5

5. On some lines of Virgil

[Montaigne now breaks totally new ground. A concern for marriage and human sexuality was widespread in the Renaissance, partly because of the Reformation with its respect for marriage and the demands made on it, partly because of ferment within the Roman Catholic Church, the universities, legal and medical circles and among moralists. (A good example of such ferment in a comic setting is The Third Book of Pantagruel by Rabelais.) Montaigne’s achievement can be compared and contrasted with that of a friend of Rabelais, the great jurisconsult Andreas Tiraquellus in his ever-expanding Latin Laws of Marriage. But Montaigne is partly making a general confession; partly (for the first time ever) giving a self-portrait in which the sexual drive is openly portrayed; partly showing how old age may come to terms with dwindling physical potency yet powerful erotic dreams and memories. The development of sexuality in his own time from (in Montaigne’s view) the courteous chastity of his father’s days to his own youth with its tolerance of the courtly service of love in extramarital love-affairs (especially between young unmarried gentlemen and married ladies) to the brutality which he believed to mark French sexuality in his declining years was doubtless (if true) one of the results of the moral collapse brought about by the Wars of Religion. Montaigne, as usual, sees men and women as body-plus-‘soul’ (or ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’). Love-affairs, primarily but by no means exclusively, concern the body. The love, amour, which Montaigne discusses here is not amitié, that loving-friendship proper to marriage at its best; after his own wedding he himself was much more loyal to his marriage-vows than he had ever dreamt possible. Virgil and Lucretius lead him to stress the poetry of erotic love and to contrast and compare it with the outspoken quasi-pornographic verses of the classical Priapics and their Renaissance imitators, who included religious leaders such as Beza. The chapter is marked by statements of anti-feminism and of jaundiced views of marriage: these are in fact often humorous in ways not always clear to modern readers. Medieval and Renaissance convention often made such attitudes comic or ironical: there is much of that here; but Horace is cited: ‘What can stop us from telling the truth with a laugh!’ Montaigne was warned before publication that his ironies might be taken seriously. That did not worry him: this is a self-portrait and he was indeed given to irony. But while Montaigne presents men and women as a case of of ‘us’ and ‘them’, he frequently gives examples of men to support a statement of allegedly female vice or virtue, and of women to exemplify allegedly masculine ones. In Rabelais or Tiraquellus, men and women are almost different creatures, their sexual drives deriving from different causes and producing different effects (men being able to control their sexuality without risk to life and health, women not). Montaigne goes back to the very passage of Plato’s Timaeus where doctors had for a millennium and a half found justification for that conviction and quietly shows that Plato made men and women equally subject to analogous sexual drives. The conclusion of Montaigne is an arresting one: women should be allowed more freedom: men and women share a common ‘mould’ – both have the common form of human kind. And that is nowhere more obvious than in our sexuality.

The element of confession in this chapter is emphasized by Montaigne’s reminder that God sees through society’s conventions and what are nowadays called taboos, seeing us not clad in evasive words but in the cankered nakedness of soul and body, ‘with our tattered rags ripped off our pudenda.]

[B] The more our moral thoughts are abundant and solid the more engrossing they are and oppressive. Vice, death, poverty, illness are weighty subjects and they do indeed weigh on us. We need our Soul to be instructed in the means of sustaining evils and of fighting them off, instructed too in the rules of right-living and right-believing; and we need to awaken her to practise so fine an endeavour. But in the case of a soul of the common sort this must be done with moderation and some laxity: keep her continually tensed and you drive her mad. In my youth I needed to arouse myself and counsel myself if I were to remain dutiful: liveliness and good-health do not agree all that well, [C] they say, [B] with serious and sagacious discourse. Nowadays. I am in a different state: the properties of old age give me too many counsels, making me wise and preaching at me. I have fallen from excessive gaiety into excessive seriousness which is more bothersome. That is why I deliberately go in for a bit of debauchery at times by employing my Soul on youngish wanton thoughts over which she can linger a while. From now on I am all too stale, heavy and ripe. Every day the years read me lectures on lack of ardour and on temperance. My body flees from excess: it is afraid of it. It is its turn now to guide my mind towards amendment of life. It is its turn now to act the professor, and it does so more harshly and imperiously. For one single hour, sleeping or waking, it never allows me to take time off from learning about death, suffering and penitence. I now defend myself against temperance as I used to do against voluptuousness. Now it is my body which pulls me back, to the point of numbness. Yet I want to be in every way master of myself. Wisdom has its excesses and has no less need of moderation than folly. So, fearing that in the intervals which my ills allow me, I may be desiccated, dried up and weighed down by wisdom –

mens intenta suis ne siet usque malis [Lest my mind should dwell intensely on its ills]1

I turn very gently aside and make my eyes steal away from such stormy, cloud-wracked skies as lie before me: which, thanks be to God, I can contemplate without terror but not without strain and effort; and I find myself spending my time recalling periods of my past youth:

animus quod perdidit optat,Atque in præterita se totus imagine versat

[My mind prefers what it has lost and gives itself entirely over to by-gone memories.]

Let babes look ahead, old age behind: is that not what was meant by the double face of Janus?2 The years can drag me along if they will, but they will have to drag me along facing backwards. While my eyes can still make reconnaissances into that beautiful season now expired, I will occasionally look back upon it. Although it has gone from my blood and veins at least I have no wish to tear the thought of it from my memory by the roots:

hoc est Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui.

[To be able to enjoy your former life again is to live twice.]3

[C] Plato tells old men to go and watch the exercises, dancing and sports of the young, to enjoy in others that beauty and suppleness of body which they have no longer and to recall to their memory the grace and privileges of those years of bloom; and he desires that they should award the victory in those sports to the young man who has given most joy and gladness to the greatest number of the old.

[B] Once upon a time I used to mark as exceptional the dark, depressing days: those days are now my routine ones; it is the ones which are beautiful and serene which are extraordinary now. I am close to the point when I shall jump for joy and accept anything which does not actually hurt as some new favour. Tickle myself I may, but cannot force a laugh out of this vile body. I make myself delight in dream and fantasy so as to divert by ruse the chagrin of old age. But it would take a different remedy to cure it. What a feeble struggle of art against nature!

There is great silliness in extending by anticipation our human ills;. I do not want to be old before my time; I prefer to be old for a shorter one. I grab hold of even the slightest occasions of pleasure that. I come across. I know from hearsay that there are several species of pleasure which are wise, strong and laudable; but rumour has not enough power over me to arouse an appetite for them in me. [C] I do not so much want noble, magnificent and proud pleasures as sweetish ones, easy and ready to hand: ‘A natura discedimus; populo nos damus, nullius rei bono auctori’ [We are departing from what is natural, surrendering ourselves to the plebs who are never a good guide in anything.]4

[B] My philosophy lies in action, in natural [C] and present [B] practice, and but little in ratiocination. Would that I could enjoy tossing hazelnuts and whipping tops!

Non ponebat enim rumores ante salutem [Not for him did common report take precedence over his welfare.]5

As a quality, pleasure-seeking is not very ambitious; of itself it reckons it is rich enough without bringing in the prize of reputation; it likes itself more in the shadows. If a man spends time savouring the tastes of wine and sauces when he is young, we ought to give him a good hiding. There is nothing I knew or valued less. I am learning about them now, I am ashamed to say: but what else can I do? I am even more ashamed and angry at the causes which drive me to it. It is for us to act the madman over trifles: young men ought to stand to their reputation and in the best places; youth is making its way forward in the world and seeking a name: we we are on our way back. [C] ‘Sibi arma, sibi equos, sibi hastas, sibi clavam, sibi pilam, sibi natationes et cursus habeant; nobis senibus, ex lusionibus multis, talos relinquant et tesseras.’ [Let them have their arms, their horses, their spears and their fencing-foils; let them toss balls and swim and race: and from the many pastimes let old men choose dice and knuckle-bones.]6 [B] The very laws send us back to our homes. The least I can do on behalf of this wretched state into which my age has thrust me is to furnish it, as we do childhood, with toys and playthings: for that is what we are declining into. Wisdom and folly both will have plenty to do if they are to support and succour me alternately in disastrous old age:

Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem. [Mix a little brief folly in your counsels.]7

I similarly flee from the slightest pin-pricks: those which once would have scarcely scratched me now run right through me. My mode of being is beginning to like dwelling on the pain. [C] ‘In fragili corpore odiosa omnis offensio est.’ [To a frail body every shock is vexatious.]8

[B] Mensque pati durum sustinet ægra nihil. [A mind that is ill can tolerate no hardships whatsoever.]9

I have always been delicately sensitive to attacks of pain; I am more tender still now and in every way defenceless.

Et minimæ vires frangere quassa valent. [The least shock will shatter a cracked vessel.]

My judgement prevents me from kicking and muttering against the indignities which Nature orders me to tolerate, but it does not stop me from feeling them. I would run from one end of the world to the other to seek a single twelve-month of gay and pleasant tranquillity: I have no other end but to live and enjoy myself. There is enough sombre and dull tranquillity for me now, but it sends me to sleep and dulls my brain: I can never be satisfied by it. If there is any man or any good fellowship of men in town or country, in France or abroad, sedentary or gadabout, whom my humours please and whose humours please me, they have but to whistle through their fingers and I’ll come to them, furnishing them with ‘essays’ in flesh and blood.

Since it is the privilege of the mind to escape from old age I counsel it to do so with all my might: let it meanwhile sprout green and flourish, if it can, like mistletoe on a dead tree. But it is a traitor, I fear: it is so closely bound in brotherhood to the body that it is constantly deserting me to follow my body in its necessity. In vain do I try to divert it from this attachment; I set before it Seneca and Catullus and the ladies and their dances royales: but if its comrade has colic paroxysms it thinks it has them too! The very activities which are proper and peculiar to it cannot then raise it up: they too manifestly reek of snot. There is no alacrity about what the mind brings forth when there is none in its body at the very same time.

[C] Magistri Nostri10 are wrong when they seek to explain the extraordinary transports of our spirit. Leaving aside the attribution of some of them to divine rapture, to love, to the harshness of war, to poetry, to wine, they do not allow the part played in them by good health, by boiling vigorous health, whole and idle, such as from time to time in former days my verdant years, so free from care, provided for me. That joyful fire gives rise to flashes in our spirit; they are lively and bright beyond our natural reach; they are some of our most lively enthusiasms, even though they are not the most frenzied. No wonder then if the opposite state overburdens my spirit, hammers it down and produces opposite results:

[B] Ad nullum consurgit opus, cum corpore languet. [No task can make it struggle to its feet: it languishes with the body.]11

Furthermore my spirit wants me to be beholden to it for its allegedly showing much less complicity in all this than is usually the practice among men. Let us at least drive away ills and hardships from our human intercourse while we are enjoying a truce:

Dum licet, obducta solvatur fronte senectus. [So while it can, let old age smooth away the wrinkles on its brow.]

‘Tetrica sunt amoenenda jocularibus.’ [Gloomy thoughts should be made pleasant by jests.] I like the kind of wisdom which is gay and companionable; I fly from grating manners and from sourness; I am suspicious of grim faces.

[C] Tristemque vultus tetrici arrogantiam;

[The sad arrogance of a gloomy face;]

[B] Et habet tristis quoque turba cynaedos.

[And buggers too are found in groups of sombre men.]

[C] I wholeheartedly believe Plato when he says that great portents of the goodness or evil of a soul are easy or difficult humours. Socrates had a set expression but a serene and laughing one: it was not set as was that of the aged Crassus who was never known to laugh.12 [B] As a quality virtue is pleasing and gay. I know that few of those who will glower at the unrestrained freedom of my writings do not have greater cause to glower at the unrestrained freedom of their thoughts. I am certainly in harmony with their sentiments: it is their eyes I offend! What a well-ordered mind that is which can gloss over the writings of Plato burying all knowledge of his alleged affairs with Phaedo, Dion, Stella and Archeanassa! ‘Non pudeat dicere quod non pudeat sentire.’ [Let us be not ashamed to say whatever we are not ashamed to think.]13

[B] I loathe a morose and gloomy mind which glides over life’s pleasures but holds on to its misfortunes and feeds on them – like flies which cannot get a hold on to anything highly polished and smooth and so cling to rough and rugged places and stay there; or like leeches which crave to suck only bad blood.14 I have moreover bidden myself to dare to write whatever I dare to do: I am loath even to have thoughts which I cannot publish. The worst of my deeds or qualities does not seem to me as ugly as the ugly cowardice of not daring to avow it. Everybody is circumspect about confessing, whereas they ought to be circumspect about doing: daring to do wrong is to some extent counterweighted and bridled by the courage needed to confess it. [C] Any man who would bind himself to tell all would bind himself to do nothing which we are forced to keep quiet about. God grant that my excessive licence may draw men nowadays to be free, rising above those cowardly counterfeit virtues which are born of our imperfections, and also grant that I may draw them to the pinnacle of reason at the expense of my own lack of moderation! If you are to tell of a vice of yours you must first see it and study it. Those who conceal it from others usually do so from themselves as well: they hold that it is not sufficiently hidden if they can see it, so they disguise it and steal it from their own moral awareness. ‘Quare vitia sua nemo confitetur? Quia etiam nunc in illis est; somnium narrare vigilantis est.’ [Why does nobody confess his faults? Because even now he remains within them: only after men have awakened can they relate their dreams.]15

The body’s ills become clearer as they grow bigger: we discover that what we called a sprain or a touch of rheumatism is the gout. But as the soul’s ills grow in strength they are wrapped in greater obscurity: the more ill a man is, the less he realizes it. That is why the maladies of the soul need to be often probed in daylight, cut and torn from our hollow breasts by a pitiless hand. What applies to the benefactions we receive applies to the evils that we do: sometimes the only way to requite them is to acknowledge them. Is there some ugliness in our wrong-doing which dispenses us from the duty of acknowledging it?

