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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Analytical Studies, by Honoré de Balzac
+
+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: Analytical Studies
+
+Author: Honoré de Balzac
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2005 [eBook #16206]
+[Most recently updated: April 20, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Produced by: Dagny and John Bickers
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANALYTICAL STUDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+ANALYTICAL STUDIES
+
+BY HONORÉ DE BALZAC
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+Notice the words: _The man of distinction to whom this book is
+dedicated_. Need I say: “You are that man.”—THE AUTHOR.
+
+
+The woman who may be induced by the title of this book to open it, can
+save herself the trouble; she has already read the work without knowing
+it. A man, however malicious he may possibly be, can never say about a
+woman as much good or as much evil as they themselves think. If, in
+spite of this notice, a woman will persist in reading the volume, she
+ought to be prevented by delicacy from despising the author, from the
+very moment that he, forfeiting the praise which most artists welcome,
+has in a certain way engraved on the title page of his book the prudent
+inscription written on the portal of certain establishments: _Ladies
+must not enter_.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+ INTRODUCTION
+ THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE
+ PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+The two Analytical Studies, _Physiology of Marriage_ and _Petty
+Troubles of Married Life_, belong quite apart from the action of the
+_Comedie Humaine_, and can only be included therein by virtue of a
+special dispensation on the part of their author, who made for them an
+eighth division therein, thus giving them a local habitation and a
+name. Although they come far down in the list of titles, their creation
+belongs almost to the formative era. Balzac had just shaken his skirts
+clear of the immature dust of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_, and by the
+publication, in 1829, of _The Chouans_, had made his first real bow to
+his larger public. In December of that same year appeared the
+_Physiology of Marriage_, followed eleven months later by a few papers
+belonging to _Petty Troubles of Married Life_. Meanwhile, between these
+two Analytical Studies, came a remarkable novelette, _At the Sign of
+the Cat and Racket_, followed soon after by one of the most famous
+stories of the entire _Comedie_, _The Magic Skin_.
+
+We are thus particular to place the two Analytical Studies in time and
+in environment, that the wonderful versatility of the author may become
+apparent—and more: that Balzac may be vindicated from the charge of
+dullness and inaccuracy at this period. Such traits might have been
+charged against him had he left only the Analytical Studies. But when
+they are preceded by the faithful though heavy scene of military life,
+and succeeded by the searching and vivid philosophical study, their
+faults and failures may be considered for the sake of their company.
+
+It is hard to determine Balzac’s full purpose in including the
+Analytical Studies in the _Comedie_. They are not novels. The few,
+lightly-sketched characters are not connected with those of the
+_Comedie_, save in one or two remote instances. They must have been
+included in order to make one more room in the gigantic mansion which
+the author had planned. His seventh sense of subdivision saw here fresh
+material to classify. And so these grim, almost sardonic essays were
+placed where they now appear.
+
+In all kindness, the Balzac novitiate is warned against beginning an
+acquaintance with the author through the medium of the Analytical
+Studies. He would be almost certain to misjudge Balzac’s attitude, and
+might even be tempted to forsake his further cultivation. The mistake
+would be serious for the reader and unjust to the author. These studies
+are chiefly valuable as outlining a peculiar—and, shall we say,
+forced?—mood that sought expression in an isolated channel. All his
+life long, Balzac found time for miscellaneous writings —critiques,
+letters, reviews, essays, political diatribes and sketches. In early
+life they were his “pot-boilers,” and he never ceased writing them,
+probably urged partly by continued need of money, partly through
+fondness for this sort of thing. His _Physiology_ is fairly
+representative of the material, being analysis in satirical vein of
+sundry foibles of society. This class of composition was very popular
+in the time of Louis Philippe.
+
+The _Physiology of Marriage_ is couched in a spirit of
+pseudo-seriousness that leaves one in doubt as to Balzac’s faith with
+the reader. At times he seems honestly to be trying to analyze a
+particular phase of his subject; at other times he appears to be
+ridiculing the whole institution of marriage. If this be not the case,
+then he would seem unfitted for his task—through the ignorance of a
+bachelor—and adds to error the element of slander. He is at fault
+through lack of intimate experience. And yet the flashes of keen
+penetration preclude such a charge as this. A few bold touches of his
+pen, and a picture is drawn which glows with convincing reality. While
+here and there occur paragraphs of powerful description or searching
+philosophy which proclaim Balzac the mature, Balzac the observant.
+
+On the publication of _Petty Troubles of Married Life_ in _La Presse_,
+the publishers of that periodical had this to say: “M. de Balzac has
+already produced, as you know, the _Physiology of Marriage_, a book
+full of diabolical ingenuity and an analysis of society that would
+drive to despair Leuwenhoech and Swammerdam, who beheld the entire
+universe in a drop of water. This inexhaustible subject has again
+inspired an entertaining book full of Gallic malice and English humor,
+where Rabelais and Sterne meet and greet him at the same moment.”
+
+In _Petty Troubles_ we have the sardonic vein fully developed. The
+whole edifice of romance seems but a card house, and all virtue merely
+a question of utility. We must not err, however, in taking sentiments
+at their apparent value, for the real Balzac lies deeper; and here and
+there a glimpse of his true spirit and greater power becomes apparent.
+The bitter satire yields place to a vein of feeling true and fine, and
+gleaming like rich gold amid baser metal. Note “Another Glimpse of
+Adolphus” with its splendid vein of reverie and quiet inspiration to
+higher living. It is touches like this which save the book and reveal
+the author.
+
+_Petty Troubles of Married Life_ is a pendant or sequel to _Physiology
+of Marriage_. It is, as Balzac says, to the _Physiology_ “what Fact is
+to Theory, or History to Philosophy, and has its logic, as life, viewed
+as a whole, has its logic also.” We must then say with the author, that
+“if literature is the reflection of manners, we must admit that our
+manners recognize the defects pointed out by the _Physiology of
+Marriage_ in this fundamental institution;” and we must concede for
+_Petty Troubles_ one of those “terrible blows dealt this social basis.”
+
+The _Physiologie du Mariage, ou Meditations de philosophie eclectique
+sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal_ is dated at Paris, 1824-29. It
+first appeared anonymously, December, 1829, dated 1830, from the press
+of Charles Gosselin and Urbain Canel, in two octavo volumes with its
+present introduction and a note of correction now omitted. Its next
+appearance was signed, in 1834, in a two-volume edition of Ollivier. In
+1846 it was entered, with its dedication to the reader, in the first
+edition of _Etudes Analytiques_—the first edition also of the _Comedie
+Humaine_—as Volume XVI. All the subsequent editions have retained the
+original small division heads, called Meditations.
+
+_Petites Miseres de la Vie Conjugale_ is not dated. Its composition was
+achieved piecemeal, beginning shortly after its predecessor appeared.
+But it was not till long after—in 1845-46—that its present two-part
+form was published in a single octavo volume by Chlendowski. A break
+had ensued between the first and second parts, the latter having
+appeared practically in full in _La Presse_ of December, 1845. The
+sub-headings have remained unchanged since the original printing.
+
+J. WALKER MCSPADDEN.
+
+
+
+
+THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE;
+OR,
+THE MUSINGS OF AN ECLECTIC PHILOSOPHER ON THE HAPPINESS AND
+UNHAPPINESS OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+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 them over and over again you will admit them, in order to be
+delivered from the discussion. Thus the power of the rattle will prove
+to you:
+
+That you are very fortunate to have such an excellent wife;
+
+That she has done you too much honor in marrying you;
+
+That women often see clearer than men;
+
+That you ought to take the advice of your wife in everything, and
+almost always ought to follow it;
+
+That you ought to respect the mother of your children, to honor her and
+have confidence in her;
+
+That the best way to escape being deceived, is to rely upon a wife’s
+refinement, for according to certain old ideas which we have had the
+weakness to give credit, it is impossible for a man to prevent his wife
+from minotaurizing him;
+
+That a lawful wife is a man’s best friend;
+
+That a woman is mistress in her own house and queen in her
+drawing-room, etc.
+
+Those who wish to oppose a firm resistance to a woman’s conquest,
+effected by means of her dignity over man’s power, fall into the
+category of the predestined.
+
+At first, quarrels arise which in the eye of wives give an air of
+tyranny to husbands. The tyranny of a husband is always a terrible
+excuse for inconsistency in a wife. Then, in their frivolous
+discussions they are enabled to prove to their families and to ours, to
+everybody and to ourselves, that we are in the wrong. If, for the sake
+of peace, or from love, you acknowledge the pretended rights of women,
+you yield an advantage to your wife by which she will profit eternally.
+A husband, like a government, ought never to acknowledge a mistake. In
+case you do so, your power will be outflanked by the subtle artifices
+of feminine dignity; then all will be lost; from that moment she will
+advance from concession to concession until she has driven you from her
+bed.
+
+The woman being shrewd, intelligent, sarcastic and having leisure to
+meditate over an ironical phrase, can easily turn you into ridicule
+during a momentary clash of opinions. The day on which she turns you
+into ridicule, sees the end of your happiness. Your power has expired.
+A woman who has laughed at her husband cannot henceforth love him. A
+man should be, to the woman who is in love with him, a being full of
+power, of greatness, and always imposing. A family cannot exist without
+despotism. Think of that, ye nations!
+
+Now the difficult course which a man has to steer in presence of such
+serious incidents as these, is what we may call the _haute politique_
+of marriage, and is the subject of the second and third parts of our
+book. That breviary of marital Machiavelism will teach you the manner
+in which you may grow to greatness within that frivolous mind, within
+that soul of lacework, to use Napoleon’s phrase. You may learn how a
+man may exhibit a soul of steel, may enter upon this little domestic
+war without ever yielding the empire of his will, and may do so without
+compromising his happiness. For if you exhibit any tendency to
+abdication, your wife will despise you, for the sole reason that she
+has discovered you to be destitute of mental vigor; you are no longer a
+_man_ to her.
+
+But we have not yet reached the point at which are to be developed
+those theories and principles, by means of which a man may unite
+elegance of manners with severity of measures; let it suffice us, for
+the moment, to point out the importance of impending events and let us
+pursue our theme.
+
+At this fatal epoch, you will see that she is adroitly setting up a
+right to go out alone.
+
+You were at one time her god, her idol. She has now reached that height
+of devotion at which it is permitted to see holes in the garments of
+the saints.
+
+“Oh, mon Dieu! My dear,” said Madame de la Valliere to her husband,
+“how badly you wear your sword! M. de Richelieu has a way of making it
+hang straight at his side, which you ought to try to imitate; it is in
+much better taste.”
+
+“My dear, you could not tell me in a more tactful manner that we have
+been married five months!” replied the Duke, whose repartee made his
+fortune in the reign of Louis XV.
+
+She will study your character in order to find weapons against you.
+Such a study, which love would hold in horror, reveals itself in the
+thousand little traps which she lays purposely to make you scold her;
+when a woman has no excuse for minotaurizing her husband she sets to
+work to make one.
+
+She will perhaps begin dinner without waiting for you.
+
+If you drive through the middle of the town, she will point out certain
+objects which escaped your notice; she will sing before you without
+feeling afraid; she will interrupt you, sometimes vouchsafe no reply to
+you, and will prove to you, in a thousand different ways, that she is
+enjoying at your side the use of all her faculties and exercising her
+private judgment.
+
+She will try to abolish entirely your influence in the management of
+the house and to become sole mistress of your fortune. At first this
+struggle will serve as a distraction for her soul, whether it be empty
+or in too violent commotion; next, she will find in your opposition a
+new motive for ridicule. Slang expressions will not fail her, and in
+France we are so quickly vanquished by the ironical smile of another!
+
+At other times headaches and nervous attacks make their appearance; but
+these symptoms furnish matter for a whole future Meditation. In the
+world she will speak of you without blushing, and will gaze at you with
+assurance. She will begin to blame your least actions because they are
+at variance with her ideas, or her secret intentions. She will take no
+care of what pertains to you, she will not even know whether you have
+all you need. You are no longer her paragon.
+
+In imitation of Louis XIV, who carried to his mistresses the bouquets
+of orange blossoms which the head gardener of Versailles put on his
+table every morning, M. de Vivonne used almost every day to give his
+wife choice flowers during the early period of his marriage. One
+morning he found the bouquet lying on the side table without having
+been placed, as usual, in a vase of water.
+
+“Oh! Oh!” said he, “if I am not a cuckold, I shall very soon be one.”
+
+You go on a journey for eight days and you receive no letters, or you
+receive one, three pages of which are blank.—Symptom.
+
+You come home mounted on a valuable horse which you like very much, and
+between her kisses your wife shows her uneasiness about the horse and
+his fodder.—Symptom.
+
+To these features of the case, you will be able to add others. We shall
+endeavor in the present volume always to paint things in bold fresco
+style and leave the miniatures to you. According to the characters
+concerned, the indications which we are describing, veiled under the
+incidents of ordinary life, are of infinite variety. One man may
+discover a symptom in the way a shawl is put on, while another needs to
+receive a fillip to his intellect, in order to notice the indifference
+of his mate.
+
+Some fine spring morning, the day after a ball, or the eve of a country
+party, this situation reaches its last phase; your wife is listless and
+the happiness within her reach has no more attractions for her. Her
+mind, her imagination, perhaps her natural caprices call for a lover.
+Nevertheless, she dare not yet embark upon an intrigue whose
+consequences and details fill her with dread. You are still there for
+some purpose or other; you are a weight in the balance, although a very
+light one. On the other hand, the lover presents himself arrayed in all
+the graces of novelty and all the charms of mystery. The conflict which
+has arisen in the heart of your wife becomes, in presence of the enemy,
+more real and more full of peril than before. Very soon the more
+dangers and risks there are to be run, the more she burns to plunge
+into that delicious gulf of fear, enjoyment, anguish and delight. Her
+imagination kindles and sparkles, her future life rises before her
+eyes, colored with romantic and mysterious hues. Her soul discovers
+that existence has already taken its tone from this struggle which to a
+woman has so much solemnity in it. All is agitation, all is fire, all
+is commotion within her. She lives with three times as much intensity
+as before, and judges the future by the present. The little pleasure
+which you have lavished upon her bears witness against you; for she is
+not excited as much by the pleasures which she has received, as by
+those which she is yet to enjoy; does not imagination show her that her
+happiness will be keener with this lover, whom the laws deny her, than
+with you? And then, she finds enjoyment even in her terror and terror
+in her enjoyment. Then she falls in love with this imminent danger,
+this sword of Damocles hung over her head by you yourself, thus
+preferring the delirious agonies of such a passion, to that conjugal
+inanity which is worse to her than death, to that indifference which is
+less a sentiment than the absence of all sentiment.
+
+You, who must go to pay your respects to the Minister of Finance, to
+write memorandums at the bank, to make your reports at the Bourse, or
+to speak in the Chamber; you, young men, who have repeated with many
+others in our first Meditation the oath that you will defend your
+happiness in defending your wife, what can you oppose to these desires
+of hers which are so natural? For, with these creatures of fire, to
+live is to feel; the moment they cease to experience emotion they are
+dead. The law in virtue of which you take your position produces in her
+this involuntary act of minotaurism. “There is one sequel,” said
+D’Alembert, “to the laws of movement.” Well, then, where are your means
+of defence?— Where, indeed?
+
+Alas! if your wife has not yet kissed the apple of the Serpent, the
+Serpent stands before her; you sleep, we are awake, and our book
+begins.
+
+Without inquiring how many husbands, among the five hundred thousand
+which this book concerns, will be left with the predestined; how many
+have contracted unfortunate marriages; how many have made a bad
+beginning with their wives; and without wishing to ask if there be many
+or few of this numerous band who can satisfy the conditions required
+for struggling against the danger which is impending, we intend to
+expound in the second and third part of this work the methods of
+fighting the Minotaur and keeping intact the virtue of wives. But if
+fate, the devil, the celibate, opportunity, desire your ruin, in
+recognizing the progress of all intrigues, in joining in the battles
+which are fought by every home, you will possibly be able to find some
+consolation. Many people have such a happy disposition, that on showing
+to them the condition of things and explaining to them the why and the
+wherefore, they scratch their foreheads, rub their hands, stamp on the
+ground, and are satisfied.
+
+MEDITATION IX.
+
+EPILOGUE.
+
+
+Faithful to our promise, this first part has indicated the general
+causes which bring all marriages to the crises which we are about to
+describe; and, in tracing the steps of this conjugal preamble, we have
+also pointed out the way in which the catastrophe is to be avoided, for
+we have pointed out the errors by which it is brought about.
+
+But these first considerations would be incomplete if, after
+endeavoring to throw some light upon the inconsistency of our ideas, of
+our manners and of our laws, with regard to a question which concerns
+the life of almost all living beings, we did not endeavor to make
+plain, in a short peroration, the political causes of the infirmity
+which pervades all modern society. After having exposed the secret
+vices of marriage, would it not be an inquiry worthy of philosophers to
+search out the causes which have rendered it so vicious?
+
+The system of law and of manners which so far directs women and
+controls marriage in France, is the outcome of ancient beliefs and
+traditions which are no longer in accordance with the eternal
+principles of reason and of justice, brought to light by the great
+Revolution of 1789.
+
+Three great disturbances have agitated France; the conquest of the
+country by the Romans, the establishment of Christianity and the
+invasion of the Franks. Each of these events has left a deep impress
+upon the soil, upon the laws, upon the manners and upon the intellect
+of the nation.
+
+Greece having one foot on Europe and the other on Asia, was influenced
+by her voluptuous climate in the choice of her marriage institutions;
+she received them from the East, where her philosophers, her
+legislators and her poets went to study the abstruse antiquities of
+Egypt and Chaldea. The absolute seclusion of women which was
+necessitated under the burning sun of Asia prevailed under the laws of
+Greece and Ionia. The women remained in confinement within the marbles
+of the gyneceum. The country was reduced to the condition of a city, to
+a narrow territory, and the courtesans who were connected with art and
+religion by so many ties, were sufficient to satisfy the first passions
+of the young men, who were few in number, since their strength was
+elsewhere taken up in the violent exercises of that training which was
+demanded of them by the military system of those heroic times.
+
+At the beginning of her royal career Rome, having sent to Greece to
+seek such principles of legislation as might suit the sky of Italy,
+stamped upon the forehead of the married woman the brand of complete
+servitude. The senate understood the importance of virtue in a
+republic, hence the severity of manners in the excessive development of
+the marital and paternal power. The dependence of the woman on her
+husband is found inscribed on every code. The seclusion prescribed by
+the East becomes a duty, a moral obligation, a virtue. On these
+principles were raised temples to modesty and temples consecrated to
+the sanctity of marriage; hence, sprang the institution of censors, the
+law of dowries, the sumptuary laws, the respect for matrons and all the
+characteristics of the Roman law. Moreover, three acts of feminine
+violation either accomplished or attempted, produced three revolutions!
+And was it not a grand event, sanctioned by the decrees of the country,
+that these illustrious women should make their appearances on the
+political arena! Those noble Roman women, who were obliged to be either
+brides or mothers, passed their life in retirement engaged in educating
+the masters of the world. Rome had no courtesans because the youth of
+the city were engaged in eternal war. If, later on, dissoluteness
+appeared, it merely resulted from the despotism of emperors; and still
+the prejudices founded upon ancient manners were so influential that
+Rome never saw a woman on a stage. These facts are not put forth idly
+in scanning the history of marriage in France.
+
+After the conquest of Gaul, the Romans imposed their laws upon the
+conquered; but they were incapable of destroying both the profound
+respect which our ancestors entertained for women and the ancient
+superstitions which made women the immediate oracles of God. The Roman
+laws ended by prevailing, to the exclusion of all others, in this
+country once known as the “land of written law,” or _Gallia togata_,
+and their ideas of marriage penetrated more or less into the “land of
+customs.”
+
+But, during the conflict of laws with manners, the Franks invaded the
+Gauls and gave to the country the dear name of France. These warriors
+came from the North and brought the system of gallantry which had
+originated in their western regions, where the mingling of the sexes
+did not require in those icy climates the jealous precautions of the
+East. The women of that time elevated the privations of that kind of
+life by the exaltation of their sentiments. The drowsy minds of the day
+made necessary those varied forms of delicate solicitation, that
+versatility of address, the fancied repulse of coquetry, which belong
+to the system whose principles have been unfolded in our First Part, as
+admirably suited to the temperate clime of France.
+
+To the East, then, belong the passion and the delirium of passion, the
+long brown hair, the harem, the amorous divinities, the splendor, the
+poetry of love and the monuments of love.— To the West, the liberty of
+wives, the sovereignty of their blond locks, gallantry, the fairy life
+of love, the secrecy of passion, the profound ecstasy of the soul, the
+sweet feelings of melancholy and the constancy of love.
+
+These two systems, starting from opposite points of the globe, have
+come into collision in France; in France, where one part of the
+country, Languedoc, was attracted by Oriental traditions, while the
+other, Languedoil, was the native land of a creed which attributes to
+woman a magical power. In the Languedoil, love necessitates mystery, in
+the Languedoc, to see is to love.
+
+At the height of this struggle came the triumphant entry of
+Christianity into France, and there it was preached by women, and there
+it consecrated the divinity of a woman who in the forests of Brittany,
+of Vendee and of Ardennes took, under the name of Notre-Dame, the place
+of more than one idol in the hollow of old Druidic oaks.
+
+If the religion of Christ, which is above all things a code of morality
+and politics, gave a soul to all living beings, proclaimed that
+equality of all in the sight of God, and by such principles as these
+fortified the chivalric sentiments of the North, this advantage was
+counterbalanced by the fact, that the sovereign pontiff resided at
+Rome, of which seat he considered himself the lawful heir, through the
+universality of the Latin tongue, which became that of Europe during
+the Middle Ages, and through the keen interest taken by monks, writers
+and lawyers in establishing the ascendency of certain codes, discovered
+by a soldier in the sack of Amalfi.
+
+These two principles of the servitude and the sovereignty of women
+retain possession of the ground, each of them defended by fresh
+arguments.
+
+The Salic law, which was a legal error, was a triumph for the principle
+of political and civil servitude for women, but it did not diminish the
+power which French manners accorded them, for the enthusiasm of
+chivalry which prevailed in Europe supplanted the party of manners
+against the party of law.
+
+And in this way was created that strange phenomenon which since that
+time has characterized both our national despotism and our legislation;
+for ever since those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution,
+when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of
+the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the
+Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the
+aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the country
+within their clutches, that woman still remains the subject of strange
+counter-opinions, each springing from one of the three great movements
+to which we have referred. Was it possible that the woman question
+should be discussed and woman’s political education and marriage should
+be ventilated when feudalism threatened the throne, when reform menaced
+both king and barons, and the people, between the hierarchy and the
+empire, were forgotten? According to a saying of Madame Necker, women,
+amid these great movements, were like the cotton wool put into a case
+of porcelain. They were counted for nothing, but without them
+everything would have been broken.
+
+A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out
+at service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner; a collision
+between these two principles which frequently occurred, produced odd
+situations by the thousand. And then, woman was physically little
+understood, and what was actually sickness in her, was considered a
+prodigy, witchcraft or monstrous turpitude. In those days these
+creatures, treated by the law as reckless children, and put under
+guardianship, were by the manners of the time deified and adored. Like
+the freedmen of emperors, they disposed of crowns, they decided
+battles, they awarded fortunes, they inspired crimes and revolutions,
+wonderful acts of virtue, by the mere flash of their glances, and yet
+they possessed nothing and were not even possessors of themselves. They
+were equally fortunate and unfortunate. Armed with their weakness and
+strong in instinct, they launched out far beyond the sphere which the
+law allotted them, showing themselves omnipotent for evil, but impotent
+for good; without merit in the virtues that were imposed upon them,
+without excuse in their vices; accused of ignorance and yet denied an
+education; neither altogether mothers nor altogether wives. Having all
+the time to conceal their passions, while they fostered them, they
+submitted to the coquetry of the Franks, while they were obliged like
+Roman women, to stay within the ramparts of their castles and bring up
+those who were to be warriors. While no system was definitely decided
+upon by legislation as to the position of women, their minds were left
+to follow their inclinations, and there are found among them as many
+who resemble Marion Delorme as those who resemble Cornelia; there are
+vices among them, but there are as many virtues. These were creatures
+as incomplete as the laws which governed them; they were considered by
+some as a being midway between man and the lower animals, as a
+malignant beast which the laws could not too closely fetter, and which
+nature had destined, with so many other things, to serve the pleasure
+of men; while others held woman to be an angel in exile, a source of
+happiness and love, the only creature who responded to the highest
+feelings of man, while her miseries were to be recompensed by the
+idolatry of every heart. How could the consistency, which was wanting
+in a political system, be expected in the general manners of the
+nation?
+
+And so woman became what circumstances and men made her, instead of
+being what the climate and native institutions should have made her;
+sold, married against her taste, in accordance with the _Patria
+potestas_ of the Romans, at the same time that she fell under the
+marital despotism which desired her seclusion, she found herself
+tempted to take the only reprisals which were within her power. Then
+she became a dissolute creature, as soon as men ceased to be intently
+occupied in intestine war, for the same reason that she was a virtuous
+woman in the midst of civil disturbances. Every educated man can fill
+in this outline, for we seek from movements like these the lessons and
+not the poetic suggestion which they yield.
+
+The Revolution was too entirely occupied in breaking down and building
+up, had too many enemies, or followed perhaps too closely on the
+deplorable times witnessed under the regency and under Louis XV, to pay
+any attention to the position which women should occupy in the social
+order.
+
+The remarkable men who raised the immortal monument which our codes
+present were almost all old-fashioned students of law deeply imbued
+with a spirit of Roman jurisprudence; and moreover they were not the
+founders of any political institutions. Sons of the Revolution, they
+believed, in accordance with that movement, that the law of divorce
+wisely restricted and the bond of dutiful submission were sufficient
+ameliorations of the previous marriage law. When that former order of
+things was remembered, the change made by the new legislation seemed
+immense.
+
+At the present day the question as to which of these two principles
+shall triumph rests entirely in the hands of our wise legislators. The
+past has teaching which should bear fruit in the future. Have we lost
+all sense of the eloquence of fact?
+
+The principles of the East resulted in the existence of eunuchs and
+seraglios; the spurious social standing of France has brought in the
+plague of courtesans and the more deadly plague of our marriage system;
+and thus, to use the language of a contemporary, the East sacrifices to
+paternity men and the principle of justice; France, women and modesty.
+Neither the East nor France has attained the goal which their
+institutions point to; for that is happiness. The man is not more loved
+by the women of a harem than the husband is sure of being in France, as
+the father of his children; and marrying is not worth what it costs. It
+is time to offer no more sacrifice to this institution, and to amass a
+larger sum of happiness in the social state by making our manners and
+our institution conformable to our climate.
+
+Constitutional government, a happy mixture of two extreme political
+systems, despotism and democracy, suggests by the necessity of blending
+also the two principles of marriage, which so far clash together in
+France. The liberty which we boldly claim for young people is the only
+remedy for the host of evils whose source we have pointed out, by
+exposing the inconsistencies resulting from the bondage in which girls
+are kept. Let us give back to youth the indulgence of those passions,
+those coquetries, love and its terrors, love and its delights, and that
+fascinating company which followed the coming of the Franks. At this
+vernal season of life no fault is irreparable, and Hymen will come
+forth from the bosom of experiences, armed with confidence, stripped of
+hatred, and love in marriage will be justified, because it will have
+had the privilege of comparison.
+
+In this change of manners the disgraceful plague of public prostitution
+will perish of itself. It is especially at the time when the man
+possesses the frankness and timidity of adolescence, that in his
+pursuit of happiness he is competent to meet and struggle with great
+and genuine passions of the heart. The soul is happy in making great
+efforts of whatever kind; provided that it can act, that it can stir
+and move, it makes little difference, even though it exercise its power
+against itself. In this observation, the truth of which everybody can
+see, there may be found one secret of successful legislation, of
+tranquillity and happiness. And then, the pursuit of learning has now
+become so highly developed that the most tempestuous of our coming
+Mirabeaus can consume his energy either in the indulgence of a passion
+or the study of a science. How many young people have been saved from
+debauchery by self-chosen labors or the persistent obstacles put in the
+way of a first love, a love that was pure! And what young girl does not
+desire to prolong the delightful childhood of sentiment, is not proud
+to have her nature known, and has not felt the secret tremblings of
+timidity, the modesty of her secret communings with herself, and wished
+to oppose them to the young desires of a lover inexperienced as
+herself! The gallantry of the Franks and the pleasures which attend it
+should then be the portion of youth, and then would naturally result a
+union of soul, of mind, of character, of habits, of temperament and of
+fortune, such as would produce the happy equilibrium necessary for the
+felicity of the married couple. This system would rest upon foundations
+wider and freer, if girls were subjected to a carefully calculated
+system of disinheritance; or if, in order to force men to choose only
+those who promised happiness by their virtues, their character or their
+talents, they married as in the United States without dowry.
+
+In that case, the system adopted by the Romans could advantageously be
+applied to the married women who when they were girls used their
+liberty. Being exclusively engaged in the early education of their
+children, which is the most important of all maternal obligations,
+occupied in creating and maintaining the happiness of the household, so
+admirably described in the fourth book of _Julie_, they would be in
+their houses like the women of ancient Rome, living images of
+Providence, which reigns over all, and yet is nowhere visible. In this
+case, the laws covering the infidelity of the wife should be extremely
+severe. They should make the penalty disgrace, rather than inflict
+painful or coercive sentences. France has witnessed the spectacle of
+women riding asses for the pretended crime of magic, and many an
+innocent woman has died of shame. In this may be found the secret of
+future marriage legislation. The young girls of Miletus delivered
+themselves from marriage by voluntary death; the senate condemned the
+suicides to be dragged naked on a hurdle, and the other virgins
+condemned themselves for life.
+
+Women and marriage will never be respected until we have that radical
+change in manners which we are now begging for. This profound thought
+is the ruling principle in the two finest productions of an immortal
+genius. _Emile_ and _La Nouvelle Heloise_ are nothing more than two
+eloquent pleas for the system. The voice there raised will resound
+through the ages, because it points to the real motives of true
+legislation, and the manners which will prevail in the future. By
+placing children at the breast of their mothers, Jean-Jacques rendered
+an immense service to the cause of virtue; but his age was too deeply
+gangrened with abuses to understand the lofty lessons unfolded in those
+two poems; it is right to add also that the philosopher was in these
+works overmastered by the poet, and in leaving in the heart of _Julie_
+after her marriage some vestiges of her first love, he was led astray
+by the attractiveness of a poetic situation, more touching indeed, but
+less useful than the truth which he wished to display.
+
+Nevertheless, if marriage in France is an unlimited contract to which
+men agree with a silent understanding that they may thus give more
+relish to passion, more curiosity, more mystery to love, more
+fascination to women; if a woman is rather an ornament to the
+drawing-room, a fashion-plate, a portmanteau, than a being whose
+functions in the order politic are an essential part of the country’s
+prosperity and the nation’s glory, a creature whose endeavors in life
+vie in utility with those of men—I admit that all the above theory, all
+these long considerations sink into nothingness at the prospect of such
+an important destiny!——
+
+But after having squeezed a pound of actualities in order to obtain one
+drop of philosophy, having paid sufficient homage to that passion for
+the historic, which is so dominant in our time, let us turn our glance
+upon the manners of the present period. Let us take the cap and bells
+and the coxcomb of which Rabelais once made a sceptre, and let us
+pursue the course of this inquiry without giving to one joke more
+seriousness than comports with it, and without giving to serious things
+the jesting tone which ill befits them.
+
+SECOND PART
+
+MEANS OF DEFENCE, INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR.
+
+“To be or not to be,
+That is the question.”
+—Shakspeare, _Hamlet_.
+
+MEDITATION X.
+
+A TREATISE ON MARITAL POLICY.
+
+
+When a man reaches the position in which the first part of this book
+sets him, we suppose that the idea of his wife being possessed by
+another makes his heart beat, and rekindles his passion, either by an
+appeal to his _amour propre_, his egotism, or his self-interest, for
+unless he is still on his wife’s side, he must be one of the lowest of
+men and deserves his fate.
+
+In this trying moment it is very difficult for a husband to avoid
+making mistakes; for, with regard to most men, the art of ruling a wife
+is even less known than that of judiciously choosing one. However,
+marital policy consists chiefly in the practical application of three
+principles which should be the soul of your conduct. The first is never
+to believe what a woman says; the second, always to look for the spirit
+without dwelling too much upon the letter of her actions; and the
+third, not to forget that a woman is never so garrulous as when she
+holds her tongue, and is never working with more energy than when she
+keeps quiet.
+
+From the moment that your suspicions are aroused, you ought to be like
+a man mounted on a tricky horse, who always watches the ears of the
+beast, in fear of being thrown from the saddle.
+
+But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the
+manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a
+razor in the hand of a monkey. Moreover, the first and most vital of
+your duties consists in perpetual dissimulation, an accomplishment in
+which most husbands are sadly lacking. In detecting the symptoms of
+minotaurism a little too plainly marked in the conduct of their wives,
+most men at once indulge in the most insulting suspicions. Their minds
+contract a tinge of bitterness which manifests itself in their
+conversation, and in their manners; and the alarm which fills their
+heart, like the gas flame in a glass globe, lights up their
+countenances so plainly, that it accounts for their conduct.
+
+Now a woman, who has twelve hours more than you have each day to
+reflect and to study you, reads the suspicion written upon your face at
+the very moment that it arises. She will never forget this gratuitous
+insult. Nothing can ever remedy that. All is now said and done, and the
+very next day, if she has opportunity, she will join the ranks of
+inconsistent women.
+
+You ought then to begin under these circumstances to affect towards
+your wife the same boundless confidence that you have hitherto had in
+her. If you begin to lull her anxieties by honeyed words, you are lost,
+she will not believe you; for she has her policy as you have yours. Now
+there is as much need for tact as for kindliness in your behavior, in
+order to inculcate in her, without her knowing it, a feeling of
+security, which will lead her to lay back her ears, and prevent you
+from using rein or spur at the wrong moment.
+
+But how can we compare a horse, the frankest of all animals, to a
+being, the flashes of whose thought, and the movements of whose
+impulses render her at moments more prudent than the Servite Fra-Paolo,
+the most terrible adviser that the Ten at Venice ever had; more
+deceitful than a king; more adroit than Louis XI; more profound than
+Machiavelli; as sophistical as Hobbes; as acute as Voltaire; as pliant
+as the fiancee of Mamolin; and distrustful of no one in the whole wide
+world but you?
+
+Moreover, to this dissimulation, by means of which the springs that
+move your conduct ought to be made as invisible as those that move the
+world, must be added absolute self-control. That diplomatic
+imperturbability, so boasted of by Talleyrand, must be the least of
+your qualities; his exquisite politeness and the grace of his manners
+must distinguish your conversation. The professor here expressly
+forbids you to use your whip, if you would obtain complete control over
+your gentle Andalusian steed.
+
+LXI.
+If a man strike his mistress it is a self-inflicted wound; but if he
+strike his wife it is suicide!
+
+How can we think of a government without police, an action without
+force, a power without weapons?—Now this is exactly the problem which
+we shall try to solve in our future meditations. But first we must
+submit two preliminary observations. They will furnish us with two
+other theories concerning the application of all the mechanical means
+which we propose you should employ. An instance from life will refresh
+these arid and dry dissertations: the hearing of such a story will be
+like laying down a book, to work in the field.
+
+In the year 1822, on a fine morning in the month of February, I was
+traversing the boulevards of Paris, from the quiet circles of the
+Marais to the fashionable quarters of the Chaussee-d’Antin, and I
+observed for the first time, not without a certain philosophic joy, the
+diversity of physiognomy and the varieties of costume which, from the
+Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule even to the Madeleine, made each portion of the
+boulevard a world of itself, and this whole zone of Paris, a grand
+panorama of manners. Having at that time no idea of what the world was,
+and little thinking that one day I should have the audacity to set
+myself up as a legislator on marriage, I was going to take lunch at the
+house of a college friend, who was perhaps too early in life afflicted
+with a wife and two children. My former professor of mathematics lived
+at a short distance from the house of my college friend, and I promised
+myself the pleasure of a visit to this worthy mathematician before
+indulging my appetite for the dainties of friendship. I accordingly
+made my way to the heart of a study, where everything was covered with
+a dust which bore witness to the lofty abstraction of the scholar. But
+a surprise was in store for me there. I perceived a pretty woman seated
+on the arm of an easy chair, as if mounted on an English horse; her
+face took on the look of conventional surprise worn by mistresses of
+the house towards those they do not know, but she did not disguise the
+expression of annoyance which, at my appearance, clouded her
+countenance with the thought that I was aware how ill-timed was my
+presence. My master, doubtless absorbed in an equation, had not yet
+raised his head; I therefore waved my right hand towards the young
+lady, like a fish moving his fin, and on tiptoe I retired with a
+mysterious smile which might be translated “I will not be the one to
+prevent him committing an act of infidelity to Urania.” She nodded her
+head with one of those sudden gestures whose graceful vivacity is not
+to be translated into words.
+
+“My good friend, don’t go away,” cried the geometrician. “This is my
+wife!”
+
+I bowed for the second time!—Oh, Coulon! Why wert thou not present to
+applaud the only one of thy pupils who understood from that moment the
+expression, “anacreontic,” as applied to a bow?—The effect must have
+been very overwhelming; for Madame the Professoress, as the Germans
+say, rose hurriedly as if to go, making me a slight bow which seemed to
+say: “Adorable!——” Her husband stopped her, saying:
+
+“Don’t go, my child, this is one of my pupils.”
+
+The young woman bent her head towards the scholar as a bird perched on
+a bough stretches its neck to pick up a seed.
+
+“It is not possible,” said the husband, heaving a sigh, “and I am going
+to prove it to you by A plus B.”
+
+“Let us drop that, sir, I beg you,” she answered, pointing with a wink
+to me.
+
+If it had been a problem in algebra, my master would have understood
+this look, but it was Chinese to him, and so he went on.
+
+“Look here, child, I constitute you judge in the matter; our income is
+ten thousand francs.”
+
+At these words I retired to the door, as if I were seized with a wild
+desire to examine the framed drawings which had attracted my attention.
+My discretion was rewarded by an eloquent glance. Alas! she did not
+know that in Fortunio I could have played the part of Sharp-Ears, who
+heard the truffles growing.
+
+“In accordance with the principles of general economy,” said my master,
+“no one ought to spend in rent and servant’s wages more than two-tenths
+of his income; now our apartment and our attendance cost altogether a
+hundred louis. I give you twelve hundred francs to dress with” [in
+saying this he emphasized every syllable]. “Your food,” he went on,
+takes up four thousand francs, our children demand at lest twenty-five
+louis; I take for myself only eight hundred francs; washing, fuel and
+light mount up to about a thousand francs; so that there does not
+remain, as you see, more than six hundred francs for unforeseen
+expenses. In order to buy the cross of diamonds, we must draw a
+thousand crowns from our capital, and if once we take that course, my
+little darling, there is no reason why we should not leave Paris which
+you love so much, and at once take up our residence in the country, in
+order to retrench. Children and household expenses will increase fast
+enough! Come, try to be reasonable!”
+
+“I suppose I must,” she said, “but you will be the only husband in
+Paris who has not given a New Year’s gift to his wife.”
+
+And she stole away like a school-boy who goes to finish an imposed
+duty. My master made a gesture of relief. When he saw the door close he
+rubbed his hands, he talked of the war in Spain; and I went my way to
+the Rue de Provence, little knowing that I had received the first
+installment of a great lesson in marriage, any more than I dreamt of
+the conquest of Constantinople by General Diebitsch. I arrived at my
+host’s house at the very moment they were sitting down to luncheon,
+after having waited for me the half hour demanded by usage. It was, I
+believe, as she opened a _pate de foie gras_ that my pretty hostess
+said to her husband, with a determined air:
+
+“Alexander, if you were really nice you would give me that pair of
+ear-rings that we saw at Fossin’s.”
+
+“You shall have them,” cheerfully replied my friend, drawing from his
+pocketbook three notes of a thousand francs, the sight of which made
+his wife’s eyes sparkle. “I can no more resist the pleasure of offering
+them to you,” he added, “than you can that of accepting them. This is
+the anniversary of the day I first saw you, and the diamonds will
+perhaps make you remember it!——”
+
+“You bad man!” said she, with a winning smile.
+
+She poked two fingers into her bodice, and pulling out a bouquet of
+violets she threw them with childlike contempt into the face of my
+friend. Alexander gave her the price of the jewels, crying out:
+
+“I had seen the flowers!”
+
+I shall never forget the lively gesture and the eager joy with which,
+like a cat which lays its spotted paw upon a mouse, the little woman
+seized the three bank notes; she rolled them up blushing with pleasure,
+and put them in the place of the violets which before had perfumed her
+bosom. I could not help thinking about my old mathematical master. I
+did not then see any difference between him and his pupil, than that
+which exists between a frugal man and a prodigal, little thinking that
+he of the two who seemed to calculate the better, actually calculated
+the worse. The luncheon went off merrily. Very soon, seated in a little
+drawing-room newly decorated, before a cheerful fire which gave warmth
+and made our hearts expand as in spring time, I felt compelled to make
+this loving couple a guest’s compliments on the furnishing of their
+little bower.
+
+“It is a pity that all this costs so dear,” said my friend, “but it is
+right that the nest be worthy of the bird; but why the devil do you
+compliment me upon curtains which are not paid for?—You make me
+remember, just at the time I am digesting lunch, that I still owe two
+thousand francs to a Turk of an upholsterer.”
+
+At these words the mistress of the house made a mental inventory of the
+pretty room with her eyes, and the radiancy of her face changed to
+thoughtfulness. Alexander took me by the hand and led me to the recess
+of a bay window.
+
+“Do you happen,” he said in a low voice, “to have a thousand crowns to
+lend me? I have only twelve thousand francs income, and this year—”
+
+“Alexander,” cried the dear creature, interrupting her husband, while,
+rushing up, she offered him the three banknotes, “I see now that it is
+a piece of folly—”
+
+“What do you mean?” answered he, “keep your money.”
+
+“But, my love, I am ruining you! I ought to know that you love me so
+much, that I ought not to tell you all that I wish for.”
+
+“Keep it, my darling, it is your lawful property—nonsense, I shall
+gamble this winter and get all that back again!”
+
+“Gamble!” cried she, with an expression of horror. “Alexander, take
+back these notes! Come, sir, I wish you to do so.”
+
+“No, no,” replied my friend, repulsing the white and delicious little
+hand. “Are you not going on Thursday to a ball of Madame de B——-?”
+
+“I will think about what you asked of me,” said I to my comrade.
+
+I went away bowing to his wife, but I saw plainly after that scene that
+my anacreontic salutation did not produce much effect upon her.
+
+“He must be mad,” thought I as I went away, “to talk of a thousand
+crowns to a law student.”
+
+Five days later I found myself at the house of Madame de B——-, whose
+balls were becoming fashionable. In the midst of the quadrilles I saw
+the wife of my friend and that of the mathematician. Madame Alexander
+wore a charming dress; some flowers and white muslin were all that
+composed it. She wore a little cross _a la Jeannette_, hanging by a
+black velvet ribbon which set off the whiteness of her scented skin;
+long pears of gold decorated her ears. On the neck of Madame the
+Professoress sparkled a superb cross of diamonds.
+
+“How funny that is,” said I to a personage who had not yet studied the
+world’s ledger, nor deciphered the heart of a single woman.
+
+That personage was myself. If I had then the desire to dance with those
+fair women, it was simply because I knew a secret which emboldened my
+timidity.
+
+“So after all, madame, you have your cross?” I said to her first.
+
+“Well, I fairly won it!” she replied, with a smile hard to describe.
+
+“How is this! no ear-rings?” I remarked to the wife of my friend.
+
+“Ah!” she replied, “I have enjoyed possession of them during a whole
+luncheon time, but you see that I have ended by converting Alexander.”
+
+“He allowed himself to be easily convinced?”
+
+She answered with a look of triumph.
+
+Eight years afterwards, this scene suddenly rose to my memory, though I
+had long since forgotten it, and in the light of the candles I
+distinctly discerned the moral of it. Yes, a woman has a horror of
+being convinced of anything; when you try to persuade her she
+immediately submits to being led astray and continues to play the role
+which nature gave her. In her view, to allow herself to be won over is
+to grant a favor, but exact arguments irritate and confound her; in
+order to guide her you must employ the power which she herself so
+frequently employs and which lies in an appeal to sensibility. It is
+therefore in his wife, and not in himself, that a husband can find the
+instruments of his despotism; as diamond cuts diamond so must the woman
+be made to tyrannize over herself. To know how to offer the ear-rings
+in such a way that they will be returned, is a secret whose application
+embraces the slightest details of life. And now let us pass to the
+second observation.
+
+“He who can manage property of one toman, can manage one of an hundred
+thousand,” says an Indian proverb; and I, for my part, will enlarge
+upon this Asiatic adage and declare, that he who can govern one woman
+can govern a nation, and indeed there is very much similarity between
+these two governments. Must not the policy of husbands be very nearly
+the same as the policy of kings? Do not we see kings trying to amuse
+the people in order to deprive them of their liberty; throwing food at
+their heads for one day, in order to make them forget the misery of a
+whole year; preaching to them not to steal and at the same time
+stripping them of everything; and saying to them: “It seems to me that
+if I were the people I should be virtuous”? It is from England that we
+obtain the precedent which husbands should adopt in their houses. Those
+who have eyes ought to see that when the government is running smoothly
+the Whigs are rarely in power. A long Tory ministry has always
+succeeded an ephemeral Liberal cabinet. The orators of a national party
+resemble the rats which wear their teeth away in gnawing the rotten
+panel; they close up the hole as soon as they smell the nuts and the
+lard locked up in the royal cupboard. The woman is the Whig of our
+government. Occupying the situation in which we have left her she might
+naturally aspire to the conquest of more than one privilege. Shut your
+eyes to the intrigues, allow her to waste her strength in mounting half
+the steps of your throne; and when she is on the point of touching your
+sceptre, fling her back to the ground, quite gently and with infinite
+grace, saying to her: “Bravo!” and leaving her to expect success in the
+hereafter. The craftiness of this manoeuvre will prove a fine support
+to you in the employment of any means which it may please you to choose
+from your arsenal, for the object of subduing your wife.
+
+Such are the general principles which a husband should put into
+practice, if he wishes to escape mistakes in ruling his little kingdom.
+Nevertheless, in spite of what was decided by the minority at the
+council of Macon (Montesquieu, who had perhaps foreseen the coming of
+constitutional government has remarked, I forget in what part of his
+writings, that good sense in public assemblies is always found on the
+side of the minority), we discern in a woman a soul and a body, and we
+commence by investigating the means to gain control of her moral
+nature. The exercise of thought, whatever people may say, is more noble
+than the exercise of bodily organs, and we give precedence to science
+over cookery and to intellectual training over hygiene.
+
+MEDITATION XI.
+
+INSTRUCTION IN THE HOME.
+
+
+Whether wives should or should not be put under instruction—such is the
+question before us. Of all those which we have discussed this is the
+only one which has two extremes and admits of no compromise. Knowledge
+and ignorance, such are the two irreconcilable terms of this problem.
+Between these two abysses we seem to see Louis XVIII reckoning up the
+felicities of the eighteenth century, and the unhappiness of the
+nineteenth. Seated in the centre of the seesaw, which he knew so well
+how to balance by his own weight, he contemplates at one end of it the
+fanatic ignorance of a lay brother, the apathy of a serf, the shining
+armor on the horses of a banneret; he thinks he hears the cry, “France
+and Montjoie-Saint-Denis!” But he turns round, he smiles as he sees the
+haughty look of a manufacturer, who is captain in the national guard;
+the elegant carriage of a stock broker; the simple costume of a peer of
+France turned journalist and sending his son to the Polytechnique; then
+he notices the costly stuffs, the newspapers, the steam engines; and he
+drinks his coffee from a cup of Sevres, at the bottom of which still
+glitters the “N” surmounted by a crown.
+
+“Away with civilization! Away with thought!”—That is your cry. You
+ought to hold in horror the education of women for the reason so well
+realized in Spain, that it is easier to govern a nation of idiots than
+a nation of scholars. A nation degraded is happy: if she has not the
+sentiment of liberty, neither has she the storms and disturbances which
+it begets; she lives as polyps live; she can be cut up into two or
+three pieces and each piece is still a nation, complete and living, and
+ready to be governed by the first blind man who arms himself with the
+pastoral staff.
+
+What is it that produces this wonderful characteristic of humanity?
+Ignorance; ignorance is the sole support of despotism, which lives on
+darkness and silence. Now happiness in the domestic establishment as in
+a political state is a negative happiness. The affection of a people
+for a king, in an absolute monarchy, is perhaps less contrary to nature
+than the fidelity of a wife towards her husband, when love between them
+no longer exists. Now we know that, in your house, love at this moment
+has one foot on the window-sill. It is necessary for you, therefore, to
+put into practice that salutary rigor by which M. de Metternich
+prolongs his _statu quo_; but we would advise you to do so with more
+tact and with still more tenderness; for your wife is more crafty than
+all the Germans put together, and as voluptuous as the Italians.
+
+You should, therefore, try to put off as long as possible the fatal
+moment when your wife asks you for a book. This will be easy. You will
+first of all pronounce in a tone of disdain the phrase “Blue stocking;”
+and, on her request being repeated, you will tell her what ridicule
+attaches, among the neighbors, to pedantic women.
+
+You will then repeat to her, very frequently, that the most lovable and
+the wittiest women in the world are found at Paris, where women never
+read;
+
+That women are like people of quality who, according to Mascarillo,
+know everything without having learned anything; that a woman while she
+is dancing, or while she is playing cards, without even having the
+appearance of listening, ought to know how to pick up from the
+conversation of talented men the ready-made phrases out of which fools
+manufacture their wit at Paris;
+
+That in this country decisive judgments on men and affairs are passed
+round from hand to hand; and that the little cutting phrase with which
+a woman criticises an author, demolishes a work, or heaps contempt on a
+picture, has more power in the world than a court decision;
+
+That women are beautiful mirrors, which naturally reflect the most
+brilliant ideas;
+
+That natural wit is everything, and the best education is gained rather
+from what we learn in the world than by what we read in books;
+
+That, above all, reading ends in making the eyes dull, etc.
+
+To think of leaving a woman at liberty to read the books which her
+character of mind may prompt her to choose! This is to drop a spark in
+a powder magazine; it is worse than that, it is to teach your wife to
+separate herself from you; to live in an imaginary world, in a
+Paradise. For what do women read? Works of passion, the _Confessions_
+of Rousseau, romances, and all those compositions which work most
+powerfully on their sensibility. They like neither argument nor the
+ripe fruits of knowledge. Now have you ever considered the results
+which follow these poetical readings?
+
+Romances, and indeed all works of imagination, paint sentiments and
+events with colors of a very different brilliancy from those presented
+by nature. The fascination of such works springs less from the desire
+which each author feels to show his skill in putting forth choice and
+delicate ideas than from the mysterious working of the human intellect.
+It is characteristic of man to purify and refine everything that he
+lays up in the treasury of his thoughts. What human faces, what
+monuments of the dead are not made more beautiful than actual nature in
+the artistic representation? The soul of the reader assists in this
+conspiracy against the truth, either by means of the profound silence
+which it enjoys in reading or by the fire of mental conception with
+which it is agitated or by the clearness with which imagery is
+reflected in the mirror of the understanding. Who has not seen on
+reading the _Confessions_ of Jean-Jacques, that Madame de Warens is
+described as much prettier than she ever was in actual life? It might
+almost be said that our souls dwell with delight upon the figures which
+they had met in a former existence, under fairer skies; that they
+accept the creations of another soul only as wings on which they may
+soar into space; features the most delicate they bring to perfection by
+making them their own; and the most poetic expression which appears in
+the imagery of an author brings forth still more ethereal imagery in
+the mind of a reader. To read is to join with the writer in a creative
+act. The mystery of the transubstantiation of ideas, originates perhaps
+in the instinctive consciousness that we have of a vocation loftier
+than our present destiny. Or, is it based on the lost tradition of a
+former life? What must that life have been, if this slight residuum of
+memory offers us such volumes of delight?
+
+Moreover, in reading plays and romances, woman, a creature much more
+susceptible than we are to excitement, experiences the most violent
+transport. She creates for herself an ideal existence beside which all
+reality grows pale; she at once attempts to realize this voluptuous
+life, to take to herself the magic which she sees in it. And, without
+knowing it, she passes from spirit to letter and from soul to sense.
+
+And would you be simple enough to believe that the manners, the
+sentiments of a man like you, who usually dress and undress before your
+wife, can counterbalance the influence of these books and outshine the
+glory of their fictitious lovers, in whose garments the fair reader
+sees neither hole nor stain?—Poor fool! too late, alas! for her
+happiness and for yours, your wife will find out that the _heroes_ of
+poetry are as rare in real life as the _Apollos_ of sculpture!
+
+Very many husbands will find themselves embarrassed in trying to
+prevent their wives from reading, yet there are certain people who
+allege that reading has this advantage, that men know what their wives
+are about when they have a book in hand. In the first place you will
+see, in the next Meditation, what a tendency the sedentary life has to
+make a woman quarrelsome; but have you never met those beings without
+poetry, who succeed in petrifying their unhappy companions by reducing
+life to its most mechanical elements? Study great men in their
+conversation and learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they
+condemn poetry and the pleasures of imagination.
+
+But if, after all your efforts, your wife persists in wishing to read,
+put at her disposal at once all possible books from the A B C of her
+little boy to _Rene_, a book more dangerous to you when in her hands
+than _Therese Philosophe_. You might create in her an utter disgust for
+reading by giving her tedious books; and plunge her into utter idiocy
+with _Marie Alacoque_, _The Brosse de Penitence_, or with the chansons
+which were so fashionable in the time of Louis XV; but later on you
+will find, in the present volume, the means of so thoroughly employing
+your wife’s time, that any kind of reading will be quite out of the
+question.
+
+And first of all, consider the immense resources which the education of
+women has prepared for you in your efforts to turn your wife from her
+fleeting taste for science. Just see with what admirable stupidity
+girls lend themselves to reap the benefit of the education which is
+imposed upon them in France; we give them in charge to nursery maids,
+to companions, to governesses who teach them twenty tricks of coquetry
+and false modesty, for every single noble and true idea which they
+impart to them. Girls are brought up as slaves, and are accustomed to
+the idea that they are sent into the world to imitate their
+grandmothers, to breed canary birds, to make herbals, to water little
+Bengal rose-bushes, to fill in worsted work, or to put on collars.
+Moreover, if a little girl in her tenth year has more refinement than a
+boy of twenty, she is timid and awkward. She is frightened at a spider,
+chatters nonsense, thinks of dress, talks about the fashions and has
+not the courage to be either a watchful mother or a chaste wife.
+
+Notice what progress she had made; she has been shown how to paint
+roses, and to embroider ties in such a way as to earn eight sous a day.
+She has learned the history of France in _Ragois_ and chronology in the
+_Tables du Citoyen Chantreau_, and her young imagination has been set
+free in the realm of geography; all without any aim, excepting that of
+keeping away all that might be dangerous to her heart; but at the same
+time her mother and her teachers repeat with unwearied voice the
+lesson, that the whole science of a woman lies in knowing how to
+arrange the fig leaf which our Mother Eve wore. “She does not hear for
+fifteen years,” says Diderot, “anything else but ‘my daughter, your fig
+leaf is on badly; my daughter, your fig leaf is on well; my daughter,
+would it not look better so?’”
+
+Keep your wife then within this fine and noble circle of knowledge. If
+by chance your wife wishes to have a library, buy for her Florian,
+Malte-Brun, _The Cabinet des Fees_, _The Arabian Nights_, Redoute’s
+_Roses_, _The Customs of China_, _The Pigeons_, by Madame Knip, the
+great work on Egypt, etc. Carry out, in short, the clever suggestion of
+that princess who, when she was told of a riot occasioned by the
+dearness of bread, said, “Why don’t they eat cake?”
+
+Perhaps, one evening, your wife will reproach you for being sullen and
+not speaking to her; perhaps she will say that you are ridiculous, when
+you have just made a pun; but this is one of the slight annoyances
+incident to our system; and, moreover, what does it matter to you that
+the education of women in France is the most pleasant of absurdities,
+and that your marital obscurantism has brought a doll to your arms? As
+you have not sufficient courage to undertake a fairer task, would it
+not be better to lead your wife along the beaten track of married life
+in safety, than to run the risk of making her scale the steep
+precipices of love? She is likely to be a mother: you must not exactly
+expect to have Gracchi for sons, but to be really _pater quem nuptiae
+demonstrant_; now, in order to aid you in reaching this consummation,
+we must make this book an arsenal from which each one, in accordance
+with his wife’s character and his own, may choose weapons fit to employ
+against the terrible genius of evil, which is always ready to rise up
+in the soul of a wife; and since it may fairly be considered that the
+ignorant are the most cruel opponents of feminine education, this
+Meditation will serve as a breviary for the majority of husbands.
+
+If a woman has received a man’s education, she possesses in very truth
+the most brilliant and most fertile sources of happiness both to
+herself and to her husband; but this kind of woman is as rare as
+happiness itself; and if you do not possess her for your wife, your
+best course is to confine the one you do possess, for the sake of your
+common felicity, to the region of ideas she was born in, for you must
+not forget that one moment of pride in her might destroy you, by
+setting on the throne a slave who would immediately be tempted to abuse
+her power.
+
+After all, by following the system prescribed in this Meditation, a man
+of superiority will be relieved from the necessity of putting his
+thoughts into small change, when he wishes to be understood by his
+wife, if indeed this man of superiority has been guilty of the folly of
+marrying one of those poor creatures who cannot understand him, instead
+of choosing for his wife a young girl whose mind and heart he has
+tested and studied for a considerable time.
+
+Our aim in this last matrimonial observation has not been to advise all
+men of superiority to seek for women of superiority and we do not wish
+each one to expound our principles after the manner of Madame de Stael,
+who attempted in the most indelicate manner to effect a union between
+herself and Napoleon. These two beings would have been very unhappy in
+their domestic life; and Josephine was a wife accomplished in a very
+different sense from this virago of the nineteenth century.
+
+And, indeed, when we praise those undiscoverable girls so happily
+educated by chance, so well endowed by nature, whose delicate souls
+endure so well the rude contact of the great soul of him we call _a
+man_, we mean to speak of those rare and noble creatures of whom Goethe
+has given us a model in his Claire of _Egmont_; we are thinking of
+those women who seek no other glory than that of playing their part
+well; who adapt themselves with amazing pliancy to the will and
+pleasure of those whom nature has given them for masters; soaring at
+one time into the boundless sphere of their thought and in turn
+stooping to the simple task of amusing them as if they were children;
+understanding well the inconsistencies of masculine and violent souls,
+understanding also their slightest word, their most puzzling looks;
+happy in silence, happy also in the midst of loquacity; and well aware
+that the pleasures, the ideas and the moral instincts of a Lord Byron
+cannot be those of a bonnet-maker. But we must stop; this fair picture
+has led us too far from our subject; we are treating of marriage and
+not of love.
+
+MEDITATION XII.
+
+THE HYGIENE OF MARRIAGE.
+
+
+The aim of this Meditation is to call to your attention a new method of
+defence, by which you may reduce the will of your new wife to a
+condition of utter and abject submission. This is brought about by the
+reaction upon her moral nature of physical changes, and the wise
+lowering of her physical condition by a diet skillfully controlled.
+
+This great and philosophical question of conjugal medicine will
+doubtless be regarded favorably by all who are gouty, are impotent, or
+suffer from catarrh; and by that legion of old men whose dullness we
+have quickened by our article on the predestined. But it principally
+concerns those husbands who have courage enough to enter into those
+paths of machiavelism, such as would not have been unworthy of that
+great king of France who endeavored to secure the happiness of the
+nation at the expense of certain noble heads. Here, the subject is the
+same. The amputation or the weakening of certain members is always to
+the advantage of the whole body.
+
+Do you think seriously that a celibate who has been subject to a diet
+consisting of the herb hanea, of cucumbers, of purslane and the
+applications of leeches to his ears, as recommended by Sterne, would be
+able to carry by storm the honor of your wife? Suppose that a diplomat
+had been clever enough to affix a permanent linen plaster to the head
+of Napoleon, or to purge him every morning: Do you think that Napoleon,
+Napoleon the Great, would ever have conquered Italy? Was Napoleon,
+during his campaign in Russia, a prey to the most horrible pangs of
+dysuria, or was he not? That is one of the questions which has weighed
+upon the minds of the whole world. Is it not certain that cooling
+applications, douches, baths, etc., produce great changes in more or
+less acute affections of the brain? In the middle of the heat of July
+when each one of your pores slowly filters out and returns to the
+devouring atmosphere the glasses of iced lemonade which you have drunk
+at a single draught, have you ever felt the flame of courage, the vigor
+of thought, the complete energy which rendered existence light and
+sweet to you some months before?
+
+No, no; the iron most closely cemented into the hardest stone will
+raise and throw apart the most durable monument, by reason of the
+secret influence exercised by the slow and invisible variations of heat
+and cold, which vex the atmosphere. In the first place, let us be sure
+that if atmospheric mediums have an influence over man, there is still
+a stronger reason for believing that man, in turn, influences the
+imagination of his kind, by the more or less vigor with which he
+projects his will and thus produces a veritable atmosphere around him.
+
+It is in this fact that the power of the actor’s talent lies, as well
+as that of poetry and of fanaticism; for the former is the eloquence of
+words, as the latter is the eloquence of actions; and in this lies the
+foundation of a science, so far in its infancy.
+
+This will, so potent in one man against another, this nervous and fluid
+force, eminently mobile and transmittable, is itself subject to the
+changing condition of our organization, and there are many
+circumstances which make this frail organism of ours to vary. At this
+point, our metaphysical observation shall stop and we will enter into
+an analysis of the circumstances which develop the will of man and
+impart to it a grater degree of strength or weakness.
+
+Do not believe, however, that it is our aim to induce you to put
+cataplasms on the honor of your wife, to lock her up in a sweating
+house, or to seal her up like a letter; no. We will not even attempt to
+teach you the magnetic theory which would give you the power to make
+your will triumph in the soul of your wife; there is not a single
+husband who would accept the happiness of an eternal love at the price
+of this perpetual strain laid upon his animal forces. But we shall
+attempt to expound a powerful system of hygiene, which will enable you
+to put out the flame when your chimney takes fire. The elegant women of
+Paris and the provinces (and these elegant women form a very
+distinguished class among the honest women) have plenty of means of
+attaining the object which we propose, without rummaging in the arsenal
+of medicine for the four cold specifics, the water-lily and the
+thousand inventions worthy only of witches. We will leave to Aelian his
+herb hanea and to Sterne the purslane and cucumber which indicate too
+plainly his antiphlogistic purpose.
+
+You should let your wife recline all day long on soft armchairs, in
+which she sinks into a veritable bath of eiderdown or feathers; you
+should encourage in every way that does no violence to your conscience,
+the inclination which women have to breathe no other air but the
+scented atmosphere of a chamber seldom opened, where daylight can
+scarcely enter through the soft, transparent curtains.
+
+You will obtain marvelous results from this system, after having
+previously experienced the shock of her excitement; but if you are
+strong enough to support this momentary transport of your wife you will
+soon see her artificial energy die away. In general, women love to live
+fast, but, after their tempest of passion, return to that condition of
+tranquillity which insures the happiness of a husband.
+
+Jean-Jacques, through the instrumentality of his enchanting Julie, must
+have proved to your wife that it was infinitely becoming to refrain
+from affronting her delicate stomach and her refined palate by making
+chyle out of coarse lumps of beef, and enormous collops of mutton. Is
+there anything purer in the world than those interesting vegetables,
+always fresh and scentless, those tinted fruits, that coffee, that
+fragrant chocolate, those oranges, the golden apples of Atalanta, the
+dates of Arabia and the biscuits of Brussels, a wholesome and elegant
+food which produces satisfactory results, at the same time that it
+imparts to a woman an air of mysterious originality? By the regimen
+which she chooses she becomes quite celebrated in her immediate circle,
+just as she would be by a singular toilet, a benevolent action or a
+_bon mot_. Pythagoras must needs have cast his spell over her, and
+become as much petted by her as a poodle or an ape.
+
+Never commit the imprudence of certain men who, for the sake of putting
+on the appearance of wit, controvert the feminine dictum, _that the
+figure is preserved by meagre diet_. Women on such a diet never grow
+fat, that is clear and positive; do you stick to that.
+
+Praise the skill with which some women, renowned for their beauty, have
+been able to preserve it by bathing themselves in milk, several times a
+day, or in water compounded of substances likely to render the skin
+softer and to lower the nervous tension.
+
+Advise her above all things to refrain from washing herself in cold
+water; because water warm or tepid is the proper thing for all kinds of
+ablutions.
+
+Let Broussais be your idol. At the least indisposition of your wife,
+and on the slightest pretext, order the application of leeches; do not
+even shrink from applying from time to time a few dozen on yourself, in
+order to establish the system of that celebrated doctor in your
+household. You will constantly be called upon from your position as
+husband to discover that your wife is too ruddy; try even sometimes to
+bring the blood to her head, in order to have the right to introduce
+into the house at certain intervals a squad of leeches.
+
+Your wife ought to drink water, lightly tinged with a Burgundy wine
+agreeable to her taste, but destitute of any tonic properties; every
+other kind of wine would be bad for her. Never allow her to drink water
+alone; if you do, you are lost.
+
+“Impetuous fluid! As soon as you press against the floodgates of the
+brain, how quickly do they yield to your power! Then Curiosity comes
+swimming by, making signs to her companions to follow; they plunge into
+the current. Imagination sits dreaming on the bank. She follows the
+torrent with her eyes and transforms the fragments of straw and reed
+into masts and bowsprit. And scarcely has the transformation taken
+place, before Desire, holding in one hand her skirt drawn up even to
+her knees, appears, sees the vessel and takes possession of it. O ye
+drinkers of water, it is by means of that magic spring that you have so
+often turned and turned again the world at your will, throwing beneath
+your feet the weak, trampling on his neck, and sometimes changing even
+the form and aspect of nature!”
+
+If by this system of inaction, in combination with our system of diet,
+you fail to obtain satisfactory results, throw yourself with might and
+main into another system, which we will explain to you.
