As for women's jealousy--they are suspicious, they have infinitely more at stake than we, they have made a greater sacrifice to love, have far fewer means of distraction and, above all, far fewer means of keeping a check on their lover's actions. A woman feels herself degraded by jealousy; she thinks her lover is laughing at her, or, still worse, making fun of her tenderest transports. Cruelty must tempt her--and yet, legally, she cannot kill her rival! For women, jealousy must be a still more abominable evil than it is for men. It is the last degree of impotent rage and self-contempt[1] which a heart can bear without breaking. I know no other remedy for so cruel an evil, than the death of the one who is the cause of it or of the one who suffers. An example of French jealousy is the story of Madame de la Pommeraie in _Jacques le Fataliste_(19). La Rochefoucauld says: "We are ashamed of owning we are jealous, but pride ourselves on having been and of being capable of jealousy."[2] Poor woman dares not own even to having suffered this torture, so much ridicule does it bring upon her. So painful a wound can never quite heal up. If cold reason could be unfolded before the fire of imagination with the merest shade of success, I would say [Pg 133] to those wretched women, who are unhappy from jealousy: "There is a great difference between infidelity in man and in you. In you, the importance of the act is partly direct, partly symbolic. But, as an effect of the education of our military schools, it is in man the symbol of nothing at all. On the contrary, in women, through the effect of modesty, it is the most decisive of all the symbols of devotion. Bad habit makes it almost a necessity to men. During all our early years, the example set by the so-called 'bloods' makes us set all our pride on the number of successes of this kind--as the one and only proof of our worth. For you, your education acts in exactly the opposite direction." As for the value of an action as symbol--in a moment of anger I upset a table on to the foot of my neighbour; that gives him the devil of a pain, but can quite easily be fixed up--or again, I make as if to give him a slap in the face.... The difference between infidelity in the two sexes is so real, that a woman of passion may pardon it, while for a man that is impossible. Here we have a decisive ordeal to show the difference between passion-love and love from pique: infidelity in women all but kills the former and doubles the force of the latter.