it
is as difficult not to be corrupted by erotic Novels and
Poetry as to touch fire without being burned.
Of what use all the efforts of parents to keep obscene
images from the eyes and thoughts of their children, if
these very things are flaunted in the streets ? All the
lessons of teachers, all the good advice of parents, must
remain barren, if children are to find unhiealthy stimulus
in the public ways. It is the duty of Society to protect
young people by removing all causes of corruption out
of their reach ; it fails in this duty when it does not
second the efforts made by fathers of families in the same
direction. Juvenal wrote: "Let nothing that may wound
eyes or ears penetrate the dwelling where childhood lives.
. . . What! miserable man! you are in agonies of fear
lest your hall, fouled by a dog's excrement offend your
friend's eyes when he enters your house, lest your porch
show stains of mud . . . yet you pay no heed that your
home show pure of all stain, free from every vice, in your
boy's eyes?" May we not address the same vigorous
expressions to the representatives of public order, and
say: "What! you remove with scrupulous care the filth
of the streets, but you leave in the windows of booksellers'
and photographers' shops, in street kiosks, and on railway
bookstalls, books and journals, whose very titles are an
abomination ; you allow songs to be sung in cafés which
cannot but corrupt the mind. You make unheard-of
efforts to cleanse the streets and remove everything that
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 463
can vitiate the atmosphere, and you let young people's
minds inhale all the while a poisoned air. Why do you
not lavish the same care on the soul as on the body ? If
the moral atmosphere young people breathe is wholesome,
it will give them health and strength ; if it is vitiated, it
will poison them. Moral sanitation is just as important
as physical.
Nor are the revolutionary Papers the only ones to bring
bad novels within the reach of young people and the
working classes, Newspapers calling themselves conserva-
tive often publish novels in feuilleton form which tend to
upset society by their sophistries, and disseminate bad
behaviour by their naturalistic descriptions.
I have shown above how man's evil instincts find
encouragement in materialistic and fatalistic doctrines,
and how Crime is the inevitable outcome. The disciple,
in M. Bourget's Novel of that name, is quite justified in
writing as he does to his master, who has taught him the
doctrines of materialism and irresponsibility : " There
exists between you, the illustrious master, and me, your
pupil, now accused of the most despicable crime, a tie
that men can hardly comprehend, one that you do not
yourself realize, but which / feel at once binding and un-
breakable. I have lived with your thought and by your
thought so passionately and so completely at the most
decisive epoch of my existence."
Still, in these cases Crime is not glorified. It remains
to me to show how Fiction, after poetizing disease, death,
suicide, adultery, selfishness, has come at last, like the
Anarchists, to glorify Crime.
The glorification of Crime has been the capital folly of
Romantic Literature. Jean Jacques Rousseau said he
"could not conceive what pleasure is to be found in
picturing and fashioning the character of a villain . . ., in
throwing the most fascinating glamour over him." Yet
just this has been the great delight of the Romanticists.
The glorification of Crime was after all only a plagiarism
from English and German Literature, which had brought
464 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
brigands and corsairs into fashion. "In Germany," Goethe
says, "we got drunk in every shape and form, on wine,
beer, love and blood-thirsty dreams. ,, Schiller was still
in this period of young intoxication and wild thoughts,
when he composed The Robbers, which gave birth in
Germany and France to a host of dramas, the heroes of
which were bandits. " My thoughts were held in check,"
Schiller writes ; " they exploded in the creation of a
monster (the Robber Chief), such as never existed in this
world. My only excuse is, I wanted to paint men two
years before I knew them." Alfred de Musset copied
Schiller's Robbers in his La Coupe et les Lèvres. Victor
Hugo in the same way made banditti into heroes and saw
never a scoundrel but among Kings, Priests and Ministers
of the Crown. Authors of the Romantic school assigned
admirable virtues to murderers, courtesans, brigands and
lackeys ; in fact they created monsters. " Monsters are
the fashion," George Sand used to say, " come let us make
monsters." — "She used to hatch her Romances with a
facility almost equal to mine," Musset declared, " choosing
the most dramatic subjects, parricides, rapes, murders,
down to common pocket-picking." — " At that period,"
George Sand herself states, "the strangest things were
done in Literature. The eccentricities of Victor Hugo's
genius had intoxicated young men. . . . Chateaubriand
was voted not romantic enough. . . . Impossible titles
were at a premium and disgusting subjects preferred." *
The Romantics went out of their way to find " energetic"
characters in the gaols. George Sand saw in the inhabi-
tants of the bagnio men " full of power." Tremnor, who
murdered his mistress, is depicted in Lélia as a superior
being ; Alexandre Dumas accumulates crime upon crime
in his Novels and Plays ; " it is a wager of wickedness, a
primitive fanfaronade of villanies." 2
In this Literature nothing is thought so fine as a good
dagger-thrust ; the dagger is a sort of fetish. Charles de
1 George Sand, Histoire de ma vie, 4th Part, ch. xv.
8 Weiss.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 465
Rémusat, who for all this was a man of wit and taste,
speaking at this time of the dénoûment of Emilia Galotti>
where a father is shown killing his daughter who had let
herself be seduced, exclaims admiringly : " Tis a fine bit
of dagger play ! " These Romantic heroes always have a
dagger handy, wearing it as an ornament when they don't
want to use it. Antony uses a dagger by way of a seal.
In Christine^ Sentinelli employs a dagger to open a clasp
with. Byron's heroines carry daggers like his corsairs.
Balzac laments because the Parisians hang up the dagger
as a curiosity on a gilt nail ; he would rather see them
wear it in their belts and know how to use it.
These monsters of Literature, brigands, murderers,
poisoners, poetized by Romances, have in turn produced
monsters of the Criminal Courts, robbers and murderers
like Lacenaire, adulterous wives and husband poisoners
like Mme. Laffarge. The crimes of Lacenaire and Mme.
Laffarge were essentially romantic crimes. The cakes
this woman gave her husband were drugged with arsenic
and Romanticism. We have only to read her Memoirs
to see she was merely an echo of George Sand's Novels ;
indeed she admits she had read her stories with enthusi-
astic admiration, and particularly Indiana. These studies
had developed in her such a high degree of romantic
exaltation that she positively refused to marry a young
man who sought her hand previously to M. Laffarge,
because he had declared his love in such a commonplace
way she had found it impossible to throw any romantic
glamour over the affair; she longed to be loved, to be adored
madly. Marriage moreover seemed a very prosaic thing
to her, and she strove to put it off all she could. After
marriage, she had for her husband the scorn a heroine of
romance never fails to feel, upbraiding society for having
invented the slavery of wedlock. Unable to overcome the
disgust her husband inspired her with, she put in practice
the advice she had read so often in prose and verse:
44 Tu peux tuer cet homme avec tranquillité." l
1 " You can kill this man with a quiet conscience."
2 G
466 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Indeed in Romantic Novels and Romantic Dramas the
adulterous wife and her lover never dream of anything
but murdering the unhappy husband. " Oh ! if only you
knew," says Antony, "how often I have fallen asleep
thinking of the fellow, my hand upon my dagger . . . and
I have dreamed of gallows and scaffold . . . Duty, virtue,
empty words ! ... A murder will make you a widow. . . .
I am ready to undertake murder ; a crime stands between
you and me, — well ! I will commit the crime." — In Balzac's
La Femme de trente ans, Lord Grenville says to Mme
d'Anglemont : " I have repeatedly counted over too care-
fully all the ways and means of killing the man (her
husband) to be able to go on resisting the temptation,
if I remained with you," to which the woman replies with
equal coolness, " I have entertained the same idea myself."
If after a first crime, a second is required, the hero of
romance does not hesitate to commit it ; it is only the
first crime that counts, — or rather it scarcely does count
and the second even less. " To have committed, to win
you, rape, assault and adultery, and to keep you to stick
at another crime ? ... To lose my soul for such a trifle. . . .
No, no! you are mine ... I am carrying you off; woe
to the man who stops me ! "
Romanticism, having begun by defending suicide, was
not slow to go on to the glorification of murder. Werther
kills himself rather than kill Albert. Antony does not
put an end to himself, in spite of his melancholy, but he
murders Adèle. Dumas' plays fired young men's and
women's fancies, and just as Werther gave rise to
Wertherism, Antony produced Antoninism.
In the pages of Romantic Literature, lovers who rest
content with adultery and boggle at the husband's murder,
are ashamed of their weakness, but console themselves by
tickling their imagination with the refreshing thought of
the murder they dare not commit. " If now and again,"
says one of them, " I refresh my mind by the thought of
a crime, theft or murder, or both together, I find myself
quite incapable of committing it in sober reality. The
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 467
Countess is a wonderful creature who might well claim
our pity, and a man is not an Othello for wishing to be."
Men of culture have left off by this time reading Eugène
Sue's novels; but he was widely read formerly, at the
time when the Journal des Débats brought them out, and
the people, working men and women, still devour them
greedily. But on every page we find the sentiment ex-
pressed that " to complete a truly great, a frenzied passion,
a warm and ardent passion, a crime is a necessity."
The author who most ardently admired crimes of passion
was Stendhal, of whom I have already spoken, and must
speak again. This Novelist, who despised humanity and
called his father an " old villain," when he failed to send
him money enough, professed the liveliest admiration for
crimes of passion. The aim of life, for him, was pleasure ;
happiness lies only in the satisfaction of the passions, and
"energy" is only expressed in crimes of passion. He
has summed up his life in the words : " I have written, I
have loved, I have lived."
On the occasion of a crime of passion committed in 1699
by the wife of a Counsellor in the Parlement of Aix, some
ladies challenged the Abbé Gastaud, Advocate in the same
Parlement, to compose a funeral oration over the accused.
The Abbé accepted the challenge, and the ladies locked
him up in a room, telling him he would not be released
until the funeral oration was finished. The Abbé finally
came out with a harangue, in which he drew a seductive
picture of the woman guilty of this crime of love, of her
greatness of soul, the vigour of her passions, the strength
of mind with which she had conceived and prepared her
crime for three long years ! This panegyric of amorous
strenuousness, which was merely a jeu d'esprit at the time,
a society diversion, has since Stendhal grown into a
literary theory. In the eyes of these admirers of strenuous-
ness, Love that does not run to crime is no true love at
ail. Unless it is a fever, a fury, a homicidal frenzy, it is
without vigour or beauty; but if it rises to the level of
crime, ah ! then it is grand, glorious, admirable. Murders
468 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
due to jealousy delight Stendhal. " Last night," he writes
in his Promenades dans Rome, " two murders took place.
A young butcher, a mere boy, stabbed his rival. ... The
second murder occurred near St Peter's, among the
Trasteverini, This is another dangerous quarter, they
say, — but in my eyes superb; energy is to be found there,
the quality of all others most lacking in the Nineteenth
Century." Stendhal despises France, because in his day
crimes of passion were rare in that country ; he dislikes
his fellow-countrymen, because they do not know how to
kill either themselves or other people from love. " Hardly
do the Newspapers," he exclaims regretfully, " tell us the
story of a bare yearly half-dozen Othellos ; Frenchmen, by
the gradual perfecting of their ways of life, are attaining
refinement and elegance, but they are losing energy. At
Rome, on the contrary, none of those limitations and con-
straints exist, none of those modes and conventions, which
in other countries are known to science as usages of society,
or even as decency and virtue." At Rome, they know
how to hate a rival, and how to wreak vengeance on him.
At Rome, a husband knows how to kill his wife's lover
and have done with it ; " and this is why Rome is the
finest place in all Italy." 1 In France men of position are
incapable of flying in a fury and avenging a wrong ; work-
ing men may punch each other's heads, but this is the
utmost to be expected. The Romans carry knives, and
use them. Only let a knife thrust be delivered by a
Roman, even for some motive that has nothing to do with
love, and instantly Stendhal is full of boundless admiration
for the murderer's "energy." He never gives a moment's con-
sideration to the victim's sufferings and those of his family;
1 Chateaubriand however, who lived for years in Rome, says in his
Mémoires d'outre-tombe, "tragic love adventures have ceased to fill the lires
of the great Roman ladies." — Taine, who travelled in Italy, understood better
than Stendhal the true nature of this Italian "energy"; "it is," he ays,
"merely a tendency towards violent and dangerous acts . . . passion and
blood suffuse their eyes simultaneously, and in an instant they are back to
primitive ferocity; they are downright savages." {Voyage in Italie, vol i.
P. 315.)
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 469
11 his sympathies go out to the murderer. The sight of
lood was agreeable to him. One day he saw a workgirl
f Civita Vecchia stabbed to death, and was struck by the
jperbly picturesque effect produced by the fine colour of
ie blood on well-gartered stockings and a well-made leg."
At the very time Stendhal was making himself miserable
ver the inferiority of France as compared with Italy in
he matter of knifing, a crime of passion was committed
a the Pyrenees by a working cabinet-maker ; this event
ie saluted with a cry of enthusiasm, and wrote that " the
nurderer had more soul in him than all the poets of the
teriod put together, and more wit than most of these
gentlemen." These poets, who according to Stendhal had
ess soul and less wit than the murderer, enjoyed the
lames of Delavigne, Lamartine and Victor Hugo. All
he same the murderer was a common criminal who,
vounded by the indifference his mistress manifested
owards him, first shot her with a revolver, and then cut
1er throat We shall see from the account he gave of his
:rime before the Assize Court, that this bully was also
l coward. " Then," (on Thérèse refusing to go out with
lim), "then," he says in his narrative, "I fire a pistol shot
it her and miss ; I seize her by the arm, saying, ' turn
ound,' and at the same moment fire a second shot. She
alls down and her headkerchief covers her eyes. I want
[kill myself. . . . But, before firing, I notice there is no
)lood near Thérèse's body and I say to myself, ' perhaps
ihe is only swooning?' ... I raise the kerchief that hid
1er eyes, and found them open. I say to myself, ' Alas !
[ am done for now, and you will survive me to make fun of
ny death V No ! it is not fair. I will confess all ; I take
ny knife, the coward's weapon (I had no other), and cut
1er throat with it. I was horrified at my own act. ... I
:overed up her face so as not to see it. . . . Presently,
>beying a natural instinct of order and cleanliness, I wipe
ny knife, shut it and put it back in my pocket. I then
et off a pistol shot in my own mouth, but without my
jeingjaware of it, the weapon was loaded with powder only."
470 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGIOK
This commonplace malefactor's mind was unhinged; he
was on the brink, in fact, of madness, under the form of
the mania of persecution. It was the dread of his mistress's
mockery that turned him into a homicidal maniac; in
Stendhal's eyes he is a model of " energy and tenderness!"
Nor is it only the murderer out of jealousy who rouses
Stendhal's admiration ; the thief gives him pleasure too.
" When I am stopped by thieves," he says, "... I feel a
great passion of anger against the Government and the
Parson of the parish. As for the thief, I like him, if he
is a man of energy, for he amuses me." l
What Stendhal calls energy or strenuousness is the
letting loose of cruelty and sensuality, the violence of
passion deaf to reason. Directly passion is restrained
and reason comes in to regulate the senses, " energy *
disappears. If a girl refuses to quit her father's house
and disgrace her name by eloping with a lover, Stendhal
writes, " she had character enough to fly with him." Ta
have character, it would seem a girl must lose all sense of
honour and modesty. 2
Stendhal's paradox as to the beauty of crimes of passion
has been reiterated, cultivated and enlarged by the most
celebrated writers of the Romantic School ; and at the
present time is to be found in the Novels of M. M. Barrés.
M. Barrés adores Spain, because it shows "the most violent
life of nervous energy ever given to man to live," because
its bull-fights breathe " the intoxicating force that exhales
from slaughter," because the Spaniard knows how to be
at one and the same time of high-strung soul and ferocious
cruelty, at once mystical and savage, and "loves to see
blood, to bite and tear." 8 M. Barrés, it is plain enough,
1 The quotation is borrowed from a book entitled, VArt et la vU it
Stendhal, p. 406.
'■* Nevertheless in a Collection of great French Writers dedicated to young
people this Novelist has been included, a man who says in one of his Prefaces,
" I write for a mere poor hundred readers . . . not hypocrites, and not nwral.
I cannot understand why they should style ' the apostle of energy ' an author
who spends his time in analysing his sensations and makes the end and aim of
life consist in the search after pleasure."
* M. Barrés, Du sang, de la volupté et de la mort.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 47 1
copies Stendhal, but Stendhal himself was an imitator of
Saint-Evrémond. Everywhere plagiarism, — imitatores>
servum pecus (" Ye plagiarists, a servile crowd "). As long
ago as the Seventeenth Century, Saint-Evrémond com-
plained they did not know how in France to love with
the same energy as in Spain, vaunting the fury and fierce-
ness of Spanish love and deeming love in France to be of
far too reasonable a sort. " Though naturally enough," he
wrote, " Love never has very well defined rules and regula-
tions in any country, I make bold to say that in France
nothing very extravagant is to be found either in the way
it is made or in the ordinary effects it produces. What
they call a "genuine love affair" only just escapes being
ridiculous. ... In Spain, life is not worth living without
Love."
To live only for love, to make love extravagant and
criminal, such is the ideal of these literary doctrinaires of
crimes of passion, whose admiration is confined to frantic
passions and countries where manners are sensual and
cruel. These writers content themselves with dreaming
over crimes of passion and relishing the enjoyment of
them in imagination ; they take good care not to do any
of the criminalities themselves they make others commit.
Succeeding the Novelists and Dramatic authors who
celebrated the beauty of crimes of passion, came the
Romantic historians of the Revolution, with their glori-
fication of political crime and the massacres of the Terror,
and later still the admirers of the Commune and the
44 noble attitudes " of Anarchists hurling bombs. Even
crimes of common Law have found apologists ; Dostoiewski
in one of his Novels makes a member of the secret Societies
of Russia say : " Crime is not a form of madness, as Littré
would have us believe, but a wholesome idea, almost a
duty, at the least a noble protest." The populace has been
led to admire Novels and Plays, in which the murderer is
a man of honour, the thief has wit and the prostitute
modesty. Lacenaire has founded a school ; he admired
the murderer's energy, — "every murderer," he said, "is a
472 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
brave man." Well! he has made converts, and has had
his admirers male and female, especially the latter; not
a few women wrote to him to express their admiration in
passionate letters. The same thing happened to PranzinL
These examples show how dangerous are the Romances
that poetize criminals and lend a factitious intellectuality
and tragic grandeur. Descriptions of murder are par-
ticularly dangerous when they are joined with the de-
lineation of voluptuous sensations. This association of
sanguinary and voluptuous images, which constitutes
Sadism, has been drawn in glowing colours by a number
of Writers, who have thus been instrumental in spreading
this form of sexual perversion. It is well known that in
certain individuals voluptuous sensations provoke cruelty
and vice versa ; voluptuous ideas awake sanguinary ones,
and sanguinary ideas voluptuous ones. The Princes who
have been most prone to debauchery have been cruel
Princes. It has been proved that soldiers, after a battle,
have experienced when pillaging fierce sexual appetites.
I am much inclined to believe that the sight of blood, shed
in the games of the Circus, tended strongly to excite among
the Romans voluptuous cravings. Physicians who have
studied sexual perversions, say that debauchees delight in
picturing women bathed in blood to their imagination.
Dr KrafTt-Ebing, Professor of Psychiatry at the University
of Vienna, quotes several cases from amongst his patients
showing the connection existing between voluptuous sensa-
tion and the craving to shed blood or to see it shed. He
gives the instance of a young man "whose imagination
was continually haunted by ideas of bloodshed which
produced in him feelings of voluptuous pleasure. . . .
Frequently other cruel fancies beset him. For instance
he would picture himself playing the part of a tyrant
mowing down the populace with grape shot. Or he
would find his mind filled with pictures of the scenes
that would occur if an enemy were entering a conquered
city, violating, torturing and carrying off virgins." 1 I am
1 Psychopathia sexua!is y p. 98.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 473
of opinion that a similar state of mind existed in certain
poets, notably in Baudelaire, Musset and Byron, all of
whom found pleasure in writing poems at once sinister
and voluptuous, where murders follow scenes of love-
making. Byron's poems are full of descriptions of battles
followed by the ravishing of women ; it is to heighten the
voluptuousness that he first wallows in a butchery. In
Musset's early poems, dagger thrusts and pistol shots
alternate with kisses. Baudelaire goes farther still ; he
says in the preface of his book :
" Si le viol, le poison, le poignard, l'incendie
N'ont pas encor brodé de leurs plaisants dessins
Le canevas banal de nos piteux destins,
Cest que notre âme, hélas ! n'est pas assez hardie. . . ." !
The fact is familiar that profligates sometimes strangle
the women they have abused, and this not solely to escape
the law by putting the witness out of the way, but because
they experience a highly agreeable sensation in killing
them in this way. Verzeni, who strangled several women
after violating them, said these murders caused him " an
intensely voluptuous sensation " ; barely did he touch his
victims' necks before he experienced sexual excitement. 2
Probably Vacher and other stranglers of women were
similarly affected. Baudelaire would seem to have been
possessed by a like picture of a murdered woman and he
has written a poem on the subject entitled, Une Martyre
(" A Martyr ").
" Dans une chambre tiède où, comme en une serre,
L'air est dangereux et fatal, . . .
Un cadavre sans tête épanche, comme un fleuve,
Sur l'oreiller desaltéré,
Un sang rouge et vivant. . . ." 3
Baudelaire ends the pôem with the question whether
1 " If rape, poison, dagger, arson, have not yet embroidered with their
pleasing patterns the dull canvas of our petty destinies, it is because, alas !
our soul is not bold and brave enough. ..."
a Psyckopathia sexttalis, p. 89.
* •' In a heated bedchamber where, as in a greenhouse, the atmosphere is
dangerous and sinister ... a headless corpse pours out like a river over the
soaked pillow a red and living blood. ..."
474 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
the murderer has eventually succeeded in assuaging his
appetite for voluptuous sensations :
" L'homme vindicatif, que tu n'as pu vivant,
Malgré tant d'amour, assouvir,
Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante
L'immensité de son désir ? " l
Taine tells us that Byron said one day : " I should be
curious to experience the sensations a man must have
when he has just committed a murder." 2 In a Novel of
Dostoiewski's, Raskolnikoff has the same longing to feel
the sensations of a murderer. Plagiarism again ! There
is never a literary eccentricity that is not copied from
Literature to Literature. Wholesome ideas are dissemin-
ated slowly and with difficulty, but the infection of ex-
travagant follies always spreads rapidly. Fiction has been
so successful in arousing the taste for perverse sensations
that at the trial of the Student Ch , a witness came
forward to depone how he had heard the accused express
the very same wish as Lord Byron, " I should like to
procure myself the sensations of a murderer." Remember-
ing the insignificant wound which the accused had given
himself in the cheek, instead of aiming at the temple, and
the fact that he refrained from firing the fifth chamber of
his revolver, which remained undischarged to the end,
we are led to suppose he had wished to kill his victim
after dishonouring her, to gratify his craving for literary
and perverse sensations, and mingle love and death
together, like the heroes of Romance. 3
1 "The revengeful man whom you could not, in spite of all your love, satisfy
when alive, did he surfeit on your still and uncomplaining flesh the immensity
of his desire ? "
2 Histoire de la Littérature anglaise, 8vo éd., vol. iii. p. 532.
3 On April 23rd, 1898, two foreign students, one a Bulgarian, the other a
Russian, living in the University district of Paris, shot themselves with
revolvers. The first died, the second survived his wound, and declared he
had tried to commit'suicide in search of a new sensation. These strange words»
showing to what a degree Literature, by turning young men's thoughts to the
search and analysis of sensations, upsets their minds, were reported to me by
the Police Commissary's Secretary of the Val -de-Grâce, who enquired into
the affair. The Police Commissary himself told me he was terrified by
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 475
Literary vanity combines with the most perverted
sensualism in all the forms these crimes of passion take.
Before killing Mme. C , Ch read her a copy of
verses he had composed for her. After the murder, he is
proud of his pseudo-romantic escapade, the memory of
which he hopes to utilize in a psychological Novel. One
of his quartier latin friends writes to him : " You talk of
pride ; ah ! yes ! you can and you ought to be proud. . . .
Write to us. . . . Tell us of the state of your mind. . . -
All, men and women, the whole quarter is with you and for
you. . . . You will be a great man, never fear, great heart,
after being a great agonizer (you see I invent a word) ;
you must write us Literature from your point of view."
To make a novel out of the murder of the woman he
had killed, a married woman and the mother of three
children, is the idea that filled the mind of this young
murderer of literary tendencies and of his friends. He
Is to become famous by writing down as a tale the fine
love tragedy he has brought about A love adventure is
to be utilized to supply copy !
Men who prey on women's hearts feel no repugnance,
in their consuming self-conceit, to admit the public to their
amorous confidences, and even to those of others. The
most illustrious of our Novelists have not avoided this
pitfall. Rousseau composed his Nouvelle Heloïse out of
recollections of his love for Mme. d'Houdetot, the details
:>f which he made public in his Confessions. Goethe
divulged in Werther his liaison with Charlotte Buff and
Kestner, making a friend of the latter's declare "it is a
langerous thing to have a friend an author." In René>
Chateaubriand did not fear to relate the incestuous passion
>f his sister Amélie. The great Lamartine, who with a
narvellous poetic genius combined a sound good sense
hat is rare among poets, failed to guard himself from
he continual increase in the numbers of suicides in the Quartier latin, and
hat he had noticed that those who killed themselves by means of charcoal
umes took a pleasure in describing their sensations down to the minutest details.
n the Russian student's rooms was found a note-book filled with maxims from
Schopenhauer, Spinoza and other philosophers.
476 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
similar rather indelicate indiscretions ; he saw good to
recall in Graziella the love and despair of the Neapolitan
girl he had deserted, and in Raphaël the love of Julie 1
Abelard, that mediaeval Romantic, also gratified his vanity
by celebrating in song his amours with HeloYse, at the
risk of ruining her good name and drawing down her
uncle's anger upon her. How widely does all this literary
vanity, this public exhibition of his personal qualities,
differ from the simplicity, the modesty, the tact of the
Writers of the Seventeenth Century, who never speak of
themselves !
The heroes of the Criminal Courts copy the literary
vanity of the heroes of romance and their authors ; they
write their Memoirs too. Among the papers relating to
the case of the murderer Vitalis, a retired bookseller, I
found a host of writings entitled, Thoughts for her. To
arguments against the religious life Vitalis joins declarations
of love addressed to the girl he wished to marry, written
in a fiery style, an echo of the romantic books he was in
the habit of reading. " Ungrateful being," he writes, "you
have refused to reign over the heart that loved you, the
heart that for one word of your mouth, one look of your
eyes, would have sacrificed all, his friends, his future, his
whole life, living only for you, breathing only for you,
thinking only of you, yours ever and always ! " This
cultured murderer had moreover written a biography of
the woman he had killed, the girl's mother, ending it with
these words : " It is a resume 'of Nineteenth Century woman-
kind." — Mme. Laffarge published her Memoirs and her
Heures de Prison (" Prison Hours "). — Among the papers
of Marie Bière were found six sets of verses from her
hand. — Clotilde Andeal, a former actress of ingénue parts
at the Palais-Royal Theatre, who threw vitriol over her
lover, did not omit to compose a Memoir of her life. —
The widow Gras again had her literary ambitions; she
wrote in prison a lengthy love poem for the lover she had
1 In his Preface to the Nouvelles Confidences, Lamartine nobly admitted his
fault and declared he had written these volumes only in order to pay his debts.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 477
blinded. — The lovers of Montmorency, whom Alfred de
Vigny celebrated in a " dithyramb," wrote poetry on the
eve of their death at the inn where they took their last
meal. And plenty of similar instances could be adduced.
Commonplace criminals, who are proud of their crimes,
are content to say, " They will talk of me in the News-
papers." More highly educated persons in the same
position call in the aid of Literature and utilize both these
means in combination to win celebrity. " You can hardly
believe," Lacenaire said, "how I should love, before my
head falls, to leave some pages behind not unworthy of
my talents. . . . You see, I am an unfortunate fellow ; well !
you have no idea how often I have dreamed of theatrical
triumphs." With this object he had written a drama and
a farce. He had likewise dreamed of oratorical successes,
and before becoming a murderer himself, he had pictured
murders in his own mind as a young man, that he might
improvise eloquent speeches in defence of the criminals.
He was highly flattered by the notice taken of him in
prison. " Avril " (his accomplice), " is not made nearly so
much of as I am," he used to say : " I wager this is because
he does not write poetry like me, and not such bad poetry
either. The worthy Advocates of the Paris Bar have been
most polite to me and have complimented me." Lacenaire's
theories as to the fatality of crime have had even more
success than his poetry. We all know that celebrated
Writers on Crime have tried to substitute for the doctrine
of responsibility that of physiological fatality, and have
affirmed the existence of the " born criminal," declaring :
" A man is born a thief or a murderer, as another is born
a poet." l These savants have unconsciously reproduced
Lacenaire's theory, who said in the very same words : " I
was born a murderer, as another man is born a poet, as
Coquin was born a rascal, and Papavoine a madman." 2
The murderer Morisset, finding it impossible to arrive
at notoriety by way of the poems and novels he had
1 Dr. Lombroso, Dr. Maudsley.
2 Lacenaire après sa condamnation, p. 54.
478 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
written, also sought fame in crime. He had a fervent
admiration for Lacenaire ; " he is a magnificent fellow," he
declared, " a powerful individuality. . . . Shall I end like
him ? When I cross-question my conscience, I elicit the
reply, ' It may be so.' Poet, thief, murderer, — a noteworthy
progression. And I tell myself softly, — in a whisper: I
am half-way on the road already."
The authors of crimes of passion, who very often are
great readers of novels, draw attention to themselves by
their literary pretensions ; they write poetry, in which they
allude to favours they have not received, or else avenge
themselves for the slights they have suffered by satirical
verses. In the letters they write, they love to harp on the
so-called " right of love," a phrase they have borrowed from
some novel. One Foucou, who was tried some few years
ago at the Assize Court of the Bouches-du-Rhône, wishing
to seduce a young married woman, who would not accept
his advances, declared : " When you love a woman, that
woman ought to be yours." Young men who commit
suicide together with their mistresses often write the
history of their amours with copious detail. I have
myself read a number of these highly circumstantial
accounts. It is evident that, their heads stuffed with
romantic books, they experience a craving to themselves
compose a dramatic novel. One of these conceived the
quaint idea of filling a bulky note-book for his mother's
perusal with a minutely detailed narrative of his amours ;
without a thought of the impropriety of his confidences,
he described for his mother's benefit the bliss he had felt
in possessing his mistress a few hours before dying along
with her.
Another thing frequently observed in the authors of
crimes of passion and even among common murderers, is
a great affectation of sensibility, borrowed from the books
they have read. It was Jean Jacques Rousseau, as every-
body knows, who brought sensibility into fashion, being
endowed with extreme sensibility himself. He was melted
to tears with the utmost facility. Almost every page of
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 479
bis confessions speaks of his tears and sobs ; in the Second
Dialogue he says of himself : " As to moral sensibility, I
liave never known anyone so much its slave as myself.'
He thought himself very virtuous, because he always spoke
3f virtue in a melting mood ; he mistook a love of virtue
for virtue itself. Sensibility has been deemed, since
Rousseau wrote, a sufficient passport to virtue, and the
world has plumed itself on its sensibility as if that in-
cluded everything. Necker, who like all his contem-
poraries, fell under the influence of his fellow-countryman,
wrote: "I care not whether or no there is a moral aim
in the novel or story that has made me shed so many tears,
for I cannot be so stirred without becoming a better
man." * But a readiness to feel emotion and shed tears is
not necessarily a proof of goodness. Rousseau himself, who
could not mention children without the liveliest emotion, put
his own in the Foundling Hospital. Mme. de Luxembourg,
who attracted much attention by her extreme sensibility,
killed her step-daughter by inches. The sentimental
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was anything but a good man.
Sensibility is not true pity. In the Revolution time, men
who would weep in the theatre over imaginary sufferings,
used to look on indifferently as the heads fell under the
executioner's hand. By dint of shedding tears over fictitious
misfortunes, none are left to expend on real ones. It is no
uncommon thing to hear murderers talk about their sensi-
bility. Hermione says of herself in the play : " Hermione
possesses sensibility, Oreste virtue."
Here are some passages from letters I have read written
by a murderer, afterwards executed. He freely admits it
is impossible to conceive a more horrible crime than his,
but endeavours to find extenuating circumstances in the
mental sufferings his victim had made him endure. " These
can be realized," he says, " only by one who has suffered as
I have, and who possesses a just and sensitive heart such as
mine." Maintaining he had been driven to the crime by
his mistress, he goes on to say he had devoted all his being
1 Manuscript by M. Necker, Sur r attendrissement % p. 43.
480 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
to the object of his affections, his idol, and had sacrificed
his life for her. " The happiness of her we love," he writes,
" affords as much bliss as grief and suffering on her part
gives us pain ; what man is there, who seeing a woman he
loves suffering, would not do all that lies in his power to
relieve her ? " The murderer in question, who had plunged
a kitchen knife into a woman's bosom, who had then tried
to strangle his victim, breaking her teeth in the attempt,
talks of nothing but love in his letters. " Man's life," he
says in one place, " should be a life of love. How can a
man be happy, if he thinks only of himself? . . . The
commanding voice of Nature tells us : * Love ; is not God
love ? if you would know Him, love ! ' Only by love can
you understand Him. This word sums up everything."
He writes to the mother of the girl he wished to marry :
" You saw me, choked with tears, ask you to grant me life or
death, you saw me clinging to your knees and wetting them
with my tears, you heard me crave permission to love
Marie or die of grief. • . . Do you remember the evening
when I asked you for Marie's hand ? We were walking,
you hung on my aftn like a mother who needs a son's
support ; you talked to me of Marie and I was happy, I
felt an indescribable joy. When the wind now and again
stirred the leaves, I would fain have stilled it, to lose
nothing of the sweet words that spoke to me of my
beloved. ... To see if I really loved Marie, you told me
she wished to become a nun ; at this I felt a shudder run
through all my body, and in my rage I should have liked
to destroy all the convents in the land."
Mme. Weiss again, who poisoned her husband, was a
woman of sensibility ; she declared that Music made her
" vibrate exquisitely," that she loved the twilight, that she
felt herself " lifted up and lost in infinity as she gazed at
the starry firmament." — Tacitus relates how Messalina
was at one and the same time full of sensibility and
cruelty ; when she wished to have Asiaticus put to death,
she was present at his examination in the apartment of
Claudius and could not help shedding tears as she listened
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 48 1
to his defence. She left the room to dry them, but she
took the same opportunity to warn Vitellius not to let
him escape. 1 According to Plutarch, the tyrant of Pheres,
who listened without a pang to the cries of the unhappy
men who were being butchered at his command, used to
go and weep at the Theatre over the calamities of Priam
and Andromache. During the Great Revolution the same
combination of sensibility and cruelty was witnessed in
the case of Robespierre and several members of the Paris
Commune ; these men were full of sensibility for animals,
but had nothing but cruelty for men.
The murderer Morisset, a great reader of Novels and
admirer of Lacenaire, wrote : " Like him I had great
bursts of sensibility, and could never see without emotion
a calf driven to the shambles or a dog thrown into the
Loire." The saying is often heard : the man who does
not love animals does not love people. The proverb is
true, in the sense that anyone who ill-uses animals, cannot
be good-natured towards his fellow-creatures, but it is not
true in the sense that a love of animals is a sufficient
guarantee of a good heart. M. Zola, who wrote an article
about love for animals, has left it on record that this article
earned him touching demonstrations of sympathy from a
great number of fair ladies. But these admirers of his
were not aware of the fact that we frequently find blood-
thirsty murderers possessed of a passionate love for
animals. 2 A murderer, who had killed two women at
Marseilles, and who was executed, asked as a special
favour to be allowed to go to the scaffold with his parrot
Lacenaire never wept but once, over the death of a cat.
" I who never wept over the bodies of any of the women
I killed," he said, " I felt myself choking at sight of an
1 Tacitus, Annals y xi. § I.
2 Zoophily is often observed also among patients suffering from neurasthenia,
hysteria and insanity. They refuse to eat meat, not for hygienic reasons, but
from love of animals. I saw a young girl at Sainte- Anne refuse to drink milk
because it was an animal food. Excessive affection for animals is a sign of
want of intellectual equilibrium, of degeneration, and a symptom of morbid
sensibility.
2 H
482 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
unfortunate cat I cruelly murdered. There's something for
you to explain, my philosophic friends." — The widow Gras,
who was guilty of such an atrocious crime, used to pick up
and take care of wounded birds. — Women of pleasure who
care little for their family, are as a rule deeply attached
to animals. Ovid tells us his mistress was devoted to a
parrot. Juvenal says Cynthia was inconsolable at the death
of a sparrow. It is no uncommon thing to see women
ill-treat their children and lavish the greatest attention on
their cats. — I have myself noted a case where a mother
used her children vilely, but kept seven pet dogs ; she
would stint her children of food to increase the dogs'
allowance. Juvenal speaks of Roman ladies who would
willingly have sacrificed their husbands to save their
favourite lap-dog's life. I believe women of the same
sort might be found in Paris at the present day. Bright
feminine eyes that fill with tears at the death of a dog, a
cat or a canary, are dry when a husband dies.
" La mort d'un passereau leur fait verser les larmes." '
" Il n'aurait pas marché sur une mouche à terre,
Mais s'il l'avait trouvée à dîner dans un verre,
Il aurait assommé cinq on six de ses gens." *
Sensibility then and affection for animals we see are
no sufficient proof of the possession of a tender heart
The Student Ch , though endowed with extreme
sensibility, accepted readily enough the sacrifice of Mile.
G 's life, entirely indifferent to the grief her death must
necessarily cause her husband and children and the dis-
grace such a scandal must bring upon a respectable family.
This morbid sensibility was not solely due to his tempera-
ment, he owed it largely to the books he read. " I read
enormously," he said, "particularly the poets." He read
romances no less passionately ; " I wept over Obermann
1 "The death of a sparrow makes them shed tears." — Gilbert.
8 •• He would not have stepped on a fly on the ground, but had he found
one in his glass at dinner, he would have killed five or six of his servants. 11 '
Alfred de Musset.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 483
and René. . . . The mere play of my intelligence had
consumed in me the solid stuff of my will. The more I
meditated, the more I felt myself off my balance." All
this reading of novelists and poets had already in-
ordinately stimulated his sensibility and imagination,
when he devoted himself to the perusal of the analytical
romances of Stendhal, Balzac, M. Bourget. In this school
of literature he acquired a craving for sensation and analysis
pushed beyond all bounds ; he watched himself live, like
the hero of a psychological romance, analysing every senti-
ment and every emotion, and composed a novel on The
infinitesimal Dispersion of the Heart ! This craving for
sensation and analysis inordinately indulged, a thing that
-dries up the heart and destroys the brain, completed the
-derangement of his nerves and imagination, and he was
now ripe for suicide, crime or madness. " I had a dread
of going mad," he said ; " one day I felt myself irresistibly
drawn to seize a knife lying on a block, and had to fly
to escape the temptation. My condition had become
pathological."
M. Bourget began by protesting against the notion of
throwing upon Literature and more especially on novels
of analysis any share of responsibility for the intellectual
and moral perversity of the criminal of Constantine. " It
is very easy," he said, " to make Literature responsible for
the moral obliquities painfully elaborated in this man's
mind by ten years' efforts, and malevolence has not missed
its opportunity to do so, — as if Literature had ever exercised
the smallest influence over souls not previously prepared
to meet it half way." 1 "Why, my good sir!" Stendhal
1 Preface by M. Paul Bourget prefixed to Causes Criminelles of 1888 by
Bataille. M. Bourget' s objection being only a reproduction of Ovid's and M.
Jules Lemattre's, which I have already answered, I think it unnecessary to
repeat my reply here; it is to be found on pp. 420, 406. M. Bourget has him-
self in more than one of his books drawn attention to the fact that reading is
capable of exerting no small influence, inasmuch as he attributes the moral
degradation of several of his heroes to effects of Literature. Thus in his
Crime a* amour y he makes one character say : " School life and modern
Literature befouled my mind before I knew what life was. The same sort
of reading set me against Religion at fifteen."
484 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
wrote as long ago as 1850, referring to this problem of
literary responsibility, " a book is a looking-glass travelling
on the highway. At one moment we see it reflect the
blue skies, at another only the mire and mud of the road-
way. And the man who carries the looking-glass on his
back you choose to call immoral ! His mirror shows mire,
and you blame the mirror ! Rather blame the state of the
track where mud is allowed to accumulate and still more
the road-inspector, whose neglect lets water collect and
mud-holes abound." *
To begin with, we may tell Stendhal and M. Bourget
that it is degrading Literature to make it a mere looking-
glass, reproducing indiscriminately blue sky and roadside
mud. The mirror does not select, but the Writer must;
the mirror reflects, it does not think. Because there is
filth in the human heart, is the Novelist bound, like the
mirror, to reproduce the filth ? 2
This mania for endless analysis is especially dangerous
for young men who require activity, enthusiasm and
generous beliefs. It is not well to live too self-centred a
life, preoccupied with the analysis of one's own sentiments
and sensations. This worship of the ego, so much in
fashion nowadays, leads to a ferocious selfishness, an aridity
of heart, a predilection for violent emotions, a contempt
for morality.
This same habit of ruthless analysis overstimulates a
morbid sensibility ; by dint of too constant observation,
1 Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir, ch. xlix.
3 Literature is not so much the " mirror " of society as the expression of its
aspirations, regrets and hopes. The pastoral poems of Fontenelle, Florian,
Gesner, do not represent the manners of the Eighteenth Century, but its ideals.
The Army officers in Scribe's plays show admirably the contemporary attitude
of mind in France, where men living under a peacefully-minded Prince, re-
gretted the excitements of war and admired the gallant soldiers of the Revolu-
tion and the Empire. The domination of the middle classes sees the outburst
of Romantic Drama, drawing its inspiration from the dramas of the Great
Revolution and rousing the desire for fresh Revolutionary dramas. Literature
then is not simply a reflection of life and habits of life ; it provokes changes
in ideas and sentiments, and is thus a powerful factor in the formation of habits
of life.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 485
men grow nervous, over-impressionable, the "slave of
circumstance." " By too much self-study and too little self-
discipline, a man becomes a sort of moral écorcfié} a bundle
of nerves, a creature wounded by every pin-prick, defence-
less, skinless, bleeding ; " 2 he loses the finest of all qualities,
manly energy, and turns his soul into a woman's. "When
Nature has given you a man's soul, your affectation is to
be like a woman," wrote Euripides. 8
Chenedollé, who had formed the habit of self-analysis
and of noting down his most trifling impressions, soon
found that it is not good for a man to observe his own
sensations too exactly, to give himself up to his own
thoughts and griefs ; " by doing so he eats out his heart,
and ends by killing himself or going mad." To counteract
this danger, he set himself for three months to dig in his
garden all day long ; " only by this means could I gain
a little rest for my sick fancy, which was gone astray from
Nature's beaten tracks." — In the article he wrote on
Sautelet's suicide, Armand Carrel stated how his friend
was endowed to the highest degree with the faculty of
analysing rapidly and perspicaciously whatever emotions
he felt, and penetrating deeply into the secret recesses of
others' hearts ; he said further that he was animated by
the liveliest curiosity, and the wish to try every experience
life has to offer. — "John Stuart Mill maintained that self-
introspection and the advance of psychological analysis
have a disintegrating effect, which added to disillusion
springing from too much knowledge, leads to melancholy.
We see too clearly the working of the springs of action
and the true basis of character and feeling." (Guyou,
L Irréligion de l'Avenir.)
The Student Ch so fully realized the dangers inherent
in unlimited analysis that after his condemnation, think-
ing in prison over the causes of his ruin, he declared : " I
1 An artist's lay-figure showing the human figure flayed, so as to display the
anatomy of the muscles.
1 Idées et sensations, by the Brothers Goncourt.
* Euripides, Fragments, vol. ii. p. 374.
486 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSIOK, AND CONTAGION
promised myself, if ever I became a father, I would guard
my children against self-analysis." M. Bourget says him-
self in the Preface I have just quoted from, that the
criminal of Constantine " was the victim of that dangerous
spirit of analysis which goes on continually from bad to
worse in some of the new generation till it lays waste
utterly heart and mind." No doubt, "this morbid sort of
literature has no great hold over healthy minds," as
Michelet says, who regrets " to see in our century so much
genius wasted in this dismal form of romance, devoted to
sounding our wounds and sharpening their pain." 1 But
how many of these robust minds are there, minds inacces-
sible to bad influences? Michelet himself allows that a
young woman who has been " prematurely ripened, spoiled,
bitten by the worm of mysticism and religious ambiguities,"
has ceased to be wholesome-minded, and is all ready to
be corrupted by Fiction.
Not less manifest is the influence of the Novel of analysis
in the case of Mme. Weiss than in that of Ch . This
woman, who tried in concert with her lover, the Engineer
R , to poison her husband, found pleasure after her
condemnation in writing an account of her life and her
crime, in making an elaborate analysis of her own person-
ality, its variations and states of mind. " M. R ," she
wrote, "awoke in me a woman I did not know existed, a
woman of violent passions but passive submissiveness ; he
1 Michelet, VAvwur> p. 275. — Nisard has expressed similar regrets to
Michelet's : "All the imagination, wit and style that are wasted on his in-
genious but rash experiments, might perhaps turn to the glory of France, if she
were to take a sudden disgust for Novels and send all these pens back to work
more worthy of the Nation that holds the sceptre of things intellectual- n
(D. Nisard, Histoire de la Littérature française, vol. iv. p. 576.) The Ancients
preferred History to Fiction ; the history of public life seemed to them more
interesting than any pictures of private could be. They found more profit and
pleasure in reading the lives of great Captains, Philosophers and Legislators
than in perusing the story of a servant maid in love or a profligate's adventures.
There were only two writers of fiction among the Romans, Petronius and
Apuleius, and neither is exactly a praiseworthy author. We can count them
by thousands. The populace is more deeply interested in the tale of the
Wandering Jew or of Rocambole than in the history of their own country.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 487
changed my whole existence, changing at the same time
my entire inner nature. ... I loved him as the arbiter of
my thoughts, my intellect, my person, of every fibre of my
being, as the beloved master in whom I was annihilated
body and soul." In some letters written by the accused
woman which were impounded by the police, were found
hints of the novels of analysis she was in the habit of
reading. " I have read Cruelle Énigme? she writes, " the
plot is just the same as in Cœur de Femme, — sensual love
and intellectual inspired at one and the same time in the
same woman by two different men. I do not myself see
much enigma in the situation ; if one is the lover but is
incapable to playing the male, why the other. . . ."
Analysing her love, she tells her lover in a letter it is at
once intellectual and sensual, — "My body cannot live
without yours." — In prison also she wrote a great deal.
Speaking of her husband, who notwithstanding the crime
she had attempted against him, still loved her, she said :
" He pitied me, for he knows better than any one that the
woman who displayed herself in me during the past
twelve months, was not the same who made his home
happy for five years." 1 Bracing her courage to commit
suicide by the thought that her death would relieve her
husband and children of the shame of her being in gaol,
she is surprised by her own hesitation and her desire to
live, " so I give the idea the slip like a coward," she writes ;
" I set to work and this rids me for the time being of the
consciousness of my own personality, and I stick stolidly at
it." " Suicide," she declared, " is the strength of those who
have no strength remaining, the hope of those who have no
hope left, the sublime courage of the vanquished. I have
no home now, no husband, no soul ; I am death's, and
death's only. My double death wrings my heart" (she
had just lost a little girl who had been allowed her as a
companion), " and I can no more, I will no more ! To the
1 Indeed, as a matter of fact, her husband told the Court that during the
first years of marriage she had been a devoted and pious wife, reading her
Bible every morning.
488 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
rescue, Death, for pity's sake ! Come, come, come ! " After
a fruitless attempt to strangle herself during her preliminary
detention, she eventually poisoned herself, during the night
subsequent to her condemnation, with strychnine, wrapped
up in a cigarette paper hidden in the hem of her pocket-
handkerchief.
The analytical Novel is useful, by way of a scrutiny of
conscience, for teaching men to know themselves, — but on
two conditions, that we do not base our gratification
exclusively on sounding all the depths of wretchedness
possible to weak and degraded natures, and secondly, that
we do not take pleasure in depicting vice without a thought
of its enormity. It is a dangerous thing to teach men to
despise human nature and believe themselves the slaves of
their temperament ; it is an ugly thing to study mankind
with perverse and malevolent inquisitiveness, altogether
leaving the good side out of account. The writer of the
Novel of analysis makes it his first business to lower man-
kind in their own estimation, and to make a profound
study of the causes of woman's frailty and man's wickedness.
This type of Novel, as it is written nowadays, is at bottom
only the sequel of Eighteenth Century Romances, the
stories of Crebillon fils and Laclos, doctors in profligacy.