[B] I suffer such pains whenever I dissemble that I avoid being entrusted with another man’s secret, having no mind to deny what I know. I can keep quiet about it but I cannot deny it without strain and unease. To be really able to keep a secret you need to be made that way by nature, not doing so because you are under bond. When serving princes it is not enough to keep a secret: you need to be a liar as well. To the man who inquired of Thales of Milesia whether he should deny on oath that he had been a lecher I would have replied that he should not do so, for lying has always seemed worse to me than lechery. Thales gave quite different advice, telling him to swear the oath so as to cloak a bad vice by a lesser one. Yet this counsel means not so much choosing between vices as increasing their number.16

Be it said en passant that if you present a man of conscience with the need to weigh an awkward situation against a vice he can easily strike the right bargain, but if you imprison him between two vices you oblige him to make a harsh choice – as happened to Origen who had either to commit idolatry or submit to being carnally assaulted by an ugly great Ethiopian paraded before him. He suffered the first alternative. Wrongly, it is said. So those women nowadays who protest to us that they would rather have ten lovers on their conscience than a single Mass would – by their false standards – not be making a bad choice.17

There may be a lack of discretion in publishing one’s defects this way but there is no great danger of it becoming customary by example, for Ariston said that the winds which men most fear are those which uncover them.18 We must truss up those silly rags which cover over our morals. Men dispatch their consciences to the brothels and regulate their appearances. Even traitors and murderers are wedded to the laws of etiquette and dutifully stick to them. Yet it is not for injustice to complain of discourtesy [C] nor for wickedness to complain of indiscretion. It is a pity that a wicked man should not also be a boor and that his vice should be palliated by politeness. Such stucco belongs rightly to good healthy walls which are worth whitening or preserving.

[B] As a courtesy to the Huguenots who damn our private auricular confession I make my confession here in public, sincerely and scrupulously. St Augustine, Origen and Hippocrates publicly admitted the error of their opinions; I do more; I include my morals.19 I hunger to make myself known. Provided I do so truly I do not care how many know it. Or, to put it better, I hunger for nothing, but I go in mortal fear of being mistaken for another by those who happen to know my name. If a man does all for honour and glory what does he think he gains by appearing before the world in a mask, concealing his true being from the people’s knowledge? If you praise a hunchback for his fine build he ought to take it as an insult. Are people talking about you if they honour you for valour when you are really a coward? They mistake you for somebody else. It would amuse me as much if such a person were to be gratified when men raised their caps to him, thinking that he was the master of the band when he was merely one of the retainers. When King Archelaus of Macedonia was going along the street somebody threw water over him. His entourage wanted to punish the man. ‘Ah yes,’ he replied, ‘but he never threw it at me but at the man he mistook me for.’20 [C] When somebody told Socrates that people were gossiping about him he said, ‘Not at all. There is nothing of me in what they are saying.’21 [B] In my case, if a man were to praise me for being a good navigator, for being very proper or very chaste I would not owe him a thank you. Similarly, if anyone should call me a traitor, a thief or a drunkard I would not think that it was me he attacked. Men who misjudge what they are like may well feed on false approval: I cannot. I see myself and explore myself right into my inwards; I know what pertains to me. I am content with less praise provided that I am more known. [C] People might think that I am wise with the kind of wisdom which I hold to be daft.

[B] It pains me that my Essays merely serve ladies as a routine piece of furniture – something to put into their salon. This chapter will get me into their private drawing-rooms; and I prefer my dealings with women to be somewhat private: the public ones lack intimacy and savour.

When saying our goodbyes we feel warmer affection than usual for whatever we are giving up. I am taking a last farewell of this world’s sports: these are our final embraces. But now let us get round to my subject.

The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth. Does that mean that the less we breathe a word about sex the more right we have to allow it to fill our thoughts?

[C] It is interesting that the words which are least used, least written and the least spoken are the very ones which are best known and most widely recognized. No one of any age or morals fails to know them as well as he knows the word for bread. They are printed on each one of us without being published; they have no voice, no spelling. It is interesting too that they mean an act which we have placed under the protection of silence, from which it is a crime to tear it even to arraign it and to judge it. We dare not even flog it except by periphrasis and similitude. A criminal is greatly favoured if he is so abominable that even the laws think it illicit to touch him or to see him: he is freed by the beneficence of his condemnation and saved by its severity. Is it not the same concerning books, which become more saleable and publicized once they are suppressed? Personally. I intend to take Aristotle’s advice literally: he says that coyness serves as an ornament in youth and a defect in old age.22

[B] In the school of the Ancients – the school I cling to far more than to the modern, [C] its virtues seeming greater to me and its vices less – [B] they preach these words at you:

[B] Ceux qui par trop fuyant Venus estrivent Faillent autant que ceux qui trop la suivent.

[Those who excessively strive to flee from Venus fail just like those who follow her excessively.]23

Tu, Dea, tu rerum naturam sola gubernas, Nec sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras Exoritur, neque fit lætum nec amabile quicquam.

[Thou alone, O goddess, rulest over the totality of nature; without thee nothing comes to the heavenly shores of light, nothing is joyful, nothing lovable.]

I do not know who managed to make Pallas and the Muses fall out with Venus and chill their ardour for Cupid;24 yet I can find no deities who become each other more or who owe more to each other. Anyone who removed their amorous thoughts from the Muses would rob them of the most beauteous entertainment they provide and of the noblest subject-matter of their works; and anyone who made Cupid lose contact with poetry and its services would weaken him by depriving him of his weapons. In that way we charge both the god of sexual relationships and of tenderness, and the tutelary goddesses of elegance and justice, with the vices of ingratitude and churlishness.

I have been struck off the roll of Cupid’s attendants but not for so long that my memory is not still imbued with his powers and his values:

agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ.[I can recognize the tracks of my former passions.]25

There are still some traces of heat and emotion after the fever,

Nec mihi deficiat calor hic, hiemantibus annis [And let me not lack that warmth in my winter years.]

All gross and dried up as I am, I can still feel some lukewarm remnants from that bygone ardour:

Qual l’alto Ægeo, per che Aquilone o Noto Cessi, che tutto prima il vuolse et scosse, Non s’accheta ei pero: ma’l sono e’l moto, Ritien de l’onde anco agitate è grosse.

[As the Aegean sea when the North Wind and the South have dropped, which first had whipped and churned it up, does not at once grow calm but retains the roar and surge of the waves, huge still and thrashing.]

To the best of my knowledge the powers and values of that god are found more alive and animated in poetry than in their proper essence:

Et versus digitos habet. [Poetry has playful fingers too.]

Poetry can show us love with an air more loving than Love itself. Venus is never as beautiful stark naked, quick and panting, as she is here in Virgil:

Dixerat, et niveis hinc atque hinc diva lacertis Cunctantem amplexu molli fovet. Ille repente Accepit solitam flammam, notusque medullas Intravit calor, et labefacta per ossa cucurrit. Non secus atque olim tonitru cum rupta corusco Ignea rima micans percurrit lumine nimbos. … Ea verba loquutus, Optatos dedit amplexus, placidumque petivit Conjugis infusus gremio per membra soporem.

[Venus fell silent; and as he hesitates she encircles him in her snow-white arms and warms him in her soft embrace. Soon he was welcoming the accustomed flame; its well-known heat struck him to the marrow and coursed through the bones of his trembling limbs. It was like unto the brilliant lightning which, with a thunderclap, flashes through the clouds… He spoke to her, gave her the embraces that she yearned for, and then his limbs sought quiet repose as he lay flowing around his wife’s bosom.]26

What I find worth stressing is that Virgil in these lines portrays her as a little too passionate for a married Venus. Within that wise contract our sexual desires are not so madcap; they are darkened and have lost their edge. Cupid hates that couples should be held together except by himself, and only slackly comes into partnerships such as marriage which are drawn up and sustained by different title-deeds. In marriage, alliances and money rightly weigh at least as much as attractiveness and beauty. No matter what people say, a man does not get married for his own sake: he does so at least as much (or more) for his descendants, for his family. The customary benefits of marriage go way beyond ourselves and concern our lineage. That is why I like the practice of having marriages arranged at the hands of a third party rather than our own, not by our own judgement but by someone else’s. How contrary all that is to amorous compacts. Moreover there is a kind of lewdness (as I think I have said already) in deploying the rapturous strivings of Love’s licentiousness within such a relationship, which is sacred and to be revered.27 Aristotle says that we should approach our wives wisely and gravely for fear lest we unhinge their reason by arousing them too lasciviously. What he says for our moral sense the doctors say for our health’s sake, namely that too hot, voluptuous and unremitting a pleasure is deleterious to the sperm and impedes conception.28 They go on to say that in the case of the kind of intercourse which is feeble by nature (as the married kind is) we should undertake it rarely, at stated intervals, so as to fill it with a just and fruitful heat,

quo rapiat sitiens venerem interiusque recondat. [by which the mare avidly seizes on Venus’ seed and buries it deep inside her.]29

I know no marriages which fail and come to grief more quickly than those which are set on foot by beauty and amorous desire. Marriage requires foundations which are solid and durable; and we must keep on the alert. That boiling rapture is no good at all.

Those who think to honour marriage by associating passion with it are like those (it seems to me) who to promote virtue hold rank to be none other than a virtue: there is some cousinship between rank and virtue but great differences as well; there is no gain in confusing their names and title-deeds: we wrong them both by confounding them that way. Noble rank is a beautiful quality and was rightly instituted; but, since it is a qualitydependent on others and can fall to a vicious man of naught, it is well below virtue in esteem. It is a ‘virtue’ – if indeed it be one – which is artificial and visible, dependent on time and fortune, differing in style in various countries; it lives, yet is mortal, having no more origin than the river Nile. Genealogical and not individual, it depends on succession; it is drawn from sequency – and a feeble sequency at that! Knowledge, fortitude, goodness, beauty, riches, indeed all other qualities, are subject to communication and sharing; rank is self-devouring and of no utility in the service of others. It was explained to one of our kings that a choice had to be made between two candidates for the same office: one of them was a nobleman, the other certainly not. He commanded that they should choose, irrespective of rank, the man with the greater merit; but should they prove to be of exactly equal worth, they should in that case take rank into account. That was to assign to it its just importance. When a young unproven man asked Antigonus for the position held by his father (a valiant man who had just died), he replied: ‘My friend, in such promotions I do not so much have regard for the rank of my soldiers as for their prowess.’30

[C] It really should not be done as it was for the office-holders of the kings of Sparta – trumpeters, minstrels and cooks – who were succeeded in their charges by their sons, no matter how ignorant they might be, taking precedence over men best skilled at the craft.31 The people of Calicut make their nobility into a species higher than Man. Marriage is forbidden them, as is any profession but war. They can have their fill of concubines, and their women may have as many studs; jealousy is unknown between them; but it is an unforgivable crime punishable by death to lie with anyone of a different rank; they feel defiled if they are even touched by them as they go by; and since their noble state is marvellously polluted and tainted by it, they slaughter those who draw even a little too close to them; the untouchables are therefore forced to cry out at street corners as they walk along, like gondoliers in Venice, to avoid colliding. And persons of rank can order them to get out of their way whenever they want to. By such means the nobility avoid a disgrace which they consider indelible; the others avoid certain death. No stretch of time, no princely favour, no office, valour or wealth can entitle a commoner to become a nobleman. This is reinforced by their custom of forbidding marriages across trades: a woman descended from cobblers cannot marry a woodworker and parents are under the obligation of training their sons for their father’s calling – exactly that one: no other will do. By such means they maintain permanent distinctions in their lot.32

[B] A good marriage (if there be such a thing) rejects the company and conditions of Cupid: it strives to reproduce those of loving-friendship. It is a pleasant fellowship for life, full of constancy, trust and an infinity of solid useful services and mutual duties. No wife who has ever savoured its taste –

optato quant junxit lumine tæda [whom the marriage-torch has joined with its long-desired light]33

–would ever wish to be the beloved mistress of her husband. If she is lodged in his affection as a wife then her lodging is far more honourable and secure. Even when he is swept off his feet with passion for another, just ask him whether he would prefer some disgrace to befall his wife or his mistress; whose misfortune would grieve him more? for which of them he desires the greater respect? In a healthy marriage such questions admit of no doubt. The fact that one sees so few good ones is a token of its value and price. Shape it and accept it rightly and there is no more beautiful element in our society. We cannot do without it yet we go and besmirch it, with the result that it is like birds and cages: the ones outside despair of getting in: the ones inside only care to get out. [C] When Socrates was asked whether it was more appropriate to take or not to take a wife, he, replied, ‘Whichever you do you will be sorry.’34 [B] It is a contractual engagement to which can be exactly applied the proverb: Man is god or wolf to Man. Many elements have to coincide to construct it. In our times it is considered to be more rewarding for those with uncomplicated everyday souls which are not so troubled by frivolity, curiosity and sloth. Roving humours such as mine which loathe all forms of tie or bond are not so proper for it:

Et mihi dulce magis resoluto vivere collo. [For me too it is sweeter far to live with no chain about my neck.]35

By my own design I would have fled from marrying Wisdom herself if she would have had me. But no matter what we may say, the customs and practices of life in society sweep us along. Most of my doings are governed by example not choice. Nevertheless I did not, strictly speaking, invite myself to the feast: I was led there, brought to it by external considerations.

There is nothing so awkward – in fact nothing at all, no matter how ugly, vitiated or repugnant – but can become bearable under certain conditions and in certain circumstances, so vain is our human situation. When I was borne into marriage I was less broken in and more recalcitrant than I am now that I have made an assay at it. And, womanizer though I am held to be, I have, in truth, more rigidly observed the laws of matrimony than I ever vowed or hoped. It is no longer the time for kicking over the traces once they have tied your legs together! We should tend our freedom wisely; but once we have submitted to the marriage-bond we must stay there under the laws of our common duty (or at least strive to). The actions of those husbands who accept the bargain and then show hatred and contempt are harsh and unjust. Equally unfair and intolerable is that fine counsel which I see passed from hand to hand among our women:

Sers ton mary comme ton maistre, Et t’en guarde comme d’un traistre.

[Serve him like a master: watch him like a traitor.]

That is a challenge and a call to battle, meaning, ‘Act towards him with a constrained respect, hostile and suspicious.’

I am too easy-going for such prickly designs. To tell the truth I have yet to attain to that perfect intellectual elegance and cunning which confound right and injustice and which ridicule any rule and order which may not accord with my desires. Just because I loathe superstition I do not go straightway mocking religion. Though we may not always do our duty we must always at least love and acknowledge it. [C] To take a wife without espousing her is treachery.

[B] Let us get on.

Our poet Virgil portrays a marriage full of concord and harmony, in which however there is not much fidelity. Did he mean to say that it is not impossible to surrender to the attacks of Cupid and yet nevertheless to keep a sense of duty towards one’s marriage; that one may injure marriage without tearing it totally apart? [C] A valet can diddle his master without hating him!