+
+Man has a certain degree of energy given to him. Such and such a man or
+woman stands to another as ten is to thirty, as one to five; and there
+is a certain degree of energy which no one of us ever exceeds. The
+quantity of energy, or willpower, which each of us possesses diffuses
+itself like sound; it is sometimes weak, sometimes strong; it modifies
+itself according to the octaves to which it mounts. This force is
+unique, and although it may be dissipated in desire, in passion, in
+toils of intellect or in bodily exertion, it turns towards the object
+to which man directs it. A boxer expends it in blows of the fist, the
+baker in kneading his bread, the poet in the enthusiasm which consumes
+and demands an enormous quantity of it; it passes to the feet of the
+dancer; in fact, every one diffuses it at will, and may I see the
+Minotaur tranquilly seated this very evening upon my bed, if you do not
+know as well as I do how he expends it. Almost all men spend in
+necessary toils, or in the anguish of direful passions, this fine sum
+of energy and of will, with which nature has endowed them; but our
+honest women are all the prey to the caprices and the struggles of this
+power which knows not what to do with itself. If, in the case of your
+wife, this energy has not been subdued by the prescribed dietary
+regimen, subject her to some form of activity which will constantly
+increase in violence. Find some means by which her sum of force which
+inconveniences you may be carried off, by some occupation which shall
+entirely absorb her strength. Without setting your wife to work the
+crank of a machine, there are a thousand ways of tiring her out under
+the load of constant work.
+
+In leaving it to you to find means for carrying out our design—and
+these means vary with circumstances—we would point out that dancing is
+one of the very best abysses in which love may bury itself. This point
+having been very well treated by a contemporary, we will give him here
+an opportunity of speaking his mind:
+
+“The poor victim who is the admiration of an enchanted audience pays
+dear for her success. What result can possibly follow on exertions so
+ill-proportioned to the resources of the delicate sex? The muscles of
+the body, disproportionately wearied, are forced to their full power of
+exertion. The nervous forces, intended to feed the fire of passions,
+and the labor of the brain, are diverted from their course. The failure
+of desire, the wish for rest, the exclusive craving for substantial
+food, all point to a nature impoverished, more anxious to recruit than
+to enjoy. Moreover, a denizen of the side scenes said to me one day,
+‘Whoever has lived with dancers has lived with sheep; for in their
+exhaustion they can think of nothing but strong food.’ Believe me,
+then, the love which a ballet girl inspires is very delusive; in her we
+find, under an appearance of an artificial springtime, a soil which is
+cold as well as greedy, and senses which are utterly dulled. The
+Calabrian doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric
+affections which are common among the women of their country; and the
+Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the highbred mares, whose too
+lively temperament hinders their fecundity. ‘Dull as a dancer’ is a
+familiar proverb at the theatre. In fact, the best brains of Europe are
+convinced that dancing brings with it a result eminently cooling.
+
+“In support of this it may be necessary to add other observations. The
+life of shepherds gives birth to irregular loves. The morals of weavers
+were horribly decried in Greece. The Italians have given birth to a
+proverb concerning the lubricity of lame women. The Spanish, in whose
+veins are found many mixtures of African incontinence, have expressed
+their sentiments in a maxim which is familiar with them: _Muger y
+gallina pierna quebrantada_ [it is good that a woman and a hen have one
+broken leg]. The profound sagacity of the Orientals in the art of
+pleasure is altogether expressed by this ordinance of the caliph Hakim,
+founder of the Druses, who forbade, under pain of death, the making in
+his kingdom of any shoes for women. It seems that over the whole globe
+the tempests of the heart wait only to break out after the limbs are at
+rest!”
+
+What an admirable manoeuvre it would be to make a wife dance, and to
+feed her on vegetables!
+
+Do not believe that these observations, which are as true as they are
+wittily stated, contradict in any way the system which we have
+previously prescribed; by the latter, as by the former, we succeed in
+producing in a woman that needed listlessness, which is the pledge of
+repose and tranquility. By the latter you leave a door open, that the
+enemy may flee; by the former, you slay him.
+
+Now at this point it seems to us that we hear timorous people and those
+of narrow views rising up against our idea of hygiene in the name of
+morality and sentiment.
+
+“Is not woman endowed with a soul? Has she not feelings as we have?
+What right has any one, without regard to her pain, her ideas, or her
+requirements, to hammer her out, as a cheap metal, out of which a
+workman fashions a candlestick or an extinguisher? Is it because the
+poor creatures are already so feeble and miserable that a brute claims
+the power to torture them, merely at the dictate of his own fancies,
+which may be more or less just? And, if by this weakening or heating
+system of yours, which draws out, softens, hardens the fibres, you
+cause frightful and cruel sickness, if you bring to the tomb a woman
+who is dear to you; if, if,—”
+
+This is our answer:
+
+Have you never noticed into how many different shapes harlequin and
+columbine change their little white hats? They turn and twist them so
+well that they become, one after another, a spinning-top, a boat, a
+wine-glass, a half-moon, a cap, a basket, a fish, a whip, a dagger, a
+baby, and a man’s head.
+
+This is an exact image of the despotism with which you ought to shape
+and reshape your wife.
+
+The wife is a piece of property, acquired by contract; she is part of
+your furniture, for possession is nine-tenths of the law; in fact, the
+woman is not, to speak correctly, anything but an adjunct to the man;
+therefore abridge, cut, file this article as you choose; she is in
+every sense yours. Take no notice at all of her murmurs, of her cries,
+of her sufferings; nature has ordained her for your use, that she may
+bear everything—children, griefs, blows and pains from man.
+
+Don’t accuse yourself of harshness. In the codes of all the nations
+which are called civilized, man has written the laws which govern the
+destiny of women in these cruel terms: _Vae victis!_ Woe to the
+conquered!
+
+Finally, think upon this last observation, the most weighty, perhaps,
+of all that we have made up to this time: if you, her husband, do not
+break under the scourge of your will this weak and charming reed, there
+will be a celibate, capricious and despotic, ready to bring her under a
+yoke more cruel still; and she will have to endure two tyrannies
+instead of one. Under all considerations, therefore, humanity demands
+that you should follow the system of our hygiene.
+
+MEDITATION XIII.
+
+OF PERSONAL MEASURES.
+
+
+Perhaps the preceding Meditations will prove more likely to develop
+general principles of conduct, than to repel force by force. They
+furnish, however, the pharmacopoeia of medicine and not the practice of
+medicine. Now consider the personal means which nature has put into
+your hands for self-defence; for Providence has forgotten no one; if to
+the sepia (that fish of the Adriatic) has been given the black dye by
+which he produces a cloud in which he disappears from his enemy, you
+should believe that a husband has not been left without a weapon; and
+now the time has come for you to draw yours.
+
+You ought to have stipulated before you married that your wife should
+nurse her own children; in this case, as long as she is occupied in
+bearing children or in nursing them you will avoid the danger from one
+or two quarters. The wife who is engaged in bringing into the world and
+nursing a baby has not really the time to bother with a lover, not to
+speak of the fact that before and after her confinement she cannot show
+herself in the world. In short, how can the most bold of the
+distinguished women who are the subject of this work show herself under
+these circumstances in public? O Lord Byron, thou didst not wish to see
+women even eat!
+
+Six months after her confinement, and when the child is on the eve of
+being weaned, a woman just begins to feel that she can enjoy her
+restoration and her liberty.
+
+If your wife has not nursed her first child, you have too much sense
+not to notice this circumstance, and not to make her desire to nurse
+her next one. You will read to her the _Emile_ of Jean-Jacques; you
+will fill her imagination with a sense of motherly duties; you will
+excite her moral feelings, etc.: in a word, you are either a fool or a
+man of sense; and in the first case, even after reading this book, you
+will always be minotaurized; while in the second, you will understand
+how to take a hint.
+
+This first expedient is in reality your own personal business. It will
+give you a great advantage in carrying out all the other methods.
+
+Since Alcibiades cut the ears and the tail of his dog, in order to do a
+service to Pericles, who had on his hands a sort of Spanish war, as
+well as an Ouvrard contract affair, such as was then attracting the
+notice of the Athenians, there is not a single minister who has not
+endeavored to cut the ears of some dog or other.
+
+So in medicine, when inflammation takes place at some vital point of
+the system, counter-irritation is brought about at some other point, by
+means of blisters, scarifications and cupping.
+
+Another method consists in blistering your wife, or giving her, with a
+mental needle, a prod whose violence is such as to make a diversion in
+your favor.
+
+A man of considerable mental resources had made his honeymoon last for
+about four years; the moon began to wane, and he saw appearing the
+fatal hollow in its circle. His wife was exactly in that state of mind
+which we attributed at the close of our first part to every honest
+woman; she had taken a fancy to a worthless fellow who was both
+insignificant in appearance and ugly; the only thing in his favor was,
+he was not her own husband. At this juncture, her husband meditated the
+cutting of some dog’s tail, in order to renew, if possible, his lease
+of happiness. His wife had conducted herself with such tact, that it
+would have been very embarrassing to forbid her lover the house, for
+she had discovered some slight tie of relationship between them. The
+danger became, day by day, more imminent. The scent of the Minotaur was
+all around. One evening the husband felt himself plunged into a mood of
+deep vexation so acute as to be apparent to his wife. His wife had
+begun to show him more kindness than she had ever exhibited, even
+during the honeymoon; and hence question after question racked his
+mind. On her part a dead silence reigned. The anxious questionings of
+his mind were redoubled; his suspicions burst forth, and he was seized
+with forebodings of future calamity! Now, on this occasion, he deftly
+applied a Japanese blister, which burned as fiercely as an _auto-da-fe_
+of the year 1600. At first his wife employed a thousand stratagems to
+discover whether the annoyance of her husband was caused by the
+presence of her lover; it was her first intrigue and she displayed a
+thousand artifices in it. Her imagination was aroused; it was no longer
+taken up with her lover; had she not better, first of all, probe her
+husband’s secret?
+
+One evening the husband, moved by the desire to confide in his loving
+helpmeet all his troubles, informed her that their whole fortune was
+lost. They would have to give up their carriage, their box at the
+theatre, balls, parties, even Paris itself; perhaps, by living on their
+estate in the country a year or two, they might retrieve all! Appealing
+to the imagination of his wife, he told her how he pitied her for her
+attachment to a man who was indeed deeply in love with her, but was now
+without fortune; he tore his hair, and his wife was compelled in honor
+to be deeply moved; then in this first excitement of their conjugal
+disturbance he took her off to his estate. Then followed
+scarifications, mustard plaster upon mustard plaster, and the tails of
+fresh dogs were cut: he caused a Gothic wing to be built to the
+chateau; madame altered the park ten time over in order to have
+fountains and lakes and variations in the grounds; finally, the husband
+in the midst of her labors did not forget his own, which consisted in
+providing her with interesting reading, and launching upon her delicate
+attentions, etc. Notice, he never informed his wife of the trick he had
+played on her; and if his fortune was recuperated, it was directly
+after the building of the wing, and the expenditure of enormous sums in
+making water-courses; but he assured her that the lake provided a
+water-power by which mills might be run, etc.
+
+Now, there was a conjugal blister well conceived, for this husband
+neither neglected to rear his family nor to invite to his house
+neighbors who were tiresome, stupid or old; and if he spent the winter
+in Paris, he flung his wife into the vortex of balls and races, so that
+she had not a minute to give to lovers, who are usually the fruit of a
+vacant life.
+
+Journeys to Italy, Switzerland or Greece, sudden complaints which
+require a visit to the waters, and the most distant waters, are pretty
+good blisters. In fact, a man of sense should know how to manufacture a
+thousand of them.
+
+Let us continue our examination of such personal methods.
+
+And here we would have you observe that we are reasoning upon a
+hypothesis, without which this book will be unintelligible to you;
+namely, we suppose that your honeymoon has lasted for a respectable
+time and that the lady that you married was not a widow, but a maid; on
+the opposite supposition, it is at least in accordance with French
+manners to think that your wife married you merely for the purpose of
+becoming inconsistent.
+
+From the moment when the struggle between virtue and inconsistency
+begins in your home, the whole question rests upon the constant and
+involuntary comparison which your wife is instituting between you and
+her lover.
+
+And here you may find still another mode of defence, entirely personal,
+seldom employed by husbands, but the men of superiority will not fear
+to attempt it. It is to belittle the lover without letting your wife
+suspect your intention. You ought to be able to bring it about so that
+she will say to herself some evening while she is putting her hair in
+curl-papers, “My husband is superior to him.”
+
+In order to succeed, and you ought to be able to succeed, since you
+have the immense advantage over the lover in knowing the character of
+your wife, and how she is most easily wounded, you should, with all the
+tact of a diplomat, lead this lover to do silly things and cause him to
+annoy her, without his being aware of it.
+
+In the first place, this lover, as usual, will seek your friendship, or
+you will have friends in common; then, either through the
+instrumentality of these friends or by insinuations adroitly but
+treacherously made, you will lead him astray on essential points; and,
+with a little cleverness, you will succeed in finding your wife ready
+to deny herself to her lover when he calls, without either she or he
+being able to tell the reason. Thus you will have created in the bosom
+of your home a comedy in five acts, in which you play, to your profit,
+the brilliant role of Figaro or Almaviva; and for some months you will
+amuse yourself so much the more, because your _amour-propre_, your
+vanity, your all, were at stake.
+
+I had the good fortune in my youth to win the confidence of an old
+_emigre_ who gave me those rudiments of education which are generally
+obtained by young people from women. This friend, whose memory will
+always be dear to me, taught me by his example to put into practice
+those diplomatic stratagems which require tact as well as grace.
+
+The Comte de Noce had returned from Coblenz at a time when it was
+dangerous for the nobility to be found in France. No one had such
+courage and such kindness, such craft and such recklessness as this
+aristocrat. Although he was sixty years old he had married a woman of
+twenty-five, being compelled to this act of folly by soft-heartedness;
+for he thus delivered this poor child from the despotism of a
+capricious mother. “Would you like to be my widow?” this amiable old
+gentleman had said to Mademoiselle de Pontivy, but his heart was too
+affectionate not to become more attached to his wife than a sensible
+man ought to be. As in his youth he had been under the influence of
+several among the cleverest women in the court of Louis XV, he thought
+he would have no difficulty in keeping his wife from any entanglement.
+What man excepting him have I ever seen, who could put into successful
+practice the teachings which I am endeavoring to give to husbands! What
+charm could he impart to life by his delightful manners and fascinating
+conversation!—His wife never knew until after his death what she then
+learned from me, namely, that he had the gout. He had wisely retired to
+a home in the hollow of a valley, close to a forest. God only knows
+what rambles he used to take with his wife!—His good star decreed that
+Mademoiselle de Pontivy should possess an excellent heart and should
+manifest in a high degree that exquisite refinement, that sensitive
+modesty which renders beautiful the plainest girl in the world. All of
+a sudden, one of his nephews, a good-looking military man, who had
+escaped from the disasters of Moscow, returned to his uncle’s house, as
+much for the sake of learning how far he had to fear his cousins, as
+heirs, as in the hope of laying siege to his aunt. His black hair, his
+moustache, the easy small-talk of the staff officer, a certain freedom
+which was elegant as well as trifling, his bright eyes, contrasted
+favorably with the faded graces of his uncle. I arrived at the precise
+moment when the young countess was teaching her newly found relation to
+play backgammon. The proverb says that “women never learn this game
+excepting from their lovers, and vice versa.” Now, during a certain
+game, M. de Noce had surprised his wife and the viscount in the act of
+exchanging one of those looks which are full of mingled innocence,
+fear, and desire. In the evening he proposed to us a hunting-party, and
+we agreed. I never saw him so gay and so eager as he appeared on the
+following morning, in spite of the twinges of gout which heralded an
+approaching attack. The devil himself could not have been better able
+to keep up a conversation on trifling subjects than he was. He had
+formerly been a musketeer in the Grays and had known Sophie Arnoud.
+This explains all. The conversation after a time became so exceedingly
+free among us three, that I hope God may forgive me for it!
+
+“I would never have believed that my uncle was such a dashing blade?”
+said the nephew.
+
+We made a halt, and while we were sitting on the edge of a green forest
+clearing, the count led us on to discourse about women just as Brantome
+and Aloysia might have done.
+
+“You fellows are very happy under the present government!—the women of
+the time are well mannered” (in order to appreciate the exclamation of
+the old gentleman, the reader should have heard the atrocious stories
+which the captain had been relating). “And this,” he went on, “is one
+of the advantages resulting from the Revolution. The present system
+gives very much more charm and mystery to passion. In former times
+women were easy; ah! indeed, you would not believe what skill it
+required, what daring, to wake up those worn-out hearts; we were always
+on the _qui vive_. But yet in those days a man became celebrated for a
+broad joke, well put, or for a lucky piece of insolence. That is what
+women love, and it will always be the best method of succeeding with
+them!”
+
+These last words were uttered in a tone of profound contempt; he
+stopped, and began to play with the hammer of his gun as if to disguise
+his deep feeling.
+
+“But nonsense,” he went on, “my day is over! A man ought to have the
+body as well as the imagination young. Why did I marry? What is most
+treacherous in girls educated by mothers who lived in that brilliant
+era of gallantry, is that they put on an air of frankness, of reserve;
+they look as if butter would not melt in their mouths, and those who
+know them well feel that they would swallow anything!”
+
+He rose, lifted his gun with a gesture of rage, and dashing it to the
+ground thrust it far up the butt in the moist sod.
+
+“It would seem as if my dear aunt were fond of a little fun,” said the
+officer to me in a low voice.
+
+“Or of denouements that do not come off!” I added.
+
+The nephew tightened his cravat, adjusted his collar and gave a jump
+like a Calabrian goat. We returned to the chateau at about two in the
+afternoon. The count kept me with him until dinner-time, under the
+pretext of looking for some medals, of which he had spoken during our
+return home. The dinner was dull. The countess treated her nephew with
+stiff and cold politeness. When we entered the drawing-room the count
+said to his wife:
+
+“Are you going to play backgammon?—We will leave you.”
+
+The young countess made no reply. She gazed at the fire, as if she had
+not heard. Her husband took some steps towards the door, inviting me by
+the wave of his hand to follow him. At the sound of his footsteps, his
+wife quickly turned her head.
+
+“Why do you leave us?” said she, “you will have all tomorrow to show
+your friend the reverse of the medals.”
+
+The count remained. Without paying any attention to the awkwardness
+which had succeeded the former military aplomb of his nephew, the count
+exercised during the whole evening his full powers as a charming
+conversationalist. I had never before seen him so brilliant or so
+gracious. We spoke a great deal about women. The witticisms of our host
+were marked by the most exquisite refinement. He made me forget that
+his hair was white, for he showed the brilliancy which belonged to a
+youthful heart, a gaiety which effaces the wrinkles from the cheek and
+melts the snow of wintry age.
+
+The next day the nephew went away. Even after the death of M. de Noce,
+I tried to profit by the intimacy of those familiar conversations in
+which women are sometimes caught off their guard to sound her, but I
+could never learn what impertinence the viscount had exhibited towards
+his aunt. His insolence must have been excessive, for since that time
+Madame de Noce has refused to see her nephew, and up to the present
+moment never hears him named without a slight movement of her eyebrows.
+I did not at once guess the end at which the Comte de Noce aimed, in
+inviting us to go shooting; but I discovered later that he had played a
+pretty bold game.
+
+Nevertheless, if you happen at last, like M. de Noce, to carry off a
+decisive victory, do not forget to put into practice at once the system
+of blisters; and do not for a moment imagine that such _tours de force_
+are to be repeated with safety. If that is the way you use your
+talents, you will end by losing caste in your wife’s estimation; for
+she will demand of you, reasonably enough, double what you would give
+her, and the time will come when you declare bankruptcy. The human soul
+in its desires follows a sort of arithmetical progression, the end and
+origin of which are equally unknown. Just as the opium-eater must
+constantly increase his doses in order to obtain the same result, so
+our mind, imperious as it is weak, desires that feeling, ideas and
+objects should go on ever increasing in size and in intensity. Hence
+the necessity of cleverly distributing the interest in a dramatic work,
+and of graduating doses in medicine. Thus you see, if you always resort
+to the employment of means like these, that you must accommodate such
+daring measures to many circumstances, and success will always depend
+upon the motives to which you appeal.
+
+And finally, have you influence, powerful friends, an important post?
+The last means I shall suggest cuts to the root of the evil. Would you
+have the power to send your wife’s lover off by securing his promotion,
+or his change of residence by an exchange, if he is a military man? You
+cut off by this means all communication between them; later on we will
+show you how to do it; for _sublata causa tollitur effectus_,—Latin
+words which may be freely translated “there is no effect without a
+cause.”
+
+Nevertheless, you feel that your wife may easily choose another lover;
+but in addition to these preliminary expedients, you will always have a
+blister ready, in order to gain time, and calculate how you may bring
+the affair to an end by fresh devices.
+
+Study how to combine the system of blisters with the mimic wiles of
+Carlin, the immortal Carlin of the _Comedie-Italienne_ who always held
+and amused an audience for whole hours, by uttering the same words,
+varied only by the art of pantomime and pronounced with a thousand
+inflections of different tone,—“The queen said to the king!” Imitate
+Carlin, discover some method of always keeping your wife in check, so
+as not to be checkmated yourself. Take a degree among constitutional
+ministers, a degree in the art of making promises. Habituate yourself
+to show at seasonable times the punchinello which makes children run
+after you without knowing the distance they run. We are all children,
+and women are all inclined through their curiosity to spend their time
+in pursuit of a will-o’-the-wisp. The flame is brilliant and quickly
+vanishes, but is not the imagination at hand to act as your ally?
+Finally, study the happy art of being near her and yet not being near
+her; of seizing the opportunity which will yield you pre-eminence in
+her mind without ever crushing her with a sense of your superiority, or
+even of her own happiness. If the ignorance in which you have kept her
+does not altogether destroy her intellect, you must remain in such
+relations with her that each of you will still desire the company of
+the other.
+
+MEDITATION XIV.
+
+OF APARTMENTS.
+
+
+The preceding methods and systems are in a way purely moral; they share
+the nobility of the soul, there is nothing repulsive in them; but now
+we must proceed to consider precautions _a la Bartholo_. Do not give
+way to timidity. There is a marital courage, as there is a civil and
+military courage, as there is the courage of the National Guard.
+
+What is the first course of a young girl after having purchased a
+parrot? Is it not to fasten it up in a pretty cage, from which it
+cannot get out without permission?
+
+You may learn your duty from this child.
+
+Everything that pertains to the arrangement of your house and of your
+apartments should be planned so as not to give your wife any advantage,
+in case she has decided to deliver you to the Minotaur; half of all
+actual mischances are brought about by the deplorable facilities which
+the apartments furnish.
+
+Before everything else determine to have for your porter a _single man_
+entirely devoted to your person. This is a treasure easily to be found.
+What husband is there throughout the world who has not either a
+foster-father or some old servant, upon whose knees he has been
+dandled! There ought to exist by means of your management, a hatred
+like that of Artreus and Thyestes between your wife and this Nestor
+—guardian of your gate. This gate is the Alpha and Omega of an
+intrigue. May not all intrigues in love be confined in these words
+—entering and leaving?
+
+Your house will be of no use to you if it does not stand between a
+court and a garden, and so constructed as to be detached from all other
+buildings. You must abolish all recesses in your apartments. A
+cupboard, if it contain but six pots of preserves, should be walled in.
+You are preparing yourself for war, and the first thought of a general
+is to cut his enemy off from supplies. Moreover, all the walls must be
+smooth, in order to present to the eye lines which may be taken in at a
+glance, and permit the immediate recognition of the least strange
+object. If you consult the remains of antique monuments you will see
+that the beauty of Greek and Roman apartments sprang principally from
+the purity of their lines, the clear sweep of their walls and
+scantiness of furniture. The Greeks would have smiled in pity, if they
+had seen the gaps which our closets make in our drawing-rooms.
+
+This magnificent system of defence should above all be put in active
+operation in the apartment of your wife; never let her curtain her bed
+in such a way that one can walk round it amid a maze of hangings; be
+inexorable in the matter of connecting passages, and let her chamber be
+at the bottom of your reception-rooms, so as to show at a glance those
+who come and go.
+
+_The Marriage of Figaro_ will no doubt have taught you to put your
+wife’s chamber at a great height from the ground. All celibates are
+Cherubins.
+
+Your means, doubtless, will permit your wife to have a dressing-room, a
+bath-room, and a room for her chambermaid. Think then on Susanne, and
+never commit the fault of arranging this little room below that of
+madame’s, but place it always above, and do not shrink from disfiguring
+your mansion by hideous divisions in the windows.
+
+If, by ill luck, you see that this dangerous apartment communicates
+with that of your wife by a back staircase, earnestly consult your
+architect; let his genius exhaust itself in rendering this dangerous
+staircase as innocent as the primitive garret ladder; we conjure you
+let not this staircase have appended to it any treacherous
+lurking-place; its stiff and angular steps must not be arranged with
+that tempting curve which Faublas and Justine found so useful when they
+waited for the exit of the Marquis de B——-. Architects nowadays make
+such staircases as are absolutely preferable to ottomans. Restore
+rather the virtuous garret steps of our ancestors.
+
+Concerning the chimneys in the apartment of madame, you must take care
+to place in the flue, five feet from the ground, an iron grill, even
+though it be necessary to put up a fresh one every time the chimney is
+swept. If your wife laughs at this precaution, suggest to her the
+number of murders that have been committed by means of chimneys. Almost
+all women are afraid of robbers. The bed is one of those important
+pieces of furniture whose structure will demand long consideration.
+Everything concerning it is of vital importance. The following is the
+result of long experience in the construction of beds. Give to this
+piece of furniture a form so original that it may be looked upon
+without disgust, in the midst of changes of fashion which succeed so
+rapidly in rendering antiquated the creations of former decorators, for
+it is essential that your wife be unable to change, at pleasure, this
+theatre of married happiness. The base should be plain and massive and
+admit of no treacherous interval between it and the floor; and bear in
+mind always that the Donna Julia of Byron hid Don Juan under her
+pillow. But it would be ridiculous to treat lightly so delicate a
+subject.
+
+LXII.
+The bed is the whole of marriage.
+
+Moreover, we must not delay to direct your attention to this wonderful
+creation of human genius, an invention which claims our recognition
+much more than ships, firearms, matches, wheeled carriages, steam
+engines of all kinds, more than even barrels and bottles. In the first
+place, a little thought will convince us that this is all true of the
+bed; but when we begin to think that it is our second father, that the
+most tranquil and most agitated half of our existence is spent under
+its protecting canopy, words fail in eulogizing it. (See Meditation
+XVII, entitled “Theory of the Bed.”)
+
+When the war, of which we shall speak in our third part, breaks out
+between you and madame, you will always have plenty of ingenious
+excuses for rummaging in the drawers and escritoires; for if your wife
+is trying to hide from you some statue of her adoration, it is your
+interest to know where she has hidden it. A gyneceum, constructed on
+the method described, will enable you to calculate at a glance, whether
+there is present in it two pounds of silk more than usual. Should a
+single closet be constructed there, you are a lost man! Above all,
+accustom your wife, during the honeymoon, to bestow especial pains in
+the neatness of her apartment; let nothing put off that. If you do not
+habituate her to be minutely particular in this respect, if the same
+objects are not always found in the same places, she will allow things
+to become so untidy, that you will not be able to see that there are
+two pounds of silk more or less in her room.
+
+The curtains of your apartments ought to be of a stuff which is quite
+transparent, and you ought to contract the habit in the evenings of
+walking outside so that madame may see you come right up to the window
+just out of absent-mindedness. In a word, with regard to windows, let
+the sills be so narrow that even a sack of flour cannot be set up on
+them.
+
+If the apartment of your wife can be arranged on these principles, you
+will be in perfect safety, even if there are niches enough there to
+contain all the saints of Paradise. You will be able, every evening,
+with the assistance of your porter, to strike the balance between the
+entrances and exits of visitors; and, in order to obtain accurate
+results, there is nothing to prevent your teaching him to keep a book
+of visitors, in double entry.
+
+If you have a garden, cultivate a taste for dogs, and always keep at
+large one of these incorruptible guardians under your windows; you will
+thus gain the respect of the Minotaur, especially if you accustom your
+four-footed friend to take nothing substantial excepting from the hand
+of your porter, so that hard-hearted celibates may not succeed in
+poisoning him.
+
+But all these precautions must be taken as a natural thing so that they
+may not arouse suspicions. If husbands are so imprudent as to neglect
+precautions from the moment they are married, they ought at once to
+sell their house and buy another one, or, under the pretext of repairs,
+alter their present house in the way prescribed.
+
+You will without scruple banish from your apartment all sofas,
+ottomans, lounges, sedan chairs and the like. In the first place, this
+is the kind of furniture that adorns the homes of grocers, where they
+are universally found, as they are in those of barbers; but they are
+essentially the furniture of perdition; I can never see them without
+alarm. It has always seemed to me that there the devil himself is
+lurking with his horns and cloven foot.
+
+After all, nothing is so dangerous as a chair, and it is extremely
+unfortunate that women cannot be shut up within the four walls of a
+bare room! What husband is there, who on sitting down on a rickety
+chair is not always forced to believe that this chair has received some
+of the lessons taught by the _Sofa_ of Crebillion junior? But happily
+we have arranged your apartment on such a system of prevention that
+nothing so fatal can happen, or, at any rate, not without your
+contributory negligence.
+
+One fault which you must contract, and which you must never correct,
+will consist in a sort of heedless curiosity, which will make you
+examine unceasingly all the boxes, and turn upside down the contents of
+all dressing-cases and work-baskets. You must proceed to this
+domiciliary visit in a humorous mood, and gracefully, so that each time
+you will obtain pardon by exciting the amusement of your wife.
+
+You must always manifest a most profound astonishment on noticing any
+piece of furniture freshly upholstered in her well-appointed apartment.
+You must immediately make her explain to you the advantages of the
+change; and then you must ransack your mind to discover whether there
+be not some underhand motive in the transaction.
+
+This is by no means all. You have too much sense to forget that your
+pretty parrot will remain in her cage only so long as that cage is
+beautiful. The least accessory of her apartment ought, therefore, to
+breathe elegance and taste. The general appearance should always
+present a simple, at the same time a charming picture. You must
+constantly renew the hangings and muslin curtains. The freshness of the
+decorations is too essential to permit of economy on this point. It is
+the fresh chickweed each morning carefully put into the cage of their
+birds, that makes their pets believe it is the verdure of the meadows.
+An apartment of this character is then the _ultima ratio_ of husbands;
+a wife has nothing to say when everything is lavished on her.
+
+Husbands who are condemned to live in rented apartments find themselves
+in the most terrible situation possible. What happy or what fatal
+influence cannot the porter exercise upon their lot?
+
+Is not their home flanked on either side by other houses? It is true
+that by placing the apartment of their wives on one side of the house
+the danger is lessened by one-half; but are they not obliged to learn
+by heart and to ponder the age, the condition, the fortune, the
+character, the habits of the tenants of the next house and even to know
+their friends and relations?
+
+A husband will never take lodgings on the ground floor.
+
+Every man, however, can apply in his apartments the precautionary
+methods which we have suggested to the owner of a house, and thus the
+tenant will have this advantage over the owner, that the apartment,
+which is less spacious than the house, is more easily guarded.
+
+MEDITATION XV.
+
+OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE.
+
+
+“But no, madame, no—”
+
+“Yes, for there is such inconvenience in the arrangement.”
+
+“Do you think, madame, that we wish, as at the frontier, to watch the
+visits of persons who cross the threshold of your apartments, or
+furtively leave them, in order to see whether they bring to you
+articles of contraband? That would not be proper; and there is nothing
+odious in our proceeding, any more than there is anything of a fiscal
+character; do not be alarmed.”
+
+The Custom House of the marriage state is, of all the expedients
+prescribed in this second part, that which perhaps demands the most
+tact and the most skill as well as the most knowledge acquired _a
+priori_, that is to say before marriage. In order to carry it out, a
+husband ought to have made a profound study of Lavater’s book, and to
+be imbued with all his principles; to have accustomed his eye to judge
+and to apprehend with the most astonishing promptitude, the slightest
+physical expressions by which a man reveals his thoughts.
+
+Lavater’s _Physiognomy_ originated a veritable science, which has won a
+place in human investigation. If at first some doubts, some jokes
+greeted the appearance of this book, since then the celebrated Doctor
+Gall is come with his noble theory of the skull and has completed the
+system of the Swiss savant, and given stability to his fine and
+luminous observations. People of talent, diplomats, women, all those
+who are numbered among the choice and fervent disciples of these two
+celebrated men, have often had occasion to recognize many other evident
+signs, by which the course of human thought is indicated. The habits of
+the body, the handwriting, the sound of the voice, have often betrayed
+the woman who is in love, the diplomat who is attempting to deceive,
+the clever administrator, or the sovereign who is compelled to
+distinguish at a glance love, treason or merit hitherto unknown. The
+man whose soul operates with energy is like a poor glowworm, which
+without knowing it irradiates light from every pore. He moves in a
+brilliant sphere where each effort makes a burning light and outlines
+his actions with long streamers of fire.
+
+These, then, are all the elements of knowledge which you should
+possess, for the conjugal custom house insists simply in being able by
+a rapid but searching examination to know the moral and physical
+condition of all who enter or leave your house—all, that is, who have
+seen or intend to see your wife. A husband is, like a spider, set at
+the centre of an invisible net, and receives a shock from the least
+fool of a fly who touches it, and from a distance, hears, judges and
+sees what is either his prey or his enemy.
+
+Thus you must obtain means to examine the celibate who rings at your
+door under two circumstances which are quite distinct, namely, when he
+is about to enter and when he is inside.
+
+At the moment of entering how many things does he utter without even
+opening his mouth!
+
+It may be by a slight wave of his hand, or by his plunging his fingers
+many times into his hair, he sticks up or smoothes down his
+characteristic bang.
+
+Or he hums a French or an Italian air, merry or sad, in a voice which
+may be either tenor, contralto, soprano or baritone.
+
+Perhaps he takes care to see that the ends of his necktie are properly
+adjusted.
+
+Or he smoothes down the ruffles or front of his shirt or evening-dress.
+
+Or he tries to find out by a questioning and furtive glance whether his
+wig, blonde or brown, curled or plain, is in its natural position.
+
+Perhaps he looks at his nails to see whether they are clean and duly
+cut.
+
+Perhaps with a hand which is either white or untidy, well-gloved or
+otherwise, he twirls his moustache, or his whiskers, or picks his teeth
+with a little tortoise-shell toothpick.
+
+Or by slow and repeated movements he tries to place his chin exactly
+over the centre of his necktie.
+
+Or perhaps he crosses one foot over the other, putting his hands in his
+pockets.
+
+Or perhaps he gives a twist to his shoe, and looks at it as if he
+thought, “Now, there’s a foot that is not badly formed.”
+
+Or according as he has come on foot or in a carriage, he rubs off or he
+does not rub off the slight patches of mud which soil his shoes.
+
+Or perhaps he remains as motionless as a Dutchman smoking his pipe.
+
+Or perhaps he fixes his eyes on the door and looks like a soul escaped
+from Purgatory and waiting for Saint Peter with the keys.
+
+Perhaps he hesitates to pull the bell; perhaps he seizes it
+negligently, precipitately, familiarly, or like a man who is quite sure
+of himself.
+
+Perhaps he pulls it timidly, producing a faint tinkle which is lost in
+the silence of the apartments, as the first bell of matins in
+winter-time, in a convent of Minims; or perhaps after having rung with
+energy, he rings again impatient that the footman has not heard him.
+
+Perhaps he exhales a delicate scent, as he chews a pastille.
+
+Perhaps with a solemn air he takes a pinch of snuff, brushing off with
+care the grains that might mar the whiteness of his linen.
+
+Perhaps he looks around like a man estimating the value of the
+staircase lamp, the balustrade, the carpet, as if he were a furniture
+dealer or a contractor.
+
+Perhaps this celibate seems a young or an old man, is cold or hot,
+arrives slowly, with an expression of sadness or merriment, etc.
+
+You see that here, at the very foot of your staircase, you are met by
+an astonishing mass of things to observe.
+
+The light pencil-strokes, with which we have tried to outline this
+figure, will suggest to you what is in reality a moral kaleidoscope
+with millions of variations. And yet we have not even attempted to
+bring any woman on to the threshold which reveals so much; for in that
+case our remarks, already considerable in number, would have been
+countless and light as the grains of sand on the seashore.
+
+For as a matter of fact, when he stands before the shut door, a man
+believes that he is quite alone; and he would have no hesitation in
+beginning a silent monologue, a dreamy soliloquy, in which he revealed
+his desires, his intentions, his personal qualities, his faults, his
+virtues, etc.; for undoubtedly a man on a stoop is exactly like a young
+girl of fifteen at confession, the evening before her first communion.
+
+Do you want any proof of this? Notice the sudden change of face and
+manner in this celibate from the very moment he steps within the house.
+No machinist in the Opera, no change in the temperature in the clouds
+or in the sun can more suddenly transform the appearance of a theatre,
+the effect of the atmosphere, or the scenery of the heavens.
+
+On reaching the first plank of your antechamber, instead of betraying
+with so much innocence the myriad thoughts which were suggested to you
+on the steps, the celibate has not a single glance to which you could
+attach any significance. The mask of social convention wraps with its
+thick veil his whole bearing; but a clever husband must already have
+divined at a single look the object of his visit, and he reads the soul
+of the new arrival as if it were a printed book.
+
+The manner in which he approaches your wife, in which he addresses her,
+looks at her, greets her and retires—there are volumes of observations,
+more or less trifling, to be made on these subjects.
+
+The tone of his voice, his bearing, his awkwardness, it may be his
+smile, even his gloom, his avoidance of your eye,—all are significant,
+all ought to be studied, but without apparent attention. You ought to
+conceal the most disagreeable discovery you may make by an easy manner
+and remarks such as are ready at hand to a man of society. As we are
+unable to detail the minutiae of this subject we leave them entirely to
+the sagacity of the reader, who must by this time have perceived the
+drift of our investigation, as well as the extent of this science which
+begins at the analysis of glances and ends in the direction of such
+movements as contempt may inspire in a great toe hidden under the satin
+of a lady’s slipper or the leather of a man’s boot.
+
+But the exit!—for we must allow for occasions where you have omitted
+your rigid scrutiny at the threshold of the doorway, and in that case
+the exit becomes of vital importance, and all the more so because this
+fresh study of the celibate ought to be made on the same lines, but
+from an opposite point of view, from that which we have already
+outlined.
+
+In the exit the situation assumes a special gravity; for then is the
+moment in which the enemy has crossed all the intrenchments within
+which he was subject to our examination and has escaped into the
+street! At this point a man of understanding when he sees a visitor
+passing under the _porte-cochere_ should be able to divine the import
+of the whole visit. The indications are indeed fewer in number, but how
+distinct is their character! The denouement has arrived and the man
+instantly betrays the importance of it by the frankest expression of
+happiness, pain or joy.
+
+These revelations are therefore easy to apprehend; they appear in the
+glance cast either at the building or at the windows of the apartment;
+in a slow or loitering gait, in the rubbing of hands, on the part of a
+fool, in the bounding gait of a coxcomb, or the involuntary arrest of
+his footsteps, which marks the man who is deeply moved; in a word, you
+see upon the stoop certain questions as clearly proposed to you as if a
+provincial academy had offered a hundred crowns for an essay; but in
+the exit you behold the solution of these questions clearly and
+precisely given to you. Our task would be far above the power of human
+intelligence if it consisted in enumerating the different ways by which
+men betray their feelings, the discernment of such things is purely a
+matter of tact and sentiment.
+
+If strangers are the subject of these principles of observation, you
+have a still stronger reason for submitting your wife to the formal
+safeguards which we have outlined.
+
+A married man should make a profound study of his wife’s countenance.
+Such a study is easy, it is even involuntary and continuous. For him
+the pretty face of his wife must needs contain no mysteries, he knows
+how her feelings are depicted there and with what expression she shuns
+the fire of his glance.
+
+The slightest movement of the lips, the faintest contraction of the
+nostrils, scarcely perceptible changes in the expression of the eye, an
+altered voice, and those indescribable shades of feeling which pass
+over her features, or the light which sometimes bursts forth from them,
+are intelligible language to you.
+
+The whole woman nature stands before you; all look at her, but none can
+interpret her thoughts. But for you, the eye is more or less dimmed,
+wide-opened or closed; the lid twitches, the eyebrow moves; a wrinkle,
+which vanishes as quickly as a ripple on the ocean, furrows her brow
+for one moment; the lip tightens, it is slightly curved or it is
+wreathed with animation—for you the woman has spoken.
+
+If in those puzzling moments in which a woman tries dissimulation in
+presence of her husband, you have the spirit of a sphinx in seeing
+through her, you will plainly observe that your custom-house
+restrictions are mere child’s play to her.
+
+When she comes home or goes out, when in a word she believes she is
+alone, your wife will exhibit all the imprudence of a jackdaw and will
+tell her secret aloud to herself; moreover, by her sudden change of
+expression the moment she notices you (and despite the rapidity of this
+change, you will not fail to have observed the expression she wore
+behind your back) you may read her soul as if you were reading a book
+of Plain Song. Moreover, your wife will often find herself just on the
+point of indulging in soliloquies, and on such occasions her husband
+may recognize the secret feelings of his wife.
+
+Is there a man as heedless of love’s mysteries as not to have admired,
+over and over again, the light, mincing, even bewitching gait of a
+woman who flies on her way to keep an assignation? She glides through
+the crowd, like a snake through the grass. The costumes and stuffs of
+the latest fashion spread out their dazzling attractions in the shop
+windows without claiming her attention; on, on she goes like the
+faithful animal who follows the invisible tracks of his master; she is
+deaf to all compliments, blind to all glances, insensible even to the
+light touch of the crowd, which is inevitable amid the circulation of
+Parisian humanity. Oh, how deeply she feels the value of a minute! Her
+gait, her toilet, the expression of her face, involve her in a thousand
+indiscretions, but oh, what a ravishing picture she presents to the
+idler, and what an ominous page for the eye of a husband to read, is
+the face of this woman when she returns from the secret place of
+rendezvous in which her heart ever dwells! Her happiness is impressed
+even on the unmistakable disarray of her hair, the mass of whose wavy
+tresses has not received from the broken comb of the celibate that
+radiant lustre, that elegant and well-proportioned adjustment which
+only the practiced hand of her maid can give. And what charming ease
+appears in her gait! How is it possible to describe the emotion which
+adds such rich tints to her complexion!—which robs her eyes of all
+their assurance and gives to them an expression of mingled melancholy
+and delight, of shame which is yet blended with pride!
+
+These observations, stolen from our Meditation, _Of the Last Symptoms_,
+and which are really suggested by the situation of a woman who tries to
+conceal everything, may enable you to divine by analogy the rich crop
+of observation which is left for you to harvest when your wife arrives
+home, or when, without having committed the great crime she innocently
+lets out the secrets of her thoughts. For our own part we never see a
+landing without wishing to set up there a mariner’s card and a
+weather-cock.
+
+As the means to be employed for constructing a sort of domestic
+observatory depend altogether on places and circumstances, we must
+leave to the address of a jealous husband the execution of the methods
+suggested in this Meditation.
+
+MEDITATION XVI.
+
+THE CHARTER OF MARRIAGE.
+
+
+I acknowledge that I really know of but one house in Paris which is
+managed in accordance with the system unfolded in the two preceding
+Meditations. But I ought to add, also, that I have built up my system
+on the example of that house. The admirable fortress I allude to
+belonged to a young councillor of state, who was mad with love and
+jealousy.
+
+As soon as he learned that there existed a man who was exclusively
+occupied in bringing to perfection the institution of marriage in
+France, he had the generosity to open the doors of his mansion to me
+and to show me his gyneceum. I admired the profound genius which so
+cleverly disguised the precautions of almost oriental jealousy under
+the elegance of furniture, beauty of carpets and brightness of painted
+decorations. I agreed with him that it was impossible for his wife to
+render his home a scene of treachery.
+
+“Sir,” said I, to this Othello of the council of state who did not seem
+to me peculiarly strong in the _haute politique_ of marriage, “I have
+no doubt that the viscountess is delighted to live in this little
+Paradise; she ought indeed to take prodigious pleasure in it,
+especially if you are here often. But the time will come when she will
+have had enough of it; for, my dear sir, we grow tired of everything,
+even of the sublime. What will you do then, when madame, failing to
+find in all your inventions their primitive charm, shall open her mouth
+in a yawn, and perhaps make a request with a view to the exercise of
+two rights, both of which are indispensable to her happiness:
+individual liberty, that is, the privilege of going and coming
+according to the caprice of her will; and the liberty of the press,
+that is, the privilege of writing and receiving letters without fear of
+your censure?”
+
+Scarcely had I said these words when the Vicomte de V——- grasped my arm
+tightly and cried:
+
+“Yes, such is the ingratitude of woman! If there is any thing more
+ungrateful than a king, it is a nation; but, sir, woman is more
+ungrateful than either of them. A married woman treats us as the
+citizens of a constitutional monarchy treat their king; every measure
+has been taken to give these citizens a life of prosperity in a
+prosperous country; the government has taken all the pains in the world
+with its gendarmes, its churches, its ministry and all the
+paraphernalia of its military forces, to prevent the people from dying
+of hunger, to light the cities by gas at the expense of the citizens,
+to give warmth to every one by means of the sun which shines at the
+forty-fifth degree of latitude, and to forbid every one, excepting the
+tax-gatherers, to ask for money; it has labored hard to give to all the
+main roads a more or less substantial pavement—but none of these
+advantages of our fair Utopia is appreciated! The citizens want
+something else. They are not ashamed to demand the right of traveling
+over the roads at their own will, and of being informed where that
+money given to the tax-gatherers goes. And, finally, the monarch will
+soon be obliged, if we pay any attention to the chatter of certain
+scribblers, to give to every individual a share in the throne or to
+adopt certain revolutionary ideas, which are mere Punch and Judy shows
+for the public, manipulated by a band of self-styled patriots,
+riff-raff, always ready to sell their conscience for a million francs,
+for an honest woman, or for a ducal coronet.”
+
+“But, monsieur,” I said, interrupting him, “while I perfectly agree
+with you on this last point, the question remains, how will you escape
+giving an answer to the just demands of your wife?”
+
+“Sir” he replied, “I shall do—I shall answer as the government answers,
+that is, those governments which are not so stupid as the opposition
+would make out to their constituents. I shall begin by solemnly
+interdicting any arrangement, by virtue of which my wife will be
+declared entirely free. I fully recognize her right to go wherever it
+seems good to her, to write to whom she chooses, and to receive
+letters, the contents of which I do not know. My wife shall have all
+the rights that belong to an English Parliament; I shall let her talk
+as much as she likes, discuss and propose strong and energetic
+measures, but without the power to put them into execution, and then
+after that—well, we shall see!”
+
+“By St. Joseph!” said I to myself, “Here is a man who understands the
+science of marriage as well as I myself do. And then, you will see,
+sir,” I answered aloud, in order to obtain from him the fullest
+revelation of his experience; “you will see, some fine morning, that
+you are as big a fool as the next man.”
+
+“Sir,” he gravely replied, “allow me to finish what I was saying. Here
+is what the great politicians call a theory, but in practice they can
+make that theory vanish in smoke; and ministers possess in a greater
+degree than even the lawyers of Normandy, the art of making fact yield
+to fancy. M. de Metternich and M. de Pilat, men of the highest
+authority, have been for a long time asking each other whether Europe
+is in its right senses, whether it is dreaming, whether it knows
+whither it is going, whether it has ever exercised its reason, a thing
+impossible on the part of the masses, of nations and of women. M. de
+Metternich and M. de Pilat are terrified to see this age carried away
+by a passion for constitutions, as the preceding age was by the passion
+for philosophy, as that of Luther was for a reform of abuses in the
+Roman religion; for it truly seems as if different generations of men
+were like those conspirators whose actions are directed to the same
+end, as soon as the watchword has been given them. But their alarm is a
+mistake, and it is on this point alone that I condemn them, for they
+are right in their wish to enjoy power without permitting the middle
+class to come on a fixed day from the depth of each of their six
+kingdoms, to torment them. How could men of such remarkable talent fail
+to divine that the constitutional comedy has in it a moral of profound
+meaning, and to see that it is the very best policy to give the age a
+bone to exercise its teeth upon! I think exactly as they do on the
+subject of sovereignty. A power is a moral being as much interested as
+a man is in self-preservation. This sentiment of self-preservation is
+under the control of an essential principle which may be expressed in
+three words—_to lose nothing_. But in order to lose nothing, a power
+must grow or remain indefinite, for a power which remains stationary is
+nullified. If it retrogrades, it is under the control of something
+else, and loses its independent existence. I am quite as well aware, as
+are those gentlemen, in what a false position an unlimited power puts
+itself by making concessions; it allows to another power whose essence
+is to expand a place within its own sphere of activity. One of them
+will necessarily nullify the other, for every existing thing aims at
+the greatest possible development of its own forces. A power,
+therefore, never makes concessions which it does not afterwards seek to
+retract. This struggle between two powers is the basis on which stands
+the balance of government, whose elasticity so mistakenly alarmed the
+patriarch of Austrian diplomacy, for comparing comedy with comedy the
+least perilous and the most advantageous administration is found in the
+seesaw system of the English and of the French politics. These two
+countries have said to the people, ‘You are free;’ and the people have
+been satisfied; they enter the government like the zeros which give
+value to the unit. But if the people wish to take an active part in the
+government, immediately they are treated, like Sancho Panza, on that
+occasion when the squire, having become sovereign over an island on
+terra firma, made an attempt at dinner to eat the viands set before
+him.
+
+“Now we ought to parody this admirable scene in the management of our
+homes. Thus, my wife has a perfect right to go out, provided she tell
+me where she is going, how she is going, what is the business she is
+engaged in when she is out and at what hour she will return. Instead of
+demanding this information with the brutality of the police, who will
+doubtless some day become perfect, I take pains to speak to her in the
+most gracious terms. On my lips, in my eyes, in my whole countenance,
+an expression plays, which indicates both curiosity and indifference,
+seriousness and pleasantry, harshness and tenderness. These little
+conjugal scenes are so full of vivacity, of tact and address that it is
+a pleasure to take part in them. The very day on which I took from the
+head of my wife the wreath of orange blossoms which she wore, I
+understood that we were playing at a royal coronation—the first scene
+in a comic pantomime!—I have my gendarmes!—I have my guard royal!—I
+have my attorney general—that I do!” he continued enthusiastically. “Do
+you think that I would allow madame to go anywhere on foot
+unaccompanied by a lackey in livery? Is not that the best style? Not to
+count the pleasure she takes in saying to everybody, ‘I have my people
+here.’ It has always been a conservative principle of mine that my
+times of exercise should coincide with those of my wife, and for two
+years I have proved to her that I take an ever fresh pleasure in giving
+her my arm. If the weather is not suitable for walking, I try to teach
+her how to drive with success a frisky horse; but I swear to you that I
+undertake this in such a manner that she does not learn very
+quickly!—If either by chance, or prompted by a deliberate wish, she
+takes measures to escape without a passport, that is to say, alone in
+the carriage, have I not a driver, a footman, a groom? My wife,
+therefore, go where she will, takes with her a complete _Santa
+Hermandad_, and I am perfectly easy in mind—But, my dear sir, there is
+abundance of means by which to annul the charter of marriage by our
+manner of fulfilling it! I have remarked that the manners of high
+society induce a habit of idleness which absorbs half of the life of a
+woman without permitting her to feel that she is alive. For my part, I
+have formed the project of dexterously leading my wife along, up to her
+fortieth year, without letting her think of adultery, just as poor
+Musson used to amuse himself in leading some simple fellow from the Rue
+Saint-Denis to Pierrefitte without letting him think that he had left
+the shadows of St. Lew’s tower.”
+
+“How is it,” I said, interrupting him, “that you have hit upon those
+admirable methods of deception which I was intending to describe in a
+Meditation entitled _The Act of Putting Death into Life!_ Alas! I
+thought I was the first man to discover that science. The epigrammatic
+title was suggested to me by an account which a young doctor gave me of
+an excellent composition of Crabbe, as yet unpublished. In this work,
+the English poet has introduced a fantastic being called _Life in
+Death_. This personage crosses the oceans of the world in pursuit of a
+living skeleton called _Death in Life_—I recollect at the time very few
+people, among the guests of a certain elegant translator of English
+poetry, understood the mystic meaning of a fable as true as it was
+fanciful. Myself alone, perhaps, as I sat buried in silence, thought of
+the whole generations which as they were hurried along by life, passed
+on their way without living. Before my eyes rose faces of women by the
+million, by the myriad, all dead, all disappointed and shedding tears
+of despair, as they looked back upon the lost moments of their ignorant
+youth. In the distance I saw a playful Meditation rise to birth, I
+heard the satanic laughter which ran through it, and now you doubtless
+are about to kill it.—But come, tell me in confidence what means you
+have discovered by which to assist a woman to squander the swift
+moments during which her beauty is at its full flower and her desires
+at their full strength.—Perhaps you have some stratagems, some clever
+devices, to describe to me—”
+
+The viscount began to laugh at this literary disappointment of mine,
+and he said to me, with a self-satisfied air:
+
+“My wife, like all the young people of our happy century, has been
+accustomed, for three or four consecutive years, to press her fingers
+on the keys of a piano, a long-suffering instrument. She has hammered
+out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the
+exercises of Crammer. I had already taken pains to convince her of the
+excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, I have
+listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in the world, and
+I have at last consented to give her a box at the Bouffons. I have thus
+gained three quiet evenings out of the seven which God has created in
+the week. I am the mainstay of the music shops. At Paris there are
+drawing-rooms which exactly resemble the musical snuff-boxes of
+Germany. They are a sort of continuous orchestra to which I regularly
+go in search of that surfeit of harmony which my wife calls a concert.
+But most part of the time my wife keeps herself buried in her
+music-books—”
+
+“But, my dear sir, do you not recognize the danger that lies in
+cultivating in a woman a taste for singing, and allowing her to yield
+to all the excitements of a sedentary life? It is only less dangerous
+to make her feed on mutton and drink cold water.”
+
+“My wife never eats anything but the white meat of poultry, and I
+always take care that a ball shall come after a concert and a reception
+after an Opera! I have also succeeded in making her lie down between
+one and two in the day. Ah! my dear sir, the benefits of this nap are
+incalculable! In the first place each necessary pleasure is accorded as
+a favor, and I am considered to be constantly carrying out my wife’s
+wishes. And then I lead her to imagine, without saying a single word,
+that she is being constantly amused every day from six o’clock in the
+evening, the time of our dinner and of her toilet, until eleven o’clock
+in the morning, the time when we get up.”
+
+“Ah! sir, how grateful you ought to be for a life which is so
+completely filled up!”
+
+“I have scarcely more than three dangerous hours a day to pass; but she
+has, of course, sonatas to practice and airs to go over, and there are
+always rides in the Bois de Boulogne, carriages to try, visits to pay,
+etc. But this is not all. The fairest ornament of a woman is the most
+exquisite cleanliness. A woman cannot be too particular in this
+respect, and no pains she takes can be laughed at. Now her toilet has
+also suggested to me a method of thus consuming the best hours of the
+day in bathing.”
+
+“How lucky I am in finding a listener like you!” I cried; “truly, sir,
+you could waste for her four hours a day, if only you were willing to
+teach her an art quite unknown to the most fastidious of our modern
+fine ladies. Why don’t you enumerate to the viscountess the astonishing
+precautions manifest in the Oriental luxury of the Roman dames? Give
+her the names of the slaves merely employed for the bath in Poppea’s
+palace: the _unctores_, the _fricatores_, the _alipilarili_, the
+_dropacistae_, the _paratiltriae_, the _picatrices_, the _tracatrices_,
+the swan whiteners, and all the rest. —Talk to her about this multitude
+of slaves whose names are given by Mirabeau in his _Erotika Biblion_.
+If she tries to secure the services of all these people you will have
+the fine times of quietness, not to speak of the personal satisfaction
+which will redound to you yourself from the introduction into your
+house of the system invented by these illustrious Romans, whose hair,
+artistically arranged, was deluged with perfumes, whose smallest vein
+seemed to have acquired fresh blood from the myrrh, the lint, the
+perfume, the douches, the flowers of the bath, all of which were
+enjoyed to the strains of voluptuous music.”
+
+“Ah! sir,” continued the husband, who was warming to his subject, “can
+I not find also admirable pretexts in my solicitude for her heath? Her
+health, so dear and precious to me, forces me to forbid her going out
+in bad weather, and thus I gain a quarter of the year. And I have also
+introduced the charming custom of kissing when either of us goes out,
+this parting kiss being accompanied with the words, ‘My sweet angel, I
+am going out.’ Finally, I have taken measures for the future to make my
+wife as truly a prisoner in the house as the conscript in his sentry
+box! For I have inspired her with an incredible enthusiasm for the
+sacred duties of maternity.”
+
+“You do it by opposing her?” I asked.
+
+“You have guessed it,” he answered, laughing. “I have maintained to her
+that it is impossible for a woman of the world to discharge her duties
+towards society, to manage her household, to devote herself to fashion,
+as well as to the wishes of her husband, whom she loves, and, at the
+same time, to rear children. She then avers that, after the example of
+Cato, who wished to see how the nurse changed the swaddling bands of
+the infant Pompey, she would never leave to others the least of the
+services required in shaping the susceptible minds and tender bodies of
+these little creatures whose education begins in the cradle. You
+understand, sir, that my conjugal diplomacy would not be of much
+service to me unless, after having put my wife in solitary confinement,
+I did not also employ a certain harmless machiavelism, which consists
+in begging her to do whatever she likes, and asking her advice in every
+circumstance and on every contingency. As this delusive liberty has
+entirely deceived a creature so high-minded as she is, I have taken
+pains to stop at no sacrifice which would convince Madame de V——- that
+she is the freest woman in Paris; and, in order to attain this end, I
+take care not to commit those gross political blunders into which our
+ministers so often fall.”
+
+“I can see you,” said I, “when you wish to cheat your wife out of some
+right granted her by the charter, I can see you putting on a mild and
+deliberate air, hiding your dagger under a bouquet of roses, and as you
+plunge it cautiously into her heart, saying to her with a friendly
+voice, ‘My darling, does it hurt?’ and she, like those on whose toes
+you tread in a crowd, will probably reply, ‘Not in the least.’”
+
+He could not restrain a laugh and said:
+
+“Won’t my wife be astonished at the Last Judgment?”
+
+“I scarcely know,” I replied, “whether you or she will be most
+astonished.”
+
+The jealous man frowned, but his face resumed its calmness as I added:
+
+“I am truly grateful, sir, to the chance which has given me the
+pleasure of your acquaintance. Without the assistance of your remarks I
+should have been less successful than you have been in developing
+certain ideas which we possess in common. I beg of you that you will
+give me leave to publish this conversation. Statements which you and I
+find pregnant with high political conceptions, others perhaps will
+think characterized by more or less cutting irony, and I shall pass for
+a clever fellow in the eyes of both parties.”
+
+While I thus tried to express my thanks to the viscount (the first
+husband after my heart that I had met with), he took me once more
+through his apartments, where everything seemed to be beyond criticism.
+
+I was about to take leave of him, when opening the door of a little
+boudoir he showed me a room with an air which seemed to say, “Is there
+any way by which the least irregularity should occur without my seeing
+it?”
+
+I replied to this silent interrogation by an inclination of the head,
+such as guests make to their Amphytrion when they taste some
+exceptionally choice dish.
+
+“My whole system,” he said to me in a whisper, “was suggested to me by
+three words which my father heard Napoleon pronounce at a crowded
+council of state, when divorce was the subject of conversation.
+‘Adultery,’ he exclaimed, ‘is merely a matter of opportunity!’ See,
+then, I have changed these accessories of crime, so that they become
+spies,” added the councillor, pointing out to me a divan covered with
+tea-colored cashmere, the cushions of which were slightly pressed.
+“Notice that impression,—I learn from it that my wife has had a
+headache, and has been reclining there.”
+
+We stepped toward the divan, and saw the word FOOL lightly traced upon
+the fatal cushion, by four
+
+Things that I know not, plucked by lover’s hand
+From Cypris’ orchard, where the fairy band
+Are dancing, once by nobles thought to be
+Worthy an order of new chivalry,
+A brotherhood, wherein, with script of gold,
+More mortal men than gods should be enrolled.
+
+“Nobody in my house has black hair!” said the husband, growing pale.
+
+I hurried away, for I was seized with an irresistible fit of laughter,
+which I could not easily overcome.
+
+“That man has met his judgment day!” I said to myself; “all the
+barriers by which he has surrounded her have only been instrumental in
+adding to the intensity of her pleasures!”
+
+This idea saddened me. The adventure destroyed from summit to
+foundation three of my most important Meditations, and the catholic
+infallibility of my book was assailed in its most essential point. I
+would gladly have paid to establish the fidelity of the Viscountess
+V——- a sum as great as very many people would have offered to secure
+her surrender. But alas! my money will now be kept by me.
+
+Three days afterwards I met the councillor in the foyer of the
+Italiens. As soon as he saw me he rushed up. Impelled by a sort of
+modesty I tried to avoid him, but grasping my arm: “Ah! I have just
+passed three cruel days,” he whispered in my ear. “Fortunately my wife
+is as innocent as perhaps a new-born babe—”
+
+“You have already told me that the viscountess was extremely
+ingenious,” I said, with unfeeling gaiety.
+
+“Oh!” he said, “I gladly take a joke this evening; for this morning I
+had irrefragable proofs of my wife’s fidelity. I had risen very early
+to finish a piece of work for which I had been rushed, and in looking
+absently in my garden, I suddenly saw the _valet de chambre_ of a
+general, whose house is next to mine, climbing over the wall. My wife’s
+maid, poking her head from the vestibule, was stroking my dog and
+covering the retreat of the gallant. I took my opera glass and examined
+the intruder—his hair was jet black!—Ah! never have I seen a Christian
+face that gave me more delight! And you may well believe that during
+the day all my perplexities vanished. So, my dear sir,” he continued,
+“if you marry, let your dog loose and put broken bottles over the top
+of your walls.”
+
+“And did the viscountess perceive your distress during these three
+days?
+
+“Do you take me for a child?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I have
+never been so merry in all my life as I have been since we met.”
+
+“You are a great man unrecognized,” I cried, “and you are not—”
+
+He did not permit me to conclude; for he had disappeared on seeing one
+of his friends who approached as if to greet the viscountess.
+
+Now what can we add that would not be a tedious paraphrase of the
+lessons suggested by this conversation? All is included in it, either
+as seed or fruit. Nevertheless, you see, O husband! that your happiness
+hangs on a hair.
+
+MEDITATION XVII.
+
+THE THEORY OF THE BED.
+
+
+It was about seven o’clock in the evening. They were seated upon the
+academic armchairs, which made a semi-circle round a huge hearth, on
+which a coal fire was burning fitfully—symbol of the burning subject of
+their important deliberations. It was easy to guess, on seeing the
+grave but earnest faces of all the members of this assembly, that they
+were called upon to pronounce sentence upon the life, the fortunes and
+the happiness of people like themselves. They had no commission
+excepting that of their conscience, and they gathered there as the
+assessors of an ancient and mysterious tribunal; but they represented
+interests much more important than those of kings or of peoples; they
+spoke in the name of the passions and on behalf of the happiness of the
+numberless generations which should succeed them.
+
+The grandson of the celebrated Boulle was seated before a round table
+on which were placed the criminal exhibits which had been collected
+with remarkable intelligence. I, the insignificant secretary of the
+meeting, occupied a place at this desk, where it was my office to take
+down a report of the meeting.
+
+“Gentlemen,” said an old man, “the first question upon which we have to
+deliberate is found clearly stated in the following passage of a
+letter. The letter was written to the Princess of Wales, Caroline of
+Anspach, by the widow of the Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV,
+mother of the Regent: ‘The Queen of Spain has a method of making her
+husband say exactly what she wishes. The king is a religious man; he
+believes that he will be damned if he touched any woman but his wife,
+and still this excellent prince is of a very amorous temperament. Thus
+the queen obtains her every wish. She has placed castors on her
+husband’s bed. If he refuses her anything, she pushes the bed away. If
+he grants her request, the beds stand side by side, and she admits him
+into hers. And so the king is highly delighted, since he likes ——-’ I
+will not go any further, gentlemen, for the virtuous frankness of the
+German princess might in this assembly be charged with immorality.”
+
+Should wise husbands adopt these beds on castors? This is the problem
+which we have to solve.
+
+The unanimity of the vote left no doubt about the opinion of the
+assembly. I was ordered to inscribe in the records, that if two married
+people slept on two separate beds in the same room the beds ought not
+to be set on castors.
+
+“With this proviso,” put in one of the members, “that the present
+decision should have no bearing on any subsequent ruling upon the best
+arrangement of the beds of married people.”
+
+The president passed to me a choicely bound volume, in which was
+contained the original edition, published in 1788, of the letters of
+Charlotte Elizabeth de Baviere, widow of the Duke of Orleans, the only
+brother of Louis XIV, and, while I was transcribing the passage already
+quoted, he said:
+
+“But, gentlemen, you must all have received at your houses the
+notification in which the second question is stated.”
+
+“I rise to make an observation,” exclaimed the youngest of the jealous
+husbands there assembled.
+
+The president took his seat with a gesture of assent.
+
+“Gentlemen,” said the young husband, “are we quite prepared to
+deliberate upon so grave a question as that which is presented by the
+universally bad arrangement of the beds? Is there not here a much wider
+question than that of mere cabinet-making to decide? For my own part I
+see in it a question which concerns that of universal human intellect.
+The mysteries of conception, gentlemen, are still enveloped in a
+darkness which modern science has but partially dissipated. We do not
+know how far external circumstances influence the microscopic beings
+whose discovery is due to the unwearied patience of Hill, Baker,
+Joblot, Eichorn, Gleichen, Spallanzani, and especially of Muller, and
+last of all of M. Bory de Saint Vincent. The imperfections of the bed
+opens up a musical question of the highest importance, and for my part
+I declare I shall write to Italy to obtain clear information as to the
+manner in which beds are generally arranged. We do not know whether
+there are in the Italian bed numerous curtain rods, screws and castors,
+or whether the construction of beds is in this country more faulty than
+everywhere else, or whether the dryness of timber in Italy, due to the
+influence of the sun, does not _ab ovo_ produce the harmony, the sense
+of which is to so large an extent innate in Italians. For these reasons
+I move that we adjourn.”
+
+“What!” cried a gentleman from the West, impatiently rising to his
+feet, “are we here to dilate upon the advancement of music? What we
+have to consider first of all is manners, and the moral question is
+paramount in this discussion.”
+
+“Nevertheless,” remarked one of the most influential members of the
+council, “the suggestion of the former speaker is not in my opinion to
+be passed by. In the last century, gentlemen, Sterne, one of the
+writers most philosophically delightful and most delightfully
+philosophic, complained of the carelessness with which human beings
+were procreated; ‘Shame!’ he cried ‘that he who copies the divine
+physiognomy of man receives crowns and applause, but he who achieves
+the masterpiece, the prototype of mimic art, feels that like virtue he
+must be his own reward.’
