← catalogue

The Physiology of Marriage, Complete

by Honoré de Balzac · English · Gutenberg #16205 · 670,643 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Physiology of Marriage, Complete
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Physiology of Marriage, Complete

Author: Honoré de Balzac


        
Release date: July 4, 2005 [eBook #16205]
                Most recently updated: November 22, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16205

Credits: Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE, COMPLETE ***




Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny





THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE;

OR, THE MUSINGS OF AN ECLECTIC PHILOSOPHER

ON THE HAPPINESS AND UNHAPPINESS OF MARRIED LIFE


By Honore De Balzac





INTRODUCTION

“Marriage is not an institution of nature. The family in the east is
entirely different from the family in the west. Man is the servant of
nature, and the institutions of society are grafts, not spontaneous
growths of nature. Laws are made to suit manners, and manners vary.

“Marriage must therefore undergo the gradual development towards
perfection to which all human affairs submit.”

These words, pronounced in the presence of the Conseil d’Etat by
Napoleon during the discussion of the civil code, produced a profound
impression upon the author of this book; and perhaps unconsciously
he received the suggestion of this work, which he now presents to the
public. And indeed at the period during which, while still in his youth,
he studied French law, the word ADULTERY made a singular impression upon
him. Taking, as it did, a prominent place in the code, this word
never occurred to his mind without conjuring up its mournful train of
consequences. Tears, shame, hatred, terror, secret crime, bloody wars,
families without a head, and social misery rose like a sudden line of
phantoms before him when he read the solemn word ADULTERY! Later on,
when he became acquainted with the most cultivated circles of society,
the author perceived that the rigor of marriage laws was very generally
modified by adultery. He found that the number of unhappy homes was
larger than that of happy marriages. In fact, he was the first to notice
that of all human sciences that which relates to marriage was the least
progressive. But this was the observation of a young man; and with him,
as with so many others, this thought, like a pebble flung into the
bosom of a lake, was lost in the abyss of his tumultuous thoughts.
Nevertheless, in spite of himself the author was compelled to
investigate, and eventually there was gathered within his mind, little
by little, a swarm of conclusions, more or less just, on the subject of
married life. Works like the present one are formed in the mind of the
author with as much mystery as that with which truffles grow on the
scented plains of Perigord. Out of the primitive and holy horror which
adultery caused him and the investigation which he had thoughtlessly
made, there was born one morning a trifling thought in which his ideas
were formulated. This thought was really a satire upon marriage. It was
as follows: A husband and wife found themselves in love with each other
for the first time after twenty-seven years of marriage.

He amused himself with this little axiom and passed a whole week in
delight, grouping around this harmless epigram the crowd of ideas which
came to him unconsciously and which he was astonished to find that he
possessed. His humorous mood yielded at last to the claims of serious
investigation. Willing as he was to take a hint, the author returned to
his habitual idleness. Nevertheless, this slight germ of science and
of joke grew to perfection, unfostered, in the fields of thought. Each
phase of the work which had been condemned by others took root and
gathered strength, surviving like the slight branch of a tree which,
flung upon the sand by a winter’s storm, finds itself covered at morning
with white and fantastic icicles, produced by the caprices of nightly
frosts. So the sketch lived on and became the starting point of myriad
branching moralizations. It was like a polypus which multiplies itself
by generation. The feelings of youth, the observations which a favorable
opportunity led him to make, were verified in the most trifling events
of his after life. Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life,
seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst
of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its
wild creations. Amid all the distractions of the world and of life, the
author always heard a voice ringing in his ears and mockingly revealing
the secrets of things at the very moment he was watching a woman as she
danced, smiled, or talked. Just as Mephistopheles pointed out to Faust
in that terrific assemblage at the Brocken, faces full of frightful
augury, so the author was conscious in the midst of the ball of a demon
who would strike him on the shoulder with a familiar air and say to him:
“Do you notice that enchanting smile? It is a grin of hatred.” And then
the demon would strut about like one of the captains in the old comedies
of Hardy. He would twitch the folds of a lace mantle and endeavor to
make new the fretted tinsel and spangles of its former glory. And then
like Rabelais he would burst into loud and unrestrainable laughter, and
would trace on the street-wall a word which might serve as a pendant
to the “Drink!” which was the only oracle obtainable from the heavenly
bottle. This literary Trilby would often appear seated on piles of
books, and with hooked fingers would point out with a grin of malice
two yellow volumes whose title dazzled the eyes. Then when he saw he had
attracted the author’s attention he spelt out, in a voice alluring as
the tones of an harmonica, _Physiology of Marriage_! But, almost always
he appeared at night during my dreams, gentle as some fairy guardian;
he tried by words of sweetness to subdue the soul which he would
appropriate to himself. While he attracted, he also scoffed at me;
supple as a woman’s mind, cruel as a tiger, his friendliness was more
formidable than his hatred, for he never yielded a caress without also
inflicting a wound. One night in particular he exhausted the resources
of his sorceries, and crowned all by a last effort. He came, he sat on
the edge of the bed like a young maiden full of love, who at first keeps
silence but whose eyes sparkle, until at last her secret escapes her.

“This,” said he, “is a prospectus of a new life-buoy, by means of which
one can pass over the Seine dry-footed. This other pamphlet is the
report of the Institute on a garment by wearing which we can pass
through flames without being burnt. Have you no scheme which can
preserve marriage from the miseries of excessive cold and excessive
heat? Listen to me! Here we have a book on the _Art_ of preserving
foods; on the _Art_ of curing smoky chimneys; on the _Art_ of making
good mortar; on the _Art_ of tying a cravat; on the _Art_ of carving
meat.”

In a moment he had named such a prodigious number of books that the
author felt his head go round.

“These myriads of books,” says he, “have been devoured by readers; and
while everybody does not build a house, and some grow hungry, and others
have no cravat, or no fire to warm themselves at, yet everybody to some
degree is married. But come look yonder.”

He waved his hand, and appeared to bring before me a distant ocean where
all the books of the world were tossing up and down like agitated waves.
The octodecimos bounded over the surface of the water. The octavos as
they were flung on their way uttered a solemn sound, sank to the bottom,
and only rose up again with great difficulty, hindered as they were by
duodecimos and works of smaller bulk which floated on the top and melted
into light foam. The furious billows were crowded with journalists,
proof-readers, paper-makers, apprentices, printers’ agents, whose hands
alone were seen mingled in the confusion among the books. Millions of
voices rang in the air, like those of schoolboys bathing. Certain men
were seen moving hither and thither in canoes, engaged in fishing out
the books, and landing them on the shore in the presence of a tall man,
of a disdainful air, dressed in black, and of a cold, unsympathetic
expression. The whole scene represented the libraries and the public.
The demon pointed out with his finger a skiff freshly decked out with
all sails set and instead of a flag bearing a placard. Then with a peal
of sardonic laughter, he read with a thundering voice: _Physiology of
Marriage_.

The author fell in love, the devil left him in peace, for he would have
undertaken more than he could handle if he had entered an apartment
occupied by a woman. Several years passed without bringing other
torments than those of love, and the author was inclined to believe that
he had been healed of one infirmity by means of another which took its
place. But one evening he found himself in a Parisian drawing-room where
one of the men among the circle who stood round the fireplace began the
conversation by relating in a sepulchral voice the following anecdote:


A peculiar thing took place at Ghent while I was staying there. A lady
ten years a widow lay on her bed attacked by mortal sickness. The three
heirs of collateral lineage were waiting for her last sigh. They did
not leave her side for fear that she would make a will in favor of the
convent of Beguins belonging to the town. The sick woman kept silent,
she seemed dozing and death appeared to overspread very gradually her
mute and livid face. Can’t you imagine those three relations seated in
silence through that winter midnight beside her bed? An old nurse is
with them and she shakes her head, and the doctor sees with anxiety that
the sickness has reached its last stage, and holds his hat in one hand
and with the other makes a sign to the relations, as if to say to them:
“I have no more visits to make here.” Amid the solemn silence of the
room is heard the dull rustling of a snow-storm which beats upon the
shutters. For fear that the eyes of the dying woman might be dazzled by
the light, the youngest of the heirs had fitted a shade to the candle
which stood near that bed so that the circle of light scarcely reached
the pillow of the deathbed, from which the sallow countenance of the
sick woman stood out like a figure of Christ imperfectly gilded and
fixed upon a cross of tarnished silver. The flickering rays shed by the
blue flames of a crackling fire were therefore the sole light of this
sombre chamber, where the denouement of a drama was just ending. A
log suddenly rolled from the fire onto the floor, as if presaging some
catastrophe. At the sound of it the sick woman quickly rose to a sitting
posture. She opened two eyes, clear as those of a cat, and all present
eyed her in astonishment. She saw the log advance, and before any one
could check an unexpected movement which seemed prompted by a kind of
delirium, she bounded from her bed, seized the tongs and threw the coal
back into the fireplace. The nurse, the doctor, the relations rushed to
her assistance; they took the dying woman in their arms. They put her
back in bed; she laid her head upon her pillow and after a few minutes
died, keeping her eyes fixed even after her death upon that plank in the
floor which the burning brand had touched. Scarcely had the Countess Van
Ostroem expired when the three co-heirs exchanged looks of suspicion,
and thinking no more about their aunt, began to examine the mysterious
floor. As they were Belgians their calculations were as rapid as their
glances. An agreement was made by three words uttered in a low voice
that none of them should leave the chamber. A servant was sent to fetch
a carpenter. Their collateral hearts beat excitedly as they gathered
round the treasured flooring, and watched their young apprentice giving
the first blow with his chisel. The plank was cut through.

“My aunt made a sign,” said the youngest of the heirs.

“No; it was merely the quivering light that made it appear so,” replied
the eldest, who kept one eye on the treasure and the other on the
corpse.

The afflicted relations discovered exactly on the spot where the brand
had fallen a certain object artistically enveloped in a mass of plaster.

“Proceed,” said the eldest of the heirs.

The chisel of the apprentice then brought to light a human head and some
odds and ends of clothing, from which they recognized the count whom all
the town believed to have died at Java, and whose loss had been bitterly
deplored by his wife.


The narrator of this old story was a tall spare man, with light eyes and
brown hair, and the author thought he saw in him a vague resemblance to
the demon who had before this tormented him; but the stranger did not
show the cloven foot. Suddenly the word ADULTERY sounded in the ears of
the author; and this word woke up in his imagination the most mournful
countenances of that procession which before this had streamed by on the
utterance of the magic syllables. From that evening he was haunted and
persecuted by dreams of a work which did not yet exist; and at no period
of his life was the author assailed with such delusive notions about the
fatal subject of this book. But he bravely resisted the fiend, although
the latter referred the most unimportant incidents of life to this
unknown work, and like a customhouse officer set his stamp of mockery
upon every occurrence.

Some days afterwards the author found himself in the company of two
ladies. The first of them had been one of the most refined and the most
intellectual women of Napoleon’s court. In his day she occupied a
lofty position, but the sudden appearance of the Restoration caused her
downfall; she became a recluse. The second, who was young and beautiful,
was at that time living at Paris the life of a fashionable woman. They
were friends, because, the one being forty and the other twenty-two
years old, they were seldom rivals on the same field. The author was
considered quite insignificant by the first of the two ladies, and since
the other soon discovered this, they carried on in his presence the
conversation which they had begun in a frank discussion of a woman’s
lot.

“Have you noticed, dear, that women in general bestow their love only
upon a fool?”

“What do you mean by that, duchess? And how can you make your remark fit
in with the fact that they have an aversion for their husbands?”

“These women are absolute tyrants!” said the author to himself. “Has the
devil again turned up in a mob cap?”

“No, dear, I am not joking,” replied the duchess, “and I shudder with
fear for myself when I coolly consider people whom I have known in other
times. Wit always has a sparkle which wounds us, and the man who has
much of it makes us fear him perhaps, and if he is a proud man he will
be capable of jealousy, and is not therefore to our taste. In fact, we
prefer to raise a man to our own height rather than to have to climb
up to his. Talent has great successes for us to share in, but the fool
affords enjoyment to us; and we would sooner hear said ‘that is a very
handsome man’ than to see our lover elected to the Institute.”

“That’s enough, duchess! You have absolutely startled me.”

And the young coquette began to describe the lovers about whom all the
women of her acquaintance raved; there was not a single man of intellect
among them.

“But I swear by my virtue,” she said, “their husbands are worth more.”

“But these are the sort of people they choose for husbands,” the duchess
answered gravely.

“Tell me,” asked the author, “is the disaster which threatens the
husband in France quite inevitable?”

“It is,” replied the duchess, with a smile; “and the rage which
certain women breathe out against those of their sex, whose unfortunate
happiness it is to entertain a passion, proves what a burden to them is
their chastity. If it were not for fear of the devil, one would be Lais;
another owes her virtue to the dryness of her selfish heart; a third to
the silly behaviour of her first lover; another still--”

The author checked this outpour of revelation by confiding to the two
ladies his design for the work with which he had been haunted; they
smiled and promised him their assistance. The youngest, with an air of
gaiety suggested one of the first chapters of the undertaking, by saying
that she would take upon herself to prove mathematically that women who
are entirely virtuous were creatures of reason.

When the author got home he said at once to his demon:

“Come! I am ready; let us sign the compact.”

But the demon never returned.

If the author has written here the biography of his book he has not
acted on the prompting of fatuity. He relates facts which may furnish
material for the history of human thought, and will without doubt
explain the work itself. It may perhaps be important to certain
anatomists of thought to be told that the soul is feminine. Thus
although the author made a resolution not to think about the book which
he was forced to write, the book, nevertheless, was completed. One
page of it was found on the bed of a sick man, another on the sofa of a
boudoir. The glances of women when they turned in the mazes of a waltz
flung to him some thoughts; a gesture or a word filled his disdainful
brain with others. On the day when he said to himself, “This work, which
haunts me, shall be achieved,” everything vanished; and like the three
Belgians, he drew forth a skeleton from the place over which he had bent
to seize a treasure.

A mild, pale countenance took the place of the demon who had tempted
me; it wore an engaging expression of kindliness; there were no sharp
pointed arrows of criticism in its lineaments. It seemed to deal more
with words than with ideas, and shrank from noise and clamor. It was
perhaps the household genius of the honorable deputies who sit in the
centre of the Chamber.

“Wouldn’t it be better,” it said, “to let things be as they are? Are
things so bad? We ought to believe in marriage as we believe in the
immortality of the soul; and you are certainly not making a book to
advertise the happiness of marriage. You will surely conclude that among
a million of Parisian homes happiness is the exception. You will find
perhaps that there are many husbands disposed to abandon their wives to
you; but there is not a single son who will abandon his mother. Certain
people who are hit by the views which you put forth will suspect your
morals and will misrepresent your intentions. In a word, in order
to handle social sores, one ought to be a king, or a first consul at
least.”

Reason, although it appeared under a form most pleasing to the author,
was not listened to; for in the distance Folly tossed the coxcomb of
Panurge, and the author wished to seize it; but, when he tried to catch
it, he found that it was as heavy as the club of Hercules. Moreover, the
cure of Meudon adorned it in such fashion that a young man who was less
pleased with producing a good work than with wearing fine gloves could
not even touch it.

“Is our work completed?” asked the younger of the two feminine
assistants of the author.

“Alas! madame,” I said, “will you ever requite me for all the hatreds
which that work will array against me?”

She waved her hand, and then the author replied to her doubt by a look
of indifference.

“What do you mean? Would you hesitate? You must publish it without fear.
In the present day we accept a book more because it is in fashion than
because it has anything in it.”

Although the author does not here represent himself as anything more
than the secretary of two ladies, he has in compiling their observations
accomplished a double task. With regard to marriage he has here arranged
matters which represent what everybody thinks but no one dares to say;
but has he not also exposed himself to public displeasure by expressing
the mind of the public? Perhaps, however, the eclecticism of the present
essay will save it from condemnation. All the while that he indulges in
banter the author has attempted to popularize certain ideas which are
particularly consoling. He has almost always endeavored to lay bare the
hidden springs which move the human soul. While undertaking to defend
the most material interests of man, judging them or condemning them, he
will perhaps bring to light many sources of intellectual delight. But
the author does not foolishly claim always to put forth his pleasantries
in the best of taste; he has merely counted upon the diversity of
intellectual pursuits in expectation of receiving as much blame
as approbation. The subject of his work was so serious that he is
constantly launched into anecdote; because at the present day anecdotes
are the vehicle of all moral teaching, and the anti-narcotic of every
work of literature. In literature, analysis and investigation prevail,
and the wearying of the reader increases in proportion with the egotism
of the writer. This is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall
a book, and the present author has been quite aware of it. He has
therefore so arranged the topics of this long essay as to afford resting
places for the reader. This method has been successfully adopted by a
writer, who produced on the subject of Taste a work somewhat parallel to
that which is here put forth on the subject of Marriage. From the former
the present writer may be permitted to borrow a few words in order
to express a thought which he shares with the author of them. This
quotation will serve as an expression of homage to his predecessor,
whose success has been so swiftly followed by his death:

“When I write and speak of myself in the singular, this implies a
confidential talk with the reader; he can examine the statement,
discuss it, doubt and even ridicule it; but when I arm myself with
the formidable WE, I become the professor and demand
submission.”--Brillat-Savarin, Preface to the _Physiology of Taste_.

DECEMBER 5, 1829.




FIRST PART. A GENERAL CONSIDERATION.


We will declaim against stupid laws until they are changed, and in the
meantime blindly submit to them.--Diderot, _Supplement to the Voyage of
Bougainville_.




MEDITATION I. THE SUBJECT.

Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?

Is not your object to prove that marriage unites for life two beings who
do not know each other?

That life consists in passion, and that no passion survives marriage?

That marriage is an institution necessary for the preservation of
society, but that it is contrary to the laws of nature?

That divorce, this admirable release from the misfortunes of marriage,
should with one voice be reinstated?

That, in spite of all its inconveniences, marriage is the foundation on
which property is based?

That it furnishes invaluable pledges for the security of government?

That there is something touching in the association of two human beings
for the purpose of supporting the pains of life?

That there is something ridiculous in the wish that one and the same
thoughts should control two wills?

That the wife is treated as a slave?

That there has never been a marriage entirely happy?

That marriage is filled with crimes and that the known murders are not
the worst?

That fidelity is impossible, at least to the man?

That an investigation if it could be undertaken would prove that in the
transmission of patrimonial property there was more risk than security?

That adultery does more harm than marriage does good?

That infidelity in a woman may be traced back to the earliest ages
of society, and that marriage still survives this perpetuation of
treachery?

That the laws of love so strongly link together two human beings that no
human law can put them asunder?

That while there are marriages recorded on the public registers, there
are others over which nature herself has presided, and they have
been dictated either by the mutual memory of thought, or by an utter
difference of mental disposition, or by corporeal affinity in the
parties named; that it is thus that heaven and earth are constantly at
variance?

That there are many husbands fine in figure and of superior intellect
whose wives have lovers exceedingly ugly, insignificant in appearance or
stupid in mind?

All these questions furnish material for books; but the books have been
written and the questions are constantly reappearing.

Physiology, what must I take you to mean?