In fact M. Bourget actually quotes as models of analysis
the Liaisons dangereuses} Le Rouge et le Noir, a book in
which roués give instructions in the art of seduction, and
Mademoiselle de Maùfin, where a form of unnatural love is
depicted. The true Psychology is to be found in Pascal's
Pensées, La Rochefoucauld's Maximes, La Bruyere's
Charactères, the Comedies of Molière and the Sermons of
Bossuet and Bourdaloue. It is not the science of the
human heart, as these great men understood it, that is the
subject of the analytical Novel. Its real interest lies in
the psychology of Love, and this psychology is found in
much greater perfection in the Tragedies of Corneille and
Racine, in the Comedies of Marivaux, and the Romances
of Mme. de Lafayette, than in the licentious Novels of the
1 Preface to Terre Promise,
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 489
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Even in the most
passionate of Racine's female characters, love is described
with decency before the final error ; in contemporary
novelists it is analysed before, during and after the
woman's fall, without a shadow of reticence.
In an article in the Semaine littéraire of Geneva of
October 30th, 1898, M. Philippe Godet, who has had
opportunities, both as instructor and friend, of seeing a
great number of young men at close quarters, declares
that a certain psychological Novel (I refrain from giving
the title) has done an irreparable amount of harm to
young readers. "This is an actual fact, and I have the
proofs before me ! The book, with all its culture, has
wrought havoc that I have seen with my own eyes." No
doubt whatever there are psychological Novels which by
virtue of elevation of thought and refinement of sentiment,
do more good than harm. Nothing can be finer or more
moral than Mme. de Lafayette's Princesse de Clèves, while
several of Octave Feuillet's books, Monsieur de Cantors,
Sibylle, La Morte, are at once works of art and wholesome
reading. In the same category may be reckoned M. Paul
Bourget's later Novels, the Terre promise and Cosmopolis.
The same cannot however be said of some earlier books
from the same pen, such as Crime d? amour, Mensonges,
Cruelle Énigme, in which mere sensuality masquerades
under the name of sensibility. The heroes and heroines
of these works live at the mercy of their own sensations ;
44 it is all a pack of dirty abominations," as the Abbé
Taconet says in Mensonges. It was Rousseau who first
taught Novel Writers to cloak sensuality under the guise
of sentiment, to throw a halo of poetry over sensibility.
Long before the Abbé Taconet, Bourdaloue had seen
where sensibility often leads to. " Sensibility of the
heart," he says, " is not a crime in itself, but it is the
beginning of a great many; it so easily changes into
sensuality." 1
It was the crime committed by the Student Ch
1 Bourdaloue, De la charité chrétienne et des amitiés humaines.
490 CRIME DETEkNflNED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
whose mind had been corrupted by the books he read,
that awoke in M. Paul Bourget the sense of literary
responsibility and wrought the moral transformation so
conspicuous in his more recent works. It was of the
unhappy criminal of Constantine he was thinking when
he wrote in his Sensations d'Italie, p. 58 : u Our analysts
heat their brains to prove the ever-changing complexity
of human personality, 1 what a poor boy I really cannot
remember without unfeigned compassion called the In-
finitesimal dispersion of the heart? — this is the title Ch
gave to a Novel of analysis he proposed to write It was
while thinking of the harm wrought by doctrines which
destroy moral belief, that M. Bourget wrote his noble
preface to the Disciple.
This question of responsibility preoccupies him more
and more ; responsibility of the Writer towards his readers,
responsibility of the father towards his natural son, re-
sponsibility of the man who has lived a profligate life
towards a fiancée of spotless and unsullied purity, all
these responsibilities are dwelt upon in his later Novels.
The numerous examples I have quoted suffice to teach
us what we are to think of the opinion of those who say
Novels libel life without corrupting it 2 Yes, truly ! Novels
often enough libel society, representing it as worse than
it really is. Even in the Eighteenth Century, society was
less vicious than society Novels. In the same way at the
present time our society is good for something better than
most Novels make out. Such pictures libel French society
in the eyes of foreigners, who, judging us by our Novels,
form a low opinion of our morality. But they forget that
Novels exaggerate the vices of society, to amuse their
readers, and because vice lends itself more readily than
virtue to picturesque effects. These delineations of vice
1 M. Bourget belongs to that group of analysts who have substituted for the
unity, the identity of the ego> the multiplication of the ego. This last doctrine,
which approves itself to hiin as a great psychological verity, is in my opinion
a great psychological error, and a view utterly destructive of all moral
responsibility.
3 Cuvillier-Fleury.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 49 1
do indeed libel society, but they corrupt it as well, because
suggesting the pursuit of a similar line of conduct.
Stendhal claims for the Novelist the right to paint mire
and mud. From mire to filth is only a step, and one that
has been often taken. Is there any real necessity why the
Novelist should concentrate all his attention on ugly and
repulsive matters? Is beauty not as real as ugliness?
Why is no place to be found in Novels for poetry, grace,
pure sentiment ? The realities of the muck-heap and the
Criminal Court are not the only truths. The merit and
charm of a story does not surely depend on the delineation
of obscenity and crime, and the use of coarse phrases. It
shows a want of good taste and moral sense to seek inspira-
tion exclusively among debauchees, criminals, drunkards,
prostitutes and adulteresses. It is dangerous to devote
every energy to the representation of scenes of wantonness
and cruelty, for fear of stirring up a spirit of emulation.
There is in every man a wild heart full of lubricity and
cruelty, whose perverted instincts are put to sleep by
education, but are always ready to awake at the call of
bad example.
The Novelist professes to chasten morals by exhibiting
vice in all its hideousness. But we do not ask the Novelist
to teach morality, we only ask him not to flaunt vice
abroad. Every sort of exhibition and delineation is not
judicious ; and there are moral maladies it is as imprudent
to expose in books as it is in the street. Do they hope
to improve morals by making a public spectacle of vice ?
Are they not aware that lasciviousness is stimulated by
lascivious pictures? What would be said of a physician
who should make his patients breathe a vitiated atmo-
sphere, in order to teach them the value of fresh air ?
Nor are Novels always a faithful picture of society,
because very often they depict exceptional characters.
The brother and sister who love each other like René and
Amélie with incestuous passion, are quite exceptional
beings. The young man, who enamoured of a married
woman he cannot seduce, kills himself out of despair, like
492 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Werther, is equally exceptional. No less so the youthful
debauchee, proud and indolent, who puts an end to his
life, like Rolla. Neither do the Demi-vierge and the
Femme de trente ans represent thé general character and
habits of girls and women of thirty. In a word, the Novel
prefers to describe exceptions, romantic, psychological,
physiological and even pathological ; M. Bourget gives
as one of the beauties of the analytical novel that it
" relates exceptional situations, unique characters." x What
is the result? By showing the public exceptional types
and extraordinary characters, the Novel tends to make
these general, because it provokes others to imitate them ;
it makes Renés, Amélies, Werthers, "demi-vierges" and
" women of thirty."
When they are not delineating exceptional beings,
Novelists describe themselves, and as they are often
strange and eccentric creatures, they propagate by their
writings their own eccentricities. Balzac told George
Sand, " I too love exceptional characters. I am one
myself." Baudelaire, Murger, and how many others, are
unique personages, whose defects their readers copy, find-
ing it a more difficult thing to imitate their qualities. By
making the life of Bohemia poetical, Murger has made
many Bohemians, just as Baudelaire has made profligates*
and Balzac misers and voluptuaries. " Ah me ! beneath
this giant's feet," says Vallès, speaking of Balzac, whose
influence over rebellious natures he has drawn attention
to, " how many blighted consciences, what oceans of filth
and blood ! What work he has given the judges, what
tears he has made mothers shed ! How many have been
ruined, have gone under, waving above the Slough of
Despond that was so soon to engulf them, a page torn
from a volume of the Comédie Humaine V 2 Balzac's
literary types have served as models to a host of ambitious
young men, who coming to Paris to push their fortunes,
have rushed into the hazards of the Commune, to play a
part in politics and satisfy their cravings for the good
1 Bourget, Terre promise, Preface. 2 T. Vallès, Les Réfractaires, p. i8f .
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 493
things of this life. It is still Balzac's Novels that to this
day fire young men with that inordinate love of pleasure,
wealth and power, that drives them to seek in the intrigues
of politics and love, a means of rising in the world and
getting rich.
If they are not out of the common by natural predis-
position, conceit often urges Novel Writers to deliberately
adopt various eccentricities to escape too great a resem-
blance to common mortals, eccentricities often extending
even to the cut of their clothes and the way of wearing
their hair. Eccentricity has an agreeable piquancy,
especially in societies where equality reigns ; it is con-
sidered artistic not to be like a " bourgeois," and this sort
of originality is pursued at the expense of good sense,
which is voted far too prosaic a thing. It can hardly be
said then, in these different cases, that Novels are not to
blame, as being merely the faithful mirror of society, seeing
they promote eccentricities and make exceptional types
fashionable. Novelists and Poets who create these excep-
tional types are themselves the first to copy them ; after
writing the Corsair^ Byron was for imitating his own
creation, and after inventing Rolla, Musset took that hero
for his model.
If the Novelist is content to be a "mirror," his obvious
duty is not to embellish disgraceful actions. A Novel
ceases to be the faithful image of society, when it poetizes
adultery and crimes of passion, offences punished by
society as culpable and unlawful acts. It creates a state
of mind perilous for public security, persuading young men
and women that love is equivalent to virtue, that it
possesses rights superior to those of the law, that true
love is not true love unless it rises to crime, that murder
resulting from passion is the sign manual of a great soul.
Our actions depend largely on our conceptions. The man
who thinks poverty the greatest of evils is more likely to
enrich himself even at the cost of a lapse from strict
integrity than one holding a different opinion. Tacitus
relates that Asinius, grandson of Pollio and a friend of
494 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Virgil and Horace, forged a will in conjunction with certain
Roman équités ; and the historian accounts for his crime by
saying, " he had committed the error of supposing poverty
the greatest of all ills." 1 In the same way the married
woman who lets herself be overpersuaded by novels that
Love is the greatest of all good things and that it is
allowed her to seek it outside marriage, such a one is not
far from forgetting her duty to her husband. Hence the
Novelist who has led his fair readers into unfaithfulness
to the marriage vow must bear a share of responsibility
for the lapses of women intoxicated by the sophistries to be
found in his pages ? The Author who, by means of his
paradoxes as to the beauty and nobility of crimes of
passion, has corrupted his reader's mind and driven him
to commit an act of violence, seems to me morally an
accomplice in the murder he has made him do.
Writers who disseminate antisocial paradoxes, are averse,
I know, to hearing their responsibility proclaimed; after
assailing everything, family, law, religion, they then claim
for themselves the privilege of irresponsibility. But .Magis-
trates, who hear literary sophistries, that have been their
undoing, from the mouths of prisoners in the dock, are
appalled by all the mischief that may be done by words
whether written or spoken. In the Weiss affair, for instance,
the Engineer R claimed from his mistress that she
should poison her husband as the only indisputable proof
of her love for him. After long hesitating at such a crime,
Mme. Weiss made up her mind to do it solely and entirely
that she might not refuse her lover the testimony of
affection he demanded. After her condemnation, realizing
the harm she had got from the sophistries that are so
common in novels and how these had corrupted her mind,
she wrote in her autobiographical memoranda, that her
crime had been one "of error not of malice prepense, and
that she had been blinded by cunning sophistries." *
Another way in which the Novelists seek to escape
1 Tacitus, Annals y Bk. xiv. § 40.
3 Ai chives a* anthropologie criminelle^ 1891, p. 427.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 495
responsibility is by saying that a work of literature, if
written with talent, can never be harmful. "Directly a
writer has talent," Zola says, " I hold everything is lawful
for him ; ... for me no books are obscene but those ill-
conceived and badly executed." 1 But talent does not
abrogate responsibility, it really increases it. Are we to
say that Voltaire's Pucelle is not an obscene book, because
it is written with talent? In a Novel, as in every work of
art, there are two different things, — the form and the
matter. The form may be good and elegant, but the
matter as bad as can be, just as a poisoned draught
may be offered in a beautifully chiselled cup. There are
Novelists who possess a great deal of talent, and very
little morality. The artists of the Renaissance, who had
the highest development of the aesthetic sense, often lacked
moral sense ; their number included murderers, thieves
and forgers. Nor were the Italian artists the only ones
to have many dealings with the law ; the Belgian,
Flemish, Dutch painters who came to Rome soon adopted
Italian ways. A high aesthetic sense then by no means
necessarily implies a high moral tone. Talent only makes
Novels more dangerous, when their motive is unwhole-
some. Coarse lubricity will revolt a delicate mind, while
elegant naughtiness will corrupt it almost unconsciously.
"The coarseness you eliminate would horrify, if it were
openly displayed ; and the skill shown in concealing it
only tends to attract the fancy in a more delicate fashion,
and one that is only the more dangerous, the better dis-
guised it appears." (Bossuet.) Talent then is no excuse,
it is an aggravation of the offence. The Novelist is subject
to the laws of Morality like the rest of mankind, even
when he possesses, or thinks he possesses, great talents ;
he is not justified in using these to the detriment of society.
He may not choose to compete for the " prix Montyon " of
virtue, but at any rate he should not work for the Morgue
and the Criminal Courts.
Novel Writers object that preoccupation with morals clips
1 Zola, Documents littéraires, 2nd cd. , p. 386.
496 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
the wings of their fancy. But self-respect and respect
for others, and a proper feeling of responsibility, only clip
the wings of such as have none to clip. True Art loses
nothing by respecting morality. Talent rises pari passu
with the elevation of the mind, and declines in the ratio of
its degradation. " Verse never fails to reflect the shadow
of a bad heart." The style is the man.
Delacroix writes in his journal : " Ponder on the mighty
Michel Angelo, feed on great and severe beauties, which
enrich the soul." It is the same advice Boileau addressed
to poets :
" Aimez donc la vertue, nourissez-en votre âme." *
There is a very close connection between the authors
life and his works. Literary paradox is often the outcome
of a paradoxical life, and rectitude of life is an important
factor in rectitude of intellect. Literary beauty and the
beauty of the Writer's mind are bound up intimately
together. Talent depends more than is generally supposed
on a due elevation of feeling. The chief literary superiority
of Mme. de Lafayette's romances over those of Rousseau
arises from the higher moral tone of the former. If we
find in the Nouvelle Heloïse so many pages that were better
away side by side with much noble work, the Author's
faults must be attributed to his deficiency of moral refine-
ment. Taste is distaste of what is low and coarse,
and the preference for beauty and refinement "Art,"
says Auguste Comte, "should primarily develop in us
the feeling for perfection. . . . True taste invariably
presupposes distaste." l
Granted it is no duty of Art to preach morality, still it is
bound not to outrage it, not to encourage crimes of passion
by its sophistries. The best safeguard against crime is
public reprobation ; men refrain from acts generally held
disgraceful. But if Novelists excuse and even glorify an
immoral action, they are facilitating its accomplishment, by
1 " Love virtue then, feed your soul on it."
2 A. Comte, Catéchisme pcsitivi s te y p. 178.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 497
corrupting their readers' minds. How much less heavy
would be their responsibility, if only they would leave off
describing virtuous adulteresses, chaste harlots, mystically-
minded profligates, and calling marriage a tyranny, con-
jugal fidelity an absurdity, and adultery obedience to the
laws of Nature.
Goethe maintains that books cannot exert an influence
more inimical to morals than actual life does, daily offering
as the latter does examples of immorality. But the
examples offered by Novels are very much more dangerous
than those life has to show, inasmuch as the former are
idealized and often seconded by fallacious maxims of right
and wrong.
No Moralist of course wishes for the entire suppression
of Physiology in novels, for some is needful to make them
true to Nature; and Physiology is to be found in the
greatest of the classical poets, even those of Antiquity, in
Virgil, Homer and Lucretius. Homer describes wounds
-with the utmost precision. The famous surgeon, Malgaigne,
wrote two interesting treatises on the Anatomy and
Physiology of Homer, in which he demonstrates the entire
exactitude of his physiological descriptions. The poem
La Nature contains the physiological delineation of Love. 1
A Writer should not be ignorant of the influences of
climate, race, temperament, sex, age, heredity. At the
same time he should never forget there is something else in
a man besides nerves, blood, a stomach, an abdomen. All
those comparisons of man to a plant, an animal, a machine,
which recur so constantly in novels ever since Stendhal
brought them into fashion, and which, while heralded as
physiological novelties bound to regenerate the art of
fiction, are really old stories dating back thousands of
years. They were laughed out of Court long ago in
Ancient times. " What name are these systems to bear ? "
1 Dr. Meniere, Professor and Fellow of the Faculty of Medicine at Paris has
written a book on Cicéron Médecin (Cicero as a Physician) and another entitled,
Études médicales sur les Poètes latins (•' Medical Studies on the Latin Poets ").
— The Latin poets assigned to Minerva the epithet of Medic a.
2 I
49$ GRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
said Hermios, "... poor me! they were for pulverising
me in atoms, but now . . . now they make me out an
animal. . . . Last of all comes Empedocles, and turns me
into a plant! " x If only he will make his characters men
endowed with conscience and will and not plants and
animals governed slavishly by their instincts, if he will
re-establish in Fiction that most dramatic of struggles,
between duty and passion, the Author will at the same
time avoid the risk of encouraging crimes of passion by
affording it the excuse of physiological necessity, and
rendering his work more literary and more moving.
As modern Novelists study the text-books of Medicine
and Physiology, an acquaintance with which is necessary
for a proper knowledge of man, let them remember that
the great lesson to be learned from these studies is the
recognition of human weakness. Medicine teaches us
that not only is the flesh weak, but the reason weak and
fragile too, that very little is needed to confuse and lead
it astray, and that every writer who has any sense of
responsibility towards young people, women and the
masses, should avoid every sort of unwholesome stimula-
tion, harmful phrase and chance of offence. Goethe
did not think so; "even for a child," he said, "there is
no need to be over-anxious about the effect a book or a
play may have upon him." 2 My own opinion is exactly
the opposite ; I do not think we can be too anxious.
Victor Hugo, 3 who has always had a proper respect for
children, was better inspired than Goethe when he wrote:
" Poets, ever keep a moral purpose before your eyes.
Never forget that perhaps children may read you. Have
pity on the flaxen heads. We owe even more respect
to youth than to old age."
Absence of any evil intent is not enough to prevent a
book's being harmful, or to relieve the Author from the
responsibility of the mischief he causes. There is a classi-
fication of crimes in Literature no less than in Penal Law,
1 Plutarch. 2 Entretiens d'Eckermann, p. 268.
3 Victor Hugo, Littérature et philosophie miUes t p. 14.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 499
there is wilful murder, and there is manslaughter by mis-
adventure. To kill a man by carelessness or failure to
observe regulations is a fault the Law very rightly punishes.
Absence of criminal intention does not eliminate moral,
nor even penal, responsibility. Man living among his
fellow-men is bound to think of the consequences of his
acts, and is liable to punishment if he causes another's
death by his carelessness. I have myself had to try a
landowner, who to keep his wine sound added a deleterious
substance to it which poisoned those who drank it; the
man had no intention of killing anybody, yet he was
condemned for involuntary manslaughter. Similarly the
Writer who mixes in his Tales sophistries that pervert
the mind and lead his readers into suicide, adultery and
crime, is guilty of an offence for which he is directly
responsible. When M. Bourget's Disciple commits a
crime, which is the logical consequence of the master's
teaching, the latter is morally responsible for the crime
he has led up to, and the disciple's mother is justified in
blaming the master for the mischief that has ensued.
However, Novelists are not always the only persons
responsible for the consequences arising out of their
books. Often it is schoolmasters and parents that are
to blame, because they set young people to read, or let
them read, Novels never intended for them. If a child
wounds itself with a gun its parents have allowed it to
handle, it is not the gunsmith who is responsible for the
accident, it is the parents who have acted unwisely.
Moral nourishment ought to be adapted to the mind,
just as physical nourishment should be to the stomach.
Such and such an article of food is suitable to the stomach
of an adult, but is unsuitable to that of a child. A glass
of wine, which helps a grown-up man's digestion, will
upset a boy's. A man can bear strong drink, but children
require milk.
I would ask if teachers and lecturers, led away by their
admiration for the genius of Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius,
are not sometimes unwise in lavishing unqualified
500 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
panegyric in the presence of young people on a poetry
that inculcates the art of loving, trifling, drinking, counting
all women alike, even servants, that idealizes not merely
physical love, but even homosexual love. In a study
on Ovid, after extolling the beauties of the Ars Amoris,
a literary critic exclaims, addressing young men : " Hear
the master and imitate him." 1 I have heard lectures
given at the Sorbonne, before young women, on La
Fontaine's and Boccaccio's Contes. Non erat hic locus,—
"this was not the place." The Lecturers, who are after
all men of wit and intelligence, Members of the Institute,
would have done well to remember a sentence in La
Bruyère : " We may speak well, truly, and on a fitting
occasion." It is surely an offence against this last con-
dition to treat risqué subjects before girls coming for
instruction to the Sorbonne ; these have other and better
things to do than to read La Fontaine's and Boccaccio's
Contes. I have often had occasion to note, in both Civil
and Criminal cases, how young women and young men
had been ruined by the reading of erotic Poets and
Novelists. In the trial of M. and Mme. S , Maître
Betolaud brought out the fact that the young woman
had been corrupted by reading Ovid's Ars Amoris and
Théophile Gautier's Novel Mademoiselle de Maupin* This
study of Novels and erotic poetry gives young people a
taste for profligacy, and the precocity so fostered prepares
the ground, it may be for suicide, it may be for crimes of
passion.
Lads of fifteen to eighteen who experience fierce out-
bursts of disappointed love and furious jealousy at an age
when they should be playing prisoner's base, have not the
strength of mind to master their passions. If they still
retain some measure of self-restraint, they kill themselves,
unable to bear the pangs of baulked love. If, on the other
hand, they let themselves be led into entanglements with
unworthy women, they will steal to satisfy their caprices
1 Study by Jules Janin on Ovid prefixed to the Ars Amoris^ p. 62.
a Bataille, Causes criminelles for 1880, p. 85.
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 5OI
and end in murder. Such, for instance, was the fate of
the young Ducret, who belonged to a highly respectable
family. At thirteen, he began to read a great many erotic
novels and poems ; he fell in love with a young girl, and
spent his time in writing sentimental poetry. At seventeen
he started for Brussels to rejoin the object of his young
affections. Turned out of the house, he came back to
Paris on foot ; subsequently he returned a second time to
Brussels to see the girl again, and in order to get money,
resorted to smuggling and begging, and finally robbed his
employer. A passion for another girl next seized him ; this
love not being returned, he felt such poignant unhappiness
that he tried to kill himself. To stifle his pain, he gave him-
self to a life of profligacy, frequented the public dancing-
rooms and took to drinking. Having lost his employment,
in a moment of intoxication he strangled an old woman,
intending to rob her ; seized with a sudden remorse, he
abandoned the proceeds and went and gave himself up to
the Police. A copy was found on him in his own hand-
writing of Victor Hugo's fine lines on Conscience, and it
was this that seems to have dictated his final action, his
unprompted confessions and remorse. If the Courts have
before them a constantly increasing number of youthful
thieves and murderers, this must partly be attributed to
the precocious development of profligacy at the present
day. I was myself on the bench at the trial of a young
Graduate on a charge of inciting children under age to
immorality ; he kept a bar, it appears, where he welcomed
girls of tender years. His mistress was a divorcée, the
daughter of an Officer of Rank, who had been brought up
at Saint-Denis.
If only teachers, who think more of the form than of
the matter of Authors they comment on, would better
realize the necessity of distinguishing the intellectual
training from the moral education they should give their
pupils, they would spare them a great deal of nonsense
and their parents many bitter disappointments. The
smallest solecism from a pupil makes them gasp with
502 CRIME DETERMINED: BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
horror. Let them show the same indignation against the
lapses of Writers who turn Literature into a forcing-house
of sensuality.
Erotic reading directly stimulates sexual precocity.
But, from the point of view of morals no less than of
health, it is advisable to retard the manifestations of the
sexual instinct. Continence is a saving of force, while
precocity of the passions destroys both physical and moral
vigour, diminishes intellectual activity, weakens family
affection and exaggerates selfishness. A youthful pro-
fligate, heedless of his parents and family, careless of his
honour, may easily grow capable of any and every breach
of decorum, any and every baseness, to satisfy his evil
passions.
Not that the Novelist's responsibility abrogates in any
way that of the reader. One of the most important of
moral obligations is a fitting choice of books ; these must
be appropriate for the age, sex, temperament and up-
bringing of readers. Such and such a book may be quite
inoffensive for one person, yet highly dangerous for another.
Montesquieu, surprising his daughter in the act of reading
the Lettres Persanes^ told her : " Let it alone ; 'tis a book
of my young days, never intended for yours." The same
books are far from making the same impression on all
readers. Novels which charm the fancy of a grown-up
man without disturbing his equilibrium, will stir the heart
of a young woman and upset her mind. The very same
romance of passion which is harmless for a man and wife
of middle age, nay ! which may even be good for them as
warming their dulled imagination, will be mischievous to a
young man by throwing fuel on the fire of his passions.
The impression produced by books varies according to our
mental predispositions, and should therefore be chosen
with a view to these. The same work may have a bad
effect at one time, yet an exactly opposite one at another.
Again novel-reading is different in the results it produces
according as it is pursued in moderation, by a mind
occupied with serious studies, which only resorts to it for
OF NOVELS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 503
a momentary diversion, or. as it becomes the regular mental
food of youthful intellects. Constant and exclusive read-
ing of works of fiction, affording as they do merely emotions,
sensations, impressions, teaches young people neither to
think nor act Age moreover modifies the influence
exercised by books. A novel which only wearies a man of
mature age, may dangerously inflame the imagination of
a young man. In 1803 Napoleon I. thought Rousseau
tedious, whereas in his young days the Nouvelle Heloise
had turned his brain. It was after reading this Author
that in May 1806, at Valence, he took a disgust for life and
wished to die. 1 Werther seemed extremely tiresome to
La Harpe and Geoffroy. The latter wrote in 1812 : " There
is a certain German Romance, that in former days appeared
well adapted to turn young people's heads. . . . Yet so
diffuse is it, so stuffed with empty nonsense, that nowadays
its only effect is to make a man die of weariness, instead
of love." Nevertheless we have seen instances, already
quoted in the preceding Chapter, to show that for years
after Geoffroy's criticism, Werther continued to make young
men die, not of weariness at all, but of love and despair.
Believe me, it is a mistake for young men and young
women, in whom sensibility and imagination are more
developed than reason, to seek in the books they read only
a stimulus to the former faculties. But what are we to
think of Politicians who found libraries for the people as a
means of influencing their constituents, and who to attract
readers and gain votes, put licentious novels side by side
with books of political propaganda ? I have seen boys and
girls of fifteen and sixteen come for these books. And
what are we to think of the Municipal Libraries, in which
the interests of party introduce electoral agents of little
or no education as administrators, men who use the funds
in purchasing pornographic novels and authorizing school-
boys to come and read them ?
Public taste too shares the responsibility for this literary
dissipation. Being all for "light literature," it stimulates
1 Chuquet, La Jeunesse de Napoléon, p. 15.
504 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION.
authors to meet this demand. Pornographic novelists
would not be so numerous, if the public did not read
their books, if it preferred more solid literature. " I could
write serious books well enough," Martial says; "but I
prefer amusing ones ; it is all your fault, dear reader, you
who read and sing my verses in every street in Rome."
CHAPTER XII.
CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND THE CONTAGION
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT.
" Les mauvais exemples sont contagieux même sur les théâtres ; les
feintes représentations ne causent que trop de véritables crimes. . . ."
(Sentiments de f Académie française sur le " Cid") l
THE influence exerted on Morals by the Stage has been
discussed in Antiquity by Plato, Aristotle and Aristophanes,
in the Seventeenth Century by Theologians, Nicole and
Bossuet, in the Eighteenth by Philosophers, Voltaire,
Rousseau, d'Alembert. I propose myself to study it as a
Magistrate and a Moralist, by the light of proceedings in
the Criminal Courts. In Modern days documents and close
reasoning are the chief things looked for, for no estimate
is worth much that is not based on established facts.
So long as the proofs are withheld, enquiry makes little
or no progress, and we are left to wander in the domain
of individual opinion. If the everlastingly debated question
of the influence exerted on Morals by the Stage remains
still undecided, this is because both sides alike, those who
admit such influence and those who deny it, omit to
furnish any proof, any decisive document, to support their
contention ; neither advance beyond mere generalities.
Moreover, I think the question has been badly put. In
fact, all those who have studied the influence of Stage
plays on Morals have declared it good or bad as the case
may be absolutely > without making any distinction between
good plays and bad plays, without drawing attention to
1 " Evil examples are infectious even on the Stage ; fictitious representations
are only too apt to lead to veritable and actual crimes. ..."
(Opinions of the •• French Academy " on the Cid.)
f©5
506 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
the fact that the impression produced by a piece varies
according to the age, sex, education and intelligence of
the spectators. For some the Stage is invariably pernicious ;
it is a mere school of corruption. For others, it is invari-
ably beneficial, — a school of morality. The former declare :
" Les dogmes qu'il contient, les leçons qu'il renferme,
Loin de nous corriger, de nous rendre meilleurs,
Séduisent l'innocence et corrompent les mœurs." l
The latter are no less absolute in affirming the contrary,
and stoutly maintain the Stage to be an academy of virtue,
a lay sermon.
" La scène est une école où l'on n'enseigne plus
Que l'horreur des forfaits et l'amour des vertus." 2
According to Voltaire " genuine Tragedy is a school of
Virtue, and the only difference between the purified Stage
and the recognized Works on Morality is that in Tragedy
the teaching is exhibited in action, that it is interesting
and is displayed heightened by the charms of an Art,
which surely was invented in old times for no other end
but to instruct the earth and bless the sky." s D'Alembert
again, in his Letter to Rousseau, opines that the Stage "is
Morality put in action, its precepts reduced to concrete
examples ; Tragedy shows us the calamities produced by
the vices of mankind, Comedy the ridicule attaching to
their less heinous faults, the two together place before our
very eyes what Morality exhibits only in an abstract
fashion and as it were afar off."
The truth seems to me to lie midway between these
two extremes. There are good plays and bad plays;
there are Comedies which correct our faults by making
us laugh at them ; there are Tragedies which educate by
1 "The dogmas it contains, the lessons it includes, far from chastening as
and making us better, seduce our innocence and corrupt our morals." U
Brun.
2 " The Stage is a school where no longer now is anything taught but horror
of sin and love of Virtue." Hauterive.
3 Voltaire, Dissertation sur la tragédie.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 5Ô7
combining moral émotions with literary. But there are
also on the other hand Comedies which demoralize the
crowd by exciting their mockery of holy things, and there
arc Dramas which by poetizing free love, adultery and
even crimes of passion, encourage them. The Stage may
purify or corrupt morals, elevate or degrade men's minds,
according to the use Dramatic authors make of their
talents, according to the ideals they set before them,
and their own moral idiosyncrasies.
The Stage then is a school of good or of bad morals
according to the play put upon it My object, therefore,
is to inquire by the help of judicial documents, reports
of criminal proceedings and my own reminiscences as a
Magistrate, under what circumstances and to what audience
the Stage exerts a good, bad or indifferent influence, and
what are the plays that encourage Vice and crimes of
passion by the alluring pictures they draw of their delights
and by the sophistries they give currency to in order to
excuse their indulgence.
Writers who dread the reproach of immorality maintain
there are no such things as immoral plays, only badly
written plays ; or else they quiet their conscience by
declaring the Stage has not the smallest influence on
morals and the character of the people at large. My own
opinion on the contrary is that the Stage exerts very
considerable influence, that the exaggerated love of
theatrical emotions makes a People u theatrical." It must
enjoy emotions in everyday life like those of the Stage, —
whether political, judicial or religious. Life seems tire-
some, if it is not full of stir and movement, love seems
insipid, if it is not tragic ; Politics, the Administration of
Justice, are interesting only in virtue of dramatic incidents.
A People that has once acquired this passion for the
Theatre, will have the Theatre everywhere, at the Law
Courts, in the Chamber of Deputies, in Church ; it trans-
forms a criminal trial into a judicial drama, a political
debate into a parliamentary drama, a religious ceremony
into a theatrical representation, history into a series of
508 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
stage situations. In one word, it likes to have its Justice,
its Politics, its Oratory, its Religion, its History, its Love,
one and all theatrical.
The People that is possessed by this passion for
theatrical emotions, cares but little for reason, logic,
sequence of ideas, or indeed any solid qualities of head
or heart ; it prefers flashy brilliance, declamation, emphasis»
sounding phrases. Staging, mode of presentation, pictur-
esque grouping, dramatic effects, touch it more to the
quick than truth and utility. In Politics it admires
dramatic situations, transformation scenes, revolutions, amp
d'États, better than salutary reforms. Statesmen who ait
merely economical and peacefully disposed seem to lack
prestige; the public prefers brilliant adventurers, who lavish
its blood and its money broadcast. An administration
that is merely wise, prudent and ready to promote reforms
is thought prosaic and contemptible ; the Nation is bored,
and to get a change and a dose of theatrical emotions, it
rushes into revolt and revolution. The People that
idolizes the Play is always craving after novelty ; it must
have battles abroad and coups d'États, whether popular or
governmental, at home, — dramatic catastrophes at any cost
To please this public, Politicians, Magistrates, Churchmen,
transform themselves into stage-players and perform their
rôle like Comedians, dramatizing Politics, Justice and
Religion. The very Historians dramatize History and
look for dramatic effects in their account of great historical
crimes, throwing a halo of interest round the scoundrels
who played a part in the tragedies of the Terror.
Greedy for emotion, in life as on the stage, the Public
seeks it everywhere, in newspaper scandals and political
revelations ; everybody hankers after risqué narratives,
stories of passion, dramatic incidents, tragic adventures,
while Vice and Crime fascinate it. To satisfy all this
morbid curiosity and craving for sensation, the Press
collects and exaggerates scandals, dramatizes the daily
crimes and suicides, makes the heroes of the Criminal
Courts into theatrical personages.
OK PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 509
The everyday life of society becomes theatrical, and the
Newspapers report an evening party or a dance as if it
were a piece at the theatre. The Stage encroaches on
the Drawing-room.
So greedy is the Public for excitement it even seeks
theatrical sensation at the foot of the scaffold. It flocks
to see an execution as it would to a melodrama, and
makes the guillotine into a show. It goes to see a man
die, as it would to see an actor in a new part, and hires
the windows most closely overlooking the scaffold as if
they were boxes at a theatre. The condemned man on
his side puts on a theatrical swagger and looks out for
u effects"; he knows the Newspapers will talk about him
in their columns and publish his portrait.
The Stage does not originate this craving for emotional
excitement, but it develops it inordinately; it makes the
public emotional', it stimulates some very amiable qualities,
keenness of wit, sensibility, sociability, but at the same
time it makes the habitual theatre-goer over-impression-
able, scoffing and stagey. At the same time M. P. Albert
maintains that the Stage exercises no influence over
morals, because the emotions it rouses, so he says, are
essentially fugitive. 1 My own opinion is that it is entirely
a mistake to suppose these emotions transitory, that they
last only while the play is actually being represented ; I
say they produce stirrings of the mind that continue long
afterwards. Literary critics are strangely deceived because
they estimate the impressions made by the Stage generally
by those they feel themselves. Granted such impressions
are fugitive in a man of middle age, a regular frequenter
of the Comédie-Française, a critic rendered blasé by a
hundred plays, a man with family cares and duties, or
absorbing professional interests; but they are deep and
lasting among young people, men of the uncultivated
classes, and women. With such they may very quickly
become the germ of actions modelled on those seen on
the boards. The sentiments, ideas, passions, the play has
1 Paul Albert, La Prose* p. 274.
5IO CRJME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
awakened in them during its progress, are not effaced
directly they have left the theatre ; the spectacle remains
engraved in their minds, in their ears and eyes, and the
images thus called up are powerful enough to stir the
desire to imitate what has been seen.
At a Commission of Inquiry held at the "Conseil d'État*
under the presidency of M. Vivien, on the management
and improvement of the Theatres and the Censorship of
Plays, Jules Janin insisted on the necessity of a prohibitory
censorship, relating the following anecdote in support of his
contention. Visiting one day one of the Paris prisons, he
was much impressed by what the Governor told him: a I
read," the latter said, " your notices in the paper, but I can
tell without that what sort of pieces are on at the Theatres;
if a bad play has been staged, I discover the fact imme-
diately by the number of young offenders who come here." 1
A mother, whose son had turned out badly, told Philarète
Chasles her boy had been demoralized by theatre-going,
" that this had broken down his physical strength, got into
his head *ind taken away all taste for work." 2 Mme.
de Staël relates in her book on Germany 3 how young men
who saw Schiller's Robbers on the stage, were filled with
enthusiasm for the character and life of the Robber Chiet
and longed to imitate their hero. They revolted against
conventional society and hurried to the woods to lead
the life of bandits. " Their attempts at revolt were only
ludicrous," says Mme. de Staël ; " but for all that tragedies
and romances have far more importance in Germany than
in any other country. Everything is taken seriously there,
and the perusal of such and such a book, or the witnessing
of such and such a play, exercises an influence over life and
all its destinies."
Nor is it only in Germany that books and plays may
exert a determining influence over life. The passion for
the Theatre is even stronger in France than in Germany.
1 Histoire de la censure théâtrale ', by Hal lays- Dabot, p. 331.
2 Études contemporaines, p. 96.
1 De l 'Allemagne, 2nd Part, ch. xvii.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 5 1 I
The Stage has acquired a high degree of importance in
Paris and the great provincial towns. Conversation turns
on the last new piece and the play of the actors, and
Parisians are more familiar with the names of players
than of Generals. An actress is more popular than a
Commander-in-Chief, and the favourite Comedian of the
hour enjoys an enormous prestige. We might well
suppose ourselves back in the days when the Romans
of the Decadence would be crowding to the Theatre,
though the Barbarians were at the Gates, and when more
than one city was captured while the populace was wildly
applauding the actors' efforts. The Roman People asked
for bread and the Games. A section of the Parisian
population asks only alcohol and Stage-plays.
I have shown in the preceding Chapter how readers are
drawn on to copy the heroes of novels by a kind of in-
fectious imitation. And the influence of the Stage is even
greater than that of books. Not only is the Theatre an
amusement for the idle, a refined pleasure for the cultured,
it is also, according to the nature of the pieces played,
a school of good or bad manners and morals, a pulpit
preaching just ideas or mischievous fallacies; it moulds
the spirit of the audience, forms public opinion, paves the
way for moral, social and even political reforms. With
Corneille, the Stage is a school of heroism ; with some
other dramatic Authors, it is a school of depraved morals,
adultery, profligacy and even murder.
The Stage stirs all passions, the noblest as well as the
basest. It teaches love, piety, patriotism, just as it teaches
hatred and revenge; its lessons include the sacrificing of
love to duty, as they do that of duty to love. There are
good plays, which elevate the mind and strengthen the
will ; there are bad plays, which enervate the mind and
weaken the will. There are dramatic authors, who are
true painters of character, clear-minded psychologists,
moralists, politicians and philosophers ; there are others,
who are no more than public entertainers, flatterers of the
populace and artists in pornography. Everything depends
512 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
on the piece played, but its influence is always great The
plays of Alexandre Dumas fils have the effect of making
us indulgent, perhaps too indulgent, towards young women
who have been seduced, and very severe upon their
seducers. Corneille's Horace, M. Sardou's Patrie, M. de
Bornier's La Fille de Roland, teach love of country.
Husbands may find useful lessons in Molière's L'École da
Maris \ mothers in Marivaux's and La Chaussée's L'École
des Mères ; fathers in Marivaux's and Pieyre's L'École da
Pères; old men in C. Delavigne's L'École des Vieillards.
Comedies which are political satires, like Scribe's Bertrand
et Raton, C. Delavigne's Popularité, Sardou's Rabagas, are
useful to society, by teaching the public to beware of
Politicians. Again the Stage is useful, when it depicts
misers, hypocrites, coquettes, adventuresses, when it attacks
shady financiers, pushing upstarts, unscrupulous journalists,
backbiters, dishonest attorneys. It was by way of the
Stage Voltaire coloured public morality with his ideas on
toleration, social equality and political liberty. It was by
his Comedies that Beaumarchais attacked the "ancien
régime" and worked for the emancipation of the Third
Estate. The Barbier de Seville and the Mariage de
Figaro have had more influence than a hundred political
disquisitions.
Doubtless neither misers, nor hypocrites, nor misan-
thropes, neither jealous husbands nor coquettish wives,
have been reformed by the Stage. When vices and foibles
are deeply rooted, it is, if not impossible, at least very diffi-
cult to reform them ; but the studies of avarice, hypocrisy,
misanthropy, coquetry, displayed to theatrical audiences,
may very well, if they have not as yet contracted these
faults, keep them from ever doing so. Literary studies of
the sort are a kind of moral Hygiene, a department of
preventive Medicine.
Nor are the great Dramatic Authors devoid of Philosophy.
Corneille draws his inspiration from Descartes, Racine from
the Port-Royalists, Molière from Gassendi. Hence the
defenders of the Stage are well justified in regarding it as
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 513
an instrument of civilization. Nor, on the other hand, are
its adversaries wrong either, when thinking of another class
of playwrights, whose works deprave the People, they see
in it all only a school of corruption.
Just as the Stage may be a school of good taste by
virtue of its criticism of the foibles of blue-stockings,
pedants, conceited noblemen, ignorant doctors, loquacious
lawyers, it may equally become a school of coarseness and
cheap cynicism, teaching the public thieves' slang and the
cynicism of light women and adulterous wives.
Nothing is more infectious than good and bad examples
afforded by the Stage, nothing spreads more readily than
wise or mischievous maxims disseminated in this way.
The Stage possesses no small power for good no less than
for evil. Alexandre Dumas fils should have been the last
to deny the active influence of dramatic literature ; for he
has himself exercised a great influence over public opinion,
he has not been satisfied with diverting his audiences, but
has endeavoured to make them better by modifying the
current notions with regard to seduction, marriage and
illegitimacy. He has indeed largely contributed towards
the re-establishment of divorce and the movement of public
opinion in favour of a law which shall not prohibit inquiries
as to paternity with so much rigour as at present.
The influence of the Stage over the passions is even
greater than over the mind ; for passion is the very soul
of the Stage, and to interest an audience, the heroes of
the Stage are bound to be passionate, amorous, jealous,
ambitious, revengeful.
If the masses have patriotic plays set before them, they
wax patriotic ; if fanaticism is preached to them from the
boards, they grow fanatical ; if antisocial declamation is
supplied them, they are stirred to rebellion. If crime is
made to look attractive, they are drawn into crime. In
one word, the Stage, which is merely a literary pleasure
for cultivated minds, is for the People a school of morality
or immorality, patriotism or selfishness, obedience to law
and order or revolt.
2 K
514 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
On the boards it is not merely words appealing to the
reader's intellect ; it is living passion speaking to the eyes
of the spectator, sounding in his ears, communicating itself
to him in every feature and look and gesture of the actors,
in every illusion and piece of stage effect, while each
spectator's individual emotion is further increased by that
radiated from all the rest. In an empty house or one
only partly filled, a play produces only half its proper
effect. If the benches are full, the emotion of the audience
is enormously increased ; a sort of electric current runs
through the crowd and sets all hearts quivering. Montes-
quieu, though far from being a man of sensitive heart or
hot head, writes that the Sémiramis and Atrée of
Crébillon thçew him into " transports worthy of the
Bacchantes." Lord Byron tells us that a piece of Alfieri's,
Myrra, actually moved him to tears, making him sob, he
declares, " with an anguish, a terror, that very few speci-
mens of the poetic art have ever occasioned me." If men of
genius, like Montesquieu and Byron, are stirred so forcibly
by dramatic fictions, we can easily understand how they
may upset the imaginations of young people, of women,
and generally of persons of more sensibility than solidity
of mind. Horace quotes the case of a spectator whom
a tragedy turned into a madman, while Lucian relates
how an excellent actor, named Archelaus, having played
the Andromeda of Euripides before the citizens of Abdera,
in the middle of an exceptionally hot summer, several
of the audience left the Theatre in a state of high fever,
their imaginations all on fire with the Tragedy. Fancying
themselves now Andromeda, now Perseus, now Medusa,
they could not stop declaiming the Poet's verses and
going through the piece the same as Archelaus had done.
In fact, the Tragedy had brought on an excess of Euripi-
dotnania. It was the sight of Euripides' play of Telephus
that decided Crates to embrace the life of a cynic. 1 Bayle,
who mentions the mad fit of imitation on the part of the
men of Abdera just referred to, 2 adds with no small
1 Patin, Eschyle ', p. 135. 2 In his Dictionary ', under " AM en."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 515
sagacity : " The mind is subject to epidemics, just like
the body. . . . Let a heresiarch or fanatic arise, whose
infectious imagination and vehement passions are adapted
to impress others, he will in a very short time infatuate
a whole countryside or at any rate a very large number
of persons."
Passion is infectious. In its criticisms of the Cid, the
French Academy undoubtedly judged Corneille's play
with an unfair degree of harshness, but it was quite justified
in the remark that "strong passions well expressed often
produce in those who see them as spectators some part
of the effect they make on those who represent them in
actuality ; . . . fictitious presentments only too frequently
lead up to veritable crimes, and the danger is great in
amusing the masses with pleasures which may one day
cause public calamities."
Much has been written in the last few years on this
tendency to imitation, awakened by reading about criminal
acts or seeing them represented on the Stage. 1 The
famous savant Chevreul was one of the first to draw
attention to it in his pamphlet on La Baguette divinatoire
et Us tables tournantes ("The Divining Rod and Table
Turning "). " I have no doubt," he says, " that the sight
of certain actions, or even the knowledge gained of them
merely by reading, leads certain individuals to perform
the same acts, by reason of a tendency to movement thus
mechanically determining them to an act which they
would never have thought of apart from a circumstance
foreign to their will, and to which instinct would never
have led them." I have repeatedly seen instances coming
under my cognizance as a Magistrate, where this observa-
tion of M. Chevreul's found confirmation.
So great is the force of example it creates a sort of
contagion, a species of epidemic. Those who find them-
selves in a situation identical with that of the author of
a crime, feel themselves almost irresistibly drawn on to
1 Sec the Works of M. Tarde and Dr. Aubry, as also ch. x. of my book Le
Criwu et la Peine, headed Le Crime et V imitation (** Crime and Imitation ").
516 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
imitate him. Seeing a husband who kills his unfaithful
wife, other deceived husbands begin to feel disposed for
vengeance. A business employé at Marseilles, Martinez
by name, kills his wife's lover. Reading in the Newspapers
an account of the crime, a certain Zattara exclaims, ex-
cited by this example, " I will do like him." When a
girl deserted by her lover is hesitating about avenging
herself, if she reads an account in the Paper of a case
of feminine revenge, her fancy is at once stirred by the
example and urges her to reproduce it.
If the mere report of a crime can so strongly impress
ill-balanced individuals as to wake in them homicidal
ideas by virtue of a mechanical tendency to imitation, it
is easy to understand how the representation of a drama,
in which criminal sentiments are given expression or
murders committed, must be still more liable to rouse
homicidal thoughts among impressionable members of
the audience. Uneducated persons who see the characters
on the stage kill, poison, strangle, who hear murderers
express in sounding verse their cruel sentiments, leave
the theatre with minds replete with bloodthirsty fancies
and hearts full of hatred, wrath and revenge. By
dint of sympathizing with the passionate feelings of the
stage heroes, this class of spectators (and it is the most
numerous) serve as it were an apprenticeship to the
passions of hatred, wrath and revenge, fortifying their
natural inclination towards them by forming a habit of
yielding to them in imagination. The actors' passionate
words aggravate such evil passions as the audience bring
with them to the theatre. If they have resorted there with
feelings of anger and hatred against rivals, they sympathize
keenly with the heroes of the play who experience and
express the same passions with vehemence, and presently
after feeling with them, find themselves longing to act
with them too ; thus they leave the House yet more
venomous and more vindictive than they entered. This
is why, in his Tombes^ A. Barbier has pointed out the
danger involved in these judicial dramas, which fill the
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 517
People's hearts with violent passions and their eyes with
bloodthirsty pictures, when he describes :
" Sans haleine et sans pouls, et les lèvres muettes,
Tout un peuple accroupi sur de noires banquettes,
Écoutant à plaisir la langue des bourreaux,
(Apprivoisant) ses yeux au sang des échafauds." l
This concentration of the mind on criminal ideas arouses
in simple natures images of a like kind. But to think of
an act is half way to begin to put it into execution. Very
likely the Author only thought of drawing a useful moral
from this delineation of criminal passions, by showing the
consequences that flow from them ; but as M. Chevreul
adds, "an act interpreted by skilful actors . . . may have,
quite independently of its moral signification, the complete
appreciation of which only belongs to cultured minds, a
less lofty meaning, more understandable by the masses,
which may involve more or less inconvenient consequences
for the individual as well as for society at large." The
very same piece which describing the cruelties of profligacy
will interest an educated man by virtue of the psycho-
logical study it contains, may kindle in a young fellow of
twenty the longing for a life of passion. The very same
discourse on the abuse of wealth which will do the greatest
good when addressed to the rich, may do the greatest
possible harm if addressed to the poor, inasmuch as it
excites them against the former.
