SANGUINE TEMPERAMENT IN A FEMALE
The sanguine female is the most bearable of women, at least when not stupid.
CHOLERIC TEMPERAMENT IN A MALE
The choleric male is bilious with a yellow-gray face. The nose is crooked, and the eyes go around in their sockets like hungry wolves in a narrow cage. He is easily annoyed. A fleabite or a pinprick makes him want to tear the whole world to bits. When he talks he splutters and bares his teeth, which are either stained brown or are very white. He is firmly convinced that in the winter it is “damned cold” and in the summer it is “damned hot.” He fires his cook on a weekly basis. He feels miserable at dinner because everything is overdone, oversalted, and so forth. Most men of a choleric temperament are bachelors, but if they are married, they keep their wives under lock and key. He is dreadfully jealous. He does not understand jokes. He detests everything. He reads newspapers only so he can heap abuse on the newspapermen. He swears that all newspapers lie (something he’s believed since he was a fetus). Impossible as a husband and friend; unbearable to employ; unthinkable and altogether undesirable as a boss. All too often, unfortunately, a choleric is a teacher, teaching arithmetic or Greek. I do not recommend that you sleep in the same room with him: He coughs all night, spits, and loudly curses fleas. If the howling of cats disturbs him or a rooster crows during the night, he coughs and in a tremulous voice orders a servant to climb on the roof and strangle the creature, come hell or high water. He will die of consumption or of liver disease.
CHOLERIC TEMPERAMENT IN A FEMALE
The choleric female is a devil in a skirt, a crocodile.
PHLEGMATIC TEMPERAMENT IN A MALE
The phlegmatic male is a likable man (I am talking about a Russian rather than an English phlegmatic, of course). In physical appearance he is ordinary and rough-hewn. He is always serious because he is too lazy to laugh. He eats whatever, whenever. He doesn’t drink because he’s afraid of dropping dead from a stroke. He sleeps twenty out of the twenty-four hours. He is indispensable as a participant in committees, sessions, and urgent meetings, where he understands nothing, dozes off without feeling the least bit guilty, and waits patiently for it all to come to an end. Helped by his aunts and uncle, he gets married at thirty—making the most obliging of husbands: easygoing, agreeable to everything, uncomplaining. He calls his wife “sweetheart.” He enjoys suckling pig with horseradish sauce, church choirs, all things sour, and a nip in the air. The phrase “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas”* (which he translates as “Nonsense, more nonsense, it’s all nonsense anyway”) must have been invented by a phlegmatic. Only when selected for jury duty does he fall sick. On glimpsing a fat peasant woman he wriggles his fingers and ventures a smile. He subscribes to Niva magazine* and it bothers him that the pictures aren’t in color and that the stories aren’t funny. Writers, in his opinion, are as smart as they are pernicious. He thinks it’s a pity that children aren’t beaten in school, and doesn’t mind administering a good beating himself. He is successful at work. In an orchestra, he plays the double bass, the bassoon, or the trombone. In a theater, he is the cashier, an usher, a prompter, or, sometimes, pour manger,* an actor. He dies of a stroke or of edema.
PHLEGMATIC TEMPERAMENT IN A FEMALE
The phlegmatic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.
MELANCHOLIC TEMPERAMENT IN A MALE
The male melancholic’s eyes are gray-blue in color and ever ready to shed a tear. Tiny wrinkles crease his forehead and the sides of his nose. His mouth is a bit crooked. His teeth are black. He is prone to hypochondria. He’s always complaining about stomachaches, that stabbing feeling in his side, and poor digestion. He loves to stand before a mirror and examine his flaccid tongue. His chest is weak, he’s sure, and he’s much too high-strung, so he drinks decoctum instead of tea, and aqua vitae instead of vodka. In a voice charged with tears and regret, he informs his relatives that valerian and bay rum drops no longer do him any good. He says it’s advisable to administer a laxative once a week. Long ago, he decided that doctors just don’t understand him. Faith healers, wisewomen, whisperers, drunken medical assistants, and sometimes midwives are his greatest benefactors. He puts on his fur coat in September and takes it off in May. He suspects every dog of having rabies, and after a friend told him that a cat can smother a sleeping man, he regards cats as sworn enemies to mankind. He worked out his last will and testament ages ago. He swears by all that’s sacred that he doesn’t drink but sometimes he does drink warm beer. He marries an orphan. His mother-in-law—if he has one—is the most wonderful and wisest woman. He hears her out in silence, his head tilted to the side, and he takes it as his holy duty to kiss her pudgy, sweaty hands that smell of pickle brine. He maintains a busy correspondence with uncles, aunts, his godmother, and childhood friends. He doesn’t read newspapers. On the sly, he reads Debay and Jozin.* When the plague broke out in Vetlianka,† he fasted and took communion five times. He suffers from watery eyes and nightmares. He is not particularly successful at work and will never be promoted above chief clerk. He loves the song “Luchinushka.”‡ In an orchestra he plays the flute or the cello. He groans and moans day and night, which is why sharing a room with him is not recommended. He anticipates floods, earthquakes, wars, the final collapse of morality, and his own death from a horrible disease. He dies of heart disease, of faith-healers’ remedies, and often of nothing but hypochondria.
MELANCHOLIC TEMPERAMENT IN A FEMALE
An absolutely impossible, restless creature. As a wife, she stupefies her husband until he falls into a state of despondency and commits suicide. The only good thing about her is that she is easy to get rid of: give her some money and send her on a pilgrimage.
* Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland (1762–1836) was a German biologist-physician whose most famous treatise, Macrobiotics, or the Art of Prolonging Human Life (1796), was translated into many languages.
† Babe (French); rascal (German).
‡ Paraphrase of a line from Jacques Offenbach’s opéra bouffe La belle Hélène (1864).
§ Like is cured by like (Latin) (i.e., more alcohol to “cure” a hangover).
* “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Latin).
* Niva (The Grain Field) was a weekly magazine of literature, politics, and modern life, one of the most popular weeklies in nineteenth-century Russia.
† In order to eat (French).
* Auguste Debay (1802–1890) and Antoine Émile Jozan (1817–1892) were writers of popular books on the subjects of the physiology of marriage, diseases of the “generative organs,” etc.
† An outbreak of the plague in the Vetlianka Cossack village occurred in 1878.
‡ A sad Russian folk song.
FLYING ISLANDS BY JULES VERNE