A fallen god, then, is not a man: it is an imposture; the lover has no alternative other than to prove he is really the king one adulates or to denounce himself as a usurper. When he is no longer worshipped, he has to be trampled on. In the name of this halo with which the woman in love adorns her beloved, she forbids him all weakness; she is disappointed and irritated if he does not conform to this image she put in his place; if he is tired, confused, if he is hungry or thirsty when he should not be, if he makes a mistake, if he contradicts himself, she decrees he is “not himself,” and she reproaches him for this. Likewise, she will go so far as to reproach him for all the initiatives she does not appreciate; she judges her judge, and in order for him to deserve to remain her master, she refuses him his freedom. Her adoration is sometimes better served by his absence than his presence; there are women, as we have seen, who devote themselves to dead or inaccessible heroes so that they never have to compare them with flesh-and-blood beings; the latter inevitably fail to live up to their dreams. Hence the disillusioned sayings: “You shouldn’t believe in Prince Charming. Men are just poor things.” They would not seem like dwarfs if they were not required to be giants.
This is one of the curses weighing on the passionate woman: her generosity is immediately converted into demands. Being alienated in another, she also wants to salvage herself: she has to annex this other who holds her being. She gives herself to him entirely: but he has to be totally available to receive this gift honorably. She dedicates all her moments to him: he has to be present at every moment; she only wants to live through him: but she wants to live; he has to devote himself to making her live.
Mme d’Agoult writes to Liszt: “I love you sometimes stupidly, and at such times I do not understand that I could not, would not be able to, and should not be for you the same absorbing thought as you are for me.” She tries to curtail her spontaneous wish: to be everything for him. There is the same appeal in Mlle de Lespinasse’s complaint:
My God! If you only knew what the days are like, what life is like without the interest and pleasure of seeing you! My friend, dissipation, occupation, and movement satisfy you; and I, my happiness is you, it is only you; I would not want to live if I could not see you and love you every minute of my life.
At first, the woman in love is delighted to satisfy her lover’s desire; then—like the legendary fireman who out of love for his job lights fires everywhere—she works at awakening this desire so as to have to satisfy it; if she does not succeed, she feels humiliated, useless to such an extent that the lover will feign passion he does not feel. In making herself a slave, she has found the surest means of subjugating him. This is another lie of love that many men—Lawrence, Montherlant—have resentfully denounced: he takes himself for a gift when he is a tyranny. In Adolphe, Benjamin Constant fiercely painted the chains the overly generous passion of a woman entwines around the man. “She did not count her sacrifices because she was busy making me accept them,” he says cruelly about Ellénore. Acceptance is thus a commitment that ties the lover up, without his even having the benefit of appearing to be the one who gives; the woman demands that he graciously welcome the loads she burdens him with. And her tyranny is insatiable. The man in love is authoritarian: but when he has obtained what he wanted, he is satisfied; but there are no limits to the demanding devotion of the woman. A lover who has confidence in his mistress shows no displeasure at her absences or if she is occupied when away from him: sure that she belongs to him, he prefers to possess a freedom more than a thing. By contrast, the absence of the lover is always torture for the woman: he is a gaze, a judge, as soon as he looks at something other than her, he frustrates her; everything he sees, he steals from her; far from him, she is dispossessed both of herself and of the world; even seated at her side, reading, writing, he abandons her, he betrays her. She hates his sleep. Baudelaire is touched by the sleeping woman: “Your beautiful eyes are weary, poor lover.” Proust delights in watching Albertine sleep;9 male jealousy is thus simply the desire for exclusive possession; the woman beloved, when sleep gives her back the disarming candor of childhood, belongs to no one: for the man, this certitude suffices. But the god, the master, must not abandon himself to the repose of immanence; it is with a hostile look that the woman contemplates this destroyed transcendence; she detests his animal inertia, this body that no longer exists for her but in itself, abandoned to a contingence whose ransom is her own contingence. Violette Leduc forcefully expressed this feeling:
