"I have had commerce, that's the word, with different womenkind. Rut I 've never loved any of them!… My dear fellow, its all very simple. The Orientals, they have perfectly understood woman; they have put her in the place where she belongs. We don't live in the Orient but in the Occident; so of course it isn't a matter of making our women wear veils, of keeping them shut up between four walls and eunuchs; but there is the necessity for us of shutting up the moukère morally, intellectually, in a harem. That is to say, we must not permit her to go wandering around in the domain of our thoughts, any more than in the avenues of our hearts the streets of our occupations. You understand?… Oh yes, you ask what is to be done if she deceives us? as is inevitable, for she will bore herself to death in the moral harem. Let her deceive! Ho you think I am bothering about mere contingencies? No, no, the thing is that in such conditions woman does not trouble a man any more that is the essential! Her power over a man is curiously reduced; then when she gives herself, whether to you or to your neighbour, you can put the fact down to real value, and not to a factitious value, the result of our prejudices, our pride, our fancies … You suppress idle gallantry, you suppress paying your court, jealousy, all such things which take up an enormous amount of time, when even they do not take up a man's entire life! Look at the sort of man who at twenty-five years of age is still influenced by women! He can do nothing really useful, serious, in life. How old are you, Vétheuil? I don't know—thirty-four perhaps. What have you done with your time? You've lost it in women's bedrooms, till now you are fairly isolated under the skirts of the women, sunk in the middle of the, ocean of the world, like a diver under his glass bell, as Jean-Haul Richter says. Ah, my dear fellow! there are more interesting things to do, more interesting problems to solve, in any science you please!"
Historic Types of
Deep Friendships
Between Men of
Various Tempe-
raments and
Attitudes toward
Woman.
The types of great "friendships", of passionate intimacy, between two men oi sensitive mutuality through life, or long periods of life, have multiplied through the world's social history. Such male pairs have become household names; beloved ideals forever. We go back to the very nursery, to school-forms and our earliest personal interests in humanity to meet them. Legend, myth, history and religion blend in their circle. They are so frequent even in our own unromantic date, that they almost make it needless to mention here more than a few typical instances. Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Nisus and Euryalus, Alexander the Great and Hephaestion, Julian the Apostate
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