Chapter I
I am trying to give myself an account of this passion, every sincere manifestation of which bears the stamp of beauty.
There are four kinds of love:
1. Love-passion: the love of a Portuguese nun*, the love of Eloisa for Abelard, the love of Captain Wesel, the love of a gendarme in Cento. [*Stendhal is referring to Letters from a Portuguese Nun, a collection of passionate love letters from the nun Marianna Alcaforado, published in 1669.]
2. Love-attraction, which reigned in Paris in 1760 and which can be found in the memoirs and novels of this time — in Crebillion, Lauzin, Duclos, Marmontel, Chamfort, Madame d’Epinay, etc. etc.
This is a picture where everything, down to the shadows, should be pink, where nothing unpleasant should sneak in under any pretext, because this would be a violation of custom, good tone, tact, etc. A man of good origin knows in advance all the devices that he will use and that he will encounter in the various phases of this love; there is nothing passionate and unforeseen in it, and it is often more elegant than true love, for there is a lot of intelligence in it; it is a cold and beautiful miniature compared to the picture of one of the Carraci, and while passion-love makes us sacrifice all our interests, attraction-love always knows how to adapt to them. True, if vanity is taken away from this poor love, there will be almost nothing left of it; devoid of vanity, she becomes a convalescent who is so weak that he can hardly walk.
3. Physical love
To lie in wait for a beautiful and fresh peasant woman who is running away into the forest. Everyone knows love based on pleasures of this kind; no matter how dry and unhappy a person’s character may be, at sixteen he begins with this.
4. Love-vanity
The vast majority of men, especially in France, desire and possess women who are in fashion, like beautiful horses, as the indispensable luxury of a young man; more or less flattered, more or less excited, vanity gives rise to outbursts of delight. Sometimes, but not always, there is physical love; often there is not even physical pleasure. “In the eyes of a bourgeois, a duchess is never more than thirty years old,” said the Duchess de Chaun, and people close to the court of King Louis of Holland, this just man, still smile, remembering one pretty woman from The Hague, who did not dare not find a charming man if he was a duke or prince. But, being faithful to the monarchical principle, as soon as the prince appeared at court, she immediately resigned the duke …
Chapter II
Here’s what’s going on in the soul:
- Delight.
- Man thinks: «What a pleasure to kiss her, to receive a kiss from her!» etc.
- Nadezhda.
- Second crystallization.
Then the second crystallization begins, forming, as diamonds, the confirmation of the thought: «She loves me.»
Every quarter of an hour of the night that comes after the birth of doubts, having experienced a moment of terrible grief, the lover says to himself: “Yes, she loves me”; and crystallization works to discover new charms; then doubt with a wandering eye takes possession of him and abruptly stops him. His chest forgets to breathe; he asks himself, «But does she love me?» During all these painful and sweet hesitation, the poor lover vividly feels: «She would give me the pleasure that only she can give in the whole world.»
It is the evidence of this truth, this walk along the very edge of the terrible abyss and at the same time contact with complete happiness that gives the second crystallization such an advantage over the first.
The lover continually wanders between three thoughts:
- It has all perfection.
- She loves Me.
- How to get from her the greatest proof of love that is possible?
The most painful moment of still young love, when the lover notices that he has made the wrong conclusion and has to destroy a whole bunch of crystals.
He begins to doubt crystallization itself…
Chapter IV.
In the soul of a completely unaffected young girl living in a secluded castle in the countryside, a slight surprise can turn into a slight delight, and if there is even the slightest hope, she will give rise to love and crystallization.
In this case, love attracts primarily by its entertaining nature.
Surprise and hope are strongly encouraged by the need for love and longing, which is characteristic of the age of sixteen. It is enough known that anxiety in such years is a thirst for love, and that the hallmark of this thirst is the absence of excessive exactingness about the origin of the drink offered by the case.
Let us list again the seven periods of love; This:
- Delight.
- What a pleasure, etc.
- Hope.
- Love is born.
- First crystallization.
- Doubts appear.
- Second crystallization.
It may take a year between #1 and #2.
Month — between No 2 and No 3; if hope does not rush to help, a person imperceptibly for himself refuses No 2, as from something that brings misfortune.
The blink of an eye is between No 3 and No 4.
There is no gap between No 4 and No 5. Only closeness can separate them.