+
+“Ought we not to feel more interest in the improvement of the human
+race than in that of horses? Gentlemen, I passed through a little town
+of Orleanais where the whole population consisted of hunchbacks, of
+glum and gloomy people, veritable children of sorrow, and the remark of
+the former speaker caused me to recollect that all the beds were in a
+very bad condition and the bedchambers presented nothing to the eyes of
+the married couple but what was hideous and revolting. Ah! gentlemen,
+how is it possible that our minds should be in an ideal state, when
+instead of the music of angels flying here and there in the bosom of
+that heaven to which we have attained, our ears are assailed by the
+most detestable, the most angry, the most piercing of human cries and
+lamentations? We are perhaps indebted for the fine geniuses who have
+honored humanity to beds which are solidly constructed; and the
+turbulent population which caused the French Revolution were conceived
+perhaps upon a multitude of tottering couches, with twisted and
+unstable legs; while the Orientals, who are such a beautiful race, have
+a unique method of making their beds. I vote for the adjournment.”
+
+And the gentleman sat down.
+
+A man belonging to the sect of Methodists arose. “Why should we change
+the subject of debate? We are not dealing here with the improvement of
+the race nor with the perfecting of the work. We must not lose sight of
+the interests of the jealous husband and the principles on which moral
+soundness is based. Don’t you know that the noise of which you complain
+seems more terrible to the wife uncertain of her crime, than the
+trumpet of the Last Judgment? Can you forget that a suit for infidelity
+could never be won by a husband excepting through this conjugal noise?
+I will undertake, gentlemen, to refer to the divorces of Lord
+Abergavenny, of Viscount Bolingbroke, of the late Queen Caroline, of
+Eliza Draper, of Madame Harris, in fact, of all those who are mentioned
+in the twenty volumes published by—.” (The secretary did not distinctly
+hear the name of the English publisher.)
+
+The motion to adjourn was carried. The youngest member proposed to make
+up a purse for the author producing the best dissertation addressed to
+the society upon a subject which Sterne considered of such importance;
+but at the end of the seance eighteen shillings was the total sum found
+in the hat of the president.
+
+The above debate of the society, which had recently been formed in
+London for the improvement of manners and of marriage and which Lord
+Byron scoffed at, was transmitted to us by the kindness of W. Hawkins,
+Esq., cousin-german of the famous Captain Clutterbuck. The extract may
+serve to solve any difficulties which may occur in the theory of bed
+construction.
+
+But the author of the book considers that the English society has given
+too much importance to this preliminary question. There exists in fact
+quite as many reasons for being a _Rossinist_ as for being a _Solidist_
+in the matter of beds, and the author acknowledges that it is either
+beneath or above him to solve this difficulty. He thinks with Laurence
+Sterne that it is a disgrace to European civilization that there exist
+so few physiological observations on callipedy, and he refuses to state
+the results of his Meditations on this subject, because it would be
+difficult to formulate them in terms of prudery, and they would be but
+little understood, and misinterpreted. Such reserve produces an hiatus
+in this part of the book; but the author has the pleasant satisfaction
+of leaving a fourth work to be accomplished by the next century, to
+which he bequeaths the legacy of all that he has not accomplished, a
+negative munificence which may well be followed by all those who may be
+troubled by an overplus of ideas.
+
+The theory of the bed presents questions much more important than those
+put forth by our neighbors with regard to castors and the murmurs of
+criminal conversation.
+
+We know only three ways in which a bed (in the general sense of this
+term) may be arranged among civilized nations, and particularly among
+the privileged classes to whom this book is addressed. These three ways
+are as follows:
+
+1. TWIN BEDS. 2. SEPARATE ROOMS. 3. ONE BED FOR BOTH.
+
+Before applying ourselves to the examination of these three methods of
+living together, which must necessarily have different influences upon
+the happiness of husbands and wives, we must take a rapid survey of the
+practical object served by the bed and the part it plays in the
+political economy of human existence.
+
+The most incontrovertible principle which can be laid down in this
+matter is, _that the bed was made to sleep upon_.
+
+It would be easy to prove that the practice of sleeping together was
+established between married people but recently, in comparison with the
+antiquity of marriage.
+
+By what reasonings has man arrived at that point in which he brought in
+vogue a practice so fatal to happiness, to health, even to
+_amour-propre_? Here we have a subject which it would be curious to
+investigate.
+
+If you knew one of your rivals who had discovered a method of placing
+you in a position of extreme absurdity before the eyes of those who
+were dearest to you—for instance, while you had your mouth crooked like
+that of a theatrical mask, or while your eloquent lips, like the copper
+faucet of a scanty fountain, dripped pure water—you would probably stab
+him. This rival is sleep. Is there a man in the world who knows how he
+appears to others, and what he does when he is asleep?
+
+In sleep we are living corpses, we are the prey of an unknown power
+which seizes us in spite of ourselves, and shows itself in the oddest
+shapes; some have a sleep which is intellectual, while the sleep of
+others is mere stupor.
+
+There are some people who slumber with their mouths open in the
+silliest fashion.
+
+There are others who snore loud enough to make the timbers shake.
+
+Most people look like the impish devils that Michael Angelo sculptured,
+putting out their tongues in silent mockery of the passers-by.
+
+The only person I know of in the world who sleeps with a noble air is
+Agamemnon, whom Guerin has represented lying on his bed at the moment
+when Clytemnestra, urged by Egisthus, advances to slay him. Moreover, I
+have always had an ambition to hold myself on my pillow as the king of
+kings Agamemnon holds himself, from the day that I was seized with
+dread of being seen during sleep by any other eyes than those of
+Providence. In the same way, too, from the day I heard my old nurse
+snorting in her sleep “like a whale,” to use a slang expression, I have
+added a petition to the special litany which I address to Saint-Honoré,
+my patron saint, to the effect that he would save me from indulging in
+this sort of eloquence.
+
+When a man wakes up in the morning, his drowsy face grotesquely
+surmounted by the folds of a silk handkerchief which falls over his
+left temple like a police cap, he is certainly a laughable object, and
+it is difficult to recognize in him the glorious spouse, celebrated in
+the strophes of Rousseau; but, nevertheless, there is a certain gleam
+of life to illume the stupidity of a countenance half dead—and if you
+artists wish to make fine sketches, you should travel on the
+stage-coach and, when the postilion wakes up the postmaster, just
+examine the physiognomies of the departmental clerks! But, were you a
+hundred times as pleasant to look upon as are these bureaucratic
+physiognomies, at least, while you have your mouth shut, your eyes are
+open, and you have some expression in your countenance. Do you know how
+you looked an hour before you awoke, or during the first hour of your
+sleep, when you were neither a man nor an animal, but merely a thing,
+subject to the dominion of those dreams which issue from the gate of
+horn? But this is a secret between your wife and God.
+
+Is it for the purpose of insinuating the imbecility of slumber that the
+Romans decorated the heads of their beds with the head of an ass? We
+leave to the gentlemen who form the academy of inscriptions the
+elucidation of this point.
+
+Assuredly, the first man who took it into his head, at the inspiration
+of the devil, not to leave his wife, even while she was asleep, should
+know how to sleep in the very best style; but do not forget to reckon
+among the sciences necessary to a man on setting up an establishment,
+the art of sleeping with elegance. Moreover, we will place here as a
+corollary to Axiom XXV of our Marriage Catechism the two following
+aphorisms:
+
+A husband should sleep as lightly as a watch-dog, so as never to be
+caught with his eyes shut.
+
+A man should accustom himself from childhood to go to bed bareheaded.
+
+Certain poets discern in modesty, in the alleged mysteries of love,
+some reason why the married couple should share the same bed; but the
+fact must be recognized that if primitive men sought the shade of
+caverns, the mossy couch of deep ravines, the flinty roof of grottoes
+to protect his pleasure, it was because the delight of love left him
+without defence against his enemies. No, it is not more natural to lay
+two heads upon the same pillow, than it is reasonable to tie a strip of
+muslin round the neck. Civilization is come. It has shut up a million
+of men within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled them in
+streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet square;
+after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like the tubes
+of a telescope.
+
+From this cause and from many others, such as thrift, fear, and
+ill-concealed jealousy, has sprung the custom of the sleeping together
+of the married couple; and this custom has given rise to punctuality
+and simultaneity in rising and retiring.
+
+And here you find the most capricious thing in the world, the feeling
+most pre-eminently fickle, the thing which is worthless without its own
+spontaneous inspiration, which takes all its charm from the suddenness
+of its desires, which owes its attractions to the genuineness of its
+outbursts—this thing we call love, subjugated to a monastic rule, to
+that law of geometry which belongs to the Board of Longitude!
+
+If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock,
+had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me
+good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in
+this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment
+becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means
+when it is bound to a fixed hour!
+
+Only the Author of everything can make the sun rise and set, morn and
+eve, with a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here
+below, if we may be permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste
+Rousseau, can play the role of the sun.
+
+From these preliminary observations, we conclude that it is not natural
+for two to lie under the canopy in the same bed;
+
+That a man is almost always ridiculous when he is asleep;
+
+And that this constant living together threatens the husband with
+inevitable dangers.
+
+We are going to try, therefore, to find out a method which will bring
+our customs in harmony with the laws of nature, and to combine custom
+and nature in a way that will enable a husband to find in the mahogany
+of his bed a useful ally, and an aid in defending himself.
+
+1. TWIN BEDS.
+
+If the most brilliant, the best-looking, the cleverest of husbands
+wishes to find himself minotaurized just as the first year of his
+married life ends, he will infallibly attain that end if he is unwise
+enough to place two beds side by side, under the voluptuous dome of the
+same alcove.
+
+The argument in support of this may be briefly stated. The following
+are its main lines:
+
+The first husband who invented the twin beds was doubtless an
+obstetrician, who feared that in the involuntary struggles of some
+dream he might kick the child borne by his wife.
+
+But no, he was rather some predestined one who distrusted his power of
+checking a snore.
+
+Perhaps it was some young man who, fearing the excess of his own
+tenderness, found himself always lying at the edge of the bed and in
+danger of tumbling off, or so near to a charming wife that he disturbed
+her slumber.
+
+But may it not have been some Maintenon who received the suggestion
+from her confessor, or, more probably, some ambitious woman who wished
+to rule her husband? Or, more undoubtedly, some pretty little Pompadour
+overcome by that Parisian infirmity so pleasantly described by M. de
+Maurepas in that quatrain which cost him his protracted disgrace and
+certainly contributed to the disasters of Louis XVI’s reign:
+
+“Iris, we love those features sweet,
+Your graces all are fresh and free;
+And flowerets spring beneath your feet,
+Where naught, alas! but flowers are seen.”
+
+But why should it not have been a philosopher who dreaded the
+disenchantment which a woman would experience at the sight of a man
+asleep? And such a one would always roll himself up in a coverlet and
+keep his head bare.
+
+Unknown author of this Jesuitical method, whoever thou art, in the
+devil’s name, we hail thee as a brother! Thou hast been the cause of
+many disasters. Thy work has the character of all half measures; it is
+satisfactory in no respect, and shares the bad points of the two other
+methods without yielding the advantages of either. How can the man of
+the nineteenth century, how can this creature so supremely intelligent,
+who has displayed a power well-nigh supernatural, who has employed the
+resources of his genius in concealing the machinery of his life, in
+deifying his necessary cravings in order that he might not despise
+them, going so far as to wrest from Chinese leaves, from Egyptian
+beans, from seeds of Mexico, their perfume, their treasure, their soul;
+going so far as to chisel the diamond, chase the silver, melt the gold
+ore, paint the clay and woo every art that may serve to decorate and to
+dignify the bowl from which he feeds!—how can this king, after having
+hidden under folds of muslin covered with diamonds, studded with
+rubies, and buried under linen, under folds of cotton, under the rich
+hues of silk, under the fairy patterns of lace, the partner of his
+wretchedness, how can he induce her to make shipwreck in the midst of
+all this luxury on the decks of two beds. What advantage is it that we
+have made the whole universe subserve our existence, our delusions, the
+poesy of our life? What good is it to have instituted law, morals and
+religion, if the invention of an upholsterer [for probably it was an
+upholsterer who invented the twin beds] robs our love of all its
+illusions, strips it bare of the majestic company of its delights and
+gives it in their stead nothing but what is ugliest and most odious?
+For this is the whole history of the two bed system.
+
+LXIII.
+That it shall appear either sublime or grotesque are the alternatives
+to which we have reduced a desire.
+
+If it be shared, our love is sublime; but should you sleep in twin
+beds, your love will always be grotesque. The absurdities which this
+half separation occasions may be comprised in either one of two
+situations, which will give us occasion to reveal the causes of very
+many marital misfortunes.
+
+Midnight is approaching as a young woman is putting on her curl papers
+and yawning as she did so. I do not know whether her melancholy
+proceeded from a headache, seated in the right or left lobe of her
+brain, or whether she was passing through one of those seasons of
+weariness during which all things appear black to us; but to see her
+negligently putting up her hair for the night, to see her languidly
+raising her leg to take off her garter, it seemed to me that she would
+prefer to be drowned rather than to be denied the relief of plunging
+her draggled life into the slumber that might restore it. At this
+instant, I know not to what degree from the North Pole she stands,
+whether at Spitzberg or in Greenland. Cold and indifferent she goes to
+bed thinking, as Mistress Walter Shandy might have thought, that the
+morrow would be a day of sickness, that her husband is coming home very
+late, that the beaten eggs which she has just eaten were not
+sufficiently sweetened, that she owes more than five hundred francs to
+her dressmaker; in fine, thinking about everything which you may
+suppose would occupy the mind of a tired woman. In the meanwhile
+arrives her great lout of a husband, who, after some business meeting,
+has drunk punch, with a consequent elation. He takes off his boots,
+leaves his stockings on a lounge, his bootjack lies before the
+fireplace; and wrapping his head up in a red silk handkerchief, without
+giving himself the trouble to tuck in the corners, he fires off at his
+wife certain interjectory phrases, those little marital endearments,
+which form almost the whole conversation at those twilight hours, where
+drowsy reason is no longer shining in this mechanism of ours. “What, in
+bed already! It was devilish cold this evening! Why don’t you speak, my
+pet? You’ve already rolled yourself up in bed, then! Ah! you are in the
+dumps and pretend to be asleep!” These exclamations are mingled with
+yawns; and after numberless little incidents which according to the
+usage of each home vary this preface of the night, our friend flings
+himself into his own bed with a heavy thud.
+
+Alas! before a woman who is cold, how mad a man must appear when desire
+renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting
+as an epigram and soothing as a madrigal; when he enacts with more or
+less sprightliness the scene where, in _Venice Preserved_, the genius
+of Orway has represented the senator Antonio, repeating a hundred times
+over at the feet of Aquilina: “Aquilina, Quilina, Lina, Aqui, Nacki!”
+without winning from her aught save the stroke of her whip, inasmuch as
+he has undertaken to fawn upon her like a dog. In the eyes of every
+woman, even of a lawful wife, the more a man shows eager passion under
+these circumstances, the more silly he appears. He is odious when he
+commands, he is minotaurized if he abuses his power. On this point I
+would remind you of certain aphorisms in the marriage catechism from
+which you will see that you are violating its most sacred precepts.
+Whether a woman yields, or does not yield, this institution of twin
+beds gives to marriage such an element of roughness and nakedness that
+the most chaste wife and the most intelligent husband are led to
+immodesty.
+
+This scene, which is enacted in a thousand ways and which may originate
+in a thousand different incidents, has a sequel in that other situation
+which, while it is less pleasant, is far more terrible.
+
+One evening when I was talking about these serious matters with the
+late Comte de Noce, of whom I have already had occasion to speak, a
+tall white-haired old man, his intimate friend, whose name I will not
+give, because he is still alive, looked at us with a somewhat
+melancholy air. We guessed that he was about to relate some tale of
+scandal, and we accordingly watched him, somewhat as the stenographer
+of the _Moniteur_ might watch, as he mounted the tribune, a minister
+whose speech had already been written out for the reporter. The
+story-teller on this occasion was an old marquis, whose fortune,
+together with his wife and children, had perished in the disasters of
+the Revolution. The marchioness had been one of the most inconsistent
+women of the past generation; the marquis accordingly was not wanting
+in observations on feminine human nature. Having reached an age in
+which he saw nothing before him but the gulf of the grave, he spoke
+about himself as if the subject of his talk were Mark Antony or
+Cleopatra.
+
+“My young friend”—he did me the honor to address me, for it was I who
+made the last remark in this discussion—“your reflections make me think
+of a certain evening, in the course of which one of my friends
+conducted himself in such a manner as to lose forever the respect of
+his wife. Now, in those days a woman could take vengeance with
+marvelous facility—for it was always a word and a blow. The married
+couple I speak of were particular in sleeping on separate beds, with
+their head under the arch of the same alcove. They came home one night
+from a brilliant ball given by the Comte de Mercy, ambassador of the
+emperor. The husband had lost a considerable sum at play, so he was
+completely absorbed in thought. He had to pay a debt, the next day, of
+six thousand crowns!—and you will recollect, Noce, that a hundred
+crowns couldn’t be made up from scraping together the resources of ten
+such musketeers. The young woman, as generally happens under such
+circumstances, was in a gale of high spirits. ‘Give to the marquis,’
+she said to a _valet de chambre_, ‘all that he requires for his
+toilet.’ In those days people dressed for the night. These
+extraordinary words did not rouse the husband from his mood of
+abstraction, and then madame, assisted by her maid, began to indulge in
+a thousand coquetries. ‘Was my appearance to your taste this evening?’
+‘You are always to my taste,’ answered the marquis, continuing to
+stride up and down the room. ‘You are very gloomy! Come and talk to me,
+you frowning lover,’ said she, placing herself before him in the most
+seductive negligee. But you can have no idea of the enchantments of the
+marchioness unless you had known her. Ah! you have seen her, Noce!” he
+said with a mocking smile. “Finally, in spite of all her allurements
+and beauty, the marchioness was lost sight of amid thoughts of the six
+thousand crowns which this fool of a husband could not get out of his
+head, and she went to bed all alone. But women always have one resource
+left; so that the moment that the good husband made as though he would
+get into his bed, the marchioness cried, ‘Oh, how cold I am!’ ‘So am
+I,’ he replied. ‘How is it that the servants have not warmed our
+beds?’—And then I rang.”
+
+The Comte de Noce could not help laughing, and the old marquis, quite
+put out of countenance, stopped short.
+
+Not to divine the desire of a wife, to snore while she lies awake, to
+be in Siberia when she is in the tropics, these are the slighter
+disadvantages of twin beds. What risks will not a passionate woman run
+when she becomes aware that her husband is a heavy sleeper?
+
+I am indebted to Beyle for an Italian anecdote, to which his dry and
+sarcastic manner lent an infinite charm, as he told me this tale of
+feminine hardihood.
+
+Ludovico had his palace at one end of the town of Milan; at the other
+was that of the Countess of Pernetti. At midnight, on a certain
+occasion, Ludovico resolved, at the peril of his life, to make a rash
+expedition for the sake of gazing for one second on the face he adored,
+and accordingly appeared as if by magic in the palace of his
+well-beloved. He reached the nuptial chamber. Elisa Pernetti, whose
+heart most probably shared the desire of her lover, heard the sound of
+his footsteps and divined his intention. She saw through the walls of
+her chamber a countenance glowing with love. She rose from her marriage
+bed, light as a shadow she glided to the threshold of her door, with a
+look she embraced him, she seized his hand, she made a sign to him, she
+drew him in.
+
+“But he will kill you!” said he.
+
+“Perhaps so.”
+
+But all this amounts to nothing. Let us grant that most husbands sleep
+lightly. Let us grant that they sleep without snoring, and that they
+always discern the degree of latitude at which their wives are to be
+found. Moreover, all the reasons which we have given why twin beds
+should be condemned, let us consider but dust in the balance. But,
+after all, a final consideration would make us also proscribe the use
+of beds ranged within the limits of the same alcove.
+
+To a man placed in the position of a husband, there are circumstances
+which have led us to consider the nuptial couch as an actual means of
+defence. For it is only in bed that a man can tell whether his wife’s
+love is increasing or decreasing. It is the conjugal barometer. Now to
+sleep in twin beds is to wish for ignorance. You will understand, when
+we come to treat of _civil war_ (See Part Third) of what extreme
+usefulness a bed is and how many secrets a wife reveals in bed, without
+knowing it.
+
+Do not therefore allow yourself to be led astray by the specious good
+nature of such an institution as that of twin beds.
+
+It is the silliest, the most treacherous, the most dangerous in the
+world. Shame and anathema to him who conceived it!
+
+But in proportion as this method is pernicious in the case of young
+married people, it is salutary and advantageous for those who have
+reached the twentieth year of married life. Husband and wife can then
+most conveniently indulge their duets of snoring. It will, moreover, be
+more convenient for their various maladies, whether rheumatism,
+obstinate gout, or even the taking of a pinch of snuff; and the cough
+or the snore will not in any respect prove a greater hindrance than it
+is found to be in any other arrangement.
+
+We have not thought it necessary to mention the exceptional cases which
+authorize a husband to resort to twin beds. However, the opinion of
+Bonaparte was that when once there had taken place an interchange of
+life and breath (such are his words), nothing, not even sickness,
+should separate married people. This point is so delicate that it is
+not possible here to treat it methodically.
+
+Certain narrow minds will object that there are certain patriarchal
+families whose legislation of love is inflexible in the matter of two
+beds and an alcove, and that, by this arrangement, they have been happy
+from generation to generation. But, the only answer that the author
+vouchsafes to this is that he knows a great many respectable people who
+pass their lives in watching games of billiards.
+
+2. SEPARATE ROOMS.
+
+There cannot be found in Europe a hundred husbands of each nation
+sufficiently versed in the science of marriage, or if you like, of
+life, to be able to dwell in an apartment separate from that of their
+wives.
+
+The power of putting this system into practice shows the highest degree
+of intellectual and masculine force.
+
+The married couple who dwell in separate apartments have become either
+divorced, or have attained to the discovery of happiness. They either
+abominate or adore each other. We will not undertake to detail here the
+admirable precepts which may be deduced from this theory whose end is
+to make constancy and fidelity easy and delightful. It may be
+sufficient to declare that by this system alone two married people can
+realize the dream of many noble souls. This will be understood by all
+the faithful.
+
+As for the profane, their curious questionings will be sufficiently
+answered by the remark that the object of this institution is to give
+happiness to one woman. Which among them will be willing to deprive
+general society of any share in the talents with which they think
+themselves endowed, to the advantage of one woman? Nevertheless, the
+rendering of his mistress happy gives any one the fairest title to
+glory which can be earned in this valley of Jehosaphat, since,
+according to Genesis, Eve was not satisfied even with a terrestrial
+Paradise. She desired to taste the forbidden fruit, the eternal emblem
+of adultery.
+
+But there is an insurmountable reason why we should refrain from
+developing this brilliant theory. It would cause a digression from the
+main theme of our work. In the situation which we have supposed to be
+that of a married establishment, a man who is sufficiently unwise to
+sleep apart from his wife deserves no pity for the disaster which he
+himself invites.
+
+Let us then resume our subject. Every man is not strong enough to
+undertake to occupy an apartment separate from that of his wife;
+although any man might derive as much good as evil from the
+difficulties which exist in using but one bed.
+
+We now proceed to solve the difficulties which superficial minds may
+detect in this method, for which our predilection is manifest.
+
+But this paragraph, which is in some sort a silent one, inasmuch as we
+leave it to the commentaries which will be made in more than one home,
+may serve as a pedestal for the imposing figure of Lycurgus, that
+ancient legislator, to whom the Greeks are indebted for their
+profoundest thoughts on the subject of marriage. May his system be
+understood by future generations! And if modern manners are too much
+given to softness to adopt his system in its entirety, they may at
+least be imbued with the robust spirit of this admirable code.
+
+3. ONE BED FOR BOTH.
+
+On a night in December, Frederick the Great looked up at the sky, whose
+stars were twinkling with that clear and living light which presages
+heavy frost, and he exclaimed, “This weather will result in a great
+many soldiers to Prussia.”
+
+The king expressed here, by a single phrase, the principal disadvantage
+which results from the constant living together of married people.
+Although it may be permitted to Napoleon and to Frederick to estimate
+the value of a woman more or less according to the number of her
+children, yet a husband of talent ought, according to the maxims of the
+thirteenth Meditation, to consider child-begetting merely as a means of
+defence, and it is for him to know to what extent it may take place.
+
+The observation leads into mysteries from which the physiological Muse
+recoils. She has been quite willing to enter the nuptial chambers while
+they are occupied, but she is a virgin and a prude, and there are
+occasions on which she retires. For, since it is at this passage in my
+book that the Muse is inclined to put her white hands before her eyes
+so as to see nothing, like the young girl looking through the
+interstices of her tapering fingers, she will take advantage of this
+attack of modesty, to administer a reprimand to our manners. In England
+the nuptial chamber is a sacred place. The married couple alone have
+the privilege of entering it, and more than one lady, we are told,
+makes her bed herself. Of all the crazes which reign beyond the sea,
+why should the only one which we despise be precisely that, whose grace
+and mystery ought undoubtedly to meet the approval of all tender souls
+on this continent? Refined women condemn the immodesty with which
+strangers are introduced into the sanctuary of marriage. As for us, who
+have energetically anathematized women who walk abroad at the time when
+they expect soon to be confined, our opinion cannot be doubted. If we
+wish the celibate to respect marriage, married people ought to have
+some regard for the inflammability of bachelors.
+
+To sleep every night with one’s wife may seem, we confess, an act of
+the most insolent folly.
+
+Many husbands are inclined to ask how a man, who desires to bring
+marriage to perfection, dare prescribe to a husband a rule of conduct
+which would be fatal in a lover.
+
+Nevertheless, such is the decision of a doctor of arts and sciences
+conjugal.
+
+In the first place, without making a resolution never to sleep by
+himself, this is the only course left to a husband, since we have
+demonstrated the dangers of the preceding systems. We must now try to
+prove that this last method yields more advantage and less disadvantage
+than the two preceding methods, that is, so far as relates to the
+critical position in which a conjugal establishment stands.
+
+Our observations on the twin beds ought to have taught husbands that
+they should always be strung into the same degree of fervor as that
+which prevails in the harmonious organization of their wives. Now it
+seems to us that this perfect equality in feelings would naturally be
+created under the white Aegis, which spreads over both of them its
+protecting sheet; this at the outset is an immense advantage, and
+really nothing is easier to verify at any moment than the degree of
+love and expansion which a woman reaches when the same pillow receives
+the heads of both spouses.
+
+Man [we speak now of the species] walks about with a memorandum always
+totalized, which shows distinctly and without error the amount of
+passion which he carries within him. This mysterious gynometer is
+traced in the hollow of the hand, for the hand is really that one of
+our members which bears the impress most plainly of our characters.
+Chirology is a fifth work which I bequeath to my successors, for I am
+contented here to make known but the elements of this interesting
+science.
+
+The hand is the essential organ of touch. Touch is the sense which very
+nearly takes the place of all the others, and which alone is
+indispensable. Since the hand alone can carry out all that a man
+desires, it is to an extent action itself. The sum total of our
+vitality passes through it; and men of powerful intellects are usually
+remarkable for their shapely hands, perfection in that respect being a
+distinguishing trait of their high calling.
+
+Jesus Christ performed all His miracles by the imposition of hands. The
+hand is the channel through which life passes. It reveals to the
+physician all the mysteries of our organism. It exhales more than any
+other part of our bodies the nervous fluid, or that unknown substance,
+which for want of another term we style _will_. The eye can discover
+the mood of our soul but the hand betrays at the same time the secrets
+of the body and those of the soul. We can acquire the faculty of
+imposing silence on our eyes, on our lips, on our brows, and on our
+forehead; but the hand never dissembles and nothing in our features can
+be compared to the richness of its expression. The heat and cold which
+it feels in such delicate degrees often escape the notice of other
+senses in thoughtless people; but a man knows how to distinguish them,
+however little time he may have bestowed in studying the anatomy of
+sentiments and the affairs of human life. Thus the hand has a thousand
+ways of becoming dry, moist, hot, cold, soft, rough, unctuous. The hand
+palpitates, becomes supple, grows hard and again is softened. In fine
+it presents a phenomenon which is inexplicable so that one is tempted
+to call it the incarnation of thought. It causes the despair of the
+sculptor and the painter when they wish to express the changing
+labyrinth of its mysterious lineaments. To stretch out your hand to a
+man is to save him, it serves as a ratification of the sentiments we
+express. The sorcerers of every age have tried to read our future
+destines in those lines which have nothing fanciful in them, but
+absolutely correspond with the principles of each one’s life and
+character. When she charges a man with want of tact, which is merely
+touch, a woman condemns him without hope. We use the expressions, the
+“Hand of Justice,” the “Hand of God;” and a _coup de main_ means a bold
+undertaking.
+
+To understand and recognize the hidden feelings by the atmospheric
+variations of the hand, which a woman almost always yields without
+distrust, is a study less unfruitful and surer than that of
+physiognomy.
+
+In this way you will be able, if you acquire this science, to wield
+vast power, and to find a clue which will guide you through the
+labyrinth of the most impenetrable heart. This will render your living
+together free from very many mistakes, and, at the same time, rich in
+the acquisition of many a treasure.
+
+Buffon and certain physiologists affirm that our members are more
+completely exhausted by desire than by the most keen enjoyments. And
+really, does not desire constitute of itself a sort of intuitive
+possession? Does it not stand in the same relation to visible action,
+as those incidents in our mental life, in which we take part in a
+dream, stand to the incidents of our actual life? This energetic
+apprehension of things, does it not call into being an internal emotion
+more powerful than that of the external action? If our gestures are
+only the accomplishment of things already enacted by our thought, you
+may easily calculate how desire frequently entertained must necessarily
+consume the vital fluids. But the passions which are no more than the
+aggregation of desires, do they not furrow with the wrinkle of their
+lightning the faces of the ambitious, of gamblers, for instance, and do
+they not wear out their bodies with marvelous swiftness?
+
+These observations, therefore, necessarily contain the germs of a
+mysterious system equally favored by Plato and by Epicurus; we will
+leave it for you to meditate upon, enveloped as it is in the veil which
+enshrouds Egyptian statues.
+
+But the greatest mistake that a man commits is to believe that love can
+belong only to those fugitive moments which, according to the
+magnificent expression of Bossuet, are like to the nails scattered over
+a wall: to the eye they appear numerous; but when they are collected
+they make but a handful.
+
+Love consists almost always in conversation. There are few things
+inexhaustible in a lover: goodness, gracefulness and delicacy. To feel
+everything, to divine everything, to anticipate everything; to reproach
+without bringing affliction upon a tender heart; to make a present
+without pride; to double the value of a certain action by the way in
+which it is done; to flatter rather by actions than by words; to make
+oneself understood rather than to produce a vivid impression; to touch
+without striking; to make a look and the sound of the voice produce the
+effect of a caress; never to produce embarrassment; to amuse without
+offending good taste; always to touch the heart; to speak to the
+soul—this is all that women ask. They will abandon all the delights of
+all the nights of Messalina, if only they may live with a being who
+will yield them those caresses of the soul, for which they are so
+eager, and which cost nothing to men if only they have a little
+consideration.
+
+This outline comprises a great portion of such secrets as belong to the
+nuptial couch. There are perhaps some witty people who may take this
+long definition of politeness for a description of love, while in any
+case it is no more than a recommendation to treat your wife as you
+would treat the minister on whose good-will depends your promotion to
+the post you covet.
+
+I hear numberless voices crying out that this book is a special
+advocate for women and neglects the cause of men;
+
+That the majority of women are unworthy of these delicate attentions
+and would abuse them;
+
+That there are women given to licentiousness who would not lend
+themselves to very much of what they would call mystification;
+
+That women are nothing but vanity and think of nothing but dress;
+
+That they have notions which are truly unreasonable;
+
+That they are very often annoyed by an attention;
+
+That they are fools, they understand nothing, are worth nothing, etc.
+
+In answer to all these clamors we will write here the following
+phrases, which, placed between two spaces, will perhaps have the air of
+a thought, to quote an expression of Beaumarchais.
+
+LXIV.
+A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.
+
+The reasons why the single bed must triumph over the other two methods
+of organizing the nuptial couch are as follows: In the single couch we
+have a faithful interpreter to translate with profound truthfulness the
+sentiments of a woman, to render her a spy over herself, to keep her at
+the height of her amorous temperature, never to leave her, to have the
+power of hearing her breathe in slumber, and thus to avoid all the
+nonsense which is the ruin of so many marriages.
+
+As it is impossible to receive benefits without paying for them, you
+are bound to learn how to sleep gracefully, to preserve your dignity
+under the silk handkerchief that wraps your head, to be polite, to see
+that your slumber is light, not to cough too much, and to imitate those
+modern authors who write more prefaces than books.
+
+MEDITATION XVIII.
+
+OF MARITAL REVOLUTIONS.
+
+
+The time always comes in which nations and women even the most stupid
+perceive that their innocence is being abused. The cleverest policy may
+for a long time proceed in a course of deceit; but it would be very
+happy for men if they could carry on their deceit to an infinite
+period; a vast amount of bloodshed would then be avoided, both in
+nations and in families.
+
+Nevertheless, we hope that the means of defence put forth in the
+preceding Meditations will be sufficient to deliver a certain number of
+husbands from the clutches of the Minotaur! You must agree with the
+doctor that many a love blindly entered upon perishes under the
+treatment of hygiene or dies away, thanks to marital policy. Yes [what
+a consoling mistake!] many a lover will be driven away by personal
+efforts, many a husband will learn how to conceal under an impenetrable
+veil the machinery of his machiavelism, and many a man will have better
+success than the old philosopher who cried: _Nolo coronari!_
+
+But we are here compelled to acknowledge a mournful truth. Despotism
+has its moments of secure tranquillity. Her reign seems like the hour
+which precedes the tempest, and whose silence enables the traveler,
+stretched upon the faded grass, to hear at a mile’s distance, the song
+of the cicada. Some fine morning an honest woman, who will be imitated
+by a great portion of our own women, discerns with an eagle eye the
+clever manoeuvres which have rendered her the victim of an infernal
+policy. She is at first quite furious at having for so long a time
+preserved her virtue. At what age, in what day, does this terrible
+revolution occur? This question of chronology depends entirely upon the
+genius of each husband; for it is not the vocation of all to put in
+practice with the same talent the precepts of our conjugal gospel.
+
+“A man must have very little love,” the mystified wife will exclaim,
+“to enter upon such calculations as these! What! From the first day I
+have been to him perpetually an object of suspicion! It is monstrous,
+even a woman would be incapable of such artful and cruel treachery!”
+
+This is the question. Each husband will be able to understand the
+variations of this complaint which will be made in accordance with the
+character of the young Fury, of whom he has made a companion.
+
+A woman by no means loses her head under these circumstances; she holds
+her tongue and dissembles. Her vengeance will be concealed. Only you
+will have some symptoms of hesitation to contend with on the arrival of
+the crisis, which we presume you to have reached on the expiration of
+the honeymoon; but you will also have to contend against a resolution.
+She has determined to revenge herself. From that day, so far as regards
+you, her mask, like her heart, has turned to bronze. Formerly you were
+an object of indifference to her; you are becoming by degrees
+absolutely insupportable. The Civil War commences only at the moment in
+which, like the drop of water which makes the full glass overflow, some
+incident, whose more or less importance we find difficulty in
+determining, has rendered you odious. The lapse of time which
+intervenes between this last hour, the limit of your good
+understanding, and the day when your wife becomes cognizant of your
+artifices, is nevertheless quite sufficient to permit you to institute
+a series of defensive operations, which we will now explain.
+
+Up to this time you have protected your honor solely by the exertion of
+a power entirely occult. Hereafter the wheels of your conjugal
+machinery must be set going in sight of every one. In this case, if you
+would prevent a crime you must strike a blow. You have begun by
+negotiating, you must end by mounting your horse, sabre in hand, like a
+Parisian gendarme. You must make your horse prance, you must brandish
+your sabre, you must shout strenuously, and you must endeavor to calm
+the revolt without wounding anybody.
+
+Just as the author has found a means of passing from occult methods to
+methods that are patent, so it is necessary for the husband to justify
+the sudden change in his tactics; for in marriage, as in literature,
+art consists entirely in the gracefulness of the transitions. This is
+of the highest importance for you. What a frightful position you will
+occupy if your wife has reason to complain of your conduct at the
+moment, which is, perhaps, the most critical of your whole married
+life!
+
+You must therefore find some means or other to justify the secret
+tyranny of your initial policy; some means which still prepare the mind
+of your wife for the severe measures which you are about to take; some
+means which so far from forfeiting her esteem will conciliate her; some
+means which will gain her pardon, which will restore some little of
+that charm of yours, by which you won her love before your marriage.
+
+“But what policy is it that demands this course of action? Is there
+such a policy?”
+
+Certainly there is.
+
+But what address, what tact, what histrionic art must a husband possess
+in order to display the mimic wealth of that treasure which we are
+about to reveal to him! In order to counterfeit the passion whose fire
+is to make you a new man in the presence of your wife, you will require
+all the cunning of Talma.
+
+This passion is JEALOUSY.
+
+“My husband is jealous. He has been so from the beginning of our
+marriage. He has concealed this feeling from me by his usual refined
+delicacy. Does he love me still? I am going to do as I like with him!”
+
+Such are the discoveries which a woman is bound to make, one after
+another, in accordance with the charming scenes of the comedy which you
+are enacting for your amusement; and a man of the world must be an
+actual fool, if he fails in making a woman believe that which flatters
+her.
+
+With what perfection of hypocrisy must you arrange, step by step, your
+hypocritical behavior so as to rouse the curiosity of your wife, to
+engage her in a new study, and to lead her astray among the labyrinths
+of your thought!
+
+Ye sublime actors! Do ye divine the diplomatic reticence, the gestures
+of artifice, the veiled words, the looks of doubtful meaning which some
+evening may induce your wife to attempt the capture of your secret
+thoughts?
+
+Ah! to laugh in your sleeve while you are exhibiting the fierceness of
+a tiger; neither to lie nor to tell the truth; to comprehend the
+capricious mood of a woman, and yet to make her believe that she
+controls you, while you intend to bind her with a collar of iron! O
+comedy that has no audience, which yet is played by one heart before
+another heart and where both of you applaud because both of you think
+that you have obtained success!
+
+She it is who will tell you that you are jealous, who will point out to
+you that she knows you better than you know yourself, who will prove to
+you the uselessness of your artifices and who perhaps will defy you.
+She triumphs in the excited consciousness of the superiority which she
+thinks she possesses over you; you of course are ennobled in her eyes;
+for she finds your conduct quite natural. The only thing she feels is
+that your want of confidence was useless; if she wished to betray, who
+could hinder her?
+
+Then, some evening, you will burst into a passion, and, as some trifle
+affords you a pretext, you will make a scene, in the course of which
+your anger will make you divulge the secret of your distress. And here
+comes in the promulgation of our new code.
+
+Have no fear that a woman is going to trouble herself about this. She
+needs your jealousy, she rather likes your severity. This comes from
+the fact that in the first place she finds there a justification for
+her own conduct; and then she finds immense satisfaction in playing
+before other people the part of a victim. What delightful expressions
+of sympathy will she receive! Afterwards she will use this as a weapon
+against you, in the expectation thereby of leading you into a pitfall.
+
+She sees in your conduct the source of a thousand more pleasures in her
+future treachery, and her imagination smiles at all the barricades with
+which you surround her, for will she not have the delight of
+surmounting them all?
+
+Women understand better than we do the art of analyzing the two human
+feelings, which alternately form their weapons of attack, or the
+weapons of which they are victims. They have the instinct of love,
+because it is their whole life, and of jealousy, because it is almost
+the only means by which they can control us. Within them jealousy is a
+genuine sentiment and springs from the instinct of self-preservation;
+it is vital to their life or death. But with men this feeling is
+absolutely absurd when it does not subserve some further end.
+
+To entertain feelings of jealousy towards the woman you love, is to
+start from a position founded on vicious reasoning. We are loved, or we
+are not loved; if a man entertains jealousy under either of these
+circumstances, it is a feeling absolutely unprofitable to him; jealousy
+may be explained as fear, fear in love. But to doubt one’s wife is to
+doubt one’s self.
+
+To be jealous is to exhibit, at once, the height of egotism, the error
+of _amour-propre_, the vexation of morbid vanity. Women rather
+encourage this ridiculous feeling, because by means of it they can
+obtain cashmere shawls, silver toilet sets, diamonds, which for them
+mark the high thermometer mark of their power. Moreover, unless you
+appear blinded by jealousy, your wife will not keep on her guard; for
+there is no pitfall which she does not distrust, excepting that which
+she makes for herself.
+
+Thus the wife becomes the easy dupe of a husband who is clever enough
+to give to the inevitable revolution, which comes sooner or later, the
+advantageous results we have indicated.
+
+You must import into your establishment that remarkable phenomenon
+whose existence is demonstrated in the asymptotes of geometry. Your
+wife will always try to minotaurize you without being successful. Like
+those knots which are never so tight as when one tries to loosen them,
+she will struggle to the advantage of your power over her, while she
+believes that she is struggling for her independence.
+
+The highest degree of good play on the part of a prince lies in
+persuading his people that he goes to war for them, while all the time
+he is causing them to be killed for his throne.
+
+But many husbands will find a preliminary difficulty in executing this
+plan of campaign. If your wife is a woman of profound dissimulation,
+the question is, what signs will indicate to her the motives of your
+long mystification?
+
+It will be seen that our Meditation on the Custom House, as well as
+that on the Bed, has already revealed certain means of discerning the
+thought of a woman; but we make no pretence in this book of
+exhaustively stating the resources of human wit, which are
+immeasurable. Now here is a proof of this. On the day of the Saturnalia
+the Romans discovered more features in the character of their slaves,
+in ten minutes, than they would have found out during the rest of the
+year! You ought therefore to ordain Saturnalia in your establishment,
+and to imitate Gessler, who, when he saw William Tell shoot the apple
+off his son’s head, was forced to remark, “Here is a man whom I must
+get rid of, for he could not miss his aim if he wished to kill me.”
+
+You understand, then, that if your wife wishes to drink Roussillon
+wine, to eat mutton chops, to go out at all hours and to read the
+encyclopaedia, you are bound to take her very seriously. In the first
+place, she will begin to distrust you against her own wish, on seeing
+that your behaviour towards her is quite contrary to your previous
+proceedings. She will suppose that you have some ulterior motive in
+this change of policy, and therefore all the liberty that you give her
+will make her so anxious that she cannot enjoy it. As regards the
+misfortunes that this change may bring, the future will provide for
+them. In a revolution the primary principle is to exercise a control
+over the evil which cannot be prevented and to attract the lightning by
+rods which shall lead it to the earth.
+
+And now the last act of the comedy is in preparation.
+
+The lover who, from the day when the feeblest of all first symptoms
+shows itself in your wife until the moment when the marital revolution
+takes place, has jumped upon the stage, either as a material creature
+or as a being of the imagination—the LOVER, summoned by a sign from
+her, now declares: “Here I am!”
+
+MEDITATION XIX.
+
+OF THE LOVER.
+
+
+We offer the following maxims for your consideration:
+
+We should despair of the human race if these maxims had been made
+before 1830; but they set forth in so clear a manner the agreements and
+difficulties which distinguish you, your wife and a lover; they so
+brilliantly describe what your policy should be, and demonstrate to you
+so accurately the strength of the enemy, that the teacher has put his
+_amour-propre_ aside, and if by chance you find here a single new
+thought, send it to the devil, who suggested this work.
+
+LXV.
+To speak of love is to make love.
+
+LXVI.
+In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of honest
+admiration.
+
+LXVII.
+A lover has all the good points and all the bad points which are
+lacking in a husband.
+
+LXVIII.
+A lover not only gives life to everything, he makes one forget life;
+the husband does not give life to anything.
+
+LXIX. All the affected airs of sensibility which a woman puts on
+invariably deceive a lover; and on occasions when a husband shrugs his
+shoulders, a lover is in ecstasies.
+
+LXX.
+A lover betrays by his manner alone the degree of intimacy in which he
+stands to a married woman.
+
+LXXI. A woman does not always know why she is in love. It is rarely
+that a man falls in love without some selfish purpose. A husband should
+discover this secret motive of egotism, for it will be to him the lever
+of Archimedes.
+
+LXXII.
+A clever husband never betrays his supposition that his wife has a
+lover.
+
+LXXIII. The lover submits to all the caprices of a woman; and as a man
+is never vile while he lies in the arms of his mistress, he will take
+the means to please her that a husband would recoil from.
+
+LXXIV.
+A lover teaches a wife all that her husband has concealed from her.
+
+LXXV. All the sensations which a woman yields to her lover, she gives
+in exchange; they return to her always intensified; they are as rich in
+what they give as in what they receive. This is the kind of commerce in
+which almost all husbands end by being bankrupt.
+
+LXXVI. A lover speaks of nothing to a woman but that which exalts her;
+while a husband, although he may be a loving one, can never refrain
+from giving advice which always has the appearance of reprimand.
+
+LXXVII.
+A lover always starts from his mistress to himself; with a husband the
+contrary is the case.
+
+LXXVIII. A lover always has a desire to appear amiable. There is in
+this sentiment an element of exaggeration which leads to ridicule;
+study how to take advantage of this.
+
+LXXIX. When a crime has been committed the magistrate who investigates
+the case knows [excepting in the case of a released convict who commits
+murder in jail] that there are not more than five persons to whom he
+can attribute the act. He starts from this premise a series of
+conjectures. The husband should reason like the judge; there are only
+three people in society whom he can suspect when seeking the lover of
+his wife.
+
+LXXX.
+A lover is never in the wrong.
+
+LXXXI. The lover of a married woman says to her: “Madame, you have need
+of rest. You have to give an example of virtue to your children. You
+have sworn to make your husband happy, and although he has some
+faults—he has fewer than I have—he is worthy of your esteem.
+Nevertheless you have sacrificed everything for me. Do not let a single
+murmur escape you; for regret is an offence which I think worthy of a
+severer penalty than the law decrees against infidelity. As a reward
+for these sacrifices, I will bring you as much pleasure as pain.” And
+the incredible part about it is, that the lover triumphs. The form
+which his speech takes carries it. He says but one phrase: “I love
+you.” A lover is a herald who proclaims either the merit, the beauty,
+or the wit of a woman. What does a husband proclaim?
+
+To sum up all, the love which a married woman inspires, or that which
+she gives back, is the least creditable sentiment in the world; in her
+it is boundless vanity; in her lover it is selfish egotism. The lover
+of a married woman contracts so many obligations, that scarcely three
+men in a century are met with who are capable of discharging them. He
+ought to dedicate his whole life to his mistress, but he always ends by
+deserting her; both parties are aware of this, and, from the beginning
+of social life, the one has always been sublime in self-sacrifice, the
+other an ingrate. The infatuation of love always rouses the pity of the
+judges who pass sentence on it. But where do you find such love genuine
+and constant? What power must a husband possess to struggle
+successfully against a man who casts over a woman a spell strong enough
+to make her submit to such misfortunes!
+
+We think, then, as a general rule, a husband, if he knows how to use
+the means of defence which we have outlined, can lead his wife up to
+her twenty-seventh year, not without her having chosen a lover, but
+without her having committed the great crime. Here and there we meet
+with men endowed with deep marital genius, who can keep their wives,
+body and soul to themselves alone up to their thirtieth or thirty-fifth
+year; but these exceptions cause a sort of scandal and alarm. The
+phenomenon scarcely ever is met with excepting in the country, where
+life is transparent and people live in glass houses and the husband
+wields immense power. The miraculous assistance which men and things
+thus give to a husband always vanishes in the midst of a city whose
+population reaches to two hundred and fifty thousand.
+
+It would therefore almost appear to be demonstrated that thirty is the
+age of virtue. At that critical period, a woman becomes so difficult to
+guard, that in order successfully to enchain her within the conjugal
+Paradise, resort must be had to those last means of defence which
+remain to be described, and which we will reveal in the _Essay on
+Police_, the _Art of Returning Home_, and _Catastrophes_.
+
+MEDITATION XX.
+
+ESSAY ON POLICE.
+
+
+The police of marriage consist of all those means which are given you
+by law, manners, force, and stratagem for preventing your wife in her
+attempt to accomplish those three acts which in some sort make up the
+life of love: writing, seeing and speaking.
+
+The police combine in greater or less proportion the means of defence
+put forth in the preceding Meditations. Instinct alone can teach in
+what proportions and on what occasions these compounded elements are to
+be employed. The whole system is elastic; a clever husband will easily
+discern how it must be bent, stretched or retrenched. By the aid of the
+police a man can guide his wife to her fortieth year pure from any
+fault.
+
+We will divide this treatise on Police into five captions:
+
+1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS. 2. OF CORRESPONDENCE. 3. OF SPIES. 4. THE INDEX. 5.
+OF THE BUDGET.
+
+1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS.
+
+In spite of the grave crisis which the husband has reached, we do not
+suppose that the lover has completely acquired the freedom of the city
+in the marital establishment. Many husbands often suspect that their
+wives have a lover, and yet they do not know upon which of the five or
+six chosen ones of whom we have spoken their suspicions ought to fall.
+This hesitation doubtless springs from some moral infirmity, to whose
+assistance the professor must come.
+
+Fouche had in Paris three or four houses resorted to by people of the
+highest distinction; the mistresses of these dwellings were devoted to
+him. This devotion cost a great deal of money to the state. The
+minister used to call these gatherings, of which nobody at the time had
+any suspicion, his _mouse-traps_. More than one arrest was made at the
+end of the ball at which the most brilliant people of Paris had been
+made accomplices of this oratorian.
+
+The act of offering some fragments of roasted nuts, in order to see
+your wife put her white hand in the trap, is certainly exceedingly
+delicate, for a woman is certain to be on her guard; nevertheless, we
+reckon upon at least three kinds of mouse-traps: _The Irresistible_,
+_The Fallacious_, and that which is _Touch and Go_.
+
+_The Irresistible._
+
+Suppose two husbands, we will call them A and B, wish to discover who
+are the lovers of their wives. We will put the husband A at the centre
+of a table loaded with the finest pyramids of fruit, of crystals, of
+candies and of liqueurs, and the husband B shall be at whatever point
+of this brilliant circle you may please to suppose. The champagne has
+gone round, every eye is sparkling and every tongue is wagging.
+
+HUSBAND A. (peeling a chestnut)—Well, as for me, I admire literary
+people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation
+they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults
+or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people of
+genius are like tonics—you like, but you must use them temperately.
+
+WIFE B. (who has listened attentively)—But, M. A., you are very
+exacting (with an arch smile); it seems to me that dull people have as
+many faults as people of talent, with this difference perhaps, that the
+former have nothing to atone for them!
+
+HUSBAND A. (irritably)—You will agree at least, madame, that they are
+not very amiable to you.
+
+WIFE B. (with vivacity)—Who told you so?
+
+HUSBAND A. (smiling)—Don’t they overwhelm you all the time with their
+superiority? Vanity so dominates their souls that between you and them
+the effort is reciprocal—
+
+THE MISTRESS OF THE HOUSE. (aside to Wife A)—You well deserved it, my
+dear. (Wife A shrugs her shoulders.)
+
+HUSBAND A. (still continuing)—Then the habit they have of combining
+ideas which reveal to them the mechanism of feeling! For them love is
+purely physical and every one knows that they do not shine.
+
+WIFE B. (biting her lips, interrupting him)—It seems to me, sir, that
+we are the sole judges in this matter. I can well understand why men of
+the world do not like men of letters! But it is easier to criticise
+than to imitate them.
+
+HUSBAND A. (disdainfully)—Oh, madame, men of the world can assail the
+authors of the present time without being accused of envy. There is
+many a gentleman of the drawing-room, who if he undertook to write—
+
+WIFE B. (with warmth)—Unfortunately for you, sir, certain friends of
+yours in the Chamber have written romances; have you been able to read
+them?—But really, in these days, in order to attain the least
+originality, you must undertake historic research, you must—
+
+HUSBAND B. (making no answer to the lady next him and speaking aside)
+—Oh! Oh! Can it be that it is M. de L——-, author of the _Dreams of a
+Young Girl_, whom my wife is in love with?—That is singular; I thought
+that it was Doctor M——-. But stay! (Aloud.) Do you know, my dear, that
+you are right in what you say? (All laugh.) Really, I should prefer to
+have always artists and men of letters in my drawing-room—(aside) when
+we begin to receive!—rather than to see there other professional men.
+In any case artists speak of things about which every one is
+enthusiastic, for who is there who does not believe in good taste? But
+judges, lawyers, and, above all, doctors—Heavens! I confess that to
+hear them constantly speaking about lawsuits and diseases, those two
+human ills—
+
+WIFE A. (sitting next to Husband B, speaking at the same time)—What is
+that you are saying, my friend? You are quite mistaken. In these days
+nobody wishes to wear a professional manner; doctors, since you have
+mentioned doctors, try to avoid speaking of professional matters. They
+talk politics, discuss the fashions and the theatres, they tell
+anecdotes, they write books better than professional authors do; there
+is a vast difference between the doctors of to-day and those of
+Moliere—
+
+HUSBAND A. (aside)—Whew! Is it possible my wife is in love with Dr.
+M——-? That would be odd. (Aloud.) That is quite possible, my dear, but
+I would not give a sick dog in charge of a physician who writes.
+
+WIFE A. (interrupting her husband)—I know people who have five or six
+offices, yet the government has the greatest confidence in them;
+anyway, it is odd that you should speak in this way, you who were one
+of Dr. M——-’s great cases—
+
+HUSBAND A. (aside)—There can be no doubt of it!
+
+_The Fallacious._
+
+A HUSBAND. (as he reaches home)—My dear, we are invited by Madame de
+Fischtaminel to a concert which she is giving next Tuesday. I reckoned
+on going there, as I wanted to speak with a young cousin of the
+minister who was among the singers; but he is gone to Frouville to see
+his aunt. What do you propose doing?
+
+HIS WIFE.—These concerts tire me to death!—You have to sit nailed to
+your chair whole hours without saying a word.—Besides, you know quite
+well that we dine with my mother on that day, and it is impossible to
+miss paying her a visit.
+
+HER HUSBAND. (carelessly)—Ah! that is true.
+
+_(Three days afterwards.)_
+
+THE HUSBAND. (as he goes to bed)—What do you think, my darling?
+To-morrow I will leave you at your mother’s, for the count has returned
+from Frouville and will be at Madame de Fischtaminel’s concert.
+
+HIS WIFE. (vivaciously)—But why should you go alone? You know how I
+adore music!
+
+_The Touch and Go Mouse-Trap._
+
+THE WIFE.—Why did you go away so early this evening?
+
+THE HUSBAND. (mysteriously)—Ah! It is a sad business, and all the more
+so because I don’t know how I can settle it.
+
+THE WIFE.—What is it all about, Adolph? You are a wretch if you do not
+tell me what you are going to do!
+
+THE HUSBAND.—My dear, that ass of a Prosper Magnan is fighting a duel
+with M. de Fontanges, on account of an Opera singer.—But what is the
+matter with you?
+
+THE WIFE.—Nothing.—It is very warm in this room and I don’t know what
+ails me, for the whole day I have been suffering from sudden flushing
+of the face.
+
+THE HUSBAND. (aside)—She is in love with M. de Fontanges. (Aloud.)
+Celestine! (He shouts out still louder.) Celestine! Come quick, madame
+is ill!
+
+You will understand that a clever husband will discover a thousand ways
+of setting these three kinds of traps.
+
+2. OF CORRESPONDENCE.
+
+To write a letter, and to have it posted; to get an answer, to read it
+and burn it; there we have correspondence stated in the simplest terms.
+
+Yet consider what immense resources are given by civilization, by our
+manners and by our love to the women who wish to conceal these material
+actions from the scrutiny of a husband.
+
+The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives
+its epistolary provender from all hands.
+
+There is also the fatal invention of the General Delivery. A lover
+finds in the world a hundred charitable persons, male and female, who,
+for a slight consideration, will slip the billets-doux into the amorous
+and intelligent hand of his fair mistress.
+
+A correspondence is a variable as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks.
+A young celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a letter
+on the fly-leaf of a new book, which, when the husband asked for it of
+the bookseller, reached the hands of his mistress, who had been
+prepared the evening before for this charming article.
+
+A woman in love, who fears her husband’s jealousy, will write and read
+billets-doux during the time consecrated to those mysterious
+occupations during which the most tyrannical husband must leave her
+alone.
+
+Moreover, all lovers have the art of arranging a special code of
+signals, whose arbitrary import it is difficult to understand. At a
+ball, a flower placed in some odd way in the hair; at the theatre, a
+pocket handkerchief unfolded on the front of the box; rubbing the nose,
+wearing a belt of a particular color, putting the hat on one side,
+wearing one dress oftener than another, singing a certain song in a
+concert or touching certain notes on the piano; fixing the eyes on a
+point agreed; everything, in fact, from the hurdy-gurdy which passes
+your windows and goes away if you open the shutter, to the newspaper
+announcement of a horse for sale—all may be reckoned as correspondence.
+
+How many times, in short, will a wife craftily ask her husband to do
+such and such commission for her, to go to such and such a shop or
+house, having previously informed her lover that your presence at such
+or such a place means yes or no?
+
+On this point the professor acknowledges with shame that there is no
+possible means of preventing correspondence between lovers. But a
+little machiavelism on the part of the husband will be much more likely
+to remedy the difficulty than any coercive measures.
+
+An agreement, which should be kept sacred between married people, is
+their solemn oath that they will respect each other’s sealed letters.
+Clever is the husband who makes this pledge on his wedding-day and is
+able to keep it conscientiously.
+
+In giving your wife unrestrained liberty to write and to receive
+letters, you will be enabled to discern the moment she begins to
+correspond with a lover.
+
+But suppose your wife distrusts you and covers with impenetrable clouds
+the means she takes to conceal from you her correspondence. Is it not
+then time to display that intellectual power with which we armed you in
+our Meditation entitled _Of the Custom House_? The man who does not see
+when his wife writes to her lover, and when she receives an answer, is
+a failure as a husband.
+
+The proposed study which you ought to bestow upon the movements, the
+actions, the gestures, the looks of your wife, will be perhaps
+troublesome and wearying, but it will not last long; the only point is
+to discover when your wife and her lover correspond and in what way.
+
+We cannot believe that a husband, even of moderate intelligence, will
+fail to see through this feminine manoeuvre, when once he suspects its
+existence.
+
+Meanwhile, you can judge from a single incident what means of police
+and of restraint remain to you in the event of such a correspondence.
+
+A young lawyer, whose ardent passion exemplified certain of the
+principles dwelt upon in this important part of our work, had married a
+young person whose love for him was but slight; yet this circumstance
+he looked upon as an exceedingly happy one; but at the end of his first
+year of marriage he perceived that his dear Anna [for Anna was her
+name] had fallen in love with the head clerk of a stock-broker.
+
+Adolph was a young man of about twenty-five, handsome in face and as
+fond of amusement as any other celibate. He was frugal, discreet,
+possessed of an excellent heart, rode well, talked well, had fine black
+hair always curled, and dressed with taste. In short, he would have
+done honor and credit to a duchess. The advocate was ugly, short,
+stumpy, square-shouldered, mean-looking, and, moreover, a husband.
+Anna, tall and pretty, had almond eyes, white skin and refined
+features. She was all love; and passion lighted up her glance with a
+bewitching expression. While her family was poor, Maitre Lebrun had an
+income of twelve thousand francs. That explains all.
+
+One evening Lebrun got home looking extremely chop-fallen. He went into
+his study to work; but he soon came back shivering to his wife, for he
+had caught a fever and hurriedly went to bed. There he lay groaning and
+lamenting for his clients and especially for a poor widow whose fortune
+he was to save the very next day by effecting a compromise. An
+appointment had been made with certain business men and he was quite
+incapable of keeping it. After having slept for a quarter of an hour,
+he begged his wife in a feeble voice to write to one of his intimate
+friends, asking him to take his (Lebrun’s) place next day at the
+conference. He dictated a long letter and followed with his eye the
+space taken up on the paper by his phrases. When he came to begin the
+second page of the last sheet, the advocate set out to describe to his
+confrere the joy which his client would feel on the signing of the
+compromise, and the fatal page began with these words:
+
+“My good friend, go for Heaven’s sake to Madame Vernon’s at once; you
+are expected with impatience there; she lives at No. 7 Rue de Sentier.
+Pardon my brevity; but I count on your admirable good sense to guess
+what I am unable to explain.
+
+“Tout a vous,”
+
+“Give me the letter,” said the lawyer, “that I may see whether it is
+correct before signing it.”
+
+The unfortunate wife, who had been taken off her guard by this letter,
+which bristled with the most barbarous terms of legal science, gave up
+the letter. As soon as Lebrun got possession of the wily script he
+began to complain, to twist himself about, as if in pain, and to demand
+one little attention after another of his wife. Madame left the room
+for two minutes during which the advocate leaped from his bed, folded a
+piece of paper in the form of a letter and hid the missive written by
+his wife. When Anna returned, the clever husband seized the blank
+paper, made her address it to the friend of his, to whom the letter
+which he had taken out was written, and the poor creature handed the
+blank letter to his servant. Lebrun seemed to grow gradually calmer; he
+slept or pretended to do so, and the next morning he still affected to
+feel strange pains. Two days afterwards he tore off the first leaf of
+the letter and put an “e” to the word _tout_ in the phrase “tout a
+vous.”[*] He folded mysteriously the paper which contained the innocent
+forgery, sealed it, left his bedroom and called the maid, saying to
+her:
+
+[*] Thus giving a feminine ending to the signature, and lending the
+impression that the note emanated from the wife personally—J.W.M.
+
+“Madame begs that you will take this to the house of M. Adolph; now, be
+quick about it.”
+
+He saw the chambermaid leave the house and soon afterwards he, on a
+plea of business, went out, hurried to Rue de Sentier, to the address
+indicated, and awaited the arrival of his rival at the house of a
+friend who was in the secret of his stratagem. The lover, intoxicated
+with happiness, rushed to the place and inquired for Madame de Vernon;
+he was admitted and found himself face to face with Maitre Lebrun, who
+showed a countenance pale but chill, and gazed at him with tranquil but
+implacable glance.
+
+“Sir,” he said in a tone of emotion to the young clerk, whose heart
+palpitated with terror, “you are in love with my wife, and you are
+trying to please her; I scarcely know how to treat you in return for
+this, because in your place and at your age I should have done exactly
+the same. But Anna is in despair; you have disturbed her happiness, and
+her heart is filled with the torments of hell. Moreover, she has told
+me all, a quarrel soon followed by a reconciliation forced her to write
+the letter which you have received, and she has sent me here in her
+place. I will not tell you, sir, that by persisting in your plan of
+seduction you will cause the misery of her you love, that you will
+forfeit her my esteem, and eventually your own; that your crime will be
+stamped on the future by causing perhaps sorrow to my children. I will
+not even speak to you of the bitterness you will infuse into my
+life;—unfortunately these are commonplaces! But I declare to you, sir,
+that the first step you take in this direction will be the signal for a
+crime; for I will not trust the risk of a duel in order to stab you to
+the heart!”
+
+And the eyes of the lawyer flashed ominously.
+
+“Now, sir,” he went on in a gentler voice, “you are young, you have a
+generous heart. Make a sacrifice for the future happiness of her you
+love; leave her and never see her again. And if you must needs be a
+member of my family, I have a young aunt who is yet unsettled in life;
+she is charming, clever and rich. Make her acquaintance, and leave a
+virtuous woman undisturbed.”
+
+This mixture of raillery and intimidation, together with the unwavering
+glance and deep voice of the husband, produced a remarkable impression
+on the lover. He remained for a moment utterly confused, like people
+overcome with passion and deprived of all presence of mind by a sudden
+shock. If Anna has since then had any lovers [which is a pure
+hypothesis] Adolph certainly is not one of them.
+
+This occurrence may help you to understand that correspondence is a
+double-edged weapon which is of as much advantage for the defence of
+the husband as for the inconsistency of the wife. You should therefore
+encourage correspondence for the same reason that the prefect of police
+takes special care that the street lamps of Paris are kept lighted.
+
+3. OF SPIES.
+
+To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to fall
+lower still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is perhaps
+not even a dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of folly; for
+nothing will ever guarantee to you the honesty of a servant who betrays
+her mistress, and you can never feel certain whether she is operating
+in your interest or in that of your wife. This point therefore may be
+looked upon as beyond controversy.
+
+Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of
+a family the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most
+truthful and at the same time the most discreet in the world. They are
+silent and yet they speak, they see everything and appear to see
+nothing.
+
+One day I met a friend of mine on the boulevard. He invited me to
+dinner, and we went to his house. Dinner had been already served, and
+the mistress of the house was helping her two daughters to plates of
+soup.
+
+“I see here my first symptoms,” I said to myself.
+
+We sat down. The first word of the husband, who spoke without thinking,
+and for the sake of talking, was the question:
+
+“Has any one been here to-day?”
+
+“Not a soul,” replied his wife, without lifting her eyes.
+
+I shall never forget the quickness with which the two daughters looked
+up to their mother. The elder girl, aged eight, had something
+especially peculiar in her glance. There was at the same time
+revelation and mystery, curiosity and silence, astonishment and apathy
+in that look. If there was anything that could be compared to the speed
+with which the light of candor flashed from their eyes, it was the
+prudent reserve with which both of them closed down, like shutters, the
+folds of their white eyelids.
+
+Ye sweet and charming creatures, who from the age of nine even to the
+age of marriage too often are the torment of a mother even when she is
+not a coquette, is it by the privilege of your years or the instinct of
+your nature that your young ears catch the faint sound of a man’s voice
+through walls and doors, that your eyes are awake to everything, and
+that your young spirit busies itself in divining all, even the meaning
+of a word spoken in the air, even the meaning of your mother’s
+slightest gesture?
+
+There is something of gratitude, something in fact instinctive, in the
+predilection of fathers for their daughters and mothers for their sons.
+
+But the act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere
+dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of
+the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and
+who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words,
+“You are not very successful in breaking them.”
+
+The Marshal de Saxe did not give much consolation to his Popeliniere
+when they discovered in company that famous revolving chimney, invented
+by the Duc de Richelieu.
+
+“That is the finest piece of horn work that I have ever seen!” cried
+the victor of Fontenoy.
+
+Let us hope that your espionage will not give you so troublesome a
+lesson. Such misfortunes are the fruits of the civil war and we do not
+live in that age.
+
+4. THE INDEX.
+
+The Pope puts books only on the Index; you will mark with a stigma of
+reprobation men and things.
+
+It is forbidden to madame to go into a bath except in her own house.
+
+It is forbidden to madame to receive into her house him whom you
+suspect of being her lover, and all those who are the accomplices of
+their love.
+
+It is forbidden to madame to take a walk without you.
+
+But the peculiarities which in each household originate from the
+diversity of characters, the numberless incidents of passion, and the
+habits of the married people give to this black book so many
+variations, the lines in it are multiplied or erased with such rapidity
+that a friend of the author has called this Index _The History of
+Changes in the Marital Church_.
+
+There are only two things which can be controlled or prescribed in
+accordance with definite rules; the first is the country, the second is
+the promenade.