Do you reveal new principles? Would you pretend that it is the right
thing that woman should be made common? Lycurgus and certain Greek
peoples as well as Tartars and savages have tried this.

Can it possibly be right to confine women? The Ottomans once did so, and
nowadays they give them their liberty.

Would it be right to marry young women without providing a dowry and
yet exclude them from the right of succeeding to property? Some English
authors and some moralists have proved that this with the admission of
divorce is the surest method of rendering marriage happy.

Should there be a little Hagar in each marriage establishment? There is
no need to pass a law for that. The provision of the code which makes
an unfaithful wife liable to a penalty in whatever place the crime
be committed, and that other article which does not punish the
erring husband unless his concubine dwells beneath the conjugal roof,
implicitly admits the existence of mistresses in the city.

Sanchez has written a dissertation on the penal cases incident to
marriage; he has even argued on the illegitimacy and the opportuneness
of each form of indulgence; he has outlined all the duties, moral,
religious and corporeal, of the married couple; in short his work would
form twelve volumes in octavo if the huge folio entitled _De Matrimonio_
were thus represented.

Clouds of lawyers have flung clouds of treatises over the legal
difficulties which are born of marriage. There exist several works on
the judicial investigation of impotency.

Legions of doctors have marshaled their legions of books on the subject
of marriage in its relation to medicine and surgery.

In the nineteenth century the _Physiology of Marriage_ is either an
insignificant compilation or the work of a fool written for other fools;
old priests have taken their balances of gold and have weighed the most
trifling scruples of the marriage consciences; old lawyers have put on
their spectacles and have distinguished between every kind of married
transgression; old doctors have seized the scalpel and drawn it over all
the wounds of the subject; old judges have mounted to the bench and have
decided all the cases of marriage dissolution; whole generations have
passed unuttered cries of joy or of grief on the subject, each age has
cast its vote into the urn; the Holy Spirit, poets and writers have
recounted everything from the days of Eve to the Trojan war, from Helen
to Madame de Maintenon, from the mistress of Louis XIV to the woman of
their own day.

Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?

Shall I say that you intend to publish pictures more or less skillfully
drawn, for the purpose of convincing us that a man marries:

From ambition--that is well known;

From kindness, in order to deliver a girl from the tyranny of her
mother;

From rage, in order to disinherit his relations;

From scorn of a faithless mistress;

From weariness of a pleasant bachelor life;

From folly, for each man always commits one;

In consequence of a wager, which was the case with Lord Byron;

From interest, which is almost always the case;

From youthfulness on leaving college, like a blockhead;

From ugliness,--fear of some day failing to secure a wife;

Through Machiavelism, in order to be the heir of some old woman at an
early date;

From necessity, in order to secure the standing to _our_ son;

From obligation, the damsel having shown herself weak;

From passion, in order to become more surely cured of it;

On account of a quarrel, in order to put an end to a lawsuit;

From gratitude, by which he gives more than he has received;

From goodness, which is the fate of doctrinaires;

From the condition of a will when a dead uncle attaches his legacy to
some girl, marriage with whom is the condition of succession;

From custom, in imitation of his ancestors;

From old age, in order to make an end of life;

From _yatidi_, that is the hour of going to bed and signifies amongst
the Turks all bodily needs;

From religious zeal, like the Duke of Saint-Aignan, who did not wish to
commit sin?[*]

  [*] The foregoing queries came in (untranslatable) alphabetic order in
    the original.--Editor

But these incidents of marriage have furnished matter for thirty
thousand comedies and a hundred thousand romances.

Physiology, for the third and last time I ask you--What is your meaning?

So far everything is commonplace as the pavement of the street, familiar
as a crossway. Marriage is better known than the Barabbas of the
Passion. All the ancient ideas which it calls to light permeate
literature since the world is the world, and there is not a single
opinion which might serve to the advantage of the world, nor a
ridiculous project which could not find an author to write it up, a
printer to print it, a bookseller to sell it and a reader to read it.

Allow me to say to you like Rabelais, who is in every sense our master:

“Gentlemen, God save and guard you! Where are you? I cannot see you;
wait until I put on my spectacles. Ah! I see you now; you, your wives,
your children. Are you in good health? I am glad to hear it.”

But it is not for you that I am writing. Since you have grown-up
children that ends the matter.

Ah! it is you, illustrious tipplers, pampered and gouty, and you,
tireless pie-cutters, favorites who come dear; day-long pantagruellists
who keep your private birds, gay and gallant, and who go to tierce,
to sexts, to nones, and also to vespers and compline and never tire of
going.

It is not for you that the _Physiology of Marriage_ is addressed, for
you are not married and may you never be married. You herd of bigots,
snails, hypocrites, dotards, lechers, booted for pilgrimage to Rome,
disguised and marked, as it were, to deceive the world. Go back, you
scoundrels, out of my sight! Gallows birds are ye all--now in the
devil’s name will you not begone? There are none left now but the good
souls who love to laugh; not the snivelers who burst into tears in prose
or verse, whatever their subject be, who make people sick with their
odes, their sonnets, their meditation; none of these dreamers, but
certain old-fashioned pantagruellists who don’t think twice about it
when they are invited to join a banquet or provoked to make a repartee,
who can take pleasure in a book like _Pease and the Lard_ with
commentary of Rabelais, or in the one entitled _The Dignity of
Breeches_, and who esteem highly the fair books of high degree, a quarry
hard to run down and redoubtable to wrestle with.

It no longer does to laugh at a government, my friend, since it has
invented means to raise fifteen hundred millions by taxation. High
ecclesiastics, monks and nuns are no longer so rich that we can drink
with them; but let St. Michael come, he who chased the devil from
heaven, and we shall perhaps see the good time come back again! There is
only one thing in France at the present moment which remains a laughing
matter, and that is marriage. Disciples of Panurge, ye are the only
readers I desire. You know how seasonably to take up and lay down a
book, how to get the most pleasure out of it, to understand the hint in
a half word--how to suck nourishment from a marrow-bone.

The men of the microscope who see nothing but a speck, the
census-mongers--have they reviewed the whole matter? Have they
pronounced without appeal that it is as impossible to write a book on
marriage as to make new again a broken pot?

Yes, master fool. If you begin to squeeze the marriage question you
squirt out nothing but fun for the bachelors and weariness for the
married men. It is everlasting morality. A million printed pages would
have no other matter in them.

In spite of this, here is my first proposition: marriage is a fight to
the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven,
because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the
fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in
the hands of the cleverer of the two.

Undoubtedly. But do you see in this a fresh idea?

Well, I address myself to the married men of yesterday and of to-day; to
those who on leaving the Church or the registration office indulge the
hope of keeping their wives for themselves alone; to those whom some
form or other of egotism or some indefinable sentiment induces to say
when they see the marital troubles of another, “This will never happen
to me.”

I address myself to those sailors who after witnessing the foundering
of other ships still put to sea; to those bachelors who after witnessing
the shipwreck of virtue in a marriage of another venture upon wedlock.
And this is my subject, eternally now, yet eternally old!

A young man, or it may be an old one, in love or not in love, has
obtained possession by a contract duly recorded at the registration
office in heaven and on the rolls of the nation, of a young girl with
long hair, with black liquid eyes, with small feet, with dainty tapering
fingers, with red lips, with teeth of ivory, finely formed, trembling
with life, tempting and plump, white as a lily, loaded with the most
charming wealth of beauty. Her drooping eyelashes seem like the points
of the iron crown; her skin, which is as fresh as the calyx of a white
camelia, is streaked with the purple of the red camelia; over her
virginal complexion one seems to see the bloom of young fruit and the
delicate down of a young peach; the azure veins spread a kindling warmth
over this transparent surface; she asks for life and she gives it; she
is all joy and love, all tenderness and candor; she loves her husband,
or at least believes she loves him.

The husband who is in love says in the bottom of his heart: “Those eyes
will see no one but me, that mouth will tremble with love for me alone,
that gentle hand will lavish the caressing treasures of delight on me
alone, that bosom will heave at no voice but mine, that slumbering soul
will awake at my will alone; I only will entangle my fingers in those
shining tresses; I alone will indulge myself in dreamily caressing that
sensitive head. I will make death the guardian of my pillow if only I
may ward off from the nuptial couch the stranger who would violate it;
that throne of love shall swim in the blood of the rash or of my own.
Tranquillity, honor, happiness, the ties of home, the fortune of my
children, all are at stake there; I would defend them as a lioness
defends her cubs. Woe unto him who shall set foot in my lair!”

Well now, courageous athlete, we applaud your intention. Up to the
present moment no geographer has ventured to trace the lines of
longitude and latitude in the ocean of marriage. Old husbands have
been ashamed to point out the sand banks, the reefs, the shallows, the
breakers, the monsoons, the coasts and currents which have wrecked their
ships, for their shipwrecks brought them shame. There was no pilot, no
compass for those pilgrims of marriage. This work is intended to supply
the desideratum.

Without mentioning grocers and drapers, there are so many people
occupied in discovering the secret motives of women, that it is really
a work of charity to classify for them, by chapter and verse, all the
secret situations of marriage; a good table of contents will enable them
to put their finger on each movement of their wives’ heart, as a table
of logarithms tells them the product of a given multiplication.

And now what do you think about that? Is not this a novel undertaking,
and one which no philosopher has as yet approached, I mean this attempt
to show how a woman may be prevented from deceiving her husband? Is
not this the comedy of comedies? Is it not a second _speculum vitae
humanae_. We are not now dealing with the abstract questions which we
have done justice to already in this Meditation. At the present day in
ethics as in exact science, the world asks for facts for the results of
observation. These we shall furnish.

Let us begin then by examining the true condition of things, by
analyzing the forces which exist on either side. Before arming our
imaginary champion let us reckon up the number of his enemies. Let us
count the Cossacks who intend to invade his little domain.

All who wish may embark with us on this voyage, all who can may laugh.
Weigh anchor; hoist sail! You know exactly the point from which you
start. You have this advantage over a great many books that are written.

As for our fancy of laughing while we weep, and of weeping while we
laugh, as the divine Rabelais drank while he ate and ate while he drank;
as for our humor, to put Heraclitus and Democritus on the same page
and to discard style or premeditated phrase--if any of the crew mutiny,
overboard with the doting cranks, the infamous classicists, the dead and
buried romanticists, and steer for the blue water!

Everybody perhaps will jeeringly remark that we are like those who say
with smiling faces, “I am going to tell you a story that will make you
laugh!” But it is the proper thing to joke when speaking of marriage!
In short, can you not understand that we consider marriage as a trifling
ailment to which all of us are subject and upon which this volume is a
monograph?

“But you, your bark or your work starts off like those postilions who
crack their whips because their passengers are English. You will not
have galloped at full speed for half a league before you dismount to
mend a trace or to breathe your horses. What is the good of blowing the
trumpet before victory?”

Ah! my dear pantagruellists, nowadays to claim success is to obtain
it, and since, after all, great works are only due to the expansion of
little ideas, I do not see why I should not pluck the laurels, if only
for the purpose of crowning those dirty bacon faces who join us in
swallowing a dram. One moment, pilot, let us not start without making
one little definition.

Reader, if from time to time you meet in this work the terms virtue or
virtuous, let us understand that virtue means a certain labored facility
by which a wife keeps her heart for her husband; at any rate, that the
word is not used in a general sense, and I leave this distinction to the
natural sagacity of all.




MEDITATION II. MARRIAGE STATISTICS.

The administration has been occupied for nearly twenty years in
reckoning how many acres of woodland, meadow, vineyard and fallow are
comprised in the area of France. It has not stopped there, but has also
tried to learn the number and species of the animals to be found there.
Scientific men have gone still further; they have reckoned up the cords
of wood, the pounds of beef, the apples and eggs consumed in Paris. But
no one has yet undertaken either in the name of marital honor or in the
interest of marriageable people, or for the advantage of morality and
the progress of human institutions, to investigate the number of honest
wives. What! the French government, if inquiry is made of it, is able to
say how many men it has under arms, how many spies, how many employees,
how many scholars; but, when it is asked how many virtuous women, it can
answer nothing! If the King of France took into his head to choose his
august partner from among his subjects, the administration could not
even tell him the number of white lambs from whom he could make his
choice. It would be obliged to resort to some competition which awards
the rose of good conduct, and that would be a laughable event.

Were the ancients then our masters in political institutions as in
morality? History teaches us that Ahasuerus, when he wished to take a
wife from among the damsels of Persia, chose Esther, the most virtuous
and the most beautiful. His ministers therefore must necessarily
have discovered some method of obtaining the cream of the population.
Unfortunately the Bible, which is so clear on all matrimonial questions,
has omitted to give us a rule for matrimonial choice.

Let us try to supply this gap in the work of the administration by
calculating the sum of the female sex in France. Here we call the
attention of all friends to public morality, and we appoint them judges
of our method of procedure. We shall attempt to be particularly liberal
in our estimations, particularly exact in our reasoning, in order that
every one may accept the result of this analysis.

The inhabitants of France are generally reckoned at thirty millions.

Certain naturalists think that the number of women exceeds that of men;
but as many statisticians are of the opposite opinion, we will make the
most probable calculation by allowing fifteen millions for the women.

We will begin by cutting down this sum by nine millions, which stands
for those who seem to have some resemblance to women, but whom we are
compelled to reject upon serious considerations.

Let us explain:

Naturalists consider man to be no more than a unique species of the
order bimana, established by Dumeril in his _Analytic Zoology_, page
16; and Bory de Saint Vincent thinks that the ourang-outang ought to be
included in the same order if we would make the species complete.

If these zoologists see in us nothing more than a mammal with thirty-two
vertebrae possessing the hyoid bone and more folds in the hemispheres
of the brain than any other animal; if in their opinion no other
differences exist in this order than those produced by the influence of
climate, on which are founded the nomenclature of fifteen species whose
scientific names it is needless to cite, the physiologists ought also
to have the right of making species and sub-species in accordance with
definite degrees of intelligence and definite conditions of existence,
oral and pecuniary.

Now the nine millions of human creatures which we here refer to present
at first sight all the attributes of the human race; they have the hyoid
bone, the coracoid process, the acromion, the zygomatic arch. It is
therefore permitted for the gentlemen of the Jardin des Plantes to
classify them with the bimana; but our Physiology will never admit that
women are to be found among them. In our view, and in the view of those
for whom this book is intended, a woman is a rare variety of the human
race, and her principal characteristics are due to the special care men
have bestowed upon its cultivation,--thanks to the power of money and
the moral fervor of civilization! She is generally recognized by the
whiteness, the fineness and softness of her skin. Her taste inclines
to the most spotless cleanliness. Her fingers shrink from encountering
anything but objects which are soft, yielding and scented. Like the
ermine she sometimes dies for grief on seeing her white tunic soiled.
She loves to twine her tresses and to make them exhale the most
attractive scents; to brush her rosy nails, to trim them to an almond
shape, and frequently to bathe her delicate limbs. She is not satisfied
to spend the night excepting on the softest down, and excepting on
hair-cushioned lounges, she loves best to take a horizontal position.
Her voice is of penetrating sweetness; her movements are full of grace.
She speaks with marvelous fluency. She does not apply herself to any
hard work; and, nevertheless, in spite of her apparent weakness, there
are burdens which she can bear and move with miraculous ease. She avoids
the open sunlight and wards it off by ingenious appliances. For her to
walk is exhausting. Does she eat? This is a mystery. Has she the needs
of other species? It is a problem. Although she is curious to excess she
allows herself easily to be caught by any one who can conceal from her
the slightest thing, and her intellect leads her to seek incessantly
after the unknown. Love is her religion; she thinks how to please the
one she loves. To be beloved is the end of all her actions; to excite
desire is the motive of every gesture. She dreams of nothing excepting
how she may shine, and moves only in a circle filled with grace and
elegance. It is for her the Indian girl has spun the soft fleece of
Thibet goats, Tarare weaves its airy veils, Brussels sets in motion
those shuttles which speed the flaxen thread that is purest and most
fine, Bidjapour wrenches from the bowels of the earth its sparkling
pebbles, and the Sevres gilds its snow-white clay. Night and day she
reflects upon new costumes and spends her life in considering dress and
in plaiting her apparel. She moves about exhibiting her brightness and
freshness to people she does not know, but whose homage flatters her,
while the desire she excites charms her, though she is indifferent to
those who feel it. During the hours which she spends in private, in
pleasure, and in the care of her person, she amuses herself by caroling
the sweetest strains. For her France and Italy ordain delightful
concerts and Naples imparts to the strings of the violin an harmonious
soul. This species is in fine at once the queen of the world and the
slave of passion. She dreads marriage because it ends by spoiling her
figure, but she surrenders herself to it because it promises happiness.
If she bears children it is by pure chance, and when they are grown up
she tries to conceal them.

These characteristics taken at random from among a thousand others are
not found amongst those beings whose hands are as black as those of apes
and their skin tanned like the ancient parchments of an _olim_; whose
complexion is burnt brown by the sun and whose neck is wrinkled like
that of a turkey; who are covered with rags; whose voice is hoarse;
whose intelligence is nil; who think of nothing but the bread box,
and who are incessantly bowed in toil towards the ground; who dig; who
harrow; who make hay, glean, gather in the harvest, knead the bread and
strip hemp; who, huddled among domestic beasts, infants and men, dwell
in holes and dens scarcely covered with thatch; to whom it is of little
importance from what source children rain down into their homes. Their
work it is to produce many and to deliver them to misery and toil, and
if their love is not like their labor in the fields it is at least as
much a work of chance.

Alas! if there are throughout the world multitudes of trades-women who
sit all day long between the cradle and the sugar-cask, farmers’ wives
and daughters who milk the cows, unfortunate women who are employed like
beasts of burden in the manufactories, who all day long carry the loaded
basket, the hoe and the fish-crate, if unfortunately there exist these
common human beings to whom the life of the soul, the benefits of
education, the delicious tempests of the heart are an unattainable
heaven; and if Nature has decreed that they should have coracoid
processes and hyoid bones and thirty-two vertebrae, let them remain for
the physiologist classed with the ourang-outang. And here we make no
stipulations for the leisure class; for those who have the time and
the sense to fall in love; for the rich who have purchased the right
of indulging their passions; for the intellectual who have conquered a
monopoly of fads. Anathema on all those who do not live by thought. We
say Raca and fool to all those who are not ardent, young, beautiful
and passionate. This is the public expression of that secret sentiment
entertained by philanthropists who have learned to read and can keep
their own carriage. Among the nine millions of the proscribed, the
tax-gatherer, the magistrate, the law-maker and the priest doubtless see
living souls who are to be ruled and made subject to the administration
of justice. But the man of sentiment, the philosopher of the boudoir,
while he eats his fine bread, made of corn, sown and harvested by these
creatures, will reject them and relegate them, as we do, to a place
outside the genus Woman. For them, there are no women excepting those
who can inspire love; and there is no living being but the creature
invested with the priesthood of thought by means of a privileged
education, and with whom leisure has developed the power of imagination;
in other words that only is a human being whose soul dreams, in love,
either of intellectual enjoyments or of physical delights.

