Dialogue d'Eleuthère

Dialogue of Eleuthère

Julien Benda

He found Paul Rodrigues in the midst of a pile of papers. Before him, on the back of a postcard, was the portrait of Madame Remy Salvator by La Gandara, after the painting in the Luxembourg.

--- This icon, said Eleuthère, is here no doubt in the interest of Philosophy?

--- Rather of History, said Rodrigues. I believe I have before my eyes the modern woman, at least in that extraordinary expression of assurance, of belief in her own esotericism, and of contempt that so many women today possess and that all the women of former times had ceased to have. And I am training myself, by looking at her, to understand her, that is to say, to become her consciousness. (1)

--- Speak, said Eleuthère, sitting down, speak! I burn to hear this consciousness…

Rodrigues gathered several scattered pages. He began:

“I have the most delicate of sensibilities. Only the softest dwellings, the finest fabrics, the rarest products could suit me… The coarsest things suffice for men.”
“My soul is an enigma. Genius exhausts itself seeking its key.”
“I am the indifferent idol. In the street, men look at me: I look straight ahead… In the alcove, I attend, indulgent, upon an avidity that exhausts itself in embracing me, and from which I am freed.”

Eleuthère was smiling. Rodrigues noticed it well enough to think himself encouraged, but not enough to think he was being mocked. He continued:

“I am important. My dress requires hours. My upkeep demands fortunes. I disturb. I encumber. I displace a great deal of air. What a poor creature is man in his simplicity!”
“I am the arbiter. Man measures his own worth only insofar as I distinguish him.”
“I create love in the world. Man is insipid.”
“I dispense favor. For the essence of my body is to keep itself to itself: so that to let the least part of it be taken is a derogation from my definition, properly a favor, something like what the Lord did in showing Himself to Moses…” But I stop here, said Rodrigues, for you are laughing in such a manner that I wonder whether you are even listening to me.

--- I confess, said Eleuthère, that what amuses me most in your dissection of women is the man you reveal thereby… That your subject should be a creature of grace and weakness — ah, that does not stop you from dissecting!… I was thinking, as I listened to you, of that Jewish writer Renan speaks of, (2) who, stationed before the marvels of the Archipelago, looked at nothing before him and occupied himself only with organizing his anger. And if your dissection uncovers ugly things, it is still not the grace of the subject that will prevent you from saying them… And that, too, is one of the traits of your race: the horror of impunity, the horror of gallantry, which is in sum the impunity of women… the horror of Pardon, which is at bottom a gallantry of God.

--- All that may be… But these pretensions I attribute to women, do they have them or do they not?

Eleuthère took the lesson. He put aside his fancy.

--- Well, there, I think they do have them… Only, I also think (you will allow me to place a truth beside yours) that they have some reason to have them.

Rodrigues started.

--- What! You are going to make me believe their sensibility is “delicate”? When one sees how much less than we they feel physical pain? How crude their perception is? (3) When one sees what sort of men they can endure? When one sees that it suffices for them to love in order to give — with joy — the most repulsive care?…

--- Their native sensibility is indeed quite crude; but the life that is made for them is singularly soft. Women may not have the need for softness; but they certainly have the habit of it. That explains their pretension well enough. (4)

--- And you are going to make me believe their soul is an “enigma”? As if one were not confounded on the contrary to see how simple it is, made of the most elementary movements of the heart, very few in number, always the same? As if the great examples of entanglement of the soul were not given by men, with their high culture, with their social sense…? As if a woman’s soul had ever been complex like that of Adolphe or the hero of The Triumph of Death?

--- That is certain. Only this complex soul, or one that can be, men in general do not look at it. They have not the time. An Adolphe is an exception, even in his class, and increasingly so… Whereas all the women you speak of gravely contemplate their elementary soul… Now, this gravity of the soul contemplating itself — that is what the world takes for its complexity. --- Take again their pretension not to look at men, to ignore “avidity,” etc. (5) — well, it too is justified… Oh, not that “the essence of their body is to keep itself to itself,” but because the present-day man is rather untenting… As for their power of encumbrance, of disturbance, of monopolizing, etc., that is indeed a truth, is it not? Believe me, the present situation of woman is considerable. Let us not quibble over the fact. Let us seek the causes. That is more elegant.