Let us never forget this, the impressions produced by
the representation of criminal passion on the stage are
entirely different according to the age, sex, education,
special idiosyncrasies of the spectators. Whereas a man
of cultivated mind, solid sense and mature age, will find
himself morally stirred by the portrayal on the stage of
some crime of passion, which will set him thinking on the
weakness of human will and the strength of evil passions,
other minds incapable of entertaining suchlike philo-
1 " Breathless and pulseless, with dumb lips, a whole people crouching
on black benches, listening their fill to hangmen's talk, accustoming their
eyes to the blood of scaffolds."
518 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
sophicai reflections will be thrown off their balance by
the passions they see dramatized before their eyes and
experience feelings akin to those of the heroes of the
play. The representation of Phèdre, a performance which
will interest the most rigid moralist in a very high degree
(everybody knows that the great Arnaud was a great
admirer of this play and considered it highly moral), may
produce disastrous effects upon a young woman, who will
be shocked and corrupted by the spectacle of so shameless
a passion. Habitués of the Comédie Française and the
Odéon go to the Theatre in search of a literary gratifica-
tion, a psychological study, an exact knowledge of human
passions and human character. The illusion which the repre-
sentation affords them is never so strong as to prevent their
judging the piece and its author's intention, appreciating
the truth of the delineation and the logical sequence of the
situations. Reason is never overset, and they either do
not yield themselves at all to the author's imaginative
spell, or if they do so for an instant, very soon recover
their habitual mental attitude. Once at home again, when
the emotion stirred by the play has had time to cool, they
escape the influence of the bad examples and sophistical
maxims of the piece. Far different are the impressions
experienced by young people, by women, by the un-
educated, whose imagination and sensibility much exceed
their powers of judgment ; they do not criticize the play,
they feel it, identifying themselves with its heroes and
making its sentiments their own. For them a play is no
fiction, it is a drama they live out themselves ; they are
not spectators, but actors ; when present at a play of
passion, it is not so much psychological instruction they
look for as a series of excuses and encouragements for
the indulgence of their own passions. This is just what
Goethe found ; " Young men," he declared, " saw in my
piece a banner, under which their fiery passions could
flaunt the day with impunity."
The number of those who go to the Theatre to judge
of the merits of a play is very limited. The majority of
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 519
spectators go there in search of emotions, to feel rather
than to think. The success of a piece depends on the
interest it arouses, the emotions it gives rise to. With
the exception of a small minority of men who live by the
head, the main part of every audience, including almost
all the women and young men, live by the heart and
imagination ; they find pleasure only in emotion, and
frequent only those plays which stir their feelings.
It is never the delineation of quiet goodness that
rouses an audience ; no doubt it elevates the mind, but
then it does not pique the curiosity or excite any burning
interest, it is too unexciting. Men of sense and masters
of their passions, women who are able to find love and
happiness in marriage, are no heroes for the boards.
What the public likes is frenzied passion, imagination run
mad ; what it does not appreciate on the stage is reason-
able love and domestic bliss. It finds virtue dull, and
reproaches authors who write idylls for it with putting no
wolves in their pastorals ; it likes wolves. It is to suit
this taste of their patrons, to divert their audiences l and
supply them with a due stock of thrilling emotions, that
Dramatic Authors search the records of Crime for good
telling horrors to set spectators shuddering with terror
and pity, and pile up in their dramas adultery, jealousy,
revenge, murder, poisoning and suicide. Criminals abound
in every play. The public appears to find no pleasure in
a piece unless it sees some of the characters either as
murderers or suicides. Death is the main-spring of the
modern Theatre. Many sittings of the Assize Courts
would be needed to judge all the criminals of the tragic
stage, and a whole row of tables to hold as "pièces de
conviction " all the daggers, ropes, cups of poison employed
by heroes of the theatre to stab, strangle and poison their
victims. Every variety of crime is found on the Stage,
1 "For my own part," Corneille himself says, "I hold with Aristotle and
Horace that our arts only end in amusement." Dedication to La Suite du
Menteur. — In the Preface to Bérénice, Racine also declares the sole aim of
the stage to be to please.
520 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
marital revenge, female retaliation, rape, incest, fratricide,
infanticide and parricide. Mere commonplace criminals
are not enough ; individuals are wanted of monstrous
wickedness and refined immorality. "For an enemy to
kill his enemy," says the scholiast of Aristotle, — " there is
nothing here at all out of the way. It is a commonplace
spectacle that stirs no one. For persons mutually in-
different and without connection of kinship or sentiment
to fight and destroy each other, — well! the catastrophe
may be dreadful, but it still moves only a moderate degree
of interest and excitement. But when, on the contrary,
the persons who struggle and massacre each other are
united by the closest ties, ties that should by right be the
tenderest, for instance when it is a brother who kills or is for
killing his brother, a son his father, or a mother her son,
these indeed are situations to be sought after." x This is
the reason why the Poets have brought on the stage
Medea killing her children by way of vengeance on their
father, Atreus offering to his brother Thyestes a cup full
of his children's blood. In a play by Du Belloy, a
husband presents to his wife her lover's heart swimming
in blood. Great criminals abound on the Shakespearian
Stage as on that of the Greek Dramatists. Macbeth, Lady
Macbeth, Richard III., Iago, Othello, are all heroes of the
Criminal Court complexion. In our great Tragic writers
there is nothing but murders and suicides of passion. We
may apply to their dramas what Corneille said of Médét\
" Here you will find Crime in its triumphal car, and few
personages on the stage whose character is not rather bad
than good." Even the gentle Racine piles up the corpses
in his plays, which are perfect "butcheries." In Andro-
maque, there is a murder, that of Pyrrhus, and two suicides,
those of Oreste and of Hermione. In Bajazet are included
no less than three murders, those of Bajazet himself, of
Roxane and of Orcan, besides Atalide's suicide.
On the French Stage, the murders are committed in the
1 Barthélémy Saint-Hilaire, Preface to his French Translation of Aristotle's
Politics % p. xi.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 52 1
wings ; but on the English they are often carried out
actually before the eyes of the audience, contravening
Horace's judicious precept, warning the Dramatic Author
not to do murder before the spectators :
"Ne pueros coram populo Medea trucidet." l
Of course savages and criminals are not the only
occupants of the Tragic boards. Beside Hermione, Roxane
and Phèdre, we have in Racine's plays Iphigénie and
Monime, and after depicting the jealous rage of Pyrrhus,
the same author has drawn us the noble portrait of
Burrhus. Still it would seem that a Tragedy without tears
and bloodshed is not a Tragedy at all. In his Preface to
Bérénice, Racine apologizes for having composed a Tragedy
devoid of murder and suicide. " It is quite true," he says,
" I have not driven Bérénice to kill herself, like Dido,
because in this play not having gone to the last extremities
with Titus, as Dido did with jEneas, she is not forced like
her to renounce her life. . . . There is no absolute necessity
to have blood and death in a Tragedy ; it is enough for the
action to be noble, the actors heroic, the passions to be
highstrung and the whole to breathe that majestic melan-
choly that makes all the charm of the present Play."
Nevertheless Bérénice is a less pleasing piece than Andro-
tnaque, because Titus sacrificing his love to his sense of
duty, seems too undramatic a figure. In his tragedy of
Dido, Lefranc de Pompignan again has endeavoured to
make jEneas interesting, but without success, for the
reason that the " pious hero " strikes one as over-reason-
able. "Melpomene," Voltaire declared, "demands savage
passions, startling crimes, fierce remorse ; . . . the Eclogue
in dialogue entitled Bérénice, at which Henrietta of England
set Corneille and Racine at work, was unworthy of the
Tragic Stage." It was rose-water Tragedy ; Voltaire pre-
ferred aquafortis.
The heroes of the Stage speak only of killing, — either
others or themselves. Murderers who appear in the
1 " Medea must not slaughter her children before the people's eyes."
52 2 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Criminal dock use less ferocity of language to announce
their purpose. Lacenaire alone, — and he was the author
of several tragedies, — proclaimed in melodramatic style:
" Society will have my blood, but in my turn I shall have
society's." Your Stage heroes on the other hand are for
ever repeating, till one is tired of hearing it, that they
want blood) they are continually figuring in their imagi-
nations the pleasure they are going to enjoy in shedding
a rival's blood, or slaying an unfaithful wife.
In Zaïre> Orosmane exclaims :
" ... et ma main dégouttante
Confondrait dans son sang le sang de son amant" l
Even the female characters love to set blood flowing;
" Dans ton perfide sang, je puis tout expier . . .
Revenez tout convert du sang de l'infidèle," 2
cries Hermione, intoxicated with jealousy and the lust of
vengeance.
Phèdre again declares :
" Mes homicides mains, prêtes à me venger,
Dans le sang innocent, brûlent de se plonger." 3
The sentiments found in the mouths of the heroes of
Tragedy, stripped of the splendour of the verse that
enshrines and transfigures them, are identical with those
we note among the heroes of the Criminal Courts; savage
lust of vengeance is what inspires both and drives them
to the commission of the most atrocious deeds. Always
excepting Bérénice, almost all the female characters of the
Stage who are forsaken avenge their wrongs ; Hermione,
1 ". . . and my dripping hand should mingle with her blood her lover's
gore."
2 "In thy traitorous blood I can expiate all offences . . . return drenched
in the deceiver's gore."
a " My murderous hands, ready lo wreak my revenge, burn to plunge in
innocent blood."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 523
«ane, Phèdre, Médée, all do so. Like the vitriol
>wers of the present day, Hermione and Roxane utter
rid threats of death against Pyrrhus and Bajazet, which
r go on repeating ad nauseam :
" Bajazet doit périr, dit-elle, ou l'épouser." l
% o punish Pyrrhus, Hermione urges Oreste to slay him,
when she sees him hesitate, forms the project of going
>elf to stab him to death. Her frenzied fancy pictures
pleasure she is sure to find in shedding the traitor's
>d:
" Quel plaisir de venger moi-même mon offense . . .
De retirer mon bras teint du sang du parjure ! " 2
ust like the female criminals who are tried at the
irts of Assize, the heroines of the Stage show refine-
lts of cruelty in the forms their vengeance takes, and
/ love to make a hated rival suffer doubly in actually
îessing the faithless lover's death pangs.
[ermione pushes her savage lust of vengeance so far as
irish to kill her involuntary rival's child, and Pyrrhus
self is odious enough to threaten Andromaque with the
matum, " Marriage or Astyanax* death ! "
he same vindictive fury animates a large number of
neillc's heroines ;
" L'esclave le plus vil qu'on puisse imaginer,
Sera digne de moi, s'il peut t'assassiner," 3
hat Pulchérie says to Phocas.
astly, yet another point of resemblance with ordinary
ale criminals who often kill themselves after killing
*rs, the heroines of the Stage too make their own
ide the sequel of murder :
1 Bajazet must perish, she declares, or marry her."
What pleasure to avenge my wrong myself ... to withdraw my arm
with the perjured traitor's gore ! "
The vilest slave you can imagine will be a worthy mate for me, if he can
lurder you."
524 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
"Je saurai le surprendre avec son Atalide,
Et d'un même poignard les unissant tous deux,
Les percer l'un et l'autre et moi après eux." l
So many criminals are to be found in every Play, that
d'Alembert, wishing to defend the Stage against Rousseau's
criticisms, told him : " Supposing we went to see these
Tragedies, desiring not so much to be instructed as to be
moved, where would be our fault in this, or theirs either?
They would be for respectable folk, if we may make the
comparison, what public executions are for the people,
a sight at which they would assist, moved solely by the
craving all men feel for strong emotions." The truth is,
men love emotion, and run after it everywhere, in the
public streets, in the Criminal Courts, at the scaffold's foot,
at the Morgue, the Playhouse, the Circus and the Bull
Fight. They love sights that make them shudder and
weep and commiserate. Curiosity, egoism, recollection of
their own past sufferings, pity, sympathy, all cause them
to find pleasure in looking on at the struggles, calamities
and sufferings of others, in not enduring themselves what
they see others enduring, while participating in their agonies
in imagination. To gratify the Roman populace and
satisfy its taste for strong emotions, Generals and Politicians
used to give them the Games of the Circus, the fights and
death struggles of animals and gladiators. Similarly, to
divert their audience, dramatic authors make the spectators
assist at the struggles, murders and suicides of the heroes
of the Stage. It is to gratify the public by setting them
shuddering, that Othello kills Desdemona and Hermionc
has Pyrrhus stabbed to death. There is a large infusion
of selfishness in the terror and pity the public goes to the
Theatre for ; their pleasure is of the sort Lucretius describes
in the well-known lines :
" Suave mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem." 2
1 " I shall know how to surprise him with his Atalide, and joining the pair
in one and the same dagger thrust, to transfix both, and myself afterwards."
2 " Sweet it is, when the winds are tossing the waves, safe on shore to watch
another's sore peril out at sea."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 525
The man who is running no danger himself finds an
Lgreeable emotion in the sight of perils risked by other
>eople. The pleasure spectators take in watching acrobats
>erform dangerous feats, comes from the risk these run ;
ind the spectacle is a still more attractive one when it
lot only offers a possibility of accident, but death itself
îither imminent or just completed. Hence the eagerness
>f the public to be present at the execution of criminals,
t was the same sentiment gave rise to the attraction
gladiatorial combats exercised over the ancient Romans.
To make this atrocious form of pleasure last the longer,
he gladiators were armed in such a way as to make
heir contests more protracted and more marked by tragic
iccidents. A speedy death would not have satisfied the
pectators ; what they loved was a long-drawn agony and
1 series of unexpected catastrophes. The men were
trilled to wound each other without dealing a fatal
)low, and when this was finally struck, to lie down and
lie gracefully. Philosophers and vestal virgins took
Measure in seeing men kill each other. It is an analogous
entiment that urges a modern crowd to rush to the spot
vhere a fellow-creature is in danger, when he is defending
limself against a criminal accusation, or when he is going
o be executed. The average man who is more or less
inhappy and unfortunate, takes small interest in the
lappiness of others ; he likes better to compassionate
han to envy them, he prefers to see them striving and
uffering. He has no opportunities of seeing gladiators
lie, so he goes to see tragedians weep.
The representative of a crime of passion is the one of
ill others that affords the maximum of emotion. This is
vhy the Stage, the first and foremost endeavour of which
s to stir the spectators, lives by the delineation of passion.
To listen to angry lovers on the boards, raving and weep-
ng in the throes of jealousy and passion, and share their
ufferings in fancy, is a pleasure, — and a pleasure that is
ill the keener when it is a guilty love that is represented ;
t then has the additional attraction of " forbidden fruit."
526 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
The man who has a peaceful home of his own, sheltered
from every storm, likes to watch in others the tempests of
a tortured heart and harrowed senses and the rage of un-
bridled passion. The most virtuous wife does not object
to a picture of guilty love. A pessimist will account for
the fact by saying that she is a trifle weary of her virtue
and longs to win the enjoyment, though only in make-
believe, of a criminal passion. But it is more correct to
say that this attraction towards what is wrong arises
mainly out of curiosity. For the most part of men and
women life is so flat and prosaic that the representation
of a love drama, abounding in tragic situations, shakes
them up and stirs their minds in an agreeable fashion :
" Le jeu des passions saisit le spectateur,
Il aime, il hait, il pleure, et lui-même est acteur." 1
If the hero suffer, the spectator suffers with him, if he
is happy, he is happy too, — so closely does he identify
himself with him ; the young man falls in love with the
heroine of the piece, the young girl with the hero. Both
come to see, then love to inflame their own affection
by so infectious a sight ; they leave the theatre with senses
on fire and imagination blazing, with never a thought
but of high-wrought passions. "I learned to bewail Dido,"
wrote Saint Augustine ... "if they tried to deprive
me of this reading, I should bewail at having nothing to
bewail. ... I felt likewise an inordinate passion for the
spectacles of the theatre, because I found therein a lively
picture of my own miseries, and because they served as
a train to kindle the fires that consumed me." 2 Passion
represented on the boards soon communicates itself to
the younger members of the audience, who are fired by
seeing lovers plead their passion on the stage, long for
the possession of the object of their affections, and win
it at last, making them desire the same happiness. M.
Jules Lemaître accounts for Racine's abandonment of
1 " The play of passions seizes the spectators ; he loves and hates, and weeps,
and is an actor himself." L. Racine, Epftre à M. de Valincourt.
s Les Confessions de Saint Augustine y bk. v., bk. iii., ch. ii.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 527
poetic composition after Phèdre by the terror the in-
fectious nature of passion caused him : " When he saw
the character of Phèdre as interpreted by Mlle. Champmeslé,
he realized for the first time all there is of contagion re-
siding in the presentment of love-sickness on the stage." 1
Nor is it only love-sickness that is communicated by
theatrical representation ; all love is contagious, as Bossuet
pointed out in his Réflexions sur la Comédie. Some may
think he treats the Stage from a too limited point of view
and a too ascetic standpoint; but his psychological and even
physiological reflections (for Bossuet had been a profound
student of Physiology) are admirable for their acuteness and
good sense. He depicts, just as a Physiologist of the present
day might do, the infectious nature of those theatrical re-
presentations, "which set all the pit aflame and all the
boxes, . . . which excite youth to love," which set the
fire of passion coursing "in all veins," and penetrating
44 to the marrow of the bones." Again and again he uses
the word "contagion" to express the communication of
passions to the audience by their representation on the
stage : " Do you really and truly imagine," he says, " that
the subtle contagion of a dangerous evil always demands
a coarse and unworthy object? ... To think that Saint
Augustine did not deplore in Comedies this play of the
passions and the contagious expression of our moral
weaknesses."
Corneille professes to believe that " love in misfortune
only excites pity and is better adapted to purge this
passion in us than to set us longing for it. " There is no
man," he says, " who, on leaving the house after seeing a
performance of the Cid> ever really wished to have killed,
like the hero, his mistress's father, in order to enjoy similar
favours." 2 Corneille is mistaken, the delineation of love
in calamity does not repel, and every spectator would
like to change places with Rodrigue:
"Tout Paris pour Chimène a les yeux de Rodrigue." 3
1 Jules Lemattre, 8th Series, p. 81. * Corneille, Preface to Attila.
» "All Paris for Chimène has the eyes of Rodrigue."
528 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
But Corneille, by way of answer to the two stringent
criticisms of Bossuet, might have pointed out that, if
the Stage only offered types of lovers such as Chimène
and Rodrigue, it would not be a very dangerous institu-
tion, for the lesson they teach is no other than that
duty must come before love.
Ovid likewise observed the infectious character of the
presentment of love on the stage. A young man, he says*
docile enough to the advice I offered him, by which to
free himself from his love, was all but cured ; " but the
infectious sight of some lovers brought on a sad relapse. . . .
All ye who would fain cease to love, avoid contagion. . . .
He who looks upon another's wounds finds himself
wounded too."
At the end of the Symposium^ Xenophon described long
ago, with full precision of physiological detail, the im-
pression produced on the audience by the representation
of a love drama. "They heard Bacchus ask Ariadne,"
he writes, " if she loves him, and Ariadne swear she loves
none but him. . . . When finally the guests saw them
hold each other embraced . . . those that were not married
took an oath to marry straightway, and those that were,
sprang into the saddle and away to their wives to be
happy in their turn. ,,
If the representation of a love drama had no worse
effects than to rekindle conjugal affection and inspire a
wish to marry in single men, all would be well. But
alas! it often leads to irregular liaisons, ending in desertion,
it provokes in young people a dangerous precocity in
matters of sex, and paves the way to the fall of* a
certain number of married women. There is no need,
in order to safeguard the morality of the young, to
inspire them with a horror of love and the stage plays
that depict it ; it is advantageous indeed to hold out a
loving marriage as the end they should aim at. But it
is unwise too soon to display before their eyes an ardent
presentment of love's ecstasies ; too early an initiation
into the science of the passions is sure to inspire them
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 529
with a desire to supplement theory with practice. Young
men, whose nature lays them open only too much to
amorous impressions, need something to distract their
attention by the suggestion of a different line of thought.
It would be greatly to the advantage of their well-being,
both physical and moral, as well as of their education,
to postpone their initiation into the turmoils of the
heart. But the representation of love on the stage has
exactly the opposite effect, it accelerates the blossoming
of love. I have likewise frequently had occasion in
criminal proceedings to observe the fact that young
girls who had been taken to the theatre at too early
an age readily succumbed to seduction and had, without
hesitation, abandoned friends and family to go off with
some Lovelace or other, under the excitement of a play
that had stirred their imaginations. Seeing how on the
stage Passion is an excuse for everything, how it is always
noble and always admired, even when it tramples under-
foot every duty, they had come to believe there was
nothing higher than passion, nothing more important,
more poetical and more ennobling. If they had not
found love follies invariably excused and glorified on
the boards, they would have thought a little more of
their parents, their honour and their future, and a little
less of their seducers, — who were only very commonplace
profligates after all.
The Literary Critics consider it a mark of great progress
the ever greater place Dramatic Authors assign in their
pieces to the delineation of love. In his parallel between
the Ancients and Moderns, Perrault reproaches the former
with having known nothing of gallantry. Under the
influence of the romances of Chivalry and the habits of
gallantry customary at Courts, dramatic writers have
acquired the custom of representing all their heroes as
in love and reckoning gallantry a merit Boileau himself,
who in his Dialogue on the heroes of romance made fun
of those heroes that never have a word to say of anything
but love, and who had no personal knowledge of the
530 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
passion owing to an accident in his boyhood, 1 declares
the Jerusalem Delivered would be tiresome without its
descriptions of the loves of Renaldo and Tancreda,
" Fabula nulla est sine atnore Menandri? — " No pleasing
piece of Menander's is without Love." Love being part
of life and the stage a copy of life, its representation on
the boards cannot well be prohibited, if only the dramatic
author does not devote himself to the portrayal of sensual
love, and refrains from declaring that love is virtue, is
superior to all laws, is the chief end of life, that true love
will not stop short at crime, — sophistries that lead the way
to seduction, adultery, and crimes of passion.
The modern Stage is the apotheosis of Love. It is only
in Corneille's Tragedies and in Racine's Bérénice that the
hero sacrifices Love to Duty. The rule is nowadays, Duty
must be sacrificed to Love. On the boards Passion is
always noble, even when it is savage, mad and criminal.
This was not the case among the Greeks. Less importance
and less dignity were attached to love in the Greek theatre,
because women did not frequent it ; the dramatic poets of
Antiquity wrote for men. Modern Authors on the con-
trary write above all for women, and seeing the latter are
interested chiefly, nay ! almost exclusively, in the delinea-
tion of love, they compose dramas of love expressly for them,
plays in which Passion is represented as a divine force,
entitled to rank above honour and duty. Manzoni used
to say all this picturing of passion effected was to increase
the dose of love there is in the world, and as this dose is
already infinitely stronger than it should be, Dramatists
would be doing humanity a great service, if only they
would use their talents to describe and so reinforce other
sentiments, such as courage, patriotism, piety, good-nature
and generosity. In so doing they would but be imitating
the greatest Greek Poets, iEschylus and Sophocles. There
is no love in ^Eschylus and very little in Sophocles ; there
is a great deal in Euripides, but Aristophanes blames him
for the fact. In one of his pieces he makes /Eschylus say
1 This accident has been recorded by Racine fils in his Memoirs of his father.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 53 1
to Euripides : " I will show them neither Sthenebœa nor
shameless Phaedra, and I am not aware I have ever put
a woman in love on the stage." — Euripides : " But what
harm have my Sthenebœas done to Athens ? " — Aischylus :
"You are to blame that honest wives of honest citizens
have drunk hemlock." — Euripides : " Did / invent the tale
of Phaedra ? " — jEschylus : " No ! 'tis a true story, but it is
a poet's duty to hide what is infamous, and not display it
on the scene." * — The calamities of Royal Houses, and of
the Fatherland, appeal to ^Eschylus as more interesting
than the fury of a jealous lover or the sorrows of a woman
whose passion is not returned. Corneille was of the same
opinion, when he said : " The dignity of Tragedy demands
some great interest of State or some passion nobler and
more virile than Love, such as ambition or revenge, and
should foreshadow greater calamities than the loss of a
mistress." In Esther and Athalie, Racine has likewise
shown that fine Tragedies can be written without love.
Alexandre Dumas fils, who gave so large a place to love
in his earlier Comedies, discovered in due course there are
higher thoughts than sexual preoccupations, for he makes
Claude say to his disciple : " Man of twenty, who have it
may be forty years still to live, what mean you by coming
here to talk of love sorrows? . . . And your God you
must find again? And your conscience you must re-
establish? And your Country you must re-make?" The
young men of Greece and Rome, who found something
else on their stage than outpourings of passion, had fewer
thoughts to throw away on their mistresses and more to
devote to their Country. The effect of the excessive, all
but exclusive, importance given nowadays by the theatre
to passion, is to throw into the shade nobler and more
elevated sentiments. Surely it is an inordinate limitation
of an audience's intellectual faculties to concentrate the
whole of their attention upon the relations of the sexes.
Something more of variety is demanded in the subject
matter of our plays.
1 Sec Tusculans, bk. iv. §§ 32, 33.
532 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
The type of love most frequently depicted on the Stage
is sensual love. This is what Racine has delineated in
Roxane and in Phèdre ; and lo ! the Critics have made
a merit of it and a point of superiority over Corneille.
Because in Corneille love is not a frenzy of the senses
and a paralysis of the reasoning powers, we are told he
has " a false and cold conception of love," that he describes
"an intellectual, pedantic type of passion, devoid alike
of agitation and tenderness." 1 What an utter mistake!
True, Corneille's heroes and heroines have noble souls,
but they have tender hearts as well. His heroines have
been laughed at as over-masculine; but their real sensi-
bility has been overlooked. There are to be found in
Corneille's plays feminine sayings of admirable psycho-
logical truth ; I will quote two only, which prove Corneille
to have known the female heart just as intimately as
Racine. Chimène, reproaching Rodrigue with thinking
more of his honour than his love for her, cries :
" Ton honneur t'est plus cher que je ne te suis chère." *
Similarly Pauline cannot understand that Polyeucte should
put his good faith before his love, and bids him :
" Quittez cette chimère et m'aimez." 3
What truth is here! What a knowledge of a woman's
heart !
Corneille again has fathomed better than Racine the
psychological reasons for double suicide arising out of
love, and the craving lovers feel to be united together in
the grave :
" Et jusque dans la tombe il est doux de s'unir." 4
In more than one of his most vigorous Tragedies he
reverts to this idea, and he makes it the concluding motive
1 J, Lemaître, Corneille et la poétique cTAristote, p. 13.
2 "Thy honour is more dear to thee than I, thy dear one."
3 " Quit this vain phantom, and love me."
4 M And even in the tomb itself 'tis sweet to be united."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 533
of Horace. The King wishing to appease the manes of
Camille, pronounces these lines :
" Je la plains, et pour rendre à son sort rigoureux
Ce que peut souhaiter son esprit amoureux . . .,
Je veux qu'un même jour, témoin de leurs deux morts,
Dans un même tombeau voie enfermer leur corps." l
If at the present day Racine's heroines are preferred,
who yield to passion, to Corneille's, who overcome it, this
is because the stage has accustomed us to the belief that
true love is sensual, violent and bloodthirsty. Racine is
more admired, because, like the Romantics, he depicts love
as something savage and criminal. In the Seventeenth
Century Corneille was the better liked, because he gave
passion its share of pride and nobleness, and attributed
to his heroines the power to rise superior by force of will
to the temptations of the senses ;
" Une femme d'honneur peut avouer sans honte
Ces surprises que le raison surmonte, 2
are Pauline's words.
Chimène shows the same pride :
" Chimène a l'âme haute, et quoique intéressée,
Elle ne peut souffrir une basse pensée." 3
Nowadays the Stage has spread far and wide the fallacy
that a woman does not know how to love, unless she loves
madly, and because Racine has depicted women a prey to
all the furies of passion, it appears a woman cannot really
love in any other way. If the love of Roxane, Hermione
and Phèdre is frenzied and criminal, this is because it is
essentially sensual. But there is just as much true love
in the hearts of Junie, Bérénice, Monime, Iphigénie, and
Aricie as in Roxane's, Hermione's and Phèdre's. Gentle-
1 " I commiserate her, and to render to her hard lot what her lovelorn
spirit may desire . . ., I will that one and the same day, witness of both
their deaths, see their bodies enclosed in one and the same tomb."
1 "A woman of honour may confess without shame those surprises of the
senses that reason overcomes."
* " Chimène has a lofty soul, and whatever her interest, she cannot endure
one unworthy thought."
534 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
ness, modesty, resignation, good-nature, sweet reasonable-
ness, are in no way incompatible with love. There is more
than one kind of love. It is hardly to be desired there
should be many women in the world who love, knife or
revolver in hand ; this sort of love is within the reach of
the most commonplace of womankind. It is for having
loved after this fashion that so many female criminals
appear in the dock between two gendarmes at the Police
Courts and the Assizes. Another type of love altogether,
bearing no resemblance to the frenzied passion of such
women, is no less true and far nobler and deeper.
Sensual love is not so common in women as in men.
The physical craving is less insistent in the female. The
number of passionately amorous women is not large. The
maternal instinct is much more highly developed in them
than the sexual. " Give me a child, or I die," Rachel
said to Jacob. If dramatic authors so often depict feminine
love as sensual, this is because it is sensual love that en-
genders crimes.
Above all it is the romantic Stage which, by poetizing
the love that kills either others or itself; has disseminated
among the public this idea that the murderer from love is
a great heart, a noble character. According to the Writers
of this school, a hero cannot really be in love, unless he is
ready and willing to stab his mistress or his mistress's
husband to death at a moment's notice. In Corneille's
plays, a lover proves his love to the woman he has failed
to marry by heroically saving her husband's life. On the
romantic Stage, on the contrary, the lover finds no better
way to prove his love for his mistress than by offering to
murder her husband. According to this school, so long as
love stops short of murder, its sincerity may legitimately
be doubted ; to ensure recognition, it must have set blood
flowing. If the lover does not become a furious madman,
ready to stab a husband and strangle a rival, he is not
judged to be in earnest ; his only method of proving the
sincerity of his passion is to commit a series of follies and
crimes. Woe to the stage hero who possesses common
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 535
sense or common morality ; he ceases at once to inspire
interest, if he shows any respect for human life. The
audience, and especially the female part of it, seduced by
these pictures of guilty love, deem the man worthy of all
admiration who sacrifices everything to love; a hero who
stops short of this last extravagance will fail to please
them, as being too reasonable and cool-headed. The
Stage must have frenzied passions, delirious madness,
daggers, blood, to show.
The same fallacy has spread from the theatre to society
at large, — the fallacy that love is not really deep, unless
it is capable of every reckless extravagance and savage
crime Yet nothing can be more unfounded than such
a belief; criminality in love proves only violence and
excitability of temperament, in no sense energy of char-
acter. The brutes kill their rivals and the females of
their species who repulse them, and yet they are quoted
as models of what love should be. Why, therefore, extol
as energy on the stage the brute force of the lover who
kills? With the one exception of Oreste, Racine has
attributed suchlike criminal frenzies of love only to violent
and weak-willed women ; Bajazet, Xipharès, Britannicus,
deeply as they are enamoured, are not madmen.
Every day the Courts of Assize have to adjudicate in
crimes committed by madmen in love, who have little or
nothing poetical about them. For instance, in 1 891 the
Assize Court of Meurthe-et-Moselle condemned to death
a man named Meunier, a custom-house officer and time-
expired soldier, who from motives connected with love had
twice been guilty of arson and three times of murder, and
had actually killed his own son. Left a widower with two
children, Meunier had fallen in love with Marie J , his
Captain's sister, and asked her in marriage. His demand
was refused, although he was liked and respected by his
superior officers, on the ground of his being a widower,
father of two children, and without fortune. To get money,
he robbed a priest and set fire to his house, and the priest
and his maid-servant were burned to death. Marie J ,
536 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
still persisting in her refusal to marry him, Meunier
threatened to kill himself at her feet ; and subsequently,
in order to make her as poor as himself, he set fire to the
house she lived in, with the idea that she would consent to
marry him, when she found herself houseless. Finally,
seeing that his two children were another obstacle to his
marriage, he made up his mind to put them out of the way,
and began by killing the elder, a boy of eight, smother-
ing the child on a bed underneath an eider-down quilt
Finding Marie J still set against him and thinking
her brother was encouraging her in her refusal, he deter-
mined to be revenged and shot him with a gun, shattering
his right arm and right leg. When the Presiding Judge
questioned him about the murder of his son, Meunier
answered : " Ah ! but I was very fond of him for all that,
my little lad ! " — The Judge: " What! and yet you murdered
him!" — The Prisoner: "What would you have? It was
for love of the young lady. I was mad." He received
the sentence of death with a smile, and curling his
moustache, observed: "Well and good! Still, ifs not
what every man would have done, to die like this, for a
woman." On his way to the scaffold, he remarked further:
" I am no common criminal. Ah ! women, women ! For
love of a girl, to kill one's own offspring ! A man who
had never been in trouble with anybody, and was always
well conducted. ... I am ready as soon as you are. A
good Frenchman is not afraid of death. A good soldier
like me will not turn coward."
It is no uncommon thing to see prisoners who have
done murder from motives of love or jealousy, proudly
admit the crime they have committed ; they are like
heroes of the playhouse, vain of their misdoings. The fact
is, by encouraging a habit of living in an atmosphere of
passion, the Stage makes men love and admire the passion
it is so ready to depict, and weakens the sense of duty by
rendering the authors of crimes of passion interesting. In
this way the horror a murder should by rights inspire is
transformed into pity, and the acmé of the dramatist's skill
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 537
and triumph is to draw these tears of pity not for the
victim but the murderer. To elicit sympathy for the
victim would be too commonplace. It is to the criminal
the modern playwright strives to direct pity and com-
passion, and not without success ; the audience appreciates
his motives, bewails his hard fate and sympathizes in his
sufferings, his anger and his revenge. The stage present-
ment of a crime of passion produces the same effect as a
piece of skilful special pleading, that by laying stress solely
on the extenuating circumstances assures the acquittal ot
the accused. The dramatic author makes the criminal
interesting by bringing him near us, accounting for him,
showing how he has been little by little driven to crime by
a passion we all share with him, and how he struggled
against it, suffered and succumbed. The fact is, when we
see a fellow-creature in pain, no matter how guilty he may
be, we cannot but feel some sympathy for him.
So in his answer to Rousseau, Marmontel seems to me
to have singularly exaggerated the moral good effects of
the Stage when he says, speaking of dramatic authors :
" What is the evil passion they have flattered ? . . .
What is the vice they have encouraged ? . . . All per-
nicious tendencies are condemned on the Stage ; all deadly
passions inspire horror ; all unhappy weaknesses meet
with pity and abhorrence. The Stage does what Sparta
did, where to keep children from drunkenness, they used
to show them drunken Helots." 1 Possibly the sight of
drunken helots may have taught the Spartans sobriety.
But the delineation of passion, embellished as it is by the
charm of poetry and the actor's talent, entirely fails to
inspire the same repugnance as intoxication ; the sight of
a man proud in his love does not produce the same dis-
gust as that of a drunkard does ; the presentment of his
happiness or even of his sufferings is seductive rather than
the reverse.
Women, whom love drives into crime, are objects of our
admiration on the Stage. M. Legouvé calls them " sublime
1 Mercure de France^ Nov. 1758.
538 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
murderesses " ; * M. Jules Lemaître says " these angels of
assassination " are, in his eyes, adorable. 2 Such is the magic
of dramatic poetry, which gives an aureole of sanctity to
murderers from love, that the crimes of Hermione, Roxane»
Phèdre, Médée do not inspire us with the slightest horror.
We sympathize with Hermione who has Pyrrhus stabbed,
and with Roxane who has Bajazet strangled. Racine makes
us take an admiring interest in Phèdre, who is stained both
with incest and perjury. M. Saint-Marc Girardin and M.
D. Nisard, those two Nestors of the University, find nothing
unjustifiable in the murders of Pyrrhus and Jason, and
declare that if they had had to judge Hermione and Médée
as prisoners at the bar of the Assize Court, they would not
have hesitated to acquit them. " When these women, so
basely betrayed, find means of revenge," writes Saint-Marc
Girardin, " we applaud the well-deserved act of punishment.
. . . Yes! against Jason anything is lawful; and if Medea's
soul is thirsty for the traitor's blood, and she takes his life,
if I were on the jury no man should ever make me pro-
nounce the woman guilty. I excuse, nay ! I approve and
support the outraged wife who avenges her wrongs." 3 Yet
this Fury, whom the famous Critic excuses and approves,
has had her rival done to death with hideous tortures, has
killed her own father, and would fain have burned Corinth
to the ground, to ensure her father's and her rival's death.
In her thirst for vengeance, she regrets her rival has no
children that she might destroy them. 4 Finally, with hellish
cruelty, she slaughters her own children as a means of
taking vengeance on their father. Yet, supposing this un-
natural mother to be brought up at the bar of the Court of
Assize, M. Saint-Marc Girardin would have no hesitation,
as a juryman, in acquitting her ! We can scarce wonder
1 Revue Bleue, nth Oct. 1890. 9 Ibid., 2nd Aug. 1884.
3 Cours de littérature dramatique, vol. iv. p. 306.
4 " Que n'a-t-elle pas déjà des enfants de Jason,
Sur qui plus pleinement venger sa trahison ? "
"Why has she not already children by Jason, on whom more fully to
avenge his treachery ? "
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 539
now that juries so often acquit the authors of less odious
crimes of passion, and by this mistaken clemency make such
crimes so common as they are.
Nor is M. Saint-Marc Girardin the only literary Critic
who has approved of the vengeance of passion. In his
study on Hermione, D. Nisard does not hesitate either to
declare that " her revenge is quite justified." l M. G. Merlet
again, in his remarks on Corneille as a dramatist, cannot
refrain from admiring " the art of the Poet that can ennoble
crime by the very intrepidity of its daring, and endow it
with an inexplicable air of grandeur." In his observations
on Rodogune, Corneille congratulates himself on having
framed the character of Cléopâtre, who hesitates at no
crime necessary to punish a rival and maintain her own
power. " All her crimes," he says, " are fraught with such
a high-souled grandeur, that while we detest her actions,
we cannot but admire the source from which they spring."
"To ennoble crime," "to endow it with an air of
grandeur," to make the murderer interesting and the
female prisoner saintly, — is this a useful task? Here is an
instance, which I borrow from a criminal trial, to prove
the danger of familiarizing the minds of an audience with
notions of crime and the pictures it evokes, of minimizing
the horror it should inspire and setting up a false ideal
by ennobling the crime of murder. On Nov. 16, i860,
the Assize Court of the Bouches-du-Rhône tried for
attempted murder a man named P , a tailor of
Marseilles, of Italian origin and an enthusiastic admirer
of Alfieri's tragedies. This man had become the lover of
a married woman, and had tried to murder her husband
out of jealousy. When he was arrested and taken to the
Police Station, he asked for a glass of water, and the
officer having told him to wait a moment, the prisoner
exclaimed that he was surprised to see how civilization
was understood in France. A moment later, the same
officer having looked hard at him, the man said : " There
is no need for you to stare at me so ; I am more to be
1 D. Nisard, Histoire de la Littérature française.
54° CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
pitied than blamed. I am not the only man who has
done such a thing. Read the Tragedies and you will
find plenty who have done worse. What I have done is
well done, and if I were free, I would do it again." — When
his house was searched, the police found side by side with
a bullet-mould, a copy of Alfieri's Tragedies, his favourite
reading. The Juge d'instruction questioning him as to
the book, the accused answered : " I brought the volume
of Alfieri with me, when I first came here from Rome,
six years ago; I presume it is not forbidden to read
that Poet's tragedies." The prisoner and the husband,
who had only been wounded, were confronted, and the
scene gave occasion to some striking incidents. In order
to torture the unfortunate husband, whom he was sorry
he had not killed, the accused took pleasure in detailing
to him all the circumstances of his liaison with his wife
and boasting of the love the latter had shown him, while
denying the attempted murder he had been guilty of.
The husband, an old soldier, bursting with anger at the
sight of so much cowardice and cynicism, cried out:
" Murderer that you are, you used to say that when a
man had committed a crime, he should have pride and
courage enough to avow it ; but now, you Roman you,
what a contemptible way you talk ! . . . You are a good-
for-nothing, a fellow of the dagger and the melodrama ! M1
The example I have just quoted shows how judicial
dramas are sometimes modelled upon literary ones. It
is not an uncommon thing to find prisoners brought up
for trial as having been guilty of crimes of passion assum-
ing theatrical poses, so that one might suppose them
heroes of the stage who have seen good to play out in
everyday life the tragedy they have seen on the boards.
In fact we can quote a case where the judicial drama was
preceded by a rehearsal, just like a stage-play. In the
1 In relating this crime of passion inspired by a blind copying of Alfieri'*
Tragedies, I have no such absurd idea (need I state?) as to demand the
abolition of Tragedy, — any more than a Doctor who puts down a case of
insanity to religious mania, therefore desires the disappearance of religions
sentiment.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 54 1
Bancal affair, the Presiding Judge at the Assizes, address-
ing the accused, who had killed his mistress, and then
tried unsuccessfully to kill himself, said : " In your con-
versations with Mme. P during the days immediately
preceding the crime, did you ever speak of your inten-
tions? — The Prisoner: "Yes! Indeed one day she said
to me ' Come, let us have a little rehearsal together.' She
then placed herself on a chair in the attitude of a dead
woman. Afterwards she stretched herself on the bed;
I lay down beside her, we clasped hands and remained so,
side by side." Bancal and his mistress, in fact, had re-
hearsed the part they were going to play, like actors.
Again, I have several times had occasion to observe how
lovers will make their preparations for murder or suicide
while singing operatic airs appropriate to the circum-
stances. The Student Ch , when on his way to the
villa where he proposed to die with his mistress, sang the
aria from Faust> " All hail, my latest morn ! " Readers
will remember that in William Tell there is a well-known
air to the words, " In my good right I put my trust."
Well! some years ago, at Marseilles, a merchant, who
enticed his friend into a cellar for the purpose of murder-
ing and robbing him, went to the place singing the air
from the Opera with this variation in the words, " In my
good right arm I put my trust."
It is with the Stage as with the Press ; whereas culti-
vated minds attach little or no importance to Newspaper
articles, uneducated people have an inordinate respect for
anything in print and think what the Paper says must be
true. In the same way, while sensible folks merely find
amusement in a theatrical tale, without a thought of taking
it seriously, men of the people, like the Marseilles tailor
and admirer of Alfieri, rush to the conclusion they may
surely allow themselves to do what they see accomplished
on the stage amid the applause of the public.
Aristotle, who admired the Stage, yet forbade young
people to frequent the Theatre. He dreaded their minds
being impressed to their hurt by the murders, the acts of
542 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
vengeance and treachery they would see represented and
as it were realized on the Stage ; * and in this opinion he
was at one with Plato. Judicial experience confirms the
correctness of view of these two great Philosophers. Here
is another example in support of their contention. On
Nov. 2, 1884, a child of thirteen, Joseph Wentzeis,
appeared at the bar of the Assize Court of the Depart-
ment of the Cher. The boy, apprenticed to a Confec-
tioner at Bourges, had been dismissed on account of his
improprieties of conduct and the amorous advances with
which he pestered a young servant girl, who, so he said,
showed herself more hard-hearted than her predecessor.
He made up his mind to be avenged on his former master;
with this end he carefully sharpened a long knife, posted
himself one evening at a place where his master was bound
to pass and plunged the weapon in his breast At his
trial he stated he had conceived the idea of his vengeance
from reading a novel called La Belle Julie, the hero of
which is a boy of fourteen, who commits a murder under
similar conditions. If the mere account of a crime can
impress a child's brain so vividly as to set him upon copy-
ing it, how much more perilous for a young brain must be
the representation of a crime on the stage, where we hear
the cries of fury of the guilty hero and see his face inflamed
with angry passion. Here lies the danger of melodramas
and those judicial dramas which adorn the boards of the
Minor Theatres.
Not that all Melodramas without exception are bad;
"Long live the Melodrama where Margot has wept!"
Musset says : There are Plays of this kind that do not
offend either against morals or good sense. MM. Weiss
and Sarcey did not despise the genre ; and at any rate a
good Melodrama is better than a bad Tragedy. But it is
a perilous thing to set the people weeping over virtuous
convicts and laughing at the sallies of witty murderers.
In a great proportion of these Melodramas written for the
masses, convicts are represented as such prodigies of
1 Aristotle, Politics> bk. iv. ch. xv. § 7.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 543
virtue as to make the hulks admired and society an object
of contempt, while murderers sparkle with wit and in-
tellect. It is seldom these Plays do not contain, besides
the usual crop of murders, seduction, adultery and even
rape. The witty murderer is almost always an elegant
seducer, a Don Juan of the finest manners ; he proclaims
his love in lyrical accents, and invokes the sacred rights
of passion. If the woman is married and endeavours to
resist him, he lifts her from her feet and carries her off
amid the frenzied applause of the house, the young men
envying the seducer, the female part of the audience the
victim.
Schiller first brought amorous brigands into vogue, Byron
passionate corsairs, Victor Hugo chivalrous bandits; melo-
drama has idealized the "comic murderer." All these
ruffians are at once ferocious and tender-hearted, devils
and angels, men full of bitter laughter and biting irony,
greedy of blood and love. The hero of Schiller's Play,
Moor, takes an anarchist's joy in firing powder magazines.
" Do you hear," he cries, " the powder magazine explode,
stifling in the bed of pain the mother and her new-born
babe ? Do you see yonder tongues of flame lick the cradle
of her first-born? . . . There is the nuptial torch, and
the marriage songs." 1 All these literary bandits, half
satyrs, half murderers, turn the heads of young men, who
take them for models and long for a life like theirs, made
up of orgy and revolt. Only one thing could avail to
deter them from this false hero-worship, fear of justice,
terror of the police, but in melodramas they see criminals
invariably escaping the officers of justice and getting the
laugh of them. Not only are murder, theft, rape, adultery,
prostitution and vagrancy, put upon the boards, but Justice
is mocked at and the Police flouted, the fine part being
always assigned to the murderer, and the contemptible
one to the Magistrate. How can we suppose such sights
likely to inspire respect for Law and Justice ?
Plays have actually been written with Cartouche,
1 Schiller, The Robbers, Act v. Sc. 3.
544 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Mandrin, Mingrat, and the like for heroes, while the
most notorious crimes of the day have been put on the
stage. Murders and robberies are committed on the
boards. In the Chiffonier de Paris \ Garousse kills a rate-
collector before the spectators' eyes, in order to rob him
of his money-bag. In the course of the last few years
a certain number of rate-collectors have been murdered
in Paris, Marseilles, and other towns ; I ask if recollections
of some play representing a similar crime did not suggest
the idea to the criminals concerned. The dramas of
Pixérecourt, which were so popular in the early part of
the Nineteenth Century, caused the authorities some
anxiety, and the Commune of Paris drew up a declara-
tion addressed to the police charged with the super-
intendence of Theatres, in which the following passage
occurs : " The great principle of not staining the stage
with bloodshed is habitually ignored, and the Theatre is
for ever affording the hideous spectacle of robbery and
assassination. It is much to be feared that young people,
grown accustomed to the sight of such crimes on the
boards, may make bold to carry them out elsewhere and
give way to disorders that would lead to their own ruin
and the despair of their families." 1
It is above all for the people that the Stage ought to
be a school of good morals and noble sentiments. Work-
ing men, being more exposed than their richer neighbours
to dangerous temptations arising out of poverty, want of
work and fréquentation of taverns, while on the other hand
they have never received the same lessons of morality,
philosophy and religion, need more than other members
of the audience to find only wholesome ideas and examples
of virtue on the Stage. Yet the Theatre, which should
fortify the people in wisdom and moderation, seems
specially adapted to effect the exact opposite. Instead
of strengthening their better feelings, it is more often
than not their worst instincts it appeals to and stimulates.
Just as every year we see new Magazines at a low price
1 Brunetière, Les Epoques du théâtre français, p. 347.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 545
and new Papers appear, placing sensational feuilletons
within the reach of every workman, so we find minor
theatres opened for working men, where his mind is
familiarized with vice and crime. The fact is forgotten
or ignored that vice has its imitators, murder its admirers.