[B] A wife may be attracted to an unknown man by beauty, opportuneness and destiny – for destiny plays its role in it:

fatum est in partibus illisQuas sinus abscondit: nam, si tibi sidera cessent, Nil faciet longi mensura incognita nervi

[The privy parts hidden in your toga are fated: if the stars forsake you, it will do you no good to have a tool of unprecedented size]36

–yet she may not be so totally attracted that there remain no bonds still holding her to her husband. We are dealing with two projects which each go their own distinct separate ways. A wife may give herself to another man whom – not because of the state of his finances but because of his very personality – she would never wish to marry. Few men have married their mistresses without repenting of it. [C] That even applies to the other world! What a wretched household, that of Jupiter and a wife whom he had seduced and had enjoyed having little affairs with! That, as the saying goes, is shitting in the basket and then plonking it on your head.

[B] I have in my time seen a highly placed love-affair shamefully and dishonourably cured by a marriage. The motives of both are quite distinct. We can, without difficulty, love two very different and incompatible things.

Isocrates said that the City of Athens was pleasing in the same way as a mistress served for love: all men took pleasure in spending their time and walking with her, but no man loved her well enough to wed her (that is, to make his home and habitation there).37

It has angered me to see husbands hating their wives precisely because they are doing them wrong: at very least we should not love them less when the fault is ours; at very least they ought to be made dearer to us by our regrets and our sympathy.

Isocrates meant that, while the ends were different, they were in certain circumstances not incompatible. For its part marriage has usefulness, justice, honour and constancy: a level but more universal pleasure. A love-affair is based on pleasure alone: and in truth its pleasure is more exciting, lively and keen: a pleasure set ablaze by difficulties. It must have stabs of pain and anguish. Without darts and flames of desire Cupid is Cupid no longer. In marriage the ladies are so lavish with their presents that they dull the edge of our passion and desire. [C] You merely need to see the trouble that Lycurgus and Plato give themselves in order to avoid this incongruity.

[B] Women are not entirely wrong when they reject the moral rules proclaimed in society, since it is we men alone who have made them. There is by nature always some quarrelling and brawling between women and men: the closest union between us remains turbulent and tempestuous. In the opinion of our poet we treat women without due consideration. That is seen by what follows.

We realize that women have an incomparably greater capacity for the act of love than we do and desire it more ardently – and we know that this fact was attested in Antiquity by that priest who had been first a man and then a woman:

Venus huic erat utraque nota. [He knew Venus from both angles.]38

Moreover we have learned from their own lips such proof as in former ages was provided by an Emperor and Empress of Rome, both infamous past masters on the job: he managed to deflower ten captive Sarmatian virgins in one night, but she in one night furnished the means of five-and-twenty engagements, changing her partners according to her needs and preferences:

adhuc ardens rigide tentigine vulve, Et lassata viris, nondum satiata, recessit.

[at last she retired, inflamed by a cunt stiffened by tense erections, exhausted by men but not yet satisfied.]

Then there was that plea lodged in Catalonia by a wife as plaintiff against her husband’s excessively assiduous love-making: not I think because she was actually troubled by it (except within the Faith I believe in no miracles) but rather to have a pretext for pruning back and curbing the authority of husbands over their wives even in the very deed which forms the basic act of marriage, and also to show that the nagging and spitefulness of wives extend over the marriage-bed and trample under heel the sweet delights of Venus. Her husband, a really depraved brute of a fellow, made the rejoinder that even on days of abstinence he could not manage with less than ten times. Whereupon intervened that notable judgement of the Queen of Aragon: after mature deliberation in her counsel that good Queen (wishing to provide for all time an example of the moderation required in a proper marriage and a measuring-rod for temperance) ordained that it is necessary to limit and restrict intercourse to six times a day – sacrificing much of women’s needs and surrendering many of their desires in order to establish a scale which would be unexacting and therefore durable and unchanging.39 At which the doctors exclaim: ‘If that is the rate assessed by a reasoned moral reformation, what must be the lusts and the appetites of women?’ [C] Just think of the disparity of judgements on our appetites: Solon, the head of the school of lawgivers, with the aim of avoiding failure, sets the rate for such conjugal intimacy at three times a month.40

We believe all that and teach all that. And then we go and assign sexual restraint to women as something peculiarly theirs, under pain of punishments of the utmost severity. No passion is more urgent than this one, yet our will is that they alone should resist it – not simply as a vice with its true dimensions but as an abomination and a curse,41 worse than impiety and parricide. Meanwhile we men can give way to it without blame or reproach.

Those men who have made an assay at overcoming it, employing purely material remedies to cool down the body, to weaken it and to subdue it, have adequately vouched for the difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of achieving it. Yet we men on the other hand want our wives to be in good health, energetic, radiant, buxom… and chaste at the same time, both hot and cold at once.

As for marriage (which has the duty, we say, of stopping them from burning)42 it brings them but little respite given our manners: if they do take a husband in whom the vigour of youth is still a-boil he will boast of scattering it elsewhere:

Sit tandem pudor, aut eamus in jus: Multis mentula millibus redempta, Non est hæc tua, Basse; vendidisti.

[A little more propriety, please, or I’ll take you to law. I paid a few thousand for your cock. It is not yours now, Bassus: you sold it to me.]

[C] And Polemon the philosopher rightly received a legal summons from his wife because he scattered on a barren field the fruitful seed he owed to her fertile one.

[B] If they take one of those broken-down husbands, there they are, fully wed yet worse off than virgins and widows. (We assume that they are furnished with all they need because they have a man about the place, just as the Romans assumed that a Vestal Virgin called Clodia Laeta had been raped simply because Caligula had made an approach to her, even though it was proved that he had done no more than that.)43 Their needs are then not satisfied but increased, since their ardour, which would have remained calm in their single state, is awoken by contact with any male company whatsoever. That explains why those monarchs of Poland, Boleslaus and Kinge his consort, agreed together to take the vow of chastity on their very wedding-day as they lay side by side, maintaining it in the teeth of the pleasure which marriage offers: such considerations and circumstances made their chastity more meritorious.44

We train women from childhood for the practices of love: their graces, their clothes, their education, their way of speaking regard only that one end. Those in charge of them impress nothing on them but the face of love, if only to put them off it by continually portraying it to them. My daughter – I have no other children – is of an age when the more passionate girls are legally allowed to marry. She is slender and gentle; by complexion she is young for her age, having been quietly brought up on her own by her mother; she is only just learning to throw off her childish innocence. She was reading from a French book in my presence when she came across the name of that well-known tree fouteau [a beech].45 The woman she has for governess pulled her up short rather rudely and made her jump over that awkward ditch. I let her be, so as not to interfere with women and their rules, for I play no part at all in that sort of education: feminine polity goes its own mysterious way: we must leave it entirely to them. But unless I am mistaken the company of twenty lackeys would not in half a year have imprinted on her mind an understanding of what those naughty syllables mean, how they are used and what they imply, as did that good old crone by her one reprimand and prohibition.

Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos Matura virgo, et frangitur artubus Jam nunc, et incestos amores De tenero meditatur ungui.

[The marriageable maiden loves to learn the steps of the Ionic dance; she twists her limbs and from a tender age trains herself for unchaste loves.]46

Just let them dispense with a little ceremony and become free to develop their thoughts: in knowledge of such things we are babes compared with them. Just listen to them describing our pursuit of them and our rendezvous with them. They will soon show you that we contribute nothing but what they have known and already assimilated independently of us. [C] Could Plato be right when he said that in a former existence girls had been lascivious boys!47

[B] I happened to be one day in a place where my ear could unsuspectedly catch part of what they were saying to each other. I wish. I could tell you! ‘By our Lady,’ I said, ‘let us go, after this, and study the language of Amadis and tales in Boccaccio and Aretino so as to appear sophisticated.’ What a good use of our time! There is no word, no exemplary tale and no stratagem which women do not know better than our books do. The doctrines which nature, youth and good health (those excellent schoolmasters) ceaselessly inspire in their souls are born in their veins:

Et mentem Venus ipsa dedit. [Venus herself inspired their frenzy.]48

They do not need to learn them: they give birth to them.

Nec tantum niveo gavisa est ulla columbo Compar, vel si quid dicitur improbius, Oscula mordenti semper decerpere rostro, Quantum præcipue multivola est mulier.

[Never did white dove nor any more lascivious bird which you could name invite love’s kisses with its pecking beak as much as a woman yearning for a host of men.]49

If the ferocity of their desires were not somewhat reined in by that fear for their honour with which all women are endowed, we would all be laughing-stocks. The whole movement of the world tends and leads towards copulation. It is a substance infused through everything; it is the centre towards which all things turn. We can still read some of the ordinances made by that wise Rome of old to regulate love-affairs, as well as Socrates’ precepts for the education of courtesans.50

Nec non libelli Stoici inter sericos Jacere pulvillos amant.

[And there are little books which love to lie strewn about in silken cushions: some of them are Stoic ones.]

There are enactments among Zeno’s Laws covering penetration and opening up for deflowering.51 [C] I wonder what was the drift of that book by Strato the philosopher entitled On carnal knowledge;52 what did Theophrastus treat of in those books of his which bore the titles The Lover and On Love-affairs; and what did Aristippus treat in his work On Antique Delights? What was Plato’s intention in his long and vivid descriptions of the most controversial love-affairs of the day? Then there are The Book of the Love-maker by Demetrius Phalereus; Cliniasor, or the Lover Raped, by Heraclides of Pontus; On Marriage: or How to make Children, and another, On Master and Lover, by Antisthenes; On Amorous Exploits by Ariston; two by Cleanthes, The Art of Loving and On Love; Lovers’ Dialogues by Sphaerus; The Fable of Jupiter and Juno, intolerably pornographic, by Chrysippus, with his Fifty Lecherous Letters. And I am not counting the writings of philosophers who followed the Epicurean School. [B] In bygone days fifty gods were tied to this job; and a nation was discovered who kept male and female prostitutes in their temples all ready to be enjoyed, so as to lull to sleep the lusts of those who came to worship there. [C] ‘Nimirum propter continentiam incontinentia necessaria est; incendium ignibus extinguitur.’ [Sexual excesses are doubtless needed for sexual restraint, as fire is doused by fire.]53

[B] In most parts of the world that member of our male bodies was turned into a god.54 In a single province some peeled off the skin and consecrated part of it as an oblation while others offered up their sperm and consecrated it. In another province the youths bored holes through it in public, prised gaps between the flesh and the skin and then threaded through them the longest thickest skewers which they could stand. They afterward made a bonfire of those skewers as an offering to their gods, and if they were stunned by the violence of the ferocious pain they were reckoned unchaste and lacking in vigour. Elsewhere the revered symbol of the most hallowed magistrate was the sexual organ; and in many processions an effigy of it was borne in pomp, in honour of a variety of gods. During the feast of Bacchus the ladies of Egypt wore such an effigy about their necks; it was of wood, exquisitely fashioned and as big and heavy as each could manage. In addition the statue of their god had a carved member which was bigger than the rest of his body. The married women near my place twist their headscarves into the shape of one to revel in the enjoyment they derive from it; then on becoming widows they push it back and bury it under their hair. The wisest of the Roman matrons were granted the honour of offering crowns of flowers to the god Priapus; when their maidens came to marry, they were required to squat over its less decent parts.55

I even wonder whether I have not seen in my own lifetime practices recalling similar devotions: what was the sense of that silly flap on our fathers’ flies which you can still see worn by our Swiss guards?56 Why do we parade our genitals even now behind our loose-breeches, and, what is worse, cheat and deceive by exaggerating their natural size? [C] I would like to believe that such styles of clothing were invented in better and more moral times so that people should in fact not be deceived, each man gallantly rendering in public an account of his endowments; the more primitive peoples do still display it somewhere near its real size. In those days they supplied details of man’s working member just as we give the measurements of our arm or foot.

[B] That fine fellow who when I was young castrated so many beautiful ancient statues in his City so as not to corrupt our gaze,57 [C] following the counsel of that other fellow in Antiquity:

–Flagitii principium est nudare inter cives corpora [Baring the body among our citizens is the beginning of shameful deeds] –

[B] ought to have recalled that (as in the mysteries of the Bona Dea in which all signs of the male were banned) nothing is achieved unless you also geld horses, donkeys and finally everything in nature:

Omne adeo genus in terris hominumque ferarumque, Et genus æquoreum, pecudes, pictæque volucres, In furias ignemque ruunt.

[All species on earth, both man and brute, and dwellers in the sea, and flocks and painted birds, all dash madly into the flames of desire.]58

[C] The gods, says Plato, have furnished men with a rebellious and tyrannical member which tries to force everything to submit to its appetite like an animal on the rampage. So too the women have an animal, avid and greedy: if you deny it in due season, it becomes frenzied and can brook no delay; its own raging madness is inhaled into their bodies; it stops all respiration by blocking up the tubes, so causing hundreds of kinds of illness which last until after it has drawn inwards with its breath the product of our common desire and scattered it broadcast, planting it in the ground of the womb.59

[B] Now that that lawgiver of mine60 ought also to have recalled that it is perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice to bring women to learn early what the living reality is rather than to allow them to make conjectures according to the licence of a heated imagination: instead of our organs as they are their hopes and desires lead them to substitute extravagant ones three times as big. [C] And one man I know lost out by exposing his somewhere while they were still unready to perform their most serious task.

[B] What great harm is done by those graffiti of enormous genitals which boys scatter over the corridors and staircases of our royal palaces! From them arise a cruel misunderstanding of our natural capacities. [C] Who knows whether that explains why Plato decreed (following the practice of other states with sound institutions) that both men and women, old and young, should appear naked before each other during exercises in the gymnasia?61 [B] Those Indian women who see their men in the nude have at least cooled off their visual senses.

[C] The women of that great Kingdom of Pegu wear below the belt nothing but a kirtle slit in the front and so tight that, no matter what formal decency they may seek to preserve, they reveal everything they have got with every step they take. They maintain that this fashion was created in order to attract the men to them and to distract them from that taste for males to which that nation has entirely surrendered. Yet it could be said that they lose more than they gain and that a complete hunger is more cruel than one where at least the eyes are satisfied.62 [B] Livia said, moreover, that to a moral woman a naked man means no more than a statue. [C] And the women of Sparta, who as wives were more virginal than our daughters, saw every day the young men of their city take everything off for their exercises; they themselves were not very particular about keeping their thighs covered as they went about, believing, says Plato, that they were sufficiently veiled with virtue without needing a ‘virtue-guard’.63 Yet Saint Augustine is our witness for there once having been men who attributed such wonderful powers of temptation to nudity that they doubted whether, at the General Resurrection, women would rise again as women rather than in our sex so as not to go on tempting us in that blessed state!64

[B] In short we bait and lure women by every means. We are constantly stimulating and overheating their imagination. And then we gripe about it.

