Vacation and Love!..

A tactful social critic, an exacting scholar of world stature, a writer, an author, and a thinker, a member of the French Academy ... it is not his country alone that boasts of him; rather, he is a son of all humanity.

Love — and I mean by it something that passes beyond the satisfaction of a ... appetite — is romantic love, which ... leisure time and an untroubled mind. In wealthy, pleasure-loving circles, such as the court of ..., or, nearer our own age, in what the books on society in the last century tell us ... in a word, the people of bygone days never once lacked hours of leisure; rather, they loved and made merry in every season.

But as for us, living in the world after the ..., toiling, if for nothing else, only for the necessities of life, from morning ... supper — how far are we from any broad, extended time in which love may graze and sway?

How many a married man in a great city, or anywhere at all, comes back to his house after the toil of a whole day with the ways of courtship and its theses on his lips? Or has time left us any men of pleasure and luxury like the heroes of Bourget and Maupassant?

It is as though I saw the god of love gazing at a throng of men and women, every one of them the slave of some machine, one hurrying to the factory and another to the bank, packing the buses and vying for the trains; as though I saw him leaning on his bow, which rust has overgrown, in sorrow, watching for vacation time to come, and sighing until the months of July and August arrive.

And what does he see then? Here they are, couple after couple — some stretched out on the sands of the shore in half-nakedness, some embracing the grass in the shade of the trees, some winding along a narrow mountain path; and in this fevered tableau pleasure reigns and desire holds sway over individuals bound, perhaps, by ties of a love that was not equal to what they hold in store. In truth — what time is as favorable to love affairs as vacation time, when love fills thoughts and souls before any other concern, under the sway of the beauty of nature and of travels that shed an enchanting color over living creatures, and when every means of acquaintance and chance meeting is at hand?

Take, for example, a young man from some town, whose eyes for eleven months have not gone beyond the girls of that town, whom he has known since his boyhood. He might well be able to choose the girl of his dreams from among them should the need arise, but for one reason or another the opportunity to realize his hopes has not come his way. Suddenly he finds himself, thanks to a vacation granted him, at a meeting-place with girls from thirty-six thousand districts (as in France), amid the pleasantest circumstances, the longest hours, and the sweetest mutual communions — to say nothing of the sweetness of solitude on lonely walks. And if we leave innocence aside, the vacation's great prize, for the "Don Juan," is the opening of the hunting season: there he is, and here is this nymph lying half-naked on the sand while her guardian is absorbed in fishing or entangled in ruin at the gaming table. As for the vacation of the husband devoted to his wife, it is the opportunity he has long awaited to renew their acquaintance; in it the clouds of care and weariness lift, and their true personalities come forth in a new and enchanting atmosphere in which love takes on a many-colored form.

Happy is he who takes his wife away for fifteen days to a festival of music or of poetry, that he may reap the kindled fires of his feeling, stirred up by Mozart and by Musset. But nature alone can be trusted to bring ease and contentment back to their two souls: there, across the ocean, they whisper and confide together. Amid the stillness of the countryside and its beauty they weave from their married love a legend that cannot be effaced. For our mother the earth, in all her aspects, labors to revive us — the people of the cities above all — bringing back the rapture of youth to our weary hearts.

Nor is it to be recommended that one of the two spouses take the vacation alone, without the other, except for some pressing need of health. This does not mean that there are not sound and excellent families that need fear no dissolution upon parting. A person's heart, on vacation, need not be a heart shut off from a love that rises above every passing whim. Even so, we must not forget that these trials are violent and overwhelming, and are by no means unlikely to occur. There is no doubt of the difficulty facing the woman who would keep herself: a beautiful woman left to her own devices on the seashore or in the bathing towns, a target for the marksmanship of bachelors and a morsel for the mouths of intruding husbands — whereas in her own small town her family would watch her every movement and every stillness, and the gossiping women would spy on her from behind the window frames. Nor is the field of vacation empty of gossiping women, who sow scandals there and preside over their feeding, as though scandal were the solace of their old age.

Gossips, yes — but unknown ones. Their shafts inflict no wound; such is public opinion in a foreign milieu. And solitude is not a natural condition. Goethe said: "She who can bear boredom in the midst of the bathing season is a woman deep in love." If the family is loose and tottering before the hour of opportunity arrives, it is all one whether the dangers take hold of it. And if it is knit together and firm, then there is the sacrifice: the price of loss, at the first slip of the foot, is nothing less than the whole of happiness.

Correspondence heals much of the thirst of separation. They say of letter-writing, and of love letters above all, that it grows less day by day. But I am not sure of what they claim. In any case, I am sorry if such is the state of things. Long daily letters work to unite the thoughts of those who are parted, soften the desolation of silence and estrangement, and prepare an understanding that forestalls contention and quarrel.

"But it does not prepare peace and concord," a young woman said to me, reading what I write over my shoulder. But why not? It is harmony itself at the moment of meeting. She answered: "The eloquence of a letter hangs upon the writer's thought and style." And of that too I have my doubts. How sweet are love letters in the eye of their reader, for their literary dress puts on the garment of the beloved to whom they are addressed.

And upon my life, whoever tempts his companion at the price of a vacation is neither honest nor faithful.

Rendered into Arabic by
Evelyn Hitti Kanaan