We would, however, make the remark that these nine million female
pariahs produce here and there a thousand peasant girls who from
peculiar circumstances are as fair as Cupids; they come to Paris or to
the great cities and end up by attaining the rank of _femmes comme
il faut_; but to set off against these two or three thousand favored
creatures, there are one hundred thousand others who remain servants
or abandon themselves to frightful irregularities. Nevertheless, we
are obliged to count these Pompadours of the village among the feminine
population.

Our first calculation is based upon the statistical discovery that in
France there are eighteen millions of the poor, ten millions of people
in easy circumstances and two millions of the rich.

There exist, therefore, in France only six millions of women in whom
men of sentiment are now interested, have been interested, or will be
interested.

Let us subject this social elite to a philosophic examination.

We think, without fear of being deceived, that married people who have
lived twenty years together may sleep in peace without fear of having
their love trespassed upon or of incurring the scandal of a lawsuit for
criminal conversation.

From these six millions of individuals we must subtract about two
millions of women who are extremely attractive, because for the last
forty years they have seen the world; but since they have not the power
to make any one fall in love with them, they are on the outside of
the discussion now before us. If they are unhappy enough to receive no
attention for the sake of amiability, they are soon seized with ennui;
they fall back upon religion, upon the cultivation of pets, cats,
lap-dogs, and other fancies which are no more offensive than their
devoutness.

The calculations made at the Bureau of Longitudes concerning population
authorize us again to subtract from the total mentioned two millions of
young girls, pretty enough to kill; they are at present in the A B C
of life and innocently play with other children, without dreading that
these little hobbledehoys, who now make them laugh, will one day make
them weep.

Again, of the two millions of the remaining women, what reasonable man
would not throw out a hundred thousand poor girls, humpbacked, plain,
cross-grained, rickety, sickly, blind, crippled in some way, well
educated but penniless, all bound to be spinsters, and by no means
tempted to violate the sacred laws of marriage?

Nor must we retain the one hundred thousand other girls who become
sisters of St. Camille, Sisters of Charity, monastics, teachers, ladies’
companions, etc. And we must put into this blessed company a number of
young people difficult to estimate, who are too grown up to play with
little boys and yet too young to sport their wreath of orange blossoms.

Finally, of the fifteen million subjects which remain at the bottom of
our crucible we must eliminate five hundred thousand other individuals,
to be reckoned as daughters of Baal, who subserve the appetites of the
base. We must even comprise among those, without fear that they will
be corrupted by their company, the kept women, the milliners, the shop
girls, saleswomen, actresses, singers, the girls of the opera, the
ballet-dancers, upper servants, chambermaids, etc. Most of these
creatures excite the passions of many people, but they would consider
it immodest to inform a lawyer, a mayor, an ecclesiastic or a laughing
world of the day and hour when they surrendered to a lover. Their
system, justly blamed by an inquisitive world, has the advantage of
laying upon them no obligations towards men in general, towards the
mayor or the magistracy. As these women do not violate any oath made
in public, they have no connection whatever with a work which treats
exclusively of lawful marriage.

Some one will say that the claims made by this essay are very slight,
but its limitations make just compensation for those which amateurs
consider excessively padded. If any one, through love for a wealthy
dowager, wishes to obtain admittance for her into the remaining
million, he must classify her under the head of Sisters of Charity,
ballet-dancers, or hunchbacks; in fact we have not taken more than five
hundred thousand individuals in forming this last class, because it
often happens, as we have seen above, that the nine millions of peasant
girls make a large accession to it. We have for the same reason omitted
the working-girl class and the hucksters; the women of these two
sections are the product of efforts made by nine millions of female
bimana to rise to the higher civilization. But for its scrupulous
exactitude many persons might regard this statistical meditation as a
mere joke.

We have felt very much inclined to form a small class of a hundred
thousand individuals as a crowning cabinet of the species, to serve as
a place of shelter for women who have fallen into a middle estate,
like widows, for instance; but we have preferred to estimate in round
figures.

It would be easy to prove the fairness of our analysis: let one
reflection be sufficient.

The life of a woman is divided into three periods, very distinct from
each other: the first begins in the cradle and ends on the attainment
of a marriageable age; the second embraces the time during which a
woman belongs to marriage; the third opens with the critical period,
the ending with which nature closes the passions of life. These three
spheres of existence, being almost equal in duration, might be employed
for the classification into equal groups of a given number of women.
Thus in a mass of six millions, omitting fractions, there are about
two million girls between one and eighteen, two millions women between
eighteen and forty and two millions of old women. The caprices of
society have divided the two millions of marriageable women into three
main classes, namely: those who remain spinsters for reasons which we
have defined; those whose virtue does not reckon in the obtaining of
husbands, and the million of women lawfully married, with whom we have
to deal.

You see then, by the exact sifting out of the feminine population, that
there exists in France a little flock of barely a million white lambs, a
privileged fold into which every wolf is anxious to enter.

Let us put this million of women, already winnowed by our fan, through
another examination.

To arrive at the true idea of the degree of confidence which a man ought
to have in his wife, let us suppose for a moment that all wives will
deceive their husbands.

On this hypothesis, it will be proper to cut out about one-twentieth,
viz., young people who are newly married and who will be faithful to
their vows for a certain time.

Another twentieth will be in ill-health. This will be to make a very
modest allowance for human infirmities.

Certain passions, which we are told destroy the dominion of the man over
the heart of his wife, namely, aversion, grief, the bearing of children,
will account for another twentieth.

Adultery does not establish itself in the heart of a married woman with
the promptness of a pistol-shot. Even when sympathy with another rouses
feelings on first sight, a struggle always takes place, whose duration
discounts the total sum of conjugal infidelities. It would be an insult
to French modesty not to admit the duration of this struggle in
a country so naturally combative, without referring to at least a
twentieth in the total of married women; but then we will suppose that
there are certain sickly women who preserve their lovers while they
are using soothing draughts, and that there are certain wives whose
confinement makes sarcastic celibates smile. In this way we shall
vindicate the modesty of those who enter upon the struggle from motives
of virtue. For the same reason we should not venture to believe that a
woman forsaken by her lover will find a new one on the spot; but this
discount being much more uncertain than the preceding one, we will
estimate it at one-fortieth.

These several rebates will reduce our sum total to eight hundred
thousand women, when we come to calculate the number of those who are
likely to violate married faith. Who would not at the present moment
wish to retain the persuasion that wives are virtuous? Are they not
the supreme flower of the country? Are they not all blooming creatures,
fascinating the world by their beauty, their youth, their life and their
love? To believe in their virtue is a sort of social religion, for they
are the ornament of the world, and form the chief glory of France.

It is in the midst of this million we are bound to investigate:

The number of honest women;

The number of virtuous women.

The work of investigating this and of arranging the results under two
categories requires whole meditations, which may serve as an appendix to
the present one.




MEDITATION III. OF THE HONEST WOMAN.

The preceding meditation has proved that we possess in France a floating
population of one million women reveling in the privilege of inspiring
those passions which a gallant man avows without shame, or dissembles
with delight. It is then among this million of women that we must carry
our lantern of Diogenes in order to discover the honest women of the
land.

This inquiry suggests certain digressions.

Two young people, well dressed, whose slender figures and rounded arms
suggest a paver’s tool, and whose boots are elegantly made, meet one
morning on the boulevard, at the end of the Passage des Panoramas.

“What, is this you?”

“Yes, dear boy; it looks like me, doesn’t it?”

Then they laugh, with more or less intelligence, according to the nature
of the joke which opens the conversation.

When they have examined each other with the sly curiosity of a police
officer on the lookout for a clew, when they are quite convinced of the
newness of each other’s gloves, of each other’s waistcoat and of the
taste with which their cravats are tied; when they are pretty certain
that neither of them is down in the world, they link arms and if they
start from the Theater des Varietes, they have not reached Frascati’s
before they have asked each other a roundabout question whose free
translation may be this:

“Whom are you living with now?”

As a general rule she is a charming woman.

Who is the infantryman of Paris into whose ear there have not dropped,
like bullets in the day of battle, thousands of words uttered by the
passer-by, and who has not caught one of those numberless sayings which,
according to Rabelais, hang frozen in the air? But the majority of men
take their way through Paris in the same manner as they live and
eat, that is, without thinking about it. There are very few skillful
musicians, very few practiced physiognomists who can recognize the key
in which these vagrant notes are set, the passion that prompts
these floating words. Ah! to wander over Paris! What an adorable
and delightful existence is that! To saunter is a science; it is the
gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to
live. The young and pretty women, long contemplated with ardent eyes,
would be much more admissible in claiming a salary than the cook who
asks for twenty sous from the Limousin whose nose with inflated nostrils
took in the perfumes of beauty. To saunter is to enjoy life; it is to
indulge the flight of fancy; it is to enjoy the sublime pictures of
misery, of love, of joy, of gracious or grotesque physiognomies; it is
to pierce with a glance the abysses of a thousand existences; for the
young it is to desire all, and to possess all; for the old it is to
live the life of the youthful, and to share their passions. Now how
many answers have not the sauntering artists heard to the categorical
question which is always with us?

“She is thirty-five years old, but you would not think she was more than
twenty!” said an enthusiastic youth with sparkling eyes, who, freshly
liberated from college, would, like Cherubin, embrace all.

“Zounds! Mine has dressing-gowns of batiste and diamond rings for the
evening!” said a lawyer’s clerk.

“But she has a box at the Francais!” said an army officer.

“At any rate,” cried another one, an elderly man who spoke as if he
were standing on the defence, “she does not cost me a sou! In our
case--wouldn’t you like to have the same chance, my respected friend?”

And he patted his companion lightly on the shoulder.

“Oh! she loves me!” said another. “It seems too good to be true; but she
has the most stupid of husbands! Ah!--Buffon has admirably described the
animals, but the biped called husband--”

What a pleasant thing for a married man to hear!

“Oh! what an angel you are, my dear!” is the answer to a request
discreetly whispered into the ear.

“Can you tell me her name or point her out to me?”

“Oh! no; she is an honest woman.”

When a student is loved by a waitress, he mentions her name with pride
and takes his friends to lunch at her house. If a young man loves a
woman whose husband is engaged in some trade dealing with articles
of necessity, he will answer, blushingly, “She is the wife of a
haberdasher, of a stationer, of a hatter, of a linen-draper, of a clerk,
etc.”

But this confession of love for an inferior which buds and blows in
the midst of packages, loaves of sugar, or flannel waistcoats is always
accompanied with an exaggerated praise of the lady’s fortune. The
husband alone is engaged in the business; he is rich; he has fine
furniture. The loved one comes to her lover’s house; she wears a
cashmere shawl; she owns a country house, etc.

In short, a young man is never wanting in excellent arguments to prove
that his mistress is very nearly, if not quite, an honest woman. This
distinction originates in the refinement of our manners and has become
as indefinite as the line which separates _bon ton_ from vulgarity. What
then is meant by an honest woman?

On this point the vanity of women, of their lovers, and even that of
their husbands, is so sensitive that we had better here settle upon some
general rules, which are the result of long observation.

Our one million of privileged women represent a multitude who are
eligible for the glorious title of honest women, but by no means all are
elected to it. The principles on which these elections are based may be
found in the following axioms:




APHORISMS.

                                  I.
           An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.

                                 II.
              An honest woman is under forty years old.

                                 III.
   A married woman whose favors are to be paid for is not an honest
   woman.

                                 IV.
   A married woman who keeps a private carriage is an honest woman.

                                  V.
       A woman who does her own cooking is not an honest woman.

                                 VI.
When a man has made enough to yield an income of twenty thousand francs,
his wife is an honest woman, whatever the business in which his fortune
was made.

                                 VII.
A woman who says “letter of change” for letter of exchange, who says
of a man, “He is an elegant gentleman,” can never be an honest woman,
whatever fortune she possesses.

                                VIII.
 An honest woman ought to be in a financial condition such as forbids
 her lover to think she will ever cost him anything.

                                 IX.
 A woman who lives on the third story of any street excepting the Rue
 de Rivoli and the Rue de Castiglione is not an honest woman.

                                  X.
The wife of a banker is always an honest woman, but the woman who sits
at the cashier’s desk cannot be one, unless her husband has a very large
business and she does not live over his shop.

                                 XI.
The unmarried niece of a bishop when she lives with him can pass for
an honest woman, because if she has an intrigue she has to deceive her
uncle.

                                 XII.
      An honest woman is one whom her lover fears to compromise.

                                XIII.
           The wife of an artist is always an honest woman.


By the application of these principles even a man from Ardeche can
resolve all the difficulties which our subject presents.

In order that a woman may be able to keep a cook, may be finely
educated, may possess the sentiment of coquetry, may have the right to
pass whole hours in her boudoir lying on a sofa, and may live a life of
soul, she must have at least six thousand francs a year if she lives
in the country, and twenty thousand if she lives at Paris. These two
financial limits will suggest to you how many honest women are to be
reckoned on in the million, for they are really a mere product of our
statistical calculations.

Now three hundred thousand independent people, with an income of fifteen
thousand francs, represent the sum total of those who live on pensions,
on annuities and the interest of treasury bonds and mortgages.

Three hundred thousand landed proprietors enjoy an income of three
thousand five hundred francs and represent all territorial wealth.

Two hundred thousand payees, at the rate of fifteen hundred francs each,
represent the distribution of public funds by the state budget, by the
budgets of the cities and departments, less the national debt, church
funds and soldier’s pay, (i.e. five sous a day with allowances for
washing, weapons, victuals, clothes, etc.).

Two hundred thousand fortunes amassed in commerce, reckoning the capital
at twenty thousand francs in each case, represent all the commercial
establishments possible in France.

Here we have a million husbands represented.

But at what figure shall we count those who have an income of fifty, of
a hundred, of two, three, four, five, and six hundred francs only, from
consols or some other investment?

How many landed proprietors are there who pay taxes amounting to no more
than a hundred sous, twenty francs, one hundred francs, two hundred, or
two hundred and eighty?

At what number shall we reckon those of the governmental leeches, who
are merely quill-drivers with a salary of six hundred francs a year?

How many merchants who have nothing but a fictitious capital shall we
admit? These men are rich in credit and have not a single actual sou,
and resemble the sieves through which Pactolus flows. And how many
brokers whose real capital does not amount to more than a thousand, two
thousand, four thousand, five thousand francs? Business!--my respects to
you!

Let us suppose more people to be fortunate than actually are so. Let
us divide this million into parts; five hundred thousand domestic
establishments will have an income ranging from a hundred to three
thousand francs, and five thousand women will fulfill the conditions
which entitle them to be called honest women.

After these observations, which close our meditation on statistics, we
are entitled to cut out of this number one hundred thousand individuals;
consequently we can consider it to be proven mathematically that there
exist in France no more than four hundred thousand women who can furnish
to men of refinement the exquisite and exalted enjoyments which they
look for in love.

And here it is fitting to make a remark to the adepts for whom we write,
that love does not consist in a series of eager conversations, of nights
of pleasure, of an occasional caress more or less well-timed and a spark
of _amour-propre_ baptized by the name of jealousy. Our four hundred
thousand women are not of those concerning whom it may be said, “The
most beautiful girl in the world can give only what she has.” No,
they are richly endowed with treasures which appeal to our ardent
imaginations, they know how to sell dear that which they do not possess,
in order to compensate for the vulgarity of that which they give.

Do we feel more pleasure in kissing the glove of a grisette than in
draining the five minutes of pleasure which all women offer to us?

Is it the conversation of a shop-girl which makes you expect boundless
delights?

In your intercourse with a woman who is beneath you, the delight of
flattered _amour-propre_ is on her side. You are not in the secret of
the happiness which you give.

In a case of a woman above you, either in fortune or social position,
the ticklings of vanity are not only intense, but are equally shared.
A man can never raise his mistress to his own level; but a woman always
puts her lover in the position that she herself occupies. “I can make
princes and you can make nothing but bastards,” is an answer sparkling
with truth.

If love is the first of passions, it is because it flatters all the
rest of them at the same time. We love with more or less intensity in
proportion to the number of chords which are touched by the fingers of a
beautiful mistress.

Biren, the jeweler’s son, climbing into the bed of the Duchesse de
Courlande and helping her to sign an agreement that he should be
proclaimed sovereign of the country, as he was already of the young and
beautiful queen, is an example of the happiness which ought to be given
to their lovers by our four hundred thousand women.

If a man would have the right to make stepping-stones of all the heads
which crowd a drawing-room, he must be the lover of some artistic woman
of fashion. Now we all love more or less to be at the top.

It is on this brilliant section of the nation that the attack is made by
men whose education, talent or wit gives them the right to be considered
persons of importance with regard to that success of which people of
every country are so proud; and only among this class of women is the
wife to be found whose heart has to be defended at all hazard by our
husband.

What does it matter whether the considerations which arise from the
existence of a feminine aristocracy are or are not equally applicable
to other social classes? That which is true of all women exquisite
in manners, language and thought, in whom exceptional educational
facilities have developed a taste for art and a capacity for feeling,
comparing and thinking, who have a high sense of propriety and
politeness and who actually set the fashion in French manners, ought
to be true also in the case of women whatever their nation and whatever
their condition. The man of distinction to whom this book is dedicated
must of necessity possess a certain mental vision, which makes
him perceive the various degrees of light that fill each class and
comprehend the exact point in the scale of civilization to which each of
our remarks is severally applicable.

Would it not be then in the highest interests of morality, that we
should in the meantime try to find out the number of virtuous women who
are to be found among these adorable creatures? Is not this a question
of marito-national importance?




MEDITATION IV. OF THE VIRTUOUS WOMAN.

The question, perhaps, is not so much how many virtuous women there are,
as what possibility there is of an honest woman remaining virtuous.

In order to throw light upon a point so important, let us cast a rapid
glance over the male population.

From among our fifteen millions of men we must cut off, in the first
place, the nine millions of bimana of thirty-two vertebrae and exclude
from our physiological analysis all but six millions of people. The
Marceaus, the Massenas, the Rousseaus, the Diderots and the Rollins
often sprout forth suddenly from the social swamp, when it is in a
condition of fermentation; but, here we plead guilty of deliberate
inaccuracy. These errors in calculation are likely, however, to give all
their weight to our conclusion and to corroborate what we are forced to
deduce in unveiling the mechanism of passion.

From the six millions of privileged men, we must exclude three millions
of old men and children.

It will be affirmed by some one that this subtraction leaves a remainder
of four millions in the case of women.

This difference at first sight seems singular, but is easily accounted
for.

The average age at which women are married is twenty years and at forty
they cease to belong to the world of love.

Now a young bachelor of seventeen is apt to make deep cuts with his
penknife in the parchment of contracts, as the chronicles of scandal
will tell you.

On the other hand, a man at fifty-two is more formidable than at any
other age. It is at this fair epoch of life that he enjoys an experience
dearly bought, and probably all the fortune that he will ever require.
The passions by which his course is directed being the last under whose
scourge he will move, he is unpitying and determined, like the man
carried away by a current who snatches at a green and pliant branch of
willow, the young nursling of the year.


                                 XIV.
    Physically a man is a man much longer than a woman is a woman.


With regard to marriage, the difference in duration of the life of love
with a man and with a woman is fifteen years. This period is equal to
three-fourths of the time during which the infidelities of the woman
can bring unhappiness to her husband. Nevertheless, the remainder in our
subtraction from the sum of men only differs by a sixth or so from that
which results in our subtraction from the sum of women.