Let us admit it: there is hardly one of us who is not more afraid of the disgrace which comes to him from his wife’s immorality than from his own; hardly one who is not so amazingly charitable that he worries more about his dear wife’s conscience than he does about his; hardly one who would not rather commit theft and sacrilege – or that his wife were a murderer or a heretic – than to have her be no chaster than he is.

And our women would much rather volunteer to go and earn their fees in the law-courts or their reputations on the battlefield than to have to mount so difficult a guard in the midst of idle pleasures. Our women can see, can they not, that there is no merchant, no barrister, no soldier who does not drop what he is doing so as to hurry and get on with ‘the job’ – no porter or cobbler either, however weary with toil or faint with hunger.

Num tu, que tenuit dives Achæmenes, Aut pinguis Phrygiæ Mygdonias opes, Permutare velis crine Licinniæ, Plenas aut Arabum domos, Dum fragrantia detorquet ad oscula Cervicem, aut facili sævitia negat, Quæ poscente magis gaudeat eripi, Interdum rapere occupet?

[Would you really exchange – even for all the wealth of Achaemenes or all the riches of Mygdon, King of fertile Phrygia, or the treasure-boxes of Araby – a single one of Licinnia’s tresses when she bends her neck towards you for a fragrant kiss or when, with sweet severity, she denies what she in fact desires far more than you do, and will soon be snatching from you?]65

[C] We do not weigh the vices fairly in our estimation. Both men and women are capable of hundreds of kinds of corrupt activities more damaging than lasciviousness and more disnatured. But we make things into vices and weigh them not according to their nature but our self-interest: that is why they take on so many unfair forms. The ferocity of men’s decrees about lasciviousness makes the devotion of women to it more vicious and ferocious than its characteristics warrant, and engages it in consequences which are worse than their cause.

[B] I am not even sure that the campaigns of Caesar and Alexander surpass the stern resolve of a beautiful young woman, brought up our way, in the light of society’s social norms and battered by numerous examples to the contrary, who, in the midst of hundreds of unending and forceful suitors yet remains pure. No attaining so bristles with difficulties as her abstaining; nor is any more active. I think it easier to keep on a suit of armour all your life than to keep a maidenhead. And so the vow of virginity is the noblest of all the vows and also the harshest. [C] As Saint Jerome says, ‘Diaboli virtus in lumbis est.’ [The Devil’s power is in the loins.]66

[B] We have certainly assigned to the ladies the most exacting and arduous of human duties and we let them have all the glory. It ought to serve them as a singular goad to help them stubborn it out that this is a subject in which they can challenge that vain pre-eminence in virtue and valour which men claim over them and can trample it underfoot. If they take care over it, they will find that not only are they most highly thought of but also better loved. No gentleman abandons his suit because he is refused, provided that the refusal is based on chastity not on preference for another. In vain do we swear oaths and make menaces and lamentations. We lie. We love them all the better for it. There is no lure like wise conduct when not brusque and glowering. There is cowardice and a lack of feeling in stubbornly continuing despite loathing and contempt: but when up against a constant and virtuous resolve mingled with an appreciative good-will it is an exercise fit for a noble and magnanimous soul.

They can, Up to a point, show their appreciation of our courtship and make us realize that in all honour they do not disdain us. [C] For that rule which ordains that they must detest us because we worship them and hate us because we love them is indeed cruel, if only for the hardship it causes. Why should ladies not lend an ear to our requests and offers of service provided we do not go beyond the bounds of propriety, and why do we go on assuming that their doing so suggests some inner licentiousness of thought? A Queen in our own days wittily said that to exclude such advances was a sign of frailty and an indication of one’s own levity, adding that no lady who had not been tempted could boast of her chastity.

[B] The boundaries of honour are by no means so narrowly drawn. There are means of being relaxed and showing some initiative without infringing them. Along its frontiers there is a stretch of neutral territory where a woman is free to show some discretion. If a man has been able to pursue her honour and to bring it to bay in its own corner of its fortress, then he is a silly fellow if he is not satisfied with his fortune. The prize of victory is valued for its difficulty. Do you want to know what impact your courtship and your merits have had on her heart? Measure it by her morals. Some women grant much who grant little: it is entirely in relation to the will of the one who grants it that we judge her gratitude for a kindness. The other attributes which apply to love’s favours are fortuitous and are deaf and dumb. That little which one lady grants you costs her more than it costs her companions to grant you her all. If rarity is worth esteeming in anything it must be so in this case: do not consider the smallness of the favour but the small number of those who receive it. Money is valued according to its stamp and hallmark. Whatever some men may be brought to say by frustration and bad judgement at the height of their distress, truth and virtue always regain the advantage.

I have known ladies whose reputation was unjustly compromised over a long period but who, without careful planning, were later restored to the unanimous esteem of mankind by their constancy alone. Everybody is sorry and denies what he once believed. After being young women who were just a little suspect they now hold the foremost rank among good and honoured noblewomen. When someone said to Plato, ‘They are all gossiping about you,’ he said, ‘Let them. I will so live that I will compel them to change their style.’67 But apart from the fear of God and the winning of the prize of so rare a glory (which must incite women to protect themselves) the corrupt state of our century drives them to do so; and if I were in their place there is nothing I would not do rather than commit my reputation to such dangerous hands. In my day the pleasure of telling of an affair (a pleasure scarcely less delightful than having one) was conceded only to such as had one single faithful friend; nowadays the most usual talk at table and when men get together turns to boasting about favours received and the secret bounties of the ladies, who really do show abject baseness of mind to allow such tender gifts to be thus cruelly hunted, grabbed and plundered by men so ungrateful, so indiscreet and so inconstant.

It is our exaggerated and improper harshness towards this vice which gives birth to jealousy, the most vain and turbulent distemper which afflicts our human souls:

Quis vetat apposito lumen de lumine sumi? [Whatever stops us lighting one torch from another’s light?]68Dent licet, assidue, nil tarmen inde perit. [They can go on giving, on and on: they lose nothing in the process.]

Jealousy and Envy her sister seem to me to be the most absurd of the bunch. About envy I can say virtually nothing: that passion which is portrayed as so powerful and violent has no hold on me (and I thank her for it). As for Jealousy, I know her – by sight at least. Beasts can feel it too. When the shepherd Crastis fell in love with a nanny-goat her billy charged him while he lay asleep, butting his head and smashing it.69

We have raised the temperature of jealousy’s fevered climax, following in that some of the Barbarian nations. The better educated nations have been touched by jealousy – that is reasonable – but not caught away by it:

Ense maritali nemo confossus adulter Purpureo stygias sanguine tinxit aquas.

[There, never did adulterer stain with his blood the waters of Styx while he lay pierced by a husband’s sword.]70

Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cato and other fine men were all cuckolds and knew it: they never made a commotion about it. In those days there was only one man who died of distress over it: Lepidus; and he was a fool:71

Ah! tum te miserum malique fati, Quem attractis pedibus, patente porta, Percurrent mugilesque raphanique.

[Ah! You wretched man caught out on the job! They will bind your legs together and stuff mullet and Greek radishes up your back passage.]

But when that god in our poet72 surprised one of his comrades lying with his wife he was satisfied with exposing them both to shame;

atque aliquis de Diis non tristibus optat Sic fieri turpis!

[but one of the other gods, not the most severe, wished he was shamed as well!]

And that did not stop him from being inflamed by the sweet kisses she gave him as she lamented that, for so little a thing, she had begun to doubt his love for her:

Quid causas petis ex alto, fiducia cessit Quo tibi, diva, mei?

[Why, my goddess, do you seek such far-fetched arguments? Have you lost your faith in your husband?]73

More. She begs him a favour for one of her bastards –

Arma rogo genitrix nato [I, a mother for her son, am begging you for his armour]

–and it is generously granted to her, Vulcan speaking honourably of Aeneas:

Arma acri facienda viro. [Arms must be forged for such a man.]

Humane kindness surpassing humankind! And I do agree that we can leave such excessive bounty to the gods.

Nec divis homines componier æquum est [Nor is it right to compare men to deities.]74

As for the confounding of children, [C] apart from the fact that the gravest of lawgivers want it and legislate for it in their republics,75 [B] it does not affect the women, yet it is precisely in them that jealous passion is somehow more at home.

Sæpe etiam Juno, maxima cælicolum, Conjugis in culpa flagravit quotidiana.

[Even Juno, the greatest goddess among the dwellers in heaven, feels the scourge of jealousy over her consort’s daily wrongs.]76

When jealousy seizes hold of the feeble, defenceless souls of such women it is pitiful to see how it bowls them over and cruelly tyrannizes them. It slips into them, under the title of loving affection: but as soon as it gets possession of them, those same causes which served as a basis for benevolence now serve as a basis for deadly hatred. [C] Of all the spiritual illnesses, jealousy is the one which has more things which feed it and fewer things which cure it. [B] The manly virtue, the health, the merit and the reputation of their husbands then kindle the flames of their wives’ maleficent frenzy:

Nullæ sunt inimicitiæ, nisi amoris, acerbæ. [No hatreds so bitter than those of love.]77

it is a feverish passion which turns all that is beautiful in them ugly and corrupts what is good; in a jealous woman, no matter how chaste and thrifty she may be as a wife, there, there is nothing which does not reek of bitterness and savagery. It is an insane perturbation which drives them to the other extreme, to the contrary of what causes it.

An interesting example of this was a man called Octavius in Rome. After lying with Pontia Posthumia, his delight in it so increased his love that he persistently begged her to marry him. When he could not win her over, his extreme love hurled him headlong into deeds of most cruel and mortal hatred; and he killed her.78

Similarly the regular symptoms of this kind of love-sickness are domestic discord, plottings and conspiracies –

notumque furens quid fæmina possit [we all know what a woman’s rage can do]79

–and a fury which is all the more gnawing for being compelled to justify itself by loving affection.

Now the duty of chastity is wide-ranging. What is it that we want women to bridle? Their wills? But the will is a seductive and active quality: it is too quick to let itself be restrained. Supposing their dreams sometimes so hold them in pawn that they cannot redeem them? It is not in their power to protect themselves from sexual desire and lust – not even perhaps in the power of Chastity herself: she is a woman. So if our sole concern is with their will, where do we stand? Just think of the press of assignations if a man were to have the privilege of being borne on wings (with no eyes to see him and no tongue to gossip) to the lap of every woman who would have him!

[C] The Scythian women used to poke out the eyes of all their slaves and prisoners of war in order to avail themselves of them more freely and secretly.80

Oh, what a mad advantage lies in the opportune moment! If anyone were to ask me what is the first quality needed in love I would reply: knowing how to seize an opportunity. It is the second and the third as well. It is the factor which can achieve anything. I have often lacked good fortune but also occasionally lacked initiative. God help those who can mock me for it! In our days you need to be more inconsiderate – which our young men justify under the pretence of ardour; but if women looked into it closely they would find that it arises rather from lack of respect. I myself devoutly feared to give offence and am always inclined to respect whomever I love. Besides in this sort of business if you remove the respect you dowse the lustre. I like a lover to play the timid youth serving his lady. Not in this situation precisely but in other ones, I do have something of that awkward shyness which Plutarch speaks of;81 the course of my life has been in varying ways bespattered and harmed by it. It is a quality which ill becomes my overall character: but then, what are we but dissension and discord?

I am as sensitive about giving a refusal as receiving one, and my eyes show it. It so weighs on me to weigh on others that when duty forces me to assay the intentions of a man in in a matter of doubt which could cost him some bother I hold back back and skimp it. But if it concerns my own interests – [C] though Homer says truly that in a beggar shyness is a stupid virtue82 – [B] I usually charge a third person to blush in my stead. I find it equally difficult to deny those who ask a service of me: I have occasionally had the will to refuse but not the capacity.

It is therefore madness to assay restraining [C] so blazing [B] a desire, so natural to women. And when I hear them boasting that their very wills are coldly chaste and virginal I laugh at them: that really is backing away too far. It may still not be credible, but there is at least some appearance of plausibility in the case of a toothless old hag or a young girl wasted by consumption. But women who are still alive and breathing worsen the terms of the bargain by saying so, since ill-advised excuses serve as accusations. Like one of the gentlemen in my neighbourhood who was suspected of impotence:

Languidior tenera cui pendens sicula beta Nunquam se mediam sustulit ad tunicam.

[whose tiny dagger, drooping like a flabby parsnip, never stuck halfway up his underwear.]83

Two or three days after his wedding, to prove his masculinity he went about boasting that he had ridden his wife twenty times the previous night. That was cited later to convict him of absolute ignorance and to annul the marriage.

Besides, those women are saying nothing worthwhile: for where there is no struggle there is neither continence nor virtue. ‘That is true,’ they should say, ‘but I have no intention of giving way.’ The very saints put it thus.

I am of course talking of women who seriously boast of their cold chastity and indifference, who keep a straight countenance and want us to believe what they say. For when they put on a studied countenance (with eyes which belie their looks) and make their profession with cant phrases which imply the contrary to what they say, I like that. I am the obedient servant of naïve frankness: nevertheless I cannot refrain from saying that, unless it is absolutely innocent and childlike, it does not become a lady and is inappropriate to courtship: it at once slips into provocativeness. Women’s affectations and grimaces deceive only idiots. Lying is then in the seat of honour: it is a diversion which brings us to the right truth through the wrong door.

Now if we cannot bridle their thoughts, what is it we want from women? Action? But plenty of their actions which corrupt chastity escape the knowledge of others:

Illud sæpe facit quod sine teste facit. [She often does it without testes to testify.]84

Such actions as we fear the least are perhaps the most to be feared: silent sins are the worst:

Offendor mæcha simpliciore minus. [A straightforward whore offends me less.]

[C] And then there are actions by which women can lose their maidenheads without their maidenhood – and, what is more, without their knowing it: ‘Obstetrix, virginis cujusdam integritatem manu velut explorans, sive malevolentia, sive inscitia, sive casu, dum inspicit, perdidit.’ [Sometimes the obstetrician while examining with her fingers whether the hymen is intact, has ruptured it – by ignorance or malice or bad luck.]85 Some maidens have lost their maidenhead while feeling for it: others have ruptured it while out riding.

[B] We could never delimit precisely what are the actions we forbid to them. We must frame our law in vague general terms.

The very ideal which men forge of their chastity is ridiculous: among the most extreme models of it that I know are Fatua the wife of Faunus, who after her wedding never let herself be seen by any man whatever, and the wife of Hiero, who never realized that her husband’s breath stank, thinking that it was a quality common to all men.86

To satisfy us they have to be invisible and insensate.

