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140 THE GREAT SECRET
love is not always obedient to social conventions and those who marry without love often run the risk of adultery.
The woman who is in love and does not marry the man she loves is sinning against nature. Julie de Volmar is inexcusable and her husband is impossible, even in a novel; Saint-Preux must have been mistaken over this impossible pair. A girl who gets engaged and then jilts a man, dishonours her first love; it may be tacitly regarded as an earnest of adultery when she does marry. No woman worthy of the name need blush in the presence of the man who has shown himself worthy of her first love.
We can understand a tender-hearted man marrying, and rehabilitating in this way, a decent girl who has been seduced and abandoned; but that a girl shou]d surrender herself when she is no longer her own mistress, and under the pretext that the baron d’Etange is threatening her life no iess, or because she supposes that her father will die if she does not obey him, provokes us to comment that this indelicacy of heart is hardly justified by cowardice or a foolish sensibility. A father who talks of killing his daughter or of dying if she does not act becomingly and nobly, is no longer a father but a ferocious egotist. a despot one should reprove or fly from. In a word, Rousseau’s Julie is a ‘nice girl’ who is not nice at all, but manages to betray two men at the same time. Her father is a pander who dishonours daughter and friend together; Volmar is a coward and Saint-Preux is an ass. Once he knew Julie was married, he had no business to see her again.
To marry a woman who is given to another and whom this other had not abandoned is the same thing as marrying someone else’s wife. Such a marriage is null and void before nature and before human dignity. This is something which Rousseau did not understand. I will allow the happy-go-lucky marriages of Henri Murger’s heroines, who treat life as a farce; but I will not admit the marriage of Julie, because she makes a show of taking love seriously. To be or not to be, that is the question, as Hamlet said; well, the essence of a human being is in his thoughts and in his affections.
For a person to abjure his thoughts publicly without being convinced of their falsehood, is an apostasy of the spirit; to forswear love when one feels its existence, is an apostasy of the heart.