+
+A husband ought never to take his wife to the country nor permit her to
+go there. Have a country home if you like, live there, entertain there
+nobody excepting ladies or old men, but never leave your wife alone
+there. But to take her, for even half a day, to the house of another
+man is to show yourself as stupid as an ostrich.
+
+To keep guard over a wife in the country is a task most difficult of
+accomplishment. Do you think that you will be able to be in the
+thickets, to climb the trees, to follow the tracks of a lover over the
+grass trodden down at night, but straightened by the dew in the morning
+and refreshed by the rays of the sun? Can you keep your eye on every
+opening in the fence of the park? Oh! the country and the Spring! These
+are the two right arms of the celibate.
+
+When a woman reaches the crisis at which we suppose her to be, a
+husband ought to remain in town till the declaration of war, or to
+resolve on devoting himself to all the delights of a cruel espionage.
+
+With regard to the promenade: Does madame wish to go to parties, to the
+theatre, to the Bois de Boulogne, to purchase her dresses, to find out
+what is the fashion? Madame shall go, shall see everything in the
+respectable company of her lord and master.
+
+If she take advantage of the moment when a business appointment, which
+you cannot fail to keep, detains you, in order to obtain your tacit
+permission to some meditated expedition; if in order to obtain that
+permission she displays all the witcheries of those cajoleries in which
+women excel and whose powerful influence you ought already to have
+known, well, well, the professor implores you to allow her to win you
+over, while at the same time you sell dear the boon she asks; and above
+all convince this creature, whose soul is at once as changeable as
+water and as firm as steel, that it is impossible for you from the
+importance of your work to leave your study.
+
+But as soon as your wife has set foot upon the street, if she goes on
+foot, don’t give her time to make fifty steps; follow and track her in
+such a way that you will not be noticed.
+
+It is possible that there exist certain Werthers whose refined and
+delicate souls recoil from this inquisition. But this is not more
+blamable than that of a landed proprietor who rises at night and looks
+through the windows for the purpose of keeping watch over the peaches
+on his _espaliers_. You will probably by this course of action obtain,
+before the crime is committed, exact information with regard to the
+apartments which so many lovers rent in the city under fictitious
+names. If it happens [which God forbid!] that your wife enters a house
+suspected by you, try to find out if the place has several exits.
+
+Should your wife take a hack, what have you to fear? Is there not a
+prefect of police, to whom all husbands ought to decree a crown of
+solid gold, and has he not set up a little shed or bench where there is
+a register, an incorruptible guardian of public morality? And does he
+not know all the comings and goings of these Parisian gondolas?
+
+One of the vital principles of our police will consist in always
+following your wife to the furnishers of your house, if she is
+accustomed to visit them. You will carefully find out whether there is
+any intimacy between her and her draper, her dressmaker or her
+milliner, etc. In this case you will apply the rules of the conjugal
+Custom House, and draw your own conclusions.
+
+If in your absence your wife, having gone out against your will, tells
+you that she had been to such a place, to such a shop, go there
+yourself the next day and try to find out whether she has spoken the
+truth.
+
+But passion will dictate to you, even better than the Meditation, the
+various resources of conjugal tyranny, and we will here cut short these
+tiresome instructions.
+
+5. OF THE BUDGET.
+
+In outlining the portrait of a sane and sound husband (See _Meditation
+on the Predestined_), we urgently advise that he should conceal from
+his wife the real amount of his income.
+
+In relying upon this as the foundation stone of our financial system we
+hope to do something towards discounting the opinion, so very generally
+held, that a man ought not to give the handling of his income to his
+wife. This principle is one of the many popular errors and is one of
+the chief causes of misunderstanding in the domestic establishment.
+
+But let us, in the first place, deal with the question of heart, before
+we proceed to that of money.
+
+To draw up a little civil list for your wife and for the requirements
+of the house and to pay her money as if it were a contribution, in
+twelve equal portions month by month, has something in it that is a
+little mean and close, and cannot be agreeable to any but sordid and
+mistrustful souls. By acting in this way you prepare for yourself
+innumerable annoyances.
+
+I could wish that during the first year of your mellifluous union,
+scenes more or less delightful, pleasantries uttered in good taste,
+pretty purses and caresses might accompany and might decorate the
+handing over of this monthly gift; but the time will come when the
+self-will of your wife or some unforeseen expenditure will compel her
+to ask a loan of the Chamber; I presume that you will always grant her
+the bill of indemnity, as our unfaithful deputies never fail to do.
+They pay, but they grumble; you must pay and at the same time
+compliment her. I hope it will be so.
+
+But in the crisis which we have reached, the provisions of the annual
+budget can never prove sufficient. There must be an increase of fichus,
+of bonnets, of frocks; there is an expense which cannot be calculated
+beforehand demanded by the meetings, by the diplomatic messengers, by
+the ways and means of love, even while the receipts remain the same as
+usual. Then must commence in your establishment a course of education
+the most odious, and the most dreadful which a woman can undergo. I
+know but few noble and generous souls who value, more than millions,
+purity of heart, frankness of soul, and who would a thousand times more
+readily pardon a passion than a lie, whose instinctive delicacy has
+divined the existence of this plague of the soul, the lowest step in
+human degradation.
+
+Under these circumstances there occur in the domestic establishment the
+most delightful scenes of love. It is then that a woman becomes utterly
+pliant and like to the most brilliant of all the strings of a harp,
+when thrown before the fire; she rolls round you, she clasps you, she
+holds you tight; she defers to all your caprices; never was her
+conversation so full of tenderness; she lavishes her endearments upon
+you, or rather she sells them to you; she at last becomes lower than a
+chorus girl, for she prostitutes herself to her husband. In her
+sweetest kisses there is money; in all her words there is money. In
+playing this part her heart becomes like lead towards you. The most
+polished, the most treacherous usurer never weighs so completely with a
+single glance the future value in bullion of a son of a family who may
+sign a note to him, than your wife appraises one of your desires as she
+leaps from branch to branch like an escaping squirrel, in order to
+increase the sum of money she may demand by increasing the appetite
+which she rouses in you. You must not expect to get scot-free from such
+seductions. Nature has given boundless gifts of coquetry to a woman,
+the usages of society have increased them tenfold by its fashions, its
+dresses, its embroideries and its tippets.
+
+“If I ever marry,” one of the most honorable generals of our ancient
+army used to say, “I won’t put a sou among the wedding presents—”
+
+“What will you put there then, general?” asked a young girl.
+
+“The key of my safe.”
+
+The young girl made a curtsey of approbation. She moved her little head
+with a quiver like that of the magnetic needle; raised her chin
+slightly as if she would have said:
+
+“I would gladly marry the general in spite of his forty-five years.”
+
+But with regard to money, what interest can you expect your wife to
+take in a machine in which she is looked upon as a mere bookkeeper?
+
+Now look at the other system.
+
+In surrendering to your wife, with an avowal of absolute confidence in
+her, two-thirds of your fortune and letting her as mistress control the
+conjugal administration, you win from her an esteem which nothing can
+destroy, for confidence and high-mindedness find powerful echoes in the
+heart of a woman. Madame will be loaded with a responsibility which
+will often raise a barrier against extravagances, all the stronger
+because it is she herself who has created it in her heart. You yourself
+have made a portion of the work, and you may be sure that from
+henceforth your wife will never perhaps dishonor herself.
+
+Moreover, by seeking in this way a method of defence, consider what
+admirable aids are offered to you by this plan of finances.
+
+You will have in your house an exact estimate of the morality of your
+wife, just as the quotations of the Bourse give you a just estimate of
+the degree of confidence possessed by the government.
+
+And doubtless, during the first years of your married life, your wife
+will take pride in giving you every luxury and satisfaction which your
+money can afford.
+
+She will keep a good table, she will renew the furniture, and the
+carriages; she will always keep in her drawer a sum of money sacred to
+her well-beloved and ready for his needs. But of course, in the actual
+circumstances of life, the drawer will be very often empty and monsieur
+will spend a great deal too much. The economies ordered by the Chamber
+never weigh heavily upon the clerks whose income is twelve hundred
+francs; and you will be the clerk at twelve hundred francs in your own
+house. You will laugh in your sleeve, because you will have saved,
+capitalized, invested one-third of your income during a long time, like
+Louis XV, who kept for himself a little separate treasury, “against a
+rainy day,” he used to say.
+
+Thus, if your wife speaks of economy, her discourse will be equal to
+the varying quotations of the money-market. You will be able to divine
+the whole progress of the lover by these financial fluctuations, and
+you will have avoided all difficulties. _E sempre bene._
+
+If your wife fails to appreciate the excessive confidence, and
+dissipates in one day a large proportion of your fortune, in the first
+place it is not probable that this prodigality will amount to one-third
+of the revenue which you have been saving for ten years; moreover you
+will learn, from the Meditation on _Catastrophes_, that in the very
+crisis produced by the follies of your wife, you will have brilliant
+opportunities of slaying the Minotaur.
+
+But the secret of the treasure which has been amassed by your
+thoughtfulness need never be known till after your death; and if you
+have found it necessary to draw upon it, in order to assist your wife,
+you must always let it be thought that you have won at play, or made a
+loan from a friend.
+
+These are the true principles which should govern the conjugal budget.
+
+The police of marriage has its martyrology. We will cite but one
+instance which will make plain how necessary it is for husbands who
+resort to severe measures to keep watch over themselves as well as over
+their wives.
+
+An old miser who lived at T——-, a pleasure resort if there ever was
+one, had married a young and pretty woman, and he was so wrapped up in
+her and so jealous that love triumphed over avarice; he actually gave
+up trade in order to guard his wife more closely, but his only real
+change was that his covetousness took another form. I acknowledge that
+I owe the greater portion of the observations contained in this essay,
+which still is doubtless incomplete, to the person who made a study of
+this remarkable marital phenomenon, to portray which, one single detail
+will be amply sufficient. When he used to go to the country, this
+husband never went to bed without secretly raking over the pathways of
+his park, and he had a special rake for the sand of his terraces. He
+had made a close study of the footprints made by the different members
+of his household; and early in the morning he used to go and identify
+the tracks that had been made there.
+
+“All this is old forest land,” he used to say to the person I have
+referred to, as he showed him over the park; “for nothing can be seen
+through the brushwood.”
+
+His wife fell in love with one of the most charming young men of the
+town. This passion had continued for nine years bright and fresh in the
+hearts of the two lovers, whose sole avowal had been a look exchanged
+in a crowded ball-room; and while they danced together their trembling
+hands revealed through the scented gloves the depth of their love. From
+that day they had both of them taken great delight on those trifles
+which happy lovers never disdain. One day the young man led his only
+confidant, with a mysterious air, into a chamber where he kept under
+glass globes upon his table, with more care than he would have bestowed
+upon the finest jewels in the world, the flowers that, in the
+excitement of the dance, had fallen from the hair of his mistress, and
+the finery which had been caught in the trees which she had brushed
+through in the park. He also preserved there the narrow footprint left
+upon the clay soil by the lady’s step.
+
+“I could hear,” said this confidant to me afterwards, “the violent and
+repressed palpitations of his heart sounding in the silence which we
+preserved before the treasures of this museum of love. I raised my eyes
+to the ceiling, as if to breathe to heaven the sentiment which I dared
+not utter. ‘Poor humanity!’ I thought. ‘Madame de ——- told me that one
+evening at a ball you had been found nearly fainting in her card-room?’
+I remarked to him.
+
+“‘I can well believe it,’ said he casting down his flashing glance, ‘I
+had kissed her arm!—But,’ he added as he pressed my hand and shot at me
+a glance that pierced my heart, ‘her husband at that time had the gout
+which threatened to attack his stomach.’”
+
+Some time afterwards, the old man recovered and seemed to take a new
+lease of life; but in the midst of his convalescence he took to his bed
+one morning and died suddenly. There were such evident symptoms of
+poisoning in the condition of the dead man that the officers of justice
+were appealed to, and the two lovers were arrested. Then was enacted at
+the court of assizes the most heartrending scene that ever stirred the
+emotions of the jury. At the preliminary examination, each of the two
+lovers without hesitation confessed to the crime, and with one thought
+each of them was solely bent on saving, the one her lover, the other
+his mistress. There were two found guilty, where justice was looking
+for but a single culprit. The trial was entirely taken up with the flat
+contradictions which each of them, carried away by the fury of devoted
+love, gave to the admissions of the other. There they were united for
+the first time, but on the criminals’ bench with a gendarme seated
+between them. They were found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a
+weeping jury. No one among those who had the barbarous courage to
+witness their conveyance to the scaffold can mention them to-day
+without a shudder. Religion had won for them a repentance for their
+crime, but could not induce them to abjure their love. The scaffold was
+their nuptial bed, and there they slept together in the long night of
+death.
+
+MEDITATION XXI.
+
+THE ART OF RETURNING HOME.
+
+
+Finding himself incapable of controlling the boiling transports of his
+anxiety, many a husband makes the mistake of coming home and rushing
+into the presence of his wife, with the object of triumphing over her
+weakness, like those bulls of Spain, which, stung by the red
+_banderillo_, disembowel with furious horns horses, matadors, picadors,
+toreadors and their attendants.
+
+But oh! to enter with a tender gentle mien, like Mascarillo, who
+expects a beating and becomes merry as a lark when he finds his master
+in a good humor! Well—that is the mark of a wise man!—
+
+“Yes, my darling, I know that in my absence you could have behaved
+badly! Another in your place would have turned the house topsy-turvy,
+but you have only broken a pane of glass! God bless you for your
+considerateness. Go on in the same way and you will earn my eternal
+gratitude.”
+
+Such are the ideas which ought to be expressed by your face and
+bearing, but perhaps all the while you say to yourself:
+
+“Probably he has been here!”
+
+Always to bring home a pleasant face, is a rule which admits of no
+exception.
+
+But the art of never leaving your house without returning when the
+police have revealed to you a conspiracy—to know how to return at the
+right time—this is the lesson which is hard to learn. In this matter
+everything depends upon tact and penetration. The actual events of life
+always transcend anything that is imaginable.
+
+The manner of coming home is to be regulated in accordance with a
+number of circumstances. For example:
+
+Lord Catesby was a man of remarkable strength. It happened one day that
+he was returning from a fox hunt, to which he had doubtless promised to
+go, with some ulterior view, for he rode towards the fence of his park
+at a point where, he said, he saw an extremely fine horse. As he had a
+passion for horses, he drew near to examine this one close at hand,
+There he caught sight of Lady Catesby, to whose rescue it was certainly
+time to go, if he were in the slightest degree jealous for his own
+honor. He rushed upon the gentleman he saw there, and seizing him by
+the belt he hurled him over the fence on to the road side.
+
+“Remember, sir,” he said calmly, “it rests with me to decide whether it
+well be necessary to address you hereafter and ask for satisfaction on
+this spot.”
+
+“Very well, my lord; but would you have the goodness to throw over my
+horse also?”
+
+But the phlegmatic nobleman had already taken the arm of his wife as he
+gravely said:
+
+“I blame you very much, my dear creature, for not having told me that I
+was to love you for two. Hereafter every other day I shall love you for
+the gentleman yonder, and all other days for myself.”
+
+This adventure is regarded in England as one of the best returns home
+that were ever known. It is true it consisted in uniting, with singular
+felicity, eloquence of deed to that of word.
+
+But the art of re-entering your home, principles of which are nothing
+else but natural deductions from the system of politeness and
+dissimulation which have been commended in preceding Meditations, is
+after all merely to be studied in preparation for the conjugal
+catastrophes which we will now consider.
+
+MEDITATION XXII.
+
+OF CATASTROPHES.
+
+
+The word _Catastrophe_ is a term of literature which signifies the
+final climax of a play.
+
+To bring about a catastrophe in the drama which you are playing is a
+method of defence which is as easy to undertake as it is certain to
+succeed. In advising to employ it, we would not conceal from you its
+perils.
+
+The conjugal catastrophe may be compared to one of those high fevers
+which either carry off a predisposed subject or completely restore his
+health. Thus, when the catastrophe succeeds, it keeps a woman for years
+in the prudent realms of virtue.
+
+Moreover, this method is the last of all those which science has been
+able to discover up to this present moment.
+
+The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Sicilian Vespers, the death of
+Lucretia, the two embarkations of Napoleon at Frejus are examples of
+political catastrophe. It will not be in your power to act on such a
+large scale; nevertheless, within their own area, your dramatic
+climaxes in conjugal life will not be less effective than these.
+
+But since the art of creating a situation and of transforming it, by
+the introduction of natural incidents, constitutes genius; since the
+return to virtue of a woman, whose foot has already left some tracks
+upon the sweet and gilded sand which mark the pathway of vice, is the
+most difficult to bring about of all denouements, and since genius
+neither knows it nor teaches it, the practitioner in conjugal laws
+feels compelled to confess at the outset that he is incapable of
+reducing to definite principles a science which is as changeable as
+circumstances, as delusive as opportunity, and as indefinable as
+instinct.
+
+If we may use an expression which neither Diderot, d’Alembert nor
+Voltaire, in spite of every effort, have been able to engraft on our
+language, a conjugal catastrophe _se subodore_ is scented from afar; so
+that our only course will be to sketch out imperfectly certain conjugal
+situations of an analogous kind, thus imitating the philosopher of
+ancient time who, seeking in vain to explain motion, walked forward in
+his attempt to comprehend laws which were incomprehensible.
+
+A husband, in accordance with the principles comprised in our
+Meditation on _Police_, will expressly forbid his wife to receive the
+visits of a celibate whom he suspects of being her lover, and whom she
+has promised never again to see. Some minor scenes of the domestic
+interior we leave for matrimonial imaginations to conjure up; a husband
+can delineate them much better than we can; he will betake himself in
+thought back to those days when delightful longings invited sincere
+confidences and when the workings of his policy put into motion certain
+adroitly handled machinery.
+
+Let us suppose, in order to make more interesting the natural scene to
+which I refer, that you who read are a husband, whose carefully
+organized police has made the discovery that your wife, profiting by
+the hours devoted by you to a ministerial banquet, to which she
+probably procured you an invitation, received at your house M. A——z.
+
+Here we find all the conditions necessary to bring about the finest
+possible of conjugal catastrophes.
+
+You return home just in time to find your arrival has coincided with
+that of M. A——z, for we would not advise you to have the interval
+between acts too long. But in what mood should you enter? Certainly not
+in accordance with the rules of the previous Meditation. In a rage
+then? Still less should you do that. You should come in with
+good-natured carelessness, like an absent-minded man who has forgotten
+his purse, the statement which he has drawn up for the minister, his
+pocket-handkerchief or his snuff-box.
+
+In that case you will either catch two lovers together, or your wife,
+forewarned by the maid, will have hidden the celibate.
+
+Now let us consider these two unique situations.
+
+But first of all we will observe that husbands ought always to be in a
+position to strike terror in their homes and ought long before to make
+preparations for the matrimonial second of September.
+
+Thus a husband, from the moment that his wife has caused him to
+perceive certain _first symptoms_, should never fail to give, time
+after time, his personal opinion on the course of conduct to be pursued
+by a husband in a great matrimonial crisis.
+
+“As for me,” you should say, “I should have no hesitation in killing
+the man I caught at my wife’s feet.”
+
+With regard to the discussion that you will thus give rise to, you will
+be led on to aver that the law ought to have given to the husband, as
+it did in ancient Rome, the right of life and death over his children,
+so that he could slay those who were spurious.
+
+These ferocious opinions, which really do not bind you to anything,
+will impress your wife with salutary terror; you will enumerate them
+lightly, even laughingly—and say to her, “Certainly, my dear, I would
+kill you right gladly. Would you like to be murdered by me?”
+
+A woman cannot help fearing that this pleasantry may some day become a
+very serious matter, for in these crimes of impulse there is a certain
+proof of love; and then women who know better than any one else how to
+say true things laughingly at times suspect their husbands of this
+feminine trick.
+
+When a husband surprises his wife engaged in even innocent conversation
+with her lover, his face still calm, should produce the effect
+mythologically attributed to the celebrated Gorgon.
+
+In order to produce a favorable catastrophe at this juncture, you must
+act in accordance with the character of your wife, either play a
+pathetic scene a la Diderot, or resort to irony like Cicero, or rush to
+your pistols loaded with a blank charge, or even fire them off, if you
+think that a serious row is indispensable.
+
+A skillful husband may often gain a great advantage from a scene of
+unexaggerated sentimentality. He enters, he sees the lover and
+transfixes him with a glance. As soon as the celibate retires, he falls
+at the feet of his wife, he declaims a long speech, in which among
+other phrases there occurs this:
+
+“Why, my dear Caroline, I have never been able to love you as I
+should!”
+
+He weeps, and she weeps, and this tearful catastrophe leaves nothing to
+be desired.
+
+We would explain, apropos of the second method by which the catastrophe
+may be brought about, what should be the motives which lead a husband
+to vary this scene, in accordance with the greater or less degree of
+strength which his wife’s character possesses.
+
+Let us pursue this subject.
+
+If by good luck it happens that your wife has put her lover in a place
+of concealment, the catastrophe will be very much more successful.
+
+Even if the apartment is not arranged according to the principles
+prescribed in the Meditation, you will easily discern the place into
+which the celibate has vanished, although he be not, like Lord Byron’s
+Don Juan, bundled up under the cushion of a divan. If by chance your
+apartment is in disorder, you ought to have sufficient discernment to
+know that there is only one place in which a man could bestow himself.
+Finally, if by some devilish inspiration he has made himself so small
+that he has squeezed into some unimaginable lurking-place (for we may
+expect anything from a celibate), well, either your wife cannot help
+casting a glance towards this mysterious spot, or she will pretend to
+look in an exactly opposite direction, and then nothing is easier for a
+husband than to set a mouse-trap for his wife.
+
+The hiding-place being discovered, you must walk straight up to the
+lover. You must meet him face to face!
+
+And now you must endeavor to produce a fine effect. With your face
+turned three-quarters towards him, you must raise your head with an air
+of superiority. This attitude will enhance immensely the effect which
+you aim at producing.
+
+The most essential thing to do at this moment, is to overwhelm the
+celibate by some crushing phrase which you have been manufacturing all
+the time; when you have thus floored him, you will coldly show him the
+door. You will be very polite, but as relentless as the executioner’s
+axe, and as impassive as the law. This freezing contempt will already
+probably have produced a revolution in the mind of your wife. There
+must be no shouts, no gesticulations, no excitement. “Men of high
+social rank,” says a young English author, “never behave like their
+inferiors, who cannot lose a fork without sounding the alarm throughout
+the whole neighborhood.”
+
+When the celibate has gone, you will find yourself alone with your
+wife, and then is the time when you must subjugate her forever.
+
+You should therefore stand before her, putting on an air whose affected
+calmness betrays the profoundest emotion; then you must choose from
+among the following topics, which we have rhetorically amplified, and
+which are most congenial to your feelings: “Madame,” you must say, “I
+will speak to you neither of your vows, nor of my love; for you have
+too much sense and I have too much pride to make it possible that I
+should overwhelm you with those execrations, which all husbands have a
+right to utter under these circumstances; for the least of the mistakes
+that I should make, if I did so, is that I would be fully justified. I
+will not now, even if I could, indulge either in wrath or resentment.
+It is not I who have been outraged; for I have too much heart to be
+frightened by that public opinion which almost always treats with
+ridicule and condemnation a husband whose wife has misbehaved. When I
+examine my life, I see nothing there that makes this treachery deserved
+by me, as it is deserved by many others. I still love you. I have never
+been false, I will not say to my duty, for I have found nothing onerous
+in adoring you, but not even to those welcome obligations which sincere
+feeling imposes upon us both. You have had all my confidence and you
+have also had the administration of my fortune. I have refused you
+nothing. And now this is the first time that I have turned to you a
+face, I will not say stern, but which is yet reproachful. But let us
+drop this subject, for it is of no use for me to defend myself at a
+moment when you have proved to me with such energy that there is
+something lacking in me, and that I am not intended by nature to
+accomplish the difficult task of rendering you happy. But I would ask
+you, as a friend speaking to a friend, how could you have the heart to
+imperil at the same time the lives of three human creatures: that of
+the mother of my children, who will always be sacred to me; that of the
+head of the family; and finally of him—who loves—[she perhaps at these
+words will throw herself at your feet; you must not permit her to do
+so; she is unworthy of kneeling there]. For you no longer love me,
+Eliza. Well, my poor child [you must not call her _my poor child_
+excepting when the crime has not been committed]—why deceive ourselves?
+Why do you not answer me? If love is extinguished between a married
+couple, cannot friendship and confidence still survive? Are we not two
+companions united in making the same journey? Can it be said that
+during the journey the one must never hold out his hand to the other to
+raise up a comrade or to prevent a comrade’s fall? But I have perhaps
+said too much and I am wounding your pride—Eliza! Eliza!”
+
+Now what the deuce would you expect a woman to answer? Why a
+catastrophe naturally follows, without a single word.
+
+In a hundred women there may be found at least a good half dozen of
+feeble creatures who under this violent shock return to their husbands
+never perhaps again to leave them, like scorched cats that dread the
+fire. But this scene is a veritable alexipharmaca, the doses of which
+should be measured out by prudent hands.
+
+For certain women of delicate nerves, whose souls are soft and timid,
+it would be sufficient to point out the lurking-place where the lover
+lies, and say: “M. A——z is there!” [at this point shrug your
+shoulders]. “How can you thus run the risk of causing the death of two
+worthy people? I am going out; let him escape and do not let this
+happen again.”
+
+But there are women whose hearts, too violently strained in these
+terrible catastrophes, fail them and they die; others whose blood
+undergoes a change, and they fall a prey to serious maladies; others
+actually go out of their minds. These are examples of women who take
+poison or die suddenly—and we do not suppose that you wish the death of
+the sinner.
+
+Nevertheless, the most beautiful and impressionable of all the queens
+of France, the charming and unfortunate Mary Stuart, after having seen
+Rizzio murdered almost in her arms, fell in love, nevertheless, with
+the Earl of Bothwell; but she was a queen and queens are abnormal in
+disposition.
+
+We will suppose, then, that the woman whose portrait adorns our first
+Meditation is a little Mary Stuart, and we will hasten to raise the
+curtain for the fifth act in this grand drama entitled _Marriage_.
+
+A conjugal catastrophe may burst out anywhere, and a thousand incidents
+which we cannot describe may give it birth. Sometimes it is a
+handkerchief, as in _Othello_; or a pair of slippers, as in _Don Juan_;
+sometimes it is the mistake of your wife, who cries out—“Dear
+Alphonse!” instead of “Dear Adolph!” Sometimes a husband, finding out
+that his wife is in debt, will go and call on her chief creditor, and
+will take her some morning to his house, as if by chance, in order to
+bring about a catastrophe. “Monsieur Josse, you are a jeweler and you
+sell your jewels with a readiness which is not equaled by the readiness
+of your debtors to pay for them. The countess owes you thirty thousand
+francs. If you wish to be paid to-morrow [tradesmen should always be
+visited at the end of the month] come to her at noon; her husband will
+be in the chamber. Do not attend to any sign which she may make to
+impose silence upon you—speak out boldly. I will pay all.”
+
+So that the catastrophe in the science of marriage is what figures are
+in arithmetic.
+
+All the principles of higher conjugal philosophy, on which are based
+the means of defence outlined in this second part of our book, are
+derived from the nature of human sentiments, and we have found them in
+different places in the great book of the world. Just as persons of
+intellect instinctively apply the laws of taste whose principles they
+would find difficulty in formulating, so we have seen numberless people
+of deep feeling employing with singular felicity the precepts which we
+are about to unfold, yet none of them consciously acted on a definite
+system. The sentiments which this situation inspired only revealed to
+them incomplete fragments of a vast system; just as the scientific men
+of the sixteenth century found that their imperfect microscopes did not
+enable them to see all the living organisms, whose existence had yet
+been proved to them by the logic of their patient genius.
+
+We hope that the observations already made in this book, and in those
+which follow, will be of a nature to destroy the opinion which
+frivolous men maintain, namely that marriage is a sinecure. According
+to our view, a husband who gives way to ennui is a heretic, and more
+than that, he is a man who lives quite out of sympathy with the
+marriage state, of whose importance he has no conception. In this
+connection, these Meditations perhaps will reveal to very many ignorant
+men the mysteries of a world before which they stand with open eyes,
+yet without seeing it.
+
+We hope, moreover, that these principles when well applied will produce
+many conversions, and that among the pages that separate this second
+part from that entitled _Civil War_ many tears will be shed and many
+vows of repentance breathed.
+
+Yes, among the four hundred thousand honest women whom we have so
+carefully sifted out from all the European nations, we indulge the
+belief that there are a certain number, say three hundred thousand, who
+will be sufficiently self-willed, charming, adorable, and bellicose to
+raise the standard of _Civil War_.
+
+To arms then, to arms!
+
+THIRD PART
+
+RELATING TO CIVIL WAR.
+
+“Lovely as the seraphs of Klopstock,
+Terrible as the devils of Milton.”
+—DIDEROT.
+
+MEDITATION XXIII.
+
+OF MANIFESTOES.
+
+
+The Preliminary precepts, by which science has been enabled at this
+point to put weapons into the hand of a husband, are few in number; it
+is not of so much importance to know whether he will be vanquished, as
+to examine whether he can offer any resistance in the conflict.
+
+Meanwhile, we will set up here certain beacons to light up the arena
+where a husband is soon to find himself, in alliance with religion and
+law, engaged single-handed in a contest with his wife, who is supported
+by her native craft and the whole usages of society as her allies.
+
+LXXXII.
+Anything may be expected and anything may be supposed of a woman who is
+in love.
+
+LXXXIII.
+The actions of a woman who intends to deceive her husband are almost
+always the result of study, but never dictated by reason.
+
+LXXXIV. The greater number of women advance like the fleas, by erratic
+leaps and bounds, They owe their escape to the height or depth of their
+first ideas, and any interruption of their plans rather favors their
+execution. But they operate only within a narrow area which it is easy
+for the husband to make still narrower; and if he keeps cool he will
+end by extinguishing this piece of living saltpetre.
+
+LXXXV.
+A husband should never allow himself to address a single disparaging
+remark to his wife, in presence of a third party.
+
+LXXXVI. The moment a wife decides to break her marriage vow she reckons
+her husband as everything or nothing. All defensive operations must
+start from this proposition.
+
+LXXXVII. The life of a woman is either of the head, of the heart, or of
+passion. When a woman reaches the age to form an estimate of life, her
+husband ought to find out whether the primary cause of her intended
+infidelity proceeds from vanity, from sentiment or from temperament.
+Temperament may be remedied like disease; sentiment is something in
+which the husband may find great opportunities of success; but vanity
+is incurable. A woman whose life is of the head may be a terrible
+scourge. She combines the faults of a passionate woman with those of
+the tender-hearted woman, without having their palliations. She is
+destitute alike of pity, love, virtue or sex.
+
+LXXXVIII. A woman whose life is of the head will strive to inspire her
+husband with indifference; the woman whose life is of the heart, with
+hatred; the passionate woman, with disgust.
+
+LXXXIX.
+A husband never loses anything by appearing to believe in the fidelity
+of his wife, by preserving an air of patience and by keeping silence.
+Silence especially troubles a woman amazingly.
+
+XC. To show himself aware of the passion of his wife is the mark of a
+fool; but to affect ignorance of all proves that a man has sense, and
+this is in fact the only attitude to take. We are taught, moreover,
+that everybody in France is sensible.
+
+XCI. The rock most to be avoided is ridicule.—“At least, let us be
+affectionate in public,” ought to be the maxim of a married
+establishment. For both the married couple to lose honor, esteem,
+consideration, respect and all that is worth living for in society, is
+to become a nonentity.
+
+These axioms relate to the contest alone. As for the catastrophe,
+others will be needed for that.
+
+We have called this crisis _Civil War_ for two reasons; never was a war
+more really intestine and at the same time so polite as this war. But
+in what point and in what manner does this fatal war break out? You do
+not believe that your wife will call out regiments and sound the
+trumpet, do you? She will, perhaps, have a commanding officer, but that
+is all. And this feeble army corps will be sufficient to destroy the
+peace of your establishment.
+
+“You forbid me to see the people that I like!” is an exordium which has
+served for a manifesto in most homes. This phrase, with all the ideas
+that are concomitant, is oftenest employed by vain and artificial
+women.
+
+The most usual manifesto is that which is proclaimed in the conjugal
+bed, the principal theatre of war. This subject will be treated in
+detail in the Meditation entitled: _Of Various Weapons_, in the
+paragraph, _Of Modesty in its Connection with Marriage_.
+
+Certain women of a lymphatic temperament will pretend to have the
+spleen and will even feign death, if they can only gain thereby the
+benefit of a secret divorce.
+
+But most of them owe their independence to the execution of a plan,
+whose effect upon the majority of husbands is unfailing and whose
+perfidies we will now reveal.
+
+One of the greatest of human errors springs from the belief that our
+honor and our reputation are founded upon our actions, or result from
+the approbation which the general conscience bestows upon on conduct. A
+man who lives in the world is born to be a slave to public opinion. Now
+a private man in France has less opportunity of influencing the world
+than his wife, although he has ample occasion for ridiculing it. Women
+possess to a marvelous degree the art of giving color by specious
+arguments to the recriminations in which they indulge. They never set
+up any defence, excepting when they are in the wrong, and in this
+proceeding they are pre-eminent, knowing how to oppose arguments by
+precedents, proofs by assertions, and thus they very often obtain
+victory in minor matters of detail. They see and know with admirable
+penetration, when one of them presents to another a weapon which she
+herself is forbidden to whet. It is thus that they sometimes lose a
+husband without intending it. They apply the match and long afterwards
+are terror-stricken at the conflagration.
+
+As a general thing, all women league themselves against a married man
+who is accused of tyranny; for a secret tie unites them all, as it
+unites all priests of the same religion. They hate each other, yet
+shield each other. You can never gain over more than one of them; and
+yet this act of seduction would be a triumph for your wife.
+
+You are, therefore, outlawed from the feminine kingdom. You see
+ironical smiles on every lip, you meet an epigram in every answer.
+These clever creatures force their daggers and amuse themselves by
+sculpturing the handle before dealing you a graceful blow.
+
+The treacherous art of reservation, the tricks of silence, the malice
+of suppositions, the pretended good nature of an inquiry, all these
+arts are employed against you. A man who undertakes to subjugate his
+wife is an example too dangerous to escape destruction from them, for
+will not his conduct call up against them the satire of every husband?
+Moreover, all of them will attack you, either by bitter witticisms, or
+by serious arguments, or by the hackneyed maxims of gallantry. A swarm
+of celibates will support all their sallies and you will be assailed
+and persecuted as an original, a tyrant, a bad bed-fellow, an eccentric
+man, a man not to be trusted.
+
+Your wife will defend you like the bear in the fable of La Fontaine;
+she will throw paving stones at your head to drive away the flies that
+alight on it. She will tell you in the evening all the things that have
+been said about you, and will ask an explanation of acts which you
+never committed, and of words which you never said. She professes to
+have justified you for faults of which you are innocent; she has
+boasted of a liberty which she does not possess, in order to clear you
+of the wrong which you have done in denying that liberty. The deafening
+rattle which your wife shakes will follow you everywhere with its
+obtrusive din. Your darling will stun you, will torture you, meanwhile
+arming herself by making you feel only the thorns of married life. She
+will greet you with a radiant smile in public, and will be sullen at
+home. She will be dull when you are merry, and will make you detest her
+merriment when you are moody. Your two faces will present a perpetual
+contrast.
+
+Very few men have sufficient force of mind not to succumb to this
+preliminary comedy, which is always cleverly played, and resembles the
+_hourra_ raised by the Cossacks, as they advance to battle. Many
+husbands become irritated and fall into irreparable mistakes. Others
+abandon their wives. And, indeed, even those of superior intelligence
+do not know how to get hold of the enchanted ring, by which to dispel
+this feminine phantasmagoria.
+
+Two-thirds of such women are enabled to win their independence by this
+single manoeuvre, which is no more than a review of their forces. In
+this case the war is soon ended.
+
+But a strong man who courageously keeps cool throughout this first
+assault will find much amusement in laying bare to his wife, in a light
+and bantering way, the secret feelings which make her thus behave, in
+following her step by step through the labyrinth which she treads, and
+telling her in answer to her every remark, that she is false to
+herself, while he preserves throughout a tone of pleasantry and never
+becomes excited.
+
+Meanwhile war is declared, and if her husband has not been dazzled by
+these first fireworks, a woman has yet many other resources for
+securing her triumph; and these it is the purpose of the following
+Meditations to discover.
+
+MEDITATION XXIV.
+
+PRINCIPLES OF STRATEGY.
+
+
+The Archduke Charles published a very fine treatise on military under
+the title _Principles of Strategy in Relation to the Campaigns of
+1796_. These principles seem somewhat to resemble poetic canons
+prepared for poems already published. In these days we are become very
+much more energetic, we invent rules to suit works and works to suit
+rules. But of what use were ancient principles of military art in
+presence of the impetuous genius of Napoleon? If, to-day, however, we
+reduce to a system the lessons taught by this great captain whose new
+tactics have destroyed the ancient ones, what future guarantee do we
+possess that another Napoleon will not yet be born? Books on military
+art meet, with few exceptions, the fate of ancient works on Chemistry
+and Physics. Everything is subject to change, either constant or
+periodic.
+
+This, in a few words, is the history of our work.
+
+So long as we have been dealing with a woman who is inert or lapped in
+slumber, nothing has been easier than to weave the meshes with which we
+have bound her; but the moment she wakes up and begins to struggle, all
+is confusion and complication. If a husband would make an effort to
+recall the principles of the system which we have just described in
+order to involve his wife in the nets which our second part has set for
+her, he would resemble Wurmser, Mack and Beaulieu arranging their halts
+and their marches while Napoleon nimbly turns their flank, and makes
+use of their own tactics to destroy them.
+
+This is just what your wife will do.
+
+How is it possible to get at the truth when each of you conceals it
+under the same lie, each setting the same trap for the other? And whose
+will be the victory when each of you is caught in a similar snare?
+
+“My dear, I have to go out; I have to pay a visit to Madame So and So.
+I have ordered the carriage. Would you like to come with me? Come, be
+good, and go with your wife.”
+
+You say to yourself:
+
+“She would be nicely caught if I consented! She asks me only to be
+refused.”
+
+Then you reply to her:
+
+“Just at the moment I have some business with Monsieur Blank, for he
+has to give a report in a business matter which deeply concerns us
+both, and I must absolutely see him. Then I must go to the Minister of
+Finance. So your arrangement will suit us both.”
+
+“Very well, dearest, go and dress yourself, while Celine finishes
+dressing me; but don’t keep me waiting.”
+
+“I am ready now, love,” you cry out, at the end of ten minutes, as you
+stand shaved and dressed.
+
+But all is changed. A letter has arrived; madame is not well; her dress
+fits badly; the dressmaker has come; if it is not the dressmaker it is
+your mother. Ninety-nine out of a hundred husbands will leave the house
+satisfied, believing that their wives are well guarded, when, as a
+matter of fact, the wives have gotten rid of them.
+
+A lawful wife who from her husband cannot escape, who is not distressed
+by pecuniary anxiety, and who in order to give employment to a vacant
+mind, examines night and day the changing tableaux of each day’s
+experience, soon discovers the mistake she has made in falling into a
+trap or allowing herself to be surprised by a catastrophe; she will
+then endeavor to turn all these weapons against you.
+
+There is a man in society, the sight of whom is strangely annoying to
+your wife; she can tolerate neither his tone, his manners nor his way
+of regarding things. Everything connected with him is revolting to her;
+she is persecuted by him, he is odious to her; she hopes that no one
+will tell him this. It seems almost as if she were attempting to oppose
+you; for this man is one for whom you have the highest esteem. You like
+his disposition because he flatters you; and thus your wife presumes
+that your esteem for him results from flattered vanity. When you give a
+ball, an evening party or a concert, there is almost a discussion on
+this subject, and madame picks a quarrel with you, because you are
+compelling her to see people who are not agreeable to her.
+
+“At least, sir, I shall never have to reproach myself with omitting to
+warn you. That man will yet cause you trouble. You should put some
+confidence in women when they pass sentence on the character of a man.
+And permit me to tell you that this baron, for whom you have such a
+predilection, is a very dangerous person, and you are doing very wrong
+to bring him to your house. And this is the way you behave; you
+absolutely force me to see one whom I cannot tolerate, and if I ask you
+to invite Monsieur A——-, you refuse to do so, because you think that I
+like to have him with me! I admit that he talks well, that he is kind
+and amiable; but you are more to me than he can ever be.”
+
+These rude outlines of feminine tactics, which are emphasized by
+insincere gestures, by looks of feigned ingenuousness, by artful
+intonations of the voice and even by the snare of cunning silence, are
+characteristic to some degree of their whole conduct.
+
+There are few husbands who in such circumstances as these do not form
+the idea of setting a mouse-trap; they welcome as their guests both
+Monsieur A——- and the imaginary baron who represents the person whom
+their wives abhor, and they do so in the hope of discovering a lover in
+the celibate who is apparently beloved.
+
+Oh yes, I have often met in the world young men who were absolutely
+starlings in love and complete dupes of a friendship which women
+pretended to show them, women who felt themselves obliged to make a
+diversion and to apply a blister to their husbands as their husbands
+had previously done to them! These poor innocents pass their time in
+running errands, in engaging boxes at the theatre, in riding in the
+Bois de Boulogne by the carriages of their pretended mistresses; they
+are publicly credited with possessing women whose hands they have not
+even kissed. Vanity prevents them from contradicting these flattering
+rumors, and like the young priests who celebrate masses without a Host,
+they enjoy a mere show passion, and are veritable supernumeraries of
+love.
+
+Under these circumstances sometimes a husband on returning home asks
+the porter: “Has no one been here?”—“M. le Baron came past at two
+o’clock to see monsieur; but as he found no one was in but madame he
+went away; but Monsieur A——- is with her now.”
+
+You reach the drawing-room, you see there a young celibate, sprightly,
+scented, wearing a fine necktie, in short a perfect dandy. He is a man
+who holds you in high esteem; when he comes to your house your wife
+listens furtively for his footsteps; at a ball she always dances with
+him. If you forbid her to see him, she makes a great outcry and it is
+not till many years afterwards [see Meditation on _Las Symptoms_] that
+you see the innocence of Monsieur A——- and the culpability of the
+baron.
+
+We have observed and noted as one of the cleverest manoeuvres, that of
+a young woman who, carried away by an irresistible passion, exhibited a
+bitter hatred to the man she did not love, but lavished upon her lover
+secret intimations of her love. The moment that her husband was
+persuaded that she loved the _Cicisbeo_ and hated the _Patito_, she
+arranged that she and the _Patito_ should be found in a situation whose
+compromising character she had calculated in advance, and her husband
+and the execrated celibate were thus induced to believe that her love
+and her aversion were equally insincere. When she had brought her
+husband into the condition of perplexity, she managed that a passionate
+letter should fall into his hands. One evening in the midst of the
+admirable catastrophe which she had thus brought to a climax, madame
+threw herself at her husband’s feet, wet them with her tears, and thus
+concluded the climax to her own satisfaction.
+
+“I esteem and honor you profoundly,” she cried, “for keeping your own
+counsel as you have done. I am in love! Is this a sentiment which is
+easy for me to repress? But what I can do is to confess the fact to
+you; to implore you to protect me from myself, to save me from my own
+folly. Be my master and be a stern master to me; take me away from this
+place, remove me from what has caused all this trouble, console me; I
+will forget him, I desire to do so. I do not wish to betray you. I
+humbly ask your pardon for the treachery love has suggested to me. Yes,
+I confess to you that the love which I pretended to have for my cousin
+was a snare set to deceive you. I love him with the love of friendship
+and no more.—Oh! forgive me! I can love no one but”—her voice was
+choked in passionate sobs—“Oh! let us go away, let us leave Paris!”
+
+She began to weep; her hair was disheveled, her dress in disarray; it
+was midnight, and her husband forgave her. From henceforth, the cousin
+made his appearance without risk, and the Minotaur devoured one victim
+more.
+
+What instructions can we give for contending with such adversaries as
+these? Their heads contain all the diplomacy of the congress of Vienna;
+they have as much power when they are caught as when they escape. What
+man has a mind supple enough to lay aside brute force and strength and
+follow his wife through such mazes as these?
+
+To make a false plea every moment, in order to elicit the truth, a true
+plea in order to unmask falsehood; to charge the battery when least
+expected, and to spike your gun at the very moment of firing it; to
+scale the mountain with the enemy, in order to descend to the plain
+again five minutes later; to accompany the foe in windings as rapid, as
+obscure as those of a plover on the breezes; to obey when obedience is
+necessary, and to oppose when resistance is inertial; to traverse the
+whole scale of hypotheses as a young artist with one stroke runs from
+the lowest to the highest note of his piano; to divine at last the
+secret purpose on which a woman is bent; to fear her caresses and to
+seek rather to find out what are the thoughts that suggested them and
+the pleasure which she derived from them—this is mere child’s pay for
+the man of intellect and for those lucid and searching imaginations
+which possess the gift of doing and thinking at the same time. But
+there are a vast number of husbands who are terrified at the mere idea
+of putting in practice these principles in their dealings with a woman.
+
+Such men as these prefer passing their lives in making huge efforts to
+become second-class chess-players, or to pocket adroitly a ball in
+billiards.
+
+Some of them will tell you that they are incapable of keeping their
+minds on such a constant strain and breaking up the habits of their
+life. In that case the woman triumphs. She recognizes that in mind and
+energy she is her husband’s superior, although the superiority may be
+but temporary; and yet there rises in her a feeling of contempt for the
+head of the house.
+
+If many man fail to be masters in their own house this is not from lack
+of willingness, but of talent. As for those who are ready to undergo
+the toils of this terrible duel, it is quite true that they must needs
+possess great moral force.
+
+And really, as soon as it is necessary to display all the resources of
+this secret strategy, it is often useless to attempt setting any traps
+for these satanic creatures. Once women arrive at a point when they
+willfully deceive, their countenances become as inscrutable as vacancy.
+Here is an example which came within my own experience.
+
+A very young, very pretty, and very clever coquette of Paris had not
+yet risen. Seated by her bed was one of her dearest friends. A letter
+arrived from another, a very impetuous fellow, to whom she had allowed
+the right of speaking to her like a master. The letter was in pencil
+and ran as follows:
+
+“I understand that Monsieur C——- is with you at this moment. I am
+waiting for him to blow his brains out.”
+
+Madame D——- calmly continued the conversation with Monsieur C——-. She
+asked him to hand her a little writing desk of red leather which stood
+on the table, and he brought it to her.
+
+“Thanks, my dear,” she said to him; “go on talking, I am listening to
+you.”
+
+C——- talked away and she replied, all the while writing the following
+note:
+
+“As soon as you become jealous of C——- you two can blow out each
+other’s brains at your pleasure. As for you, you may die; but brains
+—you haven’t any brains to blow out.”
+
+“My dear friend,” she said to C——-, “I beg you will light this candle.
+Good, you are charming. And now be kind enough to leave me and let me
+get up, and give this letter to Monsieur d’H——-, who is waiting at the
+door.”
+
+All this was said with admirable coolness. The tones and intonations of
+her voice, the expression of her face showed no emotion. Her audacity
+was crowned with complete success. On receiving the answer from the
+hand of Monsieur C——-, Monsieur d’H——- felt his wrath subside. He was
+troubled with only one thing and that was how to disguise his
+inclination to laugh.
+
+The more torch-light one flings into the immense cavern which we are
+now trying to illuminate, the more profound it appears. It is a
+bottomless abyss. It appears to us that our task will be accomplished
+more agreeably and more instructively if we show the principles of
+strategy put into practice in the case of a woman, when she has reached
+a high degree of vicious accomplishment. An example suggests more
+maxims and reveals the existence of more methods than all possible
+theories.
+
+One day at the end of a dinner given to certain intimate friends by
+Prince Lebrun, the guests, heated by champagne, were discussing the
+inexhaustible subject of feminine artifice. The recent adventure which
+was credited to the Countess R. D. S. J. D. A——-, apropos of a
+necklace, was the subject first broached. A highly esteemed artist, a
+gifted friend of the emperor, was vigorously maintaining the opinion,
+which seemed somewhat unmanly, that it was forbidden to a man to resist
+successfully the webs woven by a woman.
+
+“It is my happy experience,” he said, “that to them nothing is sacred.”
+
+The ladies protested.
+
+“But I can cite an instance in point.”
+
+“It is an exception!”
+
+“Let us hear the story,” said a young lady.
+
+“Yes, tell it to us,” cried all the guests.
+
+The prudent old gentleman cast his eyes around, and, after having
+formed his conclusions as to the age of the ladies, smiled and said:
+
+“Since we are all experienced in life, I consent to relate the
+adventure.”
+
+Dead silence followed, and the narrator read the following from a
+little book which he had taken from his pocket:
+
+I was head over ears in love with the Comtesse de ——-. I was twenty and
+I was ingenuous. She deceived me. I was angry; she threw me over. I was
+ingenuous, I repeat, and I was grieved to lose her. I was twenty; she
+forgave me. And as I was twenty, as I was always ingenuous, always
+deceived, but never again thrown over by her, I believed myself to have
+been the best beloved of lovers, consequently the happiest of men. The
+countess had a friend, Madame de T——-, who seemed to have some designs
+on me, but without compromising her dignity; for she was scrupulous and
+respected the proprieties. One day while I was waiting for the countess
+in her Opera box, I heard my name called from a contiguous box. It was
+Madame de T——-.
+
+“What,” she said, “already here? Is this fidelity or merely a want of
+something to do? Won’t you come to me?”
+
+Her voice and her manner had a meaning in them, but I was far from
+inclined at that moment to indulge in a romance.
+
+“Have you any plans for this evening?” she said to me. “Don’t make any!
+If I cheer your tedious solitude you ought to be devoted to me. Don’t
+ask any questions, but obey. Call my servants.”
+
+I answered with a bow and on being requested to leave the Opera box, I
+obeyed.
+
+“Go to this gentleman’s house,” she said to the lackey. “Say he will
+not be home till to-morrow.”
+
+She made a sign to him, he went to her, she whispered in his ear, and
+he left us. The Opera began. I tried to venture on a few words, but she
+silenced me; some one might be listening. The first act ended, the
+lackey brought back a note, and told her that everything was ready.
+Then she smiled, asked for my hand, took me off, put me in her
+carriage, and I started on my journey quite ignorant of my destination.
+Every inquiry I made was answered by a peal of laughter. If I had not
+been aware that this was a woman of great passion, that she had long
+loved the Marquis de V——-, that she must have known I was aware of it,
+I should have believed myself in good luck; but she knew the condition
+of my heart, and the Comtesse de ——-. I therefore rejected all
+presumptuous ideas and bided my time. At the first stop, a change of
+horses was supplied with the swiftness of lightning and we started
+afresh. The matter was becoming serious. I asked with some insistency,
+where this joke was to end.
+
+“Where?” she said, laughing. “In the pleasantest place in the world,
+but can’t you guess? I’ll give you a thousand chances. Give it up, for
+you will never guess. We are going to my husband’s house. Do you know
+him?”
+
+“Not in the least.”
+
+“So much the better, I thought you didn’t. But I hope you will like
+him. We have lately become reconciled. Negotiations went on for six
+months; and we have been writing to one another for a month. I think it
+is very kind of me to go and look him up.”
+
+“It certainly is, but what am I going to do there? What good will I be
+in this reconciliation?”
+
+“Ah, that is my business. You are young, amiable, unconventional; you
+suit me and will save me from the tediousness of a tete-a-tete.”
+
+“But it seems odd to me, to choose the day or the night of a
+reconciliation to make us acquainted; the awkwardness of the first
+interview, the figure all three of us will cut,—I don’t see anything
+particularly pleasant in that.”
+
+“I have taken possession of you for my own amusement!” she said with an
+imperious air, “so please don’t preach.”
+
+I saw she was decided, so surrendered myself to circumstances. I began
+to laugh at my predicament and we became exceedingly merry. We again
+changed horses. The mysterious torch of night lit up a sky of extreme
+clearness and shed around a delightful twilight. We were approaching
+the spot where our tete-a-tete must end. She pointed out to me at
+intervals the beauty of the landscape, the tranquillity of the night,
+the all-pervading silence of nature. In order to admire these things in
+company as it was natural we should, we turned to the same window and
+our faces touched for a moment. In a sudden shock she seized my hand,
+and by a chance which seemed to me extraordinary, for the stone over
+which our carriage had bounded could not have been very large, I found
+Madame de T——- in my arms. I do not know what we were trying to see;
+what I am sure of is that the objects before our eyes began in spite of
+the full moon to grow misty, when suddenly I was released from her
+weight, and she sank into the back cushions of the carriage.
+
+“Your object,” she said, rousing herself from a deep reverie, “is
+possibly to convince me of the imprudence of this proceeding. Judge,
+therefore, of my embarrassment!”
+
+“My object!” I replied, “what object can I have with regard to you?
+What a delusion! You look very far ahead; but of course the sudden
+surprise or turn of chance may excuse anything.”
+
+“You have counted, then, upon that chance, it seems to me?”
+
+We had reached our destination, and before we were aware of it, we had
+entered the court of the chateau. The whole place was brightly lit up.
+Everything wore a festal air, excepting the face of its master, who at
+the sight of me seemed anything but delighted. He came forward and
+expressed in somewhat hesitating terms the tenderness proper to the
+occasion of a reconciliation. I understood later on that this
+reconciliation was absolutely necessary from family reasons. I was
+presented to him and was coldly greeted. He extended his hand to his
+wife, and I followed the two, thinking of my part in the past, in the
+present and in the future. I passed through apartments decorated with
+exquisite taste. The master in this respect had gone beyond all the
+ordinary refinement of luxury, in the hope of reanimating, by the
+influence of voluptuous imagery, a physical nature that was dead. Not
+knowing what to say, I took refuge in expressions of admiration. The
+goddess of the temple, who was quite ready to do the honors, accepted
+my compliments.
+
+“You have not seen anything,” she said. “I must take you to the
+apartments of my husband.”
+
+“Madame, five years ago I caused them to be pulled down.”
+
+“Oh! Indeed!” said she.
+
+At the dinner, what must she do but offer the master some fish, on
+which he said to her:
+
+“Madame, I have been living on milk for the last three years.”
+
+“Oh! Indeed!” she said again.
+
+Can any one imagine three human beings as astonished as we were to find
+ourselves gathered together? The husband looked at me with a
+supercilious air, and I paid him back with a look of audacity.
+
+Madame de T——- smiled at me and was charming to me; Monsieur de T——-
+accepted me as a necessary evil. Never in all my life have I taken part
+in a dinner which was so odd as that. The dinner ended, I thought that
+we would go to bed early—that is, I thought that Monsieur de T——-
+would. As we entered the drawing-room:
+
+“I appreciate, madame,” said he, “your precaution in bringing this
+gentleman with you. You judged rightly that I should be but poor
+company for the evening, and you have done well, for I am going to
+retire.”
+
+Then turning to me, he added in a tone of profound sarcasm:
+
+“You will please to pardon me, and obtain also pardon from madame.”
+
+He left us. My reflections? Well, the reflections of a twelvemonth were
+then comprised in those of a minute. When we were left alone, Madame de
+T——- and I, we looked at each other so curiously that, in order to
+break through the awkwardness, she proposed that we should take a turn
+on the terrace while we waited, as she said, until the servants had
+supped.
+
+It was a superb night. It was scarcely possible to discern surrounding
+objects, they seemed to be covered with a veil, that imagination might
+be permitted to take a loftier flight. The gardens, terraced on the
+side of a mountain, sloped down, platform after platform, to the banks
+of the Seine, and the eye took in the many windings of the stream
+covered with islets green and picturesque. These variations in the
+landscape made up a thousand pictures which gave to the spot, naturally
+charming, a thousand novel features. We walked along the most extensive
+of these terraces, which was covered with a thick umbrage of trees. She
+had recovered from the effects of her husband’s persiflage, and as we
+walked along she gave me her confidence. Confidence begets confidence,
+and as I told her mine, all she said to me became more intimate and
+more interesting. Madame de T——- at first gave me her arm; but soon
+this arm became interlaced in mine, I know not how, but in some way
+almost lifted her up and prevented her from touching the ground. The
+position was agreeable, but became at last fatiguing. We had been
+walking for a long time and we still had much to say to each other. A
+bank of turf appeared and she sat down without withdrawing her arm. And
+in this position we began to sound the praises of mutual confidence,
+its charms and its delights.
+
+“Ah!” she said to me, “who can enjoy it more than we and with less
+cause of fear? I know well the tie that binds you to another, and
+therefore have nothing to fear.”
+
+Perhaps she wished to be contradicted. But I answered not a word. We
+were then mutually persuaded that it was possible for us to be friends
+without fear of going further.
+
+“But I was afraid, however,” I said, “that that sudden jolt in the
+carriage and the surprising consequences may have frightened you.”
+
+“Oh, I am not so easily alarmed!”
+
+“I fear it has left a little cloud on your mind?”
+
+“What must I do to reassure you?”
+
+“Give me the kiss here which chance—”
+
+“I will gladly do so; for if I do not, your vanity will lead you to
+think that I fear you.”
+
+I took the kiss.
+
+It is with kisses as with confidences, the first leads to another. They
+are multiplied, they interrupt conversation, they take its place; they
+scarce leave time for a sigh to escape. Silence followed. We could hear
+it, for silence may be heard. We rose without a word and began to walk
+again.
+
+“We must go in,” said she, “for the air of the river is icy, and it is
+not worth while—”
+
+“I think to go in would be more dangerous,” I answered.
+
+“Perhaps so! Never mind, we will go in.”
+
+“Why, is this out of consideration for me? You wish doubtless to save
+me from the impressions which I may receive from such a walk as this
+—the consequences which may result. Is it for me—for me only—?”
+
+“You are modest,” she said smiling, “and you credit me with singular
+consideration.”
+
+“Do you think so? Well, since you take it in this way, we will go in; I
+demand it.”
+
+A stupid proposition, when made by two people who are forcing
+themselves to say something utterly different from what they think.
+
+Then she compelled me to take the path that led back to the chateau. I
+do not know, at least I did not then know, whether this course was one
+which she forced upon herself, whether it was the result of a vigorous
+resolution, or whether she shared my disappointment in seeing an
+incident which had begun so well thus suddenly brought to a close but
+by a mutual instinct our steps slackened and we pursued our way
+gloomily dissatisfied the one with the other and with ourselves. We
+knew not the why and the wherefore of what we were doing. Neither of us
+had the right to demand or even to ask anything. We had neither of us
+any ground for uttering a reproach. O that we had got up a quarrel! But
+how could I pick one with her? Meanwhile we drew nearer and nearer,
+thinking how we might evade the duty which we had so awkwardly imposed
+upon ourselves. We reached the door, when Madame de T——- said to me:
+
+“I am angry with you! After the confidences I have given you, not to
+give me a single one! You have not said a word about the countess. And
+yet it is so delightful to speak of the one we love! I should have
+listened with such interest! It was the very best I could do after I
+had taken you away from her!”
+
+“Cannot I reproach you with the same thing?” I said, interrupting her,
+“and if instead of making me a witness to this singular reconciliation
+in which I play so odd a part, you had spoken to me of the marquis—”
+
+“Stop,” she said, “little as you know of women, you are aware that
+their confidences must be waited for, not asked. But to return to
+yourself. Are you very happy with my friend? Ah! I fear the contrary—”
+
+“Why, madame, should everything that the public amuses itself by saying
+claim our belief?”
+
+“You need not dissemble. The countess makes less a mystery of things
+than you do. Women of her stamp do not keep the secrets of their loves
+and of their lovers, especially when you are prompted by discretion to
+conceal her triumph. I am far from accusing her of coquetry; but a
+prude has as much vanity as a coquette.—Come, tell me frankly, have you
+not cause of complaint against her?”
+
+“But, madame, the air is really too icy for us to stay here. Would you
+like to go in?” said I with a smile.
+
+“Do you find it so?—That is singular. The air is quite warm.”
+
+She had taken my arm again, and we continued to walk, although I did
+not know the direction which we took. All that she had hinted at
+concerning the lover of the countess, concerning my mistress, together
+with this journey, the incident which took place in the carriage, our
+conversation on the grassy bank, the time of night, the moonlight—all
+made me feel anxious. I was at the same time carried along by vanity,
+by desire, and so distracted by thought, that I was too excited perhaps
+to take notice of all that I was experiencing. And, while I was
+overwhelmed with these mingled feelings, she continued talking to me of
+the countess, and my silence confirmed the truth of all that she chose
+to say about her. Nevertheless, certain passages in her talk recalled
+me to myself.
+
+“What an exquisite creature she is!” she was saying. “How graceful! On
+her lips the utterances of treachery sound like witticism; an act of
+infidelity seems the prompting of reason, a sacrifice to propriety;
+while she is never reckless, she is always lovable; she is seldom
+tender and never sincere; amorous by nature, prudish on principle;
+sprightly, prudent, dexterous though utterly thoughtless, varied as
+Proteus in her moods, but charming as the Graces in her manner; she
+attracts but she eludes. What a number of parts I have seen her play!
+_Entre nous_, what a number of dupes hang round her! What fun she has
+made of the baron, what a life she has led the marquis! When she took
+you, it was merely for the purpose of throwing the two rivals off the
+scent; they were on the point of a rupture; for she had played with
+them too long, and they had had time to see through her. But she
+brought you on the scene. Their attention was called to you, she led
+them to redouble their pursuit, she was in despair over you, she pitied
+you, she consoled you— Ah! how happy is a clever woman when in such a
+game as this she professes to stake nothing of her own! But yet, is
+this true happiness?”
+
+This last phrase, accompanied by a significant sigh, was a
+master-stroke. I felt as if a bandage had fallen from my eyes, without
+seeing who had put it there. My mistress appeared to me the falsest of
+women, and I believed that I held now the only sensible creature in the
+world. Then I sighed without knowing why. She seemed grieved at having
+given me pain and at having in her excitement drawn a picture, the
+truth of which might be open to suspicion, since it was the work of a
+woman. I do not know how I answered; for without realizing the drift of
+all I heard, I set out with her on the high road of sentiment, and we
+mounted to such lofty heights of feeling that it was impossible to
+guess what would be the end of our journey. It was fortunate that we
+also took the path towards a pavilion which she pointed out to me at
+the end of the terrace, a pavilion, the witness of many sweet moments.
+She described to me the furnishing of it. What a pity that she had not
+the key! As she spoke we reached the pavilion and found that it was
+open. The clearness of the moonlight outside did not penetrate, but
+darkness has many charms. We trembled as we went in. It was a
+sanctuary. Might it not be the sanctuary of love? We drew near a sofa
+and sat down, and there we remained a moment listening to our
+heart-beats. The last ray of the moon carried away the last scruple.
+The hand which repelled me felt my heart beat. She struggled to get
+away, but fell back overcome with tenderness. We talked together
+through that silence in the language of thought. Nothing is more
+rapturous than these mute conversations. Madame de T——- took refuge in
+my arms, hid her head in my bosom, sighed and then grew calm under my
+caresses. She grew melancholy, she was consoled, and she asked of love
+all that love had robbed her of. The sound of the river broke the
+silence of night with a gentle murmur, which seemed in harmony with the
+beating of our hearts. Such was the darkness of the place it was
+scarcely possible to discern objects; but through the transparent crepe
+of a fair summer’s night, the queen of that lovely place seemed to me
+adorable.
+
+“Oh!” she said to me with an angelic voice, “let us leave this
+dangerous spot. Resistance here is beyond our strength.”
+
+She drew me away and we left the pavilion with regret.
+
+“Ah! how happy is she!” cried Madame de T——-.
+
+“Whom do you mean?” I asked.
+
+“Did I speak?” said she with a look of alarm.
+
+And then we reached the grassy bank, and stopped there involuntarily.
+“What a distance there is,” she said to me, “between this place and the
+pavilion!”
+
+“Yes indeed,” said I. “But must this bank be always ominous? Is there a
+regret? Is there—?”
+
+I do not know by what magic it took place; but at this point the
+conversation changed and became less serious. She ventured even to
+speak playfully of the pleasures of love, to eliminate from them all
+moral considerations, to reduce them to their simplest elements, and to
+prove that the favors of lovers were mere pleasure, that there were no
+pledges—philosophically speaking—excepting those which were given to
+the world, when we allowed it to penetrate our secrets and joined it in
+the acts of indiscretion.
+
+“How mild is the night,” she said, “which we have by chance picked out!
+Well, if there are reasons, as I suppose there are, which compel us to
+part to-morrow, our happiness, ignored as it is by all nature, will not
+leave us any ties to dissolve. There will, perhaps, be some regrets,
+the pleasant memory of which will give us reparation; and then there
+will be a mutual understanding, without all the delays, the fuss and
+the tyranny of legal proceedings. We are such machines—and I blush to
+avow it—that in place of all the shrinkings that tormented me before
+this scene took place, I was half inclined to embrace the boldness of
+these principles, and I felt already disposed to indulge in the love of
+liberty.
+
+“This beautiful night,” she continued, “this lovely scenery at this
+moment have taken on fresh charms. O let us never forget this pavilion!
+The chateau,” she added smilingly, “contains a still more charming
+place, but I dare not show you anything; you are like a child, who
+wishes to touch everything and breaks everything that he touches.”
+
+Moved by a sentiment of curiosity I protested that I was a very good
+child. She changed the subject.
+
+“This night,” she said, “would be for me without a regret if I were not
+vexed with myself for what I said to you about the countess. Not that I
+wish to find fault with you. Novelty attracts me. You have found me
+amiable, I should like to believe in your good faith. But the dominion
+of habit takes a long time to break through and I have not learned the
+secret of doing this—By the bye, what do you think of my husband?”
+
+“Well, he is rather cross, but I suppose he could not be otherwise to
+me.”
+
+“Oh, that is true, but his way of life isn’t pleasant, and he could not
+see you here with indifference. He might be suspicious even of our
+friendship.”
+
+“Oh! he is so already.”
+
+“Confess that he has cause. Therefore you must not prolong this visit;
+he might take it amiss. As soon as any one arrives—” and she added with
+a smile, “some one is going to arrive—you must go. You have to keep up
+appearance, you know. Remember his manner when he left us to-night.”
+
+I was tempted to interpret this adventure as a trap, but as she noticed
+the impression made by her words, she added:
+
+“Oh, he was very much gayer when he was superintending the arrangement
+of the cabinet I told you about. That was before my marriage. This
+passage leads to my apartment. Alas! it testifies to the cunning
+artifices to which Monsieur de T——- has resorted in protecting his love
+for me.”
+
+“How pleasant it would be,” I said to her, keenly excited by the
+curiosity she had roused in me, “to take vengeance in this spot for the
+insults which your charms have suffered, and to seek to make
+restitution for the pleasures of which you have been robbed.”