For my part, I see two. The first is that the male has “civilized” himself: I mean that he has laid aside those “barbarisms” apt to stir “the basest sensibility” and to “strike the imagination” — colors, fabrics, jewels, perfumes, retinue, (6) inaccessibility, precedences…; that he has laid aside idleness, and with it the softness of daily life — which gives the impression of a patrician epidermis — the turning in upon himself — which gives the impression of a rich consciousness. It follows that woman remains in the world the sole possessor of all that flatters the senses and imposes upon minds. It is a formidable position. (7) That is not all. At the same stroke she escapes the attraction of man, who by his very “civilization” has become perfectly unexciting; (8) and she is desired by him more keenly than ever, for he now wants her as the expression of a world from which he feels excluded… Whence, in her, consciousness of these advantages, an explosion of arrogance and contempt; in him, anger, humiliation…, in short, a hatred of the sexes never before seen, and very nearly their rupture: for the woman no longer contents herself with despising man, with his coarse linen, his three hairs combed together and his simplistic love — she ceases to ask love of him and turns to her own kind.

--- The second cause is democracy; it is that now it is the crowd that imposes its tastes and creates royalties, that is to say, precisely that part of humanity essentially susceptible to that barbarism which woman alone possesses and dispenses. (9) Thus woman is properly the modern idol… The world attracts a couple only to have the woman… Nothing but portraits of women are made anymore… Every impresario will tell you that one makes money now only with women… The novel, the theater, the magazine, the poster — everything that speaks to the “public” treats only of women… In truth, if anything astonishes me, it is that she is so modest.

Rodrigues was grumbling. His race demanded that woman should count for nothing. Eleuthère took advantage of the falling night to ignore his ill humor. He continued as though to himself:

--- But even if their pretensions were a thousand times less just, we should still have to leave them to them… It is so clearly in our interest! What price would their “fall” have if we did not know from what height they believe they are falling!… What would the spectacle of the joy of their flesh be worth, their dark application in reaching it, the redoubling of that application as they approach it, if we did not know their pretension to “divinity” and that with this joy of their flesh there mingles something like an anger that it should be witnessed! How much their body would lose of its troubling power if we did not reflect, not so much that it is desired, but that it knows it is desired, and that it is moved itself, lifting its veils for us, by the fortune that falls to us!… The importance women attach to their person — come, it is three-quarters of the desire one has for them. It is already sad enough, as one comes to know them better, to discover that they attach much less importance to it than they say… (10)

They walked through the woods.

She told him what she had known during the week: books, people, paintings… She passed over the bad. She wished only to love and to admire.

Often, listening to her, he changed his judgments: for he was more just, but she was more true.

They refused the image of the feeblest discord: they wished to think only of beings who love one another and things that resemble each other.

They sat down. She cast around her an essential gaze, and Eleuthère understood that she felt nature, that she did not name it.

At the bend of a village, they came upon a funeral procession. She made the sign of the cross. He evoked her as a little girl, learning to read and to respect God. And he loved her more tenderly.

She spoke of her Tuscan childhood. He spoke of his own… Each grew in the other’s eyes by his tradition. Each brought to the other a fragrance of distance and very ancient ways… Then they felt that their love dared to mingle two races. And it was at once an attraction and a fear.

They lost their way. They had to climb, descend, push aside branches, cross streams on three stones… She did all of this laughing, light and strong. And Eleuthère thought of his aesthetes of neurasthenia.

At supper, he looked at her. Why, he thought, is she so different from ours? --- It is that she is free in her grandeur.

They took each other by the hand and went out into the darkness. She let fall all that clothed her. And suddenly Eleuthère thought he understood Florence, its palaces, its gardens, with their magnificent forms never insolent, drunk on royalty far less than on love…

In the night, Eleuthère awoke. Madame Camignani was sleeping, her brow in the pillow and largely uncovered, in what is called a perfectly immodest posture… For a long time he contemplated… Soon he felt within himself something like a sacred emotion. He sought what ideas such a spectacle created within him… He found two. The first was the idea of infinitude: these forms, he thought, express woman — no longer, as her face does, under the aspect of the individual and therefore of unease — but under the aspect of the species and of eternity; they will always touch religious souls… And the second was the idea that this infinitude was showing him disrespect.

