Delusions and Ironies of Love

“As I grow older, I discard one after another of my masks; but when, having discarded the last, the world sees my unknown features, I doubt whether a single cry of terror will be raised!” This is what Jerome tells his wife Gabrielle in Francois Mauriac’s short story, A Man of Letters. The story is a profound exploration of human love and relationships, particularly conjugal love.

Husband-wife relationship demands a lot more understanding and compromises than any other relationship. Living together for years will result in knowing each other too well, warts and all. Can you accept all that you see in your partner? How much compromise are you willing to make? Or, can you rise to the level of God? The narrator of Mauriac’s story says that “It is God’s omniscience that helps Him to endure the sorrows of the world.” If we know everything about a person, we cannot but love him/her.

But knowing any person that well is not quite possible. People wear masks to conceal their ugly aspects, the warts and the rest. We see the masks day after day and believe that the mask is the reality. Even if the individual concerned peels off his mask(s), we may not believe the new revelation. We have got too used to the mask(s). This is one of delusions of love that Mauriac’s characters grapple with.

Another delusion is the transmutation that love inflicts on people. We imagine others as we would like them to be. In this story, Garbrielle imagines that her husband loves solitude, silence, cleanliness, orderliness, and so on, because he is a man of letters. She is convinced that writers love all these and more. She doesn’t even care to understand whether her belief is true. “She is determined to make me what her love would have me be,” Jerome says.

What is immensely ironical is that Jerome has done something worse to Gabrielle: “he had fashioned and refashioned her out of all recognition; he had … deformed her and in such wise as to prevent her from ever again fitting any other destiny than his.”

After doing that catastrophic damage to her, Jerome is now leaving her. He has found another woman, Berthe. Berthe is “a woman worn-out and embittered, with children whom he (Jerome) speaks of with disgust,” in Gabrielle’s understanding. She lives “in a third-rate flat in the suburbs.” What Gabrielle fails to understand, however, is that Jerome had got sick of all the neatness, beauty and perfection that she was maintaining at home just for her writer-husband’s sake. Such neatness and perfection can’t create poetry, Jerome says. He hasn’t written a single line of poetry during their 15 years of life together.

“It is at the bedside of a sick child that the artist sips his nectar,” Jerome tells Gabrielle. In other words, all that she had believed about her husband, about writers, and about literature turns out be mere delusions. Moreover, Gabrielle’s love had become a stifling burden for Jerome.

True love can never stifle the loved. Love enables growth of the loved. Anything that stifles is not love but some delusion that refuses to see beyond the mask even if the wearer peels of his mask and reveals the ugly reality beneath. Towards the end of the story, Jerome tells the narrator: “I admit without shame. There must be someone on earth who knows pretty well what I am and who loves me notwithstanding. There must be someone who accepts all the known and unknown of me.”

The greatest irony in the story may be when the narrator tells Jerome that Gabrielle is the only one who possesses that acceptance. Such is love. A huge paradox. Unless we can rise to divinity and be as omniscient as humanly possible.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon

Previous Posts in this series:

1. Heights of Evil

2. Pip Learns the Essential Lessons