Les Milliet. V. Jours heureux
Dialogue of Eleuthère (continued)
Julien Benda
And again:
If the joy of possessing derives from the idea that one installs oneself in another being, this joy will be all the greater the more that being seems other…
And he resolved to think that the soul of each sex is a specific soul; that, in the truth of her being, in her vivid consciousness of pleasure and pain, a duchess is closer to her maid than to her brother…
And, without looking so far: “What will our masculine consciousness ever have in common with that of a being who stops up keyholes to undress, and who ‘refuses herself’?”
Finally he now believed he understood the taste he had for beautiful women, for tall figures, for noble forms: all things that seem bound to a greater quantity of consciousness.
Continuing to seek what ideas presided over the joy of possession, he was thinking yet:
And it is not only the idea that one installs oneself in a consciousness, it is the idea that one takes pleasure there: more precisely, it is the idea that one makes use --- that one makes use! --- of that most sacred thing to provoke in oneself the most in-famous thing: the joy of one’s body… (This too seemed to him a joy reserved for the male, refused to the woman: he alone makes use of a being; he alone satisfies a joy that is objectively ignoble; he alone satisfies it in a body called precious.
Yet it seemed to him that certain women (not young) had made use of him. This idea of having been despised attached him to the memory of those women by the basest ties, that is to say the deepest.)
And the possession of woman, thus decomposed, seemed to him the entire form of domination. The only form. Beside it all the others were laughable!… What is it to hold a slave under one’s whip, a vanquished man under one’s knee, a soldier under one’s boot…, what is all that beside pinning to a bed a trembling, naked being, enclosing her movements, imposing one’s breath upon her, installing oneself in her, moving within her, and soiling her with the laughing expansion of one’s basest joy? The woman who, outside her will, outside even her desire --- by duty --- has undergone such a fate has known the last of shames. The woman who has had to wash herself of a man she does not love is properly a human rag. Between her and a free soul, nothing more in common.
Then he thought that this was the fate of nearly all women… He heard Brunnhilde: “What can you do, wretched one!” He saw again the expression of degradation he had so often noticed on their faces when nothing occupies their attention, in concerts, in tramways. And he redoubled his pity and his mistrust toward them.
And he also thought that, having no wife, this possession of a woman against her will was a master’s joy he did not know… It seemed to him that women despised him for it. He himself despised himself for it… He resolved to think that many mistresses too give themselves from duty.
And he was trying to discern yet other ideas, creating joys of love:
There is the idea of the pleasure one causes. I say that one causes. The other’s pleasure rejoices me only because I cause it… When women come to tell us that the pleasure of the beloved is their whole joy, they lack precision: the pleasure of the beloved caused by another does not make their joy at all.
One causes sensation in the possessed object to prove to oneself that one possesses it: men once taken, one makes them suffer; women, one makes them swoon.
(Laterally: To do harm to someone is to wish to prove one’s own existence by its effect on another. It is one of the contraries of egoism, which consists at bottom in defining oneself by oneself, apart from any idea of others, like the god of the Stoics… It is a form of altruism.)
And again: There is the idea of a sort of mute and as it were preestablished intelligence, that of two beings who, without saying a word, immediately understand each other in the execution of a complicated and unofficially taught act.
And again this idea that --- always because of you --- a grown person becomes a child; that she who, this very morning, was a “lady” who “managed” a household and taught children, is now herself a child, chasing after a joy of her body as fiercely as a little girl after a cake.
He had reached this point in his reflections when Madame Camignani awoke.
--- You were not sleeping, she said. You were thinking of me?
He assured her of it. Then, naively, told her his ideas.
She listened at first with the slightly malicious indulgence she would have had for a complicated child… Soon, among her friend’s ideas, she distinguished two more clearly than the others: the softness of his eyes and the pleasantness of his mouth. She drew closer to understand better…, and gently felt her intelligence of love melt into love itself…
But now, in the possession, he applied himself to taking full consciousness of the ideas he knew to be there. And this consciousness doubled his joy by guiding it. The next day, in the woods, as the young woman was adoring their night, he reflected that mastery in love is the same as in art: to discipline one’s emotion without losing it.
III
Paul Rodrigues came to Eleuthère’s early in the morning. He had grave things to say to him:
--- I have thought all night, he said, about what you were telling me the other day: that we must maintain the very high opinion women have of themselves, because it tenfold increases the joy one feels at their defeat. Well, I have come to tell you I find that odious. The pride of the male does not revolt me less than the other. I hate all the vainglories that one sex’s low posture gives the other.
Eleuthère knew these crises of eternity, this Semitic mania for abolishing the joy of conquering.
--- And you dream, said he, of a love without pride.
--- Where no one “triumphs.”
--- Precisely.
--- Where no “self” imposes itself.
--- Exactly.
--- Where on the contrary the frontier of consciousnesses would tend rather to be effaced.
--- That is it.
--- In sum, you dream of a love without individuals.
Rodrigues was suspicious:
--- I dream of a love in which there would be nothing but love.
--- That is precisely what I meant. For we know that love. It is Tristan’s. It leads directly to death.