In these minor Theatres, a large proportion of pieces
are simply excuses for a series of tableaux vivants^ in-
tellectual pleasure being superseded by stimulation of the
senses. No need to insist upon the evil influence of such
pieces which are nothing more nor less than pornographic
exhibitions. Under such circumstances the Stage becomes
a school of vice.
In some instances the Stage is even a school of theft
For example, in the Mystères de Paris we see a thief
disguised as a respectable citizen turning over handfuls
of gold, exclaiming the while : " What a fine thing gold
is ! and how beautiful ! The sun's rays pale beside it . . .
Then, the charm of its metallic ring, that cries : gold is
everything ! gold can do everything ! gold can give every-
thing. (He plunges his fingers into the box of money.)
Oh! I love to handle gold. When I plunge my hands
in this golden bath, it gives off a sort of electric fluid
that circulates in my veins and fires me with ever fresh
cupidity." I am persuaded these ardent words pronounced
by an actor of genius must have kindled the lust of gold
in more than one spectator's heart. A few years ago at
Marseilles, the sight of a row of bowls full of gold coins
in a money-changer's window, produced in a workman a
species of dizziness, that drove him, in open day and
before numerous witnesses, to break the glass separating
him from the piles of dazzling metal that fascinated him,
in an attempt to lay hands on it.
The best thing the Stage could do would be to leave
criminals alone in the gloom of the gaol, and not lend
them the false brilliancy and prestige of the boards.
But theatrical managers, who look first and foremost
to a good run and full receipts, speculate on the un-
wholesome curiosity of the public for the delineation
2 M
546 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
of vice. After turning into derision marriage and respect
for the marriage vow, chastity, paternal authority, social
law and obligation, the Stage trifles with Crime,
holding up for popular admiration types like Robert
Macaire, the sneak-thief, the go-between, the night-hawk,
and suchlike. When Robert Macaire was played for the
first time in 1835, Jules Janin wrote with much good
sense : " Beware of Robert Macaire, he is already chosen
first favourite by the crowd; they love, admire, and
applaud him ; they call him friend, and would lend him
a knife at any moment if he wanted it Beware, I say;
Robert Macaire is the popular hero." And Jules Janin
was quite right ; Robert Macaire has served as model to
Lacenaire and many another young stage-struck criminal,
the sort who indulge in buffoonery just before and directly
after a murder, and accompany a foul blow with a bad
joke. After assassinating Germeuil to steal his money,
Robert Macaire loses none of his assurance ; he is proud
of his crime, and thinks it a clever thing to have done.
To hold up a criminal to admiration, to make him inter-
esting, to extol his ability and skill, is debauching the
spectators' minds, stifling their sense of right and wrong;
and their feeling of indignation against crime. Such plays
destroy all respect for human life ; I may go further and
say, they destroy all respect for the legal punishment of
crime. Indeed, it is a far commoner sight nowadays
than ever before to behold youthful murderers walk to
the scaffold laughing and joking. This is only another
theatrical pose borrowed from melodramas, where criminals
are represented cracking jokes with the executioner ; they
wish in their turn to die like stage heroes, and the spectacle
of their cynical indifference still further corrupts the crowd,
who learn from it to feel contempt for the last penalty of
the law. When Campi was led to the scaffold, he affected
to brazen it out, and exclaimed, on first catching sight of
it, " And that's all, is it ? "... On the morning of his
execution, Prado stripped off his prison clothes, and put
his own on again with a smile, red socks, patent-leather
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING ÏT. 547
shoes, and all ; he horrified the chaplain who attended him
by his appalling coolness. When the priest offered him
a glass of liquor to give him courage, Prado retorted :
u Courage, my dear sir ; why ! I have more than you
have ; you are all shaken, but I'm not, though Fm on my
way to the shambles to be axed."
In the Police and Assize Courts in Paris and the large
towns, we often see youthful prisoners trying to provoke
the hilarity and surprise of the public by cynical answers
and mocking comments on the proceedings; they are
posing in fact for the Newspaper Reporters, who are only
too ready to print their vapourings. These stagey mis-
demeanants, who seek to win notoriety by their insolently
cynical attitude, are often habitués of the cheap theatre,
wags whose proper place is in the pit or "gods" of a
penny-gaff. In no country in the world does a greater
tendency exist to make fun of the law, the police, the
defenders of society generally. This want of proper
respect arises from a variety of causes, — the frivolity of
the Parisian's character, his love of raillery and blague,
the violence of language indulged in by the Press, the
frequency of revolutions, placing men in power who are
not invariably fitted for its exercise. But there is no doubt
those theatrical pieces in which the public is taught to
laugh at authority, and find diversion at the expense of
Magistrates and Policemen, are not unconnected with the
loss of proper respect referred to. These more or less
witty jokes may very well supply actors and artists
generally and other educated minds with a little harmless
amusement, but they are far from being equally inoffen-
sive for the crowd and for young people who take these
gibes in dead seriousness.
Nor does the Stage appear to me to have been much
better inspired in poetizing the Paris gamin, who is more
often than not only a young blackguard, haunting taverns,
associating with thieves, on familiar terms with girls of
the streets, and with indecent songs for ever on his lips.
Victor Hugo persists, in spite of all this, in making him
548 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
out an angel of innocence, because " he has always in his
heart a pearl of innocence, and pearls do not dissolve in
mud." On the contrary, any honest inclinations that may
exist in the street-boy's heart dissolve very quickly indeed
in contact with bad company. The type of gamin shown
on the stage is a bad model for young folks. It is all
very well to build new schools and elaborate new systems
of education, but we shall never make the rising generation
moral, so long as the Stage, the Music Halls, and the Press
are suffered unchecked to give them lessons in ribaldry,
profligacy, and crime. There exists, more particularly in
Paris and the large towns, a close correlation between plays
of a mischievous tendency and crime amongst the young.
As Plato says, who is very unjustly called a dreamer,
narratives and theatrical representations of crimes deter-
mine "in the young an unhappy readiness to commit
crime." 1 It was because the presentment of a crime on
the boards may, by awakening the instinct of imitation,
produce a harmful impression on young people, that
Aristotle would not allow them in the Theatre. 2 Youthful
murderers, who astonish the Bench by theii 4 cynical insol-
ence, and recount their crimes with a grin on their faces,
are copying the heroes of the stage, who have always a
funny word to say at the expense of their victims and the
Law.
The taste for naturalistic songs, which began under the
Second Empire and developed under the Third Republic,
has further contributed to lower the moral standard of the
youth of the present day. In former years young men
borrowed their songs from the Opera, and Comic Opera,
or sang Béranger's lyrics, Nadaud's, and so on. These
songs were gay, a trifle free, it is true, but unsullied by
gross indecency, and some of them were animated with a
breath of patriotic and moral enthusiasm. Nowadays the
obscene songs that are sung at the Music Halls and
minor Theatres, have developed in the rising generation
a taste for mere coarseness and lubricity. The Parisian
1 Plato, Republic, bk. iii. 9 Aristotle, Politics, bk. iv. ch. xv. § 7. Poetics, ?i.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 549
populace, which in former days showed an appreciation of
the ideal, has grown naturalistic in manners and language,
and in direct ratio the total of crimes of violence and out-
rages increases day by day.
Plato, Bossuet and Jean Jacques Rousseau, I admit, are
too severe upon theatrical pieces that provoke merriment
" This wish to make people laugh, which your reason re-
strained, for fear of your passing for a buffoon," Plato
says, " you give it free rein and after fortifying it at the
Theatre, you often condescend in the things you do to
movements that make a veritable buffoon of you."
In his attack on Molière, Bossuet lifts up his voice
against " peals of laughter that make men forget God and
the solemn account they must give Him of their smallest
actions and most trifling words." But there is a time for
everything ; we cannot be thinking of God and death all
day long. As for Rousseau, he disapproved of laughter,
because, a victim as he was to the mania of persecution, a
prey to a morbid melancholy, he never indulged in it ; in
a letter, " which embodies his renunciation of civil society
and his last farewell to mankind, and which is addressed
to the only friend left him in the world," he says he has
only laughed twice in all his life. This gloomy melancholy
was a symptom of the mental disease he suffered from,
for gaiety and laughter are the sure signs of sound physical
and moral health, and even of a clear conscience. Observe
how merry good Priests are, and the best Nuns. Nothing
is healthier than gaiety ; bright merry pieces, free from
obscenity, like Labiche's, do a great deal of good ; by
merely making the audience laugh, they fulfil a most
useful function. Indeed it is no small merit to set people
laughing, to make them forget an instant the sad side of
life, and the dramatist who affords this momentary oblivion
and sends his audience home less sad and in better spirits,
is doing them a real service. But while there is healthy
merriment, there is also unhealthy, the sort that assails
everything respectable, that turns into derision all noble
sentiments, beliefs and social institutions.
550 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
The Stage is unwholesome when it makes a mock of
marriage, when it poetizes free love and puts passion
above the laws. It would seem, to judge by plays, that
marriage is never based on love, that conjugal love is not
really love at all, because it rests on a basis of mutual
respect as well as mutual sympathy; it is supposed to
be impossible for husband and wife to love each other,
because they are reasonable beings and not a sort of
lunatics. In Plays, as in Novels, husbands are almost
invariably tyrants, ruffians, coarse-minded vulgarians,
while lovers are represented as tender-hearted, high-
minded, sweetly sympathetic creatures. "The public,"
Voltaire says, " always takes the side of the hero lover as
against the husband who is no hero, 1 ' — the reason being
that the Stage has accustomed people to laugh at the
husband and the marriage tie. The best of our Dramatists
only laugh at the misfortunes, which are not really laugh-
able at all, of the husband who is dishonoured by his wife.
Molière's Comedies are full of witticisms on the subject
The Ancients saw nothing diverting in the calamity of an
outraged husband ; nor do other Nations find anything so
very agreeable in the lot of a father who has reason to
doubt the paternity of his children, whereas on the French
stage a wife's wickedness merely makes the husband
ridiculous.
This dread of ridicule, which under the conditions of
our modern society falls so unjustly on the outraged
husband, has much to do with acts of revenge on the
latter's part. I have found on many occasions, in criminal
cases, that the unfortunate husband suffers so keenly from
the fear of ridicule as to be almost driven mad by it
He fancies he sees his neighbours, and even passers-by
in the street, laughing at him, till at last in his exaspera-
tion he becomes a murderer.
Few and far between are the Plays that undertake to
defend marriage and the husband's rights. Dramatic
authors as a rule have scant respect for these latter,
holding the lover's to be superior. There are even pieces,
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 55 1
the Enfant malade for instance, in which the husband,
like George Sand's Jacques, surrenders his wife to her
lover, after receiving a confession of her adulterous passion.
These sentimental declamations are even more disastrous
to good morals than the Comedies that make fun of
conjugal mishaps.
Attacks have not ceased to be directed against marriage,
even since the re-establishment of the law of Divorce.
The author of Les Tenailles claims that Divorce should be
granted on the demand of either man or wife separately,
which reduces marriage to mere concubinage. The kind
of love represented on the contemporary Stage is identical
with that desired in actual life, that is love without duty.
People no longer marry to found a family, and devote
themselves to their children, self-devotion and serious
undertakings are by no means relished. Everybody
marries for his own gratification, hopes for a small
family, and has as few children as possible, 1 and is
ready to sacrifice these by obtaining a divorce in order
to run after other women. The fact is ignored, as M.
Jules Lemaître puts it wittily and feelingly, that "in
marriage there is not only the bed, there is the cradle
and the hearth as well " ; 2 but men think only of the
bed and give no thought to the other two. Can it be
supposed that these Plays, in which marriage is profaned
and its aims and objects misrepresented, are exactly
adapted to inspire women with elevated sentiments ? We
may say of the Theatre, which teaches the wife to despise
marriage and claims for her the right of love apart from
duty, what Martial said of Baïae: "She went there a
Penelope and left it a Helen."
1 Women come to Magistrates to lay complaints to the effect that their
husbands will not have children, not even a single one. One of my colleagues
even tells me he received such a complaint from a peasant woman. It is not
merely that in a great many families only one child is desired, but that there
are households where they don't want any at all. Among the ancient Germans,
whom we wrongly think of as barbarians, " to limit the number of children .
was looked upon as a crime. " Tacitus, Gtrmania, § 19.
1 Jules Lemaître, Impressions de théâtre^ 10th Series, p. 201 .
552 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Nor are plays which represent marriage as a form of
slavery and describe the married woman as a "vassal"
and her husband a tyrant, any better adapted to inspire
women with a sense of the duties incumbent on them.
They leave such theatrical performances more dogmatic
and less gentle-minded ; thinking themselves victims of
the law and their husband's persecution, they will soon
turn persecutors themselves and begin to think of adultery
or divorce.
The Stage has never shown much respect towards
marriage. Yet it was in marriage that the old Comedies
used to end. Nowadays in many Plays love does not
find its end in marriage ; it is free love that is represented
and often sensual love. Loose morality is flaunted on the
boards ; it is no longer a question of esteem and whole-
hearted affection, devotion and tenderness, but of sheer
sexual concupiscence. It is no longer even the right of
love that is claimed, but the right of amorous pleasure.
The Stage has now scarcely any types of pure love to
offer, love proved by tender hearts and generous souls;
the love it describes is often simply physical love, in other
words, what may be felt by the most coarse and brutal
man, the most vulgar and commonplace woman. A man
of mature years may witness with interest a Play in which
a "ménage à trois" is vividly and accurately described,
but it can hardly be supposed that a picture of physical
jealousy, accompanied by an exchange of cynical and
insulting phrases between a married woman and her
tortured lover, can be a sight without danger to women ?
All this delineation of physical love and physical jealousy,
in spite of the pretensions it makes to psychological pre-
cision and revelation, is nothing more than an exhibition
of sensuality on the stage, followed by all the usual con-
sequences of pornography.
M. Zola considers the contemporary Stage to be dying
of moral indigestion. In view of all the plays we see, I
should have been rather inclined to think it dying of an
indigestion of adulteries and pornographic abominations.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 553
The Theatre has become more a place for erotic stimula-
tion than for literary pleasure.
" Et les femmes au bout de ces drames impurs,
Haletantes encor, l'oeil en feu, les seins durs,
D'un pied lent désertant la salle solitaire,
(Regagnent) leurs foyers en rêvant l'adultère." *
Next day the husband goes back to his business and
forgets all about the Theatre, thinking of his patients, if
he is a doctor; his customers, if he is in business; his
cases, if he is a lawyer. Not so the wife; she goes on
pondering over the play that has moved her so, and
envying the lot of the heroine who was so madly loved.
She feels a void in her existence, and longs for a passion
less tedious than marriage gives her, and some new and
intoxicating bliss. Her amorous curiosity has been roused
by the Play, her heart filled with romantic and sensuous
longings, and she would fain transport into actual life
what she has seen represented on the boards.
By showing so many unfaithful wives on the stage,
dramatic Authors have contributed not a little to dis-
seminate a belief in the rarity of good and virtuous
women. Now I have had occasion more than once to
note, in criminal cases, that this scepticism is just what
awakens a husband's jealousy, and rouses it to such a
state of preternatural activity as to make him commit
almost any crime. In a judicial report I have on my
desk, I read how a jealous husband, who had attempted
to murder his wife, declared : " In every hundred women,
there are ninety-nine who go the pace." Many young
men refrain from marrying, because they have acquired
in the Theatre a feeling of contempt for women.
The cynical scepticism with which marriage is ridiculed,
along with all family and parental duties, is an echo of
the sensualistic philosophy of the Eighteenth Century,
1 "And women at the close of these impure plays, with still panting
breath and eyes aflame and straining bosom, their lingering steps leaving
the deserted house, return to the domestic hearth dreaming of adultery." —
A. Barbier, Melpomene.
554 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
which Gresset long ago exposed in his play of Le
Méchant:
" La parenté m'excède, et ces liens, ces chaînes . . .
Tout cela préjugé, misères du vieux temps . . .
Tous ces noms ne sont rien, chacun n'est que pour soi . . .
Tout ce qui vit n'est fait que pour nous réjouir,
Et se moquer du monde est tout Part d'en jouir." l
In the Eighteenth Century, the Marquis d'Argenson
wrote, "The fashion of marrying will pass away." This
scorn of marriage has now spread to the democracy like
everything else; "free unions" grow more and more
common in the large towns, where the morals of the
stage tend to supersede those of religion.
The Stage delights to turn parental authority into
ridicule, as it does marital. Young people might reason-
ably be supposed most in need of instruction, but the
Theatre reserves all this for the parents ; in the majority
of Plays it is the children who give lessons to their elders.
The father who is for stopping a love intrigue on his
daughter's part is always a barbarian, and the girl is
taught to deceive him with the help of a soubrette. Can
anyone imagine it a good way to teach a young girl
respect for her father, to let her listen to such advice as
her waiting-maid gives her mistress Lucinde in D Amour
médecin, " Come, come ! " she tells her, " you must not be
such a goose as to let them do whatever they please with
you ; we may surely resist a father's tyranny a bit, if we
can do it honourably. What would he have you do ? Are
you not old enough to be married ? Does he think you are
made of marble? " 2 On the Stage, a girl who obeys her
1 " I am sick of the claims of family, those ties and chains of former days.
. . . Tis all prejudice, a wretched inheritance from of old. ... All these
names mean nothing, each man is only for himself. . . . All living things are
created only to give us pleasure, and to jest at the world is the sole art of
enjoying it."
7 Bayle allows the fact "that there is nothing more likely to inspire
coquetry than these plays, because they are for ever ridiculing the pains that
fathers and mothers take to oppose love entanglements on the part of their
children." {Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, March 1684» voL i.
p. 204.)
OF PLAYS OF PASSIOK AS AFFECTING IT. 555
father is a fool ; it is a sign of wit and cleverness, if she can
raise a laugh at her parent's expense. On the Stage, the
husband a girl's parents wish to give her is invariably a
simpleton, while the man of her own choice, whom her
family do not approve of, possesses every good quality.
The Ecole des Femmes makes fun very properly of the
pretensions of jealous greybeards who wish to marry
young girls, but the latter may easily learn from that play
a string of tricks and stratagems they will afterwards have
no scruples in employing themselves in imitation of what
they have witnessed on the boards. The Ecole des Maris
again, a diverting and instructive piece enough for men
thinking of matrimony, appears to me scarcely a school of
virtue for young girls, who see Isabelle, while pretending
to embrace her guardian, extending her hand behind her
back for Valère to kiss, and later on going to her fiance's
lodgings. No doubt Regnard in the Folies Amoureuses and
Beaumarchais in the Barbier de Seville are quite right in
setting the public laughing as Molière did in the Ecole des
Femmes at the expense of fond old men and amorous
guardians. But it is certain the girl who sees on the stage
how the ingénue flouts Arnolphe, or Albert, or Barthole,
to the huge delight of the audience, will be learning a
lesson of trickery and persiflage she will turn to good
advantage against her lawful protectors; and it will be
strange if it does not suggest the thought that she too
may dupe her guardian, and choose a husband without
consulting her family. I am not wandering from my
subject when I blame all Plays liable to make women and
girls lose their sense of modesty, for this is at the root
of all crimes of passion, making the unmarried girl more
open to seduction and the married woman more accessible
to adulterous temptations. But seduction leads its victim
speedily to desertion, pregnancy, abortion, infanticide,
vengeance on the seducer who has forsaken her, while for
the married woman adultery may have consequences no
less terrible.
The mother is as a rule better treated on the Stage than
556 CRIME DETERMINED BV PASSION, AND CONTAGION
the father. But masters are almost invariably flouted and
cajoled by their servants on the boards. Since the Theatre
has come like everything else within the purview of the
democracy, and the love of playgoing has become so
universal both in the provinces and in Paris, domestic
servants who used in former days to go on Sundays to
hear Vespers, now flock to afternoon performances of
farces and comedies, where rascally valets figure, and
intriguing Abigails, whose least defect is to be evil-
tongued and excessively impertinent The valets help
their masters' sons to rob him. The soubrettes teach girls
to deceive their parents, wards to cajole their guardians,
married women to outwit their husbands. Valets and
waiting-women alike thwart the wishes of the master of
the house, act as the children's accomplices, carrying their
love-letters and facilitating their assignations. It is to be
supposed that these pieces, in which we see the tribe of
Crispins, Frontins and Scapins robbing their employers,
forging wills, concocting plots, are schools of morality for
the servants who attend these representations, at which
they take lessons in trickery, insolence and the pander's
art? Again, the plays in which we see footmen in love
with great ladies and inducing the latter to reciprocate
their passion, seem to me very liable to inspire servants
with mischievous ideas of extravagant intrigues. I have
seen several cases coming before the Courts where domestic
servants and working-men have endeavoured to imitate
these heroes of the stage, and hoped for a like success.
Then do not girls learn at the theatre to choose as con-
fidantes soubrettes, who are only too ready to contrive a
meeting with the lover? Jean Jacques Rousseau, who
had a penchant for appropriating other people's property,
as he admits in his Confessions, in which he confesses to
several thefts, is only mistaken in describing as somewhat
too generally mischievous the ill effect that may very likely
follow in the case of certain spectators from the represen-
tation of Regnard's Légataire, a play in which wills are
forged. "Which of us/' he says, "is sufficiently sure of
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 557
his own integrity to witness a Comedy of this sort without
being half tempted to copy the dishonest tricks represented
in it?" Rousseau spoils by exaggeration an observation
that is perfectly justified, if not made too general ; plays
in which the swindling devices of valets and the wiles
of young women are depicted, are harmless enough for
the majority of the audience, but dangerous for servants
and girls, who leave the theatre imbued with an inclina-
tion to imitate the unedifying examples they have seen
on the boards. Young people and half educated minds
are more apt than others to model themselves on what
they see and hear. A play that has once struck their
imagination sticks in their head ; they still see and hear
the stage characters that have delighted them ; and their
heart is full of the sentiments expressed by them. If
these sentiments are lofty, they feel their soul lifted up ;
if they are base, their soul is infected by the baseness and
correspondingly degraded.
It is a mistake to suppose the exact portrayal of Vice is
enough to inspire a disgust for it in all minds. To correct
the ill-effects produced by the delineation of evil, dramatic
authors, anxious as to the consequences their works may
lead to, represent Vice as eventually punished. No doubt
the punishment of Vice and the reward of Virtue are often
contradicted by the realities of life, which frequently shows
us the former triumphant and the latter persecuted. To
be true to Nature then the Stage should display Vice
as fortunate and Virtue unfortunate. But the sight of
triumphant Vice, which shocks reason, would produce a
highly demoralising effect on the common crowd. Ac-
cordingly, Vice is seldom left unpunished on the boards.
When it was represented to Euripides that Ixion, whom
he was putting on the stage, was exceptionally vicious,
he answered : " Well ! but I do not let him quit the stage
without condign punishment. ,, If the spectators had any
firm belief as to the punishment of crime in another world,
the danger would not be so great of exhibiting Vice as
fortunate before their eyes. But in proportion as Faith
558 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
grows weaker among the people, it would be more and
more perilous to let them look on at Vice triumphant
I am aware literary Critics have protested against this
punishing of Crime on the Stage, declaring it is not
needful in order to make us hate Vice. They invoke in
support of their contention several passages of Corneille,
who said : " (Virtue) invariably attracts our love, however
unfortunate ; Vice our hatred, however triumphant . . .
just as the portrait of an ugly woman cannot be really
beautiful, and there is no need to announce that the
original is an unattractive person to prevent her being
loved, so is it in our delineation of Vice ; when Crime is
painted in its true colours, and its faults well and
accurately portrayed, there is no necessity to exhibit its
ill success at last, in order to warn people against imitating
it." 1 There is much truth in Corneille's reflection; the
essential duty of a Dramatist is to paint Vice and Virtue
under their true colours. The faithful delineation of Vice
suffices to inspire disgust for it in choice souls, but not
in the common herd. Nil nisi turpe juvat? says Ovid.
Doubtless there is some exaggeration in this aphorism,
but there is a good deal of truth as well ; evil has an
attraction of its own, and the representation on the stage
of adultery, far from inspiring disgust, only inspires a
wish to do the like in the minds of most spectators.
" Discitur adulterium, dum videtur." 8
Nor must it be forgotten that Art can and does embellish
Vice, and makes even the criminal interesting.
" Il n'est pas de serpent et de monstre odieux,
Qui par Part imité ne puisse plaire aux yeux." 4
It was to correct this ill effect arising from the portrayal
of evil that on the Classical Stage the criminal is always
1 Corneille, Epistle prefixed to La Suite du Menteur,
2 " Nothing but what is vicious gives delight."
3 " Adultery is learnt by being seen."
4 " There is never a snake or odious monster that may not, when limned by
art, give pleasure to the eyes."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 559
punished, if he does not first punish himself. Hermione,
Oreste, Phèdre, Œnone, and the rest, punish themselves
by ending their days at their own hands. " We must take
good heed," declares the Académie Française, 1 " to accustom
neither the eyes nor ears of the people to actions they
should know nothing of, and not to teach the audience now
cruelty, now dishonesty, unless we teach it at the same
time that these vices are punished, and unless on going
home from the theatre it carries away at least a little fear
as well as a great deal of satisfaction.' 1 Corneille, who had
originally been of an opposite opinion, afterwards shared
the views of the Academy ; he wrote, we are bound " to
end a dramatic poem by punishing the bad actions done
in the course of the piece and rewarding the good." . . .
The success and final triumph of Virtue, in spite of
hindrances and dangers, stimulates us to adopt it, while
the ill success and disastrous issue of crime or injustice
may very well serve to increase the natural horror we feel
for them by making us dread a similar calamity.
Doubtless there are crimes of such enormity, of such an
odious character, there is no need, in order to inspire a
horror for them, to show their punishment on the stage,
or even to make the criminal feel remorse. Cléopâtre,
Athalie, Néron, display no remorse. Yet crimes of passion
are always interesting on the Stage. Accordingly Racine,
who well understood the danger of such delineation — for
did he not eventually give up the stage altogether? — was
careful to diminish it as far as possible by duly punishing
Crime. Here, indeed, is what he writes in the Preface to
Phèdre : " I cannot make bold to assert this to be the best
of all my Tragedies. . . . What I can say is, I have written
no other in which Virtue is more displayed than in this.
The smallest faults are severely punished in it. The mere
thought of Crime is regarded with as much horror as
Crime itself. This is, strictly speaking, the aim every man
who works for the public should set before him."
Molière, to punish Tartuffe, goes so far as to make the
1 Lit sentiments de l* Académie française sur le " Cid."
5ÔO CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
King himself intervene, while in Le Festin de Pierre he
calls in the Divine Justice, human Justice making no
move. All would be shocked, if Don Juan were shown
laughing with impunity at laws human and divine, after
piling up a series of treasons, cruelties, and impieties.
His insolent irony towards his father, his wife, and the
poor would demoralize the crowd, if he were not finally
punished ; for it is only a step from Don Juan to Robert
Macaire. In spite of the punishment that befalls him,
Don Juan remains an attractive figure in Molière's play
to the eyes of a large number of the audience, both male
and female. Mlle, de Brie, announcing the next per-
formance of the piece, wrote: "The principal rôle, Don
Juan, is a mighty seducer of girls and women, and in
spite of his guilt and villainy, he is as much loved as
hated." Molière, while making Don Juan a type of a
great nobleman, witty, elegant and profligate, gave him
vices that make him odious, a revolting hardness of heart,
a cynical impiety, an attitude of studied insolence towards
his father, and scorn towards the poor companion whom
he tries to involve in perjury for his selfish amusement
M. Jules Lemaître cannot understand how Molière de-
picted Don Juan as impious and evil-hearted, as these
two traits of character make a character odious that other-
wise appears to him strangely attractive. Molière made
Don Juan a cynic and an infidel, because free living and
free-thinking are as a rule closely connected with each
other. He added bad-heartedness and cruelty to the
picture he drew of his character, because Don Juanism is
frequently near akin to Sadism, which makes the profligate
ill-conditioned, cruel, contemptuous and heartless to all
mankind, even to the poor girls he has seduced and
forsaken.
The poets and play-writers who succeeded Molière have
spoiled this fine portrait of the great nobleman of debauched
life, of cruel and impious character. In the Plays of the
Eighteenth Century, L'Homme à bonnes fortunes, Le Chevalier
à la Mode % the roué is described in sympathetic colours;
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT; 56 1
the seducer is merely a man of fascinating address, his
perfidy an agreeable playfulness. With the romantic poets
and playwrights of the Nineteenth Century, he is poetized,
and represented as a high soul athirst for the ideal at the
very moment he is seeking nothing but his own pleasure,
even at the cost of others' suffering, and his ideal is simply
himself and his own conceit and sensuality. Byron and
Musset have made of Don Juan a hero thirsting after a
lofty ideal. Musset cannot refrain from admiring him,
envying him his long list of blondes and brunettes,
great ladies and soubrettes, that he has loved and then
left with a mocking word.
" Voilà l'homme du siècle et l'étoile polaire,
Sur qui les écoliers fixent leurs yeux ardents ;
Ses crimes noirciront un large bréviaire
Qui brûlera les mains et les cœurs de vingt ans." *
Dramatic Authors, far from depicting the libertine under
his true colours as a selfish, sensual, evil-minded fellow,
have made him a type of elegance and magnanimity ; by
throwing a halo of poetry over the seducer, they have
created admirers and imitators of Don Juan, and thereby
increased the number of unhappy women, victims of seduc-
tion and vowed to shame, suffering and crime.
Why must young men adopt as their model a liar, a
cheat, and a scoundrel ? Why must women dream of such
a man ? Why ! because the Stage and Poetry have made
seduction poetical, rendered wickedness alluring, and con-
founded the pursuit of pleasure with aspiration after the
ideal, giving sensualism a false glamour of idealism?
Instead of pointing out this confusion, Dramatic Critics
have themselves taught the same doctrine, going so far as
to claim the "right of seduction." "Don Juan," wrote
Théophile Gautier, "had a right to win his ideal and
assuage the mighty thirst for love that consumed his veins,
1 •• He is the man of the Century and the Pole Star, on which schoolboys
fix their ardent eyes; his crimes will blacken an ample breviary, that will
barn the hands and hearts of young folk of twenty."
2 N
562 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
for every desire ought to be satisfied." l To believe these
admirers of Don Juan, it would seem a man must be high-
minded and intellectual, a being of lofty ideals, an elegant,
brilliant creature, a gentleman, in order to play the part
of a seducer. They quite forget that neither high-minded-
ness, intellect, nor elegant manners are indispensable for
the rôle ; it is enough to be false, sensual and evil-minded.
There are village Don Juans, no less than drawing-room
Don Juans — Don Juans of the stable and the kitchen no
less than of the boudoir.
Nor is the Stage content merely to make seduction poeti-
cal and palliate guilty love ; like the Novel, it has made
Love into a virtue.
" Par ses principes faux, les crimes déguisés
Sous le nom de vertus sont métamorphosés. 9 *
(Le Brun.)
The chief of all causes of corruption is the transforma-
tion of Vice into Virtue. To picture, for instance, as a
virtuous woman a girl who lets herself be seduced, and as
an honourable man a Tutor who abuses the confidence
her parents place in him to wrong his pupil, is to transform
vice into virtue, and corrupt the morals of other young
men and women, who may find themselves in the same
situation as Julie and Saint-Preux. To read of a heroine
who makes assignation with her lover in her father's
house, after indulging in much moral sermonising, and
who preaches Virtue after yielding to Vice, — such an ex-
ample perverts and darkens the consciences of young girls,
whose mind is uncritical and their reason not firmly based.
Modern Literature does not always properly distinguish
between honourable and guilty forms of love. It pro-
claims all passion to be fine and noble, declaring that Love
is proved not by its quality, but by its violence.
" Qu* importe le flacon pourvue qu'on ait rivresse," s
1 Théophile Gautier, Histoire de fart dramatique, 5th Series, p. 16.
8 " By its false principles, crimes disguised under the name of virtues have
their very nature changed."
• "What matters the bottle, provided we get drunk."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 563
was what Musset said ; and Théophile Gautier writes to the
same effect in Mademoiselle de Maupin: "All my life I
have troubled about the shape of the bottle, never about
what it held." In a play of Alexandre Dumas, Mme.
Aubray says : " We must love, no matter whom, no matter
what, no matter how, provided only we do love." To put
on the same footing all sorts of love, to cease to distin-
guish between the love of a good wife and the love of
a prostitute, is to give up all distinction between what is
noble and what is base, is to give up loving woman from
any side but that of mere form, without a thought of any
moral qualities. In that case, Love ceases to be a moral
sentiment, it becomes an "intoxication," which may be
experienced by the coarsest of mankind. Modern Society,
which speaks of the morals and manners of the Middle
Ages as barbarous, is very far from showing on the Stage
the same types of chivalric love. In the Middle Ages, to
pleasure his lady, the Knight was bound to fight for God
and the oppressed, and he proved his love by his valour ;
the stage hero of the present day proves it by his sensu-
ality and extravagant behaviour.
The man who allows passion to tyrannise over him to the
point of forcing him to satisfy it by crime, should surely
be looked upon as a degraded being, who has lost all noble-
ness and beauty of character, as one deprived of pride,
-energy, and moral sensibility. The Stage, on the contrary,
like the Novel, has given currency to the fallacy that the
man of passion is nobler and greater than the man of self-
restraint 1 The woman again most commonly represented
on the Stage is the woman who possesses no self-restraint,
but gives herself up to the promptings of fierce, sensual
love. It would seem as if no other sort of love existed ;
yet it is the lowest of all kinds of love, and the one most
nearly approximating to brute instinct Corneille is the
only Tragic poet who has represented women as able to
govern their passions. For this reason \ he has been blamed
for making his women too heroic This reproach affected
1 This fallacy is to be found even in M. Séailles, Lé Génie dans Fart.
564 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
him very little, and he preferred to incur it in preference to
that of effeminating his heroes. 1 Corneille's heroines are
no cold, insensible prudes, as has been sometimes main-
tained ; they feel keenly, but they know how, when duty
requires it, to govern their sensibility. Pauline herself is
not proof against surprises of the senses. She admits as
much bravely and humbly, and hesitates about seeing
Sévère again :
" Mon père, je suis femme et je sais ma faiblesse,
Je sens déjà mon cœur qui pour lui s'intéresse.* *
However, she almost instantly regains her self-command.
Still this struggle against passion is not carried through
without some heart pangs on Pauline's part,
Bossuet charged Corneille with having glorified love at
the expense of duty, but the charge is not justified. Even
more severe than Bossuet, the author of the Dame aux
Camélias has maintained that the Cid is a masterpiece
from the dramatic point of view, but a monstrosity from
the moral and social. Chimène, he says, is an unnatural
daughter who puts Love before Duty ; " it is to be hoped
there is not in all the world an honest girl capable of
marrying her father's murderer." 8 Dumas forgets that
Chimène, in spite of her love, strives to avenge Rodrigue's
death, and that, if the fear of becoming the wife of Don
Sanche elicits from her the cry :
" Sois vanqueur d'un combat dont Chimène est le prix," *
she blushes at the avowal, and resists the King's order
with the words :
" Quand il sera vainqueur, crois-tu que je me rende ?
Mon devoir est trop fort et ma perte trop grande ;
Et ce n'est pas assez pour leur faire la loi,
Que celle du combat et le vouloir du roi." 6
* Corneille, Preface to Sophonisbt.
8 " My father, I am a woman and I know my o\»n weakness ; already I feel
my heart not insensible to his merits."
8 A. Dumas, Discours de réception à T Académie française.
4 " Come out victor in a strife whereof Chimène is the prite.' 1
8 " When he shall have triumphed, think you I shall yield? My duty is too
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 565
After Rodrigue's triumph, she still resists the King's
commands, who tells her the claim of duty is fulfilled
and she may now follow the dictates of her love :
" Si Rodrigue à l'État devient si nécessaire»
De ce qu'il fait pour vous dois-je être le salaire ?
Et me livrer moi-même au reproche éternel
D'avoir trempé mes mains dans le sang paternel ? " l
In face of this resistance, the true delicacy of which he
appreciates, the King no longer insists and urges Rodrigue
to trust to time to overcome Chimène's scruples. Thus
the Cid is not an immoral play ; and Morals would run
small risk if the Stage had no worse plays than the Cid to
show.
The Classical Stage is free from danger precisely because
it is infected with none of those sophistries the Romantic
and Naturalistic dramatists have disseminated about the
4t right of happiness " and the " right of love," about the
slavery of marriage and the necessity of submission to the
Law of Nature. It does not make of Love a fatal irre-
sistible craving, does not declare it either a Right or a
Virtue, does not see in it a Religion, a purification or a
rehabilitation.
True, maxims may be found in Corneille justifying
crimes of passion, such as :
" L'amour rend tout permis,
Un veritable amour ne connaît pas d'amis." 2
" L'amour excuse tout dans un cœur enflammé,
Et tout crime est léger dont l'auteur est aimé." 3
But of these the two first lines are spoken by Euphorbe,
strong and my loss too heavy ; 'tis not enough to make wrong into right, to
say it is the law of the tourney and the King's pleasure. "
1 " If Rodrigue becomes so needful for the State, am I to be the guerdon of
what he does for you ? — and of my own will expose myself to the external
reproach of having dyed my hands in my own father's blood ? "
9 " Love makes everything allowed, true love recks naught of friends."
Ci mux, Act iii.
1 "Love excuses everything in a heart on fire, and every crime is light
whose author is loved." La Suite du Menteur % Act iv. Sc. 3.
566 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
a freedman of Maxime's, who is stirring up his master to
betray his friend, and the other two by a female attendant
Corneille's real sentiments are to be sought in the fine
lines :
" Nous n'avons qu'un honneur, il est tant de maîtresses ;
L'amour n'est qu'un plaisir, l'honneur est un devoir." l
Corneille declared the great use of Poetry consisted in
" the sentences «and reflections that may be ingeniously
thrown in here and there and everywhere." 1 With this
idea in mind, he has filled his Tragedies with the noblest
thoughts in glorification of honour, patriotism, religious
courage, clemency and the like qualities. His maxims of
this kind would form an admirable body of morality.
Racine's Plays are of a less moral tone than Corneille's.*
Still he never makes Love into a virtue of and for itself. In
the Preface to P/ièdre, he takes care to draw attention to the
fact " that the frailties of love are there represented as true
frailties " ; he is at one with Boileau, who would wish :
" ... que l'amour de remords combattu
Paraisse une faiblesse et non une vertu." 4
Aware of the criticisms made by Nicole on the Tragic
poets, to the effect that they strip the passions of all that
is blameworthy about them and paint them up to look
charming, Racine wishing, he says, " to make out a case
for Tragedy in the eyes of numerous persons famous for
their piety and learning, who have condemned it in these
latter days," set to work to depict Phèdre's passion " with
colours that accentuate its deformity and make it odious."
1 " We have but one honour, let mistresses be as many as they may ; Love
is only a pleasure, honour a duty. "
2 Dedication of the Suite du Menteur.
3 " Corneille is more moral, Racine more natural " (La Bruyère). Corneille
is more moral because he represents men such as they ought to be, Racine
more natural because he represents them such as they are. There is the same
difference between Corneille and Racine as between Sophocles and Euripides;
Sophocles himself used to say : "I represent personages as they should be,
and Euripides as they are " (Bayle's Dictionary > t under 4I Euripides").
4 " . . . that Love combated by Remorse should appear a weakness and
not a virtue."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 567
It is only since the days of Jean Jacques Rousseau and
the Romantic school that guilty love has ceased to be a
weakness, and become a virtue.
From the glorification of love to the rehabilitation of the
courtesan by love is only a step. When Corneille put on
the stage Theodora, virgin and martyr, condemned to the
punishment of prostitution, the public found the play too
licentious for its taste, and Corneille attributed its failure
" to the idea of prostitution which the public could not
stomach," he says, M though perfectly aware it would have
no practical effects, and while to lessen the horror it
inspires I used every artifice art and experience could
supply me with." Voltaire criticised Corneille in lively
terms for having ventured to deal with such a subject
44 He does not appear," he declares, " to have thrown any
sort of veil over this revolting subject, for he employs in
the Play the words prostitution, shamelessness, and speaks
of the girl as abandoned to the soldiers' lusts." Who
would have expected an attack of modesty like this from
the author of the Puce/le? But Voltaire, who allowed
himself sufficient licence of obscenity in his books, under-
stood at any rate the necessity for decency on the Stage.
He was far from foreseeing a day when the language of
the boards would be as free as that of books, and drama-
tists, preferring to pander to the evil instincts of the crowd
rather than to respect their audience, would accustom the
latter to listen to obscenities, in which prostitutes would be
excused, made poetical and rehabilitated on the Stage.
In several Comedies of the Eighteenth Century we
already find " kept women " among the dramatis persottœ*
But the author does not claim special interest and sym-
pathy for them ; he merely draws them as they are. In the
Eighteenth Century the Stage never dreamed of rehabili-
tating the courtesan by Love, of making Love into a purify-
ing virtue. It was in the Nineteenth that the courtesan
invaded the Theatre, as she invaded society. According
to the notions of the modern Stage, Love washes away
all stains, effaces all blemishes ; the instant a woman of
<>6& CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
gallantry falls really in love with one of her many lovers,
society must melt over her affecting case, and the jury freely
acquit her, if she takes vengeance for his forsaking her.
The modern Stage is in accord with the modern Novel
in attributing the most elevated sentiments to courtesans,
holding them to be devoted, heroic, sublime, and declaring
that passion transfigures them and that their love is more de*
sirable than that of honest women. According to Balzac,
"the humility of the courtesan in love 1 shows moral
splendours which bring her very near the angels." But
Balzac forgets that the inclination to submit to' humiliat-
ing acts is often a form of sexual perversion, known
as masochism, and that this craving for humiliation, self-
abnegation, may go so far as a systematic cultivation of
rough and cruel treatment from the object of love, — a
phenomenon frequently observed among hysterical and
weak-minded persons. — In Eugène Sue's Novels, which
are still eagerly read by the people, by youths and work-
ing girls, the prostitute has the candour and delicacy of a
virgin.— In George Sand's Lélia y Pulchérie glories in her
prostitution and sets herself above the matron, the mother
of a family ; the true prostitute in the eyes of the author
of Consuelo is the wife and mother who consents to remain
with a husband she does not love. In Plays where Kings,
Queens, Ministers of State, Priests and Magistrates, are
dragged through the mire, we see courtesans rehabilitate
their virtue by passion, and attain a new maidenhood by
love, In his preface to Angelo, Victor Hugo declares that,
if he has brought a courtesan on to the boards, it is because
he wished to protest against the scorn felt by society for
her, " to prove to the world that tears will wash away the
worst stains, and how unjust is mankind, how absurd the
act of society, when they brand the courtesan with their
contempt" The same feeling is shared by George Sand ;
according to her, we condemn the courtesan only through
a survival " of that insurmountable power of social vanity
1 The Courtisane amoureuse (Harlot in Love), is also the subject of a tale
by La Fontaine.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 569
that is called honour? 1 We are a long way here from
Corneille and the cult of honour that appealed to him.
Michelet himself, who possesses so much wit and intellect,
so much imagination and sensibility, but alas! so little
sound sense, has also suffered himself to be melted at the
thought of the " Saints and Virgins of Prostitution " who
are thirsting for honour. 2 Under the influence of the
Romantic School and particularly of George Sand, 8 this
tenderness and respect towards prostitutes has passed
into Russian Literature. In Dostoiewski's "Crime and
Punishment," we see Raskolnikoff falling on his knees
before the prostitute Sonia.
In the name of good sense and good morals, the
dramatists, Emile Augier and Th. Barrière, have en-
deavoured to supply a correction in a series of vigorous
pieces such as Le Manage d'Olympe, La Contagion, Les
Filles de Marbre, to this unhealthy rehabilitation of the
courtesan. But, on the other hand, by setting the public
to weep over the Dame aux Camélias, Dumas has made
her interesting and, painting her under the most alluring
colours, has made her a popular favourite. In the contest
between the courtesan Marguerite and Duval senior, the
hero's father, the author's sympathies are on the side
of the Dame aux Camélias, and draw the sympathies of
the audience in the same direction. The spectator says of
Marguerite what Musset says of Manon :
" Tu m'amuses autant que Tiberge m'ennuie." 4
Nor does the Dame aux Camélias merely interest him ;
he finds her touching and sympathetic, and longs to meet
someone like her. Since the date of Dumas 1 famous
1 Lêlia.
9 Michelet, La Femme, p. 4x2.
' A great Russian lady has just completed a Biography of George Sand,
writing under the pseudonym of Vladimir Karénone. In it she shows that
George Sand exercised a very important influence over the Russian writers,
Tourgueneff, Dostoieffski, Tolstoi. — Dostoieffski, a man of extremely nervous
and impressionable temperament, like almost all writers of imagination, relates
how he had fever a whole night long, after reading a novel of George Sand's.
4 " You amuse me as much as Tiberge wearies me."
5/0 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
play, all categories of courtesans have invaded the Stage.
The total of plays dealing with courtesans is beyond
counting, and these women have the same importance on
the boards they have in Parisian life. This sympathy for
fallen women, first awakened by the Stage, sows no little
trouble in families, stirring up as it does imitators of
Duval among young men, and sham copies of Marguerite
among the members of her class.
Courtesans, themselves, have not been slow to appro-
priate, for their own purposes, this literary fallacy about
rehabilitation by Love ; they all set up for being Dames
aux Camélias and subjects for rehabilitation ! And young
men, on their side, readily fall under the dangerous
fascination of the paradox. The Lady of the Camellias is
an exception ; but the average young man takes the
exception for a general rule. Thus a character in one of
M. Bourget's Novels says : " Phrases read in his young
days about the redemption of prostitutes by love . . .
recurred to his memory ; the divinest figure of a courtesan
transfigured by Love, that has ever been drawn, the Esther
of Balzac, had strongly coloured his youthful dreams, and
in natures like his, in which literary impressions precede
the others, those of actual life, suchlike dreams never
fade entirely from the heart" 1 Who has not known
young men, fascinated by the poetical delineation of the
courtesan, scorn the pure love of marriage, take some
vulgar prostitute for a new Dame aux Camélias, and
allow himself to be led by her wherever she may wish to
drag him, into breaking trust, into theft and forgery,
merely to please her and gratify her caprices ? If so many
unhappy young men come to the bar of the Correctional
and Assize Courts, it is because their senseless passion for
an unworthy object, to the true baseness of which literary
paradoxes have closed their eyes, has made them lose every
redeeming quality, love of family, honour and conscience.
The influence of the same sophistical fallacies makes
itself felt again in the verdicts of acquittal recorded in
1 Bourget, Mensonges, p. 460.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 57 1
favour of women of pleasure accused of having thrown
vitriol over their lovers. Juries chosen from among the
spectators of the Dramas that throw a halo of poetry
around the courtesan and female criminal, take au grand
sérieux mere passing liaisons, formed first in the streets or
at public balls ; they see in women of gallantry, forsaken
by their lovers, Hermiones deserving of all indulgence
and pity. I have known juries acquit prostitutes who had
killed their lovers. Encouraged by such impunity, women
of pleasure mutually excite each other to take vengeance
on the lovers of a night who leave them for other charmers»
One of these women said to one of her friends, offering
half a bottle of vitriol she intended for her lover : " Take
some, come, have your revenge, too." And they do
revenge themselves, in the most cowardly and cruel way,,
and this for the most frivolous motives, because they are
jealous, because they have been refused a pecuniary
douceur they had claimed ; they demand marriage, though
still frequenting the public balls every night, and juries
constantly acquit these throwers of vitriol, so unworthy of
the interest of any sensible man. They commiserate the
lot of women of pleasure guilty of crimes of passion, but
quite forget to feel pity for the fate of the man who is
killed or blinded for life.
The type of Play that rehabilitates the courtesan appears
to me to bear a large share of the responsibility for the
excessive complaisancy of modern juries towards crimes
of passion, and the consequent frequency of such offences.
The French, more slavish admirers of the literary fashion
of the day, more unstable in their sentiments, than other
peoples and less bound by tradition, have little force to
resist mischievous paradoxes. They worship dramatic
talent to the verge of superstition, without a thought as to
the use it is put to, or the consequences that result from
it ; they have a frantic admiration for the Writer in vogue,,
even when by his sophistries he is imperilling both family
life and society at large. We find husbands taking their
wives to see Plays in which adultery is glorified, and
572 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
mothers of families applauding the rehabilitation of the
courtesan, just as we hear respectable middle-class con*
servatives speaking of property and family as bagatelles.