So now let us admit that the crucial clement in judging this duty in women lies mainly in the intention. There have been husbands who have suffered adultery not only without feeling reproach or hostility for their wives but specifically bound to acknowledge their virtue. Many a woman who loved her honour more than her life has nevertheless prostituted herself to the insane lusts of a deadly enemy in order to save her husband’s life, doing for him what she would never have done for herself. This is not the place to dwell on such exempta. They are too splendid and sublime to be rehearsed in the light of this chapter: let us keep them for a nobler place.

[C] But to give some examples here which do shine with a more vulgar vulgar light, are there not wives who daily lend their bodies to others solely to help on their husbands – and with their express command and pandering? In ancient times, for ambition’s sake, Phaulius of Argos offered his wife to King Philip;87 so too when Galba was entertaining Maecenas to dinner he noticed that his wife and his guest were beginning to ogle and to make signs and advances to each other, so he slipped down on his cushions and acted like a man torn heavy with sleep in order, for hospitality’s sake, to lend a hand to their arrangements. And he let this be known, not without some elegance: for when the wine-steward ventured to reach out for the wine-jars on the table he shouted: ‘Can you not see, you dolt, that I have only fallen asleep for Maecenas?’

[B] A woman may behave loosely yet have a will which which she has reformed more than another whose conduct is hidden by a more orderly appearance: just as we know of women who complain that they were dedicated to chastity before the age of discretion, I know of some who sincerely complain that, before the age of discretion, they were dedicated to debauchery. Vicious parents may be the cause, or the force of necessity which is a cruel counsellor.

In the East Indies, although chastity is singularly valued there, custom suffers a married woman to give herself to any man who presents her with an elephant – and not without glory for being so highly prized.88

[C] A man of good family, Phaedo the philosopher, when his country of Elis was captured, professionally prostituted his youthful beauty (as long as it lasted) to anyone who would pay for it, so as to earn his living.89 And Solon, they say, was the first legislator in Greece to give women the right to provide for the necessities of life at the expense of their modesty, a practice which Herodotus however says was accepted earlier by several polities.

[B] Then what do we hope to gain from such painful disquiet: for however justified the jealousy we still have to see whether that passion enraptures us to any purpose! Is there one man who believes that he is clever enough to buckle up his women?

Pone seram, cohibe; sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? Cauta est, et ab illis incipit uxor!

[Lock her up; shut her in. But who will guard your guardians? Your wife is clever: she will start with them!]

In so ingenious a century any occasion will suffice.

Curiosity is always a fault; here it is baleful. It is madness to want to find out about an ill for which there is no treatment except one which makes it worse and exacerbates it; one the shame of which is spread abroad and augmented chiefly by our jealousy; one which to avenge means hurting our children rather than curing ourselves. You wither and die while hunting for such hidden truth. How wretched are those husbands in my days who manage to find out!

If the man who warns you of it does not also at once supply a remedy and his help, his warning is noxious, deserving your dagger more than if he called you a liar. We mock the husband who cannot put things right no less than the one who knows nothing about it. Cuckoldry has an indelible stamp: once a man is branded with it he has it for ever; chastising cuckoldry emphasizes it more than the defect. A fine thing to tear our private misfortunes from the shadow of doubt and trumpet them abroad like tragedians on the trestles – especially misfortunes which hurt only when they are related. Marriages and wives are called good not because they are good but because they are not talked about.

We should use our ingenuity to avoid making such useless discoveries which torture us. It was the custom of the Romans when returning home from a journey to send a messenger ahead to announce their arrival to their womenfolk so as not to take them unawares. That is why There is a certain people where the priest welcomes the bride and opens the proceedings on the wedding-night to remove from the groom any doubts and worries about whether she came to him virgin or already blighted by an affaire.90

‘Yes. But people talk!’ I know some a hundred men who are cuckolds yet honoured and not unrespected. A decent man is sympathized with for it, not discredited by it. See to it that your misfortune is smothered by your virtue, so that good folk curse the cause of it and the man who wrongs you trembles to think of it.

And then who is never gossiped about for this, from the least to the greatest?

Tot qui legionibus imperitavit,… Et melior quam tu multis fuit, improbe, rebus!

[Even the general who commanded all those legions… and was a far better man than you, you reprobate!]91

When so many honourable men have been included in this opprobrium in your presence, do you think you are spared elsewhere?

‘But even the ladies will laugh at me!’ Well, what do they laugh at nowadays more readily than a peaceful, orderly marriage? [C] Each one of you has cuckolded somebody: and Nature is ever like, alternating and balancing accounts. [B] The frequency of this misfortune ought by now to have limited its bitter taste: why, it will soon be customary.

In addition that wretched misery is one you cannot even tell anyone about:

Fors etiam nostris invidit questibus aures. [Even Fortune refuses to listen to our woes.]92

For what friend can you dare to confide your worries to? Even if he does not laugh at you, will he not be put on the track and shown how to join in the kill?

[C] Wise men keep secret both the sweets of marriage and its bitternesses. For a talkative man like me, of all the distressing disadvantages of marriage one of the principal is the fact that custom has made it indecorous and obnoxious to discuss with anyone whatever all that we know and feel about it.

[B] It would be a waste of time to give women the same advice in order to make jealousy distasteful to them. Their essence is so pickled in suspicion, vanity and curiosity that you must not hope to do so by legitimate means. They often cure this infirmity by a species of well-being which is more to be feared than the malady. Just as there are magic spells which can only remove an evil by loading it on to someone else, so too wives readily pass this fever of jealousy on to their husbands, once they themselves have lost it.

All the same, to tell the truth, I do not know whether one can ever suffer anything worse than their jealousy: it is the most dangerous of their characteristics, as the head is of the anatomy. Pittacus said that every man has his curse: his was his wife’s bad temper; if it were not for that he would think himself entirely happy. Seeing that so just, so wise, so valiant, so great a man should should feel the whole state of his life corrupted by it, it must indeed be a grievous clog.93 So what are we to do about it, little men like us!

[C] The Senate of Marseilles94 was right to accede to the request of a husband for permission to kill himself so as to escape his wife’s petulance, for it is an evil which can never be removed except by removing the whole limb: you can make no worthwhile arrangement with it except by fleeing from it or putting up with it: both are fraught with difficulties. [B] That man knew what he was talking about, it seems to me, who said that a good marriage marriage needs a blind wife and a deaf husband husband.95

We also need to ensure that the great and intense harshness of the obligations which we lay on women should not produce two results hostile to our ends: namely, that it does not whet the appetites of their suitors nor make the wives more ready to surrender. As for the first point, by raising the value of a redoubt we raise the value of conquering it and the desire to do so. May not Venus herself cunningly have raised the cost of her merchandise by making the laws pimp for her, realizing that it is a silly pleasure for anyone who does not enhance it by imagination and by buying it dear?

In short, as Flaminius’ host said, ‘it is all pork with different sauces.’96 Cupid is a mischievous god: his sport is to wrestle with loyalty and justice; glory for him means clashing his strength against all others’ strength, all rules yielding to his.

Materiam culpæ prosequiturque suæ. [He is always hunting for occasion to do wrong.]97

And as for my second point, would we be cuckolded less often if we were less afraid of being so, thus conforming to the complexion of women? For interdicts provoke and incite them.

Ubi velis, nolunt; ubi nolis, volunt ultro. [What you want they don’t: what you don’t, they do.] Concessa pudet ire via. [They feel disgraced if they go the way we permit them.]

What better interpretation can we find for the case of Messalina? At the start she cuckolded her husband in secret, as one does; but as she carried on her affairs too easily because of her husband’s dull unawareness, she suddenly felt contempt for that practice. So there she was being openly courted, acknowledging her lovers, welcoming them and granting her favours in sight of everyone. She was determined that he should know of it. When that dull brute could not even be aroused by all that (so rendering her pleasures weak and insipid by his excessive complaisance, which seemed to permit them and to legitimize them) what else could she do? Well, one day when her husband was out of the City, she – the consort of an Emperor alive and in good health, at noon, in Rome the theatre of the world, with public pomp and festivity – married Silius, the man she had long since enjoyed.

Does it not appear that either she had set herself on the road to becoming chaste because of the indifference of her husband, or else that she had sought another husband who would stimulate her desire by his jealousy [C] and excite her by standing up to her?

[B] However, the first trouble she had to face was also her last. That brute of hers did wake up with a start. You often get the worst treatment from such dozing dullards. Experience has shown me that such excessive tolerance once it bursts apart produces the harshest of vengeances, for then wrath and frenzy fuse into one and fire their whole battery during the first assault;

irarumque omnes effundit habenas. [it looses anger’s every rein.]98

He put her to death, together with a large number of those who were in complicity with her, even including some who had had no option, having been driven to her marriage-bed with leathern scourges.

What Virgil sings of Venus and Vulcan, Lucretius sings more fittingly of stolen joys between her and Mars:

belli fera mænera Mavors Armipotens regit, in gremium qui sæpe tuum se Rejicit, ætemo devinctus vulnere amoris: Pascit amore avidos inhians in te, Dea, visus, Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore: Hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto Circunfusa super, suaveis ex ore loquelas Funde.

[Mars, mighty in arms, ruler of the savage works of war, now wounded by an everlasting wound of love, flees to thy bosom. He feeds his eyes on thee with gaping lips, O goddess, his breath now hanging on thy mouth. While he rests upon thy sacred body as it flows around him, pour from thine own lips, O goddess, thy sweet complaints.]99

When I chew over those words, rejicit, pascit, inhians, and then molli fovet, medullas, labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and Lucretius’ noble circunfusa motherto Virgil’s elegant infusus, I feel contempt for those little sallies and verbal sports which have been born since then. Those fine poets had no need for smart and cunning word-play; their style is full, pregnant with a sustained and natural power. With them not the tail only but everything is epigram: head, breast and feet. Nothing is strained. Nothing drags. Everything progresses steadily on its course: [C] ‘Contextus totus virilis est; non sunt circa flosculos occupati.’ [The whole texture of their work is virile: they were not concerned with little purple passages.]100 [B] Here is not merely gentle eloquence where nothing offends: it is solid and has sinews; it does not so much please you as invade you and enrapture you. And the stronger the mind the more it enraptures it. When I look upon such powerful means of expression, so dense and full of life, I do not conclude that it is said well but thought well. It is the audacity of the conception which fills the words and makes them soar: [C] ‘Pectus est quod dissertum facit.’ [It is the mind which makes for good style.]101 [B] Nowadays when men say judgement they mean style, and rich concepts are but beautiful words.

Descriptions such as these are not produced by skilful hands but by having the subject vividly stamped upon the soul. Gallus writes straightforwardly because his concepts are straightforward. Horace is not satisfied with some superficial vividness; that would betray his sense; he sees further and more clearly into his subject: to describe itself his mind goes fishing and ferreting through the whole treasure-house of words and figures of speech; as his concepts surpass the ordinary, it is not ordinary words that he needs. Plutarch said that he could see what Latin words meant from the things which they signified.102 The same applies here: the sense discovers and begets the words, which cease to be breath but flesh and blood. [C] They signify more than they say. [B] Even the weaker brethren have some notion of this: when I was in in Italy I could express whatever I wanted to say in everyday conversation, but for serious purposes I would not have dared to entrust myself to a language which I could neither mould nor turn on my lathe beyond the common idiom. I want to add something of my own.

What enriches a language is its being handled and exploited by beautiful minds – not so much by making innovations as by expanding it through more vigorous and varied applications, by extending it and deploying it. It is not words that they contribute: what they do is enrich their words, deepen their meanings and tie down their usage; they teach it unaccustomed rhythms, prudently though and with ingenuity.

That such a gift is not vouchsafed to everybody can be seen from many of the French authors of our time. They are bold enough and proud enough not to follow the common road; but their want of invention and power of selection destroys them. All we can see is some wretched affectation of novelty, cold and absurd fictions which instead of elevating their subject batter it down. Provided they are clad in new-fangled apparel they care nothing about being effective. To seize on some new word they quit the usual one which often has more sinew and more force.

In our own language there is plenty of cloth but a little want of tailoring. There is no limit to what could be done with the help of our hunting and military idioms, which form a fruitful field for borrowing; locutions are like seedlings: transplanting makes them better and stronger. I find French sufficiently abundant but not sufficiently [C] tractable and [B] vigorous. It usually collapses before a powerful concept. If you are taut as you proceed, you can often feel it weakening and giving way under you; in default your Latin comes to your aid – and Greek to the aid of others.

It is hard for us to perceive the power of some of the words I have just selected because use has somewhat cheapened their grace, and familiarity has made it commonplace. So too in our vulgar tongue there are some excellent expressions whose beauty is fading with age and metaphors whose colour is tarnished by too frequent handling. But by that they lose nothing of their savour for a man who has a good nose for them; nor does it detract from the glory of those ancient authors who were (as seems likely) the first to shed such lustre on those words.

Erudite works treat their subjects too discreetly, in too artificial a style far removed from the common natural one. My page-boy can court his lady and understands how to do so. Read him Leone Ebreo and Ficino: they are talking about him, about what he is thinking and doing. And they mean nothing to him!103 I cannot recognize most of my ordinary emotions in Aristotle: they have been covered over and clad in a different gown for use by the schoolmen. Please God they know what they are doing! If I were to in that trade, [C] just as they make nature artificial, I would make art natural.104

[B] Let us skip over Bembo and Equicola.

When I am writing I can well do without the company and memory of my books lest they interfere with my style. Also (to tell the truth) because great authors are too good at beating down my pretensions: they dishearten me… am tempted to adopt the ruse of that painter who, having wretchedly painted a portrait of some cocks, forbade his apprentices to let any natural cock enter his workshop.105 [C] And to lend me some lustre I would need to adopt the device of Antinonides the musician106 who, whenever he had to perform, arranged that, either before him or after him, his audience should have their fill of some bad singers. [B] But I cannot free myself from Plutarch so easily. He is so all-embracing, so rich that for all occasions, no matter how extravagant a subject you have chosen, he insinuates himself into your work, lending you a hand generous with riches, an unfailing source of adornments. It irritates me that those who pillage him may also be pillaging me: [C] I cannot spend the slightest time in his company without walking off with a slice of breast or a wing.