Great is the modest caution of our estimates. As to our arguments, they
are founded on evidence so widely known, that we have only expounded
them for the sake of being exact and in order to anticipate all
criticism.

It has, therefore, been proved to the mind of every philosopher, however
little disposed he may be to forming numerical estimates, that there
exists in France a floating mass of three million men between seventeen
and fifty-two, all perfectly alive, well provided with teeth, quite
resolved on biting, in fact, biting and asking nothing better than the
opportunity of walking strong and upright along the way to Paradise.

The above observations entitle us to separate from this mass of men a
million husbands. Suppose for an instant that these, being satisfied
and always happy, like our model husband, confine themselves to conjugal
love.

Our remainder of two millions do not require five sous to make love.

It is quite sufficient for a man to have a fine foot and a clear eye in
order to dismantle the portrait of a husband.

It is not necessary that he should have a handsome face nor even a good
figure;

Provided that a man appears to be intellectual and has a distinguished
expression of face, women never look where he comes from but where he is
going to;

The charms of youth are the unique equipage of love;

A coat made by Brisson, a pair of gloves bought from Boivin, elegant
shoes, for whose payment the dealer trembles, a well-tied cravat are
sufficient to make a man king of the drawing-room;

And soldiers--although the passion for gold lace and aiguillettes has
died away--do not soldiers form of themselves a redoubtable legion of
celibates? Not to mention Eginhard--for he was a private secretary--has
not a newspaper recently recorded how a German princess bequeathed her
fortune to a simple lieutenant of cuirassiers in the imperial guard?

But the notary of the village, who in the wilds of Gascony does not draw
more than thirty-six deeds a year, sends his son to study law at Paris;
the hatter wishes his son to be a notary, the lawyer destines his to be
a judge, the judge wishes to become a minister in order that his sons
may be peers. At no epoch in the world’s history has there been so eager
a thirst for education. To-day it is not intellect but cleverness that
promenades the streets. From every crevice in the rocky surface of
society brilliant flowers burst forth as the spring brings them on the
walls of a ruin; even in the caverns there droop from the vaulted
roof faintly colored tufts of green vegetation. The sun of education
permeates all. Since this vast development of thought, this even and
fruitful diffusion of light, we have scarcely any men of superiority,
because every single man represents the whole education of his age. We
are surrounded by living encyclopaedias who walk about, think, act and
wish to be immortalized. Hence the frightful catastrophes of climbing
ambitions and insensate passions. We feel the want of other worlds;
there are more hives needed to receive the swarms, and especially are we
in need of more pretty women.

But the maladies by which a man is afflicted do not nullify the sum
total of human passion. To our shame be it spoken, a woman is never so
much attached to us as when we are sick.

With this thought, all the epigrams written against the little sex--for
it is antiquated nowadays to say the fair sex--ought to be disarmed
of their point and changed into madrigals of eulogy! All men ought to
consider that the sole virtue of a woman is to love and that all women
are prodigiously virtuous, and at that point to close the book and end
their meditation.

Ah! do you not remember that black and gloomy hour when lonely and
suffering, making accusations against men and especially against your
friends, weak, discouraged, and filled with thoughts of death, your head
supported by a fevered pillow and stretched upon a sheet whose white
trellis-work of linen was stamped upon your skin, you traced with your
eyes the green paper which covered the walls of your silent chamber?
Do you recollect, I say, seeing some one noiselessly open your door,
exhibiting her fair young face, framed with rolls of gold, and a bonnet
which you had never seen before? She seemed like a star in a stormy
night, smiling and stealing towards you with an expression in which
distress and happiness were blended, and flinging herself into your
arms!

“How did you manage it? What did you tell your husband?” you ask.

“Your husband!”--Ah! this brings us back again into the depths of our
subject.


                                 XV.
  Morally the man is more often and longer a man than the woman is a
                                women.


On the other hand we ought to consider that among these two millions of
celibates there are many unhappy men, in whom a profound sense of their
misery and persistent toil have quenched the instinct of love;

That they have not all passed through college, that there are many
artisans among them, many footmen--the Duke of Gevres, an extremely
plain and short man, as he walked through the park of Versailles saw
several lackeys of fine appearance and said to his friends, “Look how
these fellows are made by us, and how they imitate us”--that there are
many contractors, many trades people who think of nothing but money;
many drudges of the shop;

That there are men more stupid and actually more ugly than God would
have made them;

That there are those whose character is like a chestnut without a
kernel;

That the clergy are generally chaste;

That there are men so situated in life that they can never enter the
brilliant sphere in which honest women move, whether for want of a coat,
or from their bashfulness, or from the failure of a mahout to introduce
them.

But let us leave to each one the task of adding to the number of these
exceptions in accordance with his personal experience--for the object
of a book is above all things to make people think--and let us instantly
suppress one-half of the sum total and admit only that there are one
million of hearts worthy of paying homage to honest women. This number
approximately includes those who are superior in all departments. Women
love only the intellectual, but justice must be done to virtue.

As for these amiable celibates, each of them relates a string of
adventures, all of which seriously compromise honest women. It would be
a very moderate and reserved computation to attribute no more than three
adventures to each celibate; but if some of them count their adventures
by the dozen, there are many more who confine themselves to two or three
incidents of passion and some to a single one in their whole life,
so that we have in accordance with the statistical method taken the
average. Now if the number of celibates be multiplied by the number of
their excesses in love the result will be three millions of adventures;
to set against this we have only four hundred thousand honest women!

If the God of goodness and indulgence who hovers over the worlds does
not make a second washing of the human race, it is doubtless because so
little success attended the first.

Here then we have a people, a society which has been sifted, and you see
the result!


                                 XVI.
 Manners are the hypocrisy of nations, and hypocrisy is more or less
                               perfect.


                                XVII.
      Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.


Physical love is a craving like hunger, excepting that man eats all the
time, and in love his appetite is neither so persistent nor so regular
as at the table.

A piece of bread and a carafe of water will satisfy the hunger of
any man; but our civilization has brought to light the science of
gastronomy.

Love has its piece of bread, but it has also its science of loving, that
science which we call coquetry, a delightful word which the French alone
possess, for that science originated in this country.

Well, after all, isn’t it enough to enrage all husbands when they think
that man is so endowed with an innate desire to change from one food
to another, that in some savage countries, where travelers have landed,
they have found alcoholic drinks and ragouts?

Hunger is not so violent as love; but the caprices of the soul are more
numerous, more bewitching, more exquisite in their intensity than the
caprices of gastronomy; but all that the poets and the experiences
of our own life have revealed to us on the subject of love, arms us
celibates with a terrible power: we are the lion of the Gospel seeking
whom we may devour.

Then, let every one question his conscience on this point, and search
his memory if he has ever met a man who confined himself to the love of
one woman only!

How, alas! are we to explain, while respecting the honor of all the
peoples, the problem which results from the fact that three millions
of burning hearts can find no more than four hundred thousand women on
which they can feed? Should we apportion four celibates for each woman
and remember that the honest women would have already established,
instinctively and unconsciously, a sort of understanding between
themselves and the celibates, like that which the presidents of royal
courts have initiated, in order to make their partisans in each chamber
enter successively after a certain number of years?

That would be a mournful way of solving the difficulty!

Should we make the conjecture that certain honest women act in dividing
up the celibates, as the lion in the fable did? What! Surely, in that
case, half at least of our altars would become whited sepulchres!

Ought one to suggest for the honor of French ladies that in the time of
peace all other countries should import into France a certain number of
their honest women, and that these countries should mainly consist of
England, Germany and Russia? But the European nations would in that
case attempt to balance matters by demanding that France should export a
certain number of her pretty women.

Morality and religion suffer so much from such calculations as this,
that an honest man, in an attempt to prove the innocence of married
women, finds some reason to believe that dowagers and young people are
half of them involved in this general corruption, and are liars even
more truly than are the celibates.

But to what conclusion does our calculation lead us? Think of our
husbands, who to the disgrace of morals behave almost all of them like
celibates and glory _in petto_ over their secret adventures.

Why, then we believe that every married man, who is at all attached
to his wife from honorable motives, can, in the words of the elder
Corneille, seek a rope and a nail; _foenum habet in cornu_.

It is, however, in the bosom of these four hundred thousand honest women
that we must, lantern in hand, seek for the number of the virtuous women
in France! As a matter of fact, we have by our statistics of marriage so
far only set down the number of those creatures with which society has
really nothing to do. Is it not true that in France the honest people,
the people _comme il faut_, form a total of scarcely three million
individuals, namely, our one million of celibates, five hundred thousand
honest women, five hundred thousand husbands, and a million of dowagers,
of infants and of young girls?

Are you then astonished at the famous verse of Boileau? This verse
proves that the poet had cleverly fathomed the discovery mathematically
propounded to you in these tiresome meditations and that his language is
by no means hyperbolical.

Nevertheless, virtuous women there certainly are:

Yes, those who have never been tempted and those who die at their first
child-birth, assuming that their husbands had married them virgins;

Yes, those who are ugly as the Kaifakatadary of the Arabian Nights;

Yes, those whom Mirabeau calls “fairy cucumbers” and who are composed
of atoms exactly like those of strawberry and water-lily roots.
Nevertheless, we need not believe that!

Further, we acknowledge that, to the credit of our age, we meet, ever
since the revival of morality and religion and during our own times,
some women, here and there, so moral, so religious, so devoted to their
duties, so upright, so precise, so stiff, so virtuous, so--that the
devil himself dare not even look at them; they are guarded on all sides
by rosaries, hours of prayer and directors. Pshaw!

We will not attempt to enumerate the women who are virtuous from
stupidity, for it is acknowledged that in love all women have intellect.

In conclusion, we may remark that it is not impossible that there exist
in some corner of the earth women, young, pretty and virtuous, whom the
world does not suspect.

But you must not give the name of virtuous woman to her who, in her
struggle against an involuntary passion, has yielded nothing to her
lover whom she idolizes. She does injury in the most cruel way in which
it can possibly be done to a loving husband. For what remains to him of
his wife? A thing without name, a living corpse. In the very midst of
delight his wife remains like the guest who has been warned by Borgia
that certain meats were poisoned; he felt no hunger, he ate sparingly or
pretended to eat. He longed for the meat which he had abandoned for that
provided by the terrible cardinal, and sighed for the moment when the
feast was over and he could leave the table.

What is the result which these reflections on the feminine virtue lead
to? Here they are; but the last two maxims have been given us by an
eclectic philosopher of the eighteenth century.


                                XVIII.
  A virtuous woman has in her heart one fibre less or one fibre more
          than other women; she is either stupid or sublime.


                                 XIX.
      The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.


                                 XX.
The most virtuous women have in them something which is never chaste.


                                 XXI.
“That a man of intellect has doubts about his mistress is conceivable,
           but about his wife!--that would be too stupid.”


                                XXII.
 “Men would be insufferably unhappy if in the presence of women they
thought the least bit in the world of that which they know by heart.”


The number of those rare women who, like the Virgins of the Parable,
have kept their lamps lighted, will always appear very small in the eyes
of the defenders of virtue and fine feeling; but we must needs exclude
it from the total sum of honest women, and this subtraction, consoling
as it is, will increase the danger which threatens husbands, will
intensify the scandal of their married life, and involve, more or less,
the reputation of all other lawful spouses.

What husband will be able to sleep peacefully beside his young and
beautiful wife while he knows that three celibates, at least, are on
the watch; that if they have not already encroached upon his little
property, they regard the bride as their destined prey, for sooner or
later she will fall into their hands, either by stratagem, compulsive
conquest or free choice? And it is impossible that they should fail some
day or other to obtain victory!

What a startling conclusion!

On this point the purist in morality, the _collets montes_ will
accuse us perhaps of presenting here conclusions which are excessively
despairing; they will be desirous of putting up a defence, either for
the virtuous women or the celibates; but we have in reserve for them a
final remark.

Increase the number of honest women and diminish the number of
celibates, as much as you choose, you will always find that the result
will be a larger number of gallant adventurers than of honest women; you
will always find a vast multitude driven through social custom to commit
three sorts of crime.

If they remain chaste, their health is injured, while they are the
slaves of the most painful torture; they disappoint the sublime ends of
nature, and finally die of consumption, drinking milk on the mountains
of Switzerland!

If they yield to legitimate temptations, they either compromise the
honest women, and on this point we re-enter on the subject of this book,
or else they debase themselves by a horrible intercourse with the five
hundred thousand women of whom we spoke in the third category of the
first Meditation, and in this case, have still considerable chance of
visiting Switzerland, drinking milk and dying there!

Have you never been struck, as we have been, by a certain error of
organization in our social order, the evidence of which gives a moral
certainty to our last calculations?

The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average age
at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial delight
are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest years of his
life, during the green season in which his beauty, his youth and his wit
make him more dangerous to husbands than at any other epoch of his life,
his finds himself without any means of satisfying legitimately that
irresistible craving for love which burns in his whole nature. During
this time, representing the sixth part of human life, we are obliged to
admit that the sixth part or less of our total male population and the
sixth part which is the most vigorous is placed in a position which is
perpetually exhausting for them, and dangerous for society.

“Why don’t they get married?” cries a religious woman.

But what father of good sense would wish his son to be married at twenty
years of age?

Is not the danger of these precocious unions apparent at all? It would
seem as if marriage was a state very much at variance with natural
habitude, seeing that it requires a special ripeness of judgment in
those who conform to it. All the world knows what Rousseau said: “There
must always be a period of libertinage in life either in one state or
another. It is an evil leaven which sooner or later ferments.”

Now what mother of a family is there who would expose her daughter to
the risk of this fermentation when it has not yet taken place?

On the other hand, what need is there to justify a fact under whose
domination all societies exist? Are there not in every country, as
we have demonstrated, a vast number of men who live as honestly as
possible, without being either celibates or married men?

Cannot these men, the religious women will always ask, abide in
continence like the priests?

Certainly, madame.

Nevertheless, we venture to observe that the vow of chastity is the most
startling exception to the natural condition of man which society makes
necessary; but continence is the great point in the priest’s profession;
he must be chaste, as the doctor must be insensible to physical
sufferings, as the notary and the advocate insensible to the misery
whose wounds are laid bare to their eyes, as the soldier to the sight
of death which he meets on the field of battle. From the fact that the
requirements of civilization ossify certain fibres of the heart and
render callous certain membranes, we must not necessarily conclude that
all men are bound to undergo this partial and exceptional death of the
soul. This would be to reduce the human race to a condition of atrocious
moral suicide.

But let it be granted that, in the atmosphere of a drawing-room the most
Jansenistic in the world, appears a young man of twenty-eight who has
scrupulously guarded his robe of innocence and is as truly virginal
as the heath-cock which gourmands enjoy. Do you not see that the most
austere of virtuous women would merely pay him a sarcastic compliment
on his courage; the magistrate, the strictest that ever mounted a
bench, would shake his head and smile, and all the ladies would hide
themselves, so that he might not hear their laughter? When the heroic
and exceptional young victim leaves the drawing-room, what a deluge of
jokes bursts upon his innocent head? What a shower of insults! What is
held to be more shameful in France than impotence, than coldness, than
the absence of all passion, than simplicity?

The only king of France who would not have laughed was perhaps Louis
XIII; but as for his roue of a father, he would perhaps have banished
the young man, either under the accusation that he was no Frenchman or
from a conviction that he was setting a dangerous example.

Strange contradiction! A young man is equally blamed if he passes life
in Holy Land, to use an expression of bachelor life. Could it possibly
be for the benefit of the honest women that the prefects of police, and
mayors of all time have ordained that the passions of the public shall
not manifest themselves until nightfall, and shall cease at eleven
o’clock in the evening?

Where do you wish that our mass of celibates should sow their wild oats?
And who is deceived on this point? as Figaro asks. Is it the governments
or the governed? The social order is like the small boys who stop their
ears at the theatre, so as not to hear the report of the firearms. Is
society afraid to probe its wound or has it recognized the fact that
evil is irremediable and things must be allowed to run their course? But
there crops up here a question of legislation, for it is impossible to
escape the material and social dilemma created by this balance of public
virtue in the matter of marriage. It is not our business to solve this
difficulty; but suppose for a moment that society in order to save a
multitude of families, women and honest girls, found itself compelled to
grant to certain licensed hearts the right of satisfying the desire of
the celibates; ought not our laws then to raise up a professional body
consisting of female Decii who devote themselves for the republic,
and make a rampart of their bodies round the honest families? The
legislators have been very wrong hitherto in disdaining to regulate the
lot of courtesans.


                                XXIII.
        The courtesan is an institution if she is a necessity.


This question bristles with so many ifs and buts that we will bequeath
it for solution to our descendants; it is right that we shall leave them
something to do. Moreover, its discussion is not germane to this work;
for in this, more than in any other age, there is a great outburst of
sensibility; at no other epoch have there been so many rules of conduct,
because never before has it been so completely accepted that pleasure
comes from the heart. Now, what man of sentiment is there, what celibate
is there, who, in the presence of four hundred thousand young and pretty
women arrayed in the splendors of fortune and the graces of wit, rich in
treasures of coquetry, and lavish in the dispensing of happiness, would
wish to go--? For shame!

Let us put forth for the benefit of our future legislature in clear and
brief axioms the result arrived at during the last few years.


                                XXIV.
    In the social order, inevitable abuses are laws of nature, in
 accordance with which mankind should frame their civil and political
                             institutes.


                                 XXV.
“Adultery is like a commercial failure, with this difference,” says
Chamfort, “that it is the innocent party who has been ruined and who
bears the disgrace.”


In France the laws that relate to adultery and those that relate to
bankruptcy require great modifications. Are they too indulgent? Do they
sin on the score of bad principles? _Caveant consules_!

Come now, courageous athlete, who have taken as your task that which is
expressed in the little apostrophe which our first Meditation addresses
to people who have the charge of a wife, what are you going to say about
it? We hope that this rapid review of the question does not make you
tremble, that you are not one of those men whose nervous fluid congeals
at the sight of a precipice or a boa constrictor! Well! my friend, he
who owns soil has war and toil. The men who want your gold are more
numerous than those who want your wife.

After all, husbands are free to take these trifles for arithmetical
estimates, or arithmetical estimates for trifles. The illusions of life
are the best things in life; that which is most respectable in life is
our futile credulity. Do there not exist many people whose principles
are merely prejudices, and who not having the force of character to form
their own ideas of happiness and virtue accept what is ready made for
them by the hand of legislators? Nor do we address those Manfreds who
having taken off too many garments wish to raise all the curtains, that
is, in moments when they are tortured by a sort of moral spleen. By
them, however, the question is boldly stated and we know the extent of
the evil.

It remains that we should examine the chances and changes which each man
is likely to meet in marriage, and which may weaken him in that struggle
from which our champion should issue victorious.




MEDITATION V. OF THE PREDESTINED.

Predestined means destined in advance for happiness or unhappiness.
Theology has seized upon this word and employs it in relation to the
happy; we give to the term a meaning which is unfortunate to our elect
of which one can say in opposition to the Gospel, “Many are called, many
are chosen.”