The sophistries of the Stage are particularly dangerous
where women are concerned, these having less of the critical
spirit than men. I have positive proof from the answers
given under judicial examination by female prisoners ac-
cused of crime that a considerable proportion of these have
been corrupted by these fallacies. Thus, for instance, I
find in a criminal case a prisoner, who after a very stormy
life had killed a lover, the last of a long series, giving this
answer : " A man's love makes a woman honesty when she
shares it" The person in question was convinced it was
sufficient to really love to be an honest woman, and that
passion and virtues, enemies as they are, are identical,— a
doctrine that would make virtue very easy for young people
and very difficult for old. This extraordinary paradox of the
identity of Virtue and Love she had got out of Plays and
Novels. In the same way in one of George Sand's Novels,
Lucrezia Floriani, who has had four lovers, considers she
has a right, because she does not take money, to say : " I
feel quite sure I am an honest woman, and I think even I
may claim to be a virtuous one in God's eyes." This fal-
lacy, sown broadcast by Novels and Plays, has sunk so
deep into women's hearts, that Magistrates are constantly
hearing female prisoners citing it as an excuse for their
evil deeds.
What harm is not wrought among young girls of the
poorer classes in our great towns by Plays and Novels of
this kind, which teach that society alone is responsible for
prostitution, that every woman has a right to happiness
and love, and that the courtesan is less blameworthy than
women of the great world ! A Literature that throws a
veil of poetry round harlots and criminals, that drags
through the mud all social institutions and authorities, can
only produce among women courtesans and déclassées,
and among men Bohemians, social rebels, Socialists and
Anarchists. By idealizing prostitution and adultery, Plays
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 573
and Novels, crammed with tirades against modesty and
marriage, are manufactories of prostitutes and adulteresses
The majority of the heroes of Romantic Novels and the
Romantic Stage are rebels against society, men of proud
stomach and sensual proclivities, whose chief and example
is Rousseau. By representing the rich and the representa-
tives of authority as great villains, the poor and even con-
victs as the only honest men, the Stage has stirred up much
popular hate. The whole aesthetic motive of Victor Hugo's
plays is but one long antisocial paradox ; for in them it
is the lackeys that show Royal dignity, the Kings servile
baseness, the Queens that exhibit low and common senti-
ments, the courtesans noble aspirations, the Magistrates
that are criminally inclined, and the Convicts virtuous.
By putting Les Misérables on the Stage, a work which at
the same time contains some superb pages, Victor Hugo
has further extended the considerable influence of his
socialistic Fiction. I could myself mention one of the
chiefs of the Socialist party, an old pupil of the Lycée
Napoléon, who first learned his hatred of society from
Les Misérables. By the poetical halo they have cast
round the Vie de Bohème, Murger, Musset, and Baudelaire
have led astray a certain number of artists, students, and
men of letters, who have passed from the Bohemia of
literature to that of poetry. Antisocial Literature has
created an anarchical condition of mind, and in the
writings of the theorists of Anarchy we find yet another
echo of sophistries current in Literature. The Socialistic
and Revolutionary movement which broke out in ex-
plosion in 1848 and 1871, has its roots in Romantic
literature; it was Romantic literature that first poked
fun at " bourgeois " virtues, in other words, at good sense,.
order, discipline, punctuality, which are social virtues, —
in striking contrast with the Literature of the Classic age,
which subordinating as it did imagination and sensibility
to reason, and the liberty of passion to a wide sense
of duty, was genuinely social in its tendencies. The
favourite heroes of the Romantic Stage are avowed
574 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
•enemies of society, bandits, courtesans, and criminals.
It is an ungrateful task to insist on the mistakes of
great Writers who occupy deservedly a high rank in the
Literature of the Nineteenth Century. I deny neither
their talent, nor the genius of some of their number, but
observing that the fallacies they have disseminated have
had, and still have, disastrous consequences, I hold it my
•duty to say so. Amicus Plato y tnagis arnica Veritas. 1 We
may apply to the Romantic Stage, where there is plenty
of talent, but a lack of good sound sense, the phrase of
Tacitus: urendo darescit, — "it enlightens by consuming."
In fact, we are such eager admirers of whatever blazes
brightly, and so indifferent to the consequences of the
conflagration, that we are something like people whose
attention, when their house is being set on fire, is occupied
about the look of the torch employed and the engaging
air of the incendiary. 2
Again, the modern Stage has done no little harm by
representing man as a passive, sensitive, irresponsible
being. In many Plays of the day, the characters declare
themselves carried away by fatal, irresistible accesses of
passion. What a highly convenient excuse for Vice is
supplied by such a belief in the irresistibility of tempta-
tion! Men find it so much to their interest to think
themselves irresponsible that they seize the excuse with
avidity. Not a few women yield to passion, because they
have been taught by Plays the creed that it is impossible
to resist Love. Possibly they might have resisted it, if
they had thought they could ; but conviction of the
impossibility of such resistance at once paralyzed their
will. The fact is, successful resistance to passion depends
upon strength of the will, and strength of will, in turn,
depends upon belief in such strength.
The Classical stage, on the contrary, counteracts the
danger involved in the delineation of crime and passion
by the moral elevation of its thought, its firm conviction
of the power of will, and the responsibility of the
1 " Plato is ray friend, but Truth is a dearer friend." * Joubert, Ptnsia.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 575
individual ; it believes by strength of will men can resist
passion, and that if they fail to do so, they are to blame.
In Corneille's plays, such noble words as duty, honour,
reason, will, are of continual occurrence. What a contrast
with the sensualistic and determinist Stage of our own
day! Corneille's heroes and heroines are not men and
women who believe themselves irresponsible and incap-
able of resisting the dictates of their own passions ; they
are tender hearts, but brave ones, sustained by their fine
sense of honour. Corneille possesses in the highest
degree the sentiment of human freedom, and he gives his
heroes the same.
Poet of the will, he gave it its due share even in love ;
in his Dedication of his play La Place Royale, he writes :
44 Tis from you I learned that the love of an honest man
must ever be voluntary." In one of his last Tragedies
(which we do wrong in neglecting, as we do in similarly
neglecting La Fontaine's later Fables, where such fine
things are to be found), in Pulchérie namely, we find yet
another picture of a Love which rests upon the basis of
Will and Reason.
" Je vous aime, Léon, et n'en fais point mystère,
Des vœux tels que les miens n'ont rien qu'il faille taire.
Je vous aime et non point de cette folle ardeur,
Que les vœux éblouis font maîtresse du cœur . . .
Ma passion pour vous généreuse et solide
A la vertu pour âme et la raison pour guide." l
I admit that Racine, who is Jansenist in tendency, shows
less of the feeling for human freedom than Corneille, but
I think M. Jules Lemaître exaggerates this difference when
he says : " Racine's plays, in contradistinction to those of
Corneille, leave us under the impression of an overmaster-
ing Destiny there is no escaping." 2 Louis Racine long
1 " I love you, Léon, and make no mystery of it ; vows such as mine have
nothing that need be hid. I love you, and not with that foolish ardour that
daxaled vows make mistress of the heart. . . . My passion for you, firm-based
and generous-hearted, has virtue for its soul and reason for its guide."
1 J. Lemaître, Les Contemporains, 2nd Series, p. 182. — M. P. Janet only
goes so far as to say that in Racine the part played by free will is of minor
importance. {Revue des deux Mondes, 15th Sept. 1875.)
576 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AtfD* CONTAGION
ago showed the baselessness of this reproach in the ex-
tremely interesting Memoirs he wrote of his father's life:
"So far was my father from teaching the doctrine of
determinism that he has placed its expression in the
mouth of the odious Œnone." Phèdre rejects indignantly
the excuse based on the fatal nature of passion which her
nurse whispers in her ear in the lines :
" Vous aimez, on ne peut vaincre sa destinée . . .
La faiblesse aux humains n'est que trop naturelle." *
Phèdre on the contrary does not believe in any such
impossibility of fighting against her destiny :
" Qu* entends-je ? Quels conseils ose-t-on me donner ?
Ainsi donc jusqu'au bout tu veux m'empoisonner ? n *
She knows she is to blame for her conduct; she feels
remorse, and says so :
" Je cédais au remords dont j'étais tourmentée,
Qui sait même où m'allait porter ce repentir ? . . .
J'ai voulu devant vous, exposant mes remords,
Par un chemin plus lent descendre vers les morts." s
Remorse is the proof of freedom and responsibility. A
woman who is driven into crime by an irresistible power,
feels no remorse. I have myself seen, and watched, and
questioned, murderers, who under the empire of a morbid
condition that annihilated their responsibility, had killed
their mother or tried to kill their father; they felt no
remorse, declaring they had been driven into their crimes
by an irresistible force. Nor can I share the opinion of
M. Jules Lemaître, who thinks that Phèdre, tortured by
the pangs of remorse, is perfectly innocent, because she
1 " You are in love ; none can fight against his destiny. . . . Frailty is
only too natural to human beings."
a " What do I hear ? What advice is this they dare give me ? Will job
to the last persist in poisoning my mind ? "
3 " I was yielding to the remorse that I was tormented by ; who knows even
where this repentance was to lead me to? . . . I was fain before yon, making
show of my remorse, by a longer road to descend to the dead."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 577
is a victim of inevitable destiny, and that she is " truly, in
spite of her incestuous infatuation, as chaste as Hippolyte."
Though she accuses Venus of having kindled the flame
of her passion, still Phèdre reproaches herself for having
yielded to it ; she recognizes that she should and could have
resisted it, and that she is blameworthy in having wished
to make Hippolyte share her guilty love. She tells him
as much in the lines :
M Ne pense pas qu' au moment que je t'aime
Innocente à mes yeux je m'approuve moi-même." l
When Thésée returns, she upbraids her nurse for having
opposed her projected suicide :
" Sur mes justes remords, tes pleurs ont prévalu." 2
She still thinks of killing herself to escape her shame,
with no fear of the inheritance of dishonour she will be
leaving her children :
" Le crime d'une mère est un pesant fardeau,
Je tremble qu'un discours, hélas ! trop véritable,
Un jour ne leur reproche une mère coupable. . . .
Mes crimes désormais ont comblé la nature,
Je respire à la fois l'inceste et la posture ! " 3
Thus, in Racine's Tragedies, Passion, no matter how
violent, is never fatal> irresistible.
Dr. Despine has maintained that Molière intended in
Tartuffe to depict the fatality of vice. But Molière
believed so firmly in free will that he admits the possi-
bility of repentance on Tartuffe's part. (Act v. Sc. 8.)
The indignant words of Cléanthe against hypocrisy, which
express Molière's own opinions, presuppose a belief in
responsibility for wrong-doing. Indignation is thrown
away against a vice that is fatal. Tartuffe would only be
1 " Think not that at the very time I love you still, innocent in my own eyes,
I approve myself of my own conduct."
* M Over my well-founded remorse your tears won the day."
• " A mother's crime is a grievous burden ; I tremble lest report, alas ! only
too well founded, some day reproach them with a guilty mother. ... My
crimes henceforth have passed the bounds of Nature, I breathe at once incest
and deceit!"
2 O
578 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
an object of pity if his vices could not be referred to him
as the responsible agent, and Orgon would be justified in
speaking of him as " that poor fellow ! " Indignation
implies belief in responsibility. Without indignation, high
comedy would be an impossibility.
The modern Stage, on the contrary, is, as a rule, fatal-
istic. Its heroes, who are guilty of crimes of love, are
not in the least ashamed of their wrong-doing, throwing
the responsibility for it on nature and society. The
prisoners at the bar of our Assize Courts take them as
models and follow suit. They make no excuses, they
accuse society; they make no claim of extenuating cir-
cumstances, they refuse any such to society, which baulks
their passions. They demand their acquittal as a right,—
a right the jury very often accord, — saying like some stage
hero :
"Je pardonne à l'amour les crimes qu'il fait faire." l
Modern juries are only too ready to believe in the fatal-
ity of passion, like the heroes of the Romantic and the
Naturalistic stage. Victor Hugo, who for all that has
written some noble verse on Conscience and Remorse,
has made Hernani a fatalist:
"... Je me sens poussé
D'un souffle impétueux, d'un destin insensé . . .
Agent aveugle et sourd des mystères funèbres." 2
In a large number of modem Plays, when a wife is
guilty of adultery, it is the fault of Nature, or the fault of
Society, or very likely the husband's fault ; everybody is
1 " I pardon Love the crimes it makes men commit."
2 " I feel myself driven by an impetuous breath, a wild destiny ... an
agent, blind and dumb, of the funereal mysteries." — Poet of the Conscience
and Human Responsibility in Les Châtiments, V Histoire d'un crime, La,
Légetide des Siècles and Les Misérables, Victor Hugo is the poet of fatality
in his Plays, in V Année Terrible and La Pitié suprême ; according to him,
only the elements are to be accused for the crimes men do :
" Je le dis, l'accusé pour moi c'est l'élément . . .
Hélas ! la faute en est au veut, ce noir passant,"
— "I own it, the guilty party for me is the element. . . . Alas ! the blame
lies with the wind, this passing night of gloom."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 579
to blame, husband, laws, society, — always excepting the
guilty woman ! Some husbands actually dare not reproach
their wives with their unfaithfulness, because they believe
such conduct to be fatally predetermined, and this
character of fatality makes it excusable. Like Jacques,
the fatalist husband in George Sand, they say : " None
can answer for the movements of the heart, and it is no
sign of weakness to yield passively to its impulses." In
Flaubert's Novel, Madame Bovary's husband, when in-
formed of his wife's unfaithfulness, tells her lover, " 'tis the
fault of destiny " ; and the very lover himself cannot help
thinking so very good-natured a husband contemptible.
The Plays of Alexandre Dumas fils again are fatalistic.
Mme. Aubray rightly interprets the author's thoughts,
when she says : u Evil-natured, guilty, hard-hearted
wretches! Nay! there are no such people, only sick
men and blind men and madmen." This physiological
fatalism Dumas learned from his physiological studies,
far too superficial as these were. So far is Physiology
from necessarily leading to any negation of moral re-
sponsibility, that the most illustrious Physiologists, whose
names I have already mentioned (p. 451), and to whom
we may add Flourens and Gall, admit the existence of free
will. But Dumas, like so many other Writers who make
only a summary study of scientific and philosophical pro-
blems, had allowed himself to be unduly impressed by the
influence, no doubt very important, exercised by tempera-
ment and heredity, to the neglect of the action, not less
surprising, of the will and ideas.
M. Paul Hervieu's Plays appear to me no less fatalistic
in tone than Alexandre Dumas'. In his Les Tenailles, a
married woman who has taken a lover, because she has
been unable to obtain a divorce, does not look upon her-
self as in any way blameworthy, but only as unfortunate,
and the Author seems to be of the same opinion. When
the woman in question informs her husband that the child
of their married life is not really his, and the husband
in his turn wishes for a divorce, she refuses, and on the
580 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
husband's expressing surprise and indignation at her re-
fusal, and asking her in horror what sort of a life he is to
lead henceforth, the young adulteress tells him cynically,
" the same sort I have lived for the last ten years." "But,"
returns the husband, " you are a guilty woman, and I am
innocent ; " — " Nay," cries the woman, " we are two un-
fortunates ; in the depths of misfortune all are equal."
Moreover, on the Stage as in modern Novels, we find
characters who shelter their irresponsibility behind the
fallacy of the plurality of the ego. A woman who no
longer loves her husband is told reproachfully how she
loved him when she married him ; but her reply is : "I
am not the woman that was married, ten years ago ; I was
another woman then." This is precisely the answer given
by Mme. Weiss, who eventually poisoned her husband,
after loving him fondly at first ; her lover, she declared,
had brought another woman to birth in her altogether.
L Évasion by M. Brieux is a protest against the physio-
logical determinism which a certain school of Physicians
are for imposing on humanity, without giving due weight
to the power of Will and Conscience as capable of modify-
ing hereditary instincts. This fine Play rehabilitates on the
Stage the belief in Free Will.
But, speaking generally, with the exception of the plays
of Emile Augier, of Ponsard, of Barrière, of M. de Bornier,
Coppée, Legouvé, Brieux, Sardou, belief in physiological
determinism is a ruling factor of the modern Stage. On
the Ancient stage we find certain heroes who, by way of
excuse for their faults and crimes, lay the blame of their
own frailties on the gods. Heroes of the modern Stage no
longer make the gods responsible for their faults ; they
attribute them to the fatality arising out of temperament
M. Brunetière then is right in a measure, when he says:
"It is merely the fatality of the Ancient stage reappear-
ing on the Modern, and the criminal is once again repre-
sented as of old as unfortunate rather than blameworthy. 1
But it is not strictly exact to compare the fatality of
1 Revue des Deux Mondes, 15th Oct. 1882.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 58 1'
Ancient Tragedy with physiological fatality ; for the latter
suppresses all, conscience, duty, responsibility, while the
former does not exclude them entirely. In the old Greek
Poets, fatality is Destiny, what we call Divine foreknow-
ledge, Providence ; but man remains free all the same,
subject to the duty his conscience prescribes ; he is blame-
worthy, if he violate this duty, he feels remorse, he is
pursued by the Furies. " No doubt it is within the power
of Fate to make a man unhappy, but this is the limit of
the empire fatality has over him ; it is powerless over the
movements of his will and cannot, in despite of him, turn
them towards virtue or towards crime." 1 In Sophocles'
and Euripides' Tragedies, man is conscious of his freedom.
Even in iEschylus, the idea of Fatality does not exclude
responsibility. Thus, these great Poets have never excused
crimes of passion, or looked upon adultery as fatally de-
termined. In Oreste, the Chorus brands the adulteress in
the strongest terms : " She merits the detestation of all
women, this daughter of Tyndarus who has dishonoured
her sex." Helen's own father holds that his daughter
deserves death. 2 Menelaus is alone in somewhat re-
sembling those husbands of the modern Stage, who
believe that their wife's unfaithfulness is fatally deter-
mined, but even he does not push his weakness and
clemency to such extravagant lengths. In fact, when
Helen accuses Cypris of having undone her, and com-
plains of being dishonoured " without being to blame,"
and being unable by reason of her dishonour to marry
her daughter, " who weeps and blushes to have as mother
a guilty wife," Menelaus is tempted, as some consolation
under his calamity, to believe in the fatal character of his
wife's passion for Paris ; but he is not long before he
realizes that Helen "only appeals to Cypris to save
appearances and that it was really of her own good will
and pleasure she left her home for the bed of a stranger."
1 Patin, Etudes sur les tragiques grec s ■, — " Eschyle," p. 39.
* In the eyes of the Egyptians, no less than of the Greeks, Helen's adultery
was a crime {Herodotus, bk. ii. § 112).
5&2 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
In Euripides, as in Racine, Phèdre knows herself guilty
and responsible for her sin. " I was well aware," she says t
" of the shame attaching to this conduct and this passion ;
I knew a woman who abandons herself to such a love to be
an object of horror to all mankind." When her nurse is
for calming her scruples by telling her it is no sin to yield
to Cypris, who governs gods and men, Euripides' Phèdre
rejects the argument with indignation. "Odious words!*
she cries, " be silent, let me hear no more of such shameful
talk."
Shakespeare's plays are still less fatalistic in tone than
the Tragedies of Antiquity. "Tis in ourselves that we
are thus or thus. Our bodies are gardens ; to the which
our wills are gardeners, ... we have reason to cool our
raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts,"
writes the great English Poet (Othello, Act i. Sc. 3). The
same author has drawn an admirable picture of remorse.
Macbeth is no monomaniac, no epileptic, as M. Taine has
described him, but a criminal tortured by remorse. Re-
morse, — I have known an instance in my own experience,
— is capable of producing hallucinations.
It was Diderot who first brought physiological fatality
on the Stage in Le Fils naturel, and he was followed in the
same line by the Romanticists and Naturalists of later
days.
In the majority of modern plays there is no longer any
struggle between passion and duty, and no traces of re-
morse. Having ceased to believe in responsibility, slaves
like the beasts that perish to their mere instincts, the
heroes of the modern Stage are no longer free creatures,
divided between the attraction of passion and the protests
of conscience, over-riding by force of will the temptations
of the senses, or bewailing their faults and rising to higher
things by virtue of repentance ; they yield to passion with-
out a struggle, no longer blushing for their sins, incapable
either of energy or remorse. Losing moral beauty, the
Stage of to-day is like to lose aesthetic beauty as well ; all
inward struggle being annihilated, the dramatic interest
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 583
is sadly lessened. Passion is dramatic only on condition
of its being at struggle with conscience and will. Louis
Racine judiciously points out that, if Phèdre yielded with-
out any remorse to her shameful passion, the audience in
its indignation at her conduct would never consent to
listen to her. A fatalistic passion, which pursues its grati-
fication without a struggle or one pang of remorse, is a
mere pathological case, interesting only to the physician.
What is enthralling on the stage is passion at deadly feud
with the will, the contest in Chimène's heart between love
and duty, the combat in Zaïre between love and religion,
the struggle of Will against Destiny or against the sexual
instinct. Will is not only the foundation of Morality, it
is the basis of the Drama. It is this that makes the hero
interesting, dramatic ; he appeals to the audience only in
virtue of his struggles, his resistance to the passions and
circumstances that are bearing him down. In one word,
without will there can be no struggle, no moral activity,
and without such activity no drama. To exaggerate in a
Play the violence of passion and to suppress the will is to
lower the interest of the action ; nay ! more, it is to make
the spectators doubt their own freedom of will, and so
diminish their power of free action. Further, it is to make
juries, chosen as they are from these spectators, doubt the
justifiability of legal penalties.
Pity for the authors of crimes of passion is an excellent
sentiment, but only on condition that it does not de-
generate into silly sentimentality; that it does not absolve
the guilty of all healthy consciousness of their sin, and
does not disorganize society by letting criminals off scot-
free. There is a marked tendency nowadays towards a
certain false sentimentality ; people weep over murderers,
but quite forget their victims' sufferings; lavish all their
pity on lovers who turn assassins, but keep none for hus-
bands poisoned by their wives, and lovers blinded by in-
furiated vitriol throwers. This extravagant commiseration
for criminals is an unhealthy sign, confounding as it does
crime with disease, voluntary vice with involuntary mis-
584 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAG10V
fortune. Oblivious of the rights of society and the require-
ments of justice, it encourages acts of individual vengeance,
and is a cruelty and an injustice towards the victims.
From this point of view, again, the Stage must bear its
share of responsibility for the excessive clemency shown
by modern juries and the practical impunity often accorded
to the authors of crimes of passion, inasmuch as it finds
excuses and forgiveness for every offence, for the wife's
adultery, the forsaken woman's violence, the outraged
husband's vengeance. Juries, when called upon to judge
the author of some crime of passion, let themselves be
mastered by emotion as if they were at a Play ; they see a
Hermione in every woman who has stabbed her lover, an
Othello in every jealous husband who has strangled his
wife. They feel the same sort of interest for prisoners at
the bar as is inspired by Racine's and Shakespeare's
heroes, and only too often record a verdict more indicative
of literary susceptibility than of sound judgment. This
excessive commiseration arises not from a heart full of
tenderness and good nature, but from a mind led astray
by a belief in the fatality of the passions.
Outraged husbands and forsaken wives are more and
more adopting the practice of taking vengeance and justice
into their own hands. They speak of themselves as
executors of judgment ', as the Anarchists do, 1 and maintain
they have a right to avenge themselves. I have repeatedly
heard prisoners claim this right of revenge. A woman who
had fired at her faithless lover with a revolver, told the
Court: "I thought I had the right to avenge myself."
Again, Marie Bière said in reply to a question of the Judge
of Assize : " I believed myself to have fulfilled a duty in
trying to kill M. G ." She had noted in her memoran-
dum book, that she condemned him to death, and a few
days later she carried her sentence into execution. Songs
1 The murderer of Canovas told tht/uge d'instruction : " My parents spent
a great deal of money on my education, and I think I have answered their
expectations."— 41 These expectations," the Magistrate remarked, " did not go
so far as to suppose you would turn out a criminal eventually." — •• I mm not a
criminal, but an executioner of justice " was the murderer's characteristic reply.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 585
have actually been composed dealing with the supposed
right of women to revenge their wrongs. I was present
at the trial of a woman before the Assize Court of the
Bouches-du-Rhône, who had made her preparations to
murder her husband while singing a song she had learnt
at a café concert, called " A Woman's Vengeance."
No doubt Revenge is a natural passion, and was not
invented in Plays. Most men and women have an instinct
within them to avenge a wrong. The pleasure of Revenge
has ever been attributed anthropomorphically to the
Divinity. Still it is certain that not a few acts of feminine
and marital revenge have been provoked by Dramas that
make vengeance into a system, and by the wrong-headed
maxims that preach its justifiability. Plays which excuse
revenge, are paving the way to acts of violence. The
Stage teems with sophistries, justifying revenge, and in a
general way, all evil passions. In fact, the heroes of the
Stage, a prey to the fury of unhappy love and tormenting
jealousy, consumed by the longing to exact vengeance on
a rival or punish an unfaithful wife, are stirred to crime
and seek to excuse their guilt by a series of specious
fallacies. Similar false maxims are found in the mouths
of their advisers and accomplices, declaring for instance :
" Eh bien ! l'ambition, l'amour et ses fureurs,
Sont-ce des passions indignes des grands cœurs ? . . .
La plus promte vengeance en est plus légitime . . .
La vengeance elle seule a de si doux plaisirs ! . . .
Qui se venge à demi, court lui-même à sa peine,
11 faut ou condamner ou couronner sa haine,
L'amour rend tout permis . . . etc., etc." *
Such maxims as these are really only excuses men make
when moved by their passions, but they assume the guise
of general truth and serious advice offered by the Author
1 •* Well ! and are ambition, love and its flames, are these passions un-
worthy of lofty hearts ? . . . The speediest vengeance is the best justified. . . .
Revenge, revenge alone has such sweet joys to show ! . . . Who avenges
his wrongs by halves, runs to his own destruction ; he must either repress or
thoroughly satisfy his hate, love makes everything legitimate, . . . " — and so
on, and so on.
586 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
of the Play. Endued with all the glamour of Poetry,
delivered with fire and spirit by talented actors, applauded
by the public, they offer a specious show that dazzles such
of the audience as are lacking in solid judgment or who
share the passion of the heroes on the stage ; they seize
eagerly on these phrases to supply an excuse for their own
evil passions. Cicero relates the fact that Caesar had for
ever on his lips the passage of Euripides' Phœnissœ, which
says : " If ever justice may be violated, 'tis to win empire;
in all things else we must be just." x Of course it was
not this false maxim that first gave Caesar the idea of
violating justice to win empire, but it may very well have
strengthened him in his purpose. " The man who used to
quote this maxim," says Schlegel, " was a standing proof
in himself of how dangerous it might be in its results.*
M. Patin adds further : " It is indeed a thing by no means
free from danger to give by a sententious turn of phrase to
an evil thought the apparent authority of a general truth,
and so prepare axioms all ready to be used in the defence
of crime." 2
The danger that may result from the sophistries and
wrong-headed maxims of the Stage is not so serious, when
these are directed towards criticism of the conditions of
government. Great political crimes are not infectious like
crimes of passion. Everybody has not a kingdom to
conquer, a power to usurp, but everybody is liable to feel
the passions arising out of love, jealousy, anger and
revenge. This is why Tragedies, like Corneille's, that
deal with affairs of State, political ambitions, patriotic
sentiments, do not offer the same risk as those in which
the only question is one of crimes of passion, as in Racine's
earlier Plays. Phrases justifying passion and revenge are
more infectious than the other kind, being apt to corrupt
the minds of a far larger number of any given audience.
The Stage is a school of Love ; but no less is it one of
hate and vengeance, by reason of the examples of these
passions it displays before the eyes of all, and the fallacies
1 De o fiais, iii. 21. 2 Patin, Eschyle, p. 6a
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 587
it expresses, all tending to justify Revenge. Corneille and
Racine excel in the delineation of feminine revenge. Iiv
Comeille's Plays, which show much more variety than
Racine's, we find every form of such vengeance : revenge
of the forsaken wife (Médée), revenge of the ambitious
woman (Rodogune), revenge of the mother (Marcelle in
Théodoré). What Racine loves to describe is more especi-
ally the revenge of the jealous woman. His Plays likewise
abound in lovers, rivals, jealous and outraged husbands, all
of whom find means to avenge their wrongs. In any given
audience visiting a theatre there will be found jealous
lovers, betrayed husbands, forsaken wives, who have not
hitherto conceived the thought of revenge, or who, having
conceived it, have repelled the temptation. But little by
little they lose their repugnance to violence, when they
hear the passion of revenge extolled in noble verse that
wins the hearty applause of the house. The beauty of the
Poetry quite hides the baseness of the sentiment. When
passions, even the meanest, are expressed in the grandest
diction, they take on a look of nobility that masks their
really odious nature. Seeing the heroes of the Stage
breathing these sentiments of hatred and revenge, impres-
sionable spectators cannot but feed their souls on the same
class of ideas, and are only too ready to make their own
the excuses the Poet puts in the mouths of his characters.
Aristotle held that the Stage purges our passions, by
making them more refined and pure. 1 I hold an exactly
contrary opinion, — that by giving an extraordinary in-
tensity to our passions, it makes these more violent and
less pure. If the theatrical representation of a passion
awakens the germ of the said passion in the heart of a
man who has not hitherto felt it, it cannot surely fail to
strengthen and inflame it yet further in the heart of a man
who is already under its influence on entering the house.
Seeing Othello on the boards, a spectator who is already
jealous will feel his jealousy increased by contact with its
manifestation on the part of Shakespeare's hero, and his
1 Aristotle, Poetics, Preface by Barthélémy Saint- Hilaire, p. xxix.
588 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
passion, far from being purified, grows more and more
violent and sanguinary. The man whose heart is already
stirred by passion comes out still deeper in love from see-
ing the representation of a love drama, which pours oil
upon the fire. The pleasures of revenge are expressed
with so much force on the Stage by vindictive dramatis
persona, that members of the audience already affected by
motives of hatred and revenge yield more and more to
these odious sentiments ; they leave the theatre in an even
more revengeful and vindictive frame of mind than they
entered it.
Seeing criminal passions represented on the Stage with
every embellishment due to the author's and the actor's
talents, people are more likely to imitate them, because
they are robbed of their ugliness. The poet's genius
throws such a brilliancy over his picture of criminal passion
as to take away all its deformity. The actor's skill pro-
duces the same effect. When the vindictive fury of a
forsaken woman is depicted with all the charm of Racine's
style and all the talent of a pretty actress, possessed of fine
eyes, noble gestures and a beautiful voice, any woman
among the audience who has been jilted by her fiancé at
her lover, and who has come to the theatre to see Her-
mione played, will undoubtedly feel less repugnance about
imitating her action and copying her revenge, on leaving
the house.
Saint-Evrémond, protesting against this paradoxical
notion of Aristotle, that the Stage "purges " the passions,
says very justly : a Can anything be more ridiculous than
to frame a science, which produces a disease for certain,
in order to establish another which works with uncertain
success for its cure ; to implant disturbance in men's
minds, in order to endeavour afterwards to calm the same
by offering reflections on the shameful straits to which
they have been reduced ? Of a thousand persons present
at the theatre, six perhaps will be philosophers, capable of
restoration to calmness by these judicious and most profit-
able meditations ; but the vast majority will pay no heed,
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 589
and we may be pretty sure the habit they acquire from
what they see on the stage will result in confirming this
unhappy loss of mental equilibrium." 1 It is hard to see
how the delineation of passions should " purge " the soul of
these passions, seeing all it does is to excite them. It is
the Author who is purged, who tranquillizes his passions
by setting them down on paper. Kotzebue saved himself
from the haunting idea of suicide by composing Misan-
thropy and Repentance. Goethe cured himself of his
melancholy by writing Werther. In one of her letters to-
Sainte-Beuve, George Sand tells him how she is resting
herself after her tragic love affair with Alfred de Musset
by means of literary composition: "I work much at calming
tasks like Valentine,- — calming I mean for me."
The true doctrinaire of Revenge is Alexandre Dumas
fils. I dispute neither his high dramatic talent nor the
moral elevation of his latest plays ; but looking at the
matter from the point of view of an impartial Magistrate,
and observing the influence of his dramas, where he says
to the husband, " Kill her ! " and to the wife, " Kill him ! "
— I feel bound to record my conviction that this double
provocation to murder, addressed to husbands and wives,.
has actually fostered in contemporary society the habit of
revenge. Alexandre Dumas himself refuses to admit this ;
he relates that on one occasion when he was in Court as a
spectator at the hearing of the Bière case, which ended in
an acquittal of the accused, a barrister of his acquaintance
said to him, " There ! you see what you have done with
your • kill her ! ' " The Author of La Femme de Claude
protests against the remark, maintaining that Literature
has no influence whatever upon morals. 2 Whenever you
try to show an Author that his theories are dangerous and
antisocial, he instantly retorts : " Bah ! never trouble about
what I have said, Literature has no effect upon morals." 5
1 Œuvres de Saint- Évremond, edit, of 1711, vol. iii. p. 113.
* A. Dumas, Les Femmes qui tuent et les femmes qui volent ', p. 56.
8 This is precisely what Bay le maintained {Pensées diverses à F occasion de la
comète, cxxxv. ; and what is maintained at the present day by Dr. Lombroso-
mnd Dr. Richet.
590 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
But — why does he write at all in that case ? The truth is
that Authors, that genus irritable vatum, do not like to
hear their responsibility spoken of, and that the very
people who criticise everything, Religion, Legislation, the
Administration of Justice, cannot bear to be criticised
themselves. " No literary work can involve danger,"
•d'Holbach used to declare, appealing to Hobbes's opinion,
who likewise maintained " that no harm can be done to
mankind by setting out ideas before them." La Mettrie
and Grimm spoke in a similar strain. 1
The theory of murder advocated in La Femme de Claude
is not merely that of the hero of the play, but the deliberate
conviction of the Author as well. Dumas advises the
husband to kill the adulterous wife in defiance of the
dictates of Divine and human law, which forbid such an
act. The writer of La Femme de Claude who, in his youth,
drew such alluring pictures of great sinners of the fairer
sex became, in his riper years, their most savage adversary,
and expressly authorizes marital vengeance to the annihila-
tion of rights of law. He constitutes him Grand Justicier
and slayer of women ; he tells the husband, already
blinded by anger and jealousy, to take the place of the
judge, who at any rate is calm and unprejudiced, to take a
gun and shoot down his wife like some noxious beast. In
the Play in question, Claude threatens to kill his wife, if
she lays her hand upon Antonin or Rebecca, if she
attempts to hinder his task, if she becomes an obstacle in
the way of what God bids him do ; in a word, it is the
■deliberate apology of murder. Who can fail to perceive
the danger of repeating, again and again, a series of repre-
sentations where the audience is to be numbered by
thousands, among whom there will certainly be some
injured husbands included : " Kill your guilty wives, the
Laws allow you to do so," — which is not true. Unfortunate
husbands are already urged quite strongly enough by their
1 D'Holbach, Système de la nature, 2nd Part, chaps, xii. and xlii.— U
Mettrie, Discours préliminaire ; Grimm, Correspondance Littéraire, January
1772.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 59 1
anger to exact some terrible punishment, without its being
needful for the dramatic author to further encourage this
craving for revenge.
Dumas gives the husband an absolute right to kill his
wife, in contradiction to the Law which denies him any
such privilege, adding : " She is not your wife ; she is not
a woman at all ! She is no part of the Divine conception
of humanity, but an animal, pure and simple ! She is the
beast of the land of Nod, the helpmate of Cain. Kill
her ! " But it wants more than a figure of speech to
change a human being into a " beast," a noxious animal
we have the right to kill without further form of law.
Already, in L Affaire Clemenceau, the hero of the Novel
kills his wife, with the words : " I have slain the monster."
But in civilized societies, " monsters," that is to say
criminals, are judged by the representatives of society, and
not by their self-styled victims. In Courts of Law, an
interval elapses between the criminal act and the delivery
of judgment, disinterested witnesses are heard by im-
partial judges ; the prisoner is properly defended, and
light is thrown on the case by the comparison of conflict-
ing evidence. But if the plaintiff is to be himself both
judge and executioner in his own case, if trial, witnesses,
defence, judicial impartiality are all to be abolished, it is
not Justice that is done but an act of vengeance that is
wreaked, — to speak plainly, a murder that is committed.
The Classical Stage abounds also in heroes and heroines
who avenge their wrongs with their own hands. But we
never find them claiming the right of vengeance, and re-
presenting murder as an act of justice. In Horace, it is
true, this confusion occurs. Horace (Horatius) having just
killed his sister, Procule asks him :
" Que venez-vous de faire ?" — " Un acte de justice ;
Un semblable forfait veut un pareil supplice," '
answers Horace. But the King reasserts the truth in the
words :
1 " What have you done ?" — " An act of justice ; such a crime deserves no
less a punishment."
592 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
" Cette énorme action, faite presque à nos yeux,
Outrage la nature et blesse jusqu'aux dieux.
Un premier mouvement qui produit un tel crime
Ne saurait lui servir d'excuse légitime.
Les moins sévères en ce point sont d'accord,
Et si nous les suivons, il est digne de mort." 1
The King pardons Horace, because his anger was in-
spired by a praiseworthy patriotism, and because he had
saved Rome ; but with a good sense, in which, alas ! we
are much deficient, he calls the crime a crime and not an
act of justice.
In Racine's Plays, no less than in Corneille's, vengeance
is still a crime. Hermione does not try to justify her
revenge, nor does Oreste endeavour to make out a case
for himself. It is only on the contemporary stage that we
see characters wreak vengeance without a pang of remorse,
and kill in cold blood. Crime, grown argumentative and
sophistical, is for justifying itself, refusing to call itself
crime at all, preferring to be known as an act of justice ; the
assassin no longer murders, he executes the sentence he
has pronounced. This piece of sophistry has spread from
the Stage to prisoners at the bar. In the Marie Bière
case, the Juge d'instruction said to the accused woman:
" To-day, when you have had an opportunity for reflection
and are in a calmer frame of mind, do you not realize that
you have been guilty of a crime?" — The accused, who
had formerly been an actress, replied : " I looked upon
myself as an instrument in God's hand to punish a man
who had wronged me ; possibly my notion was absurd, but
I was deeply embued with it." — The practice of arrogating
1 "This hideous act, done almost before, our eyes, outrages nature and
wounds the very gods themselves. A first movement of passion producing
such a crime could not serve as any legitimate excuse for it. The least hirsh
judges are agreed in this, and if we follow them, he is deserving of death."—
Corneille is not only a statesman, a philosopher, a psychologist, he is a
trained lawyer and a magistrate besides. His Tragedies might well be studied
with great profit by young men preparing for the bar and the bench. Admir-
able examples of judicial pleading are to be found in them. — According to
Livy, not only had Horatius been blamed, but he had actually been sentenced
to death by the Duumviri.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 593
the right to do justice themselves becomes more and more
common amongst all classes. Some few months ago, the
Police discovered in the Bois de Vincennes the corpse of a
youth of seventeen, the son of one Vasseur, a dealer in
wine. Suspicion having fallen upon the father, the latter
admitted : " Yes ! I killed my son ; he was disgracing us,
1 have only done an act of justice." Quite lately again,
at Marseilles, a father killed his son, who was disgracing
him, in the belief that he was performing an act of justice.
No doubt it is due to the inspiration of crimes like these
that a Writer has within the last few months put on the
stage, under the title of A Mother's Rights, a Play in
which a mother claims the right to kill her own son.
Carried away by his love and admiration of family life,
and a noble indignation against the courtesan, Emile
Augier, in spite of his customary good sense and modera-
tion, has also represented the murder of an obnoxious ad-
venturess as an act of justice in his Mariage d'Olympe.
After the Marquis de Puygiron has killed the adventuress,
his nephew asks him: "What have you done?" and the
murderer answers — " Justice ! " Montégut, who neverthe-
less is a critic of great penetration and judgment, has de-
clared his opinion that this pistol-shot may offend against
human laws, but that it respects and indeed applies those
of God. 1 Another critic, as a rule a man of sound sense
and powerful intellect, likewise approves of vengeance by
way of homicide, and allows the right to kill. " There are
cases," he says, "where it is lawful to kill, and others
where it is right to forgive." 2 In Emile Augier's play, the
Marquis de Puygiron has the less right to kill Olympe,
seeing he is not her husband, and was in the act of dis-
puting with her about the price of a letter he wished to
gain possession of. The sentiment animating the Author
was a noble and lofty one — the love and admiration of
family life ; but the best of sentiments may lead to ex-
cesses on occasion. Heretics were burned out of a mis-
1 Dramaturges et romanciers, p. 353.
2 La rr ou met, Études de Littérature dram. t 4th Series, p. 39.
2 P
594 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
taken love of Religion ; Nobles and Priests guillotined out
of an ill-understood love of Liberty. It is equally unreason-
able to shoot the adventuress in Augier's Play from love
for the sanctity of family life. All the Author needs do is
to hold her up to scorn and detestation by means of a
faithful portrayal of her ignominy. To go further, to
murder, is to go beyond all bounds. Scorn and contempt
are enough. A human being cannot be put out of the
way like "a noxious beast," "a vibrio 1 in human shape"
" a kind of vermin " ; and it is not permissible to raise the
cry, "Down with Olympe ! death to the Wife of Claudel
death to the Foreign Woman's husband ! " merely in order
to win a literary triumph.
After slaughtering on the boards with revolver shots
or dagger thrusts adulteresses and adventuresses, Dramatic
Authors, always on the look-out for new effects, have now
adopted the doctrine of forgiveness. Bound to be ever
oscillating between these two doctrines, the Stage, which
craves perpetual variety, passes from one to the other.
Literary dogmas are like fashions ; directly one of them,
that of the right of vengeance for instance, grows hack-
neyed, the opposite doctrine of the beauty of forgiveness
reappears, as it has at the present moment. These
dogmas of the Theatre almost invariably show a lack of
proportion and moderation ; and audiences are mighty
simple when they take them seriously, and look to the
Stage for examples to copy in everyday life.
To sum up, after pointing out the dangers liable to
result, for certain sections of the audience, from the stage
representation of crimes of passion, I do not conclude the
Stage must be abolished. I only advocate its reformation,
to bring it into better accord with moral truth and legal
requirements, and the banishment of antisocial fallacies
from the boards. An exact reproduction of the life of
passion and its tragic consequences is not necessarily im-
moral. Frou Frou, for instance, is not only a most remark-
able Play, but a highly moral spectacle, bringing into relief
1 A species of infusoria.
0F PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 595
with striking vividness and truth the terrible results of
adultery. The portrait so finely drawn in it of the Parisian
woman of fashion, frivolous and pleasure-loving, incapable
of a single serious thought, nervous, more or less hysteri-
cal, in the medical sense of the word, rushing into adultery
at the call of a mere sudden infatuation, is the companion
picture to the Romantic country wife, described for us by
Flaubert in Madame Bovary,
The study I have penned above is not a piece of special
pleading against the Stage, but against the corruptions
of the Stage. Side by side with Plays that do harm, are
others that do good. Anyone who is present at a representa-
tion of Cinna, Horace, or Polyeucte, leaves the Theatre with
feelings more generous, more patriotic, and more Christian
than he entered it with. The Stage then is not bad in
itself, as was thought by Nicole, Bossuet, and Jean Jacques
Rousseau ; it may enlighten or pervert the public con-
science, according to the use it is put to. Nothing is
better than a good play. " Tragedy," Napoleon I. declared
warmly, "stirs the soul, elevates the heart, can and ought
to create heroes. In this respect it may well be France
owes to Corneille some parts of her noble deeds ; there-
fore, gentlemen, if Corneille were alive, I would make him
a Prince." x He added that noble Tragedy was the school
of great men, and that it was the duty of Sovereigns to
encourage it and extend its influence. And without doubt
a people that loved Corneille's plays, would become great
in chivalrous courage, patriotism, and moral elevation.
Its soldiers would grow braver ; and women no less than
men would find literary gratification and moral advantage
in his Tragedies. A young girl runs no risk of imitating
Chimène. A wife, who has made a marriage "of reason,"
and presently meets the man she would fain have wedded,
will not be tempted by any words of Pauline's to forsake
her husband and fly with a lover. Nothing can be better
than Corneille's plays, teaching as they do honour, duty,
the power of will, the subordination of sensibility to reason.
1 Mémorial de Sainte- Hélène.
596 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
On the contrary, nothing is worse than a corrupt stage,
which is a school of bad behaviour, barren persiflage,
cynicism, adultery, and crimes of passion of every sort
No one dreams of abolishing the sentiment of religion,
patriotism, and the love of family because of the excesses
they may lead to ; and it is equally out of the question
to think of abolishing the Stage because of the dangers
involved in a certain number of Plays. We do not tear
up the vines, because there are individuals who drink too
much wine, and tavern-keepers who sell adulterated wine.
We do not dispense altogether with fire on account of the
dangers of accidental conflagration, or because incendiaries
exist. What we do is to prevent children going near fire,
to punish incendiaries, and wine dealers who poison their
customers, and not to allow children to get drunk. Simi-
larly we should not take young people, and above all
young girls, too early to the Theatre. Goethe, who was
no Puritan, lifted his voice against the imprudence of
parents in taking their young daughters to the Theatre ;
" And then," he wrote, " what business have young girls at
the Theatre ? They are out of place there. . . . The Theatre
is for men and women, who are already familiarized with
the facts of life." x Alexandre Dumas fils held the same
opinion, and strongly advised parents not to take their
daughters to see Plays. Aristotle declared : " The Law
ought to forbid young people's being present at satirical
farces and Comedies, till they have reached an age
entitling them to sit at the common feasts." 2 Quintilian
said Comedy was not good for the young, "until there
shall be no more reason to fear for their morals," adding,
" As for Elegy, which turns entirely on love, it is a duty to
keep children from it, if possible, or defer their reading it
to a more advanced age." 3 This is a duty the modern
parent has no conception of.
The Stage being an imitation of Life, we cannot forbid
it to depict the passions and crimes the conditions of Life
1 Entretien df Eckermann, p. 85. a Aristotle, Politics, bk. iv. ch. xv. § 8.
3 Quintilian, bk. i. § 8.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 597
lead to. .Aristophanes, who was far from observing any
very strict reserve in his Comedies, was over-severe
when he reproached Euripides with painting evil, and
maintained that the dramatic author must represent only
the good. Literature is justified in depicting evil, but on
condition of not embellishing it The delineation of evil
ceases to be dangerous, if it is done without complacency ;
it may even be useful, if it is inspired by a spirit of
healthy indignation. The effect produced depends on
the execution and the sentiments which inspired the
Author.
On the Stage we look for calamities, passions, subjects
of ridicule, vices and crimes. We laugh at the delineation
of the ridiculous and vicious ; weep over the calamities
represented before us ; are stirred at the contact of fierce
passions ; feel pity and indignation for crimes committed.
To depict criminals, if done without undue complacency,
is not to condone their crimes, while the delineation of
crime followed by remorse or dire catastrophes produces
a great dramatic and moral effect Besides, the Fifth Act
of the Play would be simply impossible, if the author
were unable to allow himself a suicide or so and a murder
or two. There is no really moving drama but has a little
butchery in it ; a few dagger thrusts are indispensable. It
is not displeasing to hear jealous husbands and infuriated
wives "tearing a passion to rags" on the boards and vow-
ing vengeance. But it must never be forgotten that the
representation of passions and crimes produces different
effects upon the audience, according to the age, sex and
education of its component parts. The Author's talent and
the fidelity of the portrait drawn of the criminal hero do
not avail to make a critical mind forget the criminality of
the passion represented, whereas a young man or a young
woman, transported by the delineation of over-mastering
passion, admires everything indiscriminately. But, nothing
is more provocative of imitation than sympathy experi-
enced for the criminal who is the hero of the piece ; and the
Author still further increases this danger, if he embellishes
598 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
crimes of passion, makes excuses for adultery, idealizes
free love and turns marriage into ridicule. His bounden
duty is never to make virtue look ridiculous or vice
attractive.
Again, the Stage would do well to follow another piece
of advice given by Voltaire : " It is allowed, of course, to
bring villains on the Stage, but it is a finer thing to see
good people there." 1 The boards have been so glutted
with adulteresses, harlots, criminals of love, it would be an
agreeable novelty to show a few honest men and virtuous
women there for a change. The public would find the
same pleasure in looking at them that George Sand ex-
perienced in writing La Petite Fadette and La Mare au
Diable, after Lélia and Indiana. "In this literature of
mystery and iniquity that talent and imagination have
brought into fashion," she wrote, "we like the mild and
gentle characters better than the scoundrels, with all their
dramatic intensity." I am entirely of her opinion. It is
not true that nobility of sentiments is any less literary than
baseness of instincts, or that vice and crime are the only
things really interesting. Pénélope and Andromaque appeal
more to our sympathies than Clytemnestre and Phèdre.
Antigone and Iphigénie are more touching than Hermione.
La Petite Fadette is better worth having than Indiana. The
character of Burrhus is finer, even from the dramatic point
of view, than that of Pyrrhus. Moral beauty is more, not
less, literary than moral ugliness.