I hate sleepers. I lean over them with bad intent. Their submission exasperates me. I hate their unconscious serenity, their false anesthesia, their studiously blind face, their reasonable drunkenness, their incompetent earnestness … I hovered, I waited for a long time for the pink bubble that would come out of my sleeper’s mouth. I only wanted a bubble of presence from him. I didn’t get it … I saw that his night eyelids were eyelids of death … I took refuge in his eyelids’ gaiety when this man was impossible. Sleep is hard when it wants to be. He walked off with everything. I hate my sleeper who can create peace for himself with an unconsciousness that is alien to me. I hate his sweet forehead … He is deep down inside himself busy with his rest. He is recapitulating who knows what … We had left posthaste. We wanted to leave the earth by using our personality. We had taken off, climbed up, watched out, waited, hummed, arrived, whined, won, and lost together. It was a serious school for playing hooky. We had uncovered a new kind of nothingness. Now you’re sleeping. Your effacement is not honest … If my sleeper moves, my hand touches, in spite of itself, the seed. It is the barn with fifty sacks of grain that is stifling, despotic. The scrotum of a sleeping man fell on my hand … I have the little bags of seed. I have in my hand the fields that will be plowed, the orchards that will be pruned, the force of the waters that will be transformed, the four boards that will be nailed, the tarpaulins that will be lifted. I have in my hand the fruits, flowers, and chosen animals. I have in my hand the lancet, the clippers, the probe, the revolver, the forceps, and all that does not fill my hand. The seed of the sleeping world is only the dangling extra of the soul’s prolongation …
You, when you sleep, I hate you.10
The god must not sleep, or he becomes clay and flesh; he must not cease to be present, or his creature founders in nothingness. For woman, man’s sleep is avarice and betrayal. At times the lover wakes his mistress: it is to make love to her; she wakes him simply to keep him from sleeping, to keep him nearby, thinking only of her, there, closed up in the room, in the bed, in her arms—like God in the tabernacle—this is what the woman desires: she is a jailer.
And yet, she does not really consent to have the man be nothing else but her prisoner. Here is one of the painful paradoxes of love: captive, the god sheds his divinity. The woman preserves her transcendence by handing it over to him: but he must bring it to the whole world. If two lovers disappear into the absolute of passion together, all freedom deteriorates into immanence; only death can provide a solution: this is one of the meanings of the Tristan and Isolde myth. Two lovers who are exclusively destined for each other are already dead: they die of boredom. Marcel Arland in Terres étrangères (Foreign Lands) described this slow agony of a love that devours itself. The woman understands this danger. Except for cases of jealous frenzy, she herself demands that man be project and action: he has to accomplish exploits to remain a hero. The chevalier who embarks on new feats of prowess offends his lady; but she scorns him if he stays seated at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love; woman wants to have man all to herself, but she demands that he go beyond all the givens he could possibly possess; one does not have a freedom; she wants to lock up here an existent who is, in Heidegger’s words, a “being from afar,” she knows full well that this effort is futile. “My friend, I love you as one should love, with excess, madness, rapture, and despair,” writes Julie de Lespinasse. Idolatrous love, if lucid, can only be hopeless. For the woman in love who asks her lover to be a hero, giant, demigod, demands not to b
e everything for him, whereas she can find happiness only if she contains him entirely within herself.
Nietzsche says:
A woman’s passion in its unconditional renunciation of rights of her own presupposes precisely that … there is no equal pathos, no equal will to renunciation; for if both partners felt impelled by love to renounce themselves, we should then get—I do not know what; perhaps an empty space? Woman wants to be taken … she wants someone who takes, who does not give himself or give himself away; on the contrary, he is supposed to become richer in “himself”… Woman gives herself away, man acquires more.11
In any case, the woman will be able to find her joy in this enrichment she brings to her loved one; she is not All for him: but she will try to believe herself indispensable; there are no degrees in necessity. If he cannot “get along without her,” she considers herself the foundation of his precious existence, and she derives her own worth from that. Her joy is to serve him: but he must gratefully recognize this service; giving becomes demand according to the customary dialectic of devotion.12 And a woman of scrupulous mind asks herself: Is it really me he needs? The man cherishes her, desires her with singular tenderness and desire: But would he not have just as singular feelings for another? Many women in love let themselves be deluded; they want to ignore the fact that the general is enveloped in the particular, and the man facilitates this illusion because he shares it at first; there is often in his desire a passion that seems to defy time; at the moment he desires this woman, he desires her with passion, he wants only her: and certainly the moment is an absolute, but a momentary absolute. Duped, the woman passes into the eternal. Deified by the embrace of the master, she believes she has always been divine and destined for the god: she alone. But male desire is as fleeting as it is imperious; once satisfied, it dies rather quickly, while it is most often after love that the woman becomes his prisoner. This is the theme of a whole type of shallow literature and songs. “A young man was passing by, a girl was singing … A young man was singing, a girl was crying.” And even if the man is seriously attached to the