Flora Tristan by Sandra Dijkstra;

Author:Sandra Dijkstra;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

His description of his fear of this kind of love is equally powerful:

The one (of those passions) he feared most was love; he knew that once man falls prey to this passion he cannot control himself; that unwittingly he is ruled by the will of another, that he loses his personality which becomes absorbed in that of the loved one. Therefore he considered it a sign of weakness and pusillanimity to give way to feelings of the heart. (Méphis II, pp. 28–9)

Even though Méphis glimpses the destructive power of such an all-encompassing love, and even though this kind of love runs counter to all his principles, he finally succumbs to it, and before long woman has her revenge. Méphis’ resistance is futile: ‘He obeys as the slave obeys his master.’ (Méphis II, p. 31) Thus he forfeits his priorities: of accomplishing his worldly projects, of considering the happiness of the masses before that of the individual, of transforming Maréquita into the strong person with whose help he can change the world. Because his position represents the one that Tristan admired most and tried to live by, the process of his relinquishing it constitutes a strong condemnation of the woman who leads him to it, as well as an indictment of his weakness in succumbing to it.

The similarity of Tristan’s own predicament to that of both Méphis and Maréquita can be seen from her description of her own struggle against herself. In a letter to her friend Traviès, Tristan confessed the effort it had been to act on the strength of her beliefs:

Ganneau. I have already told you that I loved the soul of that man in a very special way. My soul has never felt in any other soul the sweet comfort that his has given me … However, true to my opinion, that one must mercilessly cut the individual to pieces, on the eve of my departure I offended Ganneau most cruelly! One day I shall tell you the inner tears I shed at seeing the perspiration dripping from his brow. But by the living God! I shall not be accused now of succumbing to the general faint-heartedness. I wanted to crush G. in order to make sure that I was strong – alas, I am not as strong as I thought… My heart does not prove as equal to the task as my brain! 64

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