The magnanimity of Augustus forgiving his would-be
assassin, the patriotism of old Horatius preferring the
safety of his country to his son's, are more dramatic senti-
ments than the fury of some jealous husband. The tears
of admiration Corneille drew from the eyes of the great
Condé are more truly moving than those shed over some
sorrow of disappointed love. There are other passions as
interesting as Love, and more noble. There are other
calamities greater and more tragic than broken hearts.
Why must our dramatic writers go out of their way to
1 Voltaire, Commentaire sur Corneille.
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 599
represent what is morally repulsive, under pretence of
seeking after truth? Noble sentiments are just as true
as ignoble. Adulterous wives and harlots and criminals
do not make up all the world. Why should not the beauti-
ful have the same artistic value in Literature as it has
in Painting and Sculpture? Literature is no whit less
fitted than the Fine Arts for the representation of what
is fine and noble. To think otherwise is surely not very
flattering to Letters.
The Ancients, whose sense of beauty was more highly
developed than ours, also appreciated better than we do
the charm of noble sentiments on the Stage. We prefer
the delineation of guilty passion. We want women pos-
sessed by furious passions, and find the Furies adorable.
These we prefer to good women of gentle, timid nature,
who express their love with modesty and refinement. A
married woman, of virtuou£ character, ready to devote her-
self to death to save her husband's life, would seem insipid
to us ; l a young man as chaste as Euripides' Hippolytus we
should vote ridiculous. Why will not the Stage paint types
of pure love, instead of preferring to represent the frantic,
sensual-minded love that often makes a murderer of a
man? A would-be bride, divided between her love and
her duty towards her parents, a Christian wife repulsing
the man she would have preferred to wed, are surely more
truly interesting than a woman who is simply amorous
and yields to her sensual impulses unresistingly. The
struggles of Conscience against Instinct are surely more
moving than the delineation of physical love and the
description of feminine frailties.
The Ancients, who knew nothing of the theory of Art
for Arts sake, thought it no degradation to Literature to
say :
" Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci."
" ET PRODESSE VOLUNT ET DELECTARE POETiE." *
1 Racine contemplated at one time restoring the Tragedy of the Ancients,
and treating this theme of Alcestis.
* •' He bore away every suffrage who united the useful with the pleasing."
" Fain would our Poets be at once profitable and delightful."
ÔOO CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
The Moderns, more anxious about the independence of
Art, separate it absolutely from morality. Granted the
Stage is not called upon to teach Morality ; but if we do
not ask it to moralize, still it should not demoralize, should
not excite women to adultery, men to contempt of marriage,
young people to .scorn of paternal authority, working men
to hatred of society. If it declines to be a school of good
manners and good conduct, at least it must not be a school
of bad behaviour and vicious living, and the amusement
that is its primary end, must not be inconsistent with
Morality. It is not too much to ask of dramatic authors,
to require of them taste, tact, good sense and common
decency. They are in no way bound to write their plays
solely for the young ; it is the parents' business to select
such as their children can see without danger. But the
morality of the Stage must not be in direct contradiction
with the morality of society. •
As La Bruyère says: "It would seem that the Novel
and the Play might be as useful as they are now mis-
chievous." How easy would it be for Dramatic Authors to
make the Theatre an instrument of good, by demonstrate
ing to the crowd the real predominance of Will and Con-
science over the passions. What an immense service
Dramatic writers would be doing, if only they would
answer to the love of honour and moral elevation
felt by a mass of men brought together in one place!
The audience assembled in a theatre shows, as a matter
of fact, more moral refinement than the same persons
taken individually ; there the vicious display indignation
against vice, and the most criminal wish to see Virtue
rewarded and Vice punished. Accordingly it would be very
easy for authors to bring themselves into harmony with
the feelings of the audience, by drawing Vice in colours to
make it odious. Instead of this, they choose to pander to
the evil instincts of the crowd, making virtue disagreeable
and vice attractive. Not content with inviting our com-
miseration for the adulterous wife, they endeavour to show
her under the most alluring aspect, all this of course at the
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 6oi
expense of the husband ; not satisfied with asking our pity
for persons accused of crimes of passion, they go further
and claim our admiration.
I freely admit I am not impressed myself by the beauty
of crimes of passion. I see nothing very interesting in the
fury of a man who is for forcing his love on a woman by
brute force, in the anger of a woman who is for making
men love her by dint of revolver bullets. What is there
poetical in the gesture of a fellow burying his knife in a
poor girl's bosom, because she repulses his advances or
would have her liberty back again ? "I never weary of
the beauty of evil and dangerous creatures," Nietzche
declared ; " I love to look at the marvels bred under the
fierce ardour of burning suns, — tigers, palm-trees and
rattlesnakes. Men likewise have some fine litters of wild
beasts to show, some magnificent hatches of reptiles."
To admire a man, because he can roar terribly and kill
effectually, is to look at him in the light of a beautiful
savage animal, whose fierceness and strong teeth and for-
midable claws are objects of wonder. Taking simply and
solely the naturalistic or aesthetic point of view, we may
admire the tiger's fury and deem it more picturesque than
the sheep's mildness. But, in our admiration of men and
women, it is surely not superfluous to take the social point
of view. If Dramatic Authors and Critics had better ap-
preciated this point of view, they would not have lavished
so much panegyric on the Furies whose one thought is
revenge. No Society is built up with murderers, with
Orestes and Othellos, Hermiones and Médées. It may be
that my habits as a Judge have weakened my admiration for
wild beasts ; but I certainly think they are more in place
in a prison than at large in society.
Still, the Poetry of criminal passion, drawn in such
pleasing colours by Dramatic writers, soon succumbs to
the Prose of the Police Court and the judicial analysis
of the Criminal's motives, who more often than not
confines himself to stammering out a string of wretched
excuses. At the bar of the Assize Court, Crime loses
Ô02 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
its aureole; it is not nearly so poetical as on the
Stage.
At the period when Romanticism was trying to beautify
Crime, a vigorous Poet, too much neglected nowadays,
Népomucène Leminier, raised a protesting voice against
this orgy of literary crimes:
" La poésie, institutrice
Des dogmes, des lois et des mœurs,
Au vil crime, à son noir supplice
N'accorde point de lâches pleurs.
Elle doit, en fille des temples,
N'exalter que les beaux exemples,
Qui seuls touchent les nobles cœurs.
Quelle contagion étrange
Nous pousse à vouler dans la fange
Les couronnes des doctes sœurs ! . . .
C'est propager les mœurs vandales,
Qu' exhumer, des vieilles annales,
Les monstres jadis trop fameux." l
In a society where the taste for the Play-house is so
universal, where the people frequents the cafés far more
than the Churches and picks up its morality at the
Theatre, it is not well for the Stage to rival the Assize
Courts and feed the imagination of the populace on pic-
tures of blood. The latter must not be shown too many
crimes, nor its thoughts allowed to dwell too much on
hideous subjects. Taine has judiciously noted how evil an
impression is left behind by such things ; that " the true
heroes" of Literature are persons of the highest culture
and the most perfect works from the point of view of art
identical with the most beneficial from the point of view of
morality. This author, who as a young man had shown
himself indifferent as to the consequences of any doctrines
1 " Poetry, fair teacher of dogmas, laws and manners, must not accord the
tears of a cowardly compassion to vulgar crime and its grim punishment. She
is bound, like a priestess of the Temples, to exalt none but noble exemplars,
the only ones that touch noble hearts. What strange infection impels us to
roll in the mire the crowns of the learned sisterhood ! . • . 'Tis to encourage
the manners of Vandals, to exhume from ancient story monsters shamefully
notorious in olden days."
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 603
that might be advanced in books, was much exercised,
when age had ripened him and experience brought wisdom,
about the harm Literature was capable of producing, and
like La Bruyère made the criterion of literary merit depend
upon the amount of good likely to be effected. Théophile
Gautier himself said : " What is good and honourable is so
dramatic and so fine ! It is to goodness and honesty, to
virtuous emotion, we must come back sooner or later, if we
wish to draw legitimate tears. You may try as you will
after a factitious dramatic interest in cries and tears and
posthumous rehabilitations of vice . . ., calm and innocent
emotion will always carry the day against the most artfully
presented exaggerations. . . . Boldly strike this noble cord
in the human heart, and instantly you will know by its all-
powerful vibrations the imperishable, eternal character that
belongs to it" x
Knowing as I do from my judicial experience that
literary monsters are quite capable of producing monsters
of the Criminal Courts by awakening evil instincts in the
younger members of an audience, I would beg Dramatic
Authors to introduce rather oftener on the Stage characters
guilty neither of crime nor suicide. If the merit of the
Dramatist consists in giving strong emotions and nothing
else, I can understand d'Alembert's having likened Tragedy
to the execution of a criminal. Besides, if that is so, the
Poet is eclipsed by the executioner, for the guillotine gives
emotions still stronger than the latter. But Dramatic Art
should not consist merely in violently stirring the spec-
tator's emotions. When Aristotle said Tragedy has for
aim to excite pity and terror, he was unduly restricting its
domain.
I do not fail to recognize the advantage there may be in
rousing the pity of an audience. History relates several
incidents proving that the Stage from this point of view
is a school of humanity. When Athens was taken by
Lysander, the victors debated whether they ought not to
raze the city. Whilst they were still deliberating, a Musi-
1 Th. Gautier, Histoire de la Littérature dramatique, vol. v. p. 264.
Ô04 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
cian recited the verses in which Euripides tells of Electra's
humiliation when brought down to the condition of a
slave by iEgisthus* harshness. This picture of undeserved
calamity strongly moved the victors, and they abandoned
their design of destroying the town. Plutarch tells us how
the cruel tyrant of Pheres, being present one day at the
representation of a Tragedy, felt himself moved to com-
passion by the ill hap of the heroes of the piece, and
hurried out of the Theatre to prevent his emotion being
noticed; he even thought of punishing the author, "because
he had melted him as iron is melted in the fire." But
Tragedy is capable of awakening other sentiments besides
pity and terror; it should rouse admiration, forgiveness
of wrongs, love of country, devotion, religious feeling. The
Tragedies of iEschylus filled the souls of the Greeks with
the fury of Mars, to follow Aristophanes' phrase, and
taught them how to vanquish the Persians. With Corneille
the Theatre became a school of determination, heroism,
magnanimity and patriotism. To no pieces more appro-
priately than to Corneille's may we apply the judgment
Napoleon I. expressed on Hector^ a play by Luce de
Lancival. " It is a headquarters piece, a man would mardi
better to meet the enemy after hearing it." Racine, again,
by the composition of Esther and Athalie % has widened
the domain of Tragedy. But unfortunately since Corneille
and Racine, the Stage has habitually sought success rather
in emotion than in elevation of sentiments and ideas,
ending in Romantic Drama or Melodrama, where adultery,
rape and murder, the results of passionate outbreak, are
piled one on the other to harrow the audience.
The Stage ought not to limit itself to representing
suicides and crimes of passion. It is not going beyond
the bounds of truth to depict men who overcome their
passions. Indeed it is only the most commonplace souls
that yield to them ; there are others, nobler far, who resist
successfully. The spectacle of vices of passion on the
Stage teaches an audience to despise human nature, making
frailty and failure seem simply natural, and consequently
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 605
excusable. On the other hand, the sight of a hero, who
resists the impulses of passion, communicates a share of
his energy to the spectators and trains them to imitate his
good example.
The delineation of the everyday, unideal life of
passion is bad for the masses. These ought to find in
Plays something else than the passions and appetites of
ordinary existence; their reason should be appealed to,
and they should be made to hear a more noble dialect
than they speak themselves, more lofty sentiments than
they habitually experience. Within the Theatre the
people must be fed on thoughts higher than what they are
familiar with outside. Noble characters and great historical
heroes are more interesting than commonplace persons
who repeat mere tales of domestic intrigue, or narratives
of criminal trials for our amusement. Alexandre Dumas
fils, who wrote not a few dramas of domestic intrigue in
his time, realized towards the end of his life the necessity
of a different class of Plays. " In Comedy, in Tragedy, in
Drama ... let us then inaugurate a type of piece that is
useful, running the risk of outcry on the part of the apostles
of Art for Arts sake." Destouches had said the same
thing at an earlier date: "I hold that Dramatic Art is
worthy of respect only in so far as it aims at instruction
along with amusement. I have always considered as
incontrovertible the maxim that, no matter how diverting
a Comedy may be, it is an imperfect, even a dangerous,
work, if its author does not keep before him the purpose
of improving morals, decrying vice, setting virtue in so fine
a light that it must attract the respect and veneration of
the public."
A Play is not bound to be immoral to be literary. Less
talent is called for to make up a play out of indecencies
and paradoxes than with just thoughts and due pro-
priety. The Stage and Morality are so far from being
incompatible that the best Plays of our time, as of all
other periods, coming from the pens of Emile Augier,
J. Sandeau, Ponsard, Sardou, Dumas, Coppée, de Hornier,
6o6 CRIME DETERMINED BY PASSION, AND CONTAGION
Rostand, Brieux, and the like, are healthy and vigorous
works.
Above all the Dramatist should be asked not to trans-
form evil into good and good into evil, and to remember
that sophistry does even more harm than passion. "Woe
unto them that call evil good, and good evil ; that put
darkness for light, and light for darkness ; that put bitter
for sweet, and sweet for bitter ! " (Isaiah). It is perverting
the people to say Love is a virtue, Adultery submission to
natural law, and to declare mankind has a right to happi-
ness and a right of revenge.
When Divine and Human Law both tell a man, " Thou
shalt not kill," it is not permitted the Dramatist to say to
the husband of an unfaithful wife, " Kill her," and to the
woman who has been forsaken by her lover, " Kill him."
Inasmuch as society is instituted in order to replace
individual vengeance by legal punishment, the Stage is
assuming a heavy responsibility when it purposes to
replace legal punishment by revenge. To corrupt the
minds of the audience, and teach them that Love is
identical with virtue and admirable in its frenzies and its
crimes, is to unchain the passions of mankind and pave
the way to manslaughter.
It is perverting the female portion of an audience to
show them one type, and one only of feminine love, viz.,
the sensual, and to represent it as incapable of control.
It is not by insisting on the impossibility of mastering
love that women are to be taught chastity. Nor in
fostering the belief that the sexual instinct cannot be
restrained, has the naturalistic Stage even the excuse of
sheltering this doctrine of the fatality of passion behind
a scientific truth, for no serious treatise on Physiology is
to be found affirming this irresponsibility of passion. 1
1 In a recent work on the Sexual Instinct {L'Instinct Sexuel, Paris : F.
Alcan), Dr Féré, on the staff of the Bicêtre Asylum, pens the following
remarks, the more worthy of attention as coming from a scientist of
determinist ways of thought: "The present work aims at putting in a
conspicuous light the necessity of self-control and personal responsibility in
connection with sexual activity, no less from the point of view of hygiene
OF PLAYS OF PASSION AS AFFECTING IT. 607
Woman is not merely an organism, a womb ; she is above
all else a living soul, possessed of a conscience and a will,
which save her from any such irresistible fatality.
To restore good taste and good sense on the Stage, it is
not enough for Dramatic Authors to be willing and ready ;
the co-operation of the public is likewise requisite. If the
public will leave off admiring Vice and crimes of passion,
theatrical managers will stop providing such fare. In any
case, audiences should bear in mind that the heroes of
the Stage are not models to imitate, but subjects for
observation ; that Roxane, Médée, Hermione, Phèdre,
are as little examples for women to copy, as Pyrrhus,
Oreste, Othello, are for men.
than from that of morals " (Preface). Dr Féré adds, further, that "it is in
the name of the psychology of animals, subject to the madness of the regularly
recurring period of rut, and not of the psychology of civilized mankind, that
the irresistibility of sexual impulses is affirmed " (p. 30). An animal in virtue
of his organs, man is free in virtue of his mental endowment. Literary
fallacies are often nothing more nor less than scientific mistakes.
CHAPTER XIII.
RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES DETERMINED
BY PASSION.
" Freedom constitutes the especial essence of Man."
(SlMPLlClUS, Commentaries on Epictetus.)
MUCH has been written on the responsibility and irrespon-
sibility of the authors of crimes of passion. While some
hold that Love excuses everything, others maintain that
crimes of passion are the most heinous of all. The truth
appears to me to lie, as always, between these two extreme
opinions. Crimes committed under the impulse of Venus
are no more excusable than those inspired by Bacchus;
the intoxication of Love is no better a justification than
that of alcohol. Notwithstanding all the Poets and
Novelists say, who make out Love to be a virtue and the
condition of passionate exaltation an irresistible fatality,
Love is neither a cause of superiority nor a reason for
irresponsibility, though it is often a motive, not indeed for
impunity, but for clemency, an extenuating circumstance,
and often one of great stringency, in certain cases.
"Crimes of passion, the very crimes our Judges and
public opinion treat with the highest degree of clemency
and mistaken sympathy," writes M. Brunetière, " are per-
haps, when duly examined, the most odious and most
dangerous of all, and above all the most antisocial 1
Similarly M. Bourget thinks crimes of passion, considered
from the point of view of social defence, more dangerous
than any others. 2 This opinion I do not myself share.
Besides the fact that the victims of crimes of passion, the
1 Revue des Deux Mondes % 1st Nov. 1 89 1.
a Bourget, Physiologie de r amour % p. 254.
608
RESPONSIBILITY DETERMINED BY PASSION. 609
unfaithful wife murdered by her husband, the seducer who
forsakes his mistress and is disfigured with vitriol thrown
by her hands, have a large share of responsibility for the
violence resorted to, there is another to be taken into
account, viz., that the author of such a crime never be-
comes a habitual, a professional criminal. He .does not
repeat his offence, does not make a habit, a sort of trade,
of criminality. Hence crimes of passion are less dangerous
than ordinary crimes.
Nor, on the other hand, do I share the views of M.
Brunetière, who writes : " Neither Love nor Hate eventuat-
ing in murder are in any way less blameworthy than
Cupidity that ends in theft" To kill out of Love and
Jealousy is not as odious a crime as to kill out of cupidity.
The poor girl who has been forsaken and kills her seducer
is not equally despicable with the servant who poisons her
master to rob the house. The husband who in the agonies
of jealousy murders his wife or his wife's lover, is infinitely
less blameworthy than the highway robber who murders
travellers from greed. When a rejected lover kills the
girl who has repulsed his suit, the act is less abominable
than a deliberate murder followed up by theft.
In many instances of crimes of passion there are ?
number of reasons all making for indulgence, — and by
indulgence I do not mean impunity, but a notable diminu-
tion of the responsibility of the guilty person and of the
need for severe repressive measures. We must take into
account the sufferings and despair of unhappy love, the
blindness due to passion, the frenzy incident to jealousy,
the constraining power of the fixed idea, which is a sort
of mental obsession, disturbing the reason and obscuring
the moral conscience, the temptations of the senses, the
physiological predispositions of temperament, the youth of
the accused, the weakness of the female sex, the interest
no one can fail to take in the lot of the forsaken mistress,
the deserted wife and the outraged husband.
Any scheme of human Justice, that is for weighing all
circumstances in due measure and proportion, is bound
2Q
6lO RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
to take into consideration the change of character often
produced by passion. Under the empire of a violent and
unfortunate love, of a devouring jealousy, a man hitherto
gentle and good-natured may become irritable and ill-
conditioned ; the man who was industrious loses all taste
for work ; the man whose disposition was gay and merry-
hearted is attracted by melancholy and despair. An
individual of energetic temperament, when deceived by a
wife he fondly loved, grows excitable and nervous, and
may be seen crying like a child or positively bellowing
with rage. Under the influence of the passion dominating
him, the man feels his own character altering and may
ask himself in alarm, like Racine's hero :
" Par quel trouble me vois-je emporté loin de moi?" 1
The man who is thus carried away by passion far out of
the bounds of his natural disposition, is deserving of our
pity, more particularly when he is young, that is to say
when his heart is full of generous feelings and his head
empty of ideas and experience.
Clemency towards women accused of crimes of passion
is also obligatory in the majority of cases for physiological
and psychical reasons. Woman is a womb ; tota mulierin
utero (" the whole woman is in the womb "), Van Helmont
declared. Of course such a definition is manifestly in-
complete, for if woman is a womb, she is likewise a brain,
a heart and a soul. At the same time there is no doubt
the important reactions the womb exercises on the nervous
system should be taken into account. The physiologi-
cal functions to which women are subject, menses, preg-
nancy, lactation, menopause, frequently determine cerebral
troubles. There exists a close connection between the
condition of the organs of generation and the condition of
the brain. Every woman's physiological and psychical
life gravitates round the great fact of maternity.
There are many hysterical subjects, in the medical
sense of the word, among such women as are guilty of
1 " By what trouble do I see myself carried away far from my own self?"
DETERMINED BV PASSION. 6 1 1
crimes of passion. Now, as everybody knows, hysterical
women cannot bear annoyance or contradiction without
weeping and stamping ; they often have fits of crying and
despair arising out of the most trivial motives. To give
an instance : a working-man scolds his wife for not keep-
ing his dinner hot, and the woman, of a very nervous
temperament and feeling his reproaches keenly, answers,
" Now I'll never get your dinner ready again ; you won't
find me when you come home this evening ; " so saying,
she seizes a bottle of laudanum and drains it. It is
obvious that a woman of a disposition like this, incapable
of enduring a word of reproach, cannot quietly submit to
a lover's treachery, or a husband's unfaithfulness. Jealous
wives who make scenes, scream, smash the crockery and
lead their husband a life, are of objectionable character only
because they are of unsound temperament ; they are called
ill-tempered and ill-conditioned, when they are only really
in ill-health. 1 The spirit of contradiction that is common
with such women is a symptom of their nervous diathesis ; 2
and this nervousness, making the patient irritable, excit-
able, hot-tempered and violent may be determined not
alone by heredity, but by long continued suffering, by a
great sorrow, by the death of a child.
The character of the woman who is guilty of a crime
determined by passion is often of a high-strung, romantic
type, the result of a neuropathic temperament inherited
from her ancestors. Mme. Weiss was of ill-balanced mind,
a nymphomaniac in fact The widow Gras was hysterical.
Marie B was the daughter of a woman who had been
under treatment as insane, and the niece of a man who
died out of his mind ; at fifteen, she had already made two
attempts at suicide. " From my earliest youth," she told
1 It is only in virtue of an exaggerated and unjustifiable generalization from
numerous, but still exceptional, instances, that Michelet arrived at his descrip-
tion of Woman as a pathological subject.
9 This spirit of contradiction is exactly portrayed in this line of Terence :
" Nolunt ubi velis ; ubi no lis, cupiuni ultra"
— "They will not when you will ; when you will not, they will and must."
6l2 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
the Juge d'instruction, " my sentiments, though never
depraved, were of extraordinary vivacity. My school-
mistress used to say: 'With that head, I don't know
what will become of you ; you will have a very unhappy
life, I am sure.' I remember how at fifteen I was seized
with an ideal affection for a schoolfellow, and how one
day I tried to poison myself, because I thought she made
light of my love for her. At an early age I experienced
a veritable passion for Music, which was the joy of my
life. When I found myself admired by M. X , towards
whom in turn I felt a strong attraction, I told him : i I do
not wish to love you, it is too serious a matter. Take care,
if I do love you, it will be for all my life long.' I told him
further that after once giving him my heart, I would never
consent to be forgotten."
Among reasons that should go towards diminishing the
penalty of crime, the ancient Jurisconsults pleaded " the
frailty of the sex," 1 what Tacitus styles intpotentia muliebris
(womanly weakness). The offence being equal, women in
ancient systems of Law were not punished as severely as
men. Thus, for instance, when a man had intercourse with
a Nun, he was beheaded, whereas the Nun was only
punished by canonical penalties. Formerly the Law
assumed that a young and inexperienced girl could only
defend herself with great difficulty against seduction.
Nowadays it draws no distinction between men and
women; 2 but I consider the Judges who administer the
Law are bound to do so. As a matter of fact, Juries
do make a difference, showing themselves more indulgent
towards women. Acquittals are more numerous in the
1 Jousse, Traité de la justice criminel!*, vol. ii. p. 626.
2 In some cases the Penal Law is actually more severe for the woman than
for the man. Adultery on the man's part is punished only if he keeps a
concubine under the conjugal roof, and is assigned less severe penalties
than for the woman. The husband who kills his wife and her accomplice
in flagrante delicto is admitted to extenuating circumstances, but not so the
woman, if she kill her husband and his accomplice under the same conditions.
The same proofs of culpability do not hold good for the adulteress and for
her accomplice, (Articles 324, 337, 338, 339 of the Penal Code.)
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 613
cases of women than of men. Moreover for some years
past the discrepancy as between the two sexes has been
increasing progressively. From 1856 to i860 the propor-
tion of men acquitted was 23 per cent. ; that of women 33.
In 1876-1880 that of men was 19 per cent, of women 35.
In 1892 the discrepancy was more considerable still,
the proportion of men acquitted being 23 per cent, of
women 52.
There is therefore no sort of justification for advocates
of women's rights who accuse men with being unjust
towards women in the application of the Law. In some
respects, I admit, the Law is capable of amelioration in
favour of women. But no one can fairly accuse Juries
of erring on the side of over-severity towards females
accused of offences against Justice. I am convinced women
would be more severely dealt with by Judges of their own
sex. True, these would be equally pitiless towards men.
But this clemency for women ought not to go so far as
to insure their practical impunity, under the pretext that
the anger of a forsaken woman is a natural failing. But
revenge is not lawful, because it is natural. Every pas-
sion is a part of nature; the raison dêtre of Conscience
and Will is to resist the natural impulses that would be
injurious to others. As Mme. de Staël acutely points
out, "the natural element in this passion in no way makes
its consequences either less mischievous or less blame-
worthy; it is to combat those involuntary movements
which lead to an undesirable eventuality that reason is
specially intended ; for indeed reflection is as much a part
of Nature as is impulse."
The man who seduces a girl and then deserts her is un-
doubtedly highly blameworthy. But whatever his wrong-
doing, it cannot make murder lawful. The duty of respect
for human life does not vary according to the goodness or
badness of the victim.
Besides, is the girl who lets herself be seduced entirely
above reproach ? Is she not blameworthy as having de-
ceived her parents, aud dishonoured her family? If she
6l4 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
had defended her honour as sturdily as she defends her
purse, she would never have fallen. In that admirable
work Don Quixote, Cervantes has drawn attention to this
fact in a very witty fashion. A woman comes before
Sancho to lay a complaint of having been ravished by a
shepherd. Sancho condemns the offender to pay twenty
ducats to the complainant ; then, when she has left the
Court, he tells the shepherd : " Run, friend, run after that
woman ; get her to give you your purse back again, and if
she won't, make her, and come back to me both of you."
Before long u the shepherd and the woman appear again,
locked tightly in each other's arms, she with lifted petti-
coats holding the purse between her legs, he trying might
and main to get hold of it ; but this he could in no wise
succeed in effecting, so well did the good woman defend its
possession. 'Justice!' she kept screaming at the top of
her voice, ' justice ! justice, just look, your worship, at the
effrontery of the blackguard, who's trying to take the purse
from me again. . . .' — ' And has he taken it ? ' asked Sancho.
* Taken it ! ' she cried ; ' nay ! he would have to tear out
my life first. . . .' — ' I admit I'm fairly beaten/ said the
countryman . . . and he let go." Then Sancho, ordering
the purse to be restored to the woman, addressed her
thus : " My sister, if only you had defended yourself this
morning with as much strength and courage as you have
just shown in defending your purse, ten men together
would never have succeeded in ravishing you." 1
While fully recognizing that the girl who is weak enough
to allow herself to be seduced is deserving of much pity,
Society cannot for all that give her the right to say to the
. * Don Quixote % ch. xlv. — Muyart de Vouglans relates how a Judge pat
Sancho's sentence in practice. He condemned a young man, whom a woman
Accused of rape, to pay her a certain sum for damages and compensation ;
then he gave the man leave to rob the woman of the money he had just given
her. But the young man was quite unable to do this, so vigorous was the
resistance the woman offered. Seeing which the Judge ordered the woman
to give the money back, telling her she might very well have defended her
person as successfully as her money, if she had been so inclined. {Institute
au droit criminel, vol. ii. p. 358.)
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 6l$
seducer: "Marriage or death!" A society in which the
citizens should do justice on one another, and Jealousy and
Revenge could do murder with impunity, would cease to
be a civilized community at all. No man can be Judge at
once and interested party in his own case, still less Judge,
interested party and executioner ! Among civilized Peoples,
it is the State that dispenses Justice. The plain citizen,
man or woman, has no right to take the place of the State,
to condemn to death or blindness, to invent new forms of
punishment, to pronounce sentence in the tribunal of private
judgment and carry the same into effect A woman can
no more say to a man, " Marry me, or die ! " than a man
can say to a woman, " Be mine, or die ; Love or Death ! "
If by the instrumentality of its representatives, Society
were to give private vengeance the right to wound or kill,
Society would be pronouncing its .own doom. To allow
Jealousy and Revenge to inflict suffering, to burn the
features and destroy the eyes, to stab the breast, would
be to set Society back on a level below primitive bar-
barism. It would be something worse than the lex talionis,
u an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth " ; it would be a
still more savage law, — an eye blinded for reparation
refused, a broken skull for a marriage missed. The duty
of Juries is to secure respect for human life and not to
encourage murder ; but to acquit a woman who has killed
her lover is to authorize individual vengeance.
The pity a Jury feels for the woman who has been
forsaken and has taken revenge into her own hands
springs from genuine good-nature, but after all senti-
mentality is not the proper frame of mind for giving
judgment. Pity, like every other sentiment, must be
governed by reason. Besides, a Jury ought not to lavish
all its commiseration on the love sorrows of women, who
are so open to temptation ; let it keep a little for the
victims. For eyes burned out after horrible torments,
heart and lungs pierced by bullets, are spectacles no less
deserving pity than female hearts transfixed by the
mythological arrows of Love.
6l6 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
Women accused of these crimes, when questioned, are
found to be themselves aware of their responsibility ; they
know they are deeply to blame, albeit astounded at the
consequences flowing fatally from a first slip. A girl who
had tried to kill her lover and afterwards herself, told
the Magistrate who conducted her examination, a I fully
admit, all that has happened to me is largely my own
fault, but at the same time I cannot help feeling I am
pursued by a fatality." What she called fatality is but
the force of circumstances, bringing out with an inexor-
able logic the most tragic consequences from a false
situation. The original offence is not fatal, but there is
a great deal of fatality in the consequences. The woman
placed in a false position cannot always say, " I will go so
far, and no farther " ; thinking she was going to stop at an
agreeable liaison, a merry adventure, she has gone on fast
from secret peccadillo to public disgrace. With appalling
rapidity the idyll has been transformed into a judicial
drama. Irregular liaisons quickly become dangerous ones;
heedlessly begun under the glamour of pleasure, they may
very soon end in grief and shame. To love is not invari-
ably to go straight to happiness, as young girls believe;
it is often the direct road to regret, disillusionment, often
to overwhelming calamity, the cause of sorrow for oneself
and others, leading to hatred and even murder. When a
girl who has been seduced revolts against the cowardice
and cruelty of the villain who has now forsaken her, she
is sorely tempted to avenge her wrongs with vitriol or the
revolver, and becomes a murderess ; or else, if she recoils
at the idea of vengeance, she is strongly drawn to suicide
or abortion, as an escape from shame. How many married
women, purposing to stop short at Platonic love, have
become adulteresses and poisoners !
" Un pas hors du devoir nous peut mener bien loin ; n
(Corneille.)
— " one step from duty's path may lead us very far," — in
fact it may with startling rapidity lead the girl who has
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 6l?
been seduced to abortion or infanticide, to suicide or
murder.
Goethe has summed up in the story of Marguerite in
Faust the catastrophes that may follow from a first
deviation from virtue. This maiden, who is so pure and
innocent before her seduction, afterwards deceives her
mother, and is the cause of her dying of grief; this fond
and devoted sister gets her brother killed in a duel with
her seducer; this tender and loving mother murders her
child ; this devoted and pious Christian dies half frantic
in a prison, crying: "My mother, 'tis I killed her! my
child, 'tis I drowned it !.. . Where is my brother? . . .
Death waits upon my footsteps."
In the last letter he writes to Lottchen before commit*
ting suicide, Werther exclaims: "Alas! alas! I never
thought this road would lead me to suicide," and he might
have added, "to the temptation to commit murder," for he
had had the idea of killing Charlotte's husband. " Yes !
Lottchen," he goes on, " why should I hide it from you ?
One of us three must die, and I shall be the one. Oh ! my
beloved, into this frenzied heart came the horrible thought
of killing your husband! . . . you ! . . . myself! ... I
must needs then begone." He only escapes murder by
means of suicide. What Werther says of himself, murderers
out of love generally may apply to themselves ; when be-
ginning an amorous idyll in all the ravishment of passion,
they never foresaw it would end at the bar of the Court of
Assize. The Magistrate who sees so many victims of Love
appear before him, feels poignant pity for them and dread
for the mysterious force that has driven them into crime,
though without at the same time relieving them of all
responsibility.
True Love may legitimately be reckoned an extenuating
circumstance, sometimes one of much stringency, 1 but it is
never a justification. Reason and Will are there on pur-
1 Old French Law, which was so strict, allowed this extenuating circum-
stance,— " because, explains Jousse, this passion is analogous to madness or
intoxication." ( Traité de la justice criminelle, vol. ii. p. 629. )
6l8 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
pose to curb passion. Apart from exceptional cases, where
a man is deprived of Will and Reason by disease, he has
the power as well as the obligation of self-restraint As
Dr. Magnan says, " the superior centres situated in the
frontal region regulate and moderate the appetites and
instincts which have for organic base the vast region lying
behind the vertical parietal division." x Writers who main-
tain the passions to be irresistible take no account of the
force of will 2 and abstract ideas. The high ideas of Duty
and Justice, love of the ideal, enthusiasm for moral beauty,
feeling of personal dignity, horror of sin and fear of re-
morse, all these sentiments, unknown to the brutes, form
a counterpoise in man to the passionate instincts, and make
him a responsible being. Man has been called a reasoning
animal, a religious animal, a metaphysical animal, an
imitative animal, a tool-inventing animal; he might also
be defined as a responsible animal. Responsibility is the
most salient characteristic of human nature. Society is
the organization of civil and penal responsibility.
There are some both amongst physicians and moralists
who liken Love to a fever or a form of madness. Huet,
Bishop of Avranches, used to say Love was a fever, that
was cured by copious bleeding. Dr. Sauvages of Mont-
pelier, in the Eighteenth Century, looked upon Love as a
disease, and wrote a treatise on the Prognostics and Thera-
peutics of Love. It is not a mere metaphor when Poets
speak of "the fires of Love," "the fever of Love," "the
flame that burns the heart." In some cases Love actually
produces fever ; it is not simply a figure of rhetoric when
Phèdre declares :
" Je sentais tout mon corps et transir et brûler." 3
Still, though Love may become a pathological condition,
it is not so normally ; it is a physiological condition, and
1 Magnan, Recherches sur les centres nerveux, 2nd Series.
8 Will power even contributes to ward off and cure diseases. To wish to
get well is the beginning of a cure. Pars sanitatis velle sanarifuit (Ovid),—
•' a part of the cure was the wish to be cured."
* " I felt my whole body freeze and burn at one and the same time."
DETERMINED By PASSION. 619
one in the regular order of Nature, being directed to assure
the conservation of the species. It is only in exceptional
instances it brings about disturbances of the circulation
and nutrition, and a true delirium, a state of melancholia
accompanied by stupor.
We cannot make of Love an excuse for irresponsibility
and assimilate it to a mental disease by any insistence on
characteristics common to both, such as fixity of idea, obses-
sion of the mind combined with precordial oppression. It
is perfectly true that Love, like neurosis, contracts the intel-
lectual horizon, that the lover thinks exclusively of the
person loved, that his attention is entirely concentrated on
her beauty, that the place where she lives, the air she
breathes, the clothes that touch her body, are the whole
universe for him. But then mental obsession is not neces-
sarily a sign of insanity. The Scientist has all-absorbing
ideas, he is always thinking of the object of his special
studies. The inventor only arrives at a great discovery
by the concentration of all his thoughts on one and the
same subject We all know the answer a man of science
gave in reply to the question, " How were you led to hit
on this discovery?" — "By constantly thinking about it,"
was the answer. Thus we see fixity of idea, which char-
acterizes the psychical condition of the lover, is not a sign
of insanity.
Every fixed idea determines certain acts, provokes the
activity of certain impulses. This is the normal play of
the intellectual life, and is perfectly reconcilable with re-
sponsibility, because it abrogates neither Conscience nor
WilL All passions are absorbing and constraining, but we
do not regard them as morbid states involving irresponsi-
bility. Every passion consists in a predilection, a con-
centration of thought on the object of the passion in
question. The ambitious man has a fixed idea, — power ;
the miser a fixed idea, — money. The nobler passions are
likewise fixed ideas ; the ardent patriot has a fixed idea, —
the greatness of his native land ; the Missionary has a fixed
idea, — the conversion of Pagan tribes ; the Saint concen-
Ô20 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
trates his thoughts on God, 1 and so on. What distinguishes
the fixed idea of the Saint, the man of ambition, from that of
the madman, is that the former is capable of turning away
their mind from the object of their habitual preoccupations!
while the madman is not. Now, while admitting that the
fixed idea of Love is more absorbing than that of other
passions, nevertheless we find it is not impossible to distract
it by travelling, by other occupations and preoccupations.
In fine, though we must allow that in some instances of
unhappy love, the sufferer cannot free himself of the fixed
idea that overmasters him, and he will fall into a state of
incurable melancholy, into a gloomy and invincible despair,
ending in suicide, yet even then this sad condition can
only lead to crime by and with the consent of the
Will.
The exact appraisement of responsibility in the case of
murderers from love is especially difficult, when a weakling,
a degenerate is in question. All degenerates are not irre-
sponsible, for there are degenerates of a superior class, and
mental specialists have so far extended the category of
those coming under the title that they actually include the
Saints under it. But, at the same time, there are inferior
degenerates who are certainly not responsible, for with
them the Will is non-existent, and the impulses irresistible.
The normal man is able to resist his passions. But by
what signs, physical and psychical, is the normal man to
be distinguished from the degenerate? In spite of the
labours of contemporary Physiologists and Specialists in
Mental Disease, nothing is involved in greater darkness
even now than the knowledge of Mankind. For three
thousand years Philosophers and Savants have been telling
man, "Know thyself 1" but he has found it easier to know
1 " A dominant passion," says Locke, "binds our thoughts so strongly to
its object . . . that, for instance, a man who is passionately in love, neglects
his most urgent affairs, being incapable of so much as thinking of them. . . •
But, albeit passions are speaking generally the chief cause of the disease, it is
not the only one which, so to say, locks up the mind and limits it for the time
being to a single object from which it cannot be distracted." (Of the Conduct
of the Understanding.)
DETERMINED BY PASSION. Ô2I
the world than to know himself. After three thousand
years of studies, researches, inventions, discoveries, modern
man knows what takes place in the bowels of the earth, in
the depth of the seas, and the abyss of the skies, but he
knows only imperfectly what happens in his own brain.
This knowledge has been much advanced by the Physi-
ologists and Mental Specialists who have shown the awful
connection that exists between the brain and the intellec-
tual and moral faculties. But how many obscurities are
still left ! How terrible the problem to discover whether
such and such a prisoner at the bar is or is not responsible
for his actions ! And this problem, with all its appalling
difficulties is given to a Jury to decide !
" Imparfait ou déchu, l'homme est le grand mystère." 1
Specialists themselves do not always succeed in agree-
ing with each other, as the following instance shows. On
August 31, 1899, the Assize Court of the Puy-de-Dôme
tried one François Fournier, twenty-nine years old, a miller,
who had violated a little girl. His answers and various
statements by witnesses having led to suspicions as to the
soundness of his mental faculties, he was submitted to the
examination of a learned Specialist of Clermont-Ferrand.
The latter's conclusions were as follows : (1) that Fournier
suffered from congenital mental debility; (2) that this
disease, or rather his innate defective condition, was of
such a kind as to interfere in certain cases with the action
of his will ; (3) that this mental debility had been suddenly
aggravated by his arrest, and had plunged him into a
condition of dull stupidity that was not simulated; (4)
that, in view of the precautions he had taken to carry out
his criminal act, and the two or three situations he had
been able to fill, he was not completely irresponsible ; but
the degree of his responsibility should be set down at the
minimum. Three fresh doctors were then ordered to ex-
amine into the mental condition of the accused, and ascer-
tain whether the stupor he exhibited was feigned, or not
1 " Imperfect or fallen, Man is the great mystery."
622 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
feigned as the Clermont-Ferrand Specialist thought. The
new experts declared that the accused was shamming
stupidity; he pretended he could not distinguish a fifty-
centimes piece from a five-francs piece ; that he knew neither
his age nor the year when he drew for exemption from
military service ; that he could not count. They added
that they found on him none of the characteristic stigmata
of degeneration. The Court eventually condemned him to
two years' imprisonment.
Specialists when called in by Justice are in the habit of
reading up the particulars of the case, finding much very
valuable information, especially in the examinations and
cross-examinations of the accused and the depositions
of witnesses, bearing upon the character, antecedents
and family of the prisoner, and the way in which the
crime was committed. But I consider that in their Report
the doctors should confine themselves to the medical
aspect of the case, — a thing which they do not always do,
sometimes basing their conclusions on such or such a piece
of evidence. In my opinion they are here going beyond
their proper province. A short time since, in the Court
over which I preside, we had to examine into the mental
condition of a prisoner who had tried to commit a murder
under the influence of jealousy. The Specialist made his
conclusions depend on a fact alleged by the accused, but
not established under examination. If, the expert said,
this fact is true, the prisoner is responsible ; if it is in-
accurate, he is irresponsible. We held, my colleagues and
myself, that the Specialist ought to have confined himself
to the medical aspect, and enquired whether the accused
presented physical and psychical characteristics that were
abnormal or morbid, and ordered a fresh medical examina-
tion, which is at present being made.
For prisoners who are neither mad enough to be shut
up in Lunatic Asylums nor yet sane enough to be declared
responsible for their actions, there should be Institutions
occupying an intermediate position between Asylum and
Gaol. To pronounce them irresponsible and leave them
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 623
at large is to compromise the public safety ; to condemn
them to punishment is to violate justice. 1
But if Love is not normally a morbid state of mind and
body, it may become so. Side by side with normal, physio-
logical love there is abnormal, pathological love. As Littré
says, in his Dictionary of Medicine^ Love " is the source of
aberrations which the specialist and professor of Medical
Jurisprudence are called upon to forestall or to interpret,
in order to find out if they have been carried out under
normal conditions or those of mental alienation." The
question is a very delicate one to decide. It is the
Physician, deeply versed in the study of mental diseases,
who must adjudicate in this matter ; all Physicians do not
possess the needful competence. In very delicate cases
my advice to Juges d'instruction is to have the persons
accused examined by the Parisian Specialists in Mental
Disease, who have exceptional competence, and get them
transferred by the Court to the Prefecture of Police, where
they can be conveniently examined by the doctors. In the
Walroff affair the Chamber of Prosecutions of the Court of
Aix ordered an examination of the accused by MM. Brou-
ardel, Motet, and Gamier, and the prisoner was transferred
to Paris. In such circumstances the question of expense is
a secondary one. The all important point is that Justice
should not run the risk of condemning a man who is
afflicted with disease, and so irretrievably disgracing both
him and his family.
I tremble every time I see a question of responsibility
referred to a Jury, because they have never made the
special studies indispensable for a decision. Sometimes
we find them proclaiming as irresponsible prisoners whom
the Specialists in Medical Jurisprudence declare respon-
sible, sometimes affirming the responsibility of persons
who are undoubtedly irresponsible. Juries take as a
1 See Gilbert Ballet, Annates médico-psychologiques, 1895, P« *71«— Also Les
Dégénérés, by Drs. Magnan and Legrain, 214. Since 1863 there has existed in
England, at Broadmoor, an Asylum for Criminal Lunatics. This expression,
Criminal Lunatics, is a misnomer, for Lunatics cannot be criminals qua
criminals, inasmuch as they are irresponsible.
624 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
proof of responsibility the declaration of the accused that
they are not mad ; " inasmuch as the accused himself,"
they say, " affirms himself to be of sound mind» we should
accept his statement, as he protests against the suspicion
of insanity, and by so doing repudiates the excuse that
would acquit him, why should Justice admit It?" But
this specious argument is contradicted by observation of
the insane. Madmen are unaware of their own affliction,
supposing themselves in full enjoyment of their wits and
accusing the doctors who attend them of madness. When
a prisoner alleges he is mad, the presumption is he is
an impostor, and that he wishes to pass for a madman to
escape punishment, but is not really insane. Sometimes,
again, we hear the Public Prosecutor's Department bring-
ing forward as a proof of perversity the absence of regrets»
of remorse, on the part of the accused. But this moral
insensibility is not always a proof of perversity. Some-
times it is the effect of criminal callousness; but often,
also, it is a symptom of mental disease. The madman
does not regret the criminal act he has committed, his Con-
science does not reproach him at all, he feels no Remorse;
being urged on by an irresistible force, he declares he will
do the same again. Remorse implies freedom of action.
The madman not being a free agent cannot experience it
I find it extremely difficult to describe exactly the
signs, physical and psychical, which show if Love is patho-
logical and implies irresponsibility. Each case must be
examined on its own merits. I have myself observed,
in a case of murder, that of a girl by a young man who
wished to marry her, physiological and psychical symptoms
leading me to believe the accused was mentally unsound
His brain was congested, the pupil dilated; he scarcely
ever spoke and had to be shaken to extract a word from
him ; he experienced extreme lassitude in the legs, and
could neither sleep nor work, but remained in a sort of
lethargy. Then suddenly from this state of prostration
he passed into a fit of fury, and killed the unhappy girL
Above all, Jealousy seizing on an individual of ill-balanced
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 625
mind or hysterical idiosyncrasy, may produce the most
terrible results, a positive aberration of reason and impulses
towards fatal violence. Nervous and ill-balanced natures,
gloomy, suspicious and excitable, are predisposed to
morbid jealousy, leading them sometimes to suicide, at
others to murder. Homicidal Love often appears among
the neuropathic. Chambige cried again and again when in
prison: "Oh! mother, why did you give me a woman's
nerves ?" A great number of murderers from motives of
love and jealousy have a feminine nervous system, a system
so sensitive, so responsive, so hard to control, that they
come very close to the borders of insanity and are in
constant fear of going mad. There can be no doubt
neuropathic patients are predisposed to suicide and crime
determined by passion. Chambige, above referred to, had
been tormented by persistent ideas of suicide and the fear
of madness, and his father had committed suicide. It is
not uncommon to hear persons accused of crimes of pas-
sion declare by way of excuse : " I bitterly regret the act
I am charged with ; but I am not always master of
myself, there are times when I cannot restrain myself."
When the hereditary antecedents of these unfortunate
beings are enquired into, they are frequently found to
be of ill-balanced mind and degenerate physique, children
of insane or neuropathic parents ; they are shy, excessively
sensitive, taciturn and suspicious, and witnesses describe
them as very queer, not all there. Exaggerated suscepti-
bility is often the mark of an abnormal nervous condition.
When the accused has acted under the empire of a
morbid condition, of hallucinations and distempered ideas,
he is responsible. Only his responsibility must be con-
sidered as modified, if he presents any defects diminishing
his powers of resistance. But if he has acted under the
empire of a morbid condition accompanied by hallucina-
tions, he should be declared fully responsible.
I cannot allow such a thing as partial responsibility.
Dr. Charpentier, Physician at the Salpétrière, and some
other specialists in mental disease, hold that in certain
2 R
626 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
forms of partial insanity, the patient may be responsible
for crimes having no connection with the particular aberra-
tion that possesses them. " A man who is driven mad by
conjugal jealousy and who commits murder under the in-
fluence of this delirium is irresponsible," says M. Charpentier;
■■" but he is responsible if he is guilty of forgery or swindling,
because there is no connection between those offences and
morbid jealousy." 1 Along with MM. Fabret, Morel, Grie-
singer, Magnan, I believe on the contrary that partial de-
lirium is invariably bound up with a general disturbance
of the reason, a diseased condition of the brain, and that
accordingly it ipso facto implies irresponsibility.
Dr. Lassègue, insisting very justly on the predisposition
to suicide arising from temperament, declares there is no
relation of cause and effect between an act of suicide and
the motive to which it is attributed, that the man who
kills himself through disappointed love was predisposed to
suicide before the disappointment occurred, and that the said
disappointment is not the main cause of his suicide. 1 The
fact of such predisposition is undeniable. Seeing all men
who have disappointments in love do not kill themselves
or others, we are justified in supposing some persons are
more than others predisposed to suicide and crime. The
predisposition to suicide is nothing more nor less than an
organization more than usually sensitive to grief and less
able to bear it, and consequently eager to escape it, —
ferroque avertere dolorem (and to avert calamity by the
steel). The biological cause of suicide is excess of suffer-
ing ; persons driven to desperation say so themselves in
the writings they leave behind. " My grief is too heavy,"
writes one despairing woman, " I cannot bear it any more.