Between No. 5 and No. 6, several days may elapse, depending on the degree of perseverance and on the tendency of the person to be daring; there is no gap between No 6 and 7…
Chapter VI
Crystallization in love almost never stops. Here is her story. Before intimacy with the beloved has yet come, there is a crystallization of imaginary resolution: only by imagination are you sure that this dignity exists in the woman you love. Once intimacy is established, the resurgent fears can be resolved in a more real way. Thus, happiness is uniform only in its source. Every day has its own special flower.
If the beloved woman succumbs to the passion she experiences and, making a huge mistake, kills fears with the ardor of her impulses [Diana de Poitiers in The Princess of Cleves], crystallization stops for a while, but, losing some of its tension, that is, its fears, it acquires the charm of complete ease , boundless trust; a sweet habit hides all life’s sorrows and gives increased interest to pleasures.
If you have been abandoned, crystallization begins again, and every act of admiration, every form of happiness that it can give and that you have no longer thought about, leads to the painful thought: “This so captivating happiness will never return to me! And I lost it through my own fault!” If you are looking for happiness in sensations of a different kind, your heart refuses to accept them. True, your fantasy draws real pictures; she puts you on a fast horse and rides off to hunt in the Devonshire woods [For if you could imagine yourself in this happiness, crystallization would give your beloved the exclusive privilege of giving you this happiness], but you see, you obviously feel that this would not give you the slightest pleasure. Here is an optical illusion that results in a gun being fired.
The game also has its own crystallization caused by the supposed use of the money you win.
Hatred has its own crystallization: as soon as the hope of revenge appears, hatred flares up again.
If every belief in which there is something unreasonable or unproven always strives to choose its head among the most unreasonable people, this is again one of the consequences of crystallization. There is crystallization even in mathematics (think of the Newtonians of 1740), in the minds of people who are unable at any moment to imagine all the links of proof for what they believe.
To see this, follow the fate of the great German philosophers, whose immortality, proclaimed so many times, never lasted more than thirty or forty years…
Chapter X
In proof of crystallization, I will only relate the following case (Empoli, June 1819).
A young girl hears talk that Eduard, a relative of hers, returning from the army, is a young man with the greatest virtues; she is assured that he fell in love with her from stories, but that, in all likelihood, he will want to see her before explaining himself and asking her parents for her hand. In church, she pays attention to a young visitor, hears that he is called Edward, thinks only of him, falls in love with him. A week later, the real Edward arrives, not the one she saw in church; she turns pale and will be unhappy all her life if she is forced to marry him.
This is what the poor in spirit call one of the follies of love.
A magnanimous man showers the unfortunate young girl with the most refined blessings; it is impossible to be better, and love is about to be born; but his hat is badly polished, and he rides clumsily; the young girl admits to herself, sighing, that she cannot return his feelings.
A man takes care of the most virtuous secular woman, she learns that in the past he had ridiculous physical failures: he becomes unbearable to her. Meanwhile, she had not the slightest intention of ever surrendering herself to him, and these secret failures do not in the least detract from his mind or his courtesy. Simply crystallization became impossible.
So that the human heart may enthusiastically set about the deification of a beloved creature, wherever it appears to him, in the Arden Forest or at the ball of Coulomb [The Arden Forest is the setting for Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, which Stendhal loved very much. The pendants are a family of famous dancers in the era of the Empire and the Restoration. One of them opened a dance hall], it must first of all seem perfect to the lover, not in all possible respects, but in those relations that he observes at the moment; it will seem to him perfect in every respect only after a few days of the second crystallization. Quite understandable: in this case, it is enough to think about some kind of perfection in order to see it in a beloved being.
It is clear why beauty is necessary for the birth of love. It is necessary that ugliness does not present an obstacle. Soon the lover begins to find the beauty of his beloved as she is, without thinking at all about true beauty.
The features of true beauty would promise him, if he saw them — let me put it this way — an amount of happiness, which I would designate by one, and the features of his beloved — as they are — promise him a thousand units of happiness.
For the birth of love, beauty is necessary, like a signboard; she predisposes to this passion with praises lavished in our presence on the one we should love. A very strong ecstasy gives decisive importance to the slightest hope.
In attraction-love, and perhaps in the first five minutes of passion-love, the woman who takes a lover takes into account other women’s ideas of him more than her own.
Hence the success of the princes and the military.