woman, it still does not mean that she is necessary to him. Yet this is what she demands: her abdication only saves her if it reinstates her empire; one cannot escape the play of reciprocity. So she must suffer or lie to herself. Most often she clutches first at the lie. She imagines the man’s love as the exact counterpart of the love she bears him; with bad faith, she takes desire for love, an erection for desire, love for religion. She forces the man to lie to her. Do you love me? As much as yesterday? Will you always love me? She cleverly asks the questions just when there is not enough time to give nuanced and sincere answers or when circumstances prevent them; imperiously she asks her questions during lovemaking, at the moment of convalescence, when sobbing, or on a railway station platform; she makes trophies of the answers she extorts; and in the absence of responses, she interprets the silences; every genuine woman in love is more or less paranoid. I remember a woman friend who, when faced with the long silence from a far-off lover, declared, “When one wants to break up, one writes to announce it”; then upon receiving an unambiguous letter: “When one really wants to break up, one doesn’t write.” It is often very difficult to decide where pathological delirium begins when hearing such confidences. Described by the panicking woman in love, the man’s behavior always seems extravagant: he’s neurotic, sadistic, repressed, a masochist, a devil, unstable, cowardly, or all of these together; he defies the most subtle psychological explanations. “X.… adores me, he’s wildly jealous, he wants me to wear a mask when I go out; but he’s such a strange being and so suspicious of love that he keeps me in the hallway and doesn’t invite me in when I ring his bell.” Or: “Z.… adored me. But he was too proud to ask me to go to Lyon, where he lives: I went there, I moved in with him. After eight days, without an argument, he threw me out. I saw him twice afterward. The third time I called him and he hung up in the middle of the conversation. He’s a neurotic.” These mysterious stories become clearer when the man explains: “I absolutely did not love her,” or “I liked her well enough, but I could not have lived one month with her.” Bad faith in excess leads to the mental asylum: one of the constants of erotomania is that the lover’s behavior seems enigmatic and paradoxical; from this slant, the patient’s delirium always succeeds in breaking down the resistance of reality. A normal woman sometimes finally realizes the truth, recognizing that she is no longer loved. But as long as her back is not to the wall, she always cheats a little. Even in reciprocal love, there is a fundamental difference between the lovers’ feelings that she tries to hide. The man must of course be capable of justifying himself without her since she hopes to be justified through him. If he is necessary to her, it is because she is fleeing her freedom: but if he assumes the freedom without which he would be neither a hero nor simply man, nothing and no one will be necessary for him. The dependence woman accepts comes from her weakness: How could she find a reciprocal dependence in the man she loves in his strength?
A passionately demanding soul cannot find tranquillity in love, because she sets her sights on a contradictory aim. Torn and tormented, she risks being a burden to the one for whom she dreamed of being a slave; she becomes importunate and obnoxious for want of feeling indispensable. Here is a common tragedy. Wiser and less intransigent, the woman in love resigns herself. She is not all, she is not necessary: it is enough for her to be useful; another can easily take her place: she is satisfied to be the one who is there. She recognizes her servitude without asking for reciprocity. She can thus enjoy modest happiness; but even in these limits, it will not be cloudless. Far more painfully than the wife, the woman in love waits. If the wife herself is exclusively a woman in love, the responsibilities of the home, motherhood, her occupations, and her pleasures will have little value in her eyes: it is the presence of her husband that lifts her out of the limbo of ennui. “When you are not there, it seems not even worthwhile to greet the day; everything that happens to me seems lifeless, I am no more than a little empty dress thrown on a chair,” writes Cécile Sauvage early in her marriage.13 And we have seen that, very often, it is outside marriage that passionate love arises and blooms. One of the most remarkable examples of a life entirely devoted to love is Juliette Drouet’s: it is an endless wait. “I must always come back to the same starting point, meaning eternally waiting for you,” she writes to Victor Hugo. “I wait for you like a squirrel in a cage.” “My God! How sad it is for someone with my nature to wait from one end of life to another.” “What a day! I thought it would never end waiting for you, and now I feel it went too quickly since I did not see you.” “I find the day eternal.” “I wait for you because after all I would rather wait than believe you are not coming at all.” It is true that Hugo, after having made her break off from her rich protector, Prince Demidoff, confined Juliette to a small apartment and forbade her to go out alone for twelve years, to prevent her from seeing her former friends. But even when her lot—she called herself “your poor cloistered victim”—had improved, she still continued to have no other reason to live than