I am going to seek a remedy in death. When you receive
these lines, all that is left of your poor Marie will be
ashes." — " I cannot live separated from X ," writes
another, " my pain is so deep I had rather die."
. It is a great mistake to suppose, as Stendhal did, that
1 Congrès de médecine mentale de Lyon, 1891, p. 183*
- • * Gazette des Hôpitaux, 1865.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 627
what chafacterizes the author of a crime of passion is
•energy ; anger, jealousy, desire of vengeance, seize upon
nervous, irritable individuals, incapable of self-government,
•upon children and women. Such irritability is a sign of
weakness and not of energy. The man who cannot endure
his mistress's unfaithfulness without losing his wits, is not
an energetic man, but a weak one. He who, transported
with fury at the sight of a rival, yields to the impulse to
strike him is not a strong man either. Nor is the forsaken
woman, who weeps and screams and stamps, tears out her
hair, and would like to tear out her false lover's eyes, a
woman of energy, but the reverse. Energy does not
consist in flying in a passion, yielding to every impulse of
the blood and the nerves, submitting to physiological
influences of every sort, without power to resist. Persons
of this violent sort are at bottom weaklings, the slaves of
impulse, victims of debility of will. Here is a recent
instance of morbid jealousy determining a fixed idea of
suicide, as related by the victim of jealousy involved, a
working cabinet-maker, a man of intelligence quite capable
of analyzing his own feelings : " I thought I was losing my
wits altogether. So confused were my ideas I thought my
head was going to burst, my brain was boiling so. What
came of these thoughts? The result was a madman's
notion, one of those ideas that occur only to lunatics, and
I cannot get rid of it. My whole life flashed through my
mind in those few seconds, and I could see nothing all
through it but disappointment and ill fortune; an evil
genius seemed to have consistently pursued me, and be-
fore this black picture, the fatal idea occurred to me to
escape it all by death." — We give another example of the
same thing : " I am utterly incapable of any kind of work,
in one word, I do not know what I want or what I don't
want. ... I am all at sea, and utterly unstrung. One
fixed idea possesses me, which has pursued me for years, —
and that is suicide. Hence my dejection and cowardly
self-abandonment."
Morbid jealousy is capable of inspiring the most extra-
628 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
ordinary acts. A jealous woman, of hysterical tempera-
ment and cunning to the last degree, will invent a thousand
fables, a thousand false charges, each more ridiculous than
the other, to punish her husband, or whoever it is that
excites her enmity. To give an example: a wife cut
herself in a number of places with a knifes and then
accused her husband of giving her the wounds she bad
to show. An enquiry was held, and the woman retracting
the charges she had made, told the Commissary of Police:
" I was mad yesterday ; I love my husband dearly, but I
am jealous, and I wanted to kill myself." We see what
prudence, what discernment, are needful for the Magistrate
who receives such complaints, in order to discriminate their
truth or falsity. It is not enough to know the Criminal
Code to be a good Magistrate; a good Magistrate must
know human nature and the female heart ; he must be a
psychologist and a specialist in insanity. 1 A jealous
woman, with a highly nervous, ill -balanced tempera-
ment, again, is very ready to believe her husband wishes
to get rid of her by poison, so as to be free to take a
mistress or marry a second wife. A prey to the mania of
persecution in its completest form, she will bring the most
unfounded charges against her husband, and will do it in
perfect good faith.
1 A knowledge of mental diseases should be required on the part of all
Magistrates, and a course of study on these subjects instituted with this express
purpose in all the Faculties of Law. Such a course of lectures does exist in
Paris, under the direction of Dr. Dubuisson ; but it ought to be made compul-
sory and more comprehensive. For want of such acquaintance with mental
diseases, the Members of the Bench and Juges d'instruction are unable to
treat cases where examination by a Specialist in insanity is called for. Irre-
sponsible lunatics are condemned to punishment as being responsible for their
actions. According to Dr. Magnan, in the Paris Courts alone 50 insane
persons are condemned on an average every year. Between 1885 and 1890, 281
insane patients, 76 of these suffering from general paralysis, have been received
in the Asylums of the Department of the Seine within short periods after their
condemnation in a Court of Law. — Again, in certain civil matters of great
importance, such as the annulling of testamentary dispositions on the plea of
insanity, the science of mental diseases is equally indispensable for Magistrates ;
the testator being dead, these latter are deprived even of the information
procurable by medico-legal examination.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. Ô2Ç
These false charges, brought by victims of jealousy, are
frequently the result of pure hallucination.
One T , a working plumber, married to a very good
and respectable woman, became exceedingly jealous of
her. He was a man of nervous, excitable disposition, and
the relations between husband and wife soon grew strained.
Suspicious and ready to take offence, he used to play the
spy on her, and ended by believing she was in the habit of
committing acts of bestiality. His wife, insulted and ill-
treated, was forced to leave her husband's roof and sue for
a divorce. On Dec. 5. 1897, the husband hid himself in
the corridor of the house where she was working, and on
her arrival accosted her with the words : " I want to know
what you went to R Street for ? " On her refusing to
answer, he drew a bottle of vitriol from his pocket and
threw the contents in his wife's face. The corrosive fluid
only just touched the intended victim, but burned more
seriously a young girl who was in the corridor at the
moment The culprit instantly took to flight, but was
arrested next day. He made a determined resistance, and
was found to be in possession of a sword-bayonet freshly
sharpened. Questioned as to why he carried such a
weapon, he replied it was to defend himself against a
possible attack on the part of his wife's lover. Before the
Court he bore himself more as accuser than accused. His
examination brought out the fact that he had always
shown a certain strangeness of character. There had been
insanity in his family too. His paternal uncle lost his
reason in 1870; he had two sons serving with the colours,
and receiving no news of them he started out to join them.
His behaviour appearing strange, he was taken for a spy,
arrested and shot. The accused in the present case, on
being examined by a professor of Medical Jurisprudence,
was found to be suffering from morbid jealousy, and to be
dominated by insane ideas combined with hallucinations,
and incapable of controlling his actions.
A change in the character is often a sign of mental
derangement. In a case directed against a husband, who
63O RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
under the influence of jealousy had fired four shots with a
revolver at his wife, I found all the witnesses without
exception declaring the same thing, that the accused man's
character had changed within the last few years. " During
the last three years," his wife stated, " my husband had
changed very much; he seemed to have a grievance against
everybody. . . . Sometimes he would tell me, with tears
in his eyes, * I feel an emptiness in my head, something
bad is going to happen to me; I'm planting plenty of
vines, but I shall get no good of them. . . . You must
have me looked after at Paris by a Specialist . . .
Nothing can be worse than going mad.' " She declared
further: "The day of my son's first communion, my
husband again said to me, 'Do things well ; invite a large
party ; it is the last fête I shall see/ "
Among persons accused of crime who suffer from morbid
jealousy we frequently note hallucinations of sight and
hearing. They believe themselves to see their wife
engaged in criminal conversation with a lover, or imagine
they hear her giving an account of her misdoings. It
was my duty not long since, as President of the Chamber
of Indictment, to hear a case directed against one N ,
who, married to a highly respectable woman, accused her
of having connection with her servant, with neighbours, with
the Curé of the Parish, with her own father ; every day he
was discovering fresh lovers. " I have turned my wife out
of my house," he told the Juge d'instruction, " because she had
relations with my man-servant. They slept twenty-eight
nights running in my bed ; I found this out from my wife,,
who told me the facts in her sleep." The Juge d'instruction
having pointed out to the accused that this confession*
on his wife's part, during her sleep, was a very extra-
ordinary thing, and having asked if he had no other more
convincing proof of her unfaithfulness, the unfortunate
man answered he had found his wife in the stables with
another servant man ; " I did not see them actually lying
together, but I am certain they were engaged in criminal
conversation because, later on, she again confessed it all
DETERMINED . BV PASSION. 63 1
to me in her sleep. One night when I was making her
speak, and reproaching her with her misbehaviour, I said,
4 Suppose I were to shoot you with a gun ? ' — and she
answered, 'We will have you put in a madhouse,' and
then awoke. Another night I questioned her about
another of her lovers ; once more she confessed, always in
her dreams, that she had had criminal relations with him.* 9
His wife having taken refuge with her husband's father, so
as to escape his ill treatment, the husband concluded she
was his father's mistress. One day seeing his mother
leaving her house, while his wife was left alone with his
father, N slipped into the house in order to catch them
flagrante delicto. " I saw the pair of them," he said, " at the
back of the kitchen ; they were standing leaning against a
settle and were kissing each other. I shouted to them,
• Hallo ! my turtle-doves ! ' — and my father turned round
and requested me to leave the room. Then I fired a
revolver shot at him ; my wife ran away, I pursued her
and fired four shots at her. Afterwards, I went home,
put away my revolver and dressed myself, to be in
readiness to give myself up to the Police. I do not regret
what I have done, for it was necessary to avenge my
honour. Only, I hope the wounds I have inflicted are not
serious."
Jealousy moreover may engender the mania of persecu-
tion. Its victim is filled with preternatural suspiciousness
and distrusts all mankind ; he is only too ready to believe
his friends and neighbours are all in league with his wife
against him. If a friend tries to make him hear reason
and convince him his wife's conduct is beyond reproach,
he turns his suspicions upon him and concludes him to
be her accomplice. Nay! more, when after some act of
violence that leads to his arrest, he is questioned by the
Juge (V instruction, he suspects this Official of being in
connivance with her ; he even suspects his Counsel of
being influenced by her beauty, and fees another.
The victim of jealousy often gives way, in order to
deaden his senses, to excessive drinking, which over-
632 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
stimulates his violent tendencies and brings on an en-
feeblement of the brain, diminishing his responsibility.
On March 27. 1897, the Assize Court of the Department
of the Puy-de-Dôme condemned to three years' imprison-
ment one Joseph Passavy, a mason, who under the in-
fluence of jealousy and intoxication had killed his wife's
lover. Exasperated by his wife's misconduct and her
lover's insolence, who boasted openly of his relations with
her, the unfortunate husband gave way to heavy drinking,
and intemperance and grief combined led to intellectual
enfeeblement. One day, when excited by drink, he yielded
to the anger he felt against his wife's lover and murdered
him. In prison he suffered from hallucinations of sight
and hearing, seeing great splashes of blood on the walls
of his cell, being unable to sleep and refusing food. After
being transferred to the Insane Asylum at Clermont, he
recovered his health and asked to be tried at the Assizes,
so as to establish his innocence. His demand was granted,
after he had undergone examination by three Doctors of
Moulins, who declared him to be responsible for his actions.
They found that he presented no signs of degeneration, and
was normally constituted.
Advocates have made inordinate use in Criminal Court
cases of irresistible impulses, which they attribute instinc-
tively to every accused person who has committed a crime
under stress of passion. But, while we must resist these
systematic views which would make irresponsibility almost
universal, we are equally bound to admit there are cases
where, under the influence of a morbid condition, prisoners
have in very truth succumbed to impulses they could not
master. The Law recognizes the existence of irresistible
impulses ; " There is neither crime nor misdemeanour,"
says Article 64 of the Penal Code, "... when the accused
has been constrained by a force he was incapable of re-
sisting." In such cases the irresponsibility is self-evident,
and acquittal a duty. Physicians in Insanity, exercised
by the unjust reproach so often brought against them of
seeing madmen everywhere, do not always see their way
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 633
in these cases to declare clearly and boldly for absolute
irresponsibility, and give their voices for extenuated or
partial responsibility. 1 But disease is more than an ex-
tenuation, it is a justification. Physicians should not allow
themselves to be intimidated by the frivolous criticism of
ignorant people, who blame them for seeing insanity where
they cannot perceive it themselves. The general public,
never having studied mental diseases, entertains utterly
mistaken notions about madness, supposing it to exist
only in conjunction with wildly disordered thoughts and
incoherent words, and entirely ignorant of the terrible
power of hallucinations and the irresistible impulses they
provoke. Consequently it may very well fail to see in-
sanity in cases where specialists know it to exist.
If some medical authorities on insanity err on the side
of timidity in their conclusions, others, inordinately exag-
gerating the importance of exceptional cases, are so rash
as to assert that Jealousy is a genuine form of madness,
bound to involve irresponsibility. Dr. Paul Moreau (of
Tours) looks upon Jealousy as an actual monomania, and
writes : " A passion that is at once violent, exclusive, and
dominant, that forcibly interferes during its continuance
with the exercise of moral freedom, must involve irre-
sponsibility. 2 If this theory were correct, every prison
would have to be shut up, and Gaols transformed into
Lunatic Asylums ; for all crimes are committed under the
1 Dr. Coutagne of Lyons was quite justified in telling his colleagues at a
medical Congress : " A declaration of extenuated irresponsibility must not be
suffered to burke a thorough-going diagnosis." — The Physicians of former
days lent themselves so readily to raillery, that Poets, from Horace, Ovid,
Juvenal and Martial down to Molière, have overwhelmed them with epigrams
that always find an echo in the heart of patients who have not been cured, or
in parents, who make the doctors responsible for the death of a beloved child.
Journalists, Novelists and Dramatic Authors are endeavouring nowadays to
rouse public opinion against the physicians who are specialists in insanity, but
their criticisms are unfounded. No doubt, among doctors as among members
of any other profession, incompetent and untrustworthy men are to be found.
But can anybody suppose that among Barristers there are none but Berryers
and Dufaures, or that all Magistrates possess the character of a Matthieu
Mole and the knowledge and acumen of a d' Aguesseau ?
3 Dr. Paul Moreau (of Tours), La FolU Jalouse, p. 105.
634 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
influence of a violent passion, and every violent passion is
exclusive and dominant, and interferes with moral free-
dom. The good man is he who resists the temptations of
passion ; the vicious man, the criminal, he who yields to
them. The great difficulty, so far as the determination of
responsibility is concerned, is to know when the accused
has been able, and when not able, to resist The presump-
tion is he has been able to resist, so long as he is not
in a morbid condition. But passion does not constitute a
morbid condition, and M. Paul Moreau, recoiling before
the consequences of the principles he has laid down, admits
himself it is impossible to acquit all prisoners who have
committed a crime out of Jealousy.
The most difficult cases to discriminate are those where
the accused is just on the borderland of insanity. Among
men who commit murder out of jealousy there are many
weak-minded individuals, very readily accessible to sugges-
tion. To give an instance, — a workman having told a friend
who was complaining about his wife, " If I had a wife like
that I should throw her in the river," the woman's husband
took the remark seriously, and did throw her into the
water. Suggestion, about which we hear so much in these
days, is no new idea. Shakespeare, for instance, has left a
study of it in the character of Macbeth, driven into crime
by his wife, who suggests the idea to him, and by the pre-
diction of the witches. He has not a thought in the first
instance of murdering Duncan ; he only dreams of the
bliss of being king, and would wish to reign without having
recourse to crime. But seeing chance is not enough to
give him the crown, he admits into his purview, as a pos-
sible eventuality, the necessity of the assassination, and
this notion not being repulsed, ends by filling his whole
mind. " My soul," he says, " wherein the thought of murder
was as yet but a fancy, so shakes my weak humanity
that all the faculties of my being are stifled by the mere
idea. . . . / give way to a suggestion^ of which the dread
image sets my hair on end." — Again both the word and
the idea of suggestion are found in Bossuet; "a holy
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 635
Pope," he writes, "has observed, and after him all the
learned Doctors of the Church, that Temptation attacks
us in three fashions, by suggestion, by delectation and by
consent" 1 — In an unpublished letter of Mirabeau to the
Chevalier de Gassaud, I find the word] suggestion again
occurring ; Mirabeau is reproaching his friend with having
seduced his wife, "who," he writes, "was virtuous pre-
viously to your horrible suggestions." — It is not enough
to have yielded to a suggestion (except in a condition of
hypnotic sleep), to be irresponsible. Othello is responsible
for the murder of Desdemona, in spite of his having been
exposed to Iago's suggestions.
The question is a still more delicate one to decide when
the individual suffering from jealousy is in a state of mind
approximating to the mania of persecution. I have fre-
quently observed how jealous people are in the habit of
declaring themselves provoked by the gibes and laughter
of the objects of their anger ; they are urged to crime by
the belief they are being made fun of. Sometimes it is
the woman they are jealous of, who laughs at them, some-
times it is her lover, sometimes the public generally. One
jealous lover who had killed his mistress, the mother of
two daughters, actually complained that these girls seemed
to be laughing at him. This excessive susceptibility is a
sure sign of a state of mind bordering very closely on
the mania of persecution. One young man killed a girl
he wanted to marry, because she would not look at him,
when she met him, and used to jest about him with her
girlish companions. — Another youthful criminal murdered
a girl he was in love with, because he had seen her laugh-
ingly showing a love letter he had written her to one of
her female friends, and because she had spoken of him as
" a crazy fellow." Extreme sensitiveness like this and fear
of ridicule call for very careful examination, to ascertain
whether the person is or is not responsible for his actions.
Complete irresponsibility can only exist provided the mania
of persecution is well established. Excessive self-love that
1 Élévations sur Us mystèrts % 23rd week, 6th elevation.
636 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
is wounded by a look or a smile cannot make a man
irresponsible. In breaking off engagements, a thing so apt
to lead to quarrels, self-love plays a not inconsiderable
part, and young men have been known to kill their fiancée
on the ground that they have been insulted when they
were sent about their business and laughed at.
True Love is allowed to be a strong reason for admitting
extenuation ; l but we must not delay to add that all crimes
of passion are not crimes of Love. Crimes of true Love,
of high-strung and lofty passion, are rare. In most crimes
of passion there is plenty of brutality and jealous frenzy,
of alcoholism and base avarice, but very little Love, and
often none at all. True Love is not often met with. To
tell a woman, " I will kill you, if you do not submit," is a
sort of love exceedingly like rape. Love and concupiscence
are two different things ; and concupiscence may be ex-
tremely strong without Love having anything to do with
1 This extenuation of guilt may be attained by a special application of
the Bérenger Law. The penalty for assassination being still often o?er
severe, the Presiding Judge of Assize, by breaking up the questions laid before
the Jury, gives them the power of diminishing it. Instead of putting before the
Jury the question : " Is so and so guilty of having on such and such a date and
at such and such a place committed wilful murder on the person of so and so?"
he may break up the charge of murder and put the two following questions :
I. "Is so and so guilty of having on such and such a date, at such and such s
place, wilfully offered violence and wounded so and so?" 2. " Did the said
violence cause death ? " — It is certainly to be regretted that a Jury, in order
to diminish the penalty, should be obliged to eliminate an undisputed fact ; it
would he better to admit the system of ' ' extenuating circumstances in a high
degree." But what is far more regrettable is acquittal, which is a scandal and
an encouragement to crime. A penalty, no matter how much softened, would
be a satisfaction to conscience and a sufficient deterrent ; it is not the length
of the imprisonment that is the important point, but the principle of condem-
nation. Our Legislators have made a mistake in rejecting the system of
" extenuating circumstances " altogether, under the pretext of not weakening the
hands of Justice in the repression of crime ; this is much more likely to happen
by reason of acquittals, which Jurymen agree to because they recoil at pro-
nouncing an over severe sentence. — I fail to understand why Virgil in the
Sixth Book of the s£neid % puts in Tartarus, without making any distinction
between them, all the victims of Love alike, equally the noblest and the
basest ; Evadné is found side by side with Phaedra, Laodamia ^ith Pasiphaé.
A Judge should not follow Virgil's example ; he ought to distinguish the less
guilty, graduate punishments and make them proportionate to the offence.
DETERMINED BY TASSION. 63/
the matter. Crimes of rape and criminal offences are deter-
mined by the violence of concupiscence and nothing else.
The males of animals, no less than men, maltreat and
kill the females of their species that resist them. Love
which tries to win possession with knife and revolver is
only a counterfeit of Love ; for true Love is the very op-
posite of brutality, it does not hurt and curtail the liberty
of the person loved, but rather submits and sacrifices itself
to the will of the object of its affection.
Crimes of debauchery are not crimes of love. Prisoners
who have killed a woman who resisted their attempts, are
often heard trying to excuse themselves by saying, " I was
madly in love ... I loved her to madness." Yet cross-
examination will reveal the fact that these madmen of love
had other intrigues on hand at the same time or spent the
night before with another woman. A farmer, owning his
own land, a brutal, dissipated fellow, who made it his amuse-
ment to seduce the young farm-girls he hired for agricul-
tural work, and used to abandon them when he had made
them mothers, was so exasperated at the resistance one of
them made to his attempts, that he lay in wait for her
one evening in a lonely place and with a blow of his bill-
hook very nearly severed her head from her body. As his
victim lay on the ground, he threw himself savagely upon
her and struck five more times with the bill-hook. On the
Presiding Judge at his trial reproaching him with his
abominable cruelty, he made the same answer, — he was
mad with love !
Debauchery makes men especially commit monstrous
crimes. In 1891, for instance, of 571 persons accused of
rape and criminal assaults on minors, 567 were men and
only four women. The report of the Ministry of Justice
issued in 1895, giving the facts observed for 1892, notes
an increase in the number of rapes and criminal assaults
on children. Little girls are torn, bitten, disembowelled,,
strangled, thrown into the water. Vile debauchees attack
them like wild beasts. Studying these abominable crimes
at close quarters, crimes of which the details cannot be
6$$ RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
reproduced in a book, we are appalled at the horrible
cruelty profligacy leads to, and ask ourselves if man, who is
more salacious and more cruel than other animals, is really
made in the image of God or of the beast. It is obviously
an exaggeration to define man with Taine as " a salacious
and ferocious Creature," for side by side with these bestial
appetites he possesses wondrous intellectual and moral
faculties that connect him with a higher world. But still
only theorists, ignorant of the realities of life,, can assert
human nature to be good fundamentally, and deny the
existence in it of a sensual and cruel beast, ready at any
moment to indulge in the wildest excesses, if it is not held
down. This beast each man has within him may turn into
a hog or a tiger, or even both together ; some have within
them a hog, others a tiger, others hog and tiger in one 1
Profligates in fact easily become murderers. Profligacy
provokes murder. We read in Livy (Bk. xxxix. § 3, 16) of
a terrible association of debauchees and murderers, count-
ing as many as 7000 members. Ferocity was so closely
allied with debauchery in the festivals of the Bacchanals,
that if any one exhibited repugnance to undergo the
infamies committed at these assemblages of men and
women, he was instantly put to death. The Bible relates
the violation of the Levite's wife by a company of good-
for-nothings, under circumstances of cruelty identical with
what we hear of only too frequently in Criminal cases of the
present day. The young ruffians who are guilty of crimes of
passion are often prostitutes' bullies, and even such fellows
-will talk the language of passion and threaten to kill the
unfortunates who try to part with them. " If you leave
1 The prisons constructed to lodge these lecherous and ferocious animals
are neither less numerous nor less spacious since modern man has begun to
boast of the progress of civilization. Below the good sentiments that educa-
tion, family life and Religion instil into civilized men, there is always an under-
lying stratum of sensuality and cruelty closely connected with sheer animalism.
Explain this as we may, by original sin or descent from brutish ancestors,
there, is no doubt about the fact. No doctor, or priest or magistrate of any
experience can be unaware of how much sensuality and cruelty lies hid under
•civilized exteriors, and sometimes behind the-' roost pleasing countenances-
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 639
me, I shall kill you," declared one of these, who appeared
as a prisoner in my Court, and on being questioned, he
replied like a hero of Romance : " Cannot you see I love
the woman madly ? "
Again there are so-called crimes of passion which are
in simple fact only crimes of alcoholic intoxication. Profli-
gacy is often found united with intemperance, the result
being the commission of crimes of passion under the
double influence of alcohol and sensuality. Intemperance
is favourable to impulses of anger and revenge, besides
being a cause of sensual over-stimulation as well. Dramas
of jealousy are often dramas of alcohol ; a large number
of such dramas take their origin in drinking shops, where
men and women of the lower class meet together to drink,
sing and quarrel. Scenes of jealousy break out among
them, when they are heated with drink, and often end in
serious scuffles and even murder. An instance is afforded
by a case lately tried at the Assize Court of the Bouches-
du-Rhône. Several groups of men and women were to-
gether in a drinking bar at Marseilles. One of the women,
who had drunk too much, seeing her lover looking in a
marked way at another woman, is seized suddenly with
a furious fit of jealousy, goes up to the other woman and
slaps her face ; the latter retorts and scratches her ad-
versary's cheeks. The latter's lover, seeing the blood flow,
springs savagely on the woman he had been casting sheep's
eyes at a moment before, and stabs her through the lungs.
It is drink again that leads to so many scenes of jealousy
in irregular households. Jealousy is inordinately stimulated
by intemperance. The victim of jealousy drinks to drown
his griefs and worries, and the habit further adds to his
irritability. Then when he ends by doing murder on the
.object of his jealousy or his rival, the crime is set down
exclusively to the account of passion, whereas this so-called
crime of passion may really and truly be very largely
attributed to Intemperance.
A husband or lover, addicted to drink, who kills his wife
or his mistress in a quarrel that has nothing to do with
64O RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
jealousy, often tries to excuse his crime by giving it the
character of a crime of passion ; he feigns jealousy, spreads
some scandal about his wife's behaviour, attributes some
guilty intrigue to her.
Prostitutes and their bullies quarrel, fight and kill one
another very often from jealousy, after indulging in alco-
holic excesses. In Paris, a section of the female population
lives by prostitution, whether from inadequate wages or
through idleness, and a section of the working-class popu-
lation lives in chronic alcoholism. In this world of gay
women and drunkards, suicides and crimes of passion are
extremely common.
Just as there are crimes of passion falsely so described,
there are suicides of passion in the same category. For
instance, I find the formal report of a Commissary of
Police classifying as a suicide for love that of a rag*
picker, a widower of sixty- four, who had entered into
relations with the widow of a cobbler and was thinking
of marrying her. The man was a drunkard, who used to
spend his wages, ten francs a day, in drink. One day,
drinking with a comrade, he said to the latter: M I am
going to ask Mme. X to marry me, and if I don't
succeed, I shall hang myself." Next day he was found
hanged. In a case like this it was Intemperance surely
rather than Love the Commissary should have attributed
the man's suicide to. — To give another instance. In Sep-
tember 1896 at Paris, the Commissary of Police notes the
suicide of a workman, a widower of fifty, and father of
three children, who in despair at his mistress having de-
serted him, swallowed the contents of a phial of vitrioL
On being carried to the Hospital and there questioned by
the Commissary, he gave the following account of himself:
" I had been living for two years with the woman X ,
when she left me a few days ago. This gave me the
deepest grief, and I tried to end my days." Now this
suicide might certainly seem to be attributable to despair
arising from disappointed love. But it appeared on further
enquiry that the man and his mistress were in the habit
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 64 1
of constantly getting drunk together and quarrelling per-
petually, that one day the woman, having been beaten
rather harder than usual, ran away and left her lover,
and that the latter, vexed at her departure, redoubled
his potations; for the three days preceding his suicide,
he never left off drinking.
Alcoholism has made appalling progress in Paris, and
developed to an incredible degree the worst instincts
of profligacy and violence. While I was Judge at the
Correctional Tribunal of the Department of the Seine, I
found fully a half of all offences might be attributed to
drunkenness. At every sitting we had to judge prisoners
who under the empire of alcoholism had committed public
outrages on decency and serious acts of violence. These
drunkards, who attack, like brute beasts, the members of
the Police force, their neighbours, their comrades, give way
to the same violence towards their wives and mistresses,
under the influence of jealousy and strong drink. Alco-
holism naturally leading to ideas of suicide and murder,
the drunkard tells his wife, " I am going to kill you, and
myself afterwards." It is impossible from a distance to
form any idea of the brutish degradation of a section of
the Parisian population due to alcoholism. Habits of in-
toxication have now extended to women. Drunken women
quarrel with their lovers, and in the paroxysm of their
anger throw themselves out of window. If they survive
the fall, they never fail to falsely accuse their lover of
having pitched them out.
In crimes of passion so called, love sorrows are often
further complicated with questions of money. Murder
or suicide results, not only because the heart is too full
of love, but because the purse is too empty of coin.
Women who avenge their desertion by murdering the
faithless lover, invariably describe themselves as the
victims of Love. Nevertheless there are Ariadnés whose
grief is appeased by money, and whose despair only takes
violent shape if the rupture is not duly accompanied by
metallic arguments to comfort wounded feelings. — How
2 s
642 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
can Love be called the determining factor of these in-
timacies of the moment, contracted in the street or at
a public ball by young men in search of pleasure, with-
out a second thought, and by artful women who rather
seduce their youthful admirers than are seduced by them?
True Love does not run the streets, still less does it fre-
quent the public ' balls, and we are justified in holding
those who frequent such places to be neither Juliettes nor
Heloïses. It is impossible to regard as victims of Love
these women of light morals, who after engaging in an
ephemeral intrigue, claim substantial indemnities on its
being broken off and kill the lover of a day, if the sum
offered is considered insufficient There are some crimes
of passion which are at bottom nothing but crimes of
greed. Sharp practice has a part to play in love no
less than in finding surety; Love Is to all appearance
the motive of a criminal act, when all the while the
true cause is greed.
Greed often assumes the mark of Love or combines with
it. Young men poorly provided with the world's goods
seek rich girls in marriage, pretending they are violently
in love with them ; if their suit is rejected, they experience
such profound vexation that they revenge themselves by
acts of violence. I have myself observed the case of a young
farmer, who had sought a wealthy heiress in marriage and
had had good hopes of winning her ; so disappointed was
he when her parents finally refused, and so chagrined at
seeing so advantageous a match slip between his fingers,
that he enticed the girl to an assignation, and after calling
upon her to accept him as her husband, inflicted a very
serious wound on her in the region of the abdomen. To
give another example. A baker who after his widowhood
had fallen violently in love with his mother-in-law, who
was at the head of a large grocery business, asked her
to marry him ; on her refusal, he killed her and fired several
revolver shots at himself. — In imitation of the women who
throw vitriol over their enemies, we see forsaken lovers
avenge themselves in this terrible way, not so much in
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 643
despair at the disappointment of their love as from vexation
at losing an advantageous connection. Quite lately, at
Nice, an Algerian trader, a man of no property, entered
into relations with a dealer in gloves, a woman possessed
of some means. The latter, having very soon found out
that her admirer was more in love with her fortune than
her person, was for showing him the door. On this, he
took vengeance by throwing vitriol at her, burning her on
the neck. It is no uncommon thing for profligates to
seduce women, in order to get at once pleasure and profit
from the connection. Such fellows may apply to them-
selves the verses :
" Je ne suis pas de ces amants vulgaires ;
J'accommode ma flamme au bien des mes affaires." l
In the case of working-men, who are shown the door
after the failure of a marriage at first all settled but eventu-
ally broken off, disappointed love is complicated with the
vexation of having gone to useless expense. A workman
who had killed his fiancée, told the Juge (Tinstruction :
*' The girl informed me she was no longer willing to marry
me, and yet she had made me launch into expenses with a
view to marriage. ... In face of her refusal, I wished to
return her the dress and the shoes I had bought for her,
expecting her to repay me the money they had cost me ;
but she declined. This further increased my irritation ;
anger filled my heart, and I did the unfortunate thing you
know of."
The crime of the widow Gras, who threw vitriol in her
lover's face, is not a crime of love, but one of greed. The
woman in question was thirty-five and without fortune,
when she made the acquaintance of L. R , a man of
twenty, who loved her passionately for several years.
Fearing her lover's affection would diminish, and he would
one day leave her, she conceived the idea of blinding him
by throwing vitriol in his eyes, so as to prevent his leaving
1 " I am not one of these commonplace lovers ;
I suit my flame to the profit of my fortune."
644 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
her, that she might always have him by her side and
enjoy his fortune. When the young man, who received
the contents of a cup of vitriol right in the face, learned
the motive of his mistress's act, the moral grief he felt was
even more cruel than the physical pain caused by the acid.
He told the Juge ^instruction, "When I received the
vitriol in my eyes, I uttered not cries, but howls, it is
impossible to describe the agonies I suffered. Well ! when
I knew it was my mistress who had burned me so cruelly,
I experienced an unspeakable pang and heartache, which
still causes me atrocious sufferings. Still, these are perhaps
less keen than what I felt, when I realized that so much
unkindness and cruelty can be hidden in the heart of a
woman I had never done anything but good to. I did not
sleep a wink for thirty nights, and I only wonder a man
can survive such grief and pain. Now I am blind. I
could have understood her killing me ; but she has shown
far greater cruelty in letting me live on in the condition she
has reduced me to, and with the future that is before me."
So atrocious was the woman's wickedness that previous to
the discovery of her guilt, she had installed herself at her
lover's bedside, to nurse him better, as she pretended, but
in reality to counteract the medical treatment and prevent
his cure. All this time, and after her arrest, she carefully
studied the fluctuations of the Money Market
Adultery and greed of money are also very often
associated. Men of mature years, who marry young
wives, are often obliged in order to win the consent of the
latter, to make provision for them in the marriage con-
tract This provision being contingent on the husband's
death, the wife kills the husband, so as to enter into im-
mediate possession of the advantages in question and enjoy
them along with her lover. It is the over-hasty proceed-
ings of the adulterous wife and her lover the sooner to
enjoy the husband's fortune that usually betray them.
The lover, if he is a workman or a farm-labourer, gives up
vyorking, goes shooting, visits the public-house, launches
into expenditure that attracts attention, helps the wife
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 645
in the proceedings she takes with the Notary in order to
get in her husband's succession. — The master, well on in
years, who gives pecuniary advantages to his housekeeper
in his will runs similar risks to those attending the old
husband of a young wife. I have myself known the case
of such a servant, who after sharing her master's bed, got
up to strike him dead and then set fire to the house that he
might perish in the flames.
Again it is a mistake to regard as crimes of passion all
the murders committed by husbands who, separated from
their wives, beseech the latter to renew cohabitation with
them, and on their refusal kill them, and then try to kill
themselves. Love is not the determining factor in these
crimes ; the truth is, the husbands, having come to the end
of their resources, wish to renew cohabitation, in order to
get hold once more of the administration of their wives'
fortunes.
In Paris money difficulties are so pressing, that both in
suicides and crimes of passion, the pecuniary question often
plays as important a part as passion itself. Take the
instance of a young woman who had two lovers, one whom
she loved, the other who loved her and paid the piper.
The latter, discovering what was going on, broke off the
connection. His mistress in despair committed suicide by
means of charcoal fumes, after writing the following letter
to the man she loved : " I wished to write to you before
dying. My friend is leaving me ; he has found out I had
you too ; all is over between us, he told me. After this,
why should I go on living? I should have to look out
other protectors and go on the loose ; it isn't worth the
trouble, really. Receive a last kiss from your darling, and
farewell 1 From one who is going to die loving you fondly."
There are also a certain number of women who kill them-
selves when they suffer love disappointments complicated
with money difficulties, or when money failing them, on the
death of their lover, they cannot make up their minds to
work. "A certain G ," says a Police report, "lived for
several years with the Baron X , who died three months
646 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
ago. His death left G — — in distress. Her state of
mental discouragement was extreme; she felt genuine
grief for her lover's death ; I urged her to take up some
occupation, but she had not the necessary energy and
ended by taking her life by means of charcoal fumes." In
Paris a large number of women, belonging to poor families
or families of country origin, attain by a life of gallantry
to a condition of ease and luxury. When these easy cir-
cumstances are changed by the death or desertion of their
lbver, some of these kill themselves, less from the pangs of
love than in consequence of their loss of comfort and well-
being. They would rather die than work.
Nor is it always the sentiment of honour which arms the
husband's hand, when he strikes down his wife or her lover.
There are husbands who endure with cynical indifference
for long years the lucrative misconduct of their wives, who
eat, drink and live under the same roof with the latter's
lover; then one day, they are suddenly seized with a fit
of jealousy and kill the man. — In other cases the com-
plaisant husband kills, to avoid being killed himself. This
is what the Emperor Claudius did, who after long putting
up with Messalina's scandalous life, had her put to death
on learning that she was secretly married to Caius Silius.
Other offences habitually classed among crimes of
passion are abduction and bigamy, and Counsel never
fail to invoke the excuse of passionate attachment in
favour of persons accused of these crimes. Neverthe-
less, these crimes also are more often inspired by greed
of money than by love. Old French Law laid down
very severe penalties against rape by seduction, in order
to " hinder crimes of rape from serving in the future
as means and steps towards arriving at advantageous
* marriages." l Not unfrequently the seducer is less moved
by the charms of the fair girl he abducts than by those of
her parents' cash-box ; abduction is his means of over-
coming the opposition her family offers to the match.
In several cases I have tried, the seducer cynically ad-
1 Declaration of 1 639.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 647
mitted he had dishonoured the girl with the idea that
her parents would then be obliged to consent to her
marrying him. The Law could scarcely punish too
severely so odious a piece of calculation. A young
workman in poor circumstances whose notice had been
attracted by the daughter of a rich landowner, deter-
mined to carry her off. To obtain access to her, he got
himself engaged as a servant in her father's house, and
by his adroit manoeuvres, and alluring looks and speeches,
succeeded eventually in touching the simple-minded and
credulous young girl's heart. How many tutors, Music
and Dancing Masters, and the like, seduce their pupils
less out of passion, like Abelard, than from mere greed !
By way of excuse, they pretend they were seduced them-
selves by the girl, who is often a mere* child! These
passionate lovers are possessed only by the passion of
money.
The crime of bigamy is committed sometimes by a
married man who, violently in love with an individual
whose favours he cannot win except by marriage, gives
himself out as single. But, very often on the other hand,
the bigamist is a thief who contracts a second marriage
solely with the object of appropriating the woman's securi-
ties and then bolting. Marriage for him is simply a means
of swindling ; he gets married to steal more conveniently.
I have known a husband first poison his wife to inherit
her property, and afterwards poison his son, who formed
an obstacle to a second union, in order to marry a very
rich woman.
Countless are the crimes that masquerade as crimes of
passion, but are really and truly only crimes of greed, pro-
fligacy, self-love, loveless jealousy or vanity. Often the
authors of so-called crimes of passion only feel a craving
after notoriety. " Remember the Newspapers will talk
about me," one of them said ; while another murderer
from motives of jealousy declared in the same vein : " In
a few days you will hear plenty about me." So too the
revenge of women forsaken by husband or lover is often
648 RESPONSIBILITY IN CASES OF CRIMES
carried out under dramatic circumstances which prove the
motive to have been rather a wish for notoriety than the
despair of a broken heart. Before shooting their lover,
girls will make public announcement of their intentions,
declaring, " The Newspapers will be full of it."
This longing to attract attention is common among
hysterical subjects, inducing them sometimes to play the
comedy of a pretended suicide. Till within the last few
years hysteria was supposed to be an exclusively female
complaint. But it is now established that men may suffer
from it. Though much more common in large towns, it is
also seen in the country. The responsibility of hysterical
patients must be estimated according to the degree of
hysteria. Pronounced hysteria may involve complete
irresponsibility* slight hysteria a considerable diminution
of responsibility. Women even slightly affected in this
way, while generally showing lively spirits and brilliant
parts, possess little will power, and are liable to sudden
impulses and bursts of anger, which they find it extremely
difficult to control.
The Works of Specialists in Mental Disease demonstrate
the necessity of extending the sphere of irresponsibility,
and that among the authors of crimes there are more victims
of disease than used to be supposed. Magistrates multiply
medical examinations in doubtful cases, in order to have
the assistance of mental science. But, on the other hand,
its professors must beware of blindly following a system,
and must guard carefully against exaggeration. They
must not confound vice voluntarily acquired with in-
voluntary disease, or regard habits of profligacy and
drunkenness leading to the frenzies of jealousy and anger
as fatally determined consequences of temperament, as
Dr. Buchner would have us believe.
We must not suffer Science falsely so called to set itself
up in contradiction with Law and Conscience, or melt
in foolish commiseration over the Criminal who is really
responsible for his vices, telling him as Jocasta might
Œdipus: "Alas! alas! unhappy man, for this is the only
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 649
name I can give you, and I will call you no other.
Guilty I could never name you. Tis not you are
guilty ; 'tis your brain that is malformed, 'tis the society
that has reared you. Virtue and vice are products as
much as sugar and vitriol. 1 ' 1
Man is irresponsible only if he is corporeally and
mentally unsound. But mental disease and irresponsi-
bility are exceptional. The general rule is health and
responsibility.
The study of mental diseases has led a certain number
of medical Specialists in Insanity to deny moral responsi-
bility altogether, even in persons of sound mind. But
Pinel, Baillarger, Morel of Rouen, Foville, Brière de Bois-
mont, Legrand du Saulle, Lassègue, Tardieu, Delasiauve,
Fournet, Fabret, Dagonnet, etc., have on the contrary
made madness consist in the loss of free will, and have
admitted irresponsibility only in the case of men suffering
from disease.
Crimes of passion falsely so called should not be allowed
to benefit by the pity and indulgence inspired by crimes
of Love. Even Love itself, though it may extenuate guilt,
must never be suffered to justify crime. The victims of
Jealousy and amorous Vengeance have as good a right
to find protection in the Law as those of greed or
hate. Whether due to passion or not, Crime is always
Crime.
1 This formula, enunciated as a profound scientific truth, was employed for
the first time by Balzac, in his Peau de Chagrin, being placed in the mouth of
an intoxicated vagabond. {Édition Charpentier, 1845, p. 69.)
CONCLUSION.
MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME DETERMINED BY
PASSION.
" Yes ! Love is a mighty master, but forget not he leads us astray,
and that he dwells in the least noble part of our being.* — Euripidxs.
AFTER demonstrating the many and complex causes,
psychological, biological, social and literary, of suicides
and crimes of passion, I think it advantageous to draw
the conclusion resulting from this study, in which I have
intentionally multiplied observations, because these appear
to me more true and more instructive than general reflec-
tions. I propose, therefore, to point out the means which
seem to me best adapted to prevent crimes of passion.
' No doubt there will always be such, but it is certainly
within the power of society to diminish their number.
It is a serious mistake to say with Alfred de Musset :
" Aimer est le grand point ; qu* importe la maitresse ! " l
On the contrary, it is the manner of loving that is the great
point. What matters, is to know how we love and whom
we love, is not to confound Love, a word sadly profaned,
but always a holy thing, with concupiscence, with caprice
of the senses and the fancy, with bestial passion, engender-
ing hate and anger, the furies of jealousy and revenge. It
is not true Love that sets the knife and revolver to work ;
it is sensual love that makes men criminals. The im-
portant thing is to love a good woman, — "To marry when
one is young and healthy, to choose a good-natured,
honest, healthy girl, to love her with all one's heart and
1 " To love is the great point ; what matters the mistress ! M
650
MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME. 65 1
all one's might, to make her a trusty companion and a
fruitful mother, to work hard to bring up the children and
•leave them at death the fair example of one's life, — there
we have the truth. All the rest is error, crime or in-
sanity." x Outside of marriage, drunkenness is at the
beginning of passion, bitterness at the end ; we believe
ourselves on the road to happiness when we are very often
going to find only grief and calamity, suicide or even crime :
" Principium dulce est, sed finis am oris amara.
Laeta venire Venus, tristis abire solet" * — OviD.
If only the great poet (Alfred de Musset), who started
for Venice with an adored, but fickle mistress, had loved
a true and devoted companion, he would not have returned
from Italy with "a sick body, a dejected spirit, a bleeding
heart;" he would not have ruined his genius and his
gaiety.
It is a fallacy, then, to declare with Propertius, omnis
amor magnus. All loves are not great. If there are noble
. passions, there are ignoble ones as well. If in pure hearts
Love rouses the most generous sentiments, if to use Plato's
expression, it gives wings to the soul and makes it capable
of any and every self-sacrifice, it may also, in souls of
coarser fibre, stir the most perverse instincts and make a
. man capable of every kind of crime.
Human Love is wilder and more intemperate than that
of animals. What jealousy ! What hate ! What treachery !
What cowardice! — all originating in Love! To love a
young girl without wedding her is to rob her of honour and
happiness, to drive her perhaps to abortion, infanticide, or
prostitution. To love a married woman is to deceive her
husband, it may be a friend, to bring calamity upon a
whole family, to dishonour a man's own children, to hate
1 A. Dumas fils % Preface to the Fils naturel.
* " The beginning is sweet, but the end of Love it bitter. Venus is ever
wont to come in joy, but depart in sorrow." — "What is it that men call
Love?" asks Phaedra in Euripides' Tragedy of that name. "The sweetest
thing there is, my child, and at the same time the bitterest," replies the
Muse.
652 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
and perhaps kill a rival. Love outside of marriage cannot
then be counted on to purify humanity, to teach women
purity and sincerity, and men goodness and gentleness.
For Love makes adulterous wives who poison their
husbands, unnatural mothers who forsake their children
to go off with a lover, fathers who ruin their family to
satisfy a mistress's caprices, girls who let themselves be
seduced and kill their parents with grief and shame. How
many men has Love made forgetful of every tie, of honour,
friendship, country, family ! How many employés cheat
their masters, how many subordinate officials commit
breaches of confidence and forgeries, for the sake of
winning some woman's love ! Under the sway of passion,
doctors abuse their patients, priests their penitents, high
functionaries young women employed in their offices. 1
u For how many unhappy women," said Bourdaloue, ** has
not the necessity to petition an immoral Judge been a
snare and a temptation?"
Poets and Novelists, therefore, strangely deceive them-
selves when they represent Love as a means of purification,
an instrument of rehabilitation, when they exclaim with
George Sand, "Think you, a love or two sufficient to
exhaust and wither a strong soul ? . . . Tis a fire that
tends ever to rise higher and higher, purer and purer."
But it is a fire that likewise tends to sink lower and lower,
to burn blacker and blacker and flicker out in mire and
blood. If it burns outside the domestic hearth, it destroys
everything, and leaves a heap of ruins in the family and in
society.
What purifies mankind is not passion, as the Poets and
Novelists assert, but love of country, love of humanity,
pity for the poor and for little children, respect for un-
happy women who gain their bread so painfully, goodness
and friendship systematically pursued. These sentiments
do not originate in a chance meeting, the exchange of a
1 The Head of an Academy told me of a certain Department of his institu-
tion, in which a large number of governesses had been ruined by Politicians
whom they had visited to obtain recommendations.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 653
glance, a physical impression ; they come from the soul,
and are felt only by upright hearts.
Doubtless the Poets have done well in displaying the
moral transformations Love brings about sometimes. But
Love is not enough to transform a criminal into a hero.
A scamp in love remains a scamp still. Love does not
purify him, it only makes him more ready for crime. Just
as in a noble soul all is noble, in a base soul all is base,
even Love. Pascal, depicting the beauties of Love, has
written : " A man is elevated by this passion, and becomes
all greatness." But a man may be lowered also by the same
passion, and become all baseness. Humanity is still far
from the ideal Love that Poets sing of. Love seldom turns
men into angels, though it often changes them into brutes ;
it makes more madmen than sages, more murderers than
heroes. It often makes lovers cowardly and cruel, friends
hypocrites and traitors, women adulteresses and poisoners,
husbands monsters of jealousy and murderers. Love may
be the charm of life, if it is in due accord with reason and
the laws of society ; but it becomes its torment and its
shame when it claims to be superior to duty. To make
Love accord with duty, that is to bring it into harmony
with marriage, is the surest way to escape the tragic
consequences that are so apt to follow from an irregular
situation.