Experience has demonstrated that there are certain classes of men more
subject than others to certain infirmities; the Gascons are given to
exaggeration and Parisians to vanity. As we see that apoplexy attacks
people with short necks, or butchers are liable to carbuncle, as
gout attacks the rich, health the poor, deafness kings, paralysis
administrators, so it has been remarked that certain classes of husbands
and their wives are more given to illegitimate passions. Thus they
forestall the celibates, they form another sort of aristocracy. If any
reader should be enrolled in one of these aristocratic classes he will,
we hope, have sufficient presence of mind, he or at least his wife,
instantly to call to mind the favorite axiom of Lhomond’s Latin Grammar:
“No rule without exception.” A friend of the house may even recite the
verse--

  “Present company always excepted.”

And then every one will have the right to believe, _in petto_, that
he forms the exception. But our duty, the interest which we take in
husbands and the keen desire which we have to preserve young and pretty
women from the caprices and catastrophes which a lover brings in
his train, force us to give notice to husbands that they ought to be
especially on their guard.

In this recapitulation first are to be reckoned the husbands whom
business, position or public office calls from their houses and detains
for a definite time. It is these who are the standard-bearers of the
brotherhood.

Among them, we would reckon magistrates, holding office during pleasure
or for life, and obliged to remain at the Palace for the greater portion
of the day; other functionaries sometimes find means to leave their
office at business hours; but a judge or a public prosecutor, seated on
his cushion of lilies, is bound even to die during the progress of the
hearing. There is his field of battle.

It is the same with the deputies and peers who discuss the laws, of
ministers who share the toils of the king, of secretaries who work with
the ministers, of soldiers on campaign, and indeed with the corporal
of the police patrol, as the letter of Lafleur, in the _Sentimental
Journey_, plainly shows.

Next to the men who are obliged to be absent from home at certain fixed
hours, come the men whom vast and serious undertakings leave not
one minute for love-making; their foreheads are always wrinkled with
anxiety, their conversation is generally void of merriment.

At the head of these unfortunates we must place the bankers, who toil
in the acquisition of millions, whose heads are so full of calculations
that the figures burst through their skulls and range themselves in
columns of addition on their foreheads.

These millionaires, forgetting most of the time the sacred laws of
marriage and the attention due to the tender flower which they have
undertaken to cultivate, never think of watering it or of defending
it from the heat and cold. They scarcely recognize the fact that the
happiness of their spouses is in their keeping; if they ever do remember
this, it is at table, when they see seated before them a woman in rich
array, or when a coquette, fearing their brutal repulse, comes, gracious
as Venus, to ask them for cash--Oh! it is then, that they recall,
sometimes very vividly, the rights specified in the two hundred and
thirteenth article of the civil code, and their wives are grateful
to them; but like the heavy tariff which the law lays upon foreign
merchandise, their wives suffer and pay the tribute, in virtue of the
axiom which says: “There is no pleasure without pain.”

The men of science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an
antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is
an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who
dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their
life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a
commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their
abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around them
strikes their attention. Their unhappiness is consummated; in full light
of noon they scarcely even perceive it. Oh happy men! a thousand times
happy! Example: Beauzee, returning home after session at the Academy,
surprises his wife with a German. “Did not I tell you, madame, that
it was necessary that I shall go,” cried the stranger. “My dear sir,”
 interrupted the academician, “you ought to say that I _should_ go!”

Then there come, lyre in hand, certain poets whose whole animal strength
has left the ground floor and mounted to the upper story. They know
better how to mount Pegasus than the beast of old Peter, they rarely
marry, although they are accustomed to lavish the fury of their passions
on some wandering or imaginary Chloris.

But the men whose noses are stained with snuff;

But those who, to their misfortune, have a perpetual cold in their head;

But the sailors who smoke or chew;

But those men whose dry and bilious temperament makes them always look
as if they had eaten a sour apple;

But the men who in private life have certain cynical habits, ridiculous
fads, and who always, in spite of everything, look unwashed;

But the husbands who have obtained the degrading name of “hen-pecked”;

Finally the old men who marry young girls.

All these people are _par excellence_ among the predestined.

There is a final class of the predestined whose ill-fortune is almost
certain, we mean restless and irritable men, who are inclined to meddle
and tyrannize, who have a great idea of domestic domination, who openly
express their low ideas of women and who know no more about life than
herrings about natural history. When these men marry, their homes have
the appearance of a wasp whose head a schoolboy has cut off, and who
dances here and there on a window pane. For this sort of predestined
the present work is a sealed book. We do not write any more for those
imbeciles, walking effigies, who are like the statues of a cathedral,
than for those old machines of Marly which are too weak to fling
water over the hedges of Versailles without being in danger of sudden
collapse.

I rarely make my observations on the conjugal oddities with which the
drawing-room is usually full, without recalling vividly a sight which I
once enjoyed in early youth:

In 1819 I was living in a thatched cottage situated in the bosom of the
delightful valley l’Isle-Adam. My hermitage neighbored on the park of
Cassan, the sweetest of retreats, the most fascinating in aspect, the
most attractive as a place to ramble in, the most cool and refreshing
in summer, of all places created by luxury and art. This verdant
country-seat owes its origin to a farmer-general of the good old times,
a certain Bergeret, celebrated for his originality; who among other
fantastic dandyisms adopted the habit of going to the opera, with his
hair powdered in gold; he used to light up his park for his own solitary
delectation and on one occasion ordered a sumptuous entertainment there,
in which he alone took part. This rustic Sardanapalus returned from
Italy so passionately charmed with the scenery of that beautiful country
that, by a sudden freak of enthusiasm, he spent four or five millions
in order to represent in his park the scenes of which he had pictures in
his portfolio. The most charming contrasts of foliage, the rarest trees,
long valleys, and prospects the most picturesque that could be brought
from abroad, Borromean islands floating on clear eddying streams like so
many rays, which concentrate their various lustres on a single point, on
an Isola Bella, from which the enchanted eye takes in each detail at
its leisure, or on an island in the bosom of which is a little house
concealed under the drooping foliage of a century-old ash, an island
fringed with irises, rose-bushes, and flowers which appears like an
emerald richly set. Ah! one might rove a thousand leagues for such a
place! The most sickly, the most soured, the most disgusted of our men
of genius in ill health would die of satiety at the end of fifteen days,
overwhelmed with the luscious sweetness of fresh life in such a spot.

The man who was quite regardless of the Eden which he thus possessed
had neither wife nor children, but was attached to a large ape which
he kept. A graceful turret of wood, supported by a sculptured column,
served as a dwelling place for this vicious animal, who being kept
chained and rarely petted by his eccentric master, oftener at Paris
than in his country home, had gained a very bad reputation. I recollect
seeing him once in the presence of certain ladies show almost as much
insolence as if he had been a man. His master was obliged to kill him,
so mischievous did he gradually become.

One morning while I was sitting under a beautiful tulip tree in flower,
occupied in doing nothing but inhaling the lovely perfumes which the
tall poplars kept confined within the brilliant enclosure, enjoying
the silence of the groves, listening to the murmuring waters and the
rustling leaves, admiring the blue gaps outlined above my head by clouds
of pearly sheen and gold, wandering fancy free in dreams of my future,
I heard some lout or other, who had arrived the day before from Paris,
playing on a violin with the violence of a man who has nothing else to
do. I would not wish for my worst enemy to hear anything so utterly
in discord with the sublime harmony of nature. If the distant notes of
Roland’s Horn had only filled the air with life, perhaps--but a noisy
fiddler like this, who undertakes to bring to you the expression of
human ideas and the phraseology of music! This Amphion, who was
walking up and down the dining-room, finished by taking a seat on the
window-sill, exactly in front of the monkey. Perhaps he was looking for
an audience. Suddenly I saw the animal quietly descend from his little
dungeon, stand upon his hind feet, bow his head forward like a swimmer
and fold his arms over his bosom like Spartacus in chains, or Catiline
listening to Cicero. The banker, summoned by a sweet voice whose silvery
tone recalled a boudoir not unknown to me, laid his violin on the
window-sill and made off like a swallow who rejoins his companion by a
rapid level swoop. The great monkey, whose chain was sufficiently long,
approached the window and gravely took in hand the violin. I don’t know
whether you have ever had as I have the pleasure of seeing a monkey try
to learn music, but at the present moment, when I laugh much less than
I did in those careless days, I never think of that monkey without a
smile; the semi-man began by grasping the instrument with his fist and
by sniffing at it as if he were tasting the flavor of an apple. The
snort from his nostrils probably produced a dull harmonious sound in the
sonorous wood and then the orang-outang shook his head, turned over the
violin, turned it back again, raised it up in the air, lowered it, held
it straight out, shook it, put it to his ear, set it down, and picked it
up again with a rapidity of movement peculiar to these agile creatures.
He seemed to question the dumb wood with faltering sagacity and in his
gestures there was something marvelous as well as infantile. At last he
undertook with grotesque gestures to place the violin under his chin,
while in one hand he held the neck; but like a spoiled child he soon
wearied of a study which required skill not to be obtained in a moment
and he twitched the strings without being able to draw forth anything
but discordant sounds. He seemed annoyed, laid the violin on the
window-sill and snatching up the bow he began to push it to and fro
with violence, like a mason sawing a block of stone. This effort only
succeeded in wearying his fastidious ears, and he took the bow with
both hands and snapped it in two on the innocent instrument, source of
harmony and delight. It seemed as if I saw before me a schoolboy holding
under him a companion lying face downwards, while he pommeled him with a
shower of blows from his fist, as if to punish him for some delinquency.
The violin being now tried and condemned, the monkey sat down upon the
fragments of it and amused himself with stupid joy in mixing up the
yellow strings of the broken bow.

Never since that day have I been able to look upon the home of
the predestined without comparing the majority of husbands to this
orang-outang trying to play the violin.

Love is the most melodious of all harmonies and the sentiment of love
is innate. Woman is a delightful instrument of pleasure, but it is
necessary to know its trembling strings, to study the position of them,
the timid keyboard, the fingering so changeful and capricious which
befits it. How many monkeys--men, I mean--marry without knowing what a
woman is! How many of the predestined proceed with their wives as the
ape of Cassan did with his violin! They have broken the heart which
they did not understand, as they might dim and disdain the amulet whose
secret was unknown to them. They are children their whole life through,
who leave life with empty hands after having talked about love, about
pleasure, about licentiousness and virtue as slaves talk about liberty.
Almost all of them married with the most profound ignorance of women and
of love. They commenced by breaking in the door of a strange house and
expected to be welcomed in this drawing-room. But the rudest artist
knows that between him and his instrument, of wood, or of ivory, there
exists a mysterious sort of friendship. He knows by experience that it
takes years to establish this understanding between an inert matter and
himself. He did not discover, at the first touch, the resources, the
caprices, the deficiencies, the excellencies of his instrument. It did
not become a living soul for him, a source of incomparable melody until
he had studied for a long time; man and instrument did not come to
understand each other like two friends, until both of them had been
skillfully questioned and tested by frequent intercourse.

Can a man ever learn woman and know how to decipher this wondrous strain
of music, by remaining through life like a seminarian in his cell? Is
it possible that a man who makes it his business to think for others,
to judge others, to rule others, to steal money from others, to feed, to
heal, to wound others--that, in fact, any of our predestined, can spare
time to study a woman? They sell their time for money, how can they give
it away for happiness? Money is their god. No one can serve two masters
at the same time. Is not the world, moreover, full of young women who
drag along pale and weak, sickly and suffering? Some of them are the
prey of feverish inflammations more or less serious, others lie under
the cruel tyranny of nervous attacks more or less violent. All the
husbands of these women belong to the class of the ignorant and the
predestined. They have caused their own misfortune and expended as
much pains in producing it as the husband artist would have bestowed in
bringing to flower the late and delightful blooms of pleasure. The time
which an ignorant man passes to consummate his own ruin is precisely
that which a man of knowledge employs in the education of his happiness.


                                XXVI.
             Do not begin marriage by a violation of law.


In the preceding meditations we have indicated the extent of the evil
with the reckless audacity of those surgeons, who boldly induce the
formation of false tissues under which a shameful wound is concealed.
Public virtue, transferred to the table of our amphitheatre, has lost
even its carcass under the strokes of the scalpel. Lover or husband,
have you smiled, or have you trembled at this evil? Well, it is with
malicious delight that we lay this huge social burden on the conscience
of the predestined. Harlequin, when he tried to find out whether his
horse could be accustomed to go without food, was not more ridiculous
than the men who wish to find happiness in their home and yet refuse to
cultivate it with all the pains which it demands. The errors of women
are so many indictments of egotism, neglect and worthlessness in
husbands.

Yet it is yours, reader, it pertains to you, who have often condemned
in another the crime which you yourself commit, it is yours to hold the
balance. One of the scales is quite loaded, take care what you are going
to put in the other. Reckon up the number of predestined ones who may be
found among the total number of married people, weigh them, and you will
then know where the evil is seated.

Let us try to penetrate more deeply into the causes of this conjugal
sickliness.

The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the
most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter.
Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought,
had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional
sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions. This double nature of ours
makes of man both an animal and a lover. This distinction gives the key
to the social problem which we are considering.

Marriage may be considered in three ways, politically, as well as from
a civil and moral point of view: as a law, as a contract and as an
institution. As a law, its object is a reproduction of the species; as a
contract, it relates to the transmission of property; as an institution,
it is a guarantee which all men give and by which all are bound:
they have father and mother, and they will have children. Marriage,
therefore, ought to be the object of universal respect. Society can
only take into consideration those cardinal points, which, from a social
point of view, dominate the conjugal question.

Most men have no other views in marrying, than reproduction, property or
children; but neither reproduction nor property nor children constitutes
happiness. The command, “Increase and multiply,” does not imply love. To
ask of a young girl whom we have seen fourteen times in fifteen days, to
give you love in the name of law, the king and justice, is an absurdity
worthy of the majority of the predestined.

Love is the union between natural craving and sentiment; happiness in
marriage results in perfect union of soul between a married pair. Hence
it follows that in order to be happy a man must feel himself bound by
certain rules of honor and delicacy. After having enjoyed the benefit of
the social law which consecrates the natural craving, he must obey also
the secret laws of nature by which sentiments unfold themselves. If
he stakes his happiness on being himself loved, he must himself love
sincerely: nothing can resist a genuine passion.

But to feel this passion is always to feel desire. Can a man always
desire his wife?

Yes.

It is as absurd to deny that it is possible for a man always to love the
same woman, as it would be to affirm that some famous musician needed
several violins in order to execute a piece of music or compose a
charming melody.

Love is the poetry of the senses. It has the destiny of all that which
is great in man and of all that which proceeds from his thought. Either
it is sublime, or it is not. When once it exists, it exists forever and
goes on always increasing. This is the love which the ancients made the
child of heaven and earth.

Literature revolves round seven situations; music expresses everything
with seven notes; painting employs but seven colors; like these three
arts, love perhaps founds itself on seven principles, but we leave this
investigation for the next century to carry out.

If poetry, music and painting have found infinite forms of expression,
pleasure should be even more diversified. For in the three arts which
aid us in seeking, often with little success, truth by means of analogy,
the man stands alone with his imagination, while love is the union of
two bodies and of two souls. If the three principal methods upon which
we rely for the expression of thought require preliminary study in those
whom nature has made poets, musicians or painters, is it not obvious
that, in order, to be happy, it is necessary to be initiated into the
secrets of pleasure? All men experience the craving for reproduction,
as all feel hunger and thirst; but all are not called to be lovers
and gastronomists. Our present civilization has proved that taste is a
science, and it is only certain privileged beings who have learned how
to eat and drink. Pleasure considered as an art is still waiting for its
physiologists. As for ourselves, we are contented with pointing out that
ignorance of the principles upon which happiness is founded, is the sole
cause of that misfortune which is the lot of all the predestined.

It is with the greatest timidity that we venture upon the publication
of a few aphorisms which may give birth to this new art, as casts have
created the science of geology; and we offer them for the meditation of
philosophers, of young marrying people and of the predestined.


                        CATECHISM OF MARRIAGE.


                                XXVII.
                        Marriage is a science.


                               XXVIII.
A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected
                         at least one woman.


                                XXIX.
           The fate of the home depends on the first night.


                                 XXX.
A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making
a sacrifice.


                                XXXI.
In love, putting aside all consideration of the soul, the heart of a
woman is like a lyre which does not reveal its secret, excepting to him
who is a skillful player.


                                XXXII.
Independently of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of
all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all
pleasure devoid of passionate feeling.


                               XXXIII.
The interest of a husband as much as his honor forbids him to indulge
a pleasure which he has not had the skill to make his wife desire.


                                XXXIV.
Pleasure being caused by the union of sensation and sentiment, we can
say without fear of contradiction that pleasures are a sort of material
ideas.


                                XXXV.
As ideas are capable of infinite combination, it ought to be the same
                           with pleasures.


                                XXXVI.
In the life of man there are no two moments of pleasure exactly alike,
 any more than there are two leaves of identical shape upon the same
                                tree.


                               XXXVII.
If there are differences between one moment of pleasure and another, a
             man can always be happy with the same woman.


                               XXXVIII.
To seize adroitly upon the varieties of pleasure, to develop them, to
impart to them a new style, an original expression, constitutes the
genius of a husband.


                                XXXIX.
Between two beings who do not love each other this genius is
licentiousness; but the caresses over which love presides are always
pure.


                                 XL.
    The married woman who is the most chaste may be also the most
                             voluptuous.


                                 XLI.
      The most virtuous woman can be forward without knowing it.


                                XLII.
When two human beings are united by pleasure, all social
conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which
many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is
a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love
ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes,
excepting at the due season.


                                XLIII.
 Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but
                          in striking true.


                                XLIV.
To call a desire into being, to nourish it, to develop it, to bring
it to full growth, to excite it, to satisfy it, is a complete poem of
itself.


                                 XLV.
The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from
the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the
ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the
dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.


                                XLVI.
                 Each night ought to have its _menu_.


                                XLVII.
    Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster which devours
                  everything, that is, familiarity.


                               XLVIII.
 If a man cannot distinguish the difference between the pleasures of
          two consecutive nights, he has married too early.


                                XLIX.
  It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it
is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from
time to time.


                                  L.
 A husband ought never to be the first to go to sleep and the last to
                               awaken.


                                 LI.
 The man who enters his wife’s dressing-room is either a philosopher or
                             an imbecile.


                                 LII.
       The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.


                                LIII.
  The married woman is a slave whom one must know how to set upon a
                               throne.


                                 LIV.
 A man must not flatter himself that he knows his wife, and is making
           her happy unless he sees her often at his knees.


It is to the whole ignorant troop of our predestined, of our legions
of snivelers, of smokers, of snuff-takers, of old and captious men that
Sterne addressed, in _Tristram Shandy_, the letter written by Walter
Shandy to his brother Toby, when this last proposed to marry the widow
Wadman.

These celebrated instructions which the most original of English writers
has comprised in this letter, suffice with some few exceptions to
complete our observations on the manner in which husbands should behave
to their wives; and we offer it in its original form to the reflections
of the predestined, begging that they will meditate upon it as one of
the most solid masterpieces of human wit.


 “MY DEAR BROTHER TOBY,

 “What I am going to say to thee is upon the nature of women, and of
  love-making to them; and perhaps it is as well for thee--tho’ not
  so well for me--that thou hast occasion for a letter of
  instructions upon that head, and that I am able to write it to
  thee.