[B] For this project of mine it is also appropriate that I do my writing at home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent anybody who knows even the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer let alone proper French. I might have done it better somewhere else, but this work would then have been less mine: and its main aim and perfection consists in being mine, exactly. I may correct an accidental slip (I am full of them, since I run on regardless) but it would be an act of treachery to remove such imperfections as are commonly and always in me. When it is said to me, or I say to myself: ‘Your figures of speech are sown too densely’; ‘This word here is pure Gascon’; ‘This is a hazardous expression’ – I reject no expressions which are used in the streets of France: those who want to fight usage with grammar are silly – ‘Here is an ignorant development’; ‘Here your argument is paradoxical’; ‘This one is too insane’; [C] ‘You are often playing about; people will think that you are serious when you are only pretending’: [B] ‘Yes,’ I reply, ‘but I correct only careless errors not customary ones. Do I not always talk like that? Am I not portraying myself to the life? If so, that suffices! I have achieved what I wanted to: everyone recognizes me in my book and my book in me.’

Now I have tendency to ape and to imitate: when I took up writing verse – I wrote it exclusively in Latin – it always manifestly betrayed who was the last poet I had been reading; and some of my earliest essays are somewhat redolent of others’ work. [C] When in Paris I talk rather differently than at Montaigne. [B] Anyone I look at with attention easily stamps something of his on me. Whatever I contemplate I make my own – a silly expression, a nasty grimace, a ridiculous turn of speech. Faults, even more so: as soon as they strike me they cling to me and will not leave me unless shaken off; I have more often been heard using swearwords from conformity than by complexion.

[C] Such imitation kills, like that of those monkeys terrifying in strength and size which King Alexander had to confront in a certain country in India.107 He would have found it hard to get the better of them, but they showed him the way to do so by their tendency to imitate everything they saw being done. This inspired those who were hunting them to put on their boots, tying many knots in the laces, while the monkeys looked on; then to deck themselves in headgear with dangling nooses and to pretend to daub their eyes with bird-lime. And so those poor creatures were led to their doom by their apish complexions: they too daubed themselves with bird-lime, tied themselves in knots and garotted themselves. Yet the talent for cleverly imitating intentionally the words and gestures of another is no more in me than in a tree-stump. When I swear my own way it is always ‘By God’ – which is the most direct of all the oaths. They say that Socrates used to swear ‘By dog’; Zeno ‘By goats’ (the same exclamation used today by the Italians, Cappari); Pythagoras, ‘By air and by water.’

[B] I am marked so easily by surface impressions that, having Sire or Your Majesty [C] thoughtlessly [B] on my lips for three days in a row, those terms slip out a full week later instead of Your Excellency or My Lord. And any expression which I have fallen into saying in jest or for fun I will say the following day seriously. That is why I am loath to write on well-trodden topics: I am afraid I might treat them with another man’s substance. All topics are equally productive to me. I could write about a fly! (God grant that the topic I now have in hand be not chosen at the behest of a will which is as light as a fly’s.) I may begin with any subject I please, since all subjects are linked to each other.

But what displeases me about my soul is that she usually gives birth quite unexpectedly, when I am least on the lookout for them, to her profoundest, her maddest ravings which please me most. Then they quickly vanish away because, then and there, I have nothing to jot them down on; it happens when I am on my horse or at table or in bed – especially on my horse, the seat of my widest musings.

When speaking I have a fastidious zeal for attention and silence if I am in earnest; should anyone interrupt me he stops me dead. On journeys the very exigencies of the roads cut down my conversation; moreover I most often journey without the proper company for sustained conversation, which enables me to be free to think my own thoughts. What happens is like what happens to my dreams: during them I commend them to my memory (for I often dream I am dreaming); next morning I can recall their colouring as it was – whether they were playful or sad or weird – but as for all the rest, the more I struggle to find it the more I bury it in forgetfulness. It is the same with those chance reflections which happen to drop into my mind: all that remains of them in my memory is a vague idea, just enough to make me gnaw irritably away, uselessly seeking for them.

Well now, leaving books aside and talking more simply and plainly, I find that sexual love is nothing but the thirst for the enjoyment of that pleasure [C] within the object of our desire, and that Venus is nothing but the pleasure of unloading our balls;108 it becomes vitiated by a lack either of moderation or discretion:109 for Socrates love is the desire to beget by the medium of Beauty.110

[B] Reflecting as I often do on the ridiculous excoriations of that pleasure, the absurd, mindless, stupefying emotions with which it disturbs a Zeno or a Cratippus,111 that indiscriminate raging, that face inflamed with frenzy and cruelty at the sweetest point of love, that grave, severe, ecstatic face in so mad an activity, [C] the fact that our delights and our waste-matters are lodged higgledy-piggledy together; [B] and that its highest pleasure has something of the groanings and distraction of pain, I believe [C] that what Plato says is true: [B] Man is the plaything of the gods112–

quænam ista jocandi Sævitia! [what a ferocious way of jesting!]

– and that it was in mockery that Nature bequeathed us this, the most disturbing of activities, the one most common to all creatures, so as to make us all equal, bringing the mad and the wise, men and beasts, to the same level.

When I picture to myself the most reflective and the most wise of men in such postures, I hold it as an effrontery that he should claim to be reflective and wise; like the legs on a peacock, they humble pride;

ridentem dicere verum Quid vetat? [what can stop us telling the truth with a laugh?]113

[C] Those who reject serious opinions in the midst of fun are, it is said, like the man who refuses to venerate the statue of a saint because it wears no drapery.

[B] We eat and drink as the beasts do, but those activities do not hamper the workings of our souls. So in them we keep our superiority over the beasts. But that other activity makes every other thought crawl defeated under the yoke; by its imperious authority it makes a brute of all the theology of Plato and a beast of all his philosophy. Everywhere else you can preserve some decency; all other activities accept the rules of propriety: this other one can only be thought of as flawed or ridiculous. Just try and find a wise and discreet way of doing it! Alexander said that he acknowledged he was a mortal because of sleep and this activity: sleep stifles and suppresses the faculties of our souls; the ‘job’ similarly devours and disperses them.114 It is indeed a sign of our original Fall, but also of our inanity and ugliness. On the one hand Nature incites us to it, having attached to this desire the most noble, useful and agreeable of her labours: on the other hand she lets us condemn it as immoderate and flee it as indecorous, lets us blush at it and recommend abstaining from it.

[C] Are we then not beasts to call the labour which makes us bestial?

[B] In their religions all peoples have several similarities which coincide, such as sacrifices, lights, incense, fastings, offertories and, among others, the condemnation of this act. All their opinions come to it, not to mention the widespread practice of cutting off the foreskin [C] which is a punishment for it. [B] Perhaps we are right to condemn ourselves for giving birth to such an absurd thing as a man; right to call it an act of shame and the organs which serve to do it shameful. [C] (It is certain that mine may now properly be called shameful and wretched.)

The Essenes whom Pliny mentions were maintained for several centuries without wet-nurses or swaddling-clothes by the arrival of outsiders who, attracted by the beauty of their doctrines, constantly joined them. An entire people risked self-extermination rather than engage in woman’s embraces, risked having no successors rather than create one.115 It is said that Zeno lay with a woman only once in his entire life; and that that was out of politeness, so as not to seem to have too stubborn a contempt for that sex.116

[B] No man likes to be in on a birth: all men rush to be in on a death. [C] To unmake a human being we choose an open field in broad daylight: to make one, we hide away in a dark little hollow. When making one we must hide and blush: but glory lies in unmaking one, and it produces other virtues. One act is unwholesome: the other, an act of grace, for Aristotle says that in his country there is a saying ‘To do a man a favour’, which means to kill him.117 The Athenians showed those two activities to be equally blemished when they were required ritually to purge the island of Delos and to seek reconciliation with Apollo: within its coasts they forbade both childbirth and burial:118

[B] Nostri nosmet pænitet. [We are embarrassed by our very selves.]

[C] We regard our very being as vitiated.

[B] There are some nations where they hide to eat. I know one lady (among the greatest) who shares the opinion that chewing distorts the face, derogating greatly from women’s grace and beauty; when hungry she avoids appearing in public. And I know a man who cannot tolerate watching people eat nor others watching him do so: he shuns all company even more when he fills his belly than when he empties it. [C] In the Empire of the Grand Turk you can find many men who, to rise above their fellows, never allow themselves to be seen eating a meal; they eat but once a week; they slash and disfigure their faces and limbs and never talk to anyone – [‘95] fanatics [C] all – folk who believe they are honouring their nature by defacing it; who pride themselves on their contempt; who seek to make themselves better by making themselves worse.

[B] What a monstrosity of an animal,119 who strikes terror in himself, [C] whose pleasures are a burden to him and who thinks himself a curse. [B] Those there are who hide their existence –

Exilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant [They give up their homes and domestic delights to go into exile]120

– stealing away from the sight of other men; they shun health and happiness as harmful and inimical qualities. There are not merely several sects but whole peoples for whom birth is a curse, death a blessing. [C] And some there are who loathe the sunlight and worship the darkness.

[B] We show our ingenuity only by ill-treating ourselves: that is the real game hunted by the power of our mind – [C] an instrument dangerous in its unruliness.

[B] O miseri! quorum gaudia crimen habent. [O pitiful men, who hold their joys a crime.]

Alas, wretched Man, you have enough [C] necessary [B] misfortunes121 without increasing them by inventing others. Your condition is wretched enough already without making it artificially so. You have uglinesses enough which are real and of your essence without fabricating others in your mind. [C] Do you really think that you are too happy unless your happiness is turned to grief? [B] Do you believe that you have already fulfilled all the necessary duties in which Nature involves you and that, unless you bind yourself to new ones, Nature is [C] defective and [B] idle within you? You are not afraid to infringe her universal and undoubted laws yet preen yourself on your own sectarian and imaginary ones: the more particular, [C] uncertain and [B] controverted they are, the more you devote your efforts to them. [C] The arbitrary laws of your own invention – your own parochial laws – engross you and bind you: you are not even touched by the laws of God and this world. [B] Just run through a few exempla of that assertion: why, all your life is there.

Those lines of our two poets,122 treating sexual pleasure as they do with reserve and discretion, seem to me to reveal it and throw a closer light upon it. Ladies cover their bosoms with lace-work; priests similarly cover many sacred objects; painters paint shadows in the pictures to emphasize the light; and it is said that the sun and wind beat down more heavily on us when deflected than when they come direct. When that Egyptian was asked, ‘What are you carrying there, hidden under your cloak?’ he gave a wise reply: ‘It is hidden under my cloak so that you should not know what it is.’123 Nevertheless some things are hidden in order to reveal them more.

Just listen to this man writing more openly:

Et nudam pressi corpus adusque meum.[Nude against my body did I press her.]124

I can feel him gelding me!

Let Martial, as he does, pull up Venus’ skirts: he does not succeed in revealing her all that completely. The poet who tells all, gluts us and puts us off: the one who is timid about expressing his thoughts leads us in our thoughts to discover more than is there. There are revelations in that sort of modesty; especially when, as they do, they half-open such a beautiful highway for our imagination. Both that act and its portrayal should savour of theft.125

For the Spaniard and the Italian sex-love is more timid and respectful, more coy and less open: I like that. (In ancient times someone or other wished that his throat was as long as the neck of a crane so as to have more time to taste what he was swallowing.126 Such a wish is more appropriate to this hasty and headlong pleasure, especially for natures such as mine whose fault is to be too quick.) For them, so as to stop its flight and to let it expand itself on preliminaries, everything serves as a grace and reward: a loving glance, a bow of the head, a word, a gesture.

Would anyone who could actually dine on the smell of roast beef not be making a fine saving saving?127 Well, this is a passion which mingles very little essential solids with plenty of vanity and feverish madness: we should reward it and treat it accordingly. Let us instruct our ladies how to make themselves valued and esteemed, to keep us waiting and to be sweet deceivers. We French always make our last attack the first: there is always that impetuosity of ours.128 If only our ladies were to string out love’s favours, offering them retail, then each one of us, according to his worth and merit, would get a scrap even in our pitiful old age. A man who only enjoys enjoying a woman, a man who only wins if he takes the lot and who, in hunting, only likes the kill, is not made for joining our sect. The more the steps the greater the height, and the more the rungs the greater the honour, of that ultimate bastion. We should take delight in being conducted there as through splendid palaces, by varied portals and corridors, long and pleasant galleries and many a winding way. Such stewardship would turn to our advantage; there we would linger and love longer: without hope and desire we no longer achieve anything worthwhile. Women should infinitely fear our overmastery and entire possession. Their position is pretty perilous once they have totally thrown themselves on the mercy of our faith and constancy; those virtues are rare and exacting; as for the women, as soon as we have them, they no longer have us:

postquam cupidæ mentis satiata libido est, Verba nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant.

[as soon as eager longing is satisfied, our minds fear not for their pledged word nor care about perjury.]129

[C] A young Greek called Thrasonides was so in love with love that, having won his lady’s heart, he refused to enjoy her so as not to weaken, glut and deaden by the joy of lying with her that unquiet ardour in which he gloried and on which he fed.

[B] Foods taste better when they are dear. Think how far kisses, the form of greeting peculiar to our nation, have had their grace cheapened by availability: Socrates thought they were most powerful and dangerous at stealing our hearts.130 Ours is an unpleasant custom which wrongs the ladies who have to lend their lips to any man, however ugly, who comes with three footmen in his train.

Cujus livida naribus caninis Dependet glacies rigetque barba: Centum occurrere malo culilingis.

[Cold leaden snot drips from his dog-like conk and bedews his beard. Why, I would a hundred times rather go and lick his arse.]131

And we men gain little from it: for as the world is made we have to kiss fifty ugly women for every three beauties. And for the delicate gullets of men of my age, a bad kiss outweighs a good one.

In Italy they play the swooning suitor even with women who sell their favours. They defend themselves thus: there are degrees in enjoying a woman; by such courtship they want to obtain for themselves the fullest enjoyment of all. Such women sell only their bodies; their wills cannot be up for sale: they are too free, too autonomous. It is her will that the Italians are after, they say. And they are right. What must be courted and ensnared is the will. I am horrified by the thought of a body given to me but lacking love. To me such raging madness is analogous to that of the boy who sullied with his love that beautiful statue of Venus sculpted by Praxiteles, or to that of the Egyptian madman who was inflamed with love for the corpse of a dead woman he was embalming while wrapping it in its shroud, and who gave rise to the law subsequently proclaimed in Egypt that the corpses of beautiful young women and of women of noble families should be kept for three days before being handed over to those whose task it was to bury them. Periander acted more horrifyingly still when he prolonged his conjugal love (itself most proper and legitimate) by enjoying his departed wife Melissa.132

[C] And was Luna’s humour not clearly lunatic when, being unable to enjoy in any other way her beloved Endymion, she went and put him to sleep for several months, feasting herself on the enjoyment of a boy who never stirred but in her dreams?133

[B] I claim that we are similarly loving a body deprived of soul and sensation when we make love to one without its agreement and desire. All enjoyings of women are not the same. Some are thin and languid: hundreds of causes other than tenderness can obtain that privilege from women. It is not in itself a sufficient proof of affection: deceiving can be found in that as in anything else; sometimes they only set about it with one cheek of their arse:

tanquam thura merumque parent: Absentem marmoreamve putes.

