The cure of jealousy: avoiding occasions for it, keeping occupied; good counsel; disregarding it, not watching women or locking them up; concealing it, and so on.

As with every other form of melancholy, some doubt whether this illness can be cured. They think it is like gout, or those hired Swiss soldiers whom we commonly call Walloons: once they take possession of a castle, they can never be driven out.

He who fears she may not be his, lest someone take her from him, Will scarcely be cured even by Machaon’s aid.

This is the cruel wound whose pain No potent liquid or plaster can relieve, No knowledge of the stars, no depth of magic Devised by that great scholar Zoroaster: A wound that so infects the soul and heart That it overpowers all our sense and reason; A wound whose pang and torment last so long That it may rightly be called incurable.

Yet I will say again what I have said before about other melancholy: it may be cured, or at least lessened, by some opposing passion, good counsel and persuasion, if it is resisted at the outset, opposed in good time, “and, as the ancients maintain, its nails are trimmed before they grow too long.”

There is no better way to resist or repel it than to avoid idleness, remaining earnestly occupied with important matters, to drive those empty fears, foolish fancies and troublesome suspicions out of his head; and then to let his sensible friends persuade him to listen to their good counsel and advice,

and to consider wisely how greatly he discredits himself and his friends, dishonours his children, disgraces his family and makes his shame public. Like a trumpeter of his own misery, he broadcasts it, wears himself down, and grieves himself and others. Let him consider what evidence of weakness it is; how absurd in its own nature, how ridiculous and brutish a passion, how foolish and hateful. For, as Jerome aptly says, “He makes himself hated, and finally becomes hateful to himself”: others hate him, and at last he hates himself for it. What a reckless illness, mad and furious! If only he will hear them speak, he may undoubtedly be cured.

Joan, queen of Spain, whom I mentioned before, was sent under the pretext of a change of air to Complutum, or Alcalá de Henares, where Ximenius, archbishop of Toledo, then lived, so that his good counsel might relieve her—as it did for the time being. “For an illness of the soul, if concealed, tortures and overturns it, and no medicine can remove it more quickly than a sensible person’s consoling words.”

I will not insert consoling sayings here for this purpose, or anticipate anyone’s invention, but leave each person to expand on the matter as their own judgment thinks fit. Let him consult Sirach 9:1, “Do not be jealous of the wife of your bosom”; read Ximenius’s consoling and forceful speech on this subject in the author himself, as Gomesius records it; consult Chaloner’s On the English Commonwealth, book 9, or Cælia’s Epistles, and so on.

I will add only this: if whatever causes this jealous passion is rightly considered, whether it is justified or unjustified, well founded or groundless, true or false, it ought not to be taken so grievously. It is not so substantial or momentous a matter that it should inflict so deep a wound. It is a blow that does not hurt, a pain not physically felt, often founded on false suspicion alone and then nourished by a hostile interpretation.

If she is not unfaithful, he torments and wears himself down without cause. Or suppose the worst: he is a cuckold. It cannot be helped, and the more he stirs the matter up, the more he increases his own misery. How much better, in such a case, to conceal or disregard it! Why fear what cannot be remedied? “Many women have finally put it aside,” says Vives, “when they see that their husbands cannot be changed”: many women have grown calm when they see there is no remedy. And are men to be more jealous than women? In such a case there is some comfort in having companions,

It comforts the wretched to have companions in sorrow.

Who can say he is exempt? Who can assure himself he has not been one in the past, or protect himself for the future? If his case were unique, it would be hard; but since it is almost a universal misfortune, he should not take it so grievously. If a man has a lock that everyone else’s key will open as well as his own, why should he expect to reserve it for himself?

In some countries they think nothing of it. “Not even the nobles,” says Leo Africanus: in many parts of Africa no nobleman marries a virgin, if she is over fourteen, or has a chaste wife. It is so common that, just as the moon shows its horns to the world once a month, they give horns to their husbands at least as often.

And it is largely true, what that Caledonian lady, the wife of Argetocoxus, a British prince, told Julia Augusta when she rebuked her for unchastity: “We Britons at least misbehave with a few select men of the better sort; but you Roman women sleep with every low scoundrel. You are a company of common whores.”

In his time the emperor Severus made laws to restrain this vice; and, as Dio of Nicaea relates in his life, “three thousand adulterers”—three thousand makers of cuckolds, or “counterfeiters of nature’s coin,” as Philo calls them, false coiners and clippers of nature’s money—were summoned before the court at once. And yet,

The miller does not see all the water that flows by,

the miller does not see all the water that passes his mill. No doubt, as in our own days, these were ordinary people; the great were not all so much as called to account for it. Martial’s epigram, I suppose, might have been generally applied in those licentious times: “You alone possess everything,” and so on—your goods, lands, money and wits are your own—“but, Candidus, you share your wife with the public”: but, neighbour Candidus, your wife is common property.