 “Had it been the good pleasure of Him who disposes of our lots, and
  thou no sufferer by the knowledge, I had been well content that
  thou should’st have dipped the pen this moment into the ink
  instead of myself; but that not being the case--Mrs. Shandy being
  now close beside me, preparing for bed--I have thrown together
  without order, and just as they have come into my mind, such hints
  and documents as I deem may be of use to thee; intending, in this,
  to give thee a token of my love; not doubting, my dear Toby, of
  the manner in which it will be accepted.

 “In the first place, with regard to all which concerns religion in
  the affair--though I perceive from a glow in my cheek, that I
  blush as I begin to speak to thee upon the subject, as well
  knowing, notwithstanding thy unaffected secrecy, how few of its
  offices thou neglectest--yet I would remind thee of one (during
  the continuance of thy courtship) in a particular manner, which I
  would not have omitted; and that is, never to go forth upon the
  enterprise, whether it be in the morning or in the afternoon,
  without first recommending thyself to the protection of Almighty
  God, that He may defend thee from the evil one.

 “Shave the whole top of thy crown clean once at least every four or
  five days, but oftener if convenient; lest in taking off thy wig
  before her, thro’ absence of mind, she should be able to discover
  how much has been cut away by Time--how much by Trim.

 “‘Twere better to keep ideas of baldness out of her fancy.

 “Always carry it in thy mind, and act upon it as a sure maxim,
  Toby--

 “_‘That women are timid.’_ And ‘tis well they are--else there would
  be no dealing with them.

 “Let not thy breeches be too tight, or hang too loose about thy
  thighs, like the trunk-hose of our ancestors.

 “A just medium prevents all conclusions.

 “Whatever thou hast to say, be it more or less, forget not to utter
  it in a low soft tone of voice. Silence, and whatever approaches
  it, weaves dreams of midnight secrecy into the brain: For this
  cause, if thou canst help it, never throw down the tongs and
  poker.

 “Avoid all kinds of pleasantry and facetiousness in thy discourse
  with her, and do whatever lies in thy power at the same time, to
  keep from her all books and writings which tend there to: there
  are some devotional tracts, which if thou canst entice her to
  read over, it will be well: but suffer her not to look into
  _Rabelais_, or _Scarron_, or _Don Quixote_.

 “They are all books which excite laughter; and thou knowest, dear
  Toby, that there is no passion so serious as lust.

 “Stick a pin in the bosom of thy shirt, before thou enterest her
  parlor.

 “And if thou art permitted to sit upon the same sofa with her, and
  she gives thee occasion to lay thy hand upon hers--beware of
  taking it--thou canst not lay thy hand upon hers, but she will
  feel the temper of thine. Leave that and as many other things as
  thou canst, quite undetermined; by so doing, thou wilt have her
  curiosity on thy side; and if she is not conquered by that, and
  thy Asse continues still kicking, which there is great reason to
  suppose--thou must begin, with first losing a few ounces of blood
  below the ears, according to the practice of the ancient
  Scythians, who cured the most intemperate fits of the appetite by
  that means.

 “_Avicenna_, after this, is for having the part anointed with the
  syrup of hellebore, using proper evacuations and purges--and I
  believe rightly. But thou must eat little or no goat’s flesh, nor
  red deer--nor even foal’s flesh by any means; and carefully
  abstain--that is, as much as thou canst,--from peacocks, cranes,
  coots, didappers and water-hens.

 “As for thy drink--I need not tell thee, it must be the infusion of
  Vervain and the herb Hanea, of which Aelian relates such effects;
  but if thy stomach palls with it--discontinue it from time to
  time, taking cucumbers, melons, purslane, water-lilies, woodbine,
  and lettuce, in the stead of them.

 “There is nothing further for thee, which occurs to me at present--

 “Unless the breaking out of a fresh war.--So wishing everything,
  dear Toby, for the best,

    “I rest thy affectionate brother,

        “WALTER SHANDY.”


Under the present circumstances Sterne himself would doubtless have
omitted from his letter the passage about the ass; and, far from
advising the predestined to be bled he would have changed the regimen of
cucumbers and lettuces for one eminently substantial. He recommended the
exercise of economy, in order to attain to the power of magic liberality
in the moment of war, thus imitating the admirable example of the
English government, which in time of peace has two hundred ships in
commission, but whose shipwrights can, in time of need, furnish double
that quantity when it is desirable to scour the sea and carry off a
whole foreign navy.

When a man belongs to the small class of those who by a liberal
education have been made masters of the domain of thought, he ought
always, before marrying, to examine his physical and moral resources. To
contend advantageously with the tempest which so many attractions tend
to raise in the heart of his wife, a husband ought to possess, besides
the science of pleasure and a fortune which saves him from sinking
into any class of the predestined, robust health, exquisite tact,
considerable intellect, too much good sense to make his superiority
felt, excepting on fit occasions, and finally great acuteness of hearing
and sight.

If he has a handsome face, a good figure, a manly air, and yet falls
short of all these promises, he will sink into the class of the
predestined. On the other hand, a husband who is plain in features
but has a face full of expression, will find himself, if his wife once
forgets his plainness, in a situation most favorable for his struggle
against the genius of evil.

He will study (and this is a detail omitted from the letter of Sterne)
to give no occasion for his wife’s disgust. Also, he will resort
moderately to the use of perfumes, which, however, always expose beauty
to injurious suspicions.

He ought as carefully to study how to behave and how to pick out
subjects of conversation, as if he were courting the most inconstant
of women. It is for him that a philosopher has made the following
reflection:

“More than one woman has been rendered unhappy for the rest of her
life, has been lost and dishonored by a man whom she has ceased to
love, because he took off his coat awkwardly, trimmed one of his nails
crookedly, put on a stocking wrong side out, and was clumsy with a
button.”

One of the most important of his duties will be to conceal from his wife
the real state of his fortune, so that he may satisfy her fancies and
caprices as generous celibates are wont to do.

Then the most difficult thing of all, a thing to accomplish which
superhuman courage is required, is to exercise the most complete control
over the ass of which Sterne speaks. This ass ought to be as submissive
as a serf of the thirteenth century was to his lord; to obey and be
silent, advance and stop, at the slightest word.

Even when equipped with these advantages, a husband enters the lists
with scarcely any hope of success. Like all the rest, he still runs the
risk of becoming, for his wife, a sort of responsible editor.

“And why!” will exclaim certain good but small-minded people, whose
horizon is limited to the tip of their nose, “why is it necessary to
take so much pains in order to love, and why is it necessary to go
to school beforehand, in order to be happy in your own home? Does the
government intend to institute a professional chair of love, just as it
has instituted a chair of law?”

This is our answer:

These multiplied rules, so difficult to deduce, these minute
observations, these ideas which vary so as to suit different
temperaments, are innate, so to speak, in the heart of those who are
born for love; just as his feeling of taste and his indescribable
felicity in combining ideas are natural to the soul of the poet, the
painter or the musician. The men who would experience any fatigue in
putting into practice the instructions given in this Meditation are
naturally predestined, just as he who cannot perceive the connection
which exists between two different ideas is an imbecile. As a matter of
fact, love has its great men although they be unrecognized, as war has
its Napoleons, poetry its Andre Cheniers and philosophy its Descartes.

This last observation contains the germ of a true answer to the question
which men from time immemorial have been asking: Why are happy marriages
so very rare?

This phenomenon of the moral world is rarely met with for the reason
that people of genius are rarely met with. A passion which lasts is a
sublime drama acted by two performers of equal talent, a drama in which
sentiments form the catastrophe, where desires are incidents and the
lightest thought brings a change of scene. Now how is it possible, in
this herd of bimana which we call a nation, to meet, on any but rare
occasions, a man and a woman who possess in the same degree the genius
of love, when men of talent are so thinly sown and so rare in all other
sciences, in the pursuit of which the artist needs only to understand
himself, in order to attain success?

Up to the present moment, we have been confronted with making a forecast
of the difficulties, to some degree physical, which two married people
have to overcome, in order to be happy; but what a task would be ours
if it were necessary to unfold the startling array of moral obligations
which spring from their differences in character? Let us cry halt! The
man who is skillful enough to guide the temperament will certainly show
himself master of the soul of another.

We will suppose that our model husband fulfills the primary conditions
necessary, in order that he may dispute or maintain possession of his
wife, in spite of all assailants. We will admit that he is not to be
reckoned in any of the numerous classes of the predestined which we have
passed in review. Let us admit that he has become imbued with the spirit
of all our maxims; that he has mastered the admirable science, some of
whose precepts we have made known; that he has married wisely, that
he knows his wife, that he is loved by her; and let us continue the
enumeration of all those general causes which might aggravate the
critical situation which we shall represent him as occupying for the
instruction of the human race.




MEDITATION VI. OF BOARDING SCHOOLS.

If you have married a young lady whose education has been carried on at
a boarding school, there are thirty more obstacles to your happiness,
added to all those which we have already enumerated, and you are exactly
like a man who thrusts his hands into a wasp’s nest.

Immediately, therefore, after the nuptial blessing has been pronounced,
without allowing yourself to be imposed upon by the innocent ignorance,
the frank graces and the modest countenance of your wife, you ought to
ponder well and faithfully follow out the axioms and precepts which we
shall develop in the second part of this book. You should even put into
practice the rigors prescribed in the third part, by maintaining an
active surveillance, a paternal solicitude at all hours, for the very
day after your marriage, perhaps on the evening of your wedding day,
there is danger in the house.

I mean to say that you should call to mind the secret and profound
instruction which the pupils have acquired _de natura rerum_,--of the
nature of things. Did Lapeyrouse, Cook or Captain Peary ever show so
much ardor in navigating the ocean towards the Poles as the scholars of
the Lycee do in approaching forbidden tracts in the ocean of pleasure?
Since girls are more cunning, cleverer and more curious than boys, their
secret meetings and their conversations, which all the art of their
teachers cannot check, are necessarily presided over by a genius a
thousand times more informal than that of college boys. What man has
ever heard the moral reflections and the corrupting confidences of
these young girls? They alone know the sports at which honor is lost in
advance, those essays in pleasure, those promptings in voluptuousness,
those imitations of bliss, which may be compared to the thefts made by
greedy children from a dessert which is locked up. A girl may come
forth from her boarding school a virgin, but never chaste. She will
have discussed, time and time again at secret meetings, the important
question of lovers, and corruption will necessarily have overcome her
heart or her spirit.

Nevertheless, we will admit that your wife has not participated in these
virginal delights, in these premature deviltries. Is she any better
because she has never had any voice in the secret councils of grown-up
girls? No! She will, in any case, have contracted a friendship with
other young ladies, and our computation will be modest, if we attribute
to her no more than two or three intimate friends. Are you certain that
after your wife has left boarding school, her young friends have not
there been admitted to those confidences, in which an attempt is made to
learn in advance, at least by analogy, the pastimes of doves? And then
her friends will marry; you will have four women to watch instead of
one, four characters to divine, and you will be at the mercy of four
husbands and a dozen celibates, of whose life, principles and habits you
are quite ignorant, at a time when our meditations have revealed to
you certain coming of a day when you will have your hands full with the
people whom you married with your wife. Satan alone could have thought
of placing a girl’s boarding school in the middle of a large town!
Madame Campan had at least the wisdom to set up her famous institution
at Ecouen. This sensible precaution proved that she was no ordinary
woman. There, her young ladies did not gaze upon the picture gallery of
the streets, the huge and grotesque figures and the obscene words drawn
by some evil-spirited pencil. They had not perpetually before their eyes
the spectacle of human infirmities exhibited at every barrier in France,
and treacherous book-stalls did not vomit out upon them in secret the
poison of books which taught evil and set passion on fire. This wise
school-mistress, moreover, could only at Ecouen preserve a young lady
for you spotless and pure, if, even there, that were possible. Perhaps
you hope to find no difficulty in preventing your wife from seeing
her school friends? What folly! She will meet them at the ball, at the
theatre, out walking and in the world at large; and how many services
two friends can render each other! But we will meditate upon this new
subject of alarm in its proper place and order.

Nor is this all; if your mother-in-law sent her daughter to a boarding
school, do you believe that this was out of solicitude for her
daughter? A girl of twelve or fifteen is a terrible Argus; and if your
mother-in-law did not wish to have an Argus in her house I should be
inclined to suspect that your mother-in-law belonged undoubtedly to the
most shady section of our honest women. She will, therefore, prove for
her daughter on every occasion either a deadly example or a dangerous
adviser.

Let us stop here!--The mother-in-law requires a whole Meditation for
herself.

So that, whichever way you turn, the bed of marriage, in this
connection, is equally full of thorns.

Before the Revolution, several aristocratic families used to send their
daughters to the convent. This example was followed by a number of
people who imagined that in sending their daughters to a school where
the daughters of some great noblemen were sent, they would assume the
tone and manners of aristocrats. This delusion of pride was, from
the first, fatal to domestic happiness; for the convents had all the
disadvantages of other boarding schools. The idleness that prevailed
there was more terrible. The cloister bars inflame the imagination.
Solitude is a condition very favorable to the devil; and one can
scarcely imagine what ravages the most ordinary phenomena of life are
able to leave in the soul of these young girls, dreamy, ignorant and
unoccupied.

Some of them, by reason of their having indulged idle fancies, are led
into curious blunders. Others, having indulged in exaggerated ideas of
married life, say to themselves, as soon as they have taken a husband,
“What! Is this all?” In every way, the imperfect instruction, which is
given to girls educated in common, has in it all the danger of ignorance
and all the unhappiness of science.

A young girl brought up at home by her mother or by her virtuous,
bigoted, amiable or cross-grained old aunt; a young girl, whose steps
have never crossed the home threshold without being surrounded by
chaperons, whose laborious childhood has been wearied by tasks, albeit
they were profitless, to whom in short everything is a mystery, even the
Seraphin puppet show, is one of those treasures which are met with, here
and there in the world, like woodland flowers surrounded by brambles so
thick that mortal eye cannot discern them. The man who owns a flower
so sweet and pure as this, and leaves it to be cultivated by others,
deserves his unhappiness a thousand times over. He is either a monster
or a fool.

And if in the preceding Meditation we have succeeded in proving to
you that by far the greater number of men live in the most absolute
indifference to their personal honor, in the matter of marriage, is
it reasonable to believe that any considerable number of them are
sufficiently rich, sufficiently intellectual, sufficiently penetrating
to waste, like Burchell in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, one or two years in
studying and watching the girls whom they mean to make their wives, when
they pay so little attention to them after conjugal possession during
that period of time which the English call the honeymoon, and whose
influence we shall shortly discuss?

Since, however, we have spent some time in reflecting upon this
important matter, we would observe that there are many methods of
choosing more or less successfully, even though the choice be promptly
made.

It is, for example, beyond doubt that the probabilities will be in your
favor:

I. If you have chosen a young lady whose temperament resembles that of
the women of Louisiana or the Carolinas.

To obtain reliable information concerning the temperament of a young
person, it is necessary to put into vigorous operation the system which
Gil Blas prescribes, in dealing with chambermaids, a system employed by
statesmen to discover conspiracies and to learn how the ministers have
passed the night.

II. If you choose a young lady who, without being plain, does not belong
to the class of pretty women.

We regard it as an infallible principle that great sweetness of
disposition united in a woman with plainness that is not repulsive, form
two indubitable elements of success in securing the greatest possible
happiness to the home.

But would you learn the truth? Open your Rousseau; for there is not a
single question of public morals whose trend he has not pointed out in
advance. Read:

“Among people of fixed principles the girls are careless, the women
severe; the contrary is the case among people of no principle.”

To admit the truth enshrined in this profound and truthful remark is
to conclude, that there would be fewer unhappy marriages if men wedded
their mistresses. The education of girls requires, therefore, important
modifications in France. Up to this time French laws and French manners
instituted to distinguish between a misdemeanor and a crime, have
encouraged crime. In reality the fault committed by a young girl is
scarcely ever a misdemeanor, if you compare it with that committed by
the married woman. Is there any comparison between the danger of giving
liberty to girls and that of allowing it to wives? The idea of taking a
young girl on trial makes more serious men think than fools laugh. The
manners of Germany, of Switzerland, of England and of the United States
give to young ladies such rights as in France would be considered
the subversion of all morality; and yet it is certain that in these
countries there are fewer unhappy marriages than in France.


                                 LV.
  “Before a woman gives herself entirely up to her lover, she ought to
consider well what his love has to offer her. The gift of her esteem and
confidence should necessarily precede that of her heart.”


Sparkling with truth as they are, these lines probably filled with light
the dungeon, in the depths of which Mirabeau wrote them; and the keen
observation which they bear witness to, although prompted by the most
stormy of his passions, has none the less influence even now in solving
the social problem on which we are engaged. In fact, a marriage sealed
under the auspices of the religious scrutiny which assumes the existence
of love, and subjected to the atmosphere of that disenchantment which
follows on possession, ought naturally to be the most firmly-welded of
all human unions.

A woman then ought never to reproach her husband for the legal right,
in virtue of which she belongs to him. She ought not to find in this
compulsory submission any excuse for yielding to a lover, because some
time after her marriage she has discovered in her own heart a traitor
whose sophisms seduce her by asking twenty times an hour, “Wherefore,
since she has been given against her will to a man whom she does not
love, should she not give herself, of her own free-will, to a man
whom she does love.” A woman is not to be tolerated in her complaints
concerning faults inseparable from human nature. She has, in advance,
made trial of the tyranny which they exercise, and taken sides with the
caprices which they exhibit.

A great many young girls are likely to be disappointed in their hopes of
love!--But will it not be an immense advantage to them to have escaped
being made the companions of men whom they would have had the right to
despise?

Certain alarmists will exclaim that such an alteration in our manners
would bring about a public dissoluteness which would be frightful; that
the laws, and the customs which prompt the laws, could not after all
authorize scandal and immorality; and if certain unavoidable abuses do
exist, at least society ought not to sanction them.

It is easy to say, in reply, first of all, that the proposed system
tends to prevent those abuses which have been hitherto regarded as
incapable of prevention; but, the calculations of our statistics,
inexact as they are, have invariably pointed out a widely prevailing
social sore, and our moralists may, therefore, be accused of preferring
the greater to the lesser evil, the violation of the principle on which
society is constituted, to the granting of a certain liberty to girls;
and dissoluteness in mothers of families, such as poisons the springs of
public education and brings unhappiness upon at least four persons, to
dissoluteness in a young girl, which only affects herself or at the
most a child besides. Let the virtue of ten virgins be lost rather than
forfeit this sanctity of morals, that crown of honor with which the
mother of a family should be invested! In the picture presented by
a young girl abandoned by her betrayer, there is something imposing,
something indescribably sacred; here we see oaths violated, holy
confidences betrayed, and on the ruins of a too facile virtue innocence
sits in tears, doubting everything, because compelled to doubt the love
of a father for his child. The unfortunate girl is still innocent; she
may yet become a faithful wife, a tender mother, and, if the past is
mantled in clouds, the future is blue as the clear sky. Shall we not
find these tender tints in the gloomy pictures of loves which violate
the marriage law? In the one, the woman is the victim, in the other,
she is a criminal. What hope is there for the unfaithful wife? If God
pardons the fault, the most exemplary life cannot efface, here below,
its living consequences. If James I was the son of Rizzio, the crime of
Mary lasted as long as did her mournful though royal house, and the fall
of the Stuarts was the justice of God.