[as cool as though preparing an offertory of incense and wine; you would think she was somewhere else, or made of marble.]134

Some ladies I know would rather lend you ‘that’ than their carriage: it is the only way they know how to converse. You need to see whether your company pleases them for some other end also (or, as does some hulking great stable-boy, only for ‘that’), and in what rank, and at what price, you are accepted:

tibi si datur uni Quo lapide illa diem candidiore notet.

[whether she gives herself to you alone, and marks that day with her whitest milestone.]

What if she is eating your bread with a sauce derived from more pleasing thoughts!

Te tenet, absentes alios suspirat amores.[She holds you close while sighing for the loves of an absent lover.]

What! Do we not know of a man who in our own day used this activity as a means of horrifying vengeance, so as to inject poison into a decent woman and kill her?135

Those who know Italy will never find it odd if, while on this subject, I do not go anywhere else for excempla, since that nation can claim to be the world’s professor in such matters. They have more routinely beautiful women than we do and fewer ugly ones, though for rare and outstanding beauties we are on a par. And I think the same applies to wit: of routinely fine ones they have more and it is obvious that brutish stupidity is incomparably more rare. But in matchless minds, those of the highest rank, we owe them [C] nothing.136 [B] Were I to have to extend that comparison it could probably be said, on the contrary, that, by their standards, valour is commonplace and natural with us: yet sometimes you can see it so full and vigorous as they handle it that it surpasses all the stern examples which we have. Italian marriages are crippled: by their customs, so harsh and slavish a rule is imposed on their wives that the slightest acquaintance with another man is as capital an offence as the most intimate. The result of this rule is that any approach to their wives becomes, of necessity, basic; and since whatever they do amounts to the same, the choice is made for them already. [C] And once they have broken out of their pens, believe you me, they are all ablaze: ‘luxuria ipsis vinculis, sicut fera bestia, irritata, deinde emissa.’ [sexual desire then breaks loose, like a wild beast first provoked and then set free.]137 [B] They really ought to give them a little more rein.

Vidi ego nuper equum, contra sua frena tenacem, Ore reluctanti fulminis ire modo.

[Of late I saw a horse, straining at the bit, pulling with its mouth and careering along like lightning.]

We can weaken the desire for such companionship by allowing them a mite of freedom.138

Both run more or less equal risks. They are excessive in restraint: we, in freedom. One of the fine customs of our nation is that the boys of good families are taken in as pages to be educated and brought up, schooled for nobility. It is said to be rude and discourteous to refuse a young gentleman. I have noted (but there are as many fashions as there are different homes) that ladies who have sought to impose the most austere of rules on the girls in their entourage have not produced any better results. What we need is moderation. We should leave a good bit of the behaviour of girls to their own discretion; whatever you do, there is no training that can bridle them in all the time; but what is true is that a girl who has bolted, bag and baggage, from a dressage in freedom inspires much more confidence than one who emerges with propriety from an austere prison of a school.

Our forefathers trained their daughters’ countenances to be bashful and timorous; their minds and desires were alike: we, knowing nothing about the matter, train them to be bold. [C] That is for Sauromatians who are forbidden to lie with a man until they have killed one with their own hands in war.139 [B] It suffices me (who have no rights in the matter except to be heard) that they retain me as a counsellor, according to the privilege of my age. So I would counsel them – [C] and us too – [B] to refrain; but if this age is too inimical to that, at least to show discretion and moderation. [C] As in the story told of Aristippus: some young men blushed at seeing him go in to the house of a courtesan: he said to them: ‘The error lies not in going in but in never coming out.’140 [B] If a woman cannot save her conscience let her at least save her reputation: even if the base is not worth it let appearances hold out. I advocate gradualness and stringing things out when dispensing of love’s favours. [C] Plato demonstrates that surrendering easily or quickly is forbidden to the defenders in loves of all kinds.141 [B] To yield all, so inadvisedly and so hastily, is a sign of voracity,142 which they must hide with all their art. By acting ordinately and with measure when distributing their gifts they succeed far better in tempting our desires and hiding their own. Let them ever flee before us – I mean even those who intend to be caught: like the Scythians they beat us best when retreating. By the law which Nature gives them, it is truly not for them to wish and to desire: their role is to accept, to obey, to consent. That is why Nature has made them able to do it at any time: we men are only able to do it occasionally and unreliably. The time is always right for them, so that they will be always ready when our time comes along: [C] ‘pati natae’ [they are born to be passive].143 [B] And whereas Nature has so arranged it that men’s desires should declare themselves by a visible projection, theirs are hidden and internal and she has furnished them with organs [C] unsuited to making a display and [B] strictly defensive.

[C] We should leave to the licence of the Amazons events like the following: when Alexander was marching through Hircania, Queen Thalestris of the Amazons came to meet him with three hundred warriors of her sex, well mounted and well armed, having left beyond the nearby mountains the rest of a big army which followed her leadership; she told him, aloud and in public, that the rumour of his victories and of his valour had brought her there to see him and to offer him her might and her support to forward his campaigns; she added that as she found him to be so beautiful, young and full of vigour she, who was perfection itself in all her qualities, advised him that they should lie together, so that there should be born from the most valiant woman in the world and the most valiant man then alive some great and rare offspring for the future. For the rest Alexander merely thanked her kindly, but he remained for thirteen days to allow time to fulfil her last request, days which he celebrated with all possible eagerness to please so courageous a princess.144

[B] In virtually everything we men are as unjust judges of women’s actions as they are of ours – I confess the truth when it goes against me just as when it serves me. It is a base disorder which drives them to change so frequently and which impedes them from settling their affections firmly on any person whatsoever; as we can see in that goddess Venus to whom is attributed so many changes of lovers. Yet it is true that it is against the nature of sex-love not to be impetuous, and it is against the nature of what is impetuous to remain constant: so those men who are amazed by this and who denounce and seek the causes of this in women as unbelievable and unnatural, ought to ask themselves why that distemper finds acceptance in themselves, without their being stunned as by a miracle. It would perhaps be more odd to find any fixity in it. It is not a passion of the body alone. Just as there is no end to covetousness and ambition, so there is no end to lust. It still lives on after satiety: you can prescribe to it no end, no lasting satisfaction: it always proceeds beyond possession. And fickleness is perhaps somewhat more excusable in them than in us. Like us they can cite in their defence the penchant we both have for variety and novelty; secondly they can cite, what we cannot, that they buy a pig in a poke [C] (Queen Joanna of Naples caused her first husband Andreosso to be hanged from the grill of her window by a gold and silver cord, plaited by her own hands, once she discovered that neither his organs nor his potency corresponded to the hopes she had conceived of his matrimonial duties from his stature, his beauty, his youth and his disposition, by which he had won her and deceived her);145 [B] they can also cite the fact that since the active partner is required to make more effort than the passive one, they at least can always provide for this necessity while we cannot. [C] That is why Plato wisely established in his laws that those making a judgement on the suitability of a marriage should see the youths who were ambitious to marry stark naked but the maidens naked only down to the girdle.146 [B] By assaying us that way the women might perhaps find us not worth the choosing:

Experta latus, madidoque simillima loro Inguina, nec lassa stare coacta manu, Deserit imbelles thalamos.

[She deserts his impotent bed after exploring his thighs and his prick which, like a damp leather thong, refuses an erection to her exhausted hand.]147

It is not enough to have the will to drive straight up: in law impotence and an inability to consummate annul a marriage –

Et querendum aliunde foret nervosius illud, Quod posset zonam solvere virgineam

[You had to look elsewhere for a more sinewy one, capable of unsealing her maidenly girdle]148

– so why should a proportionately more wanton and active sexual skill not do so,

si blando nequeat supresse labori? [if it proves unequal to its pleasant task?]149

But it is most unwise (is it not?) to bring our inadequacy and our weaknesses to a place where what we would leave behind is a good reputation and a good impression. For the little that I need nowadays –

ad unum Mollis opus[limp, even for one go]

– I would not embarrass any lady whom I should hold in reverence and awe:

Fuge suspicari, Cujus heu denum trepidavit aetas, Claudere lustrum.[Suspect not a man whose life has staggered to its fiftieth year.]150

Nature ought to be satisfied with making that age pitiful without making it ridiculous as well. I hate to see old age with an inch of paltry vigour which arouses it three times a week dashing about and bragging with the same vehemence as if it had a good day’s legitimate work in its belly. Straw on fire!151 Truly. [C] And I am always shocked when its lively and quivering fire is promptly quenched and frozen cold. That appetite was meant for the flower of beauteous youth. [B] Just to see, try relying on old age to further that tireless, full constant and great-souled ardour that is in you! It will leave you stranded halfway there! Venture to cede it to some gawky gentle dazzled youth, still quaking before his wand and blushing at it,

Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro Si quis ebur, vel mista rubent ubi lilia multa Alba rosa

[like Indian ivory stained blood-red, or even as white lilies arranged among red roses reflect their hue.]152

Any man who can without dying of shame await the morning which brings disdain from a pair of lovely eyes, conscious of his flaccidity and irrelevance,

Et taciti fecere tamen convitia vultus, [her silent features eloquent with loud reproach,]

has never known the happy pride of turning them glazed and dim by the vigorous exercises of a fulfilled and active night. When I have found a woman discontented with me I have not immediately gone and railed at her fickleness: I have asked myself, rather, whether I would be right to rail against Nature.

Si non longa satis, si non bene mentula crassa, [Should my cock be not long enough nor good and thick,]153

then Nature has indeed treated me unlawfully and unjustly –

Nimirium sapiunt, videntque parvam Matronae quoque mentulam illibenter

[Even good matrons know all too well and do not gladly see a tiny cock]

– [C] and inflicted the most enormous injury. Every one of my members, each as much as another, makes me myself: and none makes me more properly a man than that one. I owe to the public my portrait complete.

The wisdom to be found in my account lies in truth, in frankness and in essentials – entirely; it disdains to count among its real duties those little made-up rules based on provincial custom; it is natural, unvarying, universal; its daughters are indeed courtesy and respect, but they are bastard ones. Apparent defects we shall get the better of all right once we have got the better of those which are of the essence. After we have finished with the latter here, we will fall upon the others – if we find we still need to do so. For there is a danger that we will think up imaginary new duties so as to excuse our neglect of our natural ones and to jumble them up together.

That can be shown: you can see that wherever peccadillos are treated as crimes, crimes are treated as peccadillos; that among the peoples whose laws of politeness are fewest and slackest, the more basic laws, those common to all, are best observed since the countless multitude of those other obligations smother our concern, weaken it and disperse it. Applying ourselves to petty things diverts us from the pressing ones. Oh what an easy, favoured route such superficial men follow compared with ours! Such things are but shadowy pretences with which we bedaub each other and repay our mutual debts; but we cannot repay with them, but increase rather, the debt owed to that Great Judge who rips our tattered rags from off our pudenda and really sees us through and through, right down to our innermost and most secret filth. Our maidenly bashfulness would be useful and fitting if it could order that Judge not to uncover us!

To sum up: whoever could make Man grow out of an over-nice dread of words would do no great harm to this world. Our life consists partly in madness, partly in wisdom: whoever writes about it merely respectfully and by rule leaves more than half of it behind. I address no apologies to myself; were I to do so I would apologize for those apologies more than anything else. My apology is addressed to those of certain kinds of temperament (who are I believe numerically greater than those siding with me). I would like to please everyone, even though it is a difficult thing ‘esse unum hominem accommodatum ad tantam morum ac sermonum et voluntatum varietatem’ [for one single man to conform to so great a variation in manners, speech and intentions];154 so out of consideration for them I will add this: that they cannot justifiably complain that I am putting words into the mouths of authors accepted with approval for many centuries, nor can they deny me, because I lack verse, the freedom enjoyed by some of the greatest clerical cocks-of-the-walk of our own days. Here are two examples:

Rimula, dispeream, ni monogramma tua est; [Strike me dead if your slit is more than one sketchy line;]155

and:

Un vit d’amy la contente et bien traicte.[A lover’s cock services and delights her.]

And what about all the others?

I like modesty. It is not my judgement which makes me choose this shocking sort of talk: Nature chose it for me. I am no more praising it than I am praising any behaviour contrary to the accepted norms; but I am defending it, lessening the indictment by citing individual and general considerations.

Let us get on.

Similarly, [B] from what do you derive that sovereign authority you assume over any ladies who, to their own cost, grant you their favours –

Si furtiva dedit nigra munuscula nocte [If she gives you some little stolen present in the black of night]156

– so that you immediately invest yourselves with rights, cold disapproval and husbandly authority? It is a covenant freely entered into: why do you not stick to it if you want to hold them to it? [C] Voluntary agreements grant no prescriptive rights.

[B] It was not good form, but nevertheless true, that in my day I kept this bargain (as far as its nature allows) as conscientiously as any other one, and with a sort of justice, since I never showed more affection to the woman than I felt, portraying to them in all simplicity its decline, its flourishing period and its birth, its accesses of fever and its relapses. We do not go about such things with an even stride. I was so mean with my promises that I think I kept more than I ever vowed or owed. They found faithfulness there, even to the extent of my serving their inconstancy – and I mean inconstancy admitted and at times repeated. I never broke with one of them as long as I was held there even by the tail-end of a thread. And no matter what occasions they gave me, I never broke it off even for hatred or disdain: for such intimacies still oblige me to show some kindness even when acquired by the most discreditable of covenants. I did sometimes show my choler and a somewhat undiscerning impatience at the high point of their trickery, their evasions and our quarrels, but then I am by complexion subject to sudden distempers which, despite being short and light, are often prejudicial to my affairs. If they wanted to make an assay of my freedom of judgement, I never baulked at giving them bitingly paternal advice and lancing them where it hurts. If I left them any room to complain of me, it is rather for having found me to be, by modern standards, a ridiculously scrupulous lover. I kept my word in cases where anyone at all would have readily released me from it: women yielded in those days while saving their reputations by terms of surrender which they would readily have allowed their conqueror to infringe. In the interests of their honour I have more than once made my pleasure strike its sails at the point of a climax, and, when reason urged me, I have even armed them against me, so well indeed that they acted more safely and soberly by my rules, once they had frankly accepted them, than they would have done by their own.