+
+She doubtless thought this remark in good taste, but she said: “You
+promised to be good!”
+
+
+I threw a veil over the follies which every age will pardon to youth,
+on the ground of so many balked desires and bitter memories. In the
+morning, scarcely raising her liquid eyes, Madame de T——-, fairer than
+ever, said to me:
+
+“Now will you ever love the countess as much as you do me?”
+
+I was about to answer when her maid, her confidante, appeared saying:
+
+“You must go. It is broad daylight, eleven o’clock, and the chateau is
+already awake.”
+
+All had vanished like a dream! I found myself wandering through the
+corridors before I had recovered my senses. How could I regain my
+apartment, not knowing where it was? Any mistake might bring about an
+exposure. I resolved on a morning walk. The coolness of the fresh air
+gradually tranquilized my imagination and brought me back to the world
+of reality; and now instead of a world of enchantment I saw myself in
+my soul, and my thoughts were no longer disturbed but followed each
+other in connected order; in fact, I breathed once more. I was, above
+all things, anxious to learn what I was to her so lately left—I who
+knew that she had been desperately in love with the Marquis de V——-.
+Could she have broken with him? Had she taken me to be his successor,
+or only to punish him? What a night! What an adventure! Yes, and what a
+delightful woman! While I floated on the waves of these thoughts, I
+heard a sound near at hand. I raised my eyes, I rubbed them, I could
+not believe my senses. Can you guess who it was? The Marquis de V——-!
+
+“You did not expect to see me so early, did you?” he said. “How has it
+all gone off?”
+
+“Did you know that I was here?” I asked in utter amazement.
+
+“Oh, yes, I received word just as you left Paris. Have you played your
+part well? Did not the husband think your visit ridiculous? Was he put
+out? When are you going to take leave? You had better go, I have made
+every provision for you. I have brought you a good carriage. It is at
+your service. This is the way I requite you, my dear friend. You may
+rely on me in the future, for a man is grateful for such services as
+yours.”
+
+These last words gave me the key to the whole mystery, and I saw how I
+stood.
+
+“But why should you have come so soon?” I asked him; “it would have
+been more prudent to have waited a few days.”
+
+“I foresaw that; and it is only chance that has brought me here. I am
+supposed to be on my way back from a neighboring country house. But has
+not Madame de T——- taken you into her secret? I am surprised at her
+want of confidence, after all you have done for us.”
+
+“My dear friend,” I replied, “she doubtless had her reasons. Perhaps I
+did not play my part very well.”
+
+“Has everything been very pleasant? Tell me the particulars; come, tell
+me.”
+
+“Now wait a moment. I did not know that this was to be a comedy; and
+although Madame de T——- gave me a part in the play—”
+
+“It wasn’t a very nice one.”
+
+“Do not worry yourself; there are no bad parts for good actors.”
+
+“I understand, you acquitted yourself well.”
+
+“Admirably.”
+
+“And Madame de T——-?”
+
+“Is adorable.”
+
+“To think of being able to win such a woman!” said he, stopping short
+in our walk, and looking triumphantly at me. “Oh, what pains I have
+taken with her! And I have at last brought her to a point where she is
+perhaps the only woman in Paris on whose fidelity a man may infallibly
+count!”
+
+“You have succeeded—?”
+
+“Yes; in that lies my special talent. Her inconstancy was mere
+frivolity, unrestrained imagination. It was necessary to change that
+disposition of hers, but you have no idea of her attachment to me. But
+really, is she not charming?”
+
+“I quite agree with you.”
+
+“And yet _entre nous_ I recognize one fault in her. Nature in giving
+her everything, has denied her that flame divine which puts the crown
+on all other endowments; while she rouses in others the ardor of
+passion, she feels none herself, she is a thing of marble.”
+
+“I am compelled to believe you, for I have had no opportunity of
+judging, but do you think that you know that woman as well as if you
+were her husband? It is possible to be deceived. If I had not dined
+yesterday with the veritable—I should take you—”
+
+“By the way, has he been good?”
+
+“Oh, I was received like a dog!”
+
+“I understand. Let us go in, let us look for Madame de T——-. She must
+be up by this time.”
+
+“But should we not out of decency begin with the husband?” I said to
+him.
+
+“You are right. Let us go to your room, I wish to put on a little
+powder. But tell me, did he really take you for her lover?”
+
+“You may judge by the way he receives me; but let us go at once to his
+apartment.”
+
+I wished to avoid having to lead him to an apartment whose whereabouts
+I did not know; but by chance we found it. The door was open and there
+I saw my _valet de chambre_ asleep on an armchair. A candle was going
+out on a table beside him. He drowsily offered a night robe to the
+marquis. I was on pins and needles; but the marquis was in a mood to be
+easily deceived, took the man for a mere sleepy-head, and made a joke
+of the matter. We passed on to the apartment of Monsieur de T——-. There
+was no misunderstanding the reception which he accorded me, and the
+welcome, the compliments which he addressed to the marquis, whom he
+almost forced to stay. He wished to take him to madame in order that
+she might insist on his staying. As for me, I received no such
+invitation. I was reminded that my health was delicate, the country was
+damp, fever was in the air, and I seemed so depressed that the chateau
+would prove too gloomy for me. The marquis offered me his chaise and I
+accepted it. The husband seemed delighted and we were all satisfied.
+But I could not refuse myself the pleasure of seeing Madame de T——-
+once more. My impatience was wonderful. My friend conceived no
+suspicions from the late sleep of his mistress.
+
+“Isn’t this fine?” he said to me as we followed Monsieur de T——-. “He
+couldn’t have spoken more kindly if she had dictated his words. He is a
+fine fellow. I am not in the least annoyed by this reconciliation; they
+will make a good home together, and you will agree with me, that he
+could not have chosen a wife better able to do the honors.”
+
+“Certainly,” I replied.
+
+“However pleasant the adventure has been,” he went on with an air of
+mystery, “you must be off! I will let Madame de T——- understand that
+her secret will be well kept.”
+
+“On that point, my friend, she perhaps counts more on me than on you;
+for you see her sleep is not disturbed by the matter.”
+
+“Oh! I quite agree that there is no one like you for putting a woman to
+sleep.”
+
+“Yes, and a husband too, and if necessary a lover, my dear friend.”
+
+At last Monsieur de T——- was admitted to his wife’s apartment, and
+there we were all summoned.
+
+“I trembled,” said Madame de T——- to me, “for fear you would go before
+I awoke, and I thank you for saving me the annoyance which that would
+have caused me.”
+
+“Madame,” I said, and she must have perceived the feeling that was in
+my tones—“I come to say good-bye.”
+
+She looked at me and at the marquis with an air of disquietude; but the
+self-satisfied, knowing look of her lover reassured her. She laughed in
+her sleeve with me as if she would console me as well as she could,
+without lowering herself in my eyes.
+
+“He has played his part well,” the marquis said to her in a low voice,
+pointing to me, “and my gratitude—”
+
+“Let us drop the subject,” interrupted Madame de T——-; “you may be sure
+that I am well aware of all I owe him.”
+
+At last Monsieur de T——-, with a sarcastic remark, dismissed me; my
+friend threw the dust in his eyes by making fun of me; and I paid back
+both of them by expressing my admiration for Madame de T——-, who made
+fools of us all without forfeiting her dignity. I took myself off; but
+Madame de T——- followed me, pretending to have a commission to give me.
+
+“Adieu, monsieur!” she said, “I am indebted to you for the very great
+pleasure you have given me; but I have paid you back with a beautiful
+dream,” and she looked at me with an expression of subtle meaning. “But
+adieu, and forever! You have plucked a solitary flower, blossoming in
+its loveliness, which no man—”
+
+She stopped and her thought evaporated in a sigh; but she checked the
+rising flood of sensibility and smiled significantly.
+
+“The countess loves you,” she said. “If I have robbed her of some
+transports, I give you back to her less ignorant than before. Adieu! Do
+not make mischief between my friend and me.”
+
+She wrung my hand and left me.
+
+More than once the ladies who had mislaid their fans blushed as they
+listened to the old gentleman, whose brilliant elocution won their
+indulgence for certain details which we have suppressed, as too erotic
+for the present age; nevertheless, we may believe that each lady
+complimented him in private; for some time afterwards he gave to each
+of them, as also to the masculine guests, a copy of this charming
+story, twenty-five copies of which were printed by Pierre Didot. It is
+from copy No. 24 that the author has transcribed this tale, hitherto
+unpublished, and, strange to say, attributed to Dorat. It has the merit
+of yielding important lessons for husbands, while at the same time it
+gives the celibates a delightful picture of morals in the last century.
+
+MEDITATION XXV.
+
+OF ALLIES.
+
+
+Of all the miseries that civil war can bring upon a country the
+greatest lies in the appeal which one of the contestants always ends by
+making to some foreign government.
+
+Unhappily we are compelled to confess that all women make this great
+mistake, for the lover is only the first of their soldiers. It may be a
+member of their family or at least a distant cousin. This Meditation,
+then, is intended to answer the inquiry, what assistance can each of
+the different powers which influence human life give to your wife? or
+better than that, what artifices will she resort to to arm them against
+you?
+
+Two beings united by marriage are subject to the laws of religion and
+society; to those of private life, and, from considerations of health,
+to those of medicine. We will therefore divide this important
+Meditation into six paragraphs:
+
+1. OF RELIGIONS AND OF CONFESSION; CONSIDERED IN THEIR CONNECTION WITH
+MARRIAGE. 2. OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW. 3. OF BOARDING SCHOOL FRIENDS AND
+INTIMATE FRIENDS. 4. OF THE LOVER’S ALLIES. 5. OF THE MAID. 6. OF THE
+DOCTOR.
+
+1. OF RELIGIONS AND OF CONFESSION; CONSIDERED IN THEIR CONNECTION WITH
+MARRIAGE.
+
+La Bruyere has very wittily said, “It is too much for a husband to have
+ranged against him both devotion and gallantry; a woman ought to choose
+but one of them for her ally.”
+
+The author thinks that La Bruyere is mistaken.
+
+2. OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW.
+
+Up to the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a
+foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the
+_feminisms_ of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman
+becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old
+woman, it is another old woman.
+
+Some diplomats have attempted on more than one occasion the diabolical
+task of gaining over the dowagers who opposed their machinations; but
+if they have ever succeeded it was only after making enormous
+concessions to them; for diplomats are practiced people and we do not
+think that you can employ their recipe in dealing with your
+mother-in-law. She will be the first aid-de-camp of her daughter, for
+if the mother did not take her daughter’s side, it would be one of
+those monstrous and unnatural exceptions, which unhappily for husbands
+are extremely rare.
+
+When a man is so happy as to possess a mother-in-law who is
+well-preserved, he may easily keep her in check for a certain time,
+although he may not know any young celibate brave enough to assail her.
+But generally husbands who have the slightest conjugal genius will find
+a way of pitting their own mother against that of their wife, and in
+that case they will naturally neutralize each other’s power.
+
+To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in
+Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too
+rarely meets with.
+
+What of making mischief between the mother and the daughter?—That may
+be possible; but in order to accomplish such an enterprise he must have
+the metallic heart of Richelieu, who made a son and a mother deadly
+enemies to each other. However, the jealousy of a husband who forbids
+his wife to pray to male saints and wishes her to address only female
+saints, would allow her liberty to see her mother.
+
+Many sons-in-law take an extreme course which settles everything, which
+consists in living on bad terms with their mothers-in-law. This
+unfriendliness would be very adroit policy, if it did not inevitably
+result in drawing tighter the ties that unite mother and daughter.
+These are about all the means which you have for resisting maternal
+influence in your home. As for the services which your wife can claim
+from her mother, they are immense; and the assistance which she may
+derive from the neutrality of her mother is not less powerful. But on
+this point everything passes out of the domain of science, for all is
+veiled in secrecy. The reinforcements which a mother brings up in
+support of a daughter are so varied in nature, they depend so much on
+circumstances, that it would be folly to attempt even a nomenclature
+for them. Yet you may write out among the most valuable precepts of
+this conjugal gospel, the following maxims.
+
+A husband should never let his wife visit her mother unattended.
+
+A husband ought to study all the reasons why all the celibates under
+forty who form her habitual society are so closely united by ties of
+friendship to his mother-in-law; for, if a daughter rarely falls in
+love with the lover of her mother, her mother has always a weak spot
+for her daughter’s lover.
+
+3. OF BOARDING SCHOOL FRIENDS AND INTIMATE FRIENDS.
+
+Louise de L——-, daughter of an officer killed at Wagram, had been the
+object of Napoleon’s special protection. She left Ecouen to marry a
+commissary general, the Baron de V——-, who is very rich.
+
+Louise was eighteen and the baron forty. She was ordinary in face and
+her complexion could not be called white, but she had a charming
+figure, good eyes, a small foot, a pretty hand, good taste and abundant
+intelligence. The baron, worn out by the fatigues of war and still more
+by the excesses of a stormy youth, had one of those faces upon which
+the Republic, the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire seemed to
+have set their impress.
+
+He became so deeply in love with his wife, that he asked and obtained
+from the Emperor a post at Paris, in order that he might be enabled to
+watch over his treasure. He was as jealous as Count Almaviva, still
+more from vanity than from love. The young orphan had married her
+husband from necessity, and, flattered by the ascendancy she wielded
+over a man much older than herself, waited upon his wishes and his
+needs; but her delicacy was offended from the first days of their
+marriage by the habits and ideas of a man whose manners were tinged
+with republican license. He was a predestined.
+
+I do not know exactly how long the baron made his honeymoon last, nor
+when war was declared in his household; but I believe it happened in
+1816, at a very brilliant ball given by Monsieur D——-, a commissariat
+officer, that the commissary general, who had been promoted head of the
+department, admired the beautiful Madame B——-, the wife of a banker,
+and looked at her much more amorously than a married man should have
+allowed himself to do.
+
+At two o’clock in the morning it happened that the banker, tired of
+waiting any longer, went home leaving his wife at the ball.
+
+“We are going to take you home to your house,” said the baroness to
+Madame B——-. “Monsieur de V——-, offer your arm to Emilie!”
+
+And now the baron is seated in his carriage next to a woman who, during
+the whole evening, had been offered and had refused a thousand
+attentions, and from whom he had hoped in vain to win a single look.
+There she was, in all the lustre of her youth and beauty, displaying
+the whitest shoulders and the most ravishing lines of beauty. Her face,
+which still reflected the pleasures of the evening, seemed to vie with
+the brilliancy of her satin gown; her eyes to rival the blaze of her
+diamonds; and her skin to cope with the soft whiteness of the marabouts
+which tied in her hair, set off the ebon tresses and the ringlets
+dangling from her headdress. Her tender voice would stir the chords of
+the most insensible hearts; in a word, so powerfully did she wake up
+love in the human breast that Robert d’Abrissel himself would perhaps
+have yielded to her.
+
+The baron glanced at his wife, who, overcome with fatigue, had sunk to
+sleep in a corner of the carriage. He compared, in spite of himself,
+the toilette of Louise and that of Emilie. Now on occasions of this
+kind the presence of a wife is singularly calculated to sharpen the
+unquenchable desires of a forbidden love. Moreover, the glances of the
+baron, directed alternately to his wife and to her friend, were easy to
+interpret, and Madame B——- interpreted them.
+
+“Poor Louise,” she said, “she is overtired. Going out does not suit
+her, her tastes are so simple. At Ecouen she was always reading—”
+
+“And you, what used you to do?”
+
+“I, sir? Oh, I thought about nothing but acting comely. It was my
+passion!”
+
+“But why do you so rarely visit Madame de V——-? We have a country house
+at Saint-Prix, where we could have a comedy acted, in a little theatre
+which I have built there.”
+
+“If I have not visited Madame de V——-, whose fault is it?” she replied.
+“You are so jealous that you will not allow her either to visit her
+friends or to receive them.”
+
+“I jealous!” cried Monsieur de V——-, “after four years of marriage, and
+after having had three children!”
+
+“Hush,” said Emilie, striking the fingers of the baron with her fan,
+“Louise is not asleep!”
+
+The carriage stopped, and the baron offered his hand to his wife’s fair
+friend and helped her to get out.
+
+“I hope,” said Madame B——-, “that you will not prevent Louise from
+coming to the ball which I am giving this week.”
+
+The baron made her a respectful bow.
+
+This ball was a triumph of Madame B——-’s and the ruin of the husband of
+Louise; for he became desperately enamored of Emilie, to whom he would
+have sacrificed a hundred lawful wives.
+
+Some months after that evening on which the baron gained some hopes of
+succeeding with his wife’s friend, he found himself one morning at the
+house of Madame B——-, when the maid came to announce the Baroness de
+V——-.
+
+“Ah!” cried Emilie, “if Louise were to see you with me at such an hour
+as this, she would be capable of compromising me. Go into that closet
+and don’t make the least noise.”
+
+The husband, caught like a mouse in a trap, concealed himself in the
+closet.
+
+“Good-day, my dear!” said the two women, kissing each other.
+
+“Why are you come so early?” asked Emilie.
+
+“Oh! my dear, cannot you guess? I came to have an understanding with
+you!”
+
+“What, a duel?”
+
+“Precisely, my dear. I am not like you, not I! I love my husband and am
+jealous of him. You! you are beautiful, charming, you have the right to
+be a coquette, you can very well make fun of B——-, to whom your virtue
+seems to be of little importance. But as you have plenty of lovers in
+society, I beg you that you will leave me my husband. He is always at
+your house, and he certainly would not come unless you were the
+attraction.”
+
+“What a very pretty jacket you have on.”
+
+“Do you think so? My maid made it.”
+
+“Then I shall get Anastasia to take a lesson from Flore—”
+
+“So, then, my dear, I count on your friendship to refrain from bringing
+trouble in my house.”
+
+“But, my child, I do not know how you can conceive that I should fall
+in love with your husband; he is coarse and fat as a deputy of the
+centre. He is short and ugly—Ah! I will allow that he is generous, but
+that is all you can say for him, and this is a quality which is all in
+all only to opera girls; so that you can understand, my dear, that if I
+were choosing a lover, as you seem to suppose I am, I wouldn’t choose
+an old man like your baron. If I have given him any hopes, if I have
+received him, it was certainly for the purpose of amusing myself, and
+of giving you liberty; for I believed you had a weakness for young
+Rostanges.”
+
+“I?” exclaimed Louise, “God preserve me from it, my dear; he is the
+most intolerable coxcomb in the world. No, I assure you, I love my
+husband! You may laugh as you choose; it is true. I know it may seem
+ridiculous, but consider, he has made my fortune, he is no miser, and
+he is everything to me, for it has been my unhappy lot to be left an
+orphan. Now even if I did not love him, I ought to try to preserve his
+esteem. Have I a family who will some day give me shelter?”
+
+“Come, my darling, let us speak no more about it,” said Emilie,
+interrupting her friend, “for it tires me to death.”
+
+After a few trifling remarks the baroness left.
+
+“How is this, monsieur?” cried Madame B——-, opening the door of the
+closet where the baron was frozen with cold, for this incident took
+place in winter; “how is this? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for not
+adoring a little wife who is so interesting? Don’t speak to me of love;
+you may idolize me, as you say you do, for a certain time, but you will
+never love me as you love Louise. I can see that in your heart I shall
+never outweigh the interest inspired by a virtuous wife, children, and
+a family circle. I should one day be deserted and become the object of
+your bitter reflections. You would coldly say of me ‘I have had that
+woman!’ That phrase I have heard pronounced by men with the most
+insulting indifference. You see, monsieur, that I reason in cold blood,
+and that I do not love you, because you never would be able to love
+me.”
+
+“What must I do then to convince you of my love?” cried the baron,
+fixing his gaze on the young woman.
+
+She had never appeared to him so ravishingly beautiful as at that
+moment, when her soft voice poured forth a torrent of words whose
+sternness was belied by the grace of her gestures, by the pose of her
+head and by her coquettish attitude.
+
+“Oh, when I see Louise in possession of a lover,” she replied, “when I
+know that I am taking nothing away from her, and that she has nothing
+to regret in losing your affection; when I am quite sure that you love
+her no longer, and have obtained certain proof of your indifference
+towards her—Oh, then I may listen to you!—These words must seem odious
+to you,” she continued in an earnest voice; “and so indeed they are,
+but do not think that they have been pronounced by me. I am the
+rigorous mathematician who makes his deductions from a preliminary
+proposition. You are married, and do you deliberately set about making
+love to some one else? I should be mad to give any encouragement to a
+man who cannot be mine eternally.”
+
+“Demon!” exclaimed the husband. “Yes, you are a demon, and not a
+woman!”
+
+“Come now, you are really amusing!” said the young woman as she seized
+the bell-rope.
+
+“Oh! no, Emilie,” continued the lover of forty, in a calmer voice. “Do
+not ring; stop, forgive me! I will sacrifice everything for you.”
+
+“But I do not promise you anything!” she answered quickly with a laugh.
+
+“My God! How you make me suffer!” he exclaimed.
+
+“Well, and have not you in your life caused the unhappiness of more
+than one person?” she asked. “Remember all the tears which have been
+shed through you and for you! Oh, your passion does not inspire me with
+the least pity. If you do not wish to make me laugh, make me share your
+feelings.”
+
+“Adieu, madame, there is a certain clemency in your sternness. I
+appreciate the lesson you have taught me. Yes, I have many faults to
+expiate.”
+
+“Well then, go and repent of them,” she said with a mocking smile; “in
+making Louise happy you will perform the rudest penance in your power.”
+
+They parted. But the love of the baron was too violent to allow of
+Madame B——-’s harshness failing to accomplish her end, namely, the
+separation of the married couple.
+
+At the end of some months the Baron de V——- and his wife lived apart,
+though they lived in the same mansion. The baroness was the object of
+universal pity, for in public she always did justice to her husband and
+her resignation seemed wonderful. The most prudish women of society
+found nothing to blame in the friendship which united Louise to the
+young Rostanges. And all was laid to the charge of Monsieur de V——-’s
+folly.
+
+When this last had made all the sacrifices that a man could make for
+Madame B——-, his perfidious mistress started for the waters of Mount
+Dore, for Switzerland and for Italy, on the pretext of seeking the
+restoration of her health.
+
+The baron died of inflammation of the liver, being attended during his
+sickness by the most touching ministrations which his wife could lavish
+upon him; and judging from the grief which he manifested at having
+deserted her, he seemed never to have suspected her participation in
+the plan which had been his ruin.
+
+This anecdote, which we have chosen from a thousand others, exemplifies
+the services which two women can render each other.
+
+From the words—“Let me have the pleasure of bringing my husband” up to
+the conception of the drama, whose denouement was inflammation of the
+liver, every female perfidy was assembled to work out the end. Certain
+incidents will, of course, be met with which diversify more or less the
+typical example which we have given, but the march of the drama is
+almost always the same. Moreover a husband ought always to distrust the
+woman friends of his wife. The subtle artifices of these lying
+creatures rarely fail of their effect, for they are seconded by two
+enemies, who always keep close to a man—and these are vanity and
+desire.
+
+4. OF THE LOVER’S ALLIES.
+
+The man who hastens to tell another man that he has dropped a thousand
+franc bill from his pocket-book, or even that the handkerchief is
+coming out of his pocket, would think it a mean thing to warn him that
+some one was carrying off his wife. There is certainly something
+extremely odd in this moral inconsistency, but after all it admits of
+explanation. Since the law cannot exercise any interference with
+matrimonial rights, the citizens have even less right to constitute
+themselves a conjugal police; and when one restores a thousand franc
+bill to him who has lost it, he acts under a certain kind of
+obligation, founded on the principle which says, “Do unto others as ye
+would they should do unto you!”
+
+But by what reasoning can justification be found for the help which one
+celibate never asks in vain, but always receives from another celibate
+in deceiving a husband, and how shall we qualify the rendering of such
+help? A man who is incapable of assisting a gendarme in discovering an
+assassin, has no scruple in taking a husband to a theatre, to a concert
+or even to a questionable house, in order to help a comrade, whom he
+would not hesitate to kill in a duel to-morrow, in keeping an
+assignation, the result of which is to introduce into a family a
+spurious child, and to rob two brothers of a portion of their fortune
+by giving them a co-heir whom they never perhaps would otherwise have
+had; or to effect the misery of three human beings. We must confess
+that integrity is a very rare virtue, and, very often, the man that
+thinks he has most actually has least. Families have been divided by
+feuds, and brothers have been murdered, which events would never have
+taken place if some friend had refused to perform what passes to the
+world as a harmless trick.
+
+It is impossible for a man to be without some hobby or other, and all
+of us are devoted either to hunting, fishing, gambling, music, money,
+or good eating. Well, your ruling passion will always be an accomplice
+in the snare which a lover sets for you, the invisible hand of this
+passion will direct your friends, or his, whether they consent or not,
+to play a part in the little drama when they want to take you away from
+home, or to induce you to leave your wife to the mercy of another. A
+lover will spend two whole months, if necessary, in planning the
+construction of the mouse-trap.
+
+I have seen the most cunning men on earth thus taken in.
+
+There was a certain retired lawyer of Normandy. He lived in the little
+town of B——-, where a regiment of the chasseurs of Cantal were
+garrisoned. A fascinating officer of this regiment had fallen in love
+with the wife of this pettifogger, and the regiment was leaving before
+the two lovers had been able to enjoy the least privacy. It was the
+fourth military man over whom the lawyer had triumphed. As he left the
+dinner-table one evening, about six o’clock, the husband took a walk on
+the terrace of his garden from which he could see the whole country
+side. The officers arrived at this moment to take leave of him.
+Suddenly the flame of a conflagration burst forth on the horizon.
+“Heavens! La Daudiniere is on fire!” exclaimed the major. He was an old
+simple-minded soldier, who had dined at home. Every one mounted horse.
+The young wife smiled as she found herself alone, for her lover, hidden
+in the coppice, had said to her, “It is a straw stack on fire!” The
+flank of the husband was turned with all the more facility in that a
+fine courser was provided for him by the captain, and with a delicacy
+very rare in the cavalry, the lover actually sacrificed a few moments
+of his happiness in order to catch up with the cavalcade, and return in
+company with the husband.
+
+Marriage is a veritable duel, in which persistent watchfulness is
+required in order to triumph over an adversary; for, if you are unlucky
+enough to turn your head, the sword of the celibate will pierce you
+through and through.
+
+5. OF THE MAID.
+
+The prettiest waiting-maid I have ever seen is that of Madame V——y, a
+lady who to-day plays at Paris a brilliant part among the most
+fashionable women, and passes for a wife who keeps on excellent terms
+with her husband. Mademoiselle Celestine is a person whose points of
+beauty are so numerous that, in order to describe her, it would be
+necessary to translate the thirty verses which we are told form an
+inscription in the seraglio of the Grand Turk and contain each of them
+an excellent description of one of the thirty beauties of women.
+
+“You show a great deal of vanity in keeping near you such an
+accomplished creature,” said a lady to the mistress of the house.
+
+“Ah! my dear, some day perhaps you will find yourself jealous of me in
+possessing Celestine.”
+
+“She must be endowed with very rare qualities, I suppose? She perhaps
+dresses you well?”
+
+“Oh, no, very badly!”
+
+“She sews well?”
+
+“She never touches her needle.”
+
+“She is faithful?”
+
+“She is one of those whose fidelity costs more than the most cunning
+dishonesty.”
+
+“You astonish me, my dear; she is then your foster-sister?”
+
+“Not at all; she is positively good for nothing, but she is more useful
+to me than any other member of my household. If she remains with me ten
+years, I have promised her twenty thousand francs. It will be money
+well earned, and I shall not forget to give it!” said the young woman,
+nodding her head with a meaning gesture.
+
+At last the questioner of Madame V——y understood.
+
+When a woman has no friend of her own sex intimate enough to assist her
+in proving false to marital love, her maid is a last resource which
+seldom fails in bringing about the desired result.
+
+Oh! after ten years of marriage to find under his roof, and to see all
+the time, a young girl of from sixteen to eighteen, fresh, dressed with
+taste, the treasures of whose beauty seem to breathe defiance, whose
+frank bearing is irresistibly attractive, whose downcast eyes seem to
+fear you, whose timid glance tempts you, and for whom the conjugal bed
+has no secrets, for she is at once a virgin and an experienced woman!
+How can a man remain cold, like St. Anthony, before such powerful
+sorcery, and have the courage to remain faithful to the good principles
+represented by a scornful wife, whose face is always stern, whose
+manners are always snappish, and who frequently refuses to be caressed?
+What husband is stoical enough to resist such fires, such frosts?
+There, where you see a new harvest of pleasure, the young innocent sees
+an income, and your wife her liberty. It is a little family compact,
+which is signed in the interest of good will.
+
+In this case, your wife acts with regard to marriage as young
+fashionables do with regard to their country. If they are drawn for the
+army, they buy a man to carry the musket, to die in their place and to
+spare them the hardships of military life.
+
+In compromises of this sort there is not a single woman who does not
+know how to put her husband in the wrong. I have noticed that, by a
+supreme stroke of diplomacy, the majority of wives do not admit their
+maids into the secret of the part which they give them to play. They
+trust to nature, and assume an affected superiority over the lover and
+his mistress.
+
+These secret perfidies of women explain to a great degree the odd
+features of married life which are to be observed in the world; and I
+have heard women discuss, with profound sagacity, the dangers which are
+inherent in this terrible method of attack, and it is necessary to know
+thoroughly both the husband and the creature to whom he is to be
+abandoned, in order to make successful use of her. Many a woman, in
+this connection, has been the victim of her own calculations.
+
+Moreover, the more impetuous and passionate a husband shows himself,
+the less will a woman dare to employ this expedient; but a husband
+caught in this snare will never have anything to say to his stern
+better-half, when the maid, giving evidence of the fault she has
+committed, is sent into the country with an infant and a dowry.
+
+6. OF THE DOCTOR.
+
+The doctor is one of the most potent auxiliaries of an honest woman,
+when she wishes to acquire a friendly divorce from her husband. The
+services that the doctor renders, most of the time without knowing it,
+to a woman, are of such importance that there does not exist a single
+house in France where the doctor is chosen by any one but the wife.
+
+All doctors know what great influence women have on their reputation;
+thus we meet with few doctors who do not study to please the ladies.
+When a man of talent has become celebrated it is true that he does not
+lend himself to the crafty conspiracies which women hatch; but without
+knowing it he becomes involved in them.
+
+I suppose that a husband taught by the adventures of his own youth
+makes up his mind to pick out a doctor for his wife, from the first
+days of his marriage. So long as his feminine adversary fails to
+conceive the assistance that she may derive from this ally, she will
+submit in silence; but later on, if all her allurements fail to win
+over the man chosen by her husband, she will take a more favorable
+opportunity to give her husband her confidence, in the following
+remarkable manner.
+
+“I don’t like the way in which the doctor feels my pulse!”
+
+And of course the doctor is dropped.
+
+Thus it happens that either a woman chooses her doctor, wins over the
+man who has been imposed upon her, or procures his dismissal. But this
+contest is very rare; the majority of young men who marry are
+acquainted with none but beardless doctors whom they have no anxiety to
+procure for their wives, and almost always the Esculapius of the
+household is chosen by the feminine power. Thus it happens that some
+fine morning the doctor, when he leaves the chamber of madame, who has
+been in bed for a fortnight, is induced by her to say to you:
+
+“I do not say that the condition of madame presents any serious
+symptoms; but this constant drowsiness, this general listlessness, and
+her natural tendency to a spinal affection demand great care. Her lymph
+is inspissated. She wants a change of air. She ought to be sent either
+to the waters of Bareges or to the waters of Plombieres.”
+
+“All right, doctor.”
+
+You allow your wife to go to Plombieres; but she goes there because
+Captain Charles is quartered in the Vosges. She returns in capital
+health and the waters of Plombieres have done wonders for her. She has
+written to you every day, she has lavished upon you from a distance
+every possible caress. The danger of a spinal affection has utterly
+disappeared.
+
+There is extant a little pamphlet, whose publication was prompted
+doubtless by hate. It was published in Holland, and it contains some
+very curious details of the manner in which Madame de Maintenon entered
+into an understanding with Fagon, for the purposes of controlling Louis
+XIV. Well, some morning your doctor will threaten you, as Fagon
+threatened his master, with a fit of apoplexy, if you do not diet
+yourself. This witty work of satire, doubtless the production of some
+courtier, entitled “Madame de Saint Tron,” has been interpreted by the
+modern author who has become proverbial as “the young doctor.” But his
+delightful sketch is very much superior to the work whose title I cite
+for the benefit of the book-lovers, and we have great pleasure in
+acknowledging that the work of our clever contemporary has prevented
+us, out of regard for the glory of the seventeenth century, from
+publishing the fragment of the old pamphlet.
+
+Very frequently a doctor becomes duped by the judicious manoeuvres of a
+young and delicate wife, and comes to you with the announcement:
+
+“Sir, I would not wish to alarm madame with regard to her condition;
+but I will advise you, if you value her health, to keep her in perfect
+tranquillity. The irritation at this moment seems to threaten the
+chest, and we must gain control of it; there is need of rest for her,
+perfect rest; the least agitation might change the seat of the malady.
+At this crisis, the prospect of bearing a child would be fatal to her.”
+
+“But, doctor—”
+
+“Ah, yes! I know that!”
+
+He laughs and leaves the house.
+
+Like the rod of Moses, the doctor’s mandate makes and unmakes
+generations. The doctor will restore you to your marriage bed with the
+same arguments that he used in debarring you. He treats your wife for
+complaints which she has not, in order to cure her of those which she
+has, and all the while you have no idea of it; for the scientific
+jargon of doctors can only be compared to the layers in which they
+envelop their pills.
+
+An honest woman in her chamber with the doctor is like a minister sure
+of a majority; she has it in her power to make a horse, or a carriage,
+according to her good pleasure and her taste; she will send you away or
+receive you, as she likes. Sometimes she will pretend to be ill in
+order to have a chamber separate from yours; sometimes she will
+surround herself with all the paraphernalia of an invalid; she will
+have an old woman for a nurse, regiments of vials and of bottles, and,
+environed by these ramparts, will defy you by her invalid airs. She
+will talk to you in such a depressing way of the electuaries and of the
+soothing draughts which she has taken, of the agues which she has had,
+of her plasters and cataplasms, that she will fill you with disgust at
+these sickly details, if all the time these sham sufferings are not
+intended to serve as engines by means of which, eventually, a
+successful attack may be made on that singular abstraction known as
+_your honor_.
+
+In this way your wife will be able to fortify herself at every point of
+contact which you possess with the world, with society and with life.
+Thus everything will take arms against you, and you will be alone among
+all these enemies. But suppose that it is your unprecedented privilege
+to possess a wife who is without religious connections, without parents
+or intimate friends; that you have penetration enough to see through
+all the tricks by which your wife’s lover tries to entrap you; that you
+still have sufficient love for your fair enemy to resist all the
+Martons of the earth; that, in fact, you have for your doctor a man who
+is so celebrated that he has no time to listen to the maunderings of
+your wife; or that if your Esculapius is madame’s vassal, you demand a
+consultation, and an incorruptible doctor intervenes every time the
+favorite doctor prescribes a remedy that disquiets you; even in that
+case, your prospects will scarcely be more brilliant. In fact, even if
+you do not succumb to this invasion of allies, you must not forget
+that, so far, your adversary has not, so to speak, struck the decisive
+blow. If you hold out still longer, your wife, having flung round you
+thread upon thread, as a spider spins his web, an invisible net, will
+resort to the arms which nature has given her, which civilization has
+perfected, and which will be treated of in the next Meditation.
+
+MEDITATION XXVI.
+
+OF DIFFERENT WEAPONS.
+
+
+A weapon is anything which is used for the purpose of wounding. From
+this point of view, some sentiments prove to be the most cruel weapons
+which man can employ against his fellow man. The genius of Schiller,
+lucid as it was comprehensive, seems to have revealed all the phenomena
+which certain ideas bring to light in the human organization by their
+keen and penetrating action. A man may be put to death by a thought.
+Such is the moral of those heartrending scenes, when in _The Brigands_
+the poet shows a young man, with the aid of certain ideas, making such
+powerful assaults on the heart of an old man, that he ends by causing
+the latter’s death. The time is not far distant when science will be
+able to observe the complicated mechanism of our thoughts and to
+apprehend the transmission of our feelings. Some developer of the
+occult sciences will prove that our intellectual organization
+constitutes nothing more than a kind of interior man, who projects
+himself with less violence than the exterior man, and that the struggle
+which may take place between two such powers as these, although
+invisible to our feeble eyes, is not a less mortal struggle than that
+in which our external man compels us to engage.
+
+But these considerations belong to a different department of study from
+that in which we are now engaged; these subjects we intend to deal with
+in a future publication; some of our friends are already acquainted
+with one of the most important,—that, namely, entitled “THE PATHOLOGY
+OF SOCIAL LIFE, _or Meditations mathematical, physical, chemical and
+transcendental on the manifestations of thought, taken under all the
+forms which are produced by the state of society, whether by living,
+marriage, conduct, veterinary medicine, or by speech and action,
+etc._,” in which all these great questions are fully discussed. The aim
+of this brief metaphysical observation is only to remind you that the
+higher classes of society reason too well to admit of their being
+attacked by any other than intellectual arms.
+
+Although it is true that tender and delicate souls are found enveloped
+in a body of metallic hardness, at the same time there are souls of
+bronze enveloped in bodies so supple and capricious that their grace
+attracts the friendship of others, and their beauty calls for a caress.
+But if you flatter the exterior man with your hand, the _Homo duplex_,
+the interior man, to use an expression of Buffon, immediately rouses
+himself and rends you with his keen points of contact.
+
+This description of a special class of human creatures, which we hope
+you will not run up against during your earthly journey, presents a
+picture of what your wife may be to you. Every one of the sentiments
+which nature has endowed your heart with, in their gentlest form, will
+become a dagger in the hand of your wife. You will be stabbed every
+moment, and you will necessarily succumb; for your love will flow like
+blood from every wound.
+
+This is the last struggle, but for her it also means victory.
+
+In order to carry out the distinction which we think we have
+established among three sorts of feminine temperament, we will divide
+this Meditation into three parts, under the following titles:
+
+1. OF HEADACHES. 2. OF NERVOUS AFFECTATIONS. 3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS
+CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.
+
+1. OF HEADACHES.
+
+Women are constantly the dupes or the victims of excessive sensibility;
+but we have already demonstrated that with the greater number of them
+this delicacy of soul must needs, almost without their knowing it,
+receive many rude blows, from the very fact of their marriage. (See
+Meditations entitled _The Predestined_ and _Of the Honeymoon_.) Most of
+the means of defence instinctively employed by husbands are nothing but
+traps set for the liveliness of feminine affections.
+
+Now the moment comes when the wife, during the Civil War, traces by a
+single act of thought the history of her moral life, and is irritated
+on perceiving the prodigious way in which you have taken advantage of
+her sensibility. It is very rarely that women, moved either by an
+innate feeling for revenge, which they themselves can never explain, or
+by their instinct of domination, fail to discover that this quality in
+their natural machinery, when brought into play against the man, is
+inferior to no other instrument for obtaining ascendancy over him.
+
+With admirable cleverness, they proceed to find out what chords in the
+hearts of their husbands are most easily touched; and when once they
+discover this secret, they eagerly proceed to put it into practice;
+then, like a child with a mechanical toy, whose spring excites their
+curiosity, they go on employing it, carelessly calling into play the
+movements of the instrument, and satisfied simply with their success in
+doing so. If they kill you, they will mourn over you with the best
+grace in the world, as the most virtuous, the most excellent, the most
+sensible of men.
+
+In this way your wife will first arm herself with that generous
+sentiment which leads us to respect those who are in pain. The man most
+disposed to quarrel with a woman full of life and health becomes
+helpless before a woman who is weak and feeble. If your wife has not
+attained the end of her secret designs, by means of those various
+methods already described, she will quickly seize this all-powerful
+weapon. In virtue of this new strategic method, you will see the young
+girl, so strong in life and beauty, whom you had wedded in her flower,
+metamorphosing herself into a pale and sickly woman.
+
+Now headache is an affection which affords infinite resources to a
+woman. This malady, which is the easiest of all to feign, for it is
+destitute of any apparent symptom, merely obliges her to say: “I have a
+headache.” A woman trifles with you and there is no one in the world
+who can contradict her skull, whose impenetrable bones defy touch or
+ocular test. Moreover, headache is, in our opinion, the queen of
+maladies, the pleasantest and the most terrible weapon employed by
+wives against their husbands. There are some coarse and violent men who
+have been taught the tricks of women by their mistresses, in the happy
+hours of their celibacy, and so flatter themselves that they are never
+to be caught by this vulgar trap. But all their efforts, all their
+arguments end by being vanquished before the magic of these words: “I
+have a headache.” If a husband complains, or ventures on a reproach, if
+he tries to resist the power of this _Il buondo cani_ of marriage, he
+is lost.
+
+Imagine a young woman, voluptuously lying on a divan, her head softly
+supported by a cushion, one hand hanging down; on a small table close
+at hand is her glass of lime-water. Now place by her side a burly
+husband. He has made five or six turns round the room; but each time he
+has turned on his heels to begin his walk all over again, the little
+invalid has made a slight movement of her eyebrows in a vain attempt to
+remind him that the slightest noise fatigues her. At last he musters
+all his courage and utters a protest against her pretended malady, in
+the bold phrase:
+
+“And have you really a headache?”
+
+At these words the young woman slightly raises her languid head, lifts
+an arm, which feebly falls back again upon her divan, raises her eyes
+to the ceiling, raises all that she has power to raise; then darting at
+you a leaden glance, she says in a voice of remarkable feebleness:
+
+“Oh! What can be the matter with me? I suffer the agonies of death! And
+this is all the comfort you give me! Ah! you men, it is plainly seen
+that nature has not given you the task of bringing children into the
+world. What egoists and tyrants you are! You take us in all the beauty
+of our youth, fresh, rosy, with tapering waist, and then all is well!
+When your pleasures have ruined the blooming gifts which we received
+from nature, you never forgive us for having forfeited them to you!
+That was all understood. You will allow us to have neither the virtues
+nor the sufferings of our condition. You must needs have children, and
+we pass many nights in taking care of them. But child-bearing has
+ruined our health, and left behind the germs of serious maladies.—Oh,
+what pain I suffer! There are few women who are not subject to
+headaches; but your wife must be an exception. You even laugh at our
+sufferings; that is generosity!—please don’t walk about —I should not
+have expected this of you!—Stop the clock; the click of the pendulum
+rings in my head. Thanks! Oh, what an unfortunate creature I am! Have
+you a scent-bottle with you? Yes, oh! for pity’s sake, allow me to
+suffer in peace, and go away; for this scent splits my head!”
+
+What can you say in reply? Do you not hear within you a voice which
+cries, “And what if she is actually suffering?” Moreover, almost all
+husbands evacuate the field of battle very quietly, while their wives
+watch them from the corner of their eyes, marching off on tip-toe and
+closing the door quietly on the chamber henceforth to be considered
+sacred by them.
+
+Such is the headache, true or false, which is patronized at your home.
+Then the headache begins to play a regular role in the bosom of your
+family. It is a theme on which a woman can play many admirable
+variations. She sets it forth in every key. With the aid of the
+headache alone a wife can make a husband desperate. A headache seizes
+madame when she chooses, where she chooses, and as much as she chooses.
+There are headaches of five days, of ten minutes, periodic or
+intermittent headaches.
+
+You sometimes find your wife in bed, in pain, helpless, and the blinds
+of her room are closed. The headache has imposed silence on every one,
+from the regions of the porter’s lodge, where he is cutting wood, even
+to the garret of your groom, from which he is throwing down innocent
+bundles of straw. Believing in this headache, you leave the house, but
+on your return you find that madame has decamped! Soon madame returns,
+fresh and ruddy:
+
+“The doctor came,” she says, “and advised me to take exercise, and I
+find myself much better!”
+
+Another day you wish to enter madame’s room.
+
+“Oh, sir,” says the maid, showing the most profound astonishment,
+“madame has her usual headache, and I have never seen her in such pain!
+The doctor has been sent for.”
+
+“You are a happy man,” said Marshal Augereau to General R——-, “to have
+such a pretty wife!”
+
+“To have!” replied the other. “If I have my wife ten days in the year,
+that is about all. These confounded women have always either the
+headache or some other thing!”
+
+The headache in France takes the place of the sandals, which, in Spain,
+the Confessor leaves at the door of the chamber in which he is with his
+penitent.
+
+If your wife, foreseeing some hostile intentions on your part, wishes
+to make herself as inviolable as the charter, she immediately gets up a
+little headache performance. She goes to bed in a most deliberate
+fashion, she utters shrieks which rend the heart of the hearer. She
+goes gracefully through a series of gesticulations so cleverly executed
+that you might think her a professional contortionist. Now what man is
+there so inconsiderate as to dare to speak to a suffering woman about
+desires which, in him, prove the most perfect health? Politeness alone
+demands of him perfect silence. A woman knows under these circumstances
+that by means of this all-powerful headache, she can at her will paste
+on her bed the placard which sends back home the amateurs who have been
+allured by the announcement of the Comedie Francaise, when they read
+the words: “Closed through the sudden indisposition of Mademoiselle
+Mars.”
+
+O headache, protectress of love, tariff of married life, buckler
+against which all married desires expire! O mighty headache! Can it be
+possible that lovers have never sung thy praises, personified thee, or
+raised thee to the skies? O magic headache, O delusive headache, blest
+be the brain that first invented thee! Shame on the doctor who shall
+find out thy preventive! Yes, thou art the only ill that women bless,
+doubtless through gratitude for the good things thou dispensest to
+them, O deceitful headache! O magic headache!
+
+2. OF NERVOUS AFFECTATIONS.
+
+There is, however, a power which is superior even to that of the
+headache; and we must avow to the glory of France, that this power is
+one of the most recent which has been won by Parisian genius. As in the
+case with all the most useful discoveries of art and science, no one
+knows to whose intellect it is due. Only, it is certain that it was
+towards the middle of the last century that “Vapors” made their first
+appearance in France. Thus while Papin was applying the force of
+vaporized water in mechanical problems, a French woman, whose name
+unhappily is unknown, had the glory of endowing her sex with the
+faculty of vaporizing their fluids. Very soon the prodigious influence
+obtained by vapors was extended to the nerves; it was thus in passing
+from fibre to fibre that the science of neurology was born. This
+admirable science has since then led such men as Philips and other
+clever physiologists to the discovery of the nervous fluid in its
+circulation; they are now perhaps on the eve of identifying its organs,
+and the secret of its origin and of its evaporation. And thus, thanks
+to certain quackeries of this kind, we may be enabled some day to
+penetrate the mysteries of that unknown power which we have already
+called more than once in the present book, the _Will_. But do not let
+us trespass on the territory of medical philosophy. Let us consider the
+nerves and the vapors solely in their connection with marriage.
+
+Victims of Neurosis (a pathological term under which are comprised all
+affections of the nervous system) suffer in two ways, as far as married
+women are concerned; for our physiology has the loftiest disdain for
+medical classifications. Thus we recognize only:
+
+1. CLASSIC NEUROSIS. 2. ROMANTIC NEUROSIS.
+
+The classic affection has something bellicose and excitable on it.
+Those who thus suffer are as violent in their antics as pythonesses, as
+frantic as _monads_, as excited as _bacchantes_; it is a revival of
+antiquity, pure and simple.
+
+The romantic sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid
+the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their
+bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they
+breathe all the melancholy of the North.
+
+That woman with black hair, with piercing eye, with high color, with
+dry lips and a powerful hand, will become excited and convulsive; she
+represents the genius of classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman,
+with white skin, is the genius of romantic neurosis; to one belongs the
+empire gained by nerves, to the other the empire gained by vapors.
+
+Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in tears.
+
+“What is the matter, my darling?”
+
+“It is nothing.”
+
+“But you are in tears!”
+
+“I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the clouds,
+and those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some disaster—I
+think I must be going to die.”
+
+Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead
+uncle, of her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all
+these mournful shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses,
+she is attacked with all the pains they felt, she feels her heart
+palpitate with excessive violence, she feels her spleen swelling. You
+say to yourself, with a self-satisfied air:
+
+“I know exactly what this is all about!”
+
+And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns like
+an open box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew, who
+implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful memories.
+She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is
+buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping willow, and
+at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful epithalamium,
+you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish to console her
+melts away in the cloud of Ixion.
+
+There are women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from their
+feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their debts,
+or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors are
+employed as decisive weapons in Civil War.
+
+On the plea of her spinal affection or of her weak chest, a woman takes
+pains to seek out some distraction or other; you see her dressing
+herself in soft fabrics like an invalid with all the symptoms of
+spleen; she never goes out because an intimate friend, her mother or
+her sister, has tried to tear her away from that divan which
+monopolizes her and on which she spends her life in improvising
+elegies. Madame is going to spend a fortnight in the country because
+the doctor orders it. In short, she goes where she likes and does what
+she likes. Is it possible that there can be a husband so brutal as to
+oppose such desires, by hindering a wife from going to seek a cure for
+her cruel sufferings? For it has been established after many long
+discussions that in the nerves originate the most fearful torture.
+
+But it is especially in bed that vapors play their part. There when a
+woman has not a headache she has her vapors; and when she has neither
+vapors nor headache, she is under the protection of the girdle of
+Venus, which, as you know, is a myth.
+
+Among the women who fight with you the battle of vapors, are some more
+blonde, more delicate, more full of feeling than others, and who
+possess the gift of tears. How admirably do they know how to weep! They
+weep when they like, as they like and as much as they like. They
+organize a system of offensive warfare which consists of manifesting
+sublime resignation, and they gain victories which are all the more
+brilliant, inasmuch as they remain all the time in excellent health.
+
+Does a husband, irritated beyond all measure, at last express his
+wishes to them? They regard him with an air of submission, bow their
+heads and keep silence. This pantomime almost always puts a husband to
+rout. In conjugal struggles of this kind, a man prefers a woman should
+speak and defend herself, for then he may show elation or annoyance;
+but as for these women, not a word. Their silence distresses you and
+you experience a sort of remorse, like the murderer who, when he finds
+his victim offers no resistance, trembles with redoubled fear. He would
+prefer to slay him in self-defence. You return to the subject. As you
+draw near, your wife wipes away her tears and hides her handkerchief,
+so as to let you see that she has been weeping. You are melted, you
+implore your little Caroline to speak, your sensibility has been
+touched and you forget everything; then she sobs while she speaks, and
+speaks while she sobs. This is a sort of machine eloquence; she deafens
+you with her tears, with her words which come jerked out in confusion;
+it is the clapper and torrent of a mill.
+
+French women and especially Parisians possess in a marvelous degree the
+secret by which such scenes are enacted, and to these scenes their
+voices, their sex, their toilet, their manner give a wonderful charm.
+How often do the tears upon the cheeks of these adorable actresses give
+way to a piquant smile, when they see their husbands hasten to break
+the silk lace, the weak fastening of their corsets, or to restore the
+comb which holds together the tresses of their hair and the bunch of
+golden ringlets always on the point of falling down?
+
+But how all these tricks of modernity pale before the genius of
+antiquity, before nervous attacks which are violent, before the Pyrrhic
+dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the
+vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances,
+in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in contortion! It is
+then that a woman is carried away like an impetuous wind, darts forth
+like the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a movement like a billow
+which glides over the white pebbles. She is overcome with excess of
+love, she sees the future, she is the seer who prophesies, but above
+all, she sees the present moment and tramples on her husband, and
+impresses him with a sort of terror.
+
+The sight of his wife flinging off vigorous men as if they were so many
+feathers, is often enough to deter a man from ever striving to wrong
+her. He will be like the child who, having pulled the trigger of some
+terrific engine, has ever afterwards an incredible respect for the
+smallest spring. I have known a man, gentle and amiable in his ways,
+whose eyes were fixed upon those of his wife, exactly as if he had been
+put into a lion’s cage, and some one had said to him that he must not
+irritate the beast, if he would escape with his life.
+
+Nervous attacks of this kind are very fatiguing and become every day
+more rare. Romanticism, however, has maintained its ground.
+
+Sometimes, we meet with phlegmatic husbands, those men whose love is
+long enduring, because they store up their emotions, whose genius gets
+the upper hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these
+sublime creatures are rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St.
+Thomas, who wished to put his finger into the wound, they are endowed
+with an incredulity worthy of an atheist. Imperturbable in the midst of
+all these fraudulent headaches and all these traps set by neurosis,
+they concentrate their attention on the comedy which is being played
+before them, they examine the actress, they search for one of the
+springs that sets her going; and when they have discovered the
+mechanism of this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight
+impulse to the puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either
+of the reality of the disease or the artifices of these conjugal
+mummeries.
+
+But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband
+escapes all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to
+women, he will beyond doubt be overcome by the employment of a terrible
+weapon, the last which a woman would resort to, for she never destroys
+with her own hands her empire over her husband without some sort of
+repugnance. But this is a poisoned weapon as powerful as the fatal
+knife of the executioner. This reflection brings us to the last
+paragraph of the present Meditation.
+
+3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.
+
+Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary to
+inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but
+well understood coquetry? Is it anything but a sentiment that claims
+the right, on a woman’s part, to dispose of her own body as she
+chooses, as one may well believe, when we consider that half the women
+in the world go almost naked? Is it anything but a social chimera, as
+Diderot supposed, reminding us that this sentiment always gives way
+before sickness and before misery?
+
+Justice may be done to all these questions.
+
+An ingenious author has recently put forth the view that men are much
+more modest than women. He supports this contention by a great mass of
+surgical experiences; but, in order that his conclusions merit our
+attention, it would be necessary that for a certain time men were
+subjected to treatment by women surgeons.
+
+The opinion of Diderot is of still less weight.
+
+To deny the existence of modesty, because it disappears during those
+crises in which almost all human sentiments are annihilated, is as
+unreasonable as to deny that life exists because death sooner or later
+comes.
+
+Let us grant, then, that one sex has as much modesty as the other, and
+let us inquire in what modesty consists.
+
+Rousseau makes modesty the outcome of all those coquetries which
+females display before males. This opinion appears to us equally
+mistaken.
+
+The writers of the eighteenth century have doubtless rendered immense
+services to society; but their philosophy, based as it is upon
+sensualism, has never penetrated any deeper than the human epidermis.
+They have only considered the exterior universe; and so they have
+retarded, for some time, the moral development of man and the progress
+of science which will always draw its first principles from the Gospel,
+principles hereafter to be best understood by the fervent disciples of
+the Son of Man.
+
+The study of thought’s mysteries, the discovery of those organs which
+belong to the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of
+its active power, the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem to
+have an independent power of bodily movement, so as to transport
+ourselves whither we will and to see without the aid of bodily organs,
+—in a word the laws of thought’s dynamic and those of its physical
+influence,—these things will fall to the lot of the next century, as
+their portion in the treasury of human sciences. And perhaps we, of the
+present time, are merely occupied in quarrying the enormous blocks
+which later on some mighty genius will employ in the building of a
+glorious edifice.
+
+Thus the error of Rousseau is simply the error of his age. He explains
+modesty by the relations of different human beings to each other
+instead of explaining it by the moral relations of each one with
+himself. Modesty is no more susceptible of analysis than conscience;
+and this perhaps is another way of saying that modesty is the
+conscience of the body; for while conscience directs our sentiments and
+the least movement of our thoughts towards the good, modesty presides
+over external movements. The actions which clash with our interests and
+thus disobey the laws of conscience wound us more than any other; and
+if they are repeated call forth our hatred. It is the same with acts
+which violate modesty in their relations to love, which is nothing but
+the expression of our whole sensibility. If extreme modesty is one of
+the conditions on which the reality of marriage is based, as we have
+tried to prove [See _Conjugal Catechism, Meditation IV._], it is
+evident that immodesty will destroy it. But this position, which would
+require long deductions for the acceptance of the physiologist, women
+generally apply, as it were, mechanically; for society, which
+exaggerates everything for the benefit of the exterior man, develops
+this sentiment of women from childhood, and around it are grouped
+almost every other sentiment. Moreover, the moment that this boundless
+veil, which takes away the natural brutality from the least gesture, is
+dragged down, woman disappears. Heart, mind, love, grace, all are in
+ruins. In a situation where the virginal innocence of a daughter of
+Tahiti is most brilliant, the European becomes detestable. In this lies
+the last weapon which a wife seizes, in order to escape from the
+sentiment which her husband still fosters towards her. She is powerful
+because she had made herself loathsome; and this woman, who would count
+it as the greatest misfortune that her lover should be permitted to see
+the slightest mystery of her toilette, is delighted to exhibit herself
+to her husband in the most disadvantageous situation that can possibly
+be imagined.
+
+It is by means of this rigorous system that she will try to banish you
+from the conjugal bed. Mrs. Shandy may be taken to mean us harm in
+bidding the father of Tristram wind up the clock; so long as your wife
+is not blamed for the pleasure she takes in interrupting you by the
+most imperative questions. Where there formerly was movement and life
+is now lethargy and death. An act of love becomes a transaction long
+discussed and almost, as it were, settled by notarial seal. But we have
+in another place shown that we never refuse to seize upon the comic
+element in a matrimonial crisis, although here we may be permitted to
+disdain the diversion which the muse of Verville and of Marshall have
+found in the treachery of feminine manoeuvres, the insulting audacity
+of their talk, amid the cold-blooded cynicism which they exhibit in
+certain situations. It is too sad to laugh at, and too funny to mourn
+over. When a woman resorts to such extreme measures, worlds at once
+separate her from her husband. Nevertheless, there are some women to
+whom Heaven has given the gift of being charming under all
+circumstances, who know how to put a certain witty and comic grace into
+these performances, and who have such smooth tongues, to use the
+expression of Sully, that they obtain forgiveness for their caprices
+and their mockeries, and never estrange the hearts of their husbands.
+
+What soul is so robust, what man so violently in love as to persist in
+his passion, after ten years of marriage, in presence of a wife who
+loves him no longer, who gives him proofs of this every moment, who
+repulses him, who deliberately shows herself bitter, caustic, sickly
+and capricious, and who will abjure her vows of elegance and
+cleanliness, rather than not see her husband turn away from her; in
+presence of a wife who will stake the success of her schemes upon the
+horror caused by her indecency?
+
+All this, my dear sir, is so much more horrible because—
+
+XCII. LOVERS IGNORE MODESTY.
+
+We have now arrived at the last infernal circle in the Divine Comedy of
+Marriage. We are at the very bottom of Hell. There is something
+inexpressibly terrible in the situation of a married woman at the
+moment when unlawful love turns her away from her duties as mother and
+wife. As Diderot has very well put it, “infidelity in a woman is like
+unbelief in a priest, the last extreme of human failure; for her it is
+the greatest of social crimes, since it implies in her every other
+crime besides, and indeed either a wife profanes her lawless love by
+continuing to belong to her husband, or she breaks all the ties which
+attach her to her family, by giving herself over altogether to her
+lover. She ought to choose between the two courses, for her sole
+possible excuse lies in the intensity of her love.”
+
+She lives then between the claims of two obligations. It is a dilemma;
+she will work either the unhappiness of her lover, if he is sincere in
+his passion, or that of her husband, if she is still beloved by him.
+
+It is to this frightful dilemma of feminine life that all the strange
+inconsistencies of women’s conduct is to be attributed. In this lies
+the origin of all their lies, all their perfidies; here is the secret
+of all their mysteries. It is something to make one shudder. Moreover,
+even as simply based upon cold-blooded calculations, the conduct of a
+woman who accepts the unhappiness which attends virtue and scorns the
+bliss which is bought by crime, is a hundred times more reasonable.
+Nevertheless, almost all women will risk suffering in the future and
+ages of anguish for the ecstasy of one half hour. If the human feeling
+of self-preservation, if the fear of death does not check them, how
+fruitless must be the laws which send them for two years to the
+Madelonnettes? O sublime infamy! And when one comes to think that he
+for whom these sacrifices are to be made is one of our brethren, a
+gentleman to whom we would not trust our fortune, if we had one, a man
+who buttons his coat just as all of us do, it is enough to make one
+burst into a roar of laughter so loud, that starting from the
+Luxembourg it would pass over the whole of Paris and startle an ass
+browsing in the pasture at Montmartre.
+
+It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we
+have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole
+of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the
+addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances
+a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life multiplies by
+a startling progression the risks of human life, which are in any case
+so manifold.
+
+MEDITATION XXVII.
+
+OF THE LAST SYMPTOMS.
+
+
+The author of this book has met in the world so many people possessed
+by a fanatic passion for a knowledge of the mean time, for watches with
+a second hand, and for exactness in the details of their existence,
+that he has considered this Meditation too necessary for the
+tranquillity of a great number of husbands, to be omitted. It would
+have been cruel to leave men, who are possessed with the passion for
+learning the hour of the day, without a compass whereby to estimate the
+last variations in the matrimonial zodiac, and to calculate the precise
+moment when the sign of the Minotaur appears on the horizon. The
+knowledge of conjugal time would require a whole book for its
+exposition, so fine and delicate are the observations required by the
+task. The master admits that his extreme youth has not permitted him as
+yet to note and verify more than a few symptoms; but he feels a just
+pride, on his arrival at the end of his difficult enterprise, from the
+consciousness that he is leaving to his successors a new field of
+research; and that in a matter apparently so trite, not only was there
+much to be said, but also very many points are found remaining which
+may yet be brought into the clear light of observation. He therefore
+presents here without order or connection the rough outlines which he
+has so far been able to execute, in the hope that later he may have
+leisure to co-ordinate them and to arrange them in a complete system.
+If he has been so far kept back in the accomplishment of a task of
+supreme national importance, he believes, he may say, without incurring
+the charge of vanity, that he has here indicated the natural division
+of those symptoms. They are necessarily of two kinds: the unicorns and
+the bicorns. The unicorn Minotaur is the least mischievous. The two
+culprits confine themselves to a platonic love, in which their passion,
+at least, leaves no visible traces among posterity; while the bicorn
+Minotaur is unhappiness with all its fruits.
+
+We have marked with an asterisk the symptoms which seem to concern the
+latter kind.
+
+MINOTAURIC OBSERVATIONS.
+
+I.
+
+*When, after remaining a long time aloof from her husband, a woman
+makes overtures of a very marked character in order to attract his
+love, she acts in accordance with the axiom of maritime law, which
+says: _The flag protects the cargo_.
+
+II.
+
+A woman is at a ball, one of her friends comes up to her and says:
+
+“Your husband has much wit.”
+
+“You find it so?”
+
+III.
+
+Your wife discovers that it is time to send your boy to a boarding
+school, with whom, a little time ago, she was never going to part.
+
+IV.
+
+*In Lord Abergavenny’s suit for divorce, the _valet de chambre_ deposed
+that “the countess had such a detestation of all that belonged to my
+lord that he had very often seen her burning the scraps of paper which
+he had touched in her room.”
+
+V.
+
+If an indolent woman becomes energetic, if a woman who formerly hated
+study learns a foreign language; in short, every appearance of a
+complete change in character is a decisive symptom.
+
+VI.
+
+The woman who is happy in her affections does not go much into the
+world.
+
+VII.
+
+The woman who has a lover becomes very indulgent in judging others.
+
+VIII.
+
+*A husband gives to his wife a hundred crowns a month for dress; and,
+taking everything into account, she spends at least five hundred francs
+without being a sou in debt; the husband is robbed every night with a
+high hand by escalade, but without burglarious breaking in.
+
+IX.
+
+*A married couple slept in the same bed; madame was always sick. Now
+they sleep apart, she has no more headache, and her health becomes more
+brilliant than ever; an alarming symptom!
+
+X.
+
+A woman who was a sloven suddenly develops extreme nicety in her
+attire. There is a Minotaur at hand!
+
+XI.
+
+“Ah! my dear, I know no greater torment than not to be understood.”
+
+“Yes, my dear, but when one is—”
+
+“Oh, that scarcely ever happens.”
+
+“I agree with you that it very seldom does. Ah! it is great happiness,
+but there are not two people in the world who are able to understand
+you.”
+
+XII.
+
+*The day when a wife behaves nicely to her husband—all is over.
+
+XIII.
+
+I asked her: “Where have you been, Jeanne?”
+
+“I have been to your friend’s to get your plate that you left there.”
+
+“Ah, indeed! everything is still mine,” I said. The following year I
+repeated the question under similar circumstances.
+
+“I have been to bring back our plate.”
+
+“Well, well, part of the things are still mine,” I said. But after
+that, when I questioned her, she spoke very differently.
+
+“You wish to know everything, like great people, and you have only
+three shirts. I went to get my plate from my friend’s house, where I
+had stopped.”
+
+“I see,” I said, “nothing is left me.”
+
+XIV.
+
+Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.
+
+XV.
+
+Some one said to the Duchess of Chaulnes, whose life was despaired of:
+
+“The Duke of Chaulnes would like to see you once more.”
+
+“Is he there?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Let him wait; he shall come in with the sacraments.” This minotauric
+anecdote has been published by Chamfort, but we quote it here as
+typical.
+
+XVI.
+
+*Some women try to persuade their husbands that they have duties to
+perform towards certain persons.
+
+“I am sure that you ought to pay a visit to such and such a man. . . .
+We cannot avoid asking such and such a man to dinner.”
+
+XVII.
+
+“Come, my son, hold yourself straight: try to acquire good manners!
+Watch such and such a man! See how he walks! Notice the way in which he
+dresses.”
+
+XVIII.
+
+When a woman utters the name of a man but twice a day, there is perhaps
+some uncertainty about her feelings toward him—but if thrice? —Oh! oh!
+
+XIX.
+
+When a woman goes home with a man who is neither a lawyer nor a
+minister, to the door of his apartment, she is very imprudent.
+
+XX.
+
+It is a terrible day when a husband fails to explain to himself the
+motive of some action of his wife.
+
+XXI.
+
+*The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.
+
+What should be the conduct of a husband, when he recognizes a last
+symptom which leaves no doubt as to the infidelity of his wife? There
+are only two courses open; that of resignation or that of vengeance;
+there is no third course. If vengeance is decided upon, it should be
+complete.
+
+The husband who does not separate himself forever from his wife is a
+veritable simpleton. If a wife and husband think themselves fit for
+that union of friendship which exists between men, it is odious in the
+husband to make his wife feel his superiority over her.
+
+Here are some anecdotes, most of them as yet unpublished, which
+indicate pretty plainly, in my opinion, the different shades of conduct
+to be observed by a husband in like case.
+
+M. de Roquemont slept once a month in the chamber of his wife, and he
+used to say, as he went away:
+
+“I wash my hands of anything that may happen.”
+
+There is something disgusting in that remark, and perhaps something
+profound in its suggestion of conjugal policy.
+
+A diplomat, when he saw his wife’s lover enter, left his study and,
+going to his wife’s chamber, said to the two:
+
+“I hope you will at least refrain from fighting.”
+
+This was good humor.
+
+M. de Boufflers was asked what he would do if on returning after a long
+absence he found his wife with child?
+
+“I would order my night dress and slippers to be taken to her room.”