But in good faith, would the emancipation of girls set free such a host
of dangers?

It is very easy to accuse a young person for suffering herself to be
deceived, in the desire to escape, at any price, from the condition of
girlhood; but such an accusation is only just in the present condition
of our manners. At the present day, a young person knows nothing about
seduction and its snares, she relies altogether upon her weakness, and
mingling with this reliance the convenient maxims of the fashionable
world, she takes as her guide while under the control of those desires
which everything conspires to excite, her own deluding fancies, which
prove a guide all the more treacherous, because a young girl rarely ever
confides to another the secret thoughts of her first love.

If she were free, an education free from prejudices would arm her
against the love of the first comer. She would, like any one else, be
very much better able to meet dangers of which she knew, than perils
whose extent had been concealed from her. And, moreover, is it necessary
for a girl to be any the less under the watchful eye of her mother,
because she is mistress of her own actions? Are we to count as nothing
the modesty and the fears which nature has made so powerful in the
soul of a young girl, for the very purpose of preserving her from the
misfortune of submitting to a man who does not love her? Again, what
girl is there so thoughtless as not to discern, that the most immoral
man wishes his wife to be a woman of principle, as masters desire their
servants to be perfect; and that, therefore, her virtue is the richest
and the most advantageous of all possessions?

After all, what is the question before us? For what do you think we
are stipulating? We are making a claim for five or six hundred thousand
maidens, protected by their instinctive timidity, and by the high price
at which they rate themselves; they understand how to defend themselves,
just as well as they know how to sell themselves. The eighteen millions
of human beings, whom we have excepted from this consideration, almost
invariably contract marriages in accordance with the system which we
are trying to make paramount in our system of manners; and as to the
intermediary classes by which we poor bimana are separated from the men
of privilege who march at the head of a nation, the number of castaway
children which these classes, although in tolerably easy circumstances,
consign to misery, goes on increasing since the peace, if we may believe
M. Benoiston de Chateauneuf, one of the most courageous of those savants
who have devoted themselves to the arid yet useful study of statistics.
We may guess how deep-seated is the social hurt, for which we propound
a remedy, if we reckon the number of natural children which statistics
reveal, and the number of illicit adventures whose evidence in high
society we are forced to suspect. But it is difficult here to make quite
plain all the advantages which would result from the emancipation of
young girls. When we come to observe the circumstances which attend a
marriage, such as our present manners approve of, judicious minds must
appreciate the value of that system of education and liberty, which we
demand for young girls, in the name of reason and nature. The prejudice
which we in France entertain in favor of the virginity of brides is the
most silly of all those which still survive among us. The Orientals take
their brides without distressing themselves about the past and lock them
up in order to be more certain about the future; the French put
their daughters into a sort of seraglio defended by their mothers, by
prejudice, and by religious ideas, and give the most complete liberty
to their wives, thus showing themselves much more solicitous about a
woman’s past than about her future. The point we are aiming at is to
bring about a reversal of our system of manners. If we did so we should
end, perhaps, by giving to faithful married life all the flavor and the
piquancy which women of to-day find in acts of infidelity.

But this discussion would take us far from our subject, if it led us
to examine, in all its details, the vast improvement in morals which
doubtless will distinguish twentieth century France; for morals are
reformed only very gradually! Is it not necessary, in order to produce
the slightest change, that the most daring dreams of the past century
become the most trite ideas of the present one? We have touched upon
this question merely in a trifling mood, for the purposes of showing
that we are not blind to its importance, and of bequeathing also to
posterity the outline of a work, which they may complete. To speak more
accurately there is a third work to be composed; the first concerns
courtesans, while the second is the physiology of pleasure!

“When there are ten of us, we cross ourselves.”

In the present state of our morals and of our imperfect civilization,
a problem crops up which for the moment is insoluble, and which renders
superfluous all discussion on the art of choosing a wife; we commend it,
as we have done all the others, to the meditation of philosophers.



                               PROBLEM.

It has not yet been decided whether a wife is forced into infidelity by
the impossibility of obtaining any change, or by the liberty which is
allowed her in this connection.

Moreover, as in this work we pitch upon a man at the moment that he
is newly married, we declare that if he has found a wife of sanguine
temperament, of vivid imagination, of a nervous constitution or of an
indolent character, his situation cannot fail to be extremely serious.

A man would find himself in a position of danger even more critical if
his wife drank nothing but water [see the Meditation entitled _Conjugal
Hygiene_]; but if she had some talent for singing, or if she were
disposed to take cold easily, he should tremble all the time; for it
must be remembered that women who sing are at least as passionate as
women whose mucous membrane shows extreme delicacy.

Again, this danger would be aggravated still more if your wife were less
than seventeen; or if, on the other hand, her general complexion were
pale and dull, for this sort of woman is almost always artificial.

But we do not wish to anticipate here any description of the terrors
which threaten husbands from the symptoms of unhappiness which they read
in the character of their wives. This digression has already taken
us too far from the subject of boarding schools, in which so many
catastrophes are hatched, and from which issue so many young girls
incapable of appreciating the painful sacrifices by which the honest man
who does them the honor of marrying them, has obtained opulence; young
girls eager for the enjoyments of luxury, ignorant of our laws, ignorant
of our manners, claim with avidity the empire which their beauty yields
them, and show themselves quite ready to turn away from the genuine
utterances of the heart, while they readily listen to the buzzing of
flattery.

This Meditation should plant in the memory of all who read it, even
those who merely open the book for the sake of glancing at it or
distracting their mind, an intense repugnance for young women educated
in a boarding school, and if it succeeds in doing so, its services to
the public will have already proved considerable.




MEDITATION VII. OF THE HONEYMOON.

If our meditations prove that it is almost impossible for a married
woman to remain virtuous in France, our enumeration of the celibates and
the predestined, our remarks upon the education of girls, and our
rapid survey of the difficulties which attend the choice of a wife
will explain up to a certain point this national frailty. Thus, after
indicating frankly the aching malady under which the social slate is
laboring, we have sought for the causes in the imperfection of the laws,
in the irrational condition of our manners, in the incapacity of our
minds, and in the contradictions which characterize our habits. A single
point still claims our observation, and that is the first onslaught of
the evil we are confronting.

We reach this first question on approaching the high problems suggested
by the honeymoon; and although we find here the starting point of all
the phenomena of married life, it appears to us to be the brilliant
link round which are clustered all our observations, our axioms, our
problems, which have been scattered deliberately among the wise quips
which our loquacious meditations retail. The honeymoon would seem to be,
if we may use the expression, the apogee of that analysis to which
we must apply ourselves, before engaging in battle our two imaginary
champions.

The expression _honeymoon_ is an Anglicism, which has become an idiom in
all languages, so gracefully does it depict the nuptial season which is
so fugitive, and during which life is nothing but sweetness and rapture;
the expression survives as illusions and errors survive, for it contains
the most odious of falsehoods. If this season is presented to us as a
nymph crowned with fresh flowers, caressing as a siren, it is because in
it is unhappiness personified and unhappiness generally comes during the
indulgence of folly.

The married couple who intend to love each other during their whole life
have no notion of a honeymoon; for them it has no existence, or rather
its existence is perennial; they are like the immortals who do not
understand death. But the consideration of this happiness is not germane
to our book; and for our readers marriage is under the influence of two
moons, the honeymoon and the Red-moon. This last terminates its course
by a revolution, which changes it to a crescent; and when once it rises
upon a home its light there is eternal.

How can the honeymoon rise upon two beings who cannot possibly love each
other?

How can it set, when once it has risen?

Have all marriages their honeymoon?

Let us proceed to answer these questions in order.

It is in this connection that the admirable education which we give to
girls, and the wise provisions made by the law under which men marry,
bear all their fruit. Let us examine the circumstances which precede and
attend those marriages which are least disastrous.

The tone of our morals develops in the young girl whom you make your
wife a curiosity which is naturally excessive; but as mothers in France
pique themselves on exposing their girls every day to the fire which
they do not allow to scorch them, this curiosity has no limit.

Her profound ignorance of the mysteries of marriage conceals from this
creature, who is as innocent as she is crafty, a clear view of the
dangers by which marriage is followed; and as marriage is incessantly
described to her as an epoch in which tyranny and liberty equally
prevail, and in which enjoyment and supremacy are to be indulged in,
her desires are intensified by all her interest in an existence as yet
unfulfilled; for her to marry is to be called up from nothingness into
life!

If she has a disposition for happiness, for religion, for morality,
the voices of the law and of her mother have repeated to her that this
happiness can only come to her from you.

Obedience if it is not virtue, is at least a necessary thing with
her; for she expects everything from you. In the first place, society
sanctions the slavery of a wife, but she does not conceive even the wish
to be free, for she feels herself weak, timid and ignorant.

Of course she tries to please you, unless a chance error is committed,
or she is seized by a repugnance which it would be unpardonable in you
not to divine. She tries to please because she does not know you.

In a word, in order to complete your triumph, you take her at a moment
when nature demands, often with some violence, the pleasure of which you
are the dispenser. Like St. Peter you hold the keys of Paradise.

I would ask of any reasonable creature, would a demon marshal round the
angel whose ruin he had vowed all the elements of disaster with more
solicitude than that with which good morals conspire against the
happiness of a husband? Are you not a king surrounded by flatterers?

This young girl, with all her ignorance and all her desires, committed
to the mercy of a man who, even though he be in love, cannot know her
shrinking and secret emotions, will submit to him with a certain sense
of shame, and will be obedient and complaisant so long as her young
imagination persuades her to expect the pleasure or the happiness of
that morrow which never dawns.

In this unnatural situation social laws and the laws of nature are in
conflict, but the young girl obediently abandons herself to it, and,
from motives of self-interest, suffers in silence. Her obedience is a
speculation; her complaisance is a hope; her devotion to you is a
sort of vocation, of which you reap the advantage; and her silence is
generosity. She will remain the victim of your caprices so long as she
does not understand them; she will suffer from the limitations of your
character until she has studied it; she will sacrifice herself without
love, because she believed in the show of passion you made at the first
moment of possession; she will no longer be silent when once she has
learned the uselessness of her sacrifices.

And then the morning arrives when the inconsistencies which have
prevailed in this union rise up like branches of a tree bent down for
a moment under a weight which has been gradually lightened. You have
mistaken for love the negative attitude of a young girl who was waiting
for happiness, who flew in advance of your desires, in the hope that
you would go forward in anticipation of hers, and who did not dare
to complain of the secret unhappiness, for which she at first accused
herself. What man could fail to be the dupe of a delusion prepared at
such long range, and in which a young innocent woman is at once the
accomplice and the victim? Unless you were a divine being it would
be impossible for you to escape the fascination with which nature and
society have surrounded you. Is not a snare set in everything which
surrounds you on the outside and influences you within? For in order to
be happy, is it not necessary to control the impetuous desires of your
senses? Where is the powerful barrier to restrain her, raised by the
light hand of a woman whom you wish to please, because you do not
possess? Moreover, you have caused your troops to parade and march by,
when there was no one at the window; you have discharged your fireworks
whose framework alone was left, when your guest arrived to see them.
Your wife, before the pledges of marriage, was like a Mohican at
the Opera: the teacher becomes listless, when the savage begins to
understand.


                                      LVI.
   In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each
other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once it
is passed.


This first entrance into life of two persons, during which a woman is
encouraged by the hope of happiness, by the still fresh sentiment of her
married duty, by the wish to please, by the sense of virtue which begins
to be so attractive as soon as it shows love to be in harmony with duty,
is called the honeymoon. How can it last long between two beings who are
united for their whole life, unless they know each other perfectly? If
there is one thing which ought to cause astonishment it is this, that
the deplorable absurdities which our manners heap up around the nuptial
couch give birth to so few hatreds! But that the life of the wise man
is a calm current, and that of the prodigal a cataract; that the child,
whose thoughtless hands have stripped the leaves from every rose upon
his pathway, finds nothing but thorns on his return, that the man who
in his wild youth has squandered a million, will never enjoy, during his
life, the income of forty thousand francs, which this million would have
provided--are trite commonplaces, if one thinks of the moral theory of
life; but new discoveries, if we consider the conduct of most men. You
may see here a true image of all honeymoons; this is their history, this
is the plain fact and not the cause that underlies it.

But that men endowed with a certain power of thought by a privileged
education, and accustomed to think deliberately, in order to shine in
politics, literature, art, commerce or private life--that these men
should all marry with the intention of being happy, of governing a wife,
either by love or by force, and should all tumble into the same pitfall
and should become foolish, after having enjoyed a certain happiness for
a certain time,--this is certainly a problem whose solution is to be
found rather in the unknown depths of the human soul, than in the quasi
physical truths, on the basis of which we have hitherto attempted to
explain some of these phenomena. The risky search for the secret laws,
which almost all men are bound to violate without knowing it, under
these circumstances, promises abundant glory for any one even though he
make shipwreck in the enterprise upon which we now venture to set forth.
Let us then make the attempt.

In spite of all that fools have to say about the difficulty they have
had in explaining love, there are certain principles relating to it
as infallible as those of geometry; but in each character these are
modified according to its tendency; hence the caprices of love, which
are due to the infinite number of varying temperaments. If we were
permitted never to see the various effects of light without also
perceiving on what they were based, many minds would refuse to believe
in the movement of the sun and in its oneness. Let the blind men cry
out as they like; I boast with Socrates, although I am not as wise as
he was, that I know of naught save love; and I intend to attempt the
formulation of some of its precepts, in order to spare married people
the trouble of cudgeling their brains; they would soon reach the limit
of their wit.

Now all the preceding observations may be resolved into a single
proposition, which may be considered either the first or last term in
this secret theory of love, whose statement would end by wearying us, if
we did not bring it to a prompt conclusion. This principle is contained
in the following formula:


                                LVII.
   Between two beings susceptible of love, the duration of passion is in
proportion to the original resistance of the woman, or to the obstacles
which the accidents of social life put in the way of your happiness.


If you have desired your object only for one day, your love perhaps will
not last more than three nights. Where must we seek for the causes of
this law? I do not know. If you cast your eyes around you, you will find
abundant proof of this rule; in the vegetable world the plants which
take the longest time to grow are those which promise to have the
longest life; in the moral order of things the works produced yesterday
die to-morrow; in the physical world the womb which infringes the laws
of gestation bears dead fruit. In everything, a work which is permanent
has been brooded over by time for a long period. A long future requires
a long past. If love is a child, passion is a man. This general law,
which all men obey, to which all beings and all sentiments must submit,
is precisely that which every marriage infringes, as we have plainly
shown. This principle has given rise to the love tales of the Middle
Ages; the Amadises, the Lancelots, the Tristans of ballad literature,
whose constancy may justly be called fabulous, are allegories of the
national mythology which our imitation of Greek literature nipped in the
bud. These fascinating characters, outlined by the imagination of the
troubadours, set their seal and sanction upon this truth.


                                LVIII.
   We do not attach ourselves permanently to any possessions, excepting
in proportion to the trouble, toil and longing which they have cost us.


   All our meditations have revealed to us about the basis of the
primordial law of love is comprised in the following axiom, which is at
the same time the principle and the result of the law.


                                 LIX.
     In every case we receive only in proportion to what we give.


This last principle is so self-evident that we will not attempt to
demonstrate it. We merely add a single observation which appears to
us of some importance. The writer who said: “Everything is true, and
everything is false,” announced a fact which the human intellect,
naturally prone to sophism, interprets as it chooses, but it really
seems as though human affairs have as many facets as there are minds
that contemplate them. This fact may be detailed as follows:

There cannot be found, in all creation, a single law which is not
counterbalanced by a law exactly contrary to it; life in everything is
maintained by the equilibrium of two opposing forces. So in the present
subject, as regards love, if you give too much, you will not receive
enough. The mother who shows her children her whole tenderness calls
forth their ingratitude, and ingratitude is occasioned, perhaps, by
the impossibility of reciprocation. The wife who loves more than she is
loved must necessarily be the object of tyranny. Durable love is that
which always keeps the forces of two human beings in equilibrium. Now
this equilibrium may be maintained permanently; the one who loves the
more ought to stop at the point of the one who loves the less. And is it
not, after all the sweetest sacrifice that a loving heart can make, that
love should so accommodate itself as to adjust the inequality?

What sentiment of admiration must rise in the soul of a philosopher
on discovering that there is, perhaps, but one single principle in the
world, as there is but one God; and that our ideas and our affections
are subject to the same laws which cause the sun to rise, the flowers to
bloom, the universe to teem with life!

Perhaps, we ought to seek in the metaphysics of love the reasons for the
following proposition, which throws the most vivid light on the question
of honeymoons and of Red-moons:


                               THEOREM.

  Man goes from aversion to love; but if he has begun by loving, and
     afterwards comes to feel aversion, he never returns to love.


In certain human organisms the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought may
be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have the
faculty of comprehending the connections existing between different
things without formal deduction; and as they have the faculty of seizing
upon each formula separately, without combining them, or without
the power of insight, comparison and expression; so in the same way,
different souls may have more or less imperfect ideas of the various
sentiments. Talent in love, as in every other art, consists in the power
of forming a conception combined with the power of carrying it out. The
world is full of people who sing airs, but who omit the _ritornello_,
who have quarters of an idea, as they have quarters of sentiment, but
who can no more co-ordinate the movements of their affections than
of their thoughts. In a word, they are incomplete. Unite a fine
intelligence with a dwarfed intelligence and you precipitate a disaster;
for it is necessary that equilibrium be preserved in everything.

We leave to the philosophers of the boudoir or to the sages of the
back parlor to investigate the thousand ways in which men of different
temperaments, intellects, social positions and fortunes disturb this
equilibrium. Meanwhile we will proceed to examine the last cause for the
setting of the honeymoon and the rising of the Red-moon.

There is in life one principle more potent than life itself. It is a
movement whose celerity springs from an unknown motive power. Man is
no more acquainted with the secret of this revolution than the earth is
aware of that which causes her rotation. A certain something, which
I gladly call the current of life, bears along our choicest thoughts,
makes use of most people’s will and carries us on in spite of ourselves.
Thus, a man of common-sense, who never fails to pay his bills, if he is
a merchant, a man who has been able to escape death, or what perhaps is
more trying, sickness, by the observation of a certain easy but daily
regimen, is completely and duly nailed up between the four planks of his
coffin, after having said every evening: “Dear me! to-morrow I will not
forget my pills!” How are we to explain this magic spell which rules all
the affairs of life? Do men submit to it from a want of energy? Men who
have the strongest wills are subject to it. Is it default of memory?
People who possess this faculty in the highest degree yield to its
fascination.

Every one can recognize the operation of this influence in the case of
his neighbor, and it is one of the things which exclude the majority of
husbands from the honeymoon. It is thus that the wise man, survivor of
all reefs and shoals, such as we have pointed out, sometimes falls into
the snares which he himself has set.