[C] As far as in me lay I personally assumed all the risks of our assignations so as to take the load off them; and I managed our intrigues in the most difficult and unforeseeable of ways, for they are the least open to suspicion and, in my opinion, the most practical. Assignations are most overt when they seem the most covert. What is least feared is least protected, least observed; it is easy to dare what nobody thinks you will: the difficulty makes it easy.

[B] No man’s advances were ever more saucily genital. The way of courting I have described is more in harmony with the rules: but does anyone know better than I do how ridiculous it appears to folk nowadays and how unsuccessful it is! Yet I shall never be brought to gainsay it: I have nothing more to lose by it now,

me tabula sacer Votiva paries indicat uvidaSuspendisse potenti Vestimenta maris Deo.

[As is shown by my votive tablet, I have hung up my dripping garments on the temple wall and dedicated them to the god of the sea.]157

It is time, now, to talk of this openly. But as I might say to someone now, ‘You are raving mad, my friend: love in these days of yours has nothing to do with fidelity and loyalty’ –

hæc si tu postules Ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas, Quam si des operam, ut cum ratione insanias

[if you try to reduce all this to rational rules you will simply give yourself the task of going rationally insane]

– so, on the other hand, if I had to start again, I would certainly adopt the same course and the same method, however fruitless that might prove for me. [C] Inexpertise and silliness are praiseworthy in an activity which deserves no praise. [B] The further I go from others’ humours in this, the nearer I draw to my own.

Incidentally, I never allowed all of myself to be totally devoted to this business. I took delight in it but I never forgot me: both in the ladies’ service and in mine I conserved, in its entirety, such little sense and discretion as Nature had allotted me: some passion but no raging madness. My conscience was compromised by it so far as to include lasciviousness and licentiousness, though never ingratitude, treachery, wickedness or cruelty. These are prices which I would not pay for the pleasures of this vice: I was happy to pay its proper honest price: [C] ‘Nullum inter se vitium est.’158 [No vice is self-enclosed.] I have a virtually equal loathing of all cowering torpid idleness and all prickly painful bustle. One cuts into me, the other knocks me senseless: and I am no more fond of cuts than of bruises, of slashing blows than of blunt ones. In these affairs, when I was more fit for them, I found a just moderation between those two extremes. Love is a lively emotion, light-hearted and alert: I was neither confused nor afflicted by it but I was thrown into a heat by it and troubled. There you must stop: it is harmful only for fools.

When a youth asked Panaetius the philosopher whether it became a wise man to be in love, ‘Let us leave aside the wise,’ he replied, ‘neither you nor I are that; but let us not pledge ourselves to an activity so violent and disturbing, one which makes us the slave of another and despicable to ourselves.’159 He was telling the truth when he said that something so intrinsically impulsive should not be entrusted to a man’s soul if it has no means of withstanding its assaults and of disproving by its deeds the assertion of Agesilaus, that wisdom and love cannot live together.160

It is a vain pastime, it is true, indecorous, shaming and wrong; but I reckon that, treated in this fashion, it is health-bringing and appropriate for loosening up a sluggish mind and body; as a doctor I would order it for a man of my mould and disposition as readily as any other prescription so as to liven him up and keep him in trim until he is well on in years and to postpone the onset of old age. While we are still only in its outskirts, while there is still life in our pulse,

Dum nova canities, dum prima et recta senectus, Dum superest Lachesi quod torqueat, et pedibus me Porto meis, nullo dextram subeunte bacillo,

[while the hair is but newly grey, while old age is still fresh and erect, while there is still some yarn for Lachesis to spin, while I can stand on my own feet without leaning on a stick,]161

we have need of being stirred and thrilled by some such perturbation as that: just think how it restored youth, vigour and merriness to wise Anacreon. And Socrates, when older than I am, said, in talking of someone he loved, ‘When we touched shoulders and brought our heads together while looking at the same book I felt, I can assure you, a sudden jab in my shoulder like an insect’s sting: it went on irritating for five whole days and poured into my mind a ceaseless longing.’162 – A mere touch, by chance, on the shoulder, was enough to warm and disturb a soul chilled and enervated by age, a soul which was foremost among all human souls in its reformation.163 [C] And why not? Socrates was a man: he never wanted to be, or to seem to be, anything else.

[B] Philosophy does not do battle against such pleasures as are natural, provided that temperance accompanies them:164 [C] she teaches moderation in such things not avoidance; [B] her powers of resistance are used against bastard unnatural pleasures. She says that the body’s desires must not be augmented by the mind and cleverly warns us [C] not to seek to stimulate our hunger by sating it, not to seek to stuff our bellies instead of filling them, as well as to avoid any enjoyment which brings us to penury, all meats which increase hunger and all drinks that increase thirst, [B] just as165 in the service of love she orders us to take a person who simply satisfies the needs of the body and who does not disturb the soul; the soul must not make love its concern, but follow nakedly along, accompanying the body.166

But am I not right to think that these precepts – which are by my standard nevertheless a trifle rigorous167 – concern a body which is functioning properly, and that for a broken-down body (as for a prostrate stomach) we are allowed to use the art of medicine to prop it up and put a little heat into it by means of our imagination so as to restore its appetite and joy, since, left to itself, it has lost them for good? May we not say that there is nothing in us during this earthly prison either purely corporeal or purely spiritual and that it is injurious to tear a living man apart; and that it seems reasonable that we should adopt towards the enjoyment of pleasure at least as favourable an attitude as we do towards pain? Pain for example was vehement to the point of perfection in the Soul of the saints doing penance; the body naturally took part in it by right of the links binding it to her; yet it could have had little part in the cause.168 But the saints were by no means content that the body should ‘follow nakedly along, accompanying’ the afflicted soul: they afflicted such horrifying punishment on it as was proper to it, in order that both body and soul should emulate each other, plunging the whole man into pain, most salutary when most atrocious.

[C] So, in the parallel case of bodily pleasures, is it not unjust to chill the Soul towards them and to maintain that she should be dragged towards them as to some compelling obligation or some slavish need? It is for the Soul, rather, to keep them warm like a broody hen and, since she has the responsibility of governing them, to come forward and welcome them; just as in my opinion it is also her duty in the case of such pleasures as are proper to her to inject and pour into the body every sense-impression which their attributes allow and to see that they are made sweet to it and salutary. For it is, as they say, right that the body should never follow its appetites to the prejudice of the Soul. Why is it not right, then, that the Soul should not follow hers to the prejudice of the body?

[B] I have absolutely no other passion but love to keep me going. What covetousness, ambition, quarrels and lawsuits do for men who, like me, have no other allotted task, love would do more suitably: it would restore me to vigilance, sober behaviour, graceful manners and care about my person; love would give new strength to my features so that the distortions of old age, pitiful and misshapen, should not come and disfigure them; [C] it would bring me back to wise and healthy endeavours by which I could make myself better esteemed and better loved, banishing from my mind all sense of hopelessness about itself and about its application, while bringing it to know itself again: [B] it would divert me away from a thousand painful thoughts, [C] from a thousand melancholy sorrows [B] which idleness burdens us with in old age, [C] as does the poor state of our health; [B] it would, at least in dream, restore some heat to my blood – this blood of mine which Nature is foresaking; it would lift up my chin and unbuckle my sinews [C] as well as the vigour and exhilaration of the soul [B] for this poor fellow who is on his way out, rushing towards disintegration.

But I am well aware that love is a good thing very hard to recover. Our tastes have, through weakness, become more delicate and, through experience, more discriminating. We demand more when we have less to offer: we want the maximum of choice just when we least deserve to find favour. Realizing we are thus, we are less bold and more suspicious; knowing our own circumstances – and theirs – nothing can assure us we are loved.

I feel shame for myself to be found among fresh-green, boiling youth

Cujus in indomito constantior inguine nervus, Quam nova collibus arbor inhæret.

[in whose indomitable groin there is a tendon firmer far than a young tree planted on the hillside.]169

Why should we go and show our wretchedness among such eager joy,

Possint ut juvenes visere fervidi,Multo non sine risu, Dilapsam in cineres facem?

[so that burning youth, not without many a laugh, may see our nuptial torch decayed into ashes?]

They have strength and reason on their side; let us make room for them; we can hold out no longer.

[C] That sprig of budding beauty will not suffer itself to be handled by hands benumbed, nor seduced by purely material means. For, as that ancient philosopher replied to one who was laughing at him for being unable to win the favour of some tendril he was pursuing: ‘My friend, the hook will not bite when the curd is so fresh.’170

[B] Now love is a commerce which requires inter-relationship and reciprocity. We can show our appreciation of the other pleasures we receive by recompenses of a different nature: this one can only be repaid in the same coin. [C] Truly in this one the pleasure that I give stimulates my imagination more sweetly than the pleasure I receive. [B] A man who can receive pleasure when he gives none at all is in no wise generous: it is a base soul which will owe the lot and is pleased to nurse contacts with women who do all the paying. There is no beauty nor grace nor intimacy so exquisite that a gentleman should want them at that price. If they can only do us a good turn out of pity, then I would dearly prefer not to live at all than to live on charity. Would that I had the right to ask it of them in the style which I have seen beggars use in Italy: ‘Fate ben per voi’ [Do a good turn for yourself]; [C] or in the manner which Cyrus adopted to exhort his soldiers: ‘He who loves himself, let him follow me.’171

[B] Someone will say to me: ‘Go back again to women who are now in the same state as you are: fellowship in the same misfortune will make them easier to get.’ What absurd and dull terms for a truce!

Nolo Barbam vellere mortuo leoni!

[I have no desire to pluck hairs from a dead lion’s beard!]172

[C] One of the reproaches and accusations that Xenophon makes about Meno is that in his love-affairs he only got on the job with partners past their bloom.173 The sight of a young couple appropriately united in a tender embrace – or even the contemplation of it in imagination – contains I believe more sensual pleasure than being the second partner in a sad misshapen union. [B] I leave that fanciful appetite to the Emperor Galba who devoted himself only to tough and ancient flesh – or to that other pitiful wretched man:

O ego di’ faciant talem te cernere possim, Charaque mutatis oscula ferre comis, Amplectique meis corpus non pingue lacertis!

[O would the gods let me see you as you are, tenderly kiss your fading hair and clasp your withered body in my embrace!]174

[C] And I count among the principal forms of ugliness all beauties due to artifice and constraint. A young lad of Chio called Hemon, hoping that fine clothes would procure him that handsomeness which Nature had denied him, came to the philosopher Arcesilaus and asked him if a philosopher could ever find himself in love. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied, ‘provided it be not with a dishonest dressed-up beauty such as yours.’175 An ugly old age when openly avowed is in my opinion less old and less ugly than one smoothed out and painted over.

[B] Shall I say it, on condition that you do not jump down my throat? Love never seems to me to be properly and naturally seasonable except in the age nearest boyhood:

Quem si puellarum insereres choro, Mille sagaces falleret hospites Discrimen obscurum, solutis Crinibus ambiguoque vultu.

[A youth such that, if you put him among a band of maidens, those who knew him not, for all their perspicacity, would fail to pick him out with his flowing hair and his hermaphrodite’s face.]176

[C] Nor handsomeness, either. For Plato himself noted that Homer prolongs it until there is a shadow of a beard on the chin, but remarks that such a flower is rare. (We all know why Dion the Sophist jokingly called the mossy beards of adolescence Aristogitons and Harmodians!)177

[B] I find love already out of place in adult manhood let alone in old age.

Importunus enim transvolat aridas Quercus.

[For Cupid disdainfully flies past the withered oak.]178

[C] Queen Margaret of Navarre (just like a woman) greatly extends the privileges of women when she ordains that it is time for them to change the title beautiful for good after they have reached thirty.179

[B] The shorter the tenancy we grant to Cupid in our lives the better off we are. Look at his deportment! And his chin is as smooth as a boy’s! Who is unaware that in Cupid’s school you do everything contrary to good order? There the novices are the professors: study, practice and experience lead to failure. [C] ‘Amor ordinem nescit.’ [Cupid knows no order.]180 [B] The way Cupid conducts things is most in fashion when mingled with ingenuousness and awkwardness; mistakes and failures lend it charm and grace; provided it is sorrowful and yearning, it little matters whether it shows prudence. See how Cupid stumbles along, tripping over merrily; to guide him by art and wisdom is to clamp him in the stocks: you constrain his divine freedom when you lay hairy calloused hands upon him.

Moreover I often hear women portraying a relationship as being entirely of the mind, disdaining to take into consideration the interests which our senses have in it.181 Everything helps in this case, but I should add that though I have often found that we men have overlooked weaknesses in their minds on account of the beauty of their bodies, I have yet to see one woman willing, on account of the beauty of a man’s mind, however mature and wise, to lend a helping hand to his body once it has even begun to decline. Why is not one of them ever moved by desire for that noble [C] Socratic [B] bargain of body for mind, [C] purchasing at the price of her thighs a philosophical relationship and procreation through the soul – the highest price she could ever get for them!182

Plato decrees in his laws that a man who has achieved some signal and useful exploit in a war may not, for the duration of that conflict, irrespective of his age or ugliness, be refused a kiss or any other of love’s favours from anyone he pleases.183 Can what he finds so just in commendation of a warrior’s worth not also be used to commend worth of another kind? And why is no woman ever moved [B] to win, before her fellow-women do, the glory of a love so chaste? Yes, I do indeed say chaste:

nam si quando ad prælia ventum est, Ut quondam in stipulis magnus sine viribus ignis Incassum furit.

[for when it comes to the clinch, its frenzied love serves no purpose; like burning stubble: lots of flame but no force.]184

We do not rank among our worst vices those whose fire is smothered in our minds.

To bring to an end these infamous jottings which I have loosed in a diarrhoea of babble – a violent and at times morbid diarrhoea –

Ut missum sponsi furtivo muntre malum Procurrit casto virginis e gremio, Quod miseræ oblitæ molli sub veste locatum, Dum adventu matris prosilit, excutitur, Atque illud prono præceps agitur decursu; Huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor

[as when an apple, secretly given by her admirer breaks loose from the chaste bosom of a maiden as she starts to her feet on hearing her mother’s footstep, forgetting she had concealed it beneath her flowing robes; it lies there on the ground while a blush suffuses her troubled face and betrays her fault]185

– I say that male and female are cast in the same mould: save for education and custom the difference between them is not great. [C] In The Republic Plato summons both men and women indifferently to a community of all studies, administrations, offices and vocations both in peace and war;186 and Antisthenes the philosopher removed any distinction between their virtue and our own.187

[B] It is far more easy to charge one sex than to discharge the other. As the saying goes: it is the pot calling the kettle smutty.