To be dis-respected, he thought: an important factor in the pleasure of love! To tell oneself that, by what one does and what one allows to be done, one falls all at once from that state of being respected which seems sewn to one’s human person… For women it is three-quarters of the pleasure… But is it not, one might say, simply the pleasure of a return to animality? Not at all! The pleasure is that there should be a witness to this return. It is indeed the pleasure of being disrespected, despised. It is the voluptuousness of shame. --- This pleasure must be all the more vivid the more one is respected in daily life. (And Eleuthère thought of the taste magistrates have for being treated with contempt.) --- And all of this is not without relation to mystical humility. How many would love to be treated by God as Jean-Jacques loved to be treated by Mademoiselle Lambercier!…

Then, as he continued not to sleep and was now thinking of the joys he had had a few hours ago in possessing this beautiful woman lying there, he set about seeking what ideas composed the joy of possession.

It seemed to him that the chief one was the idea of that fact, absolutely extraordinary when one thinks about it, which is that one installs oneself in another being.

And he elaborated:

To install oneself: to make oneself at ease, to expand, to move freely.

In. To be inside a thing. To inconvenience it…

In another being… First, another: a being that is not myself… To move freely in a being that is not myself! What an extraordinary thing! And then, in another being, that is to say, not in a body (what would that be!), but in the feeling a body has of itself, that is to say, in that thing which seems the most essentially inviolable: in a consciousness! For that is it, yes, that is precisely it: it is to install oneself in a consciousness.

He settled into this idea.

Then he reflected:

If the joy of possessing derives from the idea that one installs oneself in a consciousness, the desire to possess further must lead to wanting to penetrate what, in the desired body, seems bound to the most intimate consciousness…

… And Eleuthère thought that what scientists call “aberrations” of love are merely its most logical development.

He reflected further:

If the joy of possessing derives from the idea that one installs oneself in a consciousness, this joy must be all the greater the more the consciousness in which one installs oneself seems reserved; (more precisely) must be all the greater the more the self-feeling one penetrates seems jealous of itself… And he thought what a surplus of joy man owed to the fact that woman is a being who hides the consciousness of her intimate functions, and what frustration it was for her that man should be an object so little ashamed of the laws of his body.

(And he thanked women for their art of renewing the aspect of reserve.)

(1) Paul Rodrigues, as a good philosopher, is subject to hasty generalizations that serve his passions… It is nevertheless fairly true that one sees in most of our “fashionable” women an expression of insolence that is in some way endemic — notably a will to be “at a distance” — that one scarcely sees in the portraits of their counterparts of times past. (Compare, for example, the portrait Rodrigues is looking at here with the portraits Latour left us of the “elegant women” of his time, the Marechale de Belle-Isle for example, or Madame de Brienne; compare again those who entered the beds of the old rulers and those who today occupy these positions.) It is true that democracy creates a need to “distinguish oneself” that those women of former times did not have.

(2) The Antichrist.

(3) An allusion to certain ungallant experiments in which it was shown that the perception of changes (notably the perception of differences in weight) is much less acute in women than in men. Some still dare proclaim what everyone knows, that they have less sense of smell than men.

(4) These dialogues present several improbabilities, from which even those of Plato, which are found so “natural,” are not exempt: 1) the characters always respond to what is said to them; 2) they speak each in turn; 3) the arguments convince them.

(5) These philosophers, as is fitting, are unaware of what goes on in salons: they would know that the new pretension of women is to be misunderstood faunesses.

(6) Everything one drags along with one.

(7) What seems to confirm the explanation Eleuthère gives here of the elevated position of woman is that, in countries where man has not laid aside the barbarian attributes, woman counts for much less: in countries, for example, where soldiers or matadors reign.

(8) These reasoners truly take too little account of the nearly unanimous affirmation by women that what attracts them in a man is his intelligence. Unless they have noticed how much the most intelligent men are famous in History for their conjugal misfortunes.

(9) That democracy should lead to the cult of woman and other Asiaticisms is what one could deduce from its definition. On the one hand, democracy unleashes the world of simple folk, with their fundamental need for astonishment, for gaping, for wide-eyed wonder; on the other hand, the natural sustenance of this need, democracy suppresses it, by suppressing kings, the court, the great, by containing the military; from that point on, this unleashed need throws itself upon what it finds: upon women, upon actors, upon foreign kings who come to visit.

(10) The idea of the favor a woman grants in consenting to love seems a relatively modern idea, (apparently Christian.) Among the ancients, man seems to have dared believe that he was as much a pleasure for the woman as she was for him. “O Circe,” says Ulysses, “you have turned my companions into swine, and you ask me to be kind (etios) to you…” It is also noteworthy that, among the ancients, all the goddesses make advances (Calypso, Circe, Venus…): it is true that they are very beautiful women.