I have myself noticed that man deals with marriage and its dangers
in very much the same way that he deals with wigs; and perhaps the
following phases of thought concerning wigs may furnish a formula for
human life in general.

FIRST EPOCH.--Is it possible that I shall ever have white hair?

SECOND EPOCH.--In any case, if I have white hair, I shall never wear a
wig. Good Lord! what is more ugly than a wig?

One morning you hear a young voice, which love much oftener makes to
vibrate than lulls to silence, exclaiming:

“Well, I declare! You have a white hair!”

THIRD EPOCH.--Why not wear a well-made wig which people would not
notice? There is a certain merit in deceiving everybody; besides, a wig
keeps you warm, prevents taking cold, etc.

FOURTH EPOCH.--The wig is so skillfully put on that you deceive every
one who does not know you.

The wig takes up all your attention, and _amour-propre_ makes you every
morning as busy as the most skillful hairdresser.

FIFTH EPOCH.--The neglected wig. “Good heavens! How tedious it is, to
have to go with bare head every evening, and to curl one’s wig every
morning!”

SIXTH EPOCH.--The wig allows certain white hairs to escape; it is put on
awry and the observer perceives on the back of your neck a white line,
which contrasts with the deep tints pushed back by the collar of your
coat.

SEVENTH EPOCH.--Your wig is as scraggy as dog’s tooth grass; and--excuse
the expression--you are making fun of your wig.

“Sir,” said one of the most powerful feminine intelligences which have
condescended to enlighten me on some of the most obscure passages in my
book, “what do you mean by this wig?”

“Madame,” I answered, “when a man falls into a mood of indifference with
regard to his wig, he is,--he is--what your husband probably is not.”

“But my husband is not--” (she paused and thought for a moment). “He is
not amiable; he is not--well, he is not--of an even temper; he is not--”

“Then, madame, he would doubtless be indifferent to his wig!”

We looked at each other, she with a well-assumed air of dignity, I with
a suppressed smile.

“I see,” said I, “that we must pay special respect to the ears of the
little sex, for they are the only chaste things about them.”

I assumed the attitude of a man who has something of importance to
disclose, and the fair dame lowered her eyes, as if she had some reason
to blush.

“Madame, in these days a minister is not hanged, as once upon a time,
for saying yes or no; a Chateaubriand would scarcely torture Francoise
de Foix, and we wear no longer at our side a long sword ready to avenge
an insult. Now in a century when civilization has made such rapid
progress, when we can learn a science in twenty-four lessons, everything
must follow this race after perfection. We can no longer speak the
manly, rude, coarse language of our ancestors. The age in which are
fabricated such fine, such brilliant stuffs, such elegant furniture, and
when are made such rich porcelains, must needs be the age of periphrase
and circumlocution. We must try, therefore, to coin a new word in place
of the comic expression which Moliere used; since the language of this
great man, as a contemporary author has said, is too free for ladies who
find gauze too thick for their garments. But people of the world
know, as well as the learned, how the Greeks had an innate taste for
mysteries. That poetic nation knew well how to invest with the tints
of fable the antique traditions of their history. At the voice of their
rhapsodists together with their poets and romancers, kings became
gods and their adventures of gallantry were transformed into immortal
allegories. According to M. Chompre, licentiate in law, the classic
author of the _Dictionary of Mythology_, the labyrinth was ‘an enclosure
planted with trees and adorned with buildings arranged in such a way
that when a young man once entered, he could no more find his way out.’
Here and there flowery thickets were presented to his view, but in the
midst of a multitude of alleys, which crossed and recrossed his path and
bore the appearance of a uniform passage, among the briars, rocks and
thorns, the patient found himself in combat with an animal called the
Minotaur.

“Now, madame, if you will allow me the honor of calling to your mind
the fact that the Minotaur was of all known beasts that which Mythology
distinguishes as the most dangerous; that in order to save themselves
from his ravages, the Athenians were bound to deliver to him, every
single year, fifty virgins; you will perhaps escape the error of good M.
Chompre, who saw in the labyrinth nothing but an English garden; and
you will recognize in this ingenious fable a refined allegory, or we may
better say a faithful and fearful image of the dangers of marriage. The
paintings recently discovered at Herculaneum have served to confirm
this opinion. And, as a matter of fact, learned men have for a long time
believed, in accordance with the writings of certain authors, that
the Minotaur was an animal half-man, half-bull; but the fifth panel
of ancient paintings at Herculaneum represents to us this allegorical
monster with a body entirely human; and, to take away all vestige of
doubt, he lies crushed at the feet of Theseus. Now, my dear madame, why
should we not ask Mythology to come and rescue us from that hypocrisy
which is gaining ground with us and hinders us from laughing as our
fathers laughed? And thus, since in the world a young lady does not very
well know how to spread the veil under which an honest woman hides her
behavior, in a contingency which our grandfathers would have roughly
explained by a single word, you, like a crowd of beautiful but
prevaricating ladies, you content yourselves with saying, ‘Ah! yes,
she is very amiable, but,’--but what?--‘but she is often very
inconsistent--.’ I have for a long time tried to find out the meaning of
this last word, and, above all, the figure of rhetoric by which you
make it express the opposite of that which it signifies; but all my
researches have been in vain. Vert-Vert used the word last, and was
unfortunately addressed to the innocent nuns whose infidelities did not
in any way infringe the honor of the men. When a woman is _inconsistent_
the husband must be, according to me, _minotaurized_. If the
minotaurized man is a fine fellow, if he enjoys a certain esteem,--and
many husbands really deserve to be pitied,--then in speaking of him, you
say in a pathetic voice, ‘M. A--- is a very estimable man, his wife
is exceedingly pretty, but they say he is not happy in his domestic
relations.’ Thus, madame, the estimable man who is unhappy in his
domestic relations, the man who has an inconsistent wife, or the husband
who is minotaurized are simply husbands as they appear in Moliere. Well,
then, O goddess of modern taste, do not these expressions seem to you
characterized by a transparency chaste enough for anybody?”

“Ah! mon Dieu!” she answered, laughing, “if the thing is the same,
what does it matter whether it be expressed in two syllables or in a
hundred?”

She bade me good-bye, with an ironical nod and disappeared, doubtless to
join the countesses of my preface and all the metaphorical creatures,
so often employed by romance-writers as agents for the recovery or
composition of ancient manuscripts.

As for you, the more numerous and the more real creatures who read my
book, if there are any among you who make common cause with my conjugal
champion, I give you notice that you will not at once become unhappy in
your domestic relations. A man arrives at this conjugal condition
not suddenly, but insensibly and by degrees. Many husbands have even
remained unfortunate in their domestic relations during their whole life
and have never known it. This domestic revolution develops itself in
accordance with fixed rules; for the revolutions of the honeymoon are as
regular as the phases of the moon in heaven, and are the same in every
married house. Have we not proved that moral nature, like physical
nature, has its laws?

Your young wife will never take a lover, as we have elsewhere said,
without making serious reflections. As soon as the honeymoon wanes, you
will find that you have aroused in her a sentiment of pleasure which you
have not satisfied; you have opened to her the book of life; and she has
derived an excellent idea from the prosaic dullness which distinguishes
your complacent love, of the poetry which is the natural result when
souls and pleasures are in accord. Like a timid bird, just startled by
the report of a gun which has ceased, she puts her head out of her nest,
looks round her, and sees the world; and knowing the word of a charade
which you have played, she feels instinctively the void which exists in
your languishing passion. She divines that it is only with a lover that
she can regain the delightful exercise of her free will in love.

You have dried the green wood in preparation for a fire.

In the situation in which both of you find yourselves, there is no
woman, even the most virtuous, who would not be found worthy of a
_grande passion_, who has not dreamed of it, and who does not believe
that it is easily kindled, for there is always found a certain
_amour-propre_ ready to reinforce that conquered enemy--a jaded wife.

“If the role of an honest woman were nothing more than perilous,”
 said an old lady to me, “I would admit that it would serve. But it is
tiresome; and I have never met a virtuous woman who did not think about
deceiving somebody.”

And then, before any lover presents himself, a wife discusses with
herself the legality of the act; she enters into a conflict with her
duties, with the law, with religion and with the secret desires of a
nature which knows no check-rein excepting that which she places upon
herself. And then commences for you a condition of affairs totally
new; then you receive the first intimation which nature, that good and
indulgent mother, always gives to the creatures who are exposed to any
danger. Nature has put a bell on the neck of the Minotaur, as on the
tail of that frightful snake which is the terror of travelers. And then
appear in your wife what we will call the first symptoms, and woe to
him who does not know how to contend with them. Those who in reading our
book will remember that they saw those symptoms in their own domestic
life can pass to the conclusion of this work, where they will find how
they may gain consolation.

The situation referred to, in which a married couple bind themselves for
a longer or a shorter time, is the point from which our work starts,
as it is the end at which our observations stop. A man of intelligence
should know how to recognize the mysterious indications, the obscure
signs and the involuntary revelation which a wife unwittingly exhibits;
for the next Meditation will doubtless indicate the more evident of the
manifestations to neophytes in the sublime science of marriage.




MEDITATION VIII. OF THE FIRST SYMPTOMS.

When your wife reaches that crisis in which we have left her, you
yourself are wrapped in a pleasant and unsuspicious security. You
have so often seen the sun that you begin to think it is shining over
everybody. You therefore give no longer that attention to the least
action of your wife, which was impelled by your first outburst of
passion.

This indolence prevents many husbands from perceiving the symptoms
which, in their wives, herald the first storm; and this disposition
of mind has resulted in the minotaurization of more husbands than have
either opportunity, carriages, sofas and apartments in town.

The feeling of indifference in the presence of danger is to some
degree justified by the apparent tranquillity which surrounds you.
The conspiracy which is formed against you by our million of hungry
celibates seems to be unanimous in its advance. Although all are enemies
of each other and know each other well, a sort of instinct forces them
into co-operation.

Two persons are married. The myrmidons of the Minotaur, young and old,
have usually the politeness to leave the bride and bridegroom entirely
to themselves at first. They look upon the husband as an artisan, whose
business it is to trim, polish, cut into facets and mount the diamond,
which is to pass from hand to hand in order to be admired all around.
Moreover, the aspect of a young married couple much taken with each
other always rejoices the heart of those among the celibates who are
known as _roues_; they take good care not to disturb the excitement by
which society is to be profited; they also know that heavy showers to
not last long. They therefore keep quiet; they watch, and wait, with
incredible vigilance, for the moment when bride and groom begin to weary
of the seventh heaven.

The tact with which celibates discover the moment when the breeze begins
to rise in a new home can only be compared to the indifference of those
husbands for whom the Red-moon rises. There is, even in intrigue, a
moment of ripeness which must be waited for. The great man is he who
anticipates the outcome of certain circumstances. Men of fifty-two, whom
we have represented as being so dangerous, know very well, for example,
that any man who offers himself as lover to a woman and is haughtily
rejected, will be received with open arms three months afterwards. But
it may be truly said that in general married people in betraying their
indifference towards each other show the same naivete with which they
first betrayed their love. At the time when you are traversing with
madame the ravishing fields of the seventh heaven--where according to
their temperament, newly married people remain encamped for a longer or
shorter time, as the preceding Meditation has proved--you go little or
not at all into society. Happy as you are in your home, if you do go
abroad, it will be for the purpose of making up a choice party and
visiting the theatre, the country, etc. From the moment you the newly
wedded make your appearance in the world again, you and your bride
together, or separately, and are seen to be attentive to each other at
balls, at parties, at all the empty amusements created to escape the
void of an unsatisfied heart, the celibates discern that your wife comes
there in search of distraction; her home, her husband are therefore
wearisome to her.

At this point the celibate knows that half of the journey is
accomplished. At this point you are on the eve of being minotaurized,
and your wife is likely to become inconsistent; which means that she is
on the contrary likely to prove very consistent in her conduct, that she
has reasoned it out with astonishing sagacity and that you are likely
very soon to smell fire. From that moment she will not in appearance
fail in any of her duties, and will put on the colors of that virtue in
which she is most lacking. Said Crebillon:

    “Alas!
  Is it right to be heir of the man who we slay?”

Never has she seemed more anxious to please you. She will seek, as
much as possible, to allay the secret wounds which she thinks about
inflicting upon your married bliss, she will do so by those little
attentions which induce you to believe in the eternity of her love;
hence the proverb, “Happy as a fool.” But in accordance with the
character of women, they either despise their own husbands from the very
fact that they find no difficulty in deceiving them; or they hate them
when they find themselves circumvented by them; or they fall into a
condition of indifference towards them, which is a thousand times worse
than hatred. In this emergency, the first thing which may be diagnosed
in a woman is a decided oddness of behavior. A woman loves to be saved
from herself, to escape her conscience, but without the eagerness shown
in this connection by wives who are thoroughly unhappy. She dresses
herself with especial care, in order, she will tell you, to flatter your
_amour-propre_ by drawing all eyes upon her in the midst of parties and
public entertainments.

When she returns to the bosom of her stupid home you will see that, at
times, she is gloomy and thoughtful, then suddenly laughing and gay as
if beside herself; or assuming the serious expression of a German
when he advances to the fight. Such varying moods always indicate the
terrible doubt and hesitation to which we have already referred. There
are women who read romances in order to feast upon the images of love
cleverly depicted and always varied, of love crowned yet triumphant;
or in order to familiarize themselves in thought with the perils of an
intrigue.

She will profess the highest esteem for you, she will tell you that she
loves you as a sister; and that such reasonable friendship is the only
true, the only durable friendship, the only tie which it is the aim of
marriage to establish between man and wife.

She will adroitly distinguish between the duties which are all she has
to perform and the rights which she can demand to exercise.

She views with indifference, appreciated by you alone, all the details
of married happiness. This sort of happiness, perhaps, has never been
very agreeable to her and moreover it is always with her. She knows it
well, she has analyzed it; and what slight but terrible evidence comes
from these circumstances to prove to an intelligent husband that this
frail creature argues and reasons, instead of being carried away on the
tempest of passion.


                                 LX.
               The more a man judges the less he loves.


And now will burst forth from her those pleasantries at which you will
be the first to laugh and those reflections which will startle you
by their profundity; now you will see sudden changes of mood and the
caprices of a mind which hesitates. At times she will exhibit extreme
tenderness, as if she repented of her thoughts and her projects;
sometimes she will be sullen and at cross-purposes with you; in a word,
she will fulfill the _varium et mutabile femina_ which we hitherto have
had the folly to attribute to the feminine temperament. Diderot, in his
desire to explain the mutations almost atmospheric in the behavior of
women, has even gone so far as to make them the offspring of what he
calls _la bete feroce_; but we never see these whims in a woman who is
happy.

These symptoms, light as gossamer, resemble the clouds which scarcely
break the azure surface of the sky and which they call flowers of the
storm. But soon their colors take a deeper intensity.

In the midst of this solemn premeditation, which tends, as Madame de
Stael says, to bring more poetry into life, some women, in whom virtuous
mothers either from considerations of worldly advantage of duty or
sentiment, or through sheer hypocrisy, have inculcated steadfast
principles, take the overwhelming fancies by which they are assailed
for suggestions of the devil; and you will see them therefore trotting
regularly to mass, to midday offices, even to vespers. This false
devotion exhibits itself, first of all in the shape of pretty books of
devotion in a costly binding, by the aid of which these dear sinners
attempt in vain to fulfill the duties imposed by religion, and long
neglected for the pleasures of marriage.

Now here we will lay down a principle, and you must engrave it on your
memory in letters of fire.

When a young woman suddenly takes up religious practices which she has
before abandoned, this new order of life always conceals a motive highly
significant, in view of her husband’s happiness. In the case of at least
seventy-nine women out of a hundred this return to God proves that they
have been inconsistent, or that they intend to become so.

But a symptom more significant still and more decisive, and one that
every husband should recognize under pain of being considered a fool, is
this:

At the time when both of you are immersed in the illusive delights of
the honeymoon, your wife, as one devoted to you, would constantly carry
out your will. She was happy in the power of showing the ready will,
which both of you mistook for love, and she would have liked for you to
have asked her to walk on the edge of the roof, and immediately, nimble
as a squirrel, she would have run over the tiles. In a word, she found
an ineffable delight in sacrificing to you that _ego_ which made her a
being distinct from yours. She had identified herself with your nature
and was obedient to that vow of the heart, _Una caro_.

All this delightful promptness of an earlier day gradually faded away.
Wounded to find her will counted as nothing, your wife will attempt,
nevertheless, to reassert it by means of a system developed gradually,
and from day to day, with increased energy.

This system is founded upon what we may call the dignity of the married
woman. The first effect of this system is to mingle with your pleasures
a certain reserve and a certain lukewarmness, of which you are the sole
judge.

According to the greater or lesser violence of your sensual passion, you
have perhaps discerned some of those twenty-two pleasures which in
other times created in Greece twenty-two kinds of courtesans, devoted
especially to these delicate branches of the same art. Ignorant and
simple, curious and full of hope, your young wife may have taken
some degrees in this science as rare as it is unknown, and which we
especially commend to the attention of the future author of _Physiology
of Pleasure_.

Lacking all these different kinds of pleasure, all these caprices of
soul, all these arrows of love, you are reduced to the most common of
love fashions, of that primitive and innocent wedding gait, the calm
homage which the innocent Adam rendered to our common Mother and which
doubtless suggested to the Serpent the idea of taking them in. But a
symptom so complete is not frequent. Most married couples are too good
Christians to follow the usages of pagan Greece, so we have ranged,
among the last symptoms, the appearance in the calm nuptial couch of
those shameless pleasures which spring generally from lawless passion.
In their proper time and place we will treat more fully of this
fascinating diagnostic; at this point, things are reduced to a
listlessness and conjugal repugnance which you alone are in a condition
to appreciate.

At the same time that she is ennobling by her dignity the objects of
marriage, your wife will pretend that she ought to have her opinion and
you yours. “In marrying,” she will say, “a woman does not vow that she
will abdicate the throne of reason. Are women then really slaves? Human
laws can fetter the body; but the mind!--ah! God has placed it so near
Himself that no human hand can touch it.”

These ideas necessarily proceed either from the too liberal teachings
which you have allowed her to receive, or from some reflections which
you have permitted her to make. A whole Meditation has been devoted to
_Home Instruction_.

Then your wife begins to say, “_My_ chamber, _my_ bed, _my_ apartment.”
 To many of your questions she will reply, “But, my dear, this is no
business of yours!” Or: “Men have their part in the direction of
the house, and women have theirs.” Or, laughing at men who meddle in
household affairs, she will affirm that “men do not understand some
things.”

The number of things which you do not understand increases day by day.

One fine morning, you will see in your little church two altars, where
before you never worshiped but at one. The altar of your wife and
your own altar have become distinct, and this distinction will go
on increasing, always in accordance with the system founded upon the
dignity of woman.

Then the following ideas will appear, and they will be inculcated in you
whether you like it or not, by means of a living force very ancient
in origin and little known. Steam-power, horse-power, man-power, and
water-power are good inventions, but nature has provided women with a
moral power, in comparison with which all other powers are nothing; we
may call it _rattle-power_. This force consists in a continuance of the
same sound, in an exact repetition of the same words, in a reversion,
over and over again, to the same ideas, and this so unvaried, that from
hearing t

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/16205