He who places himself in a false position cannot tell
where he is going ; he is taking a leap in the dark, into
the surprises and catastrophes of life, into pain and suffer-
ing, and maybe into the road that leads to suicide and
crime. He wishes to stop, but cannot always succeed, for
he is hurried on by the force of circumstances, which drag
him where he never thought to go at the commencement
of his passion. One step outside the path of duty may
bring a man, and still more a woman, to the Morgue, the
gaol or the hospital, for the first slip leads to others, each
more serious and more tragic than the last. The girl who
yields to love without marriage is running blindfold to
meet calamity that is surely lying in wait for her, though
654 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
as yet unseen. She is exposing herself to the risks of a
scandalous pregnancy, of desertion, of temptations to com-
mit abortion or infanticide, or else, as the only alternative,
to a lonely and unsuccoured motherhood. If she revolts
against the cruelty of her desertion, she is tempted to avenge
the wrong her faithless lover has done her by murder ; if her
heart is too tender for revenge, if she chooses rather to
weep and forgive, she is drawn to suicide, that she may
put an end to her sufferings. In this wise the Love that
seemed at first divine and promised her so great a bliss,
brings her at last to kill her child, or kill her lover, or else
kill herself. Infanticide, murder and suicide, these are the
three alternatives that await the end of her love idyll for the
poor girl who has been seduced. 1 In the case of a married
woman the consequences of adultery may be either the mur-
der of the husband by the lover with the complicity of the
unfaithful wife, or the murder of the lover and the wife by the
husband. It is not enough then to cry with Ovid : " Friend
i Furthermore, the girl who allows herself to be seduced runs the risk of
being murdered by her lover, when she claims fulfilment of his promise of
marriage to her, or when she becomes pregnant. Such crimes are not com*
mon ; still I have known two or three instances. Here is an account of a
crime of this kind as given by the lover, a man named Roure, under examina-
tion. "It is four or five years since I became acquainted with Rose
D , who was then a well conducted and well brought up girl. There had
even been talk of a marriage between us ; but this could not be carried out,
on account of my parents' opposition to the match. Before long we began
to live together ; and for some time we were happy. But within the last
year and a half her character grew very difficult. She made every effort to
induce me to marry her, and as I was unable to agree, we had frequent quarrels
in the course of which she used to reproach me with having allured her from
the path of virtue. I had long thought of breaking off our relations, but she
would not consent at any price. Existence became unendurable. I offered
Rose a very considerable sum, but she refused. In this state of affairs, I con-
ceived the idea of making an end of it all, by killing her. This notion ger-
minated in my mind from the beginning of the present month ; I thought
about it every day. Finally, last Tuesday, I made up my mind to carry it
out. That evening I supped with Rose. During the meal we quarrelled a
little, after which we spent the evening together, each reading a book without
troubling the other. Rose went to bed pretty early ; she went on reading in
bed for some time, and presently went to sleep. I on the other hand kept
awake, sitting in an arm-chair near the fire, a book in my hand. But my mind
was quite full of the deed I was going to do. Eventually, towards two o'clock
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 655
of peace, oh, Love, thou holdest murder in abhorrence . . .
be satisfied to draw tears, without having to bear the
reproach of anyone's death." We must avoid fake situa-
tions, if we do not wish to shed or make others shed both
tears and blood ; for there are some situations which lead
almost infallibly to a catastrophe. People think, at first
embarking on the stream of tender dalliance, they are
about to take a happy voyage between flowery banks ; but
soon the flowers disappear to make way for thorns, be-
dabbled with blood, and the voyage ends in tears and
despair and rage, and a fierce desire for death or revenge.
Of the erstwhile merry crew, some end in suicide and mad-
ness, others in vengeance and crime. What an awakening
after the sweet dreams at starting! What was wanted
that Marguerite should never have had to reproach herself
with her mother's death, and those of her brother and her
babe ? Only that, resisting Faust's allurements, she should
in the morning, I blew out my lamp and by the light of the street lamp outside
I crept up to the bed where my mistress lay asleep. I passed a handkerchief
rapidly round her neck and drew it tight. She struggled violently. At one
moment I had no strength left and let go the handkerchief; on this she
screamed, but not loud enough to be heard, and tried to jump out of bed, but
I held her down, then picked up the handkerchief again and finished off my
work. She still tried to defend herself, but I drew tighter yet. The struggle
did not last a minute, for her strength and power of resistance diminished in
proportion as I tightened the knot. I had got on the bed and knelt there in
such a way as to master her. Very soon she uttered a groan and I knew she
was dead." His crime accomplished, the murderer took to flight. Arrived at
Orange, he went to a gunsmith's, bought a double-barrelled pistol, got them
to load it an£ went to an hotel to blow out his brains. Only succeeding in
wounding himself, he sent for the Commissary of Police to confess his crime
and undergo arrest. — One of my colleagues told me how he once had to try
a man who, wishing to be rid of his mistress because he had got her with
child, proposed a sail on the sea and drowned her. — A well-to-do landowner,
unsuccessful in his attempt to procure abortion in a young servant girl who
was pregnant through him, cried in a passion : " If she won't do one thing,
let her do the other,— let her burst ! " and eventually poisoned her with
strychnine. — To escape his obligations towards the girl he has seduced and
made pregnant and the child in her womb, the seducer urges the unhappy
creature to bring about abortion. If the child comes into the world, he
incites, often almost forces, the mother to kill it. — What a host of crimi-
nal miscarriages and infanticides, of which women alone bear the responsi-
bility, while the chief offenders escape all pains and penalties entirely !
656 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
have reserved her love for an honest man, who would have
made her his lawful wife.
To place oneself in a false situation is to run the risk
of loss of repose and honour, both one's own and other
people's. The "situation à trois," which leads up to so
many comic scenes on the Stage, is often fertile in tragic
incidents when it comes to real life ; it is responsible for
Werther's suicide and Saint- Preux's intention of drowning
himself along with Mme. de Wolmar. How many young
men, who expected to find nothing but simple happiness
in a young married woman's friendship, have glided like
Goethe's hero unawares into the temptation of murdering
the husband ! They thought at first merely to enjoy the
distraction of a harmless flirtation ; but presently their
heart was touched, they learned to love and could not bear
to live without the object of their affection, they grew
jealous of the husband. At length, one day, like Werther,
they awake horrified at the murderous thoughts that cross
their minds from time to time. "When I thus lose myself
in my reveries," Werther says, " I cannot help the thought :
Why ! if Albert were to die, you would be !.. . she could
... I pursue my wild fancy, till it brings me to the brink
of an abyss, and I draw back shuddering." Others, under
similar circumstances, do not draw back on the brink of
crime.
How many married women, who wished at first to draw
the line at a refined affection, have fallen eventually into
adultery and from that into even greater sins 1 At the
first commencement of the attraction she feels for another
than her husband, the married woman who yields to it
recoils with horror at the mere thought of attempting her
husband's life. But before long her character becomes
modified, her indifference towards her husband becomes
hatred, and if her husband, by his jealousy and suspicions,
becomes an obstacle interfering with her passion, the idea
of suppressing the said obstacle presents itself to her mind
and is not rejected.
It was of this lightning rapidity with which unforeseen
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 657
consequences arise out of a false situation that Ovid
exclaims at the beginning of the Remédia Amoris :
" Principiis obsta, sero medicina paratur." *
The tempests of the heart are like the tempests of the
sea, beginning with a wind that at first only whitens the
waves; presently the gale increases, the waves roll in
heights and hollows, and soon " the sea can no more con-
tinue calm, and its waves dash on the shore with salt and
turbid foam." 2 Passion becomes violent, exacting, imperi-
ous, because it was not resisted at first ; if once allowed to
grow, it gets beyond all mastery.
The Latin Poet who taught the Roman youth the Art
of Love, surprised to find amorous idylls ending in
sanguinary dramas, seeks to quench the fire he has
kindled : " Why," he says, " suffer a lover to squeeze his
neck in a noose, and hang himself from the top of a lofty
beam ? or that another plunge in his inwards a murderous
weapon ? . . . Begin by flying idleness ; idleness gives
birth to love and feeds it, once it is born. . . . Work there-
fore, and you will be saved. Sloth, sleep prolonged beyond
measure . . . play, long hours spent in drinking, rob the
soul ... of all its energy. . . . Country life and the cares
of farming are also a source of agreeable distractions for
the heart. . . . Devote yourself likewise to the exercises
of the chase. . . . Above all, fly far away ; no matter what
the ties that restrain you, fly, undertake travels of long
continuance . . . prolong your absence till your love has
lost its strength and the fire has ceased to smoulder under
the ashes. . . . Assume the exterior seeming of a perfect
tranquillity, and this artificial calm will become real." This
last piece of advice reveals Ovid as a great psychologist,
for to simulate a feeling tends to produce it 8 Frequens
1 " Withstand the first beginnings ; it is too late afterwards to exhibit
drugs."
9 Aùmia\ bk. sit. 528 ; Isaiah, ch. vii. 28.
* Specialist! in Mental Diseases point out even that the pretence of madness
will sometimes lead to actual madness (Magnan, Recherchés sur Us centres
nerveux 9 2nd Series, p. 561).
2 T
658 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
imitatio transit in mores,^-" Constant imitation becomes
part of the character," Quintilian declares.
To these judicious precepts which Ovid addresses to
young men, to keep them from suicide and crimes of pas-
sion, may be further added the following: "Do not fritter
away your heart in unworthy intrigues, keep it intact for a
noble love, for a virtuous woman whom you will love all
your days. The faculty of loving is not infinite ; it is
liable to waste, and the heart to wither. Before rushing
recklessly into irregular amours, think of the perils of false
situations and the miseries of irregular connections, of the
possible birth of an illegitimate child, of the terrible re-
sponsibility incurred by a father who throws his child on
the streets of our great towns.
" Point de bâtards ! ... La loi les condamne . . .
Songez-y bien." 1
Married Love, and the desire to have a circle of children's
pretty faces round you, should be the object of your life.
An old Greek Poet, Phocylides, likewise gave good counsel
to the youth of Greece, which it m^y be useful to recall : " Re-
spect the purity of tender virgins. . . . Do not abandon
yourself to unbridled loves. No, love is not a God . . . but
of all passions the most dangerous and most deadly. . . .
Refrain from all carnal union, that is not preceded by
a marriage contract and that is based on* violence or
seduction." Let the young man who is tempted to seduce
a girl, think of her father's and her mother's grief the day
they discover her dishonour ; they did not bring her up
with so much care, they did not cradle her baby form on
their knees, rejoicing their hearts with her first steps and
earliest smiles, they did not save her from sickness, to
make her into an instrument of pleasure for some profli-
gate. To seduce a young girl, hitherto virtuous, and then
forsake her, is to disgrace, to murder her morally and often
to kill her parents with the same blow, for they not un-
frequently die of grief, as is shown by instances I have
1 •• No bastards J . . . The law condemns them. . . . . Forgfi* *iot that"—
Phocylides. . ,vjlnï . •
DETERMINED BV PASSION. .'. 659
already quoted. Now, what is there alluring about a fellow
who takes advantage of a young girl's simple faith and
afterwards throws her off, shame on her brow and a child
in her arms ?
Love without marriage and marriage without Love are
the chief causes of suicides and crimes of passion. Love
apart from marriage is, as a rule, a sensual passion, for it
is not ennobled by the love of children, children being for
the mother who is no wife a proof of her dishonour, an
obstacle to pleasure and a heavy responsibility, and for
the lover a source of embarrassment. This dread of
natural maternity and paternity makes love sensual.
But, sensual love is the love that kills ; it is, moreover,
the kind that is least lasting, and ruptures give rise to
quarrels and hatred and revenge.
A marriage of love is not an absolute guarantee of
happiness, for love may be only temporary ; still it is
the best means of protection against these dramas of
adultery that a loveless marriage must always fear.
The fact is, women are so made for Love, that if Love
•does not go with marriage, some will no doubt find con-
solation in motherhood or religious feeling, but others will
seek outside of marriage the Love they lack. Cohabita-
tion with a man they do not love, the obligation to ful-
fil with him the conjugal duty, becomes an intolerable
torture for them, when the union is ill-assorted and does
not give the needful satisfaction to an affectionate heart
Unfortunately, only too many marriages are loveless; —
hence so many marriages ending in misunderstanding and
unfaithfulness ; hence so many girls having more merit
than lucre left in the lurch to wither away in loneliness,
some of whom suffer so keenly as to lose their wits. 1
While a happy love shared with another contributes to
1 On a recent visit I paid to the Asylums for women at Villcjuif and Sainte-
Anne, I saw a not inconsiderable number of virtuous girls, whose craving for
affection and desire for marriage had not been satisfied, a prey to melancholy
madness or erotic delirium, who kept exclaiming, " I want to marry, I want
to many." Some of these used to hear the voice of a young roan telling them
he was going 1$ ask their hand in marjiage,
6ÔO MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
the health of mind and body, the unsatisfied craving
for love may lead to melancholia, cerebral troubles and
wasting diseases. Love matches, which were formerly
common in France, have become rare events, though they
are still numerous in England, Germany, Switzerland and
Sweden. The stress of life in large towns, the love of
luxury and comfort among women, make marriage diffi-
cult. For the same reasons in the large towns French
people marry at a later age than in England and in
Sweden. These late marriages contribute towards the
growing demoralization of society, for the men cannot
wait for the legal union, but form temporary liaisons, which
often turn out ill. Besides, when it comes to marriage,
they are already exhausted by pleasure. Marriage grows
less and less common ; hence so many bachelors on the
look-out to seduce young work-girls or married women.
Also marriages being less frequent, many girls unable to
marry, are tempted to take to a life of gallantry. If
marriages were more numerous, not so long deferred, and
above all ratified under better conditions, there would
be fewer girls seduced and then forsaken, avenging their
wrongs with revolver and vitriol, fewer unfaithful wives
poisoning their husbands, fewer deceived husbands killing
their wives in jealous fury. I may add there would like-
wise be fewer crimes against children. 1
The Physiologists, who are most unjustly accused of
immorality, 2 terrified at the ravages caused by the corrup-
1 There are to be found married people who make martyrs of their children ;
but it is especially in irregular unions that the children are ill-treated. Love
of children is not so natural and universal a sentiment as is generally supposed.
It is not the Chinese only who kill their children, especially the girls, with
the utmost readiness. Among the Romans, the father had the right to kilt
weakly children, and to expose his children, if he pleased, whether weakly
or not ; if he considered he had too large a family, he got rid of the surplus
by exposing them. At the present day, the selfishness of irregular liaisons and
divorce have undermined the love of children ; working-men who are divorced
readily abandon their children along with the mother. Irregular unions are
afraid of children ; the more honourable under such circumstances are content
not to wish for any, the more unscrupulous take measures against them.
3 The English authorities have just seized several books by distinguished
Physiologists, notably that of Dr. Féré on La Pathologie des Émotions,
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 66 1
tion of morals in modern times, declare it urgent, in order
to raise the moral level of Peoples, to recommend con«r
tinence to bachelors and faithfulness to married people.
While a certain proportion of Novelists, Poets and Dramatic
Authors boast the superiority of free love and make excuses
for adultery, Physiologists, speaking in the name of hygiene,
are found in agreement with morality, and reserve their
praise for pure morals and legitimate marriage. While
one section of modern Fiction flatters the evil instincts of
the crowd, exalts the pleasures of incontinence, and over-?
whelms chastity with mocking epigrams, declaring it at
once ridiculous and impossible, Science more enlightened,
more moral and more careful of the true interests of
society, proclaims the advantages and the possibility of
continence for bachelors, and the necessity and sanctity of
marriage ; it teaches that it is the chaste races that make
strong and fruitful races. 1 In his book on Love, Michelet,
who had much acquaintance with the Physiologists and
appreciated them highly, judiciously pointed out that the
Novelists and devisers of Utopias, who had written so
much on Love but had hardly been successful in their
treatment of it, would have done better to consult History,
and even Natural History. History, in fact, teaches that
marriage has powerfully contributed towards the progress
of Humanity. Natural History shows that the higher
animals tend towards stability in their loves ; that the
widow who remarries keeps the impress of the first
husband, and may bear children who resemble him.
Encouragement of the religious sentiment is another
means of diminishing the number of crimes arising out of
passion. Darwin, who visited the primitive savage popula-
tions of Tahiti and New Zealand, noted that a system of
profligacy, unparalleled in any other part of the World,
1 International Congress held at Brussels in 1889 on means of guarding
against Syphilis and other Venereal Diseases. — Krafft-Ebing, Psychopath**
Sexualis ; Dr. Ribbing, L'Hygiène sexuelle ; Dr. Surbled, La Vie de Jeune
Homme ; Dr. Féré, V Institut sexuel ; Dr. Herzen of Lausanne, La Question
des mœurs ; Dr. Maudsley, Crime and Insanity % p. 272.— Darwin was a great
admirer of chastity {.Descent 0/ Man).
662 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
and infanticide resulting from the system in question, had
almost entirely disappeared under the influence of the
Christian Missionaries. Taine compares Christianity to
"the great pair of wings indispensable to lift man above
himself." "Without it," he says, "man becomes again
voluptuous and callous ; cruelty and sensuality are
rampant." l
I have again and again observed during my career how
men and women have been saved from suicide by religious
belief. God is the great Consoler of forsaken women»
The dread of appearing before Him, after doing an act He
forbids, restrains many desperate women who are sorely
tempted to end their own life. George Sand relates that
she was cured of the temptation to commit suicide by
reading the Classical Writers, and by her return to the
belief in a future life, which she had lost. Despair, as the
etymology of the word itself declares, is the loss of hope.
The heroes of Goethe, Byron, Musset, who end in suicide,
are all sceptics. In Lêlia y George Sand makes Stenio,
who commits suicide, a profligate and an atheist Don
Juan mingles impiety with debauchery, and is for forcing
the poor man into atheism. Mephistopheles says of
himself, "I am he who denies."
Wherever the religious sentiment is preserved, crime
diminishes; where it is weakened, crime increases. Suicide
was very tare in the Middle Ages ; it first began to be
more frequent in the Eighteenth Century, when the
religious sentiment was weakened. Religious Faith is an
even better preservative from Suicide than from Crime,
because the Believer, after committing a crime, hopes to
escape punishment, and to have time to become reconciled
with God, whereas after suicide he must appear imme-
diately before His Présence. This is why in countries
where there are many murders, in Spain and Italy for in-
stance, there are but few suicides. In papers left behind
by suicides, of which I have read a very large number, I
1 Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage ; Taine, Revue des Deux Mondes \ June i„
1891, p. 493.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 663
found ample proof that they had lost all belief and merely
hoped to find repose in annihilation.
M. Jules Lemaitre does not believe that Religious Belief
is any better preservative against suicide and crime than
scepticism. He makes fun of Octave Feuillet because he
represents an atheistical hero in one of his Novels as
swallowing a phial of opium, and an atheistical woman as
poisoning her rival, a married woman, that she may marry
the tatter's husband, who is her lover. 1 For all my ad-
miration of his fine talents, I am bound to say I think
M. Jules Lemaitre is wrong, no less than M. Barrés, who
in the Preface of a recent work "offered to sundry Col-
legians of Paris and the Provinces/' attributes the numerous
suicides of young men to the mistake they make in taking
life too seriously. To guard their comrades against the
contagion of suicide, M. Barrés advises them to be " ardent
and sceptical.' 1 I think myself he would have been wiser
to advise them to have moderation and faith. Of course
all Atheists do not end in suicide and murder, there are
sceptics as incapable of either one or the other as any
believer; a happy nature, a good education, the love of
science, are all preservations against vice. There are even
lay Saints, like Littré. But to say that men, and still
more women, are not better preserved from suicide and
crime by religious Faith than by scepticism, is an assertion
contrary both to judicial and medical experience.
Women have even greater need than men of spiritual
beliefs, to sustain their unstable will and moderate their
nervous sensibility. Faith alone can make of this being,
naturally so weak, a strong character in virtue of educa-
tion. My own researches show there are fewer suicides
of widows than of widowers determined by grief at the
death of their mates. Moreover, I have noted several
cases of suicide of fathers in despair at the death of their
children, but never one of a mother. If widows and
mothers, though more sensitive of pain and less strong
to bear it, kill themselves more rarely than widowers and*
1 J. Lemaitre, Les Contemporains % 3rd Series, p. 28. >
064 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
fathers, this is because they find strength and consolation
in religious sentiment and the hope of another life, in
which they will see their children and husbands again.
If the proportion of women in the total number of suicides
has been increasing for some years past, it is because
women are beginning to lose their beliefs, by contact with
free-thinking husbands and fathers.
It is true at the same time that religious beliefs are not
always sufficient to preserve women from suicides of love,
because love is sometimes combined in one with mysticism.
It is no profanation of the Religious life to deem it may
be a consolation for disappointed love. Devoid of faith,
poor girls who have been seduced and abandoned, let them-
selves fall into despair or a life of profligacy. Would it
not be far preferable to see them entering a Convent,
where little by little their sorrow would be appeased,
and give place to the desire to occupy their energies
and their craving for love in loving the orphan and the
pauper I
The precocity young people of to-day show for dis-
soluteness being a cause of their equal precocity in
suicide and crimes of passion, parents could arrest the
latter by a better system of upbringing, by a stricter
surveillance of the books they are allowed to read, the
companions they go with, and the plays they see
Racine, junior, tells us his father never talked of theatrical
pieces before his children, and that once having been
asked to give lessons in elocution to a young Royal
Princess of fifteen, he was so deeply shocked to hear her
recite a passionate declamation of love from the part of
Hermione that he refused to continue the lessons. Now-
adays, there are parents who take their children to see
downright indecent plays.
There would be fewer girls seduced and unfaithful wives,
if parents would leave off teaching their daughters habits
of luxury above their social position and fortune. Unable
to realize in marriage the ideals they have dreamed or to
continue their luxurious ways of living, girls suffer from
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 665
the disappointment and disillusion ; they will not marry,
but prefer a rich lover, who will one day forsake them, to
a husband in modest circumstances, who would have loved
them all their life long, but who would have made them
blush to be seen with him, — or else, if they do marry, they
suffer from their husband's vulgarity of mind and manners,
and take to bad courses.
Young men would be less precocious in profligacy, if
parents did not themselves encourage them to amuse
themselves, saying young folks must "sow their wild
oats.' 1 The young men of our large towns are so ready
to acquire habits of dissipation at an early age, that
they take mistresses at fifteen or sixteen, whence come
•quarrels and jealousies that end in suicide or knife thrusts.
Parents again would often be saved their children's
suicide after a love disappointment, if they did not oppose
a projected match solely because the girl their son is in
love with, though possessed of every quality of heart and
mind and body, has not just quite the fortune they would
have wished for.
Suicides of passion being only possible through an
•excess of sensibility and a lack of energy to bear suffer-
ing, how many calamities would parents avoid, if only
they taught their children to moderate their sensibility
and to strengthen their will 1 How many acts of despair
would they prevent if they taught them early to master
and moderate their nervous susceptibilities! Disgust of
love, despair following on a love disappointment, are
often indeed the consequences of a too impressionable
nervous system and too weak a will ; there is a very close
connection between pessimism and nervosity ! l Suicide,
insanity, crime, are marks of failure of will and a dis-
ordered sensibility. Incapacity in a man to moderate and
govern the affection or emotional element of his nature
I call slavery, Spinoza says. To master the nerves, to
develop the will power, is the best preservative against
suicide, insanity, and crime.
1 Dr. Régis, La Médecin* et le Pessimisme contemporain.
666 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
. This necessity pf strengthening the will is better appre-
ciated at the present day than formerly by Psychologists
and Physicians ; but it is not yet realized by parents.
Parents, more especially mothers, spoil their children,
loading them with caresses and attentions, making them
selfish, sensual, and incapable of bearing the slightest
contradiction ; instead of fortifying their will-power and
reason, which latter must not be confused with mere
intelligence, they unduly develop their sensibility and
sensual impulses, and make them into nervous creatures
predisposed to precocious passion, neurasthenia and pessi-
mism, to jealousy and anger.
As long ago as the Sixteenth Century, Charron gave a
very judicious definition of the aim of education; "it
ought," he said, "to be directed rather to the acquire-
ment of wisdom than of art or science, more to the
foundation of sound judgment and consequently power
of will and conscience than to filling the memory and
heating the imagination. 1 Nowadays we do exactly the
opposite ; we stuff children's memories and heat their
fancy, plying them with sensual stimulations, and attach-
ing far too much importance to Music, especially to
Operatic Music, in the education of girls. Meantime the
cultivation of the will and the moral sense is neglected ;
the nervous system is fatigued with an intellectual surfeit,
and excitable, effeminate creatures are turned out instead
of men of action and strong will. This intellectual and
emotional over-stimulation produces especially lamentable
results in the case of girls. 2
If only parents realized the influence their vices, their
drunken habits, exercise over their children at the moment
of conception and during pregnancy, there would be fewer
children debilitated in mind and body, liable by hereditary
predisposition to yield to the temptations of passion. There
1 Charron, book iii. ch. xiv. § 13.
9 Quite lately I saw at the Sainte- Anne Asylum a young Russian girl, a
farmer's daughter, a graduate in mathematics, whose nervous system has been
completely overthrown by oarebral over-stimulation.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 667
are many "degenerates" among the authors of suicides
and crimes of passion, — and these "degenerates" are
frequently the offspring of drunken or profligate parents.
"If we could see clearly," says J. de Maistre, "all
the evils that result from generation under bad and un-
disciplined conditions and the innumerable profanations
of the World's first law, we should recoil in horror." 1
Modern Science has shown in a conspicuous light the
evils that result from generation under unfavourable and
undisciplined conditions, and proved that the physical and
moral constitution of children feels the influence of the
physical and moral state of the parents at the moment of
procreation, 2 and that children born of profligate and
drunken parents are often "degenerates." Of 1773
children, idiotic, epileptic, imbecile, and hysterical, who
entered the Bicêtre Asylum, under the superintendence of
Dr. Bourneville, between January I, 1879, and January 1,
1898, the fathers of 677 were excessive drinkers, the
mothers of 59 addicted to drunkenness. 8 It follows that,
if parents had a due sense of their responsibility, we should
not have so much reason to lament the physical and moral
feebleness of the new generations, a feebleness that directly
predisposes them to suicide and crimes of passion, for im-
1 J. de Maistre, Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, 1st Conversation.
3 The Ancient Philosophers had already an inkling of this solidarity between
children and parents. " The children born of an illegitimate bed," the Bible
says, " when we enquire what they are, become witnesses that depose against
their father's and their mother's crime " ( Wisdom, ch. iv.). " Oh, how beauti-
ful is the generation that is chaste ! " — Plato noted how important a thing it
is that children should be engendered by parents who are sober and masters of
their reason, and that children born of alcoholic parents "will be neither
strong nor upright, either in mind or body" (Laws, vi. ). — Socrates observed
the fact that children born of young parents are better endowed than such as
spring from aged parents (Xenophon, Memorabilia, iv. § 4). — Aristotle made
the same observation (Politics, bk. vii. ch. xiv. § 9).— Confucius was for
ennobling the father, as a reward for his children's virtue. — Like Dr. Bourne-
ville, all Medical Physiologists and Specialists in Mental Disease attribute
the degeneracy of children largely to the habits of profligacy and drunkenness
of the parents (V. Morel, Traité des dégénérescences ; P. Lucas, Traité de
t Hérédité \ Article by Dr. Voisin, in Jacond's Dictionary of Medicine; Dr.
Magnan, Les Dégénérés ; Recherches sur les centres nerveux).
2 Archives de neurologie, 1898, p. 527.
668 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CJEULME
pulses to suicide and murder are of common occurrence
among " degenerates," among hysterical subjects and epilep-
tics. Of this I have observed several cases, particularly
among women. Numerous examples are to be found in
the books of Specialists dealing with Mental Diseases. 1
Again, parents might do much to guard their children
against crimes of passion by exercising proper surveillance
over the books they read. Literature has a great deal to
do with suicides and crimes of passion among young people.
To discover the reason, it is not enough to say : " Look for
the woman ; " we must often rather look for the book. The
choice of books to be read and plays to be witnessed is not
indifferent to the health of the mind any more than the
choice of food is to the health of the body. The moral and
physical health of young people depend largely on the
nourishment they take and the air they breathe.
No less than parents, writers of Fiction and Drama
have a part of the responsibility for the frequency
of suicides and crimes of passion. Many of them
have no suspicion of the fact; for as a rule men
fail to recognize all their responsibilities. They think
themselves responsible only for their own faults, for-
getting the share of responsibility they must bear for
the faults of others, children, friends, pupils, readers,
spectators. Every word we utter, every act we do,
exercises some influence over the words and acts of
other people. In the moral order as in the physical
nothing is lost altogether. Each man is born for the
salvation or the ruin of some of his fellow-creatures, —
and the Author more than anybody. Literature, which
could do so much good by disseminating healthy thoughts
and lofty sentiments, does incalculable harm by destroying
the moral sense of readers, by throwing a glamour over
profligacy, sexual perversions, adultery, suicide, double
suicide and revenge of passion.
I have given numerous instances of suicide and double
1 Drs. Bourdin and Carrière have written special studies on suicidal and
homicidal impulses among " degenerates. 1 '
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 669
suicide after an orgy, copied from the poems of Musset
and Alfred de Vigny ; I have quoted the words of young
men who, having survived attempts of this sort, declared
how double suicide had appeared to them something heroic
and poetical. Seeing that suicide is infectious and this
dramatic end to a sensual passion appeals so highly to the
imagination of the young, it is the bounden duty of Poets
not to present such images to them, invested with all the
glamour of verse. So many young men are to be found,
weakened in mind and body by debauchery, overwhelmed
with debts, in revolt against the paternal authority, incap-
able of resuming honest work, that when Poets offer them
suicide after a scene of orgy as a means of escape from all
these embarrassments, the unfortunates will inevitably yield
to the temptation. There would undoubtedly be fewer de-
bauchees and suicides, if Poets and Novelists did not persist
in representing profligates as noble hearts athirst for the
ideal. Don Juan, who admits no truth but this : 2 and 2
make 4, and 4 make 8, they describe as devoured by thirst
after the infinite. As a matter of fact, this thirst after the
infinite is merely a thirst for pleasure ; this hunger after
the ideal is merely the pursuit of sensual gratification ; the
ideal of Don Juan is Mathurine, El vire, Charlotte, and the
like. Sganarelle, who knows his master thoroughly de-
scribes him as " a true Sardanapalus, a hog of Epicurus,
a downright brute." It is only in Novels that profligates
have noble hearts and philosophic minds. In actual fact,
they are candidates for ruin, for suicide and crimes of pas-
sion ; the authors of the dramas of Parisian life are often
enough simply " men about town."
If any young man is inclined to think a life of Bohemian-
ism alluring, let him read Murger's life, written by one of
his friends ; there is not a sadder book in Literature. A
considerable proportion of Murger's letters given in the
volume are dated from the Hôpital Saint-Louis, where he
made several stays, 1 and several of his friends are noted as
1 Murger sought inspiration in coffee ; M some nights," he declares, " I have
taken as much as six ounces of coffee." This abuse of coffee brought 00 terrible
670 MEANS QF DflfllfitfSHING CRIME
having died in the same hospital Murgert own death was
"" terrible," his friend says.
Poets would spare their readers the commission of many
follies, if only they put them on their guard against the
temptations of sensual love, which is full of hatred and
vindictiveness, and showed them the superiority of spiritual
love. The great Poets of Love, Dante, Petrarch, Lamartine,
have nowhere celebrated sensual love in their verses. 1
The higher form of Love is that in which the considera-
tion of the moral and intellectual qualities plays as
important a part as the value attached to physical
qualities, and affection and esteem are added to desire.
A People that should cling only to physical beauty and
neglect moral and intellectual, would be on the verge of
decadence and a return to primitive barbarism.
Erotic Writers think to excuse themselves by declaring
that their own life is honest and respectable. Thus Ovid
said :
" Mores distant a carmine nostro,
Vita verecunda est, Musa jocosa mihi * ; 2
and Martial repeated the same apology, writing :
" Lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba est. M s
But the strictness of the Erotic author's life in no way
removes the danger of his writings. Free Love and the
liaisons based on it almost invariably terminating in a
rupture, and this often leading to acts of revenge, Litera-
ture might likewise prevent many suicides and crimes of
passion, by bringing married love into fashion. This is
asking a great deal, I allow ; but Literature has so much
attacks of purpura. In the Life of Murger referred to *e find nothing bat
.accounts of dismal poverty and continual begging for employment and money.
Nothing can be more melancholy than his love affairs, nothing less poetical.
The Woman he loved best deceived him with one of his intimates a week alter
the tie was first formed.
- 1 Lamartine, it is true, wrote in his youth two volumes of erotic poetry ; bat
he burned them subsequently.
* '* My character is very different from my verse; my life is modest, only
any muse sportive."
.- V* W*ftte» *T« my PNft* but my life upright." , . ,^ : m - , ;: ,.
DETERMINED BY PASSION* : '. 67 1
power that it could, if it would, thfow a halo of poetry
over honourable love. Did it not in the Eighteenth
Century, by the pen of Jean Jacques Rousseau, bring into
fashion the practice of mothers suckling their own
children, till Society ladies, dining out, would have their
babies brought to them at dessert, to give them the breast
there and then? Nothing is impossible to Poets and
Novelists, They have turned into ridicule Mankind's
two greatest blessings, health and virtue; they have
found health less poetical than disease, life less picturesque
than death, virtue more tiresome than vice; they have
embellished melancholy, phthisis, perversions of the sexual
instinct, Sapphism, Sadism, Masochism, adultery, suicide,
double suicide and crimes of passion. I hold they are
equally capable of idealizing health, reason, temperance,
hard work, and pure love, which are just as poetical as
folly, idleness, intemperance, and profligacy.
We may apply to the type of Literature that embellishes
Vice and makes Virtue look ugly the verse of the Latin
Poet :
" Dat veniam corvis, vexât censura columbas." l
It would make the crow white and the dove black, and so
in everything. Instead of teaching the beauty of modesty,
the value of temperance, the dignity of married love, it
holds up for the reader's imitation and admiration orgy,
suicides, and crimes.
. But surely the Writer's task is not to make men melan-
choly, desperate, vindictive, and criminal, to supply excuses
for passions that are always on the look-out for some piece
of sophistry to palliate their heinousness, to silence con-
science, that tiresome, unfortunate judge. Society being
based on family life and this on marriage,* is it too much
1 "While it is lenient to the crows, censure falls heavy on the doves."
3 In Egypt and Syria, Mussulmans of the higher classes, recognizing that
Polygamy is a principle of disintegration for the family and the State, are
going back to Monogamy, in spite of the fact, that Mahomet allows them to
take a number of wives. I have this information irom a Mussulman judge at
the High Court of Cairo and a former Prêtumtr. Général at the Court of
Alexandria.
672 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
to require the Novelist not to write that "the marriage
vow is an absurdity imposed by society ? " l Men are apt
enough already in their search after the forbidden fruit and
the refinements of vice, 2 without its being needful to draw
an alluring picture for their benefit of criminal passions.
Poor humanity is sufficiently tempted by nature to indulge
in profligacy and evil passions, without its being needful
to make it still more licentious and revengeful by sensual
stimulations and direct appeals to its vindictiveness. The
mission of Literature would rather seem to consist in
softening down what there is in us of instinctive savagery ;
to subordinate the animal part of human nature to the
rational, to give the spiritual the mastery over the in-
stinctive, the social over the brutish, to make the passions
submit to reason and social well-being, to modify the
bestial element and curb it beneath the yoke of law, —
this is the end and aim of human life. Has Literature
any right to keep mankind from this aim, to destroy this
ideal, to excite his worst instincts ?
The very object of organized society being to ensure
respect for women and children and human life, is Literature
fulfilling its social mission by teaching contempt for all
these things? If Novelists who represent woman as an
invalid, inferior creature, did not with a curious inconsist-
ency incite the husband to kill the unfaithful wife, who is
in their eyes irresponsible, there would most certainly be
fewer crimes of marital vengeance. Literature has no right,
merely in order to supply readers with strong emotions, to
make acts of revenge more frequent. Murders are common
enough for it to be quite unnecessary to further increase
the number. Literature should be an instrument of life
1 G. Sand, Jacques.
8 Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata. — " We are for ever striving
after forbidden pleasures, and longing for joys denied us " (Ovid). — Savage
Peoples resemble civilized in their constant efforts to increase pleasure by the
perverse refinements of fancy. A missionary was explaining to a cannibal,
who was going to eat a human head, how odious it was to kill a man in order
to eat a head that thinks. " That is just why," retorted the cannibal, " it is
so delightful to eat it."
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 673
and progress, not of death ; it has no right whatever to set
itself up in revolt against the decrees of Law and of
Morality. The Writer's duty is not to counteract the
efficacy of the laws of the land, to disseminate antisocial
fallacies about fatality, the irresistible character of passion
and the rights of love which is on a par with virtue and
superior to legality, about the justifiability of suicide, the
beauty of crimes of passion, the paramount claims of ven-
geance. These are sophistries one and all that make
villains, suicides and murderers.
No one has ever thought of attributing to the Literature
of the Seventeenth Century any share of responsibility for
suicides and crimes, because it was never its habit to dis-
seminate sophistical fallacies or to flatter the evil instincts
of the crowd ; it always refused to draw a line of separation
between aesthetics and morals. At that period Literature
was better than society, and tended to raise its moral level.
To-day, sick as society is, the Literature of imagination,
with some very honourable exceptions, is worse than
society, and helps, along with Politics, to corrupt it still
further. If it will not make men wise, it should at any rate
not turn them into madmen and criminals.
Authors who pervert the public conscience with sophis-
tries and unhealthy imaginings, fail to consider how weak
is human nature and how rapid the progress of mental
infection. Just as a whole flock may be infected with scab
by a single sheep being attacked, so a whole group of
readers may be demoralized by a single book. Nor is it
only weak minds that fall under the contagion of example
and of sophistry. The same influence is felt by intelligent
men, of high sensibility but feeble will. Young men,
women, 1 persons of nervous temperament, very easily catch
up the ideas and sentiments of those around them and
of the writers that stir them keenly. Paradoxes readily
seduce them ; and they find it hard to resist ingenious
sophistries. Their unreasonableness quickly spreads from
1 G. Sand, in spite of all her talent, espoused in succession all her friends'
ideas, even the most paradoxical.
f U
674 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
ideas to actions. " Frailty, thy name is woman ! " says one
of Shakespeare's characters. It would be more correct to
say, " Frailty, thy name is humanity ! " — for indeed the
" stronger sex " is as frail as the weaker ; in fact, it com-
mits a far greater number of suicides and crimes.
I will not go so far as to say with Taine : " Reason is
not natural to man, nor universal in humanity. . . . Strictly
speaking, man is insane, as the body is sick, by nature ; the
health of our minds like the health of our organs is only a
frequently achieved piece of luck, a happy accident" l A
condition of health, not of disease, is the general rule ; but
human reason is very frail. The greatest minds were on
the borderland of madness. Napoleon I. said to Pinel
that between a man of genius and a madman, there was
not the thickness of a sixpenny bit, and added with a
smile, " I must take care to keep out of your hands." *
Man is not insane by nature, but he very easily becomes
so. Many men, and still more women, live in a condition
of half madness, on the confines of madness. Writers
should thoroughly realize this frailty of human reason, and
never forget that sophistry is far more catching than sweet
reasonableness.
It is not the delineation of evil, if done with proper
reserve, that constitutes a Work immoral ; the Book may
still be chaste, if its inspiration is lofty, and evil is de-
scribed only to be branded as hateful. In spite of the
coarseness of his language, Juvenal is chaste. Lucretius
remains chaste throughout the physiological description of
love. A book is immoral when the author's object is to
rouse sensuality by an alluring picture of vice.
No less than Authors, the "powers that be" should
remember this frailty of human nature, so as to secure
surroundings favourable to the health of mind and body,
not permit the Press to stifle the sense of shame and
excite antisocial passions, and exercise a stricter surveil-
lance than at present over the works displayed in the street
1 Taine, V Ancien Régime, loth edition, pp. 314, 31a.
2 Pinel, Physiologie de V homme aliéné \ p. 40.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 67 $
kiosques and in booksellers' windows, over municipal and
popular lending libraries, and over the minor Theatres,
where anything and everything may now be said and
sung. 1 It is a matter of the greatest social importance
to preserve the sentiment of modesty intact ; besides its
being the charm and ornament of womanhood, it is the
safeguard of domestic peace. Woman's chastity is the
most solid foundation of family life and public peace. It
is by good character more than by mental achievements
that women serve the interests of society and contribute to
its progress. Female corruption destroys the family, and
the disorganization of the family leads directly to the
decadence of Nations. Is it not Horace who said : " Our
Age, so fertile in crime, began by degrading marriage, the
conception of children, family life ; hence all the ills that
have (alien upon People and Land." 2 Montesquieu has
spoken in the same strain : " So many ills are connected
with the loss of virtue in women, their whole soul is so
much degraded in consequence, this main support being
removed brings so much else down in ruin, that in a
popular State we may well look upon public incontinence
as the worst of calamities and a sure sign of impending
revolution." 8
Habits of intemperance contributing so largely as they
do to the frequency of suicides and crimes of passion,
society again might diminish the total of these by tak-
ing effective measures against drunkenness. 4 Opportunity
1 The author of La Censure sous Napoléon II L. (The Censorship under
Napoleon III.) calls for the abolition of the Censorship on the ground that
it is, according to him, more preoccupied with preventing political allusions
than indecencies ; "all that highly trained pornography can invent has
appeared on the Stage, — doubles eniendres, naughty puns, risqué situations,
suggestive farces, have for years received the official authorization of the
Censors." — Valerius Maximus attributes the austere discipline that was main-
tained among the inhabitants of Marsilia (Marseilles) in Ancient times to the
strict surveillance they exercised over performances in the Theatre (bk. ii.
ch. vi. § 7).
7 Horace, Odes, bk. iii. 6.
* Montesquieu, Esprit des Lets, bk. vii. ch. viii.
4 According to Dr. Magnan, of every 100 men admitted into the Insane
676 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
makes the tippler, just as it makes the thief; so that
if there were fewer, dram-shops, there would be fewer
drunkards, and as a result fewer lunatics and criminals.
Among Nations where alcoholism has been systematically
combated, a decrease has been witnessed in insanity and
crime. In Norway, for instance, the proportion of alcoholic
sufferers in the total of insane patients fell as low as 4/4
per cent, in 1893; suicides which numbered 109 annually
for every million inhabitants up to 1850, decreased to 65
in 1896. The total of criminals which stood at 180*3
annually for every million inhabitants fell to 142-1 in
1894. 1
The authorities again might largely diminish the number
of crimes of passion, if they would cease attracting working
men to large towns, which are hot-beds of amorous stimu-
lation, — if they would only leave them in the country. The
poets, Horace, Juvenal, BoileAu, have described the incon-
veniences and noisiness of great towns. But from the
moral and social point of view, the accumulation of human
beings in big towns leads to mischief very much more
serious than any of the inconveniences alluded to by the
poets. Feeble intellects (and there are many such) are
easily led astray by the exciting influence of the révolu-
tionary and pornographic Press, by political and literary
sophistries, by the performances given at the minor
Theatres, by the songs sung at the Café-concerts^ and the
demoralizing sights of the streets. In large towns parents
cannot exercise a proper supervision over their children,
nor masters over their servants ; hence so many irregular
liaisons that turn out badly, so many suicides of girls
who have been seduced and find themselves pregnant.
Marriage is less frequent in towns and longer delayed
Asylums of the Department of the Seine, more than 35 have been brought
there by alcoholism ; of every 100 women, more than 12 {Recherches sur Us
centres nerveux, 2nd Series, p. 46). — According to Dr. Rochard, what
alcoholism costs France annually (cost of the alcohol, loss of work, expense
of treatment, etc.) would amount to a sum of at least a milliard and a half of
francs — ,£60,000,000.
1 Archives d' 'anthropologie criminelle^ Nov. 15, 1899, p. 689.
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 677
than in the country, where the number is Car smaller of
seductions and illegitimate births, as well as of suicides
and crimes of passion. By encouraging agriculture, by
reducing the land tax, labouring men might be kept in the
country districts.
Another source of demoralization which Society might
do away with is the temptations to profligacy to be found
in the public streets, in the taverns, at the public balls and
minor theatres, which are nothing more nor less than marts
for prostitution.
It is a great mistake, in my opinion, to hold civilization
responsible for the increase of crime ; it is rather the apathy
of governments and the incapacity of legislators that should
be blamed. The Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century,
d'Holbach, Grimm, Helvétius, Jean Jacques Rousseau have
exaggerated the influence of Laws and Governments, as-
serting morals to be the creation of Laws and Constitutions. 1
Nowadays, on the contrary, the effect of Laws is over much
ignored, and the maxim quid leges sine moribus ? (" what
are laws without conduct ? ") for ever on men's lips. What
strikes everyone is the influence of temperament, the force
of heredity ; everything is accounted for by temperament,
— the virtue of women, the eloquence of orators, the sensi-
bility of poets, idiosyncrasies of mind and character, even
political opinions and philosophical systems. 2 The influence
1 Montesquieu alone, with his wide and comprehensive mental outlook,
has fully appreciated all the factors, social, religious, philosophical, political,
physical, and physiological, that contribute to the formation of character and
morals.
8 M. Faguet writes: "A Philosopher, however eminent, setting out his
system, is only a man who is explaining his own character, and perhaps his
temperament." {Études sur le xix* siècle, p. 268.) When Descartes explains
his system to us, he is explaining his thought and not his temperament. With
the same character, Philosophers may have different systems ; the characters
of Malebranche and Condillac are very much alike, their systems quite
different. With different temperaments, Philosophers may hold identical
doctrines ; Maine de Biran, J ou (Troy, and Cousin had not the same tempera*
ment, and yet their philosophical systems are alike. M. Boissier, Permanent
Secretary of the Académie Française, that refined scholar who has passed
his life in the intimacy of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, and Tacitus,
instead of accounting for Mme. de Sevigné's virtue by her high education,
678 MEANS OF DIMINISHING CRIME
exercised by temperament is actually very great, and has
been recognized by spiritualistic Philosophers, by Theo-
logians, by our Moralists, even by our great Poets of the
Sixteenth Century, by Corneille, Molière, and La Fontaine,
the last named having even noted the effects of tempera-
ment as affecting the genius of the English Writers (Bk.
xii. Fable 23). Quite right to insist on the influence of
temperament; but it is spoiling a truth by exaggeration
to make too much of it, and ignore entirely the effects
arising from laws, government, religion, and literature.
Laws and Governments are not unimportant factors in the
formation of character and morals. The Laws of Moses,
of Manu, of Solon, of Lycurgus, have powerfully contri-
buted to form the character, sentiments, and ideas of the
Jews, Hindus, Athenians, and Spartans. Bad Laws, bad
Governments, corrupt morals; good Laws, and good
Governments, improve them. Increase of drunkenness and
indecency, licence of Press and Stage, are not inevitable
consequences of civilization; they may be counteracted
by judicious laws. The advance of civilization does not
necessarily involve the advance of intemperance and
pornographic literature.
- It is bad laws that make bad morals, 1 and it is bad
morals that lead to so many suicides, 2 and so many
her right-mindedness, her Christian faith and tender affection for her children,
attributes it merely to the coldness of her temperament. He supports his
contention by the witness of her cousin Bussy, a spiteful tattler if ever there
was one, who inspires Michelet with no confidence in his trustworthiness, and
who was known, Saint-Simon tells us, " for the vanity of his mind and the
baseness of his heart." Moreover, he had been wounded in his self-love
because his fair cousin had repulsed his advances, and as a matter of fact
afterwards retracted the satirical portrait he had drawn of her.
1 Among bad laws I count the Law of 1880, which abolished the control of
drinking shops, — the Law of 1881, which declared the impunity of the Press, —
the Law of 1884, which re-established divorce, in other words, the disorganiza-
tion of the family, — the Articles of the Civil Code which systematize the irre-
sponsibility of the seducer, requiring a formal document to authenticate the
paternity of an illegitimate child, and consequently declaring inoperative re-
cognition resulting from the actual avowal of the father or from his letters,
and forbidding enquiries into the question of paternity.
2 In the Statistics I have given of suicides due to passion, I have included
DETERMINED BY PASSION. 679
crimes, — not the progress of civilization. Repeal bad
laws, make the people moral, leave them the sentiment
of Religion, which is a pillar of morality and a safeguard
against suicide and crimes of passion, combat alcoholism
and pornography, organize the responsibility of the Press,
ensure the execution of justice by a better selection of
jurymen, protect women and children by declaring the
seducer responsible for the wrong he does, and you
will greatly diminish the number of suicides and crimes
determined by passion.
Poor humanity which is largely composed of weak and
feeble creatures, slaves of mere passion and instinct, would
rapidly sink back towards sheer animality, if Government,
Legislation, Literature and Religion did not set before its
eyes an ideal of Justice and Morality, and help it on the
upward path towards the attainment of this ideal.
only suicides resulting in death. But attempted suicides are still more
numerous, though it is difficult to get at the precise number. The majority
of Police reports relating to mere attempts at suicide are not communicated
to the Central Criminal Bureau of the Department of the Seine ; they remain
arranged in classes at the First Office of the First Division of the Prefecture
of Police, or else among the special Records of the Prefect of Police, when
they have to do with families of position. Lastly, the Police Commissaries
do not even invariably draw up reports at all ; they often purposely omit
doing so at the request of relations or in cases of small importance. Hence
the Statistics of the Ministry of Justice only exhibit a portion of the facts.
The real truth is even more terrible than what appears in the official reports.
Under the influence of alcoholism, debauchery, sophistical and erotic literature,
materialism of ideas and manners, politics that protect drink shops, or in other
words, poison shops, the population becomes brutalized, impoverished and
corrupt; the race degenerates, and its numbers diminish. Legislative re-
forms, that might raise the moral level of the people, are barred by electioneer-
ing considerations. In spite of the ever-increasing total of madmen, suicides,
broken intellects and criminals for which alcoholism is responsible, in spite of
the campaign conducted against this scourge of humanity by the Academy of
Medicine, the '• Institut," Moralists, Economists and Criminalists, no re*
pressive Law is ever passed, because the drink-sellers are the best electoral
agents.
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