The country in which the property marriage is most firmly established is
probably France; and in France the rights of nature are recognized in a
kind of supplementary union, which constitutes what is known as the
"domestic triangle," or in the French language, "_la vie trois_." The
young girl of the French ruling classes is guarded every moment of her
life like a prisoner in jail. She is sold in marriage, and is expected
to bear her husband an heir, possibly two or three children. After that,
she is considered, not under the law or by the church, but by the
general common sense of the community, to be free to seek satisfaction
of her love needs. Her husband has mistresses, and she has a lover, and
to that lover she is faithful, and in her dealings with him she is
guided by an elaborate and subtle code. Practically all French fiction
and drama deal with this "life in threes," and the complications and
tragedies which result from it. I name one novel, simply because it
happens to be the last that I myself have read, "The Red Lily," by
Anatole France.
Of course, every human being knows in his heart that this is a monstrous
arrangement, and there are periods of revolt when real feeling surges up
in the hearts of men, and we have stories of true love, young and
unselfish love, such for example as Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea," or
St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," or Halevy's "L'Abbe Constantin."
Everybody reads these stories and weeps over them, but everybody knows
that they are like the romantic shepherds and shepherdesses of the
ancient regime; they never had any existence in reality, and are not
meant to be taken seriously. If anybody attempts to carry them into
action, or to preach them seriously to the young, then we know that we
are dealing with a disturber of the foundations of the social order, a
dangerous and incendiary villain, and we give him a name which sends a
shudder down the spine of every friend of law and order--we call him a
"free-lover."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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