+
+This was magnanimity.
+
+“Madame, if this man ill treats you when you are alone, it is your own
+fault; but I will not permit him to behave ill towards you in my
+presence, for this is to fail in politeness in me.”
+
+This was nobility.
+
+The sublime is reached in this connection when the square cap of the
+judge is placed by the magistrate at the foot of the bed wherein the
+two culprits are asleep.
+
+There are some fine ways of taking vengeance. Mirabeau has admirably
+described in one of the books he wrote to make a living the mournful
+resignation of that Italian lady who was condemned by her husband to
+perish with him in the Maremma.
+
+LAST AXIOMS.
+
+XCIII.
+It is no act of vengeance to surprise a wife and her lover and to kill
+them locked in each other’s arms; it is a great favor to them both.
+
+XCIV.
+A husband will be best avenged by his wife’s lover.
+
+MEDITATION XXVIII.
+
+OF COMPENSATIONS.
+
+
+The marital catastrophe which a certain number of husbands cannot
+avoid, almost always forms the closing scene of the drama. At that
+point all around you is tranquil. Your resignation, if you are
+resigned, has the power of awakening keen remorse in the soul of your
+wife and of her lover; for their happiness teaches them the depth of
+the wound they have inflicted upon you. You are, you may be sure, a
+third element in all their pleasures. The principle of kindliness and
+goodness which lies at the foundation of the human soul, is not so
+easily repressed as people think; moreover the two people who are
+causing you tortures are precisely those for whom you wish the most
+good.
+
+In the conversations so sweetly familiar which link together the
+pleasures of love, and form in some way to lovers the caresses of
+thought, your wife often says to your rival:
+
+“Well, I assure you, Auguste, that in any case I should like to see my
+poor husband happy; for at bottom he is good; if he were not my
+husband, but were only my brother, there are so many things I would do
+to please him! He loves me, and—his friendship is irksome to me.”
+
+“Yes, he is a fine fellow!”
+
+Then you become an object of respect to the celibate, who would yield
+to you all the indemnity possible for the wrong he has done you; but he
+is repelled by the disdainful pride which gives a tone to your whole
+conversation, and is stamped upon your face.
+
+So that actually, during the first moments of the Minotaur’s arrival, a
+man is like an actor who feels awkward in a theatre where he is not
+accustomed to appear. It is very difficult to bear the affront with
+dignity; but though generosity is rare, a model husband is sometimes
+found to possess it.
+
+Eventually you are little by little won over by the charming way in
+which your wife makes herself agreeable to you. Madame assumes a tone
+of friendship which she never henceforth abandons. The pleasant
+atmosphere of your home is one of the chief compensations which renders
+the Minotaur less odious to a husband. But as it is natural to man to
+habituate himself to the hardest conditions, in spite of the sentiment
+of outraged nobility which nothing can change, you are gradually
+induced by a fascination whose power is constantly around you, to
+accept the little amenities of your position.
+
+Suppose that conjugal misfortune has fallen upon an epicure. He
+naturally demands the consolations which suit his taste. His sense of
+pleasure takes refuge in other gratifications, and forms other habits.
+You shape your life in accordance with the enjoyment of other
+sensations.
+
+One day, returning from your government office, after lingering for a
+long time before the rich and tasteful book shop of Chevet, hovering in
+suspense between the hundred francs of expense, and the joys of a
+Strasbourg _pate de fois gras_, you are struck dumb on finding this
+_pate_ proudly installed on the sideboard of your dining-room. Is this
+the vision offered by some gastronomic mirage? In this doubting mood
+you approach with firm step, for a _pate_ is a living creature, and
+seem to neigh as you scent afar off the truffles whose perfumes escape
+through the gilded enclosure. You stoop over it two distinct times; all
+the nerve centres of your palate have a soul; you taste the delights of
+a genuine feast, etc.; and during this ecstasy a feeling of remorse
+seizes upon you, and you go to your wife’s room.
+
+“Really, my dear girl, we have not means which warrant our buying
+_pates_.”
+
+“But it costs us nothing!”
+
+“Oh! ho!”
+
+“Yes, it is M. Achille’s brother who sent it to him.”
+
+You catch sight of M. Achille in a corner. The celibate greets you, he
+is radiant on seeing that you have accepted the _pate_. You look at
+your wife, who blushes; you stroke your beard a few times; and, as you
+express no thanks, the two lovers divine your acceptance of the
+compensation.
+
+A sudden change in the ministry takes place. A husband, who is
+Councillor of State, trembles for fear of being wiped from the roll,
+when the night before he had been made director-general; all the
+ministers are opposed to him and he has turned Constitutionalist.
+Foreseeing his disgrace he has betaken himself to Auteuil, in search of
+consolation from an old friend who quotes Horace and Tibullus to him.
+On returning home he sees the table laid as if to receive the most
+influential men of the assembly.
+
+“In truth, madame,” he says with acrimony as he enters his wife’s room,
+where she is finishing her toilette, “you seem to have lost your
+habitual tact. This is a nice time to be giving dinner parties! Twenty
+persons will soon learn—”
+
+“That you are director-general!” she cries, showing him a royal
+despatch.
+
+He is thunderstruck. He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now
+another; he opens it. He sits down and spreads it out.
+
+“I well know,” he says, “that justice would be rendered me under
+whatever ministers I served.”
+
+“Yes, my dear! But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life,
+and his eminence the Cardinal de ——- of whom he is the—”
+
+“M. de Villeplaine?”
+
+This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the
+smile of a director-general:
+
+“Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!”
+
+“Ah! don’t thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to
+you.”
+
+On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring rain,
+or tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the cafe,
+or in the world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried away by
+an impulse to follow his wife to the conjugal chamber. There he sank
+into an arm-chair and like any sultan awaited his coffee, as if he
+would say:
+
+“Well, after all, she is my wife!”
+
+The fair siren herself prepares the favorite draught; she strains it
+with special care, sweetens it, tastes it, and hands it to him; then,
+with a smile, she ventures like a submissive odalisque to make a joke,
+with a view to smoothing the wrinkles on the brow of her lord and
+master. Up to that moment he had thought his wife stupid; but on
+hearing a sally as witty as that which even you would cajole with,
+madame, he raises his head in the way peculiar to dogs who are hunting
+the hare.
+
+“Where the devil did she get that—but it’s a random shot!” he says to
+himself.
+
+From the pinnacle of his own greatness he makes a piquant repartee.
+Madame retorts, the conversation becomes as lively as it is
+interesting, and this husband, a very superior man, is quite astonished
+to discover the wit of his wife, in other respects, an accomplished
+woman; the right word occurs to her with wonderful readiness; her tact
+and keenness enable her to meet an innuendo with charming originality.
+She is no longer the same woman. She notices the effect she produces
+upon her husband, and both to avenge herself for his neglect and to win
+his admiration for the lover from whom she has received, so to speak,
+the treasures of her intellect, she exerts herself, and becomes
+actually dazzling. The husband, better able than any one else to
+appreciate a species of compensation which may have some influence on
+his future, is led to think that the passions of women are really
+necessary to their mental culture.
+
+But how shall we treat those compensations which are most pleasing to
+husbands?
+
+Between the moment when the last symptoms appear, and the epoch of
+conjugal peace, which we will not stop to discuss, almost a dozen years
+have elapsed. During this interval and before the married couple sign
+the treaty which, by means of a sincere reconciliation of the feminine
+subject with her lawful lord, consecrates their little matrimonial
+restoration, in order to close in, as Louis XVIII said, the gulf of
+revolutions, it is seldom that the honest woman has but one lover.
+Anarchy has its inevitable phases. The stormy domination of tribunes is
+supplanted by that of the sword and the pen, for few loves are met with
+whose constancy outlives ten years. Therefore, since our calculations
+prove that an honest woman has merely paid strictly her physiological
+or diabolical dues by rendering but three men happy, it is probable
+that she has set foot in more than one region of love. Sometimes it may
+happen that in an interregnum of love too long protracted, the wife,
+whether from whim, temptation or the desire of novelty, undertakes to
+seduce her own husband.
+
+Imagine charming Mme. de T——-, the heroine of our Meditation of
+_Strategy_, saying with a fascinating smile:
+
+“I never before found you so agreeable!”
+
+By flattery after flattery, she tempts, she rouses curiosity, she
+soothes, she rouses in you the faintest spark of desire, she carries
+you away with her, and makes you proud of yourself. Then the right of
+indemnifications for her husband comes. On this occasion the wife
+confounds the imagination of her husband. Like cosmopolitan travelers
+she tells tales of all the countries which she had traversed. She
+intersperses her conversation with words borrowed from several
+languages. The passionate imagery of the Orient, the unique emphasis of
+Spanish phraseology, all meet and jostle one another. She opens out the
+treasures of her notebook with all the mysteries of coquetry, she is
+delightful, you never saw her thus before! With that remarkable art
+which women alone possess of making their own everything that has been
+told them, she blends all shades and variations of character so as to
+create a manner peculiarly her own. You received from the hands of
+Hymen only one woman, awkward and innocent; the celibate returns you a
+dozen of them. A joyful and rapturous husband sees his bed invaded by
+the giddy and wanton courtesans, of whom we spoke in the Meditation on
+_The First Symptoms_. These goddesses come in groups, they smile and
+sport under the graceful muslin curtains of the nuptial bed. The
+Phoenician girl flings to you her garlands, gently sways herself to and
+fro; the Chalcidian woman overcomes you by the witchery of her fine and
+snowy feet; the Unelmane comes and speaking the dialect of fair Ionia
+reveals the treasures of happiness unknown before, and in the study of
+which she makes you experience but a single sensation.
+
+Filled with regret at having disdained so many charms, and frequently
+tired of finding too often as much perfidiousness in priestesses of
+Venus as in honest women, the husband sometimes hurries on by his
+gallantry the hour of reconciliation desired of worthy people. The
+aftermath of bliss is gathered even with greater pleasure, perhaps,
+than the first crop. The Minotaur took your gold, he makes restoration
+in diamonds. And really now seems the time to state a fact of the
+utmost importance. A man may have a wife without possessing her. Like
+most husbands you had hitherto received nothing from yours, and the
+powerful intervention of the celibate was needed to make your union
+complete. How shall we give a name to this miracle, perhaps the only
+one wrought upon a patient during his absence? Alas, my brothers, we
+did not make Nature!
+
+But how many other compensations, not less precious, are there, by
+which the noble and generous soul of the young celibate may many a time
+purchase his pardon! I recollect witnessing one of the most magnificent
+acts of reparation which a lover should perform toward the husband he
+is minotaurizing.
+
+One warm evening in the summer of 1817, I saw entering one of the rooms
+of Tortoni one of the two hundred young men whom we confidently style
+our friends; he was in the full bloom of his modesty. A lovely woman,
+dressed in perfect taste, and who had consented to enter one of the
+cool parlors devoted to people of fashion, had stepped from an elegant
+carriage which had stopped on the boulevard, and was approaching on
+foot along the sidewalk. My young friend, the celibate, then appeared
+and offered his arm to his queen, while the husband followed holding by
+the hand two little boys, beautiful as cupids. The two lovers, more
+nimble than the father of the family, reached in advance of him one of
+the small rooms pointed out by the attendant. In crossing the vestibule
+the husband knocked up against some dandy, who claimed that he had been
+jostled. Then arose a quarrel, whose seriousness was betrayed by the
+sharp tones of the altercation. The moment the dandy was about to make
+a gesture unworthy of a self-respecting man, the celibate intervened,
+seized the dandy by the arm, caught him off his guard, overcame and
+threw him to the ground; it was magnificent. He had done the very thing
+the aggressor was meditating, as he exclaimed:
+
+“Monsieur!”
+
+This “Monsieur” was one of the finest things I have ever heard. It was
+as if the young celibate had said: “This father of a family belongs to
+me; as I have carried off his honor, it is mine to defend him. I know
+my duty, I am his substitute and will fight for him.” The young woman
+behaved superbly! Pale, and bewildered, she took the arm of her
+husband, who continued his objurgations; without a word she led him
+away to the carriage, together with her children. She was one of those
+women of the aristocracy, who also know how to retain their dignity and
+self-control in the midst of violent emotions.
+
+“O Monsieur Adolphe!” cried the young lady as she saw her friend with
+an air of gayety take his seat in the carriage.
+
+“It is nothing, madame, he is one of my friends; we have shaken hands.”
+
+Nevertheless, the next morning, the courageous celibate received a
+sword thrust which nearly proved fatal, and confined him six months to
+his bed. The attentions of the married couple were lavished upon him.
+What numerous compensations do we see here! Some years afterwards, an
+old uncle of the husband, whose opinions did not fit in with those of
+the young friend of the house, and who nursed a grudge against him on
+account of some political discussion, undertook to have him driven from
+the house. The old fellow went so far as to tell his nephew to choose
+between being his heir and sending away the presumptuous celibate. It
+was then that the worthy stockbroker said to his uncle:
+
+“Ah, you must never think, uncle, that you will succeed in making me
+ungrateful! But if I tell him to do so this young man will let himself
+be killed for you. He has saved my credit, he would go through fire and
+water for me, he has relieved me of my wife, he has brought me clients,
+he has procured for me almost all the business in the Villele loans—I
+owe my life to him, he is the father of my children; I can never forget
+all this.”
+
+In this case the compensations may be looked upon as complete; but
+unfortunately there are compensations of all kinds. There are those
+which must be considered negative, deluding, and those which are both
+in one.
+
+I knew a husband of advanced years who was possessed by the demon of
+gambling. Almost every evening his wife’s lover came and played with
+him. The celibate gave him a liberal share of the pleasures which come
+from games of hazard, and knew how to lose to him a certain number of
+francs every month; but madame used to give them to him, and the
+compensation was a deluding one.
+
+You are a peer of France, and you have no offspring but daughters. Your
+wife is brought to bed of a boy! The compensation is negative.
+
+The child who is to save your name from oblivion is like his mother.
+The duchess persuades you that the child is yours. The negative
+compensation becomes deluding.
+
+Here is one of the most charming compensations known. One morning the
+Prince de Ligne meets his wife’s lover and rushes up to him, laughing
+wildly:
+
+“My friend,” he says to him, “I cuckolded you, last night!”
+
+If some husbands attain to conjugal peace by quiet methods, and carry
+so gracefully the imaginary ensigns of matrimonial pre-eminence, their
+philosophy is doubtless based on the _comfortabilisme_ of accepting
+certain compensations, a _comfortabilisme_ which indifferent men cannot
+imagine. As years roll by the married couple reach the last stage in
+that artificial existence to which their union has condemned them.
+
+MEDITATION XXIX.
+
+OF CONJUGAL PEACE.
+
+
+My imagination has followed marriage through all the phases of its
+fantastic life in so fraternal a spirit, that I seem to have grown old
+with the house I made my home so early in life at the commencement of
+this work.
+
+After experiencing in thought the ardor of man’s first passion; and
+outlining, in however imperfect a way, the principal incidents of
+married life; after struggling against so many wives that did not
+belong to me, exhausting myself in conflict with so many personages
+called up from nothingness, and joining so many battles, I feel an
+intellectual lassitude, which makes me see everything in life hang, as
+it were, in mournful crape. I seem to have a catarrh, to look at
+everything through green spectacles, I feel as if my hands trembled, as
+if I must needs employ the second half of my existence and of my book
+in apologizing for the follies of the first half.
+
+I see myself surrounded by tall children of whom I am not the father,
+and seated beside a wife I never married. I think I can feel wrinkles
+furrowing my brow. The fire before which I am placed crackles, as if in
+derision, the room is ancient in its furniture; I shudder with sudden
+fright as I lay my hand upon my heart, and ask myself: “Is that, too,
+withered?”
+
+I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never
+accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic
+maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.
+No face can delude me. I am melancholy and overcast with gloom. I know
+the world and it has no more illusions for me. My closest friends have
+proved traitors. My wife and myself exchange glances of profound
+meaning and the slightest word either of us utters is a dagger which
+pierces the heart of the other through and through. I stagnate in a
+dreary calm. This then is the tranquillity of old age! The old man
+possesses in himself the cemetery which shall soon possess him. He is
+growing accustomed to the chill of the tomb. Man, according to
+philosophers, dies in detail; at the same time he may be said even to
+cheat death; for that which his withered hand has laid hold upon, can
+it be called life?
+
+Oh, to die young and throbbing with life! ’Tis a destiny enviable
+indeed! For is not this, as a delightful poet has said, “to take away
+with one all one’s illusions, to be buried like an Eastern king, with
+all one’s jewels and treasures, with all that makes the fortune of
+humanity!”
+
+How many thank-offerings ought we to make to the kind and beneficent
+spirit that breathes in all things here below! Indeed, the care which
+nature takes to strip us piece by piece of our raiment, to unclothe the
+soul by enfeebling gradually our hearing, sight, and sense of touch, in
+making slower the circulation of our blood, and congealing our humors
+so as to make us as insensible to the approach of death as we were to
+the beginnings of life, this maternal care which she lavishes on our
+frail tabernacle of clay, she also exhibits in regard to the emotions
+of man, and to the double existence which is created by conjugal love.
+She first sends us Confidence, which with extended hand and open heart
+says to us: “Behold, I am thine forever!” Lukewarmness follows, walking
+with languid tread, turning aside her blonde face with a yawn, like a
+young widow obliged to listen to the minister of state who is ready to
+sign for her a pension warrant. Then Indifference comes; she stretches
+herself on the divan, taking no care to draw down the skirts of her
+robe which Desire but now lifted so chastely and so eagerly. She casts
+a glance upon the nuptial bed, with modesty and without shamelessness;
+and, if she longs for anything, it is for the green fruit that calls up
+again to life the dulled papillae with which her blase palate is
+bestrewn. Finally the philosophical Experience of Life presents
+herself, with careworn and disdainful brow, pointing with her finger to
+the results, and not the causes of life’s incidents; to the tranquil
+victory, not to the tempestuous combat. She reckons up the arrearages,
+with farmers, and calculates the dowry of a child. She materializes
+everything. By a touch of her wand, life becomes solid and springless;
+of yore, all was fluid, now it is crystallized into rock. Delight no
+longer exists for our hearts, it has received its sentence, ’twas but
+mere sensation, a passing paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a
+condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in
+absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping
+succeed each other, and the sluggish organs perform their functions.
+
+“This is horrible!” I cried; “I am young and full of life! Perish all
+the books in the world rather than my illusions should perish!”
+
+I left my laboratory and plunged into the whirl of Paris. As I saw the
+fairest faces glide by before me, I felt that I was not old. The first
+young woman who appeared before me, lovely in face and form and dressed
+to perfection, with one glance of fire made all the sorcery whose
+spells I had voluntarily submitted to vanish into thin air. Scarcely
+had I walked three steps in the Tuileries gardens, the place which I
+had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of the
+matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book. Had I
+desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as I
+conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator
+himself to have produced so complete a symbol of it as I then saw
+before me.
+
+Imagine a woman of fifty, dressed in a jacket of reddish brown merino,
+holding in her left hand a green cord, which was tied to the collar of
+an English terrier, and with her right arm linked with that of a man in
+knee-breeches and silk stockings, whose hat had its brim whimsically
+turned up, while snow-white tufts of hair like pigeon plumes rose at
+its sides. A slender queue, thin as a quill, tossed about on the back
+of his sallow neck, which was thick, as far as it could be seen above
+the turned down collar of a threadbare coat. This couple assumed the
+stately tread of an ambassador; and the husband, who was at least
+seventy, stopped complaisantly every time the terrier began to gambol.
+I hastened to pass this living impersonation of my Meditation, and was
+surprised to the last degree to recognize the Marquis de T——-, friend
+of the Comte de Noce, who had owed me for a long time the end of the
+interrupted story which I related in the _Theory of the Bed_. [See
+Meditation XVII.]
+
+“I have the honor to present to you the Marquise de T——-,” he said to
+me.
+
+I made a low bow to a lady whose face was pale and wrinkled; her
+forehead was surmounted by a toupee, whose flattened ringlets, ranged
+around it, deceived no one, but only emphasized, instead of concealing,
+the wrinkles by which it was deeply furrowed. The lady was slightly
+roughed, and had the appearance of an old country actress.
+
+“I do not see, sir, what you can say against a marriage such as ours,”
+said the old man to me.
+
+“The laws of Rome forefend!” I cried, laughing.
+
+The marchioness gave me a look filled with inquietude as well as
+disapprobation, which seemed to say, “Is it possible that at my age I
+have become but a concubine?”
+
+We sat down upon a bench, in the gloomy clump of trees planted at the
+corner of the high terrace which commands La Place Louis XV, on the
+side of the Garde-Meuble. Autumn had already begun to strip the trees
+of their foliage, and was scattering before our eyes the yellow leaves
+of his garland; but the sun nevertheless filled the air with grateful
+warmth.
+
+“Well, is your work finished?” asked the old man, in the unctuous tones
+peculiar to men of the ancient aristocracy.
+
+And with these words he gave a sardonic smile, as if for commentary.
+
+“Very nearly, sir,” I replied. “I have come to the philosophic
+situation, which you appear to have reached, but I confess that I—”
+
+“You are searching for ideas?” he added—finishing for me a sentence,
+which I confess I did not know how to end.
+
+“Well,” he continued, “you may boldly assume, that on arriving at the
+winter of his life, a man—a man who thinks, I mean—ends by denying that
+love has any existence, in the wild form with which our illusions
+invested it!”
+
+“What! would you deny the existence of love on the day after that of
+marriage?”
+
+“In the first place, the day after would be the very reason; but my
+marriage was a commercial speculation,” replied he, stooping to speak
+into my ear. “I have thereby purchased the care, the attention, the
+services which I need; and I am certain to obtain all the consideration
+my age demands; for I have willed all my property to my nephew, and as
+my wife will be rich only during my life, you can imagine how—”
+
+I turned on the old marquis a look so piercing that he wrung my hand
+and said: “You seem to have a good heart, for nothing is certain in
+this life—”
+
+“Well, you may be sure that I have arranged a pleasant surprise for her
+in my will,” he replied, gayly.
+
+“Come here, Joseph,” cried the marchioness, approaching a servant who
+carried an overcoat lined with silk. “The marquis is probably feeling
+the cold.”
+
+The old marquis put on his overcoat, buttoned it up, and taking my arm,
+led me to the sunny side of the terrace.
+
+“In your work,” he continued, “you have doubtless spoken of the love of
+a young man. Well, if you wish to act up to the scope which you give to
+your work—in the word ec—elec—”
+
+“Eclectic,” I said, smiling, seeing he could not remember this
+philosophic term.
+
+“I know the word well!” he replied. “If then you wish to keep your vow
+of eclecticism, you should be willing to express certain virile ideas
+on the subject of love which I will communicate to you, and I will not
+grudge you the benefit of them, if benefit there be; I wish to bequeath
+my property to you, but this will be all that you will get of it.”
+
+“There is no money fortune which is worth as much as a fortune of ideas
+if they be valuable ideas! I shall, therefore, listen to you with a
+grateful mind.”
+
+“There is no such thing as love,” pursued the old man, fixing his gaze
+upon me. “It is not even a sentiment, it is an unhappy necessity, which
+is midway between the needs of the body and those of the soul. But
+siding for a moment with your youthful thoughts, let us try to reason
+upon this social malady. I suppose that you can only conceive of love
+as either a need or a sentiment.”
+
+I made a sign of assent.
+
+“Considered as a need,” said the old man, “love makes itself felt last
+of all our needs, and is the first to cease. We are inclined to love in
+our twentieth year, to speak in round numbers, and we cease to do so at
+fifty. During these thirty years, how often would the need be felt, if
+it were not for the provocation of city manners, and the modern custom
+of living in the presence of not one woman, but of women in general?
+What is our debt to the perpetuation of the race? It probably consists
+in producing as many children as we have breasts—so that if one dies
+the other may live. If these two children were always faithfully
+produced, what would become of nations? Thirty millions of people would
+constitute a population too great for France, for the soil is not
+sufficient to guarantee more than ten millions against misery and
+hunger. Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of throwing its
+children into the water, according to the accounts of travelers. Now
+this production of two children is really the whole of marriage. The
+superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only profligate, but involve
+an immense loss to the man, as I will now demonstrate. Compare then
+with this poverty of result, and shortness of duration, the daily and
+perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence. Nature reminds us
+every hour of our real needs; and, on the other hand, refuses
+absolutely to grant the excess which our imagination sometimes craves
+in love. It is, therefore, the last of our needs, and the only one
+which may be forgotten without causing any disturbance in the economy
+of the body. Love is a social luxury like lace and diamonds. But if we
+analyze it as a sentiment, we find two distinct elements in it; namely,
+pleasure and passion. Now analyze pleasure. Human affections rest upon
+two foundations, attraction and repulsion. Attraction is a universal
+feeling for those things which flatter our instinct of
+self-preservation; repulsion is the exercise of the same instinct when
+it tells us that something is near which threatens it with injury.
+Everything which profoundly moves our organization gives us a deeper
+sense of our existence; such a thing is pleasure. It is contracted of
+desire, of effort, and the joy of possessing something or other.
+Pleasure is a unique element in life, and our passions are nothing but
+modifications, more or less keen, of pleasure; moreover, familiarity
+with one pleasure almost always precludes the enjoyment of all others.
+Now, love is the least keen and the least durable of our pleasures. In
+what would you say the pleasure of love consists? Does it lie in the
+beauty of the beloved? In one evening you may obtain for money the
+loveliest odalisques; but at the end of a month you will in this way
+have burnt out all your sentiment for all time. Would you love a women
+because she is well dressed, elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has
+commercial credit? Do not call this love, for it is vanity, avarice,
+egotism. Do you love her because she is intellectual? You are in that
+case merely obeying the dictates of literary sentiment.”
+
+“But,” I said, “love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in
+one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls,
+their lives—”
+
+“Oh dear, dear!” cried the old man, in a jeering tone. “Can you show me
+five men in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman? I do
+not say their life, for that is a slight thing,—the price of a human
+life under Napoleon was never more than twenty thousand francs; and
+there are in France to-day two hundred and fifty thousand brave men who
+would give theirs for two inches of red ribbon; while seven men have
+sacrificed for a woman ten millions on which they might have slept in
+solitude for a whole night. Dubreuil and Phmeja are still rarer than is
+the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke. These sentiments proceed from an
+unknown cause. But you have brought me thus to consider love as a
+passion. Yes, indeed, it is the last of them all and the most
+contemptible. It promises everything, and fulfils nothing. It comes,
+like love, as a need, the last, and dies away the first. Ah, talk to me
+of revenge, hatred, avarice, of gaming, of ambition, of fanaticism.
+These passions have something virile in them; these sentiments are
+imperishable; they make sacrifices every day, such as love only makes
+by fits and starts. But,” he went on, “suppose you abjure love. At
+first there will be no disquietudes, no anxieties, no worry, none of
+those little vexations that waste human life. A man lives happy and
+tranquil; in his social relations he becomes infinitely more powerful
+and influential. This divorce from the thing called love is the primary
+secret of power in all men who control large bodies of men; but this is
+a mere trifle. Ah! if you knew with what magic influence a man is
+endowed, what wealth of intellectual force, what longevity in physical
+strength he enjoys, when detaching himself from every species of human
+passion he spends all his energy to the profit of his soul! If you
+could enjoy for two minutes the riches which God dispenses to the
+enlightened men who consider love as merely a passing need which it is
+sufficient to satisfy for six months in their twentieth year; to the
+men who, scorning the luxurious and surfeiting beefsteaks of Normandy,
+feed on the roots which God has given in abundance, and take their
+repose on a bed of withered leaves, like the recluses of the
+Thebaid!—ah! you would not keep on three seconds the wool of fifteen
+merinos which covers you; you would fling away your childish switch,
+and go to live in the heaven of heavens! There you would find the love
+you sought in vain amid the swine of earth; there you would hear a
+concert of somewhat different melody from that of M. Rossini, voices
+more faultless than that of Malibran. But I am speaking as a blind man
+might, and repeating hearsays. If I had not visited Germany about the
+year 1791, I should know nothing of all this. Yes!—man has a vocation
+for the infinite. There dwells within him an instinct that calls him to
+God. God is all, gives all, brings oblivion on all, and thought is the
+thread which he has given us as a clue to communication with himself!”
+
+He suddenly stopped, and fixed his eyes upon the heavens.
+
+“The poor fellow has lost his wits!” I thought to myself.
+
+“Sir,” I said to him, “it would be pushing my devotion to eclectic
+philosophy too far to insert your ideas in my book; they would destroy
+it. Everything in it is based on love, platonic and sensual. God forbid
+that I should end my book by such social blasphemies! I would rather
+try to return by some pantagruelian subtlety to my herd of celibates
+and honest women, with many an attempt to discover some social utility
+in their passions and follies. Oh! if conjugal peace leads us to
+arguments so disillusionizing and so gloomy as these, I know a great
+many husbands who would prefer war to peace.”
+
+“At any rate, young man,” the old marquis cried, “I shall never have to
+reproach myself with refusing to give true directions to a traveler who
+had lost his way.”
+
+“Adieu, thou old carcase!” I said to myself; “adieu, thou walking
+marriage! Adieu, thou stick of a burnt-out fire-work! Adieu, thou
+machine! Although I have given thee from time to time some glimpses of
+people dear to me, old family portraits,—back with you to the picture
+dealer’s shop, to Madame de T——-, and all the rest of them; take your
+place round the bier with undertaker’s mutes, for all I care!”
+
+MEDITATION XXX.
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+
+A recluse, who was credited with the gift of second sight, having
+commanded the children of Israel to follow him to a mountain top in
+order to hear the revelation of certain mysteries, saw that he was
+accompanied by a crowd which took up so much room on the road that,
+prophet as he was, his _amour-propre_ was vastly tickled.
+
+But as the mountain was a considerable distance off, it happened that
+at the first halt, an artisan remembered that he had to deliver a new
+pair of slippers to a duke and peer, a publican fell to thinking how he
+had some specie to negotiate, and off they went.
+
+A little further on two lovers lingered under the olive trees and
+forgot the discourse of the prophet; for they thought that the promised
+land was the spot where they stood, and the divine word was heard when
+they talked to one another.
+
+The fat people, loaded with punches a la Sancho, had been wiping their
+foreheads with their handkerchiefs, for the last quarter of an hour,
+and began to grow thirsty, and therefore halted beside a clear spring.
+
+Certain retired soldiers complained of the corns which tortured them,
+and spoke of Austerlitz, and of their tight boots.
+
+At the second halt, certain men of the world whispered together:
+
+“But this prophet is a fool.”
+
+“Have you ever heard him?”
+
+“I? I came from sheer curiosity.”
+
+“And I because I saw the fellow had a large following.” (The last man
+who spoke was a fashionable.)
+
+“He is a mere charlatan.”
+
+The prophet kept marching on. But when he reached the plateau, from
+which a wide horizon spread before him, he turned back, and saw no one
+but a poor Israelite, to whom he might have said as the Prince de Ligne
+to the wretched little bandy-legged drummer boy, whom he found on the
+spot where he expected to see a whole garrison awaiting him: “Well, my
+readers, it seems that you have dwindled down to one.”
+
+Thou man of God who has followed me so far—I hope that a short
+recapitulation will not terrify thee, and I have traveled on under the
+impression that thou, like me, hast kept saying to thyself, “Where the
+deuce are we going?”
+
+Well, well, this is the place and the time to ask you, respected
+reader, what your opinion is with regard to the renewal of the tobacco
+monopoly, and what you think of the exorbitant taxes on wines, on the
+right to carry firearms, on gaming, on lotteries, on playing cards, on
+brandy, on soap, cotton, silks, etc.
+
+“I think that since all these duties make up one-third of the public
+revenues, we should be seriously embarrassed if—”
+
+So that, my excellent model husband, if no one got drunk, or gambled,
+or smoked, or hunted, in a word if we had neither vices, passions, nor
+maladies in France, the State would be within an ace of bankruptcy; for
+it seems that the capital of our national income consists of popular
+corruptions, as our commerce is kept alive by national luxury. If you
+cared to look a little closer into the matter you would see that all
+taxes are based upon some moral malady. As a matter of fact, if we
+continue this philosophical scrutiny it will appear that the gendarmes
+would want horses and leather breeches, if every one kept the peace,
+and if there were neither foes nor idle people in the world. Therefore
+impose virtue on mankind! Well, I consider that there are more
+parallels than people think between my honest woman and the budget, and
+I will undertake to prove this by a short essay on statistics, if you
+will permit me to finish my book on the same lines as those on which I
+have begun it. Will you grant that a lover must put on more clean
+shirts than are worn by either a husband, or a celibate unattached?
+This to me seems beyond doubt. The difference between a husband and a
+lover is seen even in the appearance of their toilette. The one is
+careless, he is unshaved, and the other never appears excepting in full
+dress. Sterne has pleasantly remarked that the account book of the
+laundress was the most authentic record he knew, as to the life of
+Tristram Shandy; and that it was easy to guess from the number of
+shirts he wore what passages of his book had cost him most. Well, with
+regard to lovers the account book of their laundresses is the most
+faithful historic record as well as the most impartial account of their
+various amours. And really a prodigious quantity of tippets, cravats,
+dresses, which are absolutely necessary to coquetry, is consumed in the
+course of an amour. A wonderful prestige is gained by white stockings,
+the lustre of a collar, or a shirt-waist, the artistically arranged
+folds of a man’s shirt, or the taste of his necktie or his collar. This
+will explain the passages in which I said of the honest woman
+[Meditation II], “She spends her life in having her dresses starched.”
+I have sought information on this point from a lady in order to learn
+accurately at what sum was to be estimated the tax thus imposed by
+love, and after fixing it at one hundred francs per annum for a woman,
+I recollect what she said with great good humor: “It depends on the
+character of the man, for some are so much more particular than
+others.” Nevertheless, after a very profound discussion, in which I
+settled upon the sum for the celibates, and she for her sex, it was
+agreed that, one thing with another, since the two lovers belong to the
+social sphere which this work concerns, they ought to spend between
+them, in the matter referred to, one hundred and fifty francs more than
+in time of peace.
+
+By a like treaty, friendly in character and long discussed, we arranged
+that there should be a collective difference of four hundred francs
+between the expenditure for all parts of the dress on a war footing,
+and for that on a peace footing. This provision was considered very
+paltry by all the powers, masculine or feminine, whom we consulted. The
+light thrown upon these delicate matters by the contributions of
+certain persons suggested to us the idea of gathering together certain
+savants at a dinner party, and taking their wise counsels for our
+guidance in these important investigations. The gathering took place.
+It was with glass in hand and after listening to many brilliant
+speeches that I received for the following chapters on the budget of
+love, a sort of legislative sanction. The sum of one hundred francs was
+allowed for porters and carriages. Fifty crowns seemed very reasonable
+for the little patties that people eat on a walk, for bouquets of
+violets and theatre tickets. The sum of two hundred francs was
+considered necessary for the extra expense of dainties and dinners at
+restaurants. It was during this discussion that a young cavalryman, who
+had been made almost tipsy by the champagne, was called to order for
+comparing lovers to distilling machines. But the chapter that gave
+occasion for the most violent discussion, and the consideration of
+which was adjourned for several weeks, when a report was made, was that
+concerning presents. At the last session, the refined Madame de D——-
+was the first speaker; and in a graceful address, which testified to
+the nobility of her sentiments, she set out to demonstrate that most of
+the time the gifts of love had no intrinsic value. The author replied
+that all lovers had their portraits taken. A lady objected that a
+portrait was invested capital, and care should always be taken to
+recover it for a second investment. But suddenly a gentleman of
+Provence rose to deliver a philippic against women. He spoke of the
+greediness which most women in love exhibited for furs, satins, silks,
+jewels and furniture; but a lady interrupted him by asking if Madame
+d’O——-y, his intimate friend, had not already paid his debts twice
+over.
+
+“You are mistaken, madame,” said the Provencal, “it was her husband.”
+
+“The speaker is called to order,” cried the president, “and condemned
+to dine the whole party, for having used the word _husband_.”
+
+The Provencal was completely refuted by a lady who undertook to prove
+that women show much more self-sacrifice in love than men; that lovers
+cost very dear, and that the honest woman may consider herself very
+fortunate if she gets off with spending on them two thousand francs for
+a single year. The discussion was in danger of degenerating into an
+exchange of personalities, when a division was called for. The
+conclusions of the committee were adopted by vote. The conclusions
+were, in substance, that the amount for presents between lovers during
+the year should be reckoned at five hundred francs, but that in this
+computation should be included: (1) the expense of expeditions into the
+country; (2) the pharmaceutical expenses, occasioned by the colds
+caught from walking in the damp pathways of parks, and in leaving the
+theatre, which expenses are veritable presents; (3) the carrying of
+letters, and law expenses; (4) journeys, and expenses whose items are
+forgotten, without counting the follies committed by the spenders;
+inasmuch as, according to the investigations of the committee, it had
+been proved that most of a man’s extravagant expenditure profited the
+opera girls, rather than the married women. The conclusion arrived at
+from this pecuniary calculation was that, in one way or another, a
+passion costs nearly fifteen hundred francs a year, which were required
+to meet the expense borne more unequally by lovers, but which would not
+have occurred, but for their attachment. There was also a sort of
+unanimity in the opinion of the council that this was the lowest annual
+figure which would cover the cost of a passion. Now, my dear sir, since
+we have proved, by the statistics of our conjugal calculations [See
+Meditations I, II, and III.] and proved irrefragably, that there exists
+a floating total of at least fifteen hundred thousand unlawful
+passions, it follows:
+
+That the criminal conversations of a third among the French population
+contribute a sum of nearly three thousand millions to that vast
+circulation of money, the true blood of society, of which the budget is
+the heart;
+
+That the honest woman not only gives life to the children of the
+peerage, but also to its financial funds;
+
+That manufacturers owe their prosperity to this _systolic_ movement;
+
+That the honest woman is a being essentially _budgetative_, and active
+as a consumer;
+
+That the least decline in public love would involve incalculable
+miseries to the treasury, and to men of invested fortunes;
+
+That a husband has at least a third of his fortune invested in the
+inconstancy of his wife, etc.
+
+I am well aware that you are going to open your mouth and talk to me
+about manners, politics, good and evil. But, my dear victim of the
+Minotaur, is not happiness the object which all societies should set
+before them? Is it not this axiom that makes these wretched kings give
+themselves so much trouble about their people? Well, the honest woman
+has not, like them, thrones, gendarmes and tribunals; she has only a
+bed to offer; but if our four hundred thousand women can, by this
+ingenious machine, make a million celibates happy, do not they attain
+in a mysterious manner, and without making any fuss, the end aimed at
+by a government, namely, the end of giving the largest possible amount
+of happiness to the mass of mankind?
+
+“Yes, but the annoyances, the children, the troubles—”
+
+Ah, you must permit me to proffer the consolatory thought with which
+one of our wittiest caricaturists closes his satiric observations: “Man
+is not perfect!” It is sufficient, therefore, that our institutions
+have no more disadvantages than advantages in order to be reckoned
+excellent; for the human race is not placed, socially speaking, between
+the good and the bad, but between the bad and the worse. Now if the
+work, which we are at present on the point of concluding, has had for
+its object the diminution of the worse, as it is found in matrimonial
+institutions, in laying bare the errors and absurdities due to our
+manners and our prejudices, we shall certainly have won one of the
+fairest titles that can be put forth by a man to a place among the
+benefactors of humanity. Has not the author made it his aim, by
+advising husbands, to make women more self-restrained and consequently
+to impart more violence to passions, more money to the treasury, more
+life to commerce and agriculture? Thanks to this last Meditation he can
+flatter himself that he has strictly kept the vow of eclecticism, which
+he made in projecting the work, and he hopes he has marshaled all
+details of the case, and yet like an attorney-general refrained from
+expressing his personal opinion. And really what do you want with an
+axiom in the present matter? Do you wish that this book should be a
+mere development of the last opinion held by Tronchet, who in his
+closing days thought that the law of marriage had been drawn up less in
+the interest of husbands than of children? I also wish it very much.
+Would you rather desire that this book should serve as proof to the
+peroration of the Capuchin, who preached before Anne of Austria, and
+when he saw the queen and her ladies overwhelmed by his triumphant
+arguments against their frailty, said as he came down from the pulpit
+of truth, “Now you are all honorable women, and it is we who
+unfortunately are sons of Samaritan women”? I have no objection to that
+either. You may draw what conclusion you please; for I think it is very
+difficult to put forth two contrary opinions, without both of them
+containing some grains of truth. But the book has not been written
+either for or against marriage; all I have thought you needed was an
+exact description of it. If an examination of the machine shall lead us
+to make one wheel of it more perfect; if by scouring away some rust we
+have given more elastic movement to its mechanism; then give his wage
+to the workman. If the author has had the impertinence to utter truths
+too harsh for you, if he has too often spoken of rare and exceptional
+facts as universal, if he has omitted the commonplaces which have been
+employed from time immemorial to offer women the incense of flattery,
+oh, let him be crucified! But do not impute to him any motive of
+hostility to the institution itself; he is concerned merely for men and
+women. He knows that from the moment marriage ceases to defeat the
+purpose of marriage, it is unassailable; and, after all, if there do
+arise serious complaints against this institution, it is perhaps
+because man has no memory excepting for his disasters, that he accuses
+his wife, as he accuses his life, for marriage is but a life within a
+life. Yet people whose habit it is to take their opinions from
+newspapers would perhaps despise a book in which they see the mania of
+eclecticism pushed too far; for then they absolutely demand something
+in the shape of a peroration, it is not hard to find one for them. And
+since the words of Napoleon served to start this book, why should it
+not end as it began? Before the whole Council of State the First Consul
+pronounced the following startling phrase, in which he at the same time
+eulogized and satirized marriage, and summed up the contents of this
+book:
+
+“If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!”
+
+POSTSCRIPT.
+
+“And so you are going to be married?” asked the duchess of the author
+who had read his manuscript to her.
+
+She was one of those ladies to whom the author has already paid his
+respects in the introduction of this work.
+
+“Certainly, madame,” I replied. “To meet a woman who has courage enough
+to become mine, would satisfy the wildest of my hopes.”
+
+“Is this resignation or infatuation?”
+
+“That is my affair.”
+
+“Well, sir, as you are doctor of conjugal arts and sciences, allow me
+to tell you a little Oriental fable, that I read in a certain sheet,
+which is published annually in the form of an almanac. At the beginning
+of the Empire ladies used to play at a game in which no one accepted a
+present from his or her partner in the game, without saying the word,
+_Diadeste_. A game lasted, as you may well suppose, during a week, and
+the point was to catch some one receiving some trifle or other without
+pronouncing the sacramental word.”
+
+“Even a kiss?”
+
+“Oh, I have won the _Diadeste_ twenty times in that way,” she
+laughingly replied.
+
+“It was, I believe, from the playing of this game, whose origin is
+Arabian or Chinese, that my apologue takes its point. But if I tell
+you,” she went on, putting her finger to her nose, with a charming air
+of coquetry, “let me contribute it as a finale to your work.”
+
+“This would indeed enrich me. You have done me so many favors already,
+that I cannot repay—”
+
+She smiled slyly, and replied as follows:
+
+A philosopher had compiled a full account of all the tricks that women
+could possibly play, and in order to verify it, he always carried it
+about with him. One day he found himself in the course of his travels
+near an encampment of Arabs. A young woman, who had seated herself
+under the shade of a palm tree, rose on his approach. She kindly asked
+him to rest himself in her tent, and he could not refuse. Her husband
+was then absent. Scarcely had the traveler seated himself on a soft
+rug, when the graceful hostess offered him fresh dates, and a cup of
+milk; he could not help observing the rare beauty of her hands as she
+did so. But, in order to distract his mind from the sensations roused
+in him by the fair young Arabian girl, whose charms were most
+formidable, the sage took his book, and began to read.
+
+The seductive creature piqued by this slight said to him in a melodious
+voice:
+
+“That book must be very interesting since it seems to be the sole
+object worthy of your attention. Would it be taking a liberty to ask
+what science it treats of?”
+
+The philosopher kept his eyes lowered as he replied:
+
+“The subject of this book is beyond the comprehension of ladies.”
+
+This rebuff excited more than ever the curiosity of the young Arabian
+woman. She put out the prettiest little foot that had ever left its
+fleeting imprint on the shifting sands of the desert. The philosopher
+was perturbed, and his eyes were too powerfully tempted to resist
+wandering from these feet, which betokened so much, up to the bosom,
+which was still more ravishingly fair; and soon the flame of his
+admiring glance was mingled with the fire that sparkled in the pupils
+of the young Asiatic. She asked again the name of the book in tones so
+sweet that the philosopher yielded to the fascination, and replied:
+
+“I am the author of the book; but the substance of it is not mine: it
+contains an account of all the ruses and stratagems of women.”
+
+“What! Absolutely all?” said the daughter of the desert.
+
+“Yes, all! And it has been only by a constant study of womankind that I
+have come to regard them without fear.”
+
+“Ah!” said the young Arabian girl, lowering the long lashes of her
+white eyelids.
+
+Then, suddenly darting the keenest of her glances at the pretended
+sage, she made him in one instant forget the book and all its contents.
+And now our philosopher was changed to the most passionate of men.
+Thinking he saw in the bearing of the young woman a faint trace of
+coquetry, the stranger was emboldened to make an avowal. How could he
+resist doing so? The sky was blue, the sand blazed in the distance like
+a scimitar of gold, the wind of the desert breathed love, and the woman
+of Arabia seemed to reflect all the fire with which she was surrounded;
+her piercing eyes were suffused with a mist; and by a slight nod of the
+head she seemed to make the luminous atmosphere undulate, as she
+consented to listen to the stranger’s words of love. The sage was
+intoxicated with delirious hopes, when the young woman, hearing in the
+distance the gallop of a horse which seemed to fly, exclaimed:
+
+“We are lost! My husband is sure to catch us. He is jealous as a tiger,
+and more pitiless than one. In the name of the prophet, if you love
+your life, conceal yourself in this chest!”
+
+The author, frightened out of his wits, seeing no other way of getting
+out of a terrible fix, jumped into the box, and crouched down there.
+The woman closed down the lid, locked it, and took the key. She ran to
+meet her husband, and after some caresses which put him into a good
+humor, she said:
+
+“I must relate to you a very singular adventure I have just had.”
+
+“I am listening, my gazelle,” replied the Arab, who sat down on a rug
+and crossed his feet after the Oriental manner.
+
+“There arrived here to-day a kind of philosopher,” she began, “he
+professes to have compiled a book which describes all the wiles of
+which my sex is capable; and then this sham sage made love to me.”
+
+“Well, go on!” cried the Arab.
+
+“I listened to his avowal. He was young, ardent—and you came just in
+time to save my tottering virtue.”
+
+The Arab leaped to his feet like a lion, and drew his scimitar with a
+shout of fury. The philosopher heard all from the depths of the chest
+and consigned to Hades his book, and all the men and women of Arabia
+Petraea.
+
+“Fatima!” cried the husband, “if you would save your life, answer me
+—Where is the traitor?”
+
+Terrified at the tempest which she had roused, Fatima threw herself at
+her husband’s feet, and trembling beneath the point of his sword, she
+pointed out the chest with a prompt though timid glance of her eye.
+Then she rose to her feet, as if in shame, and taking the key from her
+girdle presented it to the jealous Arab; but, just as he was about to
+open the chest, the sly creature burst into a peal of laughter. Faroun
+stopped with a puzzled expression, and looked at his wife in amazement.
+
+“So I shall have my fine chain of gold, after all!” she cried, dancing
+for joy. “You have lost the _Diadeste_. Be more mindful next time.”
+
+The husband, thunderstruck, let fall the key, and offered her the
+longed-for chain on bended knee, and promised to bring to his darling
+Fatima all the jewels brought by the caravan in a year, if she would
+refrain from winning the _Diadeste_ by such cruel stratagems. Then, as
+he was an Arab, and did not like forfeiting a chain of gold, although
+his wife had fairly won it, he mounted his horse again, and galloped
+off, to complain at his will, in the desert, for he loved Fatima too
+well to let her see his annoyance. The young woman then drew forth the
+philosopher from the chest, and gravely said to him, “Do not forget,
+Master Doctor, to put this feminine trick into your collection.”
+
+“Madame,” said I to the duchess, “I understand! If I marry, I am bound
+to be unexpectedly outwitted by some infernal trick or other; but I
+shall in that case, you may be quite sure, furnish a model household
+for the admiration of my contemporaries.”
+
+PARIS, 1824-29.
+
+
+
+
+PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+BY
+
+HONORÉ DE BALZAC
+
+PART FIRST
+
+PREFACE
+
+IN WHICH EVERY ONE WILL FIND HIS OWN IMPRESSIONS OF MARRIAGE.
+
+
+A friend, in speaking to you of a young woman, says: “Good family, well
+bred, pretty, and three hundred thousand in her own right.” You have
+expressed a desire to meet this charming creature.
+
+Usually, chance interviews are premeditated. And you speak with this
+object, who has now become very timid.
+
+YOU.—“A delightful evening!”
+
+SHE.—“Oh! yes, sir.”
+
+You are allowed to become the suitor of this young person.
+
+THE MOTHER-IN-LAW (to the intended groom).—“You can’t imagine how
+susceptible the dear girl is of attachment.”
+
+Meanwhile there is a delicate pecuniary question to be discussed by the
+two families.
+
+YOUR FATHER (to the mother-in-law).—“My property is valued at five
+hundred thousand francs, my dear madame!”
+
+YOUR FUTURE MOTHER-IN-LAW.—“And our house, my dear sir, is on a corner
+lot.”
+
+A contract follows, drawn up by two hideous notaries, a small one, and
+a big one.
+
+Then the two families judge it necessary to convoy you to the civil
+magistrate’s and to the church, before conducting the bride to her
+chamber.
+
+Then what? . . . . . Why, then come a crowd of petty unforeseen
+troubles, like the following:
+
+PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+THE UNKINDEST CUT OF ALL.
+
+Is it a petty or a profound trouble? I knew not; it is profound for
+your sons-in-law or daughters-in-law, but exceedingly petty for you.
+
+“Petty! You must be joking; why, a child costs terribly dear!” exclaims
+a ten-times-too-happy husband, at the baptism of his eleventh, called
+the little last newcomer,—a phrase with which women beguile their
+families.
+
+“What trouble is this?” you ask me. Well! this is, like many petty
+troubles of married life, a blessing for some one.
+
+You have, four months since, married off your daughter, whom we will
+call by the sweet name of CAROLINE, and whom we will make the type of
+all wives. Caroline is, like all other young ladies, very charming, and
+you have found for her a husband who is either a lawyer, a captain, an
+engineer, a judge, or perhaps a young viscount. But he is more likely
+to be what sensible families must seek,—the ideal of their desires—the
+only son of a rich landed proprietor. (See the _Preface_.)
+
+This phoenix we will call ADOLPHE, whatever may be his position in the
+world, his age, and the color of his hair.
+
+The lawyer, the captain, the engineer, the judge, in short, the
+son-in-law, Adolphe, and his family, have seen in Miss Caroline:
+
+I.—Miss Caroline;
+
+II.—The only daughter of your wife and you.
+
+Here, as in the Chamber of Deputies, we are compelled to call for a
+division of the house:
+
+1.—As to your wife.
+
+Your wife is to inherit the property of a maternal uncle, a gouty old
+fellow whom she humors, nurses, caresses, and muffles up; to say
+nothing of her father’s fortune. Caroline has always adored her uncle,
+—her uncle who trotted her on his knee, her uncle who—her uncle
+whom—her uncle, in short,—whose property is estimated at two hundred
+thousand.
+
+Further, your wife is well preserved, though her age has been the
+subject of mature reflection on the part of your son-in-law’s
+grandparents and other ancestors. After many skirmishes between the
+mothers-in-law, they have at last confided to each other the little
+secrets peculiar to women of ripe years.
+
+“How is it with you, my dear madame?”
+
+“I, thank heaven, have passed the period; and you?”
+
+“I really hope I have, too!” says your wife.
+
+“You can marry Caroline,” says Adolphe’s mother to your future
+son-in-law; “Caroline will be the sole heiress of her mother, of her
+uncle, and her grandfather.”
+
+2.—As to yourself.
+
+You are also the heir of your maternal grandfather, a good old man
+whose possessions will surely fall to you, for he has grown imbecile,
+and is therefore incapable of making a will.
+
+You are an amiable man, but you have been very dissipated in your
+youth. Besides, you are fifty-nine years old, and your head is bald,
+resembling a bare knee in the middle of a gray wig.
+
+III.—A dowry of three hundred thousand.
+
+IV.—Caroline’s only sister, a little dunce of twelve, a sickly child,
+who bids fair to fill an early grave.
+
+V.—Your own fortune, father-in-law (in certain kinds of society they
+say _papa father-in-law_) yielding an income of twenty thousand, and
+which will soon be increased by an inheritance.
+
+VI.—Your wife’s fortune, which will be increased by two inheritances
+—from her uncle and her grandfather. In all, thus:
+
+Three inheritances and interest,      750,000
+Your fortune,                         250,000
+Your wife’s fortune,                  250,000
+_________
+
+Total,                          1,250,000
+
+which surely cannot take wing!
+
+Such is the autopsy of all those brilliant marriages that conduct their
+processions of dancers and eaters, in white gloves, flowering at the
+button-hole, with bouquets of orange flowers, furbelows, veils, coaches
+and coach-drivers, from the magistrate’s to the church, from the church
+to the banquet, from the banquet to the dance, from the dance to the
+nuptial chamber, to the music of the orchestra and the accompaniment of
+the immemorial pleasantries uttered by relics of dandies, for are there
+not, here and there in society, relics of dandies, as there are relics
+of English horses? To be sure, and such is the osteology of the most
+amorous intent.
+
+The majority of the relatives have had a word to say about this
+marriage.
+
+Those on the side of the bridegroom:
+
+“Adolphe has made a good thing of it.”
+
+Those on the side of the bride:
+
+“Caroline has made a splendid match. Adolphe is an only son, and will
+have an income of sixty thousand, _some day or other_!”
+
+Some time afterwards, the happy judge, the happy engineer, the happy
+captain, the happy lawyer, the happy only son of a rich landed
+proprietor, in short Adolphe, comes to dine with you, accompanied by
+his family.
+
+Your daughter Caroline is exceedingly proud of the somewhat rounded
+form of her waist. All women display an innocent artfulness, the first
+time they find themselves facing motherhood. Like a soldier who makes a
+brilliant toilet for his first battle, they love to play the pale, the
+suffering; they rise in a certain manner, and walk with the prettiest
+affectation. While yet flowers, they bear a fruit; they enjoy their
+maternity by anticipation. All those little ways are exceedingly
+charming—the first time.
+
+Your wife, now the mother-in-law of Adolphe, subjects herself to the
+pressure of tight corsets. When her daughter laughs, she weeps; when
+Caroline wishes her happiness public, she tries to conceal hers. After
+dinner, the discerning eye of the co-mother-in-law divines the work of
+darkness.
+
+Your wife also is an expectant mother! The news spreads like lightning,
+and your oldest college friend says to you laughingly: “Ah! so you are
+trying to increase the population again!”
+
+You have some hope in a consultation that is to take place to-morrow.
+You, kind-hearted man that you are, you turn red, you hope it is merely
+the dropsy; but the doctors confirm the arrival of a _little last one_!
+
+In such circumstances some timorous husbands go to the country or make
+a journey to Italy. In short, a strange confusion reigns in your
+household; both you and your wife are in a false position.
+
+“Why, you old rogue, you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” says a
+friend to you on the Boulevard.
+
+“Well! do as much if you can,” is your angry retort.
+
+“It’s as bad as being robbed on the highway!” says your son-in-law’s
+family. “Robbed on the highway” is a flattering expression for the
+mother-in-law.
+
+The family hopes that the child which divides the expected fortune in
+three parts, will be, like all old men’s children, scrofulous, feeble,
+an abortion. Will it be likely to live? The family awaits the delivery
+of your wife with an anxiety like that which agitated the house of
+Orleans during the confinement of the Duchess de Berri: a second son
+would secure the throne to the younger branch without the onerous
+conditions of July; Henry V would easily seize the crown. From that
+moment the house of Orleans was obliged to play double or quits: the
+event gave them the game.
+
+The mother and the daughter are put to bed nine days apart.
+
+Caroline’s first child is a pale, cadaverous little girl that will not
+live.
+
+Her mother’s last child is a splendid boy, weighing twelve pounds, with
+two teeth and luxuriant hair.
+
+For sixteen years you have desired a son. This conjugal annoyance is
+the only one that makes you beside yourself with joy. For your
+rejuvenated wife has attained what must be called the _Indian Summer_
+of women; she nurses, she has a full breast of milk! Her complexion is
+fresh, her color is pure pink and white. In her forty-second year, she
+affects the young woman, buys little baby stockings, walks about
+followed by a nurse, embroiders caps and tries on the cunningest
+headdresses. Alexandrine has resolved to instruct her daughter by her
+example; she is delightful and happy. And yet this is a trouble, a
+petty one for you, a serious one for your son-in-law. This annoyance is
+of the two sexes, it is common to you and your wife. In short, in this
+instance, your paternity renders you all the more proud from the fact
+that it is incontestable, my dear sir!
+
+REVELATIONS.
+
+Generally speaking, a young woman does not exhibit her true character
+till she has been married two or three years. She hides her faults,
+without intending it, in the midst of her first joys, of her first
+parties of pleasure. She goes into society to dance, she visits her
+relatives to show you off, she journeys on with an escort of love’s
+first wiles; she is gradually transformed from girlhood to womanhood.
+Then she becomes mother and nurse, and in this situation, full of
+charming pangs, that leaves neither a word nor a moment for
+observation, such are its multiplied cares, it is impossible to judge
+of a woman. You require, then, three or four years of intimate life
+before you discover an exceedingly melancholy fact, one that gives you
+cause for constant terror.
+
+Your wife, the young lady in whom the first pleasures of life and love
+supplied the place of grace and wit, so arch, so animated, so
+vivacious, whose least movements spoke with delicious eloquence, has
+cast off, slowly, one by one, her natural artifices. At last you
+perceive the truth! You try to disbelieve it, you think yourself
+deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she can
+neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are
+frightened. You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling
+through the thorny paths, where you must perforce leave your
+self-esteem in tatters.
+
+You have already been annoyed several times by replies that, in
+society, were politely received: people have held their tongues instead
+of smiling; but you were certain that after your departure the women
+looked at each other and said: “Did you hear Madame Adolphe?”
+
+“Your little woman, she is—”
+
+“A regular cabbage-head.”
+
+“How could he, who is certainly a man of sense, choose—?”
+
+“He should educate, teach his wife, or make her hold her tongue.”
+
+AXIOMS.
+
+Axiom.—In our system of civilization a man is entirely responsible for
+his wife.
+
+Axiom.—The husband does not mould the wife.
+
+Caroline has one day obstinately maintained, at the house of Madame de
+Fischtaminel, a very distinguished lady, that her little last one
+resembled neither its father nor its mother, but looked like a certain
+friend of the family. She perhaps enlightens Monsieur de Fischtaminel,
+and overthrows the labors of three years, by tearing down the
+scaffolding of Madame de Fischtaminel’s assertions, who, after this
+visit, will treat you will coolness, suspecting, as she does, that you
+have been making indiscreet remarks to your wife.
+
+On another occasion, Caroline, after having conversed with a writer
+about his works, counsels the poet, who is already a prolific author,
+to try to write something likely to live. Sometimes she complains of
+the slow attendance at the tables of people who have but one servant
+and have put themselves to great trouble to receive her. Sometimes she
+speaks ill of widows who marry again, before Madame Deschars who has
+married a third time, and on this occasion, an ex-notary,
+Nicolas-Jean-Jerome-Nepomucene-Ange-Marie-Victor-Joseph Deschars, a
+friend of your father’s.
+
+In short, you are no longer yourself when you are in society with your
+wife. Like a man who is riding a skittish horse and glares straight
+between the beast’s two ears, you are absorbed by the attention with
+which you listen to your Caroline.
+
+In order to compensate herself for the silence to which young ladies
+are condemned, Caroline talks; or rather babbles. She wants to make a
+sensation, and she does make a sensation; nothing stops her. She
+addresses the most eminent men, the most celebrated women. She
+introduces herself, and puts you on the rack. Going into society is
+going to the stake.
+
+She begins to think you are cross-grained, moody. The fact is, you are
+watching her, that’s all! In short, you keep her within a small circle
+of friends, for she has already embroiled you with people on whom your
+interests depended.
+
+How many times have you recoiled from the necessity of a remonstrance,
+in the morning, on awakening, when you had put her in a good humor for
+listening! A woman rarely listens. How many times have you recoiled
+from the burthen of your imperious obligations!
+
+The conclusion of your ministerial communication can be no other than:
+“You have no sense.” You foresee the effect of your first lesson.
+Caroline will say to herself: “Ah I have no sense! Haven’t I though?”
+
+No woman ever takes this in good part. Both of you must draw the sword
+and throw away the scabbard. Six weeks after, Caroline may prove to you
+that she has quite sense enough to _minotaurize_ you without your
+perceiving it.
+
+Frightened at such a prospect, you make use of all the eloquent phrases
+to gild this pill. In short, you find the means of flattering
+Caroline’s various self-loves, for:
+
+Axiom.—A married woman has several self-loves.
+
+You say that you are her best friend, the only one well situated to
+enlighten her; the more careful you are, the more watchful and puzzled
+she is. At this moment she has plenty of sense.
+
+You ask your dear Caroline, whose waist you clasp, how she, who is so
+brilliant when alone with you, who retorts so charmingly (you remind
+her of sallies that she has never made, which you put in her mouth,
+and, which she smilingly accepts), how she can say this, that, and the
+other, in society. She is, doubtless, like many ladies, timid in
+company.
+
+“I know,” you say, “many very distinguished men who are just the same.”
+
+You cite the case of some who are admirable tea-party oracles, but who
+cannot utter half a dozen sentences in the tribune. Caroline should
+keep watch over herself; you vaunt silence as the surest method of
+being witty. In society, a good listener is highly prized.
+
+You have broken the ice, though you have not even scratched its glossy
+surface: you have placed your hand upon the croup of the most ferocious
+and savage, the most wakeful and clear-sighted, the most restless, the
+swiftest, the most jealous, the most ardent and violent, the simplest
+and most elegant, the most unreasonable, the most watchful chimera of
+the moral world—THE VANITY OF A WOMAN!
+
+Caroline clasps you in her arms with a saintly embrace, thanks you for
+your advice, and loves you the more for it; she wishes to be beholden
+to you for everything, even for her intellect; she may be a dunce, but,
+what is better than saying fine things, she knows how to do them! But
+she desires also to be your pride! It is not a question of taste in
+dress, of elegance and beauty; she wishes to make you proud of her
+intelligence. You are the luckiest of men in having successfully
+managed to escape from this first dangerous pass in conjugal life.
+
+“We are going this evening to Madame Deschars’, where they never know
+what to do to amuse themselves; they play all sorts of forfeit games on
+account of a troop of young women and girls there; you shall see!” she
+says.
+
+You are so happy at this turn of affairs, that you hum airs and
+carelessly chew bits of straw and thread, while still in your shirt and
+drawers. You are like a hare frisking on a flowering dew-perfumed
+meadow. You leave off your morning gown till the last extremity, when
+breakfast is on the table. During the day, if you meet a friend and he
+happens to speak of women, you defend them; you consider women
+charming, delicious, there is something divine about them.
+
+How often are our opinions dictated to us by the unknown events of our
+life!
+
+You take your wife to Madame Deschars’. Madame Deschars is a mother and
+is exceedingly devout. You never see any newspapers at her house: she
+keeps watch over her daughters by three different husbands, and keeps
+them all the more closely from the fact that she herself has, it is
+said, some little things to reproach herself with during the career of
+her two former lords. At her house, no one dares risk a jest.
+Everything there is white and pink and perfumed with sanctity, as at
+the houses of widows who are approaching the confines of their third
+youth. It seems as if every day were Sunday there.
+
+You, a young husband, join the juvenile society of young women and
+girls, misses and young people, in the chamber of Madame Deschars. The
+serious people, politicians, whist-players, and tea-drinkers, are in
+the parlor.
+
+In Madame Deschars’ room they are playing a game which consists in
+hitting upon words with several meanings, to fit the answers that each
+player is to make to the following questions:
+
+How do you like it?
+
+What do you do with it?
+
+Where do you put it?
+
+Your turn comes to guess the word, you go into the parlor, take part in
+a discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They have
+selected a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical replies.
+Everybody knows that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads, the best
+way is to choose a very ordinary word, and to invent phrases that will
+send the parlor Oedipus a thousand leagues from each of his previous
+thoughts.
+
+This game is a poor substitute for lansquenet or dice, but it is not
+very expensive.
+
+The word MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion.
+Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among
+other acceptations, has that of _mal_ [evil], a substantive that
+signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of _mal_ [pain,
+disease, complaint], a substantive that enters into a thousand
+pathological expressions; then _malle_ [a mail-bag], and finally
+_malle_ [a trunk], that box of various forms, covered with all kinds of
+skin, made of every sort of leather, with handles, that journeys
+rapidly, for it serves to carry travelling effects in, as a man of
+Delille’s school would say.
+
+For you, a man of some sharpness, the Sphinx displays his wiles; he
+spreads his wings and folds them up again; he shows you his lion’s
+paws, his woman’s neck, his horse’s loins, and his intellectual head;
+he shakes his sacred fillets, he strikes an attitude and runs away, he
+comes and goes, and sweeps the place with his terrible equine tail; he
+shows his shining claws, and draws them in; he smiles, frisks, and
+murmurs. He puts on the looks of a joyous child and those of a matron;
+he is, above all, there to make fun of you.
+
+You ask the group collectively, “How do you like it?”
+
+“I like it for love’s sake,” says one.
+
+“I like it regular,” says another.
+
+“I like it with a long mane.”
+
+“I like it with a spring lock.”
+
+“I like it unmasked.”
+
+“I like it on horseback.”
+
+“I like it as coming from God,” says Madame Deschars.
+
+“How do you like it?” you say to your wife.
+
+“I like it legitimate.”
+
+This response of your wife is not understood, and sends you a journey
+into the constellated fields of the infinite, where the mind, dazzled
+by the multitude of creations, finds it impossible to make a choice.
+
+“Where do you put it?”
+
+“In a carriage.”
+
+“In a garret.”
+
+“In a steamboat.”
+
+“In the closet.”
+
+“On a cart.”
+
+“In prison.”
+
+“In the ears.”
+
+“In a shop.”
+
+Your wife says to you last of all: “In bed.”
+
+You were on the point of guessing it, but you know no word that fits
+this answer, Madame Deschars not being likely to have allowed anything
+improper.
+
+“What do you do with it?”
+
+“I make it my sole happiness,” says your wife, after the answers of all
+the rest, who have sent you spinning through a whole world of
+linguistic suppositions.