her lover and not to see him very much. “I love you, my dearest Victor,” she wrote in 1841, “but my heart is sad and full of bitterness; I see you so little, so little, and the little I see you, you belong to me so little that all these littles make a whole of sadness that fills my heart and mind.” She dreams of reconciling independence and love. “I would like to be both independent and slave, independent through a state that nourishes me and slave only to my love.” But having totally failed in her career as an actress, she had to resign herself to being no more than a lover “from one end of life to the other.” Despite her efforts to be of service to her idol, the hours were too empty: the seventeen thousand letters she wrote to Hugo at the rate of three to four hundred every year are proof of this. Between visits from the master, she could only kill time. The worst horror of woman’s condition in a harem is that her days are deserts of boredom: when the male is not using this object that she is for hi
m, she is absolutely nothing. The situation of the woman in love is analogous: she only wants to be this loved woman, and nothing else has value in her eyes. For her to exist, then, her lover must be by her side, taken care of by her; she awaits his return, his desire, his waking; and as soon as he leaves her, she starts again to wait for him. Such is the curse that weighs on the heroines of Back Street14 and The Weather in the Streets,15 priestesses and victims of pure love. It is the harsh punishment inflicted on those who have not taken their destiny in their own hands.
Waiting can be a joy; for the woman who watches for her loved one, knowing he is hurrying to her, that he loves her, the wait is a dazzling promise. But over and above the confident intoxication of love that changes absence itself into presence, the torment of worry gets confused with the emptiness of absence: the man might never return. I knew a woman who greeted her lover with surprise each time they met: “I thought you would never return,” she would say. And if he asked her why: “Because you could never return; when I wait, I always have the impression that I will never see you again.” Above all, he may cease to love her: he may love another woman. The vehemence with which she tries to fool herself by saying “He loves me madly, he can love no one but me” does not exclude the torture of jealousy. It is characteristic of bad faith that it allows passionate and contradictory affirmations. Thus the madman who stubbornly takes himself for Napoleon does not mind admitting he is also a barber. The woman rarely consents to ask herself, does he really love me? but asks herself a hundred times: Does he love another? She does not accept that her lover’s fervor could have dimmed little by little, nor that he gives less value to love than she does: she immediately invents rivals. She considers love both a free feeling and a magic spell; and she assumes that “her” male continues to love her in his freedom while being “snared” or “tricked” by some clever schemer. The man grasps the woman as being assimilated to him, in her immanence; here is why he easily plays the Boubouroche; he cannot imagine that she too could be someone who slips away from him; jealousy for him is ordinarily just a passing crisis, like love itself: the crisis may be violent and even murderous, but rarely does it last long in him. Jealousy for him mainly appears derivative: when things go badly for him or when he feels threatened by life, he feels derided by his wife.16 By contrast, a woman loving a man in his alterity and transcendence feels in danger at every moment. There is no great distance between betrayal by absence and infidelity. As soon as she feels unloved, she becomes jealous: given her demands, it is always more or less true; her reproaches and her grievances, whatever their pretexts, are converted into jealous scenes: this is how she will express her impatience, the ennui of waiting, the bitter feeling of her dependence, the regret of having only a mutilated existence. Her whole destiny is at stake in every glance her lover casts at another woman since she has alienated her entire being in him. And she becomes irritated if for one instant her lover turns his eyes to another woman; if he reminds her that she has just been dwelling on a stranger for a long time, she firmly answers: “It’s not the same thing.” She is right. A man looked at by a woman receives nothing: giving begins only at the moment when the feminine flesh becomes prey. But the coveted woman is immediately metamorphosed into a desirable and desired object; and the neglected woman in love “returns to ordinary clay.” Thus she is always on the lookout. What is he doing? At whom is he looking? To whom is he talking? What one smile gave her, another smile can take back from her; an instant is enough to hurl her from “the pearly light of immortality” to everyday dusk. She has received everything from love; she can lose everything by losing it. Vague or definite, unfounded or justified, jealousy is frightening torture for the woman because it is a radical contestation of love: if the betrayal is certain, it is necessary to either renounce making a religion of love or renounce that love; it is such a radical upheaval that one can understand how the woman in love, both doubting and deceived, can be obsessed by the desire and fear of discovering the mortal truth.
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