--- I beg your pardon. To Eternity.
--- From the standpoint of individuals, it is exactly the same thing.
--- Good heavens! Are you by any chance abandoning Eternity!
--- I abandon everything that is not in its place. And Eternity is not in its place in human affairs. And you know it as well as we do; and you say it; and the most cynical of contradictions is your perpetual pretension to induce us into Eternity. For you are all the same. You begin by retiring to the mountain, and there you have not enough formulas to let us know that between you and ours there is nothing in common; that your Infinite, your Eternal, your “divine love” are products of an extra-human essence; that no bridge could lead from the highest human to these divinities: “between the finite and the infinite there is a difference, not of degree, but of essence”; (1) “with stops, however numerous, one will never make movement”; (2) “divine love differs from human love as the constellation of the Dog differs from the animal that bears that name” (3), etc., etc. Then, one day, you grow bored on the mountain; Eternity no longer suffices you; you wish, like the others, to exist, to be felt. And you come down among men, to impose your gods. And then one learns this strange thing: that one could not pass from our earth to your heaven, but one can pass from your heaven to our earth; that one could not pass from rest to movement, but one can pass from movement to rest; in a word, one learns this strange thing: that there was no bridge between A and B, but there is one between B and A!…
--- I beg your pardon, said Rodrigues, it is the salon infinitists who say that, those who give courses on the Infinite to fine ladies. (4) Try giving a course while remaining in Eternity!… But name me a solitary thinker.
--- Why, all of them! One (5) wants the Idea of things to already contain the things: they “participate” in their Idea! Another, who thinks to refute him, (6) wants to see the “actual” thing in the thing “in potency”! These (7) kill themselves trying to find how the Genus could, while remaining a place of indiscernibles, become this thing here, which I hold, which I am! Those (8) have exhausted themselves for two thousand years defining a God such that, without ceasing to be eternal --- that is, who does not fall --- his fall should nevertheless form part of his definition! This one (9), who was said to be dead to the sensible world and whose Infinite seemed honest, is no better than the others: the Finite torments him, and from his Infinite he “deduces” the Passion! That other (10) invents an Infinite that “stumbles” upon what is not itself in order to become things. That other (11), an Infinite that “clothes itself in matter,” that “penetrates” the world. That other (12), an Infinite that “separates itself from itself” to become Nature! Not one honestly accepts the solitude of the Infinite… I beg your pardon. The Eleatics!… Those were proud. For this prostitution of the divine to the human dates from Socrates. It is he who bears the double weight of having sullied metaphysics in the service of human things and of having obscured human things with metaphysical light. (13)
--- In sum, it is very simple: what you reproach in these men is that they could not sustain the perfectly inhuman pose they had indeed promised; that, in the very intoxication of the Concept, they could not forget the humble world of Love, and that their heart is ever stirred by the fate of the wretched who feel and act; what you reproach in them, at bottom, is their greatness…
--- It is perhaps their greatness, but it is certainly our misfortune… For with them there install themselves at the government of earthly things (and with what prestige!) values that, by their own admission, were made outside humanity; in rupture with it; what is more, are properly fruits of human anesthesia… Naturally, the whole human function is thereby impeded… And the confounded men look at one another and say: “What is this poison at the springs of life that for two thousand years has pacified our prides, softened our ardors, sublimated our wills…?” And they do not find it and they despair… But we are beginning to understand. We are beginning to glimpse it, the initial coup de force of Philosophy. And we take up again your “distinction of essences,” but this time summoning you to respect its law. So be it: one cannot pass from our mortal essence to your Eternity; but then you, neither, can you pass from your Eternity to our humanity. We lock you into your Eternity. And we claim at our ease to honor our true gods, those of whom Science itself tells us that it is by them that all grows and differs: Disequilibrium and Excitation.
--- And then it is no longer the pride of lovers you are defending. It is something else entirely. It is the hatred of races, it is injustice, it is the persistence in injustice… It is your whole past you are renouncing…
--- Perhaps… Life would truly be nothing but a horrible dead sea if there were in the world only benign conciliators and castrated impartials.
(1) Spinoza. (2) Bergson. (3) Spinoza. (4) A probable allusion, of deplorable irreverence, to a certain fashionable Philosophy much savored by worldly thinkers, in which it is said, for example: “As if the mystery did not consist in the claim that one goes from rests to movement by way of composition, which is impossible, whereas it is so easy to pass, by simple degradation, from movement to slowing and to immobility.” (5) Plato. (6) Aristotle. (7) The School. (8) The Christians. (9) Spinoza. (10) Probably Fichte. (11) Schelling. (12) Hegel. (13) It is well known that this intention of making Metaphysics serve the solution of practical problems is the foundation of the work of M. Bergson. To this work Eleuthère proposed the subtitle: Course in Applied Metaphysics.
[The dialogue continues at great length, treating the income tax and liberty, the aesthetics of democracy versus aristocracy, the nature of literary society, patriotism versus class, and many other themes. The cahier then transitions to the Milliet family memoir, “V. Happy Days,” covering life, art, and friendship. See the original on Archive.org for the complete text.]