+
+This response strikes everybody, and you especially; so you persist in
+seeking the meaning of it. You think of the bottle of hot water that
+your wife has put to her feet when it is cold,—of the warming pan,
+above all! Now of her night-cap,—of her handkerchief,—of her curling
+paper,—of the hem of her chemise,—of her embroidery,—of her flannel
+jacket,—of your bandanna,—of the pillow.
+
+In short, as the greatest pleasure of the respondents is to see their
+Oedipus mystified, as each word guessed by you throws them into fits of
+laughter, superior men, perceiving no word that will fit all the
+explanations, will sooner give it up than make three unsuccessful
+attempts. According to the law of this innocent game you are condemned
+to return to the parlor after leaving a forfeit; but you are so
+exceedingly puzzled by your wife’s answers, that you ask what the word
+was.
+
+“Mal,” exclaims a young miss.
+
+You comprehend everything but your wife’s replies: she has not played
+the game. Neither Madame Deschars, nor any one of the young women
+understand. She has cheated. You revolt, there is an insurrection among
+the girls and young women. They seek and are puzzled. You want an
+explanation, and every one participates in your desire.
+
+“In what sense did you understand the word, my dear?” you say to
+Caroline.
+
+“Why, _male_!” [male.]
+
+Madame Deschars bites her lips and manifests the greatest displeasure;
+the young women blush and drop their eyes; the little girls open
+theirs, nudge each other and prick up their ears. Your feet are glued
+to the carpet, and you have so much salt in your throat that you
+believe in a repetition of the event which delivered Lot from his wife.
+
+You see an infernal life before you; society is out of the question.
+
+To remain at home with this triumphant stupidity is equivalent to
+condemnation to the state’s prison.
+
+Axiom.—Moral tortures exceed physical sufferings by all the difference
+which exists between the soul and the body.
+
+THE ATTENTIONS OF A WIFE.
+
+Among the keenest pleasures of bachelor life, every man reckons the
+independence of his getting up. The fancies of the morning compensate
+for the glooms of evening. A bachelor turns over and over in his bed:
+he is free to gape loud enough to justify apprehensions of murder, and
+to scream at a pitch authorizing the suspicion of joys untold. He can
+forget his oaths of the day before, let the fire burn upon the hearth
+and the candle sink to its socket,—in short, go to sleep again in spite
+of pressing work. He can curse the expectant boots which stand holding
+their black mouths open at him and pricking up their ears. He can
+pretend not to see the steel hooks which glitter in a sunbeam which has
+stolen through the curtains, can disregard the sonorous summons of the
+obstinate clock, can bury himself in a soft place, saying: “Yes, I was
+in a hurry, yesterday, but am so no longer to-day. Yesterday was a
+dotard. To-day is a sage: between them stands the night which brings
+wisdom, the night which gives light. I ought to go, I ought to do it, I
+promised I would—I am weak, I know. But how can I resist the downy
+creases of my bed? My feet feel flaccid, I think I must be sick, I am
+too happy just here. I long to see the ethereal horizon of my dreams
+again, those women without claws, those winged beings and their
+obliging ways. In short, I have found the grain of salt to put upon the
+tail of that bird that was always flying away: the coquette’s feet are
+caught in the line. I have her now—”
+
+Your servant, meantime, reads your newspaper, half-opens your letters,
+and leaves you to yourself. And you go to sleep again, lulled by the
+rumbling of the morning wagons. Those terrible, vexatious, quivering
+teams, laden with meat, those trucks with big tin teats bursting with
+milk, though they make a clatter most infernal and even crush the
+paving stones, seem to you to glide over cotton, and vaguely remind you
+of the orchestra of Napoleon Musard. Though your house trembles in all
+its timbers and shakes upon its keel, you think yourself a sailor
+cradled by a zephyr.
+
+You alone have the right to bring these joys to an end by throwing away
+your night-cap as you twist up your napkin after dinner, and by sitting
+up in bed. Then you take yourself to task with such reproaches as
+these: “Ah, mercy on me, I must get up!” “Early to bed and early to
+rise, makes a man healthy—!” “Get up, lazy bones!”
+
+All this time you remain perfectly tranquil. You look round your
+chamber, you collect your wits together. Finally, you emerge from the
+bed, spontaneously! Courageously! of your own accord! You go to the
+fireplace, you consult the most obliging of timepieces, you utter
+hopeful sentences thus couched: “Whatshisname is a lazy creature, I
+guess I shall find him in. I’ll run. I’ll catch him if he’s gone. He’s
+sure to wait for me. There is a quarter of an hour’s grace in all
+appointments, even between debtor and creditor.”
+
+You put on your boots with fury, you dress yourself as if you were
+afraid of being caught half-dressed, you have the delight of being in a
+hurry, you call your buttons into action, you finally go out like a
+conqueror, whistling, brandishing your cane, pricking up your ears and
+breaking into a canter.
+
+After all, you say to yourself, you are responsible to no one, you are
+your own master!
+
+But you, poor married man, you were stupid enough to say to your wife,
+“To-morrow, my dear” (sometimes she knows it two days beforehand), “I
+have got to get up early.” Unfortunate Adolphe, you have especially
+proved the importance of this appointment: “It’s to—and to—and above
+all to—in short to—”
+
+Two hours before dawn, Caroline wakes you up gently and says to you
+softly: “Adolphy dear, Adolphy love!”
+
+“What’s the matter? Fire?”
+
+“No, go to sleep again, I’ve made a mistake; but the hour hand was on
+it, any way! It’s only four, you can sleep two hours more.”
+
+Is not telling a man, “You’ve only got two hours to sleep,” the same
+thing, on a small scale, as saying to a criminal, “It’s five in the
+morning, the ceremony will be performed at half-past seven”? Such sleep
+is troubled by an idea dressed in grey and furnished with wings, which
+comes and flaps, like a bat, upon the windows of your brain.
+
+A woman in a case like this is as exact as a devil coming to claim a
+soul he has purchased. When the clock strikes five, your wife’s voice,
+too well known, alas! resounds in your ear; she accompanies the stroke,
+and says with an atrocious calmness, “Adolphe, it’s five o’clock, get
+up, dear.”
+
+“Ye-e-e-s, ah-h-h-h!”
+
+“Adolphe, you’ll be late for your business, you said so yourself.”
+
+“Ah-h-h-h, ye-e-e-e-s.” You turn over in despair.
+
+“Come, come, love. I got everything ready last night; now you must, my
+dear; do you want to miss him? There, up, I say; it’s broad daylight.”
+
+Caroline throws off the blankets and gets up: she wants to show you
+that _she_ can rise without making a fuss. She opens the blinds, she
+lets in the sun, the morning air, the noise of the street, and then
+comes back.
+
+“Why, Adolphe, you _must_ get up! Who ever would have supposed you had
+no energy! But it’s just like you men! I am only a poor, weak woman,
+but when I say a thing, I do it.”
+
+You get up grumbling, execrating the sacrament of marriage. There is
+not the slightest merit in your heroism; it wasn’t you, but your wife,
+that got up. Caroline gets you everything you want with provoking
+promptitude; she foresees everything, she gives you a muffler in
+winter, a blue-striped cambric shirt in summer, she treats you like a
+child; you are still asleep, she dresses you and has all the trouble.
+She finally thrusts you out of doors. Without her nothing would go
+straight! She calls you back to give you a paper, a pocketbook, you had
+forgotten. You don’t think of anything, she thinks of everything!
+
+You return five hours afterwards to breakfast, between eleven and noon.
+The chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the landing,
+talking with somebody’s valet: she runs in on hearing or seeing you.
+Your servant is laying the cloth in a most leisurely style, stopping to
+look out of the window or to lounge, and coming and going like a person
+who knows he has plenty of time. You ask for your wife, supposing that
+she is up and dressed.
+
+“Madame is still in bed,” says the maid.
+
+You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep. She had been awake
+all night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is
+quite hungry now.
+
+You are the cause of all these disarrangements. If breakfast is not
+ready, she says it’s because you went out. If she is not dressed, and
+if everything is in disorder, it’s all your fault. For everything which
+goes awry she has this answer: “Well, you would get up so early!” “He
+would get up so early!” is the universal reason. She makes you go to
+bed early, because you got up early. She can do nothing all day,
+because you would get up so unusually early.
+
+Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, “Without me, you would
+never get up!” To her friends she says, “My husband get up! If it
+weren’t for me, he never _would_ get up!”
+
+To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, “A graceful
+compliment to you, madame!” This slightly indelicate comment puts an
+end to her boasts.
+
+This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone
+in the bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no
+confidant but yourself: and it often seems to you a question whether
+the inconveniences of the married state do not exceed its advantages.
+
+SMALL VEXATIONS.
+
+You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the
+bachelor to the heavy andante of the father of a family.
+
+Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the
+polished shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving his
+glistening croup under the quadruple network of the reins and ribbons
+that you so skillfully manage with what grace and elegance the Champs
+Elysees can bear witness—you drive a good solid Norman horse with a
+steady, family gait.
+
+You have learned what paternal patience is, and you let no opportunity
+slip of proving it. Your countenance, therefore, is serious.
+
+By your side is a domestic, evidently for two purposes like the
+carriage. The vehicle is four-wheeled and hung upon English springs: it
+is corpulent and resembles a Rouen scow: it has glass windows, and an
+infinity of economical arrangements. It is a barouche in fine weather,
+and a brougham when it rains. It is apparently light, but, when six
+persons are in it, it is heavy and tires out your only horse.
+
+On the back seat, spread out like flowers, is your young wife in full
+bloom, with her mother, a big marshmallow with a great many leaves.
+These two flowers of the female species twitteringly talk of you,
+though the noise of the wheels and your attention to the horse, joined
+to your fatherly caution, prevent you from hearing what they say.
+
+On the front seat, there is a nice tidy nurse holding a little girl in
+her lap: by her side is a boy in a red plaited shirt, who is
+continually leaning out of the carriage and climbing upon the cushions,
+and who has a thousand times drawn down upon himself those declarations
+of every mother, which he knows to be threats and nothing else: “Be a
+good boy, Adolphe, or else—” “I declare I’ll never bring you again, so
+there!”
+
+His mamma is secretly tired to death of this noisy little boy: he has
+provoked her twenty times, and twenty times the face of the little girl
+asleep has calmed her.
+
+“I am his mother,” she says to herself. And so she finally manages to
+keep her little Adolphe quiet.
+
+You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into
+execution. You left your home in the morning, all the opposite
+neighbors having come to their windows, envying you the privilege which
+your means give you of going to the country and coming back again
+without undergoing the miseries of a public conveyance. So you have
+dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to Vincennes, from
+Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from Charenton
+opposite some island or other which struck your wife and mother-in-law
+as being prettier than all the landscapes through which you had driven
+them.
+
+“Let’s go to Maison’s!” somebody exclaims.
+
+So you go to Maison’s, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of
+the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The
+horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled,
+and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones
+which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened by the
+sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and which, no
+less than the dust, has made him gummy, sticky and shaggy. The horse
+looks like a wrathy porcupine: you are afraid he will be foundered, and
+you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way that he perfectly
+understands, for he moves his head about like an omnibus horse, tired
+of his deplorable existence.
+
+You think a good deal of this horse; your consider him an excellent one
+and he cost you twelve hundred francs. When a man has the honor of
+being the father of a family, he thinks as much of twelve hundred
+francs as you think of this horse. You see at once the frightful amount
+of your extra expenses, in case Coco should have to lie by. For two
+days you will have to take hackney coaches to go to your business. You
+wife will pout if she can’t go out: but she will go out, and take a
+carriage. The horse will cause the purchase of numerous extras, which
+you will find in your coachman’s bill,—your only coachman, a model
+coachman, whom you watch as you do a model anybody.
+
+To these thoughts you give expression in the gentle movement of the
+whip as it falls upon the animal’s ribs, up to his knees in the black
+dust which lines the road in front of La Verrerie.
+
+At this moment, little Adolphe, who doesn’t know what to do in this
+rolling box, has sadly twisted himself up into a corner, and his
+grandmother anxiously asks him, “What is the matter?”
+
+“I’m hungry,” says the child.
+
+“He’s hungry,” says the mother to her daughter.
+
+“And why shouldn’t he be hungry? It is half-past five, we are not at
+the barrier, and we started at two!”
+
+“Your husband might have treated us to dinner in the country.”
+
+“He’d rather make his horse go a couple of leagues further, and get
+back to the house.”
+
+“The cook might have had the day to herself. But Adolphe is right,
+after all: it’s cheaper to dine at home,” adds the mother-in-law.
+
+“Adolphe,” exclaims your wife, stimulated by the word “cheaper,” “we go
+so slow that I shall be seasick, and you keep driving right in this
+nasty dust. What are you thinking of? My gown and hat will be ruined!”
+
+“Would you rather ruin the horse?” you ask, with the air of a man who
+can’t be answered.
+
+“Oh, no matter for your horse; just think of your son who is dying of
+hunger: he hasn’t tasted a thing for seven hours. Whip up your old
+horse! One would really think you cared more for your nag than for your
+child!”
+
+You dare not give your horse a single crack with the whip, for he might
+still have vigor enough left to break into a gallop and run away.
+
+“No, Adolphe tries to vex me, he’s going slower,” says the young wife
+to her mother. “My dear, go as slow as you like. But I know you’ll say
+I am extravagant when you see me buying another hat.”
+
+Upon this you utter a series of remarks which are lost in the racket
+made by the wheels.
+
+“What’s the use of replying with reasons that haven’t got an ounce of
+common-sense?” cries Caroline.
+
+You talk, turning your face to the carriage and then turning back to
+the horse, to avoid an accident.
+
+“That’s right, run against somebody and tip us over, do, you’ll be rid
+of us. Adolphe, your son is dying of hunger. See how pale he is!”
+
+“But Caroline,” puts in the mother-in-law, “he’s doing the best he
+can.”
+
+Nothing annoys you so much as to have your mother-in-law take your
+part. She is a hypocrite and is delighted to see you quarreling with
+her daughter. Gently and with infinite precaution she throws oil on the
+fire.
+
+When you arrive at the barrier, your wife is mute. She says not a word,
+she sits with her arms crossed, and will not look at you. You have
+neither soul, heart, nor sentiment. No one but you could have invented
+such a party of pleasure. If you are unfortunate enough to remind
+Caroline that it was she who insisted on the excursion, that morning,
+for her children’s sake, and in behalf of her milk—she nurses the
+baby—you will be overwhelmed by an avalanche of frigid and stinging
+reproaches.
+
+You bear it all so as “not to turn the milk of a nursing mother, for
+whose sake you must overlook some little things,” so your atrocious
+mother-in-law whispers in your ear.
+
+All the furies of Orestes are rankling in your heart.
+
+In reply to the sacramental words pronounced by the officer of the
+customs, “Have you anything to declare?” your wife says, “I declare a
+great deal of ill-humor and dust.”
+
+She laughs, the officer laughs, and you feel a desire to tip your
+family into the Seine.
+
+Unluckily for you, you suddenly remember the joyous and perverse young
+woman who wore a pink bonnet and who made merry in your tilbury six
+years before, as you passed this spot on your way to the chop-house on
+the river’s bank. What a reminiscence! Was Madame Schontz anxious about
+babies, about her bonnet, the lace of which was torn to pieces in the
+bushes? No, she had no care for anything whatever, not even for her
+dignity, for she shocked the rustic police of Vincennes by the somewhat
+daring freedom of her style of dancing.
+
+You return home, you have frantically hurried your Norman horse, and
+have neither prevented an indisposition of the animal, nor an
+indisposition of your wife.
+
+That evening, Caroline has very little milk. If the baby cries and if
+your head is split in consequence, it is all your fault, as you
+preferred the health of your horse to that of your son who was dying of
+hunger, and of your daughter whose supper has disappeared in a
+discussion in which your wife was right, _as she always is_.
+
+“Well, well,” she says, “men are not mothers!”
+
+As you leave the chamber, you hear your mother-in-law consoling her
+daughter by these terrible words: “Come, be calm, Caroline: that’s the
+way with them all: they are a selfish lot: your father was just like
+that!”
+
+THE ULTIMATUM.
+
+It is eight o’clock; you make your appearance in the bedroom of your
+wife. There is a brilliant light. The chambermaid and the cook hover
+lightly about. The furniture is covered with dresses and flowers tried
+on and laid aside.
+
+The hair-dresser is there, an artist par excellence, a sovereign
+authority, at once nobody and everything. You hear the other domestics
+going and coming: orders are given and recalled, errands are well or
+ill performed. The disorder is at its height. This chamber is a studio
+from whence to issue a parlor Venus.
+
+Your wife desires to be the fairest at the ball which you are to
+attend. Is it still for your sake, or only for herself, or is it for
+somebody else? Serious questions these.
+
+The idea does not even occur to you.
+
+You are squeezed, hampered, harnessed in your ball accoutrement: you
+count your steps as you walk, you look around, you observe, you
+contemplate talking business on neutral ground with a stock-broker, a
+notary or a banker, to whom you would not like to give an advantage
+over you by calling at their house.
+
+A singular fact which all have probably observed, but the causes of
+which can hardly be determined, is the peculiar repugnance which men
+dressed and ready to go to a party have for discussions or to answer
+questions. At the moment of starting, there are few husbands who are
+not taciturn and profoundly absorbed in reflections which vary with
+their characters. Those who reply give curt and peremptory answers.
+
+But women, at this time, are exceedingly aggravating. They consult you,
+they ask your advice upon the best way of concealing the stem of a
+rose, of giving a graceful fall to a bunch of briar, or a happy turn to
+a scarf. As a neat English expression has it, “they fish for
+compliments,” and sometimes for better than compliments.
+
+A boy just out of school would discern the motive concealed behind the
+willows of these pretexts: but your wife is so well known to you, and
+you have so often playfully joked upon her moral and physical
+perfections, that you are harsh enough to give your opinion briefly and
+conscientiously: you thus force Caroline to put that decisive question,
+so cruel to women, even those who have been married twenty years:
+
+“So I don’t suit you then?”
+
+Drawn upon the true ground by this inquiry, you bestow upon her such
+little compliments as you can spare and which are, as it were, the
+small change, the sous, the liards of your purse.
+
+“The best gown you ever wore!” “I never saw you so well dressed.”
+“Blue, pink, yellow, cherry [take your pick], becomes you charmingly.”
+“Your head-dress is quite original.” “As you go in, every one will
+admire you.” “You will not only be the prettiest, but the best
+dressed.” “They’ll all be mad not to have your taste.” “Beauty is a
+natural gift: taste is like intelligence, a thing that we may be proud
+of.”
+
+“Do you think so? Are you in earnest, Adolphe?”
+
+Your wife is coquetting with you. She chooses this moment to force from
+you your pretended opinion of one and another of her friends, and to
+insinuate the price of the articles of her dress you so much admire.
+Nothing is too dear to please you. She sends the cook out of the room.
+
+“Let’s go,” you say.
+
+She sends the chambermaid out after having dismissed the hair-dresser,
+and begins to turn round and round before her glass, showing off to you
+her most glorious beauties.
+
+“Let’s go,” you say.
+
+“You are in a hurry,” she returns.
+
+And she goes on exhibiting herself with all her little airs, setting
+herself off like a fine peach magnificently exhibited in a fruiterer’s
+window. But since you have dined rather heartily, you kiss her upon the
+forehead merely, not feeling able to countersign your opinions.
+Caroline becomes serious.
+
+The carriage waits. All the household looks at Caroline as she goes
+out: she is the masterpiece to which all have contributed, and
+everybody admires the common work.
+
+Your wife departs highly satisfied with herself, but a good deal
+displeased with you. She proceeds loftily to the ball, just as a
+picture, caressed by the painter and minutely retouched in the studio,
+is sent to the annual exhibition in the vast bazaar of the Louvre. Your
+wife, alas! sees fifty women handsomer than herself: they have invented
+dresses of the most extravagant price, and more or less original: and
+that which happens at the Louvre to the masterpiece, happens to the
+object of feminine labor: your wife’s dress seems pale by the side of
+another very much like it, but the livelier color of which crushes it.
+Caroline is nobody, and is hardly noticed. When there are sixty
+handsome women in a room, the sentiment of beauty is lost, beauty is no
+longer appreciated. Your wife becomes a very ordinary affair. The petty
+stratagem of her smile, made perfect by practice, has no meaning in the
+midst of countenances of noble expression, of self-possessed women of
+lofty presence. She is completely put down, and no one asks her to
+dance. She tries to force an expression of pretended satisfaction, but,
+as she is not satisfied, she hears people say, “Madame Adolphe is
+looking very ill to-night.” Women hypocritically ask her if she is
+indisposed and “Why don’t you dance?” They have a whole catalogue of
+malicious remarks veneered with sympathy and electroplated with
+charity, enough to damn a saint, to make a monkey serious, and to give
+the devil the shudders.
+
+You, who are innocently playing cards or walking backwards and
+forwards, and so have not seen one of the thousand pin-pricks with
+which your wife’s self-love has been tattooed, you come and ask her in
+a whisper, “What is the matter?”
+
+“Order _my_ carriage!”
+
+This _my_ is the consummation of marriage. For two years she has said
+“_my husband’s_ carriage,” “_the_ carriage,” “_our_ carriage,” and now
+she says “_my_ carriage.”
+
+You are in the midst of a game, you say, somebody wants his revenge, or
+you must get your money back.
+
+Here, Adolphe, we allow that you have sufficient strength of mind to
+say yes, to disappear, and _not_ to order the carriage.
+
+You have a friend, you send him to dance with your wife, for you have
+commenced a system of concessions which will ruin you. You already
+dimly perceive the advantage of a friend.
+
+Finally, you order the carriage. You wife gets in with concentrated
+rage, she hurls herself into a corner, covers her face with her hood,
+crosses her arms under her pelisse, and says not a word.
+
+O husbands! Learn this fact; you may, at this fatal moment, repair and
+redeem everything: and never does the impetuosity of lovers who have
+been caressing each other the whole evening with flaming gaze fail to
+do it! Yes, you can bring her home in triumph, she has now nobody but
+you, you have one more chance, that of taking your wife by storm! But
+no, idiot, stupid and indifferent that you are, you ask her, “What is
+the matter?”
+
+Axiom.—A husband should always know what is the matter with his wife,
+for she always knows what is not.
+
+“I’m cold,” she says.
+
+“The ball was splendid.”
+
+“Pooh! nobody of distinction! People have the mania, nowadays, to
+invite all Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs:
+their gowns were horribly smashed, and mine is ruined.”
+
+“We had a good time.”
+
+“Ah, you men, you play and that’s the whole of it. Once married, you
+care about as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts.”
+
+“How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we
+arrived.”
+
+“Oh, you never understand us women. I begged you to go home, and you
+left me there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason. You
+are not without intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I don’t
+know what you are thinking about.”
+
+Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter. When you give
+your wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman of
+wood: she gives you a “thank you” which puts you in the same rank as
+her servant. You understood your wife no better before than you do
+after the ball: you find it difficult to follow her, for instead of
+going up stairs, she flies up. The rupture is complete.
+
+The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace: she is received with
+blunt No’s and Yes’s, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows
+with a slanting glance at you. “Monsieur’s always doing these things,”
+she mutters.
+
+You alone might have changed Madame’s temper. She goes to bed; she has
+her revenge to take: you did not comprehend her. Now she does not
+comprehend you. She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the most
+hostile and offensive posture: she is wrapped up in her chemise, in her
+sack, in her night-cap, like a bale of clocks packed for the East
+Indies. She says neither good-night, nor good-day, nor dear, nor
+Adolphe: you don’t exist, you are a bag of wheat.
+
+Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber where
+she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead. Were you the
+Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not melt the
+ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to be asleep,
+and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked. Ask her one
+hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland replies by an
+ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.
+
+Nothing is the matter with her: she is tired: she is going to sleep.
+
+The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the
+more she isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise. If you get impatient,
+Caroline begins to dream! You grumble, you are lost.
+
+Axiom.—Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their
+strong points, they leave us to guess at their weak ones.
+
+Caroline will perhaps also condescend to assure you that she does not
+feel well. But she laughs in her night-cap when you have fallen asleep,
+and hurls imprecations upon your slumbering body.
+
+WOMEN’S LOGIC.
+
+You imagine you have married a creature endowed with reason: you are
+woefully mistaken, my friend.
+
+Axiom.—Sensitive beings are not sensible beings.
+
+Sentiment is not argument, reason is not pleasure, and pleasure is
+certainly not a reason.
+
+“Oh! sir!” she says.
+
+Reply “Ah! yes! Ah!” You must bring forth this “ah!” from the very
+depths of your thoracic cavern, as you rush in a rage from the house,
+or return, confounded, to your study.
+
+Why? Now? Who has conquered, killed, overthrown you! Your wife’s logic,
+which is not the logic of Aristotle, nor that of Ramus, nor that of
+Kant, nor that of Condillac, nor that of Robespierre, nor that of
+Napoleon: but which partakes of the character of all these logics, and
+which we must call the universal logic of women, the logic of English
+women as it is that of Italian women, of the women of Normandy and
+Brittany (ah, these last are unsurpassed!), of the women of Paris, in
+short, that of the women in the moon, if there are women in that
+nocturnal land, with which the women of the earth have an evident
+understanding, angels that they are!
+
+The discussion began after breakfast. Discussions can never take place
+in a household save at this hour. A man could hardly have a discussion
+with his wife in bed, even if he wanted to: she has too many advantages
+over him, and can too easily reduce him to silence. On leaving the
+nuptial chamber with a pretty woman in it, a man is apt to be hungry,
+if he is young. Breakfast is usually a cheerful meal, and cheerfulness
+is not given to argument. In short, you do not open the business till
+you have had your tea or your coffee.
+
+You have taken it into your head, for instance, to send your son to
+school. All fathers are hypocrites and are never willing to confess
+that their own flesh and blood is very troublesome when it walks about
+on two legs, lays its dare-devil hands on everything, and is everywhere
+at once like a frisky pollywog. Your son barks, mews, and sings; he
+breaks, smashes and soils the furniture, and furniture is dear; he
+makes toys of everything, he scatters your papers, and he cuts paper
+dolls out of the morning’s newspaper before you have read it.
+
+His mother says to him, referring to anything of yours: “Take it!” but
+in reference to anything of hers she says: “Take care!”
+
+She cunningly lets him have your things that she may be left in peace.
+Her bad faith as a good mother seeks shelter behind her child, your son
+is her accomplice. Both are leagued against you like Robert Macaire and
+Bertrand against the subscribers to their joint stock company. The boy
+is an axe with which foraging excursions are performed in your domains.
+He goes either boldly or slyly to maraud in your wardrobe: he reappears
+caparisoned in the drawers you laid aside that morning, and brings to
+the light of day many articles condemned to solitary confinement. He
+brings the elegant Madame Fischtaminel, a friend whose good graces you
+cultivate, your girdle for checking corpulency, bits of cosmetic for
+dyeing your moustache, old waistcoats discolored at the arm-holes,
+stockings slightly soiled at the heels and somewhat yellow at the toes.
+It is quite impossible to remark that these stains are caused by the
+leather!
+
+Your wife looks at your friend and laughs; you dare not be angry, so
+you laugh too, but what a laugh! The unfortunate all know that laugh.
+
+Your son, moreover, gives you a cold sweat, if your razors happen to be
+out of their place. If you are angry, the little rebel laughs and shows
+his two rows of pearls: if you scold him, he cries. His mother rushes
+in! And what a mother she is! A mother who will detest you if you don’t
+give him the razor! With women there is no middle ground; a man is
+either a monster or a model.
+
+At certain times you perfectly understand Herod and his famous decrees
+relative to the Massacre of the Innocents, which have only been
+surpassed by those of the good Charles X!
+
+Your wife has returned to her sofa, you walk up and down, and stop, and
+you boldly introduce the subject by this interjectional remark:
+
+“Caroline, we must send Charles to boarding school.”
+
+“Charles cannot go to boarding school,” she returns in a mild tone.
+
+“Charles is six years old, the age at which a boy’s education begins.”
+
+“In the first place,” she replies, “it begins at seven. The royal
+princes are handed over to their governor by their governess when they
+are seven. That’s the law and the prophets. I don’t see why you
+shouldn’t apply to the children of private people the rule laid down
+for the children of princes. Is your son more forward than theirs? The
+king of Rome—”
+
+“The king of Rome is not a case in point.”
+
+“What! Is not the king of Rome the son of the Emperor? [Here she
+changes the subject.] Well, I declare, you accuse the Empress, do you?
+Why, Doctor Dubois himself was present, besides—”
+
+“I said nothing of the kind.”
+
+“How you do interrupt, Adolphe.”
+
+“I say that the king of Rome [here you begin to raise your voice], the
+king of Rome, who was hardly four years old when he left France, is no
+example for us.”
+
+“That doesn’t prevent the fact of the Duke de Bordeaux’s having been
+placed in the hands of the Duke de Riviere, his tutor, at seven years.”
+[Logic.]
+
+“The case of the young Duke of Bordeaux is different.”
+
+“Then you confess that a boy can’t be sent to school before he is seven
+years old?” she says with emphasis. [More logic.]
+
+“No, my dear, I don’t confess that at all. There is a great deal of
+difference between private and public education.”
+
+“That’s precisely why I don’t want to send Charles to school yet. He
+ought to be much stronger than he is, to go there.”
+
+“Charles is very strong for his age.”
+
+“Charles? That’s the way with men! Why, Charles has a very weak
+constitution; he takes after you. [Here she changes from _tu_ to
+_vous_.] But if you are determined to get rid of your son, why put him
+out to board, of course. I have noticed for some time that the dear
+child annoys you.”
+
+“Annoys me? The idea! But we are answerable for our children, are we
+not? It is time Charles’ education was began: he is getting very bad
+habits here, he obeys no one, he thinks himself perfectly free to do as
+he likes, he hits everybody and nobody dares to hit him back. He ought
+to be placed in the midst of his equals, or he will grow up with the
+most detestable temper.”
+
+“Thank you: so I am bringing Charles up badly!”
+
+“I did not say that: but you will always have excellent reasons for
+keeping him at home.”
+
+Here the _vous_ becomes reciprocal and the discussion takes a bitter
+turn on both sides. Your wife is very willing to wound you by saying
+_vous_, but she feels cross when it becomes mutual.
+
+“The long and the short of it is that you want to get my child away,
+you find that he is between us, you are jealous of your son, you want
+to tyrannize over me at your ease, and you sacrifice your boy! Oh, I am
+smart enough to see through you!”
+
+“You make me out like Abraham with his knife! One would think there
+were no such things as schools! So the schools are empty; nobody sends
+their children to school!”
+
+“You are trying to make me appear ridiculous,” she retorts. “I know
+that there are schools well enough, but people don’t send boys of six
+there, and Charles shall not start now.”
+
+“Don’t get angry, my dear.”
+
+“As if I ever get angry! I am a woman and know how to suffer in
+silence.”
+
+“Come, let us reason together.”
+
+“You have talked nonsense enough.”
+
+“It is time that Charles should learn to read and write; later in life,
+he will find difficulties sufficient to disgust him.”
+
+Here, you talk for ten minutes without interruption, and you close with
+an appealing “Well?” armed with an intonation which suggests an
+interrogation point of the most crooked kind.
+
+“Well!” she replies, “it is not yet time for Charles to go to school.”
+
+You have gained nothing at all.
+
+“But, my dear, Monsieur Deschars certainly sent his little Julius to
+school at six years. Go and examine the schools and you will find lots
+of little boys of six there.”
+
+You talk for ten minutes more without the slightest interruption, and
+then you ejaculate another “Well?”
+
+“Little Julius Deschars came home with chilblains,” she says.
+
+“But Charles has chilblains here.”
+
+“Never,” she replies, proudly.
+
+In a quarter of an hour, the main question is blocked by a side
+discussion on this point: “Has Charles had chilblains or not?”
+
+You bandy contradictory allegations; you no longer believe each other;
+you must appeal to a third party.
+
+Axiom.—Every household has its Court of Appeals which takes no notice
+of the merits, but judges matters of form only.
+
+The nurse is sent for. She comes, and decides in favor of your wife. It
+is fully decided that Charles has never had chilblains.
+
+Caroline glances triumphantly at you and utters these monstrous words:
+“There, you see Charles can’t possibly go to school!”
+
+You go out breathless with rage. There is no earthly means of
+convincing your wife that there is not the slightest reason for your
+son’s not going to school in the fact that he has never had chilblains.
+
+That evening, after dinner, you hear this atrocious creature finishing
+a long conversation with a woman with these words: “He wanted to send
+Charles to school, but I made him see that he would have to wait.”
+
+Some husbands, at a conjuncture like this, burst out before everybody;
+their wives take their revenge six weeks later, but the husbands gain
+this by it, that Charles is sent to school the very day he gets into
+any mischief. Other husbands break the crockery, and keep their rage to
+themselves. The knowing ones say nothing and bide their time.
+
+A woman’s logic is exhibited in this way upon the slightest occasion,
+about a promenade or the proper place to put a sofa. This logic is
+extremely simple, inasmuch as it consists in never expressing but one
+idea, that which contains the expression of their will. Like everything
+pertaining to female nature, this system may be resolved into two
+algebraic terms—Yes: no. There are also certain little movements of the
+head which mean so much that they may take the place of either.
+
+THE JESUITISM OF WOMEN.
+
+The most jesuitical Jesuit of Jesuits is yet a thousand times less
+jesuitical than the least jesuitical woman,—so you may judge what
+Jesuits women are! They are so jesuitical that the cunningest Jesuit
+himself could never guess to what extent of jesuitism a woman may go,
+for there are a thousand ways of being jesuitical, and a woman is such
+an adroit Jesuit, that she has the knack of being a Jesuit without
+having a jesuitical look. You can rarely, though you can sometimes,
+prove to a Jesuit that he is one: but try once to demonstrate to a
+woman that she acts or talks like a Jesuit. She would be cut to pieces
+rather than confess herself one.
+
+She, a Jesuit! The very soul of honor and loyalty! She a Jesuit! What
+do you mean by “Jesuit?” She does not know what a Jesuit is: what is a
+Jesuit? She has never seen or heard of a Jesuit! It’s you who are a
+Jesuit! And she proves with jesuitical demonstration that you are a
+subtle Jesuit.
+
+Here is one of the thousand examples of a woman’s jesuitism, and this
+example constitutes the most terrible of the petty troubles of married
+life; it is perhaps the most serious.
+
+Induced by a desire the thousandth time expressed by Caroline, who
+complained that she had to go on foot or that she could not buy a new
+hat, a new parasol, a new dress, or any other article of dress, often
+enough:
+
+That she could not dress her baby as a sailor, as a lancer, as an
+artilleryman of the National Guard, as a Highlander with naked legs and
+a cap and feather, in a jacket, in a roundabout, in a velvet sack, in
+boots, in trousers: that she could not buy him toys enough, nor
+mechanical moving mice and Noah’s Arks enough:
+
+That she could not return Madame Deschars or Madame de Fischtaminel
+their civilities, a ball, a party, a dinner: nor take a private box at
+the theatre, thus avoiding the necessity of sitting cheek by jowl with
+men who are either too polite or not enough so, and of calling a cab at
+the close of the performance; apropos of which she thus discourses:
+
+“You think it cheaper, but you are mistaken: men are all the same! I
+soil my shoes, I spoil my hat, my shawl gets wet and my silk stockings
+get muddy. You economize twenty francs by not having a carriage,—no not
+twenty, sixteen, for your pay four for the cab—and you lose fifty
+francs’ worth of dress, besides being wounded in your pride on seeing a
+faded bonnet on my head: you don’t see why it’s faded, but it’s those
+horrid cabs. I say nothing of the annoyance of being tumbled and
+jostled by a crowd of men, for it seems you don’t care for that!”
+
+That she could not buy a piano instead of hiring one, nor keep up with
+the fashions; (there are some women, she says, who have all the new
+styles, but just think what they give in return! She would rather throw
+herself out of the window than imitate them! She loves you too much.
+Here she sheds tears. She does not understand such women). That she
+could not ride in the Champs Elysees, stretched out in her own
+carriage, like Madame de Fischtaminel. (There’s a woman who understands
+life: and who has a well-taught, well-disciplined and very contented
+husband: his wife would go through fire and water for him!)
+
+Finally, beaten in a thousand conjugal scenes, beaten by the most
+logical arguments (the late logicians Tripier and Merlin were nothing
+to her, as the preceding chapter has sufficiently shown you), beaten by
+the most tender caresses, by tears, by your own words turned against
+you, for under circumstances like these, a woman lies in wait in her
+house like a jaguar in the jungle; she does not appear to listen to
+you, or to heed you; but if a single word, a wish, a gesture, escapes
+you, she arms herself with it, she whets it to an edge, she brings it
+to bear upon you a hundred times over; beaten by such graceful tricks
+as “If you will do so and so, I will do this and that;” for women, in
+these cases, become greater bargainers than the Jews and Greeks (those,
+I mean, who sell perfumes and little girls), than the Arabs (those, I
+mean, who sell little boys and horses), greater higglers than the Swiss
+and the Genevese, than bankers, and, what is worse than all, than the
+Genoese!
+
+Finally, beaten in a manner which may be called beaten, you determine
+to risk a certain portion of your capital in a business undertaking.
+One evening, at twilight, seated side by side, or some morning on
+awakening, while Caroline, half asleep, a pink bud in her white linen,
+her face smiling in her lace, is beside you, you say to her, “You want
+this, you say, or you want that: you told me this or you told me that:”
+in short, you hastily enumerate the numberless fancies by which she has
+over and over again broken your heart, for there is nothing more
+dreadful than to be unable to satisfy the desires of a beloved wife,
+and you close with these words:
+
+“Well, my dear, an opportunity offers of quintupling a hundred thousand
+francs, and I have decided to make the venture.”
+
+She is wide awake now, she sits up in bed, and gives you a kiss, ah!
+this time, a real good one!
+
+“You are a dear boy!” is her first word.
+
+We will not mention her last, for it is an enormous and unpronounceable
+onomatope.
+
+“Now,” she says, “tell me all about it.”
+
+You try to explain the nature of the affair. But in the first place,
+women do not understand business, and in the next they do not wish to
+seem to understand it. Your dear, delighted Caroline says you were
+wrong to take her desires, her groans, her sighs for new dresses, in
+earnest. She is afraid of your venture, she is frightened at the
+directors, the shares, and above all at the running expenses, and
+doesn’t exactly see where the dividend comes in.
+
+Axiom.—Women are always afraid of things that have to be divided.
+
+In short, Caroline suspects a trap: but she is delighted to know that
+she can have her carriage, her box, the numerous styles of dress for
+her baby, and the rest. While dissuading you from engaging in the
+speculation, she is visibly glad to see you investing your money in it.
+
+FIRST PERIOD.—“Oh, I am the happiest woman on the face of the earth!
+Adolphe has just gone into the most splendid venture. I am going to
+have a carriage, oh! ever so much handsomer than Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s; hers is out of fashion. Mine will have curtains with
+fringes. My horses will be mouse-colored, hers are bay,—they are as
+common as coppers.”
+
+“What is this venture, madame?”
+
+“Oh, it’s splendid—the stock is going up; he explained it to me before
+he went into it, for Adolphe never does anything without consulting
+me.”
+
+“You are very fortunate.”
+
+“Marriage would be intolerable without entire confidence, and Adolphe
+tells me everything.”
+
+Thus, Adolphe, you are the best husband in Paris, you are adorable, you
+are a man of genius, you are all heart, an angel. You are petted to an
+uncomfortable degree. You bless the marriage tie. Caroline extols men,
+calling them “kings of creation,” women were made for them, man is
+naturally generous, and matrimony is a delightful institution.
+
+For three, sometimes six, months, Caroline executes the most brilliant
+concertos and solos upon this delicious theme: “I shall be rich! I
+shall have a thousand a month for my dress: I am going to keep my
+carriage!”
+
+If your son is alluded to, it is merely to ask about the school to
+which he shall be sent.
+
+SECOND PERIOD.—“Well, dear, how is your business getting on?—What has
+become of it?—How about that speculation which was to give me a
+carriage, and other things?—It is high time that affair should come to
+something.—It is a good while cooking.—When _will_ it begin to pay? Is
+the stock going up?—There’s nobody like you for hitting upon ventures
+that never amount to anything.”
+
+One day she says to you, “Is there really an affair?”
+
+If you mention it eight or ten months after, she returns:
+
+“Ah! Then there really _is_ an affair!”
+
+This woman, whom you thought dull, begins to show signs of
+extraordinary wit, when her object is to make fun of you. During this
+period, Caroline maintains a compromising silence when people speak of
+you, or else she speaks disparagingly of men in general: “Men are not
+what they seem: to find them out you must try them.” “Marriage has its
+good and its bad points.” “Men never can finish anything.”
+
+THIRD PERIOD.—_Catastrophe_.—This magnificent affair which was to yield
+five hundred per cent, in which the most cautious, the best informed
+persons took part—peers, deputies, bankers—all of them Knights of the
+Legion of Honor—this venture has been obliged to liquidate! The most
+sanguine expect to get ten per cent of their capital back. You are
+discouraged.
+
+Caroline has often said to you, “Adolphe, what is the matter? Adolphe,
+there is something wrong.”
+
+Finally, you acquaint Caroline with the fatal result: she begins by
+consoling you.
+
+“One hundred thousand francs lost! We shall have to practice the
+strictest economy,” you imprudently add.
+
+The jesuitism of woman bursts out at this word “economy.” It sets fire
+to the magazine.
+
+“Ah! that’s what comes of speculating! How is it that _you, ordinarily
+so prudent_, could go and risk a hundred thousand francs! _You know I
+was against it from the beginning!_ BUT YOU WOULD NOT LISTEN TO ME!”
+
+Upon this, the discussion grows bitter.
+
+You are good for nothing—you have no business capacity; women alone
+take clear views of things. You have risked your children’s bread,
+though she tried to dissuade you from it.—You cannot say it was for
+her. Thank God, she has nothing to reproach herself with. A hundred
+times a month she alludes to your disaster: “If my husband had not
+thrown away his money in such and such a scheme, I could have had this
+and that.” “The next time you want to go into an affair, perhaps you’ll
+consult me!” Adolphe is accused and convicted of having foolishly lost
+one hundred thousand francs, without an object in view, like a dolt,
+and without having consulted his wife. Caroline advises her friends not
+to marry. She complains of the incapacity of men who squander the
+fortunes of their wives. Caroline is vindictive, she makes herself
+generally disagreeable. Pity Adolphe! Lament, ye husbands! O bachelors,
+rejoice and be exceeding glad!
+
+MEMORIES AND REGRETS.
+
+After several years of wedded life, your love has become so placid,
+that Caroline sometimes tries, in the evening, to wake you up by
+various little coquettish phrases. There is about you a certain
+calmness and tranquillity which always exasperates a lawful wife. Women
+see in it a sort of insolence: they look upon the indifference of
+happiness as the fatuity of confidence, for of course they never
+imagine their inestimable equalities can be regarded with disdain:
+their virtue is therefore enraged at being so cordially trusted in.
+
+In this situation, which is what every couple must come to, and which
+both husband and wife must expect, no husband dares confess that the
+constant repetition of the same dish has become wearisome; but his
+appetite certainly requires the condiments of dress, the ideas excited
+by absence, the stimulus of an imaginary rivalry.
+
+In short, at this period, you walk very comfortably with your wife on
+your arm, without pressing hers against your heart with the solicitous
+and watchful cohesion of a miser grasping his treasure. You gaze
+carelessly round upon the curiosities in the street, leading your wife
+in a loose and distracted way, as if you were towing a Norman scow.
+Come now, be frank! If, on passing your wife, an admirer were gently to
+press her, accidentally or purposely, would you have the slightest
+desire to discover his motives? Besides, you say, no woman would seek
+to bring about a quarrel for such a trifle. Confess this, too, that the
+expression “such a trifle” is exceedingly flattering to both of you.
+
+You are in this position, but you have as yet proceeded no farther.
+Still, you have a horrible thought which you bury in the depths of your
+heart and conscience: Caroline has not come up to your expectations.
+Caroline has imperfections, which, during the high tides of the
+honey-moon, were concealed under the water, but which the ebb of the
+gall-moon has laid bare. You have several times run against these
+breakers, your hopes have been often shipwrecked upon them, more than
+once your desires—those of a young marrying man—(where, alas, is that
+time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces there: the
+flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the marriage
+remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression, as you talk
+over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at Caroline,
+“_She is not what I took her to be!_”
+
+Some evening, at a ball, in society, at a friend’s house, no matter
+where, you meet a sublime young woman, beautiful, intellectual and
+kind: with a soul, oh! a soul of celestial purity, and of miraculous
+beauty! Yes, there is that unchangeable oval cut of face, those
+features which time will never impair, that graceful and thoughtful
+brow. The unknown is rich, well-educated, of noble birth: she will
+always be what she should be, she knows when to shine, when to remain
+in the background: she appears in all her glory and power, the being
+you have dreamed of, your wife that should have been, she whom you feel
+you could love forever. She would always have flattered your little
+vanities, she would understand and admirably serve your interests. She
+is tender and gay, too, this young lady who reawakens all your better
+feelings, who rekindles your slumbering desires.
+
+You look at Caroline with gloomy despair, and here are the phantom-like
+thoughts which tap, with wings of a bat, the beak of a vulture, the
+body of a death’s-head moth, upon the walls of the palace in which,
+enkindled by desire, glows your brain like a lamp of gold:
+
+FIRST STANZA. Ah, dear me, why did I get married? Fatal idea! I allowed
+myself to be caught by a small amount of cash. And is it really over?
+Cannot I have another wife? Ah, the Turks manage things better! It is
+plain enough that the author of the Koran lived in the desert!
+
+SECOND STANZA. My wife is sick, she sometimes coughs in the morning. If
+it is the design of Providence to remove her from the world, let it be
+speedily done for her sake and for mine. The angel has lived long
+enough.
+
+THIRD STANZA. I am a monster! Caroline is the mother of my children!
+
+You go home, that night, in a carriage with your wife: you think her
+perfectly horrible: she speaks to you, but you answer in monosyllables.
+She says, “What is the matter?” and you answer, “Nothing.” She coughs,
+you advise her to see the doctor in the morning. Medicine has its
+hazards.
+
+FOURTH STANZA. I have been told that a physician, poorly paid by the
+heirs of his deceased patient, imprudently exclaimed, “What! they cut
+down my bill, when they owe me forty thousand a year.” _I_ would not
+haggle over fees!
+
+“Caroline,” you say to her aloud, “you must take care of yourself;
+cross your shawl, be prudent, my darling angel.”
+
+Your wife is delighted with you since you seem to take such an interest
+in her. While she is preparing to retire, you lie stretched out upon
+the sofa. You contemplate the divine apparition which opens to you the
+ivory portals of your castles in the air. Delicious ecstasy! ’Tis the
+sublime young woman that you see before you! She is as white as the
+sail of the treasure-laden galleon as it enters the harbor of Cadiz.
+Your wife, happy in your admiration, now understands your former
+taciturnity. You still see, with closed eyes, the sublime young woman;
+she is the burden of your thoughts, and you say aloud:
+
+FIFTH AND LAST STANZA. Divine! Adorable! Can there be another woman
+like her? Rose of Night! Column of ivory! Celestial maiden! Morning and
+Evening Star!
+
+Everyone says his prayers; you have said four.
+
+The next morning, your wife is delightful, she coughs no more, she has
+no need of a doctor; if she dies, it will be of good health; you
+launched four maledictions upon her, in the name of your sublime young
+woman, and four times she blessed you for it. Caroline does not know
+that in the depths of your heart there wriggles a little red fish like
+a crocodile, concealed beneath conjugal love like the other would be
+hid in a basin.
+
+A few days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal
+terms to Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her,
+and Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you
+and says she never was happier.
+
+You rush out in a rage, you are beside yourself, and are glad to meet a
+friend, that you may work off your bile.
+
+“Don’t you ever marry, George; it’s better to see your heirs carrying
+away your furniture while the death-rattle is in your throat, better to
+go through an agony of two hours without a drop to cool your tongue,
+better to be assassinated by inquiries about your will by a nurse like
+the one in Henry Monnier’s terrible picture of a ‘Bachelor’s Last
+Moments!’ Never marry under any pretext!”
+
+Fortunately you see the sublime young woman no more. You are saved from
+the tortures to which a criminal passion was leading you. You fall back
+again into the purgatory of your married bliss; but you begin to be
+attentive to Madame de Fischtaminel, with whom you were dreadfully in
+love, without being able to get near her, while you were a bachelor.
+
+OBSERVATIONS.
+
+When you have arrived at this point in the latitude or longitude of the
+matrimonial ocean, there appears a slight chronic, intermittent
+affection, not unlike the toothache. Here, I see, you stop me to ask,
+“How are we to find the longitude in this sea? When can a husband be
+sure he has attained this nautical point? And can the danger be
+avoided?”
+
+You may arrive at this point, look you, as easily after ten months as
+ten years of wedlock; it depends upon the speed of the vessel, its
+style of rigging, upon the trade winds, the force of the currents, and
+especially upon the composition of the crew. You have this advantage
+over the mariner, that he has but one method of calculating his
+position, while husbands have at least a thousand of reckoning theirs.
+
+EXAMPLE: Caroline, your late darling, your late treasure, who is now
+merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while
+walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to
+take your arm at all;
+
+Or else she notices men, older or younger as the case may be, dressed
+with more or less taste, whereas she formerly saw no one whatever,
+though the sidewalk was black with hats and traveled by more boots than
+slippers;
+
+Or, when you come home, she says, “It’s no one but my husband:” instead
+of saying “Ah! ’tis Adolphe!” as she used to say with a gesture, a
+look, an accent which caused her admirers to think, “Well, here’s a
+happy woman at last!” This last exclamation of a woman is suitable for
+two eras,—first, while she is sincere; second, while she is
+hypocritical, with her “Ah! ’tis Adolphe!” When she exclaims, “It’s
+only my husband,” she no longer deigns to play a part.
+
+Or, if you come home somewhat late—at eleven, or at midnight—you find
+her—snoring! Odious symptom!
+
+Or else she puts on her stockings in your presence. Among English
+couples, this never happens but once in a lady’s married life; the next
+day she leaves for the Continent with some captain or other, and no
+longer thinks of putting on her stockings at all.
+
+Or else—but let us stop here.
+
+This is intended for the use of mariners and husbands who are
+weatherwise.
+
+THE MATRIMONIAL GADFLY.
+
+Very well! In this degree of longitude, not far from a tropical sign
+upon the name of which good taste forbids us to make a jest at once
+coarse and unworthy of this thoughtful work, a horrible little
+annoyance appears, ingeniously called the Matrimonial Gadfly, the most
+provoking of all gnats, mosquitoes, blood-suckers, fleas and scorpions,
+for no net was ever yet invented that could keep it off. The gadfly
+does not immediately sting you; it begins by buzzing in your ears, and
+_you do not at first know what it is_.
+
+Thus, apropos of nothing, in the most natural way in the world,
+Caroline says: “Madame Deschars had a lovely dress on, yesterday.”
+
+“She is a woman of taste,” returns Adolphe, though he is far from
+thinking so.
+
+“Her husband gave it to her,” resumes Caroline, with a shrug of her
+shoulders.
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“Yes, a four hundred franc dress! It’s the very finest quality of
+velvet.”
+
+“Four hundred francs!” cries Adolphe, striking the attitude of the
+apostle Thomas.
+
+“But then there are two extra breadths and enough for a high waist!”
+
+“Monsieur Deschars does things on a grand scale,” replies Adolphe,
+taking refuge in a jest.
+
+“All men don’t pay such attentions to their wives,” says Caroline,
+curtly.
+
+“What attentions?”
+
+“Why, Adolphe, thinking of extra breadths and of a waist to make the
+dress good again, when it is no longer fit to be worn low in the neck.”
+
+Adolphe says to himself, “Caroline wants a dress.”
+
+Poor man!
+
+Some time afterward, Monsieur Deschars furnishes his wife’s chamber
+anew. Then he has his wife’s diamonds set in the prevailing fashion.
+Monsieur Deschars never goes out without his wife, and never allows his
+wife to go out without offering her his arm.
+
+If you bring Caroline anything, no matter what, it is never equal to
+what Monsieur Deschars has done. If you allow yourself the slightest
+gesture or expression a little livelier than usual, if you speak a
+little bit loud, you hear the hissing and viper-like remark:
+
+“You wouldn’t see Monsieur Deschars behaving like this! Why don’t you
+take Monsieur Deschars for a model?”
+
+In short, this idiotic Monsieur Deschars is forever looming up in your
+household on every conceivable occasion.
+
+The expression—“Do you suppose Monsieur Deschars ever allows himself”
+—is a sword of Damocles, or what is worse, a Damocles pin: and your
+self-love is the cushion into which your wife is constantly sticking
+it, pulling it out, and sticking it in again, under a variety of
+unforeseen pretexts, at the same time employing the most winning terms
+of endearment, and with the most agreeable little ways.
+
+Adolphe, stung till he finds himself tattooed, finally does what is
+done by police authorities, by officers of government, by military
+tacticians. He casts his eye on Madame de Fischtaminel, who is still
+young, elegant and a little bit coquettish, and places her (this had
+been the rascal’s intention for some time) like a blister upon
+Caroline’s extremely ticklish skin.
+
+O you, who often exclaim, “I don’t know what is the matter with my
+wife!” you will kiss this page of transcendent philosophy, for you will
+find in it _the key to every woman’s character_! But as to knowing
+women as well as I know them, it will not be knowing them much; they
+don’t know themselves! In fact, as you well know, God was Himself
+mistaken in the only one that He attempted to manage and to whose
+manufacture He had given personal attention.
+
+Caroline is very willing to sting Adolphe at all hours, but this
+privilege of letting a wasp off now and then upon one’s consort (the
+legal term), is exclusively reserved to the wife. Adolphe is a monster
+if he starts off a single fly at Caroline. On her part, it is a
+delicious joke, a new jest to enliven their married life, and one
+dictated by the purest intentions; while on Adolphe’s part, it is a
+piece of cruelty worthy a Carib, a disregard of his wife’s heart, and a
+deliberate plan to give her pain. But that is nothing.
+
+“So you are really in love with Madame de Fischtaminel?” Caroline asks.
+“What is there so seductive in the mind or the manners of the spider?”
+
+“Why, Caroline—”
+
+“Oh, don’t undertake to deny your eccentric taste,” she returns,
+checking a negation on Adolphe’s lips. “I have long seen that you
+prefer that Maypole [Madame de Fischtaminel is thin] to me. Very well!
+go on; you will soon see the difference.”
+
+Do you understand? You cannot suspect Caroline of the slightest
+inclination for Monsieur Deschars, a low, fat, red-faced man, formerly
+a notary, while you are in love with Madame de Fischtaminel! Then
+Caroline, the Caroline whose simplicity caused you such agony, Caroline
+who has become familiar with society, Caroline becomes acute and witty:
+you have two gadflies instead of one.
+
+The next day she asks you, with a charming air of interest, “How are
+you coming on with Madame de Fischtaminel?”
+
+When you go out, she says: “Go and drink something calming, my dear.”
+For, in their anger with a rival, all women, duchesses even, will use
+invectives, and even venture into the domain of Billingsgate; they make
+an offensive weapon of anything and everything.
+
+To try to convince Caroline that she is mistaken and that you are
+indifferent to Madame de Fischtaminel, would cost you dear. This is a
+blunder that no sensible man commits; he would lose his power and spike
+his own guns.
+
+Oh! Adolphe, you have arrived unfortunately at that season so
+ingeniously called the _Indian Summer of Marriage_.
+
+You must now—pleasing task!—win your wife, your Caroline, over again,
+seize her by the waist again, and become the best of husbands by trying
+to guess at things to please her, so as to act according to her whims
+instead of according to your will. This is the whole question
+henceforth.
+
+HARD LABOR.
+
+Let us admit this, which, in our opinion, is a truism made as good as
+new:
+
+Axiom.—Most men have some of the wit required by a difficult position,
+when they have not the whole of it.
+
+As for those husbands who are not up to their situation, it is
+impossible to consider their case here: without any struggle whatever
+they simply enter the numerous class of the _Resigned_.
+
+Adolphe says to himself: “Women are children: offer them a lump of
+sugar, and you will easily get them to dance all the dances that greedy
+children dance; but you must always have a sugar plum in hand, hold it
+up pretty high, and—take care that their fancy for sweetmeats does not
+leave them. Parisian women—and Caroline is one—are very vain, and as
+for their voracity—don’t speak of it. Now you cannot govern men and
+make friends of them, unless you work upon them through their vices,
+and flatter their passions: my wife is mine!”
+
+Some days afterward, during which Adolphe has been unusually attentive
+to his wife, he discourses to her as follows:
+
+“Caroline, dear, suppose we have a bit of fun: you’ll put on your new
+gown—the one like Madame Deschars!—and we’ll go to see a farce at the
+Varieties.”
+
+This kind of proposition always puts a wife in the best possible humor.
+So away you go! Adolphe has ordered a dainty little dinner for two, at
+Borrel’s _Rocher de Cancale_.
+
+“As we are going to the Varieties, suppose we dine at the tavern,”
+exclaims Adolphe, on the boulevard, with the air of a man suddenly
+struck by a generous idea.
+
+Caroline, delighted with this appearance of good fortune, enters a
+little parlor where she finds the cloth laid and that neat little
+service set, which Borrel places at the disposal of those who are rich
+enough to pay for the quarters intended for the great ones of the
+earth, who make themselves small for an hour.
+
+Women eat little at a formal dinner: their concealed harness hampers
+them, they are laced tightly, and they are in the presence of women
+whose eyes and whose tongues are equally to be dreaded. They prefer
+fancy eating to good eating, then: they will suck a lobster’s claw,
+swallow a quail or two, punish a woodcock’s wing, beginning with a bit
+of fresh fish, flavored by one of those sauces which are the glory of
+French cooking. France is everywhere sovereign in matters of taste: in
+painting, fashions, and the like. Gravy is the triumph of taste, in
+cookery. So that grisettes, shopkeepers’ wives and duchesses are
+delighted with a tasty little dinner washed down with the choicest
+wines, of which, however, they drink but little, the whole concluded by
+fruit such as can only be had at Paris; and especially delighted when
+they go to the theatre to digest the little dinner, and listen, in a
+comfortable box, to the nonsense uttered upon the stage, and to that
+whispered in their ears to explain it. But then the bill of the
+restaurant is one hundred francs, the box costs thirty, the carriage,
+dress, gloves, bouquet, as much more. This gallantry amounts to the sum
+of one hundred and sixty francs, which is hard upon four thousand
+francs a month, if you go often to the Comic, the Italian, or the
+Grand, Opera. Four thousand francs a month is the interest of a capital
+of two millions. But then the honor of being a husband is fully worth
+the price!
+
+Caroline tells her friends things which she thinks exceedingly
+flattering, but which cause a sagacious husband to make a wry face.
+
+“Adolphe has been delightful for some time past. I don’t know what I
+have done to deserve so much attention, but he overpowers me. He gives
+value to everything by those delicate ways which have such an effect
+upon us women. After taking me Monday to the _Rocher de Cancale_ to
+dine, he declared that Very was as good a cook as Borrel, and he gave
+me the little party of pleasure that I told you of all over again,
+presenting me at dessert with a ticket for the opera. They sang
+‘William Tell,’ which, you know, is my craze.”
+
+“You are lucky indeed,” returns Madame Deschars with evident jealousy.
+
+“Still, a wife who discharges all her duties, deserves such luck, it
+seems to me.”
+
+When this terrible sentiment falls from the lips of a married woman, it
+is clear that she _does her duty_, after the manner of school-boys, for
+the reward she expects. At school, a prize is the object: in marriage,
+a shawl or a piece of jewelry. No more love, then!
+
+“As for me,”—Madame Deschars is piqued—“I am reasonable. Deschars
+committed such follies once, but I put a stop to it. You see, my dear,
+we have two children, and I confess that one or two hundred francs are
+quite a consideration for me, as the mother of a family.”
+
+“Dear me, madame,” says Madame de Fischtaminel, “it’s better that our
+husbands should have cosy little times with us than with—”
+
+“Deschars!—” suddenly puts in Madame Deschars, as she gets up and says
+good-bye.
+
+The individual known as Deschars (a man nullified by his wife) does not
+hear the end of the sentence, by which he might have learned that a man
+may spend his money with other women.
+
+Caroline, flattered in every one of her vanities, abandons herself to
+the pleasures of pride and high living, two delicious capital sins.
+Adolphe is gaining ground again, but alas! (this reflection is worth a
+whole sermon in Lent) sin, like all pleasure, contains a spur. Vice is
+like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate
+it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries. With Vice a man’s
+course must always be crescendo!—and forever.
+
+Axiom.—Vice, Courtiers, Misfortune and Love, care only for the PRESENT.
+
+At the end of a period of time difficult to determine, Caroline looks
+in the glass, at dessert, and notices two or three pimples blooming
+upon her cheeks, and upon the sides, lately so pure, of her nose. She
+is out of humor at the theatre, and you do not know why, you, so
+proudly striking an attitude in your cravat, you, displaying your
+figure to the best advantage, as a complacent man should.
+
+A few days after, the dressmaker arrives. She tries on a gown, she
+exerts all her strength, but cannot make the hooks and eyes meet. The
+waiting maid is called. After a two horse-power pull, a regular
+thirteenth labor of Hercules, a hiatus of two inches manifests itself.
+The inexorable dressmaker cannot conceal from Caroline the fact that
+her form is altered. Caroline, the aerial Caroline, threatens to become
+like Madame Deschars. In vulgar language, she is getting stout. The
+maid leaves her in a state of consternation.
+
+“What! am I to have, like that fat Madame Deschars, cascades of flesh a
+la Rubens! That Adolphe is an awful scoundrel. Oh, I see, he wants to
+make me an old mother Gigogne, and destroy my powers of fascination!”
+
+Thenceforward Caroline is willing to go to the opera, she accepts two
+seats in a box, but she considers it very distingue to eat sparingly,
+and declines the dainty dinners of her husband.
+
+“My dear,” she says, “a well-bred woman should not go often to these
+places; you may go once for a joke; but as for making a habitual thing
+of it—fie, for shame!”
+
+Borrel and Very, those masters of the art, lose a thousand francs a day
+by not having a private entrance for carriages. If a coach could glide
+under an archway, and go out by another door, after leaving its fair
+occupants on the threshold of an elegant staircase, how many of them
+would bring the landlord fine, rich, solid old fellows for customers!
+
+Axiom.—Vanity is the death of good living.
+
+Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can
+tell the cause of her disgust. Pray excuse Adolphe! A husband is not
+the devil.
+
+Fully one-third of the women of Paris are bored by the theatre. Many of
+them are tired to death of music, and go to the opera for the singers
+merely, or rather to notice the difference between them in point of
+execution. What supports the theatre is this: the women are a spectacle
+before and after the play. Vanity alone will pay the exorbitant price
+of forty francs for three hours of questionable pleasure, in a bad
+atmosphere and at great expense, without counting the colds caught in
+going out. But to exhibit themselves, to see and be seen, to be the
+observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious mouthful! as
+Rabelais would say.
+
+To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must be
+looked at. Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at.
+Caroline is chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women
+who are _not_ with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short. Now,
+as the very slight return she gets from her efforts, her dresses, and
+her attitudes, does not compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue, her
+display and her weariness, it is very soon the same with the theatre as
+it was with the good cheer; high living made her fat, the theatre is
+making her yellow.
+
+Here Adolphe—or any other man in Adolphe’s place—resembles a certain
+Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in
+French, corn,—but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don’t you
+think so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into the
+sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, “Devil take
+you! Make me suffer again, will you?”
+
+“Upon my word,” says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he
+receives from his wife a refusal, “I should like very much to know what
+would please you!”
+
+Caroline looks loftily down upon her husband, and says, after a pause
+worthy of an actress, “I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!”
+
+“’Tis true, I might lay out four thousand francs a month to better
+effect,” returns Adolphe.
+
+“What do you mean?”
+
+“With the quarter of that sum, presented to estimable burglars,
+youthful jail-birds and honorable criminals, I might become somebody, a
+Man in the Blue Cloak on a small scale; and then a young woman is proud
+of her husband,” Adolphe replies.
+
+This answer is the grave of love, and Caroline takes it in very bad
+part. An explanation follows. This must be classed among the thousand
+pleasantries of the following chapter, the title of which ought to make
+lovers smile as well as husbands. If there are yellow rays of light,
+why should there not be whole days of this extremely matrimonial color?
+
+FORCED SMILES.
+
+On your arrival in this latitude, you enjoy numerous little scenes,
+which, in the grand opera of marriage, represent the intermezzos, and
+of which the following is a type:
+
+You are one evening alone after dinner, and you have been so often
+alone already that you feel a desire to say sharp little things to each
+other, like this, for instance:
+
+“Take care, Caroline,” says Adolphe, who has not forgotten his many
+vain efforts to please her. “I think your nose has the impertinence to
+redden at home quite well as at the restaurant.”
+
+“This is not one of your amiable days!”
+
+General Rule.—No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly
+advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
+
+“Perhaps it’s because you are laced too tight. Women make themselves
+sick that way.”
+
+The moment a man utters these words to a woman, no matter whom, that
+woman,—who knows that stays will bend,—seizes her corset by the lower
+end, and bends it out, saying, with Caroline:
+
+“Look, you can get your hand in! I never lace tight.”
+
+“Then it must be your stomach.”
+
+“What has the stomach got to do with the nose?”
+
+“The stomach is a centre which communicates with all the organs.”
+
+“So the nose is an organ, is it?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Your organ is doing you a poor service at this moment.” She raises her
+eyes and shrugs her shoulders. “Come, Adolphe, what have I done?”
+
+“Nothing. I’m only joking, and I am unfortunate enough not to please
+you,” returns Adolphe, smiling.
+
+“My misfortune is being your wife! Oh, why am I not somebody else’s!”
+
+“That’s what _I_ say!”
+
+“If I were, and if I had the innocence to say to you, like a coquette
+who wishes to know how far she has got with a man, ‘the redness of my
+nose really gives me anxiety,’ you would look at me in the glass with
+all the affectations of an ape, and would reply, ‘O madame, you do
+yourself an injustice; in the first place, nobody sees it: besides, it
+harmonizes with your complexion; then again we are all so after
+dinner!’ and from this you would go on to flatter me. Do I ever tell
+you that you are growing fat, that you are getting the color of a
+stone-cutter, and that I prefer thin and pale men?”
+
+They say in London, “Don’t touch the axe!” In France we ought to say,
+“Don’t touch a woman’s nose.”
+
+“And all this about a little extra natural vermilion!” exclaims
+Adolphe. “Complain about it to Providence, whose office it is to put a
+little more color in one place than another, not to me, who loves you,
+who desires you to be perfect, and who merely says to you, take care!”
+
+“You love me too much, then, for you’ve been trying, for some time
+past, to find disagreeable things to say to me. You want to run me down
+under the pretext of making me perfect—people said I _was_ perfect,
+five years ago.”
+
+“I think you are better than perfect, you are stunning!”
+
+“With too much vermilion?”
+
+Adolphe, who sees the atmosphere of the north pole upon his wife’s
+face, sits down upon a chair by her side. Caroline, unable decently to
+go away, gives her gown a sort of flip on one side, as if to produce a
+separation. This motion is performed by some women with a provoking
+impertinence: but it has two significations; it is, as whist players
+would say, either a signal _for trumps_ or a _renounce_. At this time,
+Caroline renounces.
+
+“What is the matter?” says Adolphe.
+
+“Will you have a glass of sugar and water?” asks Caroline, busying
+herself about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.
+
+“What for?”
+
+“You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain. Perhaps you
+would like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water? The doctor spoke
+of it as an excellent remedy.”
+
+“How anxious you are about my stomach!”
+
+“It’s a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act upon
+your heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue.”
+
+Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects
+upon the acuteness which his wife is acquiring: he sees her daily
+gaining in strength and in acrimony: she is getting to display an art
+in vexation and a military capacity for disputation which reminds him
+of Charles XII and the Russians. Caroline, during this time, is busy
+with an alarming piece of mimicry: she looks as if she were going to
+faint.
+
+“Are you sick?” asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place
+where women always have us.
+
+“It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back
+and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it’s just like you: you
+are always in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men are
+more or less cracked.”
+
+Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there
+pensive: marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with its
+crop of nettles and mullen stalks.
+
+“What, are you pouting?” asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour’s
+observation of her husband’s countenance.
+
+“No, I am meditating,” replied Adolphe.
+
+“Oh, what an infernal temper you’ve got!” she returns, with a shrug of
+the shoulders. “Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape
+and your digestion? Don’t you see that I was only paying you back for
+your vermilion? You’ll make me think that men are as vain as women.
+[Adolphe remains frigid.] It is really quite kind in you to take our
+qualities. [Profound silence.] I made a joke and you got angry [she
+looks at Adolphe], for you are angry. I am not like you: I cannot bear
+the idea of having given you pain! Nevertheless, it’s an idea that a
+man never would have had, that of attributing your impertinence to
+something wrong in your digestion. It’s not my Dolph, it’s his stomach
+that was bold enough to speak. I did not know you were a ventriloquist,
+that’s all.”
+
+Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles: Adolphe is as stiff as if he were
+glued.
+
+“No, he won’t laugh! And, in your jargon, you call this having
+character. Oh, how much better we are!”
+
+She goes and sits down in Adolphe’s lap, and Adolphe cannot help
+smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has
+been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon of it.
+
+“Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong,” she says. “Why pout?
+Dear me, I like you just as you are: in my eyes you are as slender as
+when I married you, and slenderer perhaps.”
+
+“Caroline, when people get to deceive themselves in these little
+matters, where one makes concessions and the other does not get angry,
+do you know what it means?”
+
+“What does it mean?” asks Caroline, alarmed at Adolphe’s dramatic
+attitude.
+
+“That they love each other less.”
+
+“Oh! you monster, I understand you: you were angry so as to make me
+believe you loved me!”
+
+Alas! let us confess it, Adolphe tells the truth in the only way he
+can—by a laugh.
+
+“Why give me pain?” she says. “If I am wrong in anything, isn’t it
+better to tell me of it kindly, than brutally to say [here she raises
+her voice], ‘Your nose is getting red!’ No, that is not right! To
+please you, I will use an expression of the fair Fischtaminel, ‘It’s
+not the act of a gentleman!’”
+
+Adolphe laughs and pays the expenses of the reconciliation; but instead
+of discovering therein what will please Caroline and what will attach
+her to him, he finds out what attaches him to her.
+
+NOSOGRAPHY OF THE VILLA.
+
+Is it advantageous for a man not to know what will please his wife
+after their marriage? Some women (this still occurs in the country) are
+innocent enough to tell promptly what they want and what they like. But
+in Paris, nearly every woman feels a kind of enjoyment in seeing a man
+wistfully obedient to her heart, her desires, her caprices—three
+expressions for the same thing!—and anxiously going round and round,
+half crazy and desperate, like a dog that has lost his master.
+
+They call this _being loved_, poor things! And a good many of them say
+to themselves, as did Caroline, “How will he manage?”
+
+Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and
+excellent Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the
+couple known as Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife
+inaugurate a delightful country house. It is an opportunity that the
+Deschars have seized upon, the folly of a man of letters, a charming
+villa upon which he lavished one hundred thousand francs and which has
+been sold at auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a new dress to
+air, or a hat with a weeping willow plume—things which a tilbury will
+set off to a charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother. The
+servants have a holiday. The youthful pair start beneath the smile of a
+blue sky, flecked with milk-while clouds merely to heighten the effect.
+They breathe the pure air, through which trots the heavy Norman horse,
+animated by the influence of spring. They soon reach Marnes, beyond
+Ville d’Avray, where the Deschars are spreading themselves in a villa
+copied from one at Florence, and surrounded by Swiss meadows, though
+without all the objectionable features of the Alps.
+
+“Dear me! what a delightful thing a country house like this must be!”
+exclaims Caroline, as she walks in the admirable wood that skirts
+Marnes and Ville d’Avray. “It makes your eyes as happy as if they had a
+heart in them.”
+
+Caroline, having no one to take but Adolphe, takes Adolphe, who becomes
+her Adolphe again. And then you should see her run about like a fawn,
+and act once more the sweet, pretty, innocent, adorable school-girl
+that she was! Her braids come down! She takes off her bonnet, and holds
+it by the strings! She is young, pink and white again. Her eyes smile,
+her mouth is a pomegranate endowed with sensibility, with a sensibility
+which seems quite fresh.
+
+“So a country house would please you very much, would it, darling?”
+says Adolphe, clasping Caroline round the waist, and noticing that she
+leans upon him as if to show the flexibility of her form.
+
+“What, will you be such a love as to buy me one? But remember, no
+extravagance! Seize an opportunity like the Deschars.”
+
+“To please you and to find out what is likely to give you pleasure,
+such is the constant study of your own Dolph.”
+
+They are alone, at liberty to call each other their little names of
+endearment, and run over the whole list of their secret caresses.
+
+“Does he really want to please his little girly?” says Caroline,
+resting her head on the shoulder of Adolphe, who kisses her forehead,
+saying to himself, “Gad! I’ve got her now!”
+
+Axiom.—When a husband and a wife have got each other, the devil only
+knows which has got the other.
+
+The young couple are captivating, whereupon the stout Madame Deschars
+gives utterance to a remark somewhat equivocal for her, usually so
+stern, prudish and devout.
+
+“Country air has one excellent property: it makes husbands very
+amiable.”
+
+M. Deschars points out an opportunity for Adolphe to seize. A house is
+to be sold at Ville d’Avray, for a song, of course. Now, the country
+house is a weakness peculiar to the inhabitant of Paris. This weakness,
+or disease, has its course and its cure. Adolphe is a husband, but not
+a doctor. He buys the house and takes possession with Caroline, who has
+become once more his Caroline, his Carola, his fawn, his treasure, his
+girly girl.
+
+The following alarming symptoms now succeed each other with frightful
+rapidity: a cup of milk, baptized, costs five sous; when it is
+anhydrous, as the chemists say, ten sous. Meat costs more at Sevres
+than at Paris, if you carefully examine the qualities. Fruit cannot be
+had at any price. A fine pear costs more in the country than in the
+(anhydrous!) garden that blooms in Chevet’s window.
+
+Before being able to raise fruit for oneself, from a Swiss meadow
+measuring two square yards, surrounded by a few green trees which look
+as if they were borrowed from the scenic illusions of a theatre, the
+most rural authorities, being consulted on the point, declare that you
+must spend a great deal of money, and—wait five years! Vegetables dash
+out of the husbandman’s garden to reappear at the city market. Madame
+Deschars, who possesses a gate-keeper that is at the same time a
+gardener, confesses that the vegetables raised on her land, beneath her
+glass frames, by dint of compost and top-soil, cost her twice as much
+as those she used to buy at Paris, of a woman who had rent and taxes to
+pay, and whose husband was an elector. Despite the efforts and pledges
+of the gate-keeper-gardener, early peas and things at Paris are a month
+in advance of those in the country.
+
+From eight in the evening to eleven our couple don’t know what to do,
+on account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and
+the questions of self-love which arise out of the merest trifles.
+
+Monsieur Deschars remarks, with that profound knowledge of figures
+which distinguishes the ex-notary, that the cost of going to Paris and
+back, added to the interest of the cost of his villa, to the taxes,
+wages of the gate-keeper and his wife, are equal to a rent of three
+thousand francs a year. He does not see how he, an ex-notary, allowed
+himself to be so caught! For he has often drawn up leases of chateaux
+with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a year.
+
+It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a
+country house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated
+nuisance.
+
+“I don’t see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has
+to be watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it,” says
+Caroline.
+
+“The way to get along in the country,” replies a little retired grocer,
+“is to stay there, to live there, to become country-folks, and then
+everything changes.”
+
+On going home, Caroline says to her poor Adolphe, “What an idea that
+was of yours, to buy a country house! The best way to do about the
+country is to go there on visits to other people.”
+
+Adolphe remembers an English proverb, which says, “Don’t have a
+newspaper or a country seat of your own: there are plenty of idiots who
+will have them for you.”
+
+“Bah!” returns Adolph, who was enlightened once for all upon women’s
+logic by the Matrimonial Gadfly, “you are right: but then you know the
+baby is in splendid health, here.”
+
+Though Adolphe has become prudent, this reply awakens Caroline’s
+susceptibilities. A mother is very willing to think exclusively of her
+child, but she does not want him to be preferred to herself. She is
+silent; the next day, she is tired to death of the country. Adolphe
+being absent on business, she waits for him from five o’clock to seven,
+and goes alone with little Charles to the coach office. She talks for
+three-quarters of an hour of her anxieties. She was afraid to go from
+the house to the office. Is it proper for a young woman to be left
+alone, so? She cannot support such an existence.
+
+The country house now creates a very peculiar phase; one which deserves
+a chapter to itself.
+
+TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE.
+
+Axiom.—There are parentheses in worry.
+
+EXAMPLE—A great deal of evil has been said of the stitch in the side;
+but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the
+pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving,
+like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant,
+which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife’s
+timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once
+devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season has its
+peculiar vexation.
+
+Caroline, after a week spent in taking note of her husband’s absences,
+perceives that he passes seven hours a day away from her. At last,
+Adolphe, who comes home as gay as an actor who has been applauded,
+observes a slight coating of hoar frost upon Caroline’s visage. After
+making sure that the coldness of her manner has been observed, Caroline
+puts on a counterfeit air of interest,—the well-known expression of
+which possesses the gift of making a man inwardly swear,—and says: “You
+must have had a good deal of business to-day, dear?”
+
+“Oh, lots!”
+
+“Did you take many cabs?”
+
+“I took seven francs’ worth.”
+
+“Did you find everybody in?”
+
+“Yes, those with whom I had appointments.”
+
+“When did you make appointments with them? The ink in your inkstand is
+dried up; it’s like glue; I wanted to write, and spent a whole hour in
+moistening it, and even then only produced a thick mud fit to mark
+bundles with for the East Indies.”
+
+Here any and every husband looks suspiciously at his better half.
+
+“It is probable that I wrote them at Paris—”
+
+“What business was it, Adolphe?”
+
+“Why, I thought you knew. Shall I run over the list? First, there’s
+Chaumontel’s affair—”
+
+“I thought Monsieur Chaumontel was in Switzerland—”
+
+“Yes, but he has representatives, a lawyer—”
+
+“Didn’t you do anything else but business?” asks Caroline, interrupting
+Adolphe.
+
+Here she gives him a direct, piercing look, by which she plunges into
+her husband’s eyes when he least expects it: a sword in a heart.
+
+“What could I have done? Made a little counterfeit money, run into
+debt, or embroidered a sampler?”
+
+“Oh, dear, I don’t know. And I can’t even guess. I am too dull, you’ve
+told me so a hundred times.”
+
+“There you go, and take an expression of endearment in bad part. How
+like a woman that is!”
+
+“Have you concluded anything?” she asks, pretending to take an interest
+in business.
+
+“No, nothing,”
+
+“How many persons have you seen?”
+
+“Eleven, without counting those who were walking in the streets.”
+
+“How you answer me!”
+
+“Yes, and how you question me! As if you’d been following the trade of
+an examining judge for the last ten years!”
+
+“Come, tell me all you’ve done to-day, it will amuse me. You ought to
+try to please me while you are here! I’m dull enough when you leave me
+alone all day long.”
+
+“You want me to amuse you by telling you about business?”
+
+“Formerly, you told me everything—”
+
+This friendly little reproach disguises the certitude that Caroline
+wishes to enjoy respecting the serious matters which Adolphe wishes to
+conceal. Adolphe then undertakes to narrate how he has spent the day.
+Caroline affects a sort of distraction sufficiently well played to
+induce the belief that she is not listening.
+
+“But you said just now,” she exclaims, at the moment when Adolphe is
+getting into a snarl, “that you had paid seven francs for cabs, and you
+now talk of a hack! You took it by the hour, I suppose? Did you do your
+business in a hack?” she asks, railingly.
+
+“Why should hacks be interdicted?” inquires Adolphe, resuming his
+narrative.
+
+“Haven’t you been to Madame de Fischtaminel’s?” she asks in the middle
+of an exceedingly involved explanation, insolently taking the words out
+of your mouth.
+
+“Why should I have been there?”
+
+“It would have given me pleasure: I wanted to know whether her parlor
+is done.”
+
+“It is.”
+
+“Ah! then you _have_ been there?”
+
+“No, her upholsterer told me.”
+
+“Do you know her upholsterer?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Who is it?”
+
+“Braschon.”
+
+“So you met the upholsterer?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You said you only went in carriages.”
+
+“Yes, my dear, but to get carriages, you have to go and—”
+
+“Pooh! I dare say Braschon was in the carriage, or the parlor was—one
+or the other is equally probable.”
+
+“You won’t listen,” exclaims Adolphe, who thinks that a long story will
+lull Caroline’s suspicions.
+
+“I’ve listened too much already. You’ve been lying for the last hour,
+worse than a drummer.”
+
+“Well, I’ll say nothing more.”
+
+“I know enough. I know all I wanted to know. You say you’ve seen
+lawyers, notaries, bankers: now you haven’t seen one of them! Suppose I
+were to go to-morrow to see Madame de Fischtaminel, do you know what
+she would say?”
+
+Here, Caroline watches Adolphe closely: but Adolphe affects a delusive
+calmness, in the middle of which Caroline throws out her line to fish
+up a clue.
+
+“Why, she would say that she had had the pleasure of seeing you! How
+wretched we poor creatures are! We never know what you are doing: here
+we are stuck, chained at home, while you are off at your business! Fine
+business, truly! If I were in your place, I would invent business a
+little bit better put together than yours! Ah, you set us a worthy
+example! They say women are perverse. Who perverted them?”
+
+Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the
+torrent of words. Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up
+by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of
+Rossini’s codas:
+
+“Yes, it’s a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so
+that you may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause
+of your passion for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in
+the trap! You are right, sir, a villa is very convenient: it serves two
+objects. But the wife can get along with it as well as the husband. You
+may take Paris and its hacks! I’ll take the woods and their shady
+groves! Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so let’s say no more about
+it.”
+
+Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.
+
+“Have you done, dear?” he asks, profiting by an instant in which she
+tosses her head after a pointed interrogation.
+
+Then Caroline concludes thus: “I’ve had enough of the villa, and I’ll
+never set foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you’ll keep
+it, probably, and leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least
+amuse myself, while you go with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods.
+What is a _Villa Adolphini_ where you get nauseated if you go six times
+round the lawn? where they’ve planted chair-legs and broom-sticks on
+the pretext of producing shade? It’s like a furnace: the walls are six
+inches thick! and my gentleman is absent seven hours a day! That’s what
+a country seat means!”
+
+“Listen to me, Caroline.”
+
+“I wouldn’t so much mind, if you would only confess what you did
+to-day. You don’t know me yet: come, tell me, I won’t scold you. I
+pardon you beforehand for all that you’ve done.”
+
+Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make
+one to his wife, replies—“Well, I’ll tell you.”
+
+“That’s a good fellow—I shall love you better.”
+
+“I was three hours—”
+
+“I was sure of it—at Madame de Fischtaminel’s!”
+
+“No, at our notary’s, as he had got me a purchaser; but we could not
+come to terms: he wanted our villa furnished. When I left there, I went
+to Braschon’s, to see how much we owed him—”
+
+“You made up this romance while I was talking to you! Look me in the
+face! I’ll go to see Braschon to-morrow.”
+
+Adolphe cannot restrain a nervous shudder.
+
+“You can’t help laughing, you monster!”
+
+“I laugh at your obstinacy.”
+
+“I’ll go to-morrow to Madame de Fischtaminel’s.”
+
+“Oh, go wherever you like!”
+
+“What brutality!” says Caroline, rising and going away with her
+handkerchief at her eyes.
+
+The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become a
+diabolical invention of Adolphe’s, a trap into which the fawn has
+fallen.
+
+Since Adolphe’s discovery that it is impossible to reason with
+Caroline, he lets her say whatever she pleases.
+
+Two months after, he sells the villa which cost him twenty-two thousand
+francs for seven thousand! But he gains this by the adventure—he finds
+out that the country is not the thing that Caroline wants.
+
+The question is becoming serious. Nature, with its woods, its forests,
+its valleys, the Switzerland of the environs of Paris, the artificial
+rivers, have amused Caroline for barely six months. Adolphe is tempted
+to abdicate and take Caroline’s part himself.
+
+A HOUSEHOLD REVOLUTION.
+
+One morning, Adolphe is seized by the triumphant idea of letting
+Caroline find out for herself what she wants. He gives up to her the
+control of the house, saying, “Do as you like.” He substitutes the
+constitutional system for the autocratic system, a responsible ministry
+for an absolute conjugal monarchy. This proof of confidence —the object
+of much secret envy—is, to women, a field-marshal’s baton. Women are
+then, so to speak, mistresses at home.
+
+After this, nothing, not even the memory of the honey-moon, can be
+compared to Adolphe’s happiness for several days. A woman, under such
+circumstances, is all sugar. She is too sweet: she would invent the art
+of petting and cosseting and of coining tender little names, if this
+matrimonial sugar-plummery had not existed ever since the Terrestrial
+Paradise. At the end of the month, Adolphe’s condition is like that of
+children towards the close of New Year’s week. So Caroline is beginning
+to say, not in words, but in acts, in manner, in mimetic expressions:
+“It’s difficult to tell _what_ to do to please a man!”
+
+Giving up the helm of the boat to one’s wife, is an exceedingly
+ordinary idea, and would hardly deserve the qualification of
+“triumphant,” which we have given it at the commencement of this
+chapter, if it were not accompanied by that of taking it back again.
+Adolphe was seduced by a wish, which invariably seizes persons who are
+the prey of misfortune, to know how far an evil will go!—to try how
+much damage fire will do when left to itself, the individual
+possessing, or thinking he possesses, the power to arrest it. This
+curiosity pursues us from the cradle to the grave. Then, after his
+plethora of conjugal felicity, Adolphe, who is treating himself to a
+farce in his own house, goes through the following phases:
+
+FIRST EPOCH. Things go on altogether too well. Caroline buys little
+account books to keep a list of her expenses in, she buys a nice little
+piece of furniture to store her money in, she feeds Adolphe superbly,
+she is happy in his approbation, she discovers that very many articles
+are needed in the house. It is her ambition to be an incomparable
+housekeeper. Adolphe, who arrogates to himself the right of censorship,
+no longer finds the slightest suggestion to make.
+
+When he dresses himself, everything is ready to his hands. Not even in
+Armide’s garden was more ingenious tenderness displayed than that of
+Caroline. For her phoenix husband, she renews the wax upon his razor
+strap, she substitutes new suspenders for old ones. None of his
+button-holes are ever widowed. His linen is as well cared for as that
+of the confessor of the devotee, all whose sins are venial. His
+stockings are free from holes. At table, his tastes, his caprices even,
+are studied, consulted: he is getting fat! There is ink in his
+inkstand, and the sponge is always moist. He never has occasion to say,
+like Louis XIV, “I came near having to wait!” In short, he hears
+himself continually called _a love of a man_. He is obliged to reproach
+Caroline for neglecting herself: she does not pay sufficient attention
+to her own needs. Of this gentle reproach Caroline takes note.
+
+SECOND EPOCH. The scene changes, at table. Everything is exceedingly
+dear. Vegetables are beyond one’s means. Wood sells as if it came from
+Campeche. Fruit? Oh! as to fruit, princes, bankers and great lords
+alone can eat it. Dessert is a cause of ruin. Adolphe often hears
+Caroline say to Madame Deschars: “How do you manage?” Conferences are
+held in your presence upon the proper way to keep cooks under the
+thumb.
+
+A cook who entered your service without effects, without clothes, and
+without talent, has come to get her wages in a blue merino gown, set
+off by an embroidered neckerchief, her ears embellished with a pair of
+ear-rings enriched with small pearls, her feet clothed in comfortable
+shoes which give you a glimpse of neat cotton stockings. She has two
+trunks full of property, and keeps an account at the savings bank.
+
+Upon this Caroline complains of the bad morals of the lower classes:
+she complains of the education and the knowledge of figures which
+distinguish domestics. From time to time she utters little axioms like
+the following: There are some mistakes you _must_ make!—It’s only those
+who do nothing who do everything well.—She has the anxieties that
+belong to power.—Ah! men are fortunate in not having a house to
+keep.—Women bear the burden of the innumerable details.
+
+THIRD EPOCH. Caroline, absorbed in the idea that you should eat merely
+to live, treats Adolphe to the delights of a cenobitic table.
+
+Adolphe’s stockings are either full of holes or else rough with the
+lichen of hasty mendings, for the day is not long enough for all that
+his wife has to do. He wears suspenders blackened by use. His linen is
+old and gapes like a door-keeper, or like the door itself. At a time
+when Adolphe is in haste to conclude a matter of business, it takes him
+an hour to dress: he has to pick out his garments one by one, opening
+many an article before finding one fit to wear. But Caroline is
+charmingly dressed. She has pretty bonnets, velvet boots, mantillas.
+She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration in virtue of
+this principle: Charity well understood begins at home. When Adolphe
+complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken wardrobe and
+Caroline’s splendor, she says, “Why, you reproached me with buying
+nothing for myself!”
+
+The husband and the wife here begin to bandy jests more or less
+acrimonious. One evening Caroline makes herself very agreeable, in
+order to insinuate an avowal of a rather large deficit, just as the
+ministry begins to eulogize the tax-payers, and boast of the wealth of
+the country, when it is preparing to bring forth a bill for an
+additional appropriation. There is this further similitude that both
+are done in the chamber, whether in administration or in housekeeping.
+From this springs the profound truth that the constitutional system is
+infinitely dearer than the monarchical system. For a nation as for a
+household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity, of
+chicanery.
+
+Adolphe, enlightened by his past annoyances, waits for an opportunity
+to explode, and Caroline slumbers in a delusive security.
+
+What starts the quarrel? Do we ever know what electric current
+precipitates the avalanche or decides a revolution? It may result from
+anything or nothing. But finally, Adolphe, after a period to be
+determined in each case by the circumstances of the couple, utters this
+fatal phrase, in the midst of a discussion: “Ah! when I was a
+bachelor!”
+
+Her husband’s bachelor life is to a woman what the phrase, “My dear
+deceased,” is to a widow’s second husband. These two stings produce
+wounds which are never completely healed.
+
+Then Adolphe goes on like General Bonaparte haranguing the Five
+Hundred: “We are on a volcano!—The house no longer has a head, the time
+to come to an understanding has arrived.—You talk of happiness,
+Caroline, but you have compromised, imperiled it by your exactions, you
+have violated the civil code: you have mixed yourself up in the
+discussions of business, and you have invaded the conjugal authority.
+—We must reform our internal affairs.”
+
+Caroline does not shout, like the Five Hundred, “Down with the
+dictator!” For people never shout a man down, when they feel that they
+can put him down.
+
+“When I was a bachelor I had none but new stockings! I had a clean
+napkin every day on my plate. The restaurateur only fleeced me of a
+determinate sum. I have given up to you my beloved liberty! What have
+you done with it?”
+
+“Am I then so very wrong, Adolphe, to have sought to spare you numerous
+cares?” says Caroline, taking an attitude before her husband. “Take the
+key of the money-box back,—but do you know what will happen? I am
+ashamed, but you will compel me to go on to the stage to get the merest
+necessaries of life. Is this what you want? Degrade your wife, or bring
+in conflict two contrary, hostile interests—”
+
+Such, for three quarters of the French people is an exact definition of
+marriage.
+
+“Be perfectly easy, dear,” resumes Caroline, seating herself in her
+chair like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, “I will never ask you for
+anything. I am not a beggar! I know what I’ll do—you don’t know me
+yet.”
+
+“Well, what will you do?” asks Adolphe; “it seems impossible to joke or
+have an explanation with you women. What will you do?”
+
+“It doesn’t concern you at all.”
+
+“Excuse me, madame, quite the contrary. Dignity, honor—”
+
+“Oh, have no fear of that, sir. For your sake more than for my own, I
+will keep it a dead secret.”
+
+“Come, Caroline, my own Carola, what do you mean to do?”
+
+Caroline darts a viper-like glance at Adolphe, who recoils and proceeds
+to walk up and down the room.
+
+“There now, tell me, what will you do?” he repeats after much too
+prolonged a silence.
+
+“I shall go to work, sir!”
+
+At this sublime declaration, Adolphe executes a movement in retreat,
+detecting a bitter exasperation, and feeling the sharpness of a north
+wind which had never before blown in the matrimonial chamber.
+
+THE ART OF BEING A VICTIM.
+
+On and after the Revolution, our vanquished Caroline adopts an infernal
+system, the effect of which is to make you regret your victory every
+hour. She becomes the opposition! Should Adolphe have one more such
+triumph, he would appear before the Court of Assizes, accused of having
+smothered his wife between two mattresses, like Shakespeare’s Othello.
+Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her submission is positively
+killing. On every occasion she assassinates Adolphe with a “Just as you
+like!” uttered in tones whose sweetness is something fearful. No
+elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who utters elegy upon elegy:
+elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile is elegiac, her silence is
+elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are a few examples, wherein
+every household will find some of its impressions recorded:
+
+AFTER BREAKFAST. “Caroline, we go to-night to the Deschars’ grand ball
+you know.”
+
+“Yes, love.”
+
+AFTER DINNER. “What, not dressed yet, Caroline?” exclaims Adolphe, who
+has just made his appearance, magnificently equipped.
+
+He finds Caroline arrayed in a gown fit for an elderly lady of strong
+conversational powers, a black moire with an old-fashioned fan-waist.
+Flowers, too badly imitated to deserve the name of artificial, give a
+gloomy aspect to a head of hair which the chambermaid has carelessly
+arranged. Caroline’s gloves have already seen wear and tear.
+
+“I am ready, my dear.”
+
+“What, in that dress?”
+
+“I have no other. A new dress would have cost three hundred francs.”
+
+“Why did you not tell me?”
+
+“I, ask you for anything, after what has happened!”
+
+“I’ll go alone,” says Adolphe, unwilling to be humiliated in his wife.
+
+“I dare say you are very glad to,” returns Caroline, in a captious
+tone, “it’s plain enough from the way you are got up.”
+
+Eleven persons are in the parlor, all invited to dinner by Adolphe.
+Caroline is there, looking as if her husband had invited her too. She
+is waiting for dinner to be served.
+
+“Sir,” says the parlor servant in a whisper to his master, “the cook
+doesn’t know what on earth to do!”
+
+“What’s the matter?”
+
+“You said nothing to her, sir: and she has only two side-dishes, the
+beef, a chicken, a salad and vegetables.”
+
+“Caroline, didn’t you give the necessary orders?”
+
+“How did I know that you had company, and besides I can’t take it upon
+myself to give orders here! You delivered me from all care on that
+point, and I thank heaven for it every day of my life.”
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel has called to pay Madame Caroline a visit. She
+finds her coughing feebly and nearly bent double over her embroidery.
+
+“Ah, so you are working those slippers for your dear Adolphe?”
+
+Adolphe is standing before the fire-place as complacently as may be.
+
+“No, madame, it’s for a tradesman who pays me for them: like the
+convicts, my labor enables me to treat myself to some little comforts.”
+
+Adolphe reddens; he can’t very well beat his wife, and Madame de
+Fischtaminel looks at him as much as to say, “What does this mean?”
+
+“You cough a good deal, my darling,” says Madame de Fischtaminel.
+
+“Oh!” returns Caroline, “what is life to me?”
+
+Caroline is seated, conversing with a lady of your acquaintance, whose
+good opinion you are exceedingly anxious to retain. From the depths of
+the embrasure where you are talking with some friends, you gather, from
+the mere motion of her lips, these words: “My husband would have it
+so!” uttered with the air of a young Roman matron going to the circus
+to be devoured. You are profoundly wounded in your several vanities,
+and wish to attend to this conversation while listening to your guests:
+you thus make replies which bring you back such inquiries as: “Why,
+what are you thinking of?” For you have lost the thread of the
+discourse, and you fidget nervously with your feet, thinking to
+yourself, “What is she telling her about me?”
+
+Adolphe is dining with the Deschars: twelve persons are at table, and
+Caroline is seated next to a nice young man named Ferdinand, Adolphe’s
+cousin. Between the first and second course, conjugal happiness is the
+subject of conversation.
+
+“There is nothing easier than for a woman to be happy,” says Caroline
+in reply to a woman who complains of her husband.
+
+“Tell us your secret, madame,” says M. de Fischtaminel agreeably.
+
+“A woman has nothing to do but to meddle with nothing to consider
+herself as the first servant in the house or as a slave that the master
+takes care of, to have no will of her own, and never to make an
+observation: thus all goes well.”
+
+This, delivered in a bitter tone and with tears in her voice, alarms
+Adolphe, who looks fixedly at his wife.
+
+“You forget, madame, the happiness of telling about one’s happiness,”
+he returns, darting at her a glance worthy of the tyrant in a
+melodrama.
+
+Quite satisfied with having shown herself assassinated or on the point
+of being so, Caroline turns her head aside, furtively wipes away a
+tear, and says:
+
+“Happiness cannot be described!”
+
+This incident, as they say at the Chamber, leads to nothing, but
+Ferdinand looks upon his cousin as an angel about to be offered up.
+
+Some one alludes to the frightful prevalence of inflammation of the
+stomach, or to the nameless diseases of which young women die.
+
+“Ah, too happy they!” exclaims Caroline, as if she were foretelling the
+manner of her death.
+
+Adolphe’s mother-in-law comes to see her daughter. Caroline says, “My
+husband’s parlor:” “Your master’s chamber.” Everything in the house
+belongs to “My husband.”
+
+“Why, what’s the matter, children?” asks the mother-in-law; “you seem
+to be at swords’ points.”
+
+“Oh, dear me,” says Adolphe, “nothing but that Caroline has had the
+management of the house and didn’t manage it right, that’s all.”
+
+“She got into debt, I suppose?”
+
+“Yes, dearest mamma.”
+
+“Look here, Adolphe,” says the mother-in-law, after having waited to be
+left alone with her son, “would you prefer to have my daughter
+magnificently dressed, to have everything go on smoothly, _without its
+costing you anything_?”
+
+Imagine, if you can, the expression of Adolphe’s physiognomy, as he
+hears _this declaration of woman’s rights_!
+
+Caroline abandons her shabby dress and appears in a splendid one. She
+is at the Deschars’: every one compliments her upon her taste, upon the
+richness of her materials, upon her lace, her jewels.
+
+“Ah! you have a charming husband!” says Madame Deschars. Adolphe tosses
+his head proudly, and looks at Caroline.
+
+“My husband, madame! I cost that gentleman nothing, thank heaven! All I
+have was given me by my mother.”
+
+Adolphe turns suddenly about and goes to talk with Madame de
+Fischtaminel.
+
+After a year of absolute monarchy, Caroline says very mildly one
+morning:
+
+“How much have you spent this year, dear?”
+
+“I don’t know.”
+
+“Examine your accounts.”
+
+Adolphe discovers that he has spent a third more than during Caroline’s
+worst year.
+
+“And I’ve cost you nothing for my dress,” she adds.
+
+Caroline is playing Schubert’s melodies. Adolphe takes great pleasure
+in hearing these compositions well-executed: he gets up and compliments
+Caroline. She bursts into tears.
+
+“What’s the matter?”
+
+“Nothing, I’m nervous.”
+
+“I didn’t know you were subject to that.”
+
+“O Adolphe, you won’t see anything! Look, my rings come off my fingers:
+you don’t love me any more—I’m a burden to you—”
+
+She weeps, she won’t listen, she weeps afresh at every word Adolphe
+utters.
+
+“Suppose you take the management of the house back again?”
+
+“Ah!” she exclaims, rising sharply to her feet, like a spring figure in
+a box, “now that you’ve had enough of your experience! Thank you! Do
+you suppose it’s money that I want? Singular method, yours, of pouring
+balm upon a wounded heart. No, go away.”
+
+“Very well, just as you like, Caroline.”
+
+This “just as you like” is the first expression of indifference towards
+a wife: and Caroline sees before her an abyss towards which she had
+been walking of her own free will.
+
+THE FRENCH CAMPAIGN.
+
+The disasters of 1814 afflict every species of existence. After
+brilliant days of conquest, after the period during which obstacles
+change to triumphs, and the slightest check becomes a piece of good
+fortune, there comes a time when the happiest ideas turn out blunders,
+when courage leads to destruction, and when your very fortifications
+are a stumbling-block. Conjugal love, which, according to authors, is a
+peculiar phase of love, has, more than anything else, its French
+Campaign, its fatal 1814. The devil especially loves to dangle his tail
+in the affairs of poor desolate women, and to this Caroline has come.
+
+Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband back.
+She spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her
+imagination works. She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands
+pensively at the window, looking at the street and seeing nothing, her
+face glued to the panes, and feeling as if in a desert, in the midst of
+her friends, in the bosom of her luxuriously furnished apartments.
+
+Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed
+between a court and a garden, all life is double. At every story, a
+family sees another family in the opposite house. Everybody plunges his
+gaze at will into his neighbor’s domains. There is a necessity for
+mutual observation, a common right of search from which none can
+escape. At a given time, in the morning, you get up early, the servant
+opposite is dusting the parlor, she has left the windows open and has
+put the rugs on the railing; you divine a multitude of things, and
+vice-versa. Thus, in a given time, you are acquainted with the habits
+of the pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman
+opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old
+bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair
+front. Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination.
+At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself—too
+late, like the chaste Susanne,—the prey of the delighted lorgnette of
+an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who
+becomes criminal gratis. On the other hand, a handsome young gentleman,
+who, for the present, works without wages, and is only nineteen years
+old, appears before the sight of a pious old lady, in the simple
+apparel of a man engaged in shaving. The watch thus kept up is never
+relaxed, while prudence, on the contrary, has its moments of
+forgetfulness. Curtains are not always let down in time. A woman, just
+before dark, approaches the window to thread her needle, and the
+married man opposite may then admire a head that Raphael might have
+painted, and one that he considers worthy of himself—a National Guard
+truly imposing when under arms. Oh, sacred private life, where art
+thou! Paris is a city ever ready to exhibit itself half naked, a city
+essentially libertine and devoid of modesty. For a person’s life to be
+decorous in it, the said person should have a hundred thousand a year.
+Virtues are dearer than vices in Paris.
+
+Caroline, whose gaze sometimes steals between the protecting muslins
+which hide her domestic life from the five stories opposite, at last
+discovers a young couple plunged in the delights of the honey-moon, and
+newly established in the first story directly in view of her window.
+She spends her time in the most exciting observations. The blinds are
+closed early, and opened late. One day, Caroline, who has arisen at
+eight o’clock notices, by accident, of course, the maid preparing a
+bath or a morning dress, a delicious deshabille. Caroline sighs. She
+lies in ambush like a hunter at the cover; she surprises the young
+woman, her face actually illuminated with happiness. Finally, by dint
+of watching the charming couple, she sees the gentleman and lady open
+the window, and lean gently one against the other, as, supported by the
+railing, they breathe the evening air. Caroline gives herself a nervous
+headache, by endeavoring to interpret the phantasmagorias, some of them
+having an explanation and others not, made by the shadows of these two
+young people on the curtains, one night when they have forgotten to
+close the shutters. The young woman is often seated, melancholy and
+pensive, waiting for her absent husband; she hears the tread of a
+horse, or the rumble of a cab at the street corner; she starts from the
+sofa, and from her movements, it is easy for Caroline to see that she
+exclaims: “’Tis he!”
+
+“How they love each other!” says Caroline to herself.
+
+By dint of nervous headache, Caroline conceives an exceedingly
+ingenious plan: this plan consists in using the conjugal bliss of the
+opposite neighbors as a tonic to stimulate Adolphe. The idea is not
+without depravity, but then Caroline’s intention sanctifies the means!
+
+“Adolphe,” she says, “we have a neighbor opposite, the loveliest woman,
+a brunette—”
+
+“Oh, yes,” returns Adolphe, “I know her. She is a friend of Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s: Madame Foullepointe, the wife of a broker, a charming
+man and a good fellow, very fond of his wife: he’s crazy about her. His
+office and rooms are here, in the court, while those on the street are
+madame’s. I know of no happier household. Foullepointe talks about his
+happiness everywhere, even at the Exchange; he’s really quite
+tiresome.”
+
+“Well, then, be good enough to present Monsieur and Madame Foullepointe
+to me. I should be delighted to learn how she manages to make her
+husband love her so much: have they been married long?”
+
+“Five years, just like us.”
+
+“O Adolphe, dear, I am dying to know her: make us intimately
+acquainted. Am I as pretty as she?”
+
+“Well, if I were to meet you at an opera ball, and if you weren’t my
+wife, I declare, I shouldn’t know which—”
+
+“You are real sweet to-day. Don’t forget to invite them to dinner
+Saturday.”
+
+“I’ll do it to-night. Foullepointe and I often meet on ’Change.”
+
+“Now,” says Caroline, “this young woman will doubtless tell me what her
+method of action is.”
+
+Caroline resumes her post of observation. At about three she looks
+through the flowers which form as it were a bower at the window, and
+exclaims, “Two perfect doves!”
+
+For the Saturday in question, Caroline invites Monsieur and Madame
+Deschars, the worthy Monsieur Fischtaminel, in short, the most virtuous
+couples of her society. She has brought out all her resources: she has
+ordered the most sumptuous dinner, she has taken the silver out of the
+chest: she means to do all honor to the model of wives.
+
+“My dear, you will see to-night,” she says to Madame Deschars, at the
+moment when all the women are looking at each other in silence, “the
+most admirable young couple in the world, our opposite neighbors: a
+young man of fair complexion, so graceful and with _such_ manners! His
+head is like Lord Byron’s, and he’s a real Don Juan, only faithful:
+he’s discovered the secret of making love eternal: I shall perhaps
+obtain a second crop of it from her example. Adolphe, when he sees
+them, will blush at his conduct, and—”
+
+The servant announces: “Monsieur and Madame Foullepointe.”
+
+Madame Foullepointe, a pretty brunette, a genuine Parisian, slight and
+erect in form, the brilliant light of her eye quenched by her long
+lashes, charmingly dressed, sits down upon the sofa. Caroline bows to a
+fat gentleman with thin gray hair, who follows this Paris Andalusian,
+and who exhibits a face and paunch fit for Silenus, a butter-colored
+pate, a deceitful, libertine smile upon his big, heavy lips,—in short,
+a philosopher! Caroline looks upon this individual with astonishment.
+
+“Monsieur Foullepointe, my dear,” says Adolphe, presenting the worthy
+quinquagenarian.
+
+“I am delighted, madame,” says Caroline, good-naturedly, “that you have
+brought your father-in-law [profound sensation], but we shall soon see
+your husband, I trust—”
+
+“Madame—!”
+
+Everybody listens and looks. Adolphe becomes the object of every one’s
+attention; he is literally dumb with amazement: if he could, he would
+whisk Caroline off through a trap, as at the theatre.
+
+“This is Monsieur Foullepointe, my husband,” says Madame Foullepointe.
+
+Caroline turns scarlet as she sees her ridiculous blunder, and Adolphe
+scathes her with a look of thirty-six candlepower.
+
+“You said he was young and fair,” whispers Madame Deschars. Madame
+Foullepointe,—knowing lady that she is,—boldly stares at the ceiling.
+
+A month after, Madame Foullepointe and Caroline become intimate.
+Adolphe, who is taken up with Madame de Fischtaminel, pays no attention
+to this dangerous friendship, a friendship which will bear its fruits,
+for—pray learn this—
+
+Axiom.—Women have corrupted more women than men have ever loved.
+
+A SOLO ON THE HEARSE.
+
+After a period, the length of which depends on the strength of
+Caroline’s principles, she appears to be languishing; and when Adolphe,
+anxious for decorum’s sake, as he sees her stretched out upon the sofa
+like a snake in the sun, asks her, “What is the matter, love? What do
+you want?”
+
+“I wish I was dead!” she replies.
+
+“Quite a merry and agreeable wish!”
+
+“It isn’t death that frightens me, it’s suffering.”
+
+“I suppose that means that I don’t make you happy! That’s the way with
+women!”
+
+Adolphe strides about the room, talking incoherently: but he is brought
+to a dead halt by seeing Caroline dry her tears, which are really
+flowing artistically, in an embroidered handkerchief.
+
+“Do you feel sick?”
+
+“I don’t feel well. [Silence.] I only hope that I shall live long
+enough to see my daughter married, for I know the meaning, now, of the
+expression so little understood by the young—_the choice of a husband_!
+Go to your amusements, Adolphe: a woman who thinks of the future, a
+woman who suffers, is not at all diverting: come, go and have a good
+time.”
+
+“Where do you feel bad?”
+
+“I don’t feel bad, dear: I never was better. I don’t feel anything. No,
+really, I am better. There, leave me to myself.”
+
+This time, being the first, Adolphe goes away almost sad.
+
+A week passes, during which Caroline orders all the servants to conceal
+from her husband her deplorable situation: she languishes, she rings
+when she feels she is going off, she uses a great deal of ether. The
+domestics finally acquaint their master with madame’s conjugal heroism,
+and Adolphe remains at home one evening after dinner, and sees his wife
+passionately kissing her little Marie.
+
+“Poor child! I regret the future only for your sake! What is life, I
+should like to know?”
+
+“Come, my dear,” says Adolphe, “don’t take on so.”
+
+“I’m not taking on. Death doesn’t frighten me—I saw a funeral this
+morning, and I thought how happy the body was! How comes it that I
+think of nothing but death? Is it a disease? I have an idea that I
+shall die by my own hand.”
+
+The more Adolphe tries to divert Caroline, the more closely she wraps
+herself up in the crape of her hopeless melancholy. This second time,
+Adolphe stays at home and is wearied to death. At the third attack of
+forced tears, he goes out without the slightest compunction. He finally
+gets accustomed to these everlasting murmurs, to these dying postures,
+these crocodile tears. So he says:
+
+“If you are sick, Caroline, you’d better have a doctor.”
+
+“Just as you like! It will end quicker, so. But bring a famous one, if
+you bring any.”
+
+At the end of a month, Adolphe, worn out by hearing the funereal air
+that Caroline plays him on every possible key, brings home a famous
+doctor. At Paris, doctors are all men of discernment, and are admirably
+versed in conjugal nosography.
+
+“Well, madame,” says the great physician, “how happens it that so
+pretty a woman allows herself to be sick?”
+
+“Ah! sir, like the nose of old father Aubry, I aspire to the tomb—”
+
+Caroline, out of consideration for Adolphe, makes a feeble effort to
+smile.
+
+“Tut, tut! But your eyes are clear: they don’t seem to need our
+infernal drugs.”
+
+“Look again, doctor, I am eaten up with fever, a slow, imperceptible
+fever—”
+
+And she fastens her most roguish glance upon the illustrious doctor,
+who says to himself, “What eyes!”
+
+“Now, let me see your tongue.”
+
+Caroline puts out her taper tongue between two rows of teeth as white
+as those of a dog.
+
+“It is a little bit furred at the root: but you have breakfasted—”
+observes the great physician, turning toward Adolphe.
+
+“Oh, a mere nothing,” returns Caroline; “two cups of tea—”
+
+Adolphe and the illustrious leech look at each other, for the doctor
+wonders whether it is the husband or the wife that is trifling with
+him.
+
+“What do you feel?” gravely inquires the physician.
+
+“I don’t sleep.”
+
+“Good!”
+
+“I have no appetite.”
+
+“Well!”
+
+“I have a pain, here.”
+
+The doctor examines the part indicated.
+
+“Very good, we’ll look at that by and by.”
+
+“Now and then a shudder passes over me—”
+
+“Very good!”
+
+“I have melancholy fits, I am always thinking of death, I feel
+promptings of suicide—”
+
+“Dear me! Really!”
+
+“I have rushes of heat to the face: look, there’s a constant trembling
+in my eyelid.”
+
+“Capital! We call that a trismus.”
+
+The doctor goes into an explanation, which lasts a quarter of an hour,
+of the trismus, employing the most scientific terms. From this it
+appears that the trismus is the trismus: but he observes with the
+greatest modesty that if science knows that the trismus is the trismus,
+it is entirely ignorant of the cause of this nervous affection, which
+comes and goes, appears and disappears—“and,” he adds, “we have decided
+that it is altogether nervous.”
+
+“Is it very dangerous?” asks Caroline, anxiously.
+
+“Not at all. How do you lie at night?”
+
+“Doubled up in a heap.”
+
+“Good. On which side?”
+
+“The left.”
+
+“Very well. How many mattresses are there on your bed?”
+
+“Three.”
+
+“Good. Is there a spring bed?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“What is the spring bed stuffed with?”
+
+“Horse hair.”
+
+“Capital. Let me see you walk. No, no, naturally, and as if we weren’t
+looking at you.”
+
+Caroline walks like Fanny Elssler, communicating the most Andalusian
+little motions to her tournure.
+
+“Do you feel a sensation of heaviness in your knees?”
+
+“Well, no—” she returns to her place. “Ah, no that I think of it, it
+seems to me that I do.”
+
+“Good. Have you been in the house a good deal lately?”
+
+“Oh, yes, sir, a great deal too much—and alone.”
+
+“Good. I thought so. What do you wear on your head at night?”
+
+“An embroidered night-cap, and sometimes a handkerchief over it.”
+
+“Don’t you feel a heat there, a slight perspiration?”
+
+“How can I, when I’m asleep?”
+
+“Don’t you find your night-cap moist on your forehead, when you wake
+up?”
+
+“Sometimes.”
+
+“Capital. Give me your hand.”
+
+The doctor takes out his watch.
+
+“Did I tell you that I have a vertigo?” asks Caroline.
+
+“Hush!” says the doctor, counting the pulse. “In the evening?”
+
+“No, in the morning.”
+
+“Ah, bless me, a vertigo in the morning,” says the doctor, looking at
+Adolphe.
+
+“The Duke of G. has not gone to London,” says the great physician,
+while examining Caroline’s skin, “and there’s a good deal to be said
+about it in the Faubourg St. Germain.”
+
+“Have you patients there?” asks Caroline.
+
+“Nearly all my patients are there. Dear me, yes; I’ve got seven to see
+this morning; some of them are in danger.”
+
+“What do you think of me, sir?” says Caroline.
+
+“Madame, you need attention, a great deal of attention, you must take
+quieting liquors, plenty of syrup of gum, a mild diet, white meat, and
+a good deal of exercise.”
+
+“There go twenty francs,” says Adolphe to himself with a smile.
+
+The great physician takes Adolphe by the arm, and draws him out with
+him, as he takes his leave: Caroline follows them on tiptoe.
+
+“My dear sir,” says the great physician, “I have just prescribed very
+insufficiently for your wife. I did not wish to frighten her: this
+affair concerns you more nearly than you imagine. Don’t neglect her;
+she has a powerful temperament, and enjoys violent health; all this
+reacts upon her. Nature has its laws, which, when disregarded, compel
+obedience. She may get into a morbid state, which would cause you
+bitterly to repent having neglected her. If you love her, why, love
+her: but if you don’t love her, and nevertheless desire to preserve the
+mother of your children, the resolution to come to is a matter of
+hygiene, but it can only proceed from you!”
+
+“How well he understand me!” says Caroline to herself. She opens the
+door and says: “Doctor, you did not write down the doses!”
+
+The great physician smiles, bows and slips the twenty franc piece into
+his pocket; he then leaves Adolphe to his wife, who takes him and says:
+
+“What is the fact about my condition? Must I prepare for death?”
+
+“Bah! He says you’re too healthy!” cries Adolphe, impatiently.
+
+Caroline retires to her sofa to weep.
+
+“What is it, now?”
+
+“So I am to live a long time—I am in the way—you don’t love me any
+more—I won’t consult that doctor again—I don’t know why Madame
+Foullepointe advised me to see him, he told me nothing but trash—I know
+better than he what I need!”
+
+“What do you need?”
+
+“Can you ask, ungrateful man?” and Caroline leans her head on Adolphe’s
+shoulder.
+
+Adolphe, very much alarmed, says to himself: “The doctor’s right, she
+may get to be morbidly exacting, and then what will become of me? Here
+I am compelled to choose between Caroline’s physical extravagance, or
+some young cousin or other.”
+
+Meanwhile Caroline sits down and sings one of Schubert’s melodies with
+all the agitation of a hypochondriac.
+
+PART SECOND
+
+PREFACE
+
+If, reader, you have grasped the intent of this book,—and infinite
+honor is done you by the supposition: the profoundest author does not
+always comprehend, I may say never comprehends, the different meanings
+of his book, nor its bearing, nor the good nor the harm it may do—if,
+then, you have bestowed some attention upon these little scenes of
+married life, you have perhaps noticed their color—
+
+“What color?” some grocer will doubtless ask; “books are bound in
+yellow, blue, green, pearl-gray, white—”
+
+Alas! books possess another color, they are dyed by the author, and
+certain writers borrow their dye. Some books let their color come off
+on to others. More than this. Books are dark or fair, light brown or
+red. They have a sex, too! I know of male books, and female books, of
+books which, sad to say, have no sex, which we hope is not the case
+with this one, supposing that you do this collection of nosographic
+sketches the honor of calling it a book.
+
+Thus far, the troubles we have described have been exclusively
+inflicted by the wife upon the husband. You have therefore seen only
+the masculine side of the book. And if the author really has the sense
+of hearing for which we give him credit, he has already caught more
+than one indignant exclamation or remonstrance:
+
+“He tells us of nothing but vexations suffered by our husbands, as if
+we didn’t have our petty troubles, too!”
+
+Oh, women! You have been heard, for if you do not always make
+yourselves understood, you are always sure to make yourselves heard.
+
+It would therefore be signally unjust to lay upon you alone the
+reproaches that every being brought under the yoke (_conjugium_) has
+the right to heap upon that necessary, sacred, useful, eminently
+conservative institution,—one, however, that is often somewhat of an
+encumbrance, and tight about the joints, though sometimes it is also
+too loose there.
+
+I will go further! Such partiality would be a piece of idiocy.
+
+A man,—not a writer, for in a writer there are many men,—an author,
+rather, should resemble Janus, see behind and before, become a spy,
+examine an idea in all its phases, delve alternately into the soul of
+Alceste and into that of Philaenete, know everything though he does not
+tell it, never be tiresome, and—
+
+We will not conclude this programme, for we should tell the whole, and
+that would be frightful for those who reflect upon the present
+condition of literature.
+
+Furthermore, an author who speaks for himself in the middle of his
+book, resembles the old fellow in “The Speaking Picture,” when he puts
+his face in the hole cut in the painting. The author does not forget
+that in the Chamber, no one can take the floor _between two votes_.
+Enough, therefore!
+
+Here follows the female portion of the book: for, to resemble marriage
+perfectly, it ought to be more or less hermaphroditic.
+
+PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+HUSBANDS DURING THE SECOND MONTH.
+
+Two young married women, Caroline and Stephanie, who had been early
+friends at M’lle Machefer’s boarding school, one of the most celebrated
+educational institutions in the Faubourg St. Honoré, met at a ball
+given by Madame de Fischtaminel, and the following conversation took
+place in a window-seat in the boudoir.
+
+It was so hot that a man had acted upon the idea of going to breathe
+the fresh night air, some time before the two young women. He had
+placed himself in the angle of the balcony, and, as there were many
+flowers before the window, the two friends thought themselves alone.
+This man was the author’s best friend.
+
+One of the two ladies, standing at the corner of the embrasure, kept
+watch by looking at the boudoir and the parlors. The other had so
+placed herself as not to be in the draft, which was nevertheless
+tempered by the muslin and silk curtains.
+
+The boudoir was empty, the ball was just beginning, the gaming-tables
+were open, offering their green cloths and their packs of cards still
+compressed in the frail case placed upon them by the customs office.
+The second quadrille was in progress.
+
+All who go to balls will remember that phase of large parties when the
+guests are not yet all arrived, but when the rooms are already filled
+—a moment which gives the mistress of the house a transitory pang of
+terror. This moment is, other points of comparison apart, like that
+which decides a victory or the loss of a battle.
+
+You will understand, therefore, how what was meant to be a secret now
+obtains the honors of publicity.
+
+“Well, Caroline?”
+
+“Well, Stephanie?”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Well?”
+
+A double sigh.
+
+“Have you forgotten our agreement?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Why haven’t you been to see me, then?”
+
+“I am never left alone. Even here we shall hardly have time to talk.”
+
+“Ah! if Adolphe were to get into such habits as that!” exclaimed
+Caroline.
+
+“You saw us, Armand and me, when he paid me what is called, I don’t
+know why, his court.”
+
+“Yes, I admired him, I thought you very happy, you had found your
+ideal, a fine, good-sized man, always well dressed, with yellow gloves,
+his beard well shaven, patent leather boots, a clean shirt, exquisitely
+neat, and so attentive—”
+
+“Yes, yes, go on.”
+
+“In short, quite an elegant man: his voice was femininely sweet, and
+then such gentleness! And his promises of happiness and liberty! His
+sentences were veneered with rosewood. He stocked his conversation with
+shawls and laces. In his smallest expression you heard the rumbling of
+a coach and four. Your wedding presents were magnificent. Armand seemed
+to me like a husband of velvet, of a robe of birds’ feathers in which
+you were to be wrapped.”
+
+“Caroline, my husband uses tobacco.”
+
+“So does mine; that is, he smokes.”
+
+“But mine, dear, uses it as they say Napoleon did: in short, he chews,
+and I hold tobacco in horror. The monster found it out, and went
+without out it for seven months.”
+
+“All men have their habits. They absolutely must use something.”
+
+“You have no idea of the tortures I endure. At night I am awakened with
+a start by one of my own sneezes. As I go to sleep my motions bring the
+grains of snuff scattered over the pillow under my nose, I inhale, and
+explode like a mine. It seems that Armand, the wretch, is used to these
+_surprises_, and doesn’t wake up. I find tobacco everywhere, and I
+certainly didn’t marry the customs office.”
+
+“But, my dear child, what does this trifling inconvenience amount to,
+if your husband is kind and possesses a good disposition?”
+
+“He is as cold as marble, as particular as an old bachelor, as
+communicative as a sentinel; and he’s one of those men who say yes to
+everything, but who never do anything but what they want to.”
+
+“Deny him, once.”
+
+“I’ve tried it.”
+
+“What came of it?”
+
+“He threatened to reduce my allowance, and to keep back a sum big
+enough for him to get along without me.”
+
+“Poor Stephanie! He’s not a man, he’s a monster.”
+
+“A calm and methodical monster, who wears a scratch, and who, every
+night—”
+
+“Well, every night—”
+
+“Wait a minute!—who takes a tumbler every night, and puts seven false
+teeth in it.”
+
+“What a trap your marriage was! At any rate, Armand is rich.”
+
+“Who knows?”
+
+“Good heavens! Why, you seem to me on the point of becoming very
+unhappy—or very happy.”
+
+“Well, dear, how is it with you?”
+
+“Oh, as for me, I have nothing as yet but a pin that pricks me: but it
+is intolerable.”
+
+“Poor creature! You don’t know your own happiness: come, what is it?”
+
+Here the young woman whispered in the other’s ear, so that it was
+impossible to catch a single word. The conversation recommenced, or
+rather finished by a sort of inference.
+
+“So, your Adolphe is jealous?”
+
+“Jealous of whom? We never leave each other, and that, in itself, is an
+annoyance. I can’t stand it. I don’t dare to gape. I am expected to be
+forever enacting the woman in love. It’s fatiguing.”
+
+“Caroline?”
+
+“Well?”
+
+“What are you going to do?”
+
+“Resign myself. What are you?
+
+“Fight the customs office.”
+
+This little trouble tends to prove that in the matter of personal
+deception, the two sexes can well cry quits.
+
+DISAPPOINTED AMBITION.
+
+I. CHODOREILLE THE GREAT.
+
+A young man has forsaken his natal city in the depths of one of the
+departments, rather clearly marked by M. Charles Dupin. He felt that
+glory of some sort awaited him: suppose that of a painter, a novelist,
+a journalist, a poet, a great statesman.
+
+Young Adolphe de Chodoreille—that we may be perfectly understood
+—wished to be talked about, to become celebrated, to be somebody. This,
+therefore, is addressed to the mass of aspiring individuals brought to
+Paris by all sorts of vehicles, whether moral or material, and who rush
+upon the city one fine morning with the hydrophobic purpose of
+overturning everybody’s reputation, and of building themselves a
+pedestal with the ruins they are to make,—until disenchantment follows.
+As our intention is to specify this peculiarity so characteristic of
+our epoch, let us take from among the various personages the one whom
+the author has elsewhere called _A Distinguished Provencal_.
+
+Adolphe has discovered that the most admirable trade is that which
+consists in buying a bottle of ink, a bunch of quills, and a ream of
+paper, at a stationer’s for twelve francs and a half, and in selling
+the two thousand sheets in the ream over again, for something like
+fifty thousand francs, after having, of course, written upon each leaf
+fifty lines replete with style and imagination.
+
+This problem,—twelve francs and a half metamorphosed into fifty
+thousand francs, at the rate of five sous a line—urges numerous
+families who might advantageously employ their members in the
+retirement of the provinces, to thrust them into the vortex of Paris.
+
+The young man who is the object of this exportation, invariably passes
+in his natal town for a man of as much imagination as the most famous
+author. He has always studied well, he writes very nice poetry, he is
+considered a fellow of parts: he is besides often guilty of a charming
+tale published in the local paper, which obtains the admiration of the
+department.
+
+His poor parents will never know what their son has come to Paris to
+learn at great cost, namely: That it is difficult to be a writer and to
+understand the French language short of a dozen years of heculean
+labor: That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to
+become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private history
+of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian, Boccaccio,
+Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne, Voltaire,
+Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the _Thousand and One Nights_,
+were all men of genius as well as giants of erudition.
+
+Their Adolphe serves his literary apprenticeship in two or three
+coffee-houses, becomes a member of the Society of Men of Letters,
+attacks, with or without reason, men of talent who don’t read his
+articles, assumes a milder tone on seeing the powerlessness of his
+criticisms, offers novelettes to the papers which toss them from one to
+the other as if they were shuttlecocks: and, after five or six years of
+exercises more or less fatiguing, of dreadful privations which
+seriously tax his parents, he attains a certain position.
+
+This position may be described as follows: Thanks to a sort of
+reciprocal support extended to each other, and which an ingenious
+writer has called “Mutual Admiration,” Adolphe often sees his name
+cited among the names of celebrities, either in the prospectuses of the
+book-trade, or in the lists of newspapers about to appear. Publishers
+print the title of one of his works under the deceitful heading “IN
+PRESS,” which might be called the typographical menagerie of bears.[*]
+Chodoreille is sometimes mentioned among the promising young men of the
+literary world.
+
+[*] A bear (_ours_) is a play which has been refused by a multitude of
+theatres, but which is finally represented at a time when some manager
+or other feels the need of one. The word has necessarily passed from
+the language of the stage into the jargon of journalism, and is applied
+to novels which wander the streets in search of a publisher.
+
+For eleven years Adolphe Chodoreille remains in the ranks of the
+promising young men: he finally obtains a free entrance to the
+theatres, thanks to some dirty work or certain articles of dramatic
+criticism: he tries to pass for a good fellow; and as he loses his
+illusions respecting glory and the world of Paris, he gets into debt
+and his years begin to tell upon him.
+
+A paper which finds itself in a tight place asks him for one of his
+bears revised by his friends. This has been retouched and revamped
+every five years, so that it smells of the pomatum of each prevailing
+and then forgotten fashion. To Adolphe it becomes what the famous cap,
+which he was constantly staking, was to Corporal Trim, for during five
+years “Anything for a Woman” (the title decided upon) “will be one of
+the most entertaining productions of our epoch.”
+
+After eleven years, Chodoreille is regarded as having written some
+respectable things, five or six tales published in the dismal
+magazines, in ladies’ newspapers, or in works intended for children of
+tender age.
+
+As he is a bachelor, and possesses a coat and a pair of black cassimere
+trousers, and when he pleases may thus assume the appearance of an
+elegant diplomat, and as he is not without a certain intelligent air,
+he is admitted to several more or less literary salons: he bows to the
+five or six academicians who possess genius, influence or talent, he
+visits two or three of our great poets, he allows himself, in
+coffee-rooms, to call the two or three justly celebrated women of our
+epoch by their Christian names; he is on the best of terms with the
+blue stockings of the second grade,—who ought to be called _socks_,—and
+he shakes hands and takes glasses of absinthe with the stars of the
+smaller newspapers.
+
+Such is the history of every species of ordinary men—men who have been
+denied what they call good luck. This good luck is nothing less than
+unyielding will, incessant labor, contempt for an easily won celebrity,
+immense learning, and that patience which, according to Buffon, is the
+whole of genius, but which certainly is the half of it.
+
+You do not yet see any indication of a petty trouble for Caroline. You
+imagine that this history of five hundred young men engaged at this
+moment in wearing smooth the paving stones of Paris, was written as a
+sort of warning to the families of the eighty-six departments of
+France: but read these two letters which lately passed between two
+girls differently married, and you will see that it was as necessary as
+the narrative by which every true melodrama was until lately expected
+to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the Parisian
+peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native village, and
+polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, the rays of his glory, which,
+like those of the sun, are only warm and brilliant at a distance.
+
+From Madame Claire de la Roulandiere, nee Jugault, to Madame Adolphe de
+Chodoreille, nee Heurtaut.
+
+“VIVIERS.
+
+
+“You have not yet written to me, and it’s real unkind in you. Don’t you
+remember that the happier was to write first and to console her who
+remained in the country?
+
+“Since your departure for Paris, I have married Monsieur de la
+Roulandiere, the president of the tribunal. You know him, and you can
+judge whether I am happy or not, with my heart _saturated_, as it is,
+with our ideas. I was not ignorant what my lot would be: I live with
+the ex-president, my husband’s uncle, and with my mother-in-law, who
+has preserved nothing of the ancient parliamentary society of Aix but
+its pride and its severity of manners. I am seldom alone, I never go
+out unless accompanied by my mother-in-law or my husband. We receive
+the heavy people of the city in the evening. They play whist at two
+sous a point, and I listen to conversations of this nature:
+
+“‘Monsieur Vitremont is dead, and leaves two hundred and eighty
+thousand francs,’ says the associate judge, a young man of forty-seven,
+who is as entertaining as a northwest wind.
+
+“‘Are you quite sure of that?’
+
+“The _that_ refers to the two hundred and eighty thousand francs. A
+little judge then holds forth, he runs over the investments, the others
+discuss their value, and it is definitely settled that if he has not
+left two hundred and eighty thousand, he left something near it.
+
+“Then comes a universal concert of eulogy heaped upon the dead man’s
+body, for having kept his bread under lock and key, for having shrewdly
+invested his little savings accumulated sou by sou, in order, probably,
+that the whole city and those who expect legacies may applaud and
+exclaim in admiration, ‘He leaves two hundred and eighty thousand
+francs!’ Now everybody has rich relations of whom they say ‘Will he
+leave anything like it?’ and thus they discuss the quick as they have
+discussed the dead.
+
+“They talk of nothing but the prospects of fortune, the prospects of a
+vacancy in office, the prospects of the harvest.
+
+“When we were children, and used to look at those pretty little white
+mice, in the cobbler’s window in the rue St. Maclou, that turned and
+turned the circular cage in which they were imprisoned, how far I was
+from thinking that they would one day be a faithful image of my life!
+
+“Think of it, my being in this condition!—I who fluttered my wings so
+much more than you, I whose imagination was so vagabond! My sins have
+been greater than yours, and I am the more severely punished. I have
+bidden farewell to my dreams: I am _Madame la Presidente_ in all my
+glory, and I resign myself to giving my arm for forty years to my big
+awkward Roulandiere, to living meanly in every way, and to having
+forever before me two heavy brows and two wall-eyes pierced in a yellow
+face, which is destined never to know what it is to smile.
+
+“But you, Caroline dear, you who, between ourselves, were admitted
+among the big girls while I still gamboled among the little ones, you
+whose only sin was pride, you,—at the age of twenty-seven, and with a
+dowry of two hundred thousand francs,—capture and captivate a truly
+great man, one of the wittiest men in Paris, one of the two talented
+men that our village has produced.—What luck!
+
+“You now circulate in the most brilliant society of Paris. Thanks to
+the sublime privileges of genius. You may appear in all the salons of
+the Faubourg St. Germain, and be cordially received. You have the
+exquisite enjoyment of the company of the two or three celebrated women
+of our age, where so many good things are said, where the happy
+speeches which arrive out here like Congreve rockets, are first fired
+off. You go to the Baron Schinner’s of whom Adolphe so often spoke to
+us, whom all the great artists and foreigners of celebrity visit. In
+short, before long, you will be one of the queens of Paris, if you
+wish. You can receive, too, and have at your house the lions of
+literature, fashion and finance, whether male or female, for Adolphe
+spoke in such terms about his illustrious friendships and his intimacy
+with the favorites of the hour, that I imagine you giving and receiving
+honors.
+
+“With your ten thousand francs a year, and the legacy from your Aunt
+Carabas, added to the twenty thousand francs that your husband earns,
+you must keep a carriage; and since you go to all the theatres without
+paying, since journalists are the heroes of all the inaugurations so
+ruinous for those who keep up with the movement of Paris, and since
+they are constantly invited to dinner, you live as if you had an income
+of sixty thousand francs a year! Happy Caroline! I don’t wonder you
+forget me!
+
+“I can understand how it is that you have not a moment to yourself.
+Your bliss is the cause of your silence, so I pardon you. Still, if,
+fatigued with so many pleasures, you one day, upon the summit of your
+grandeur, think of your poor Claire, write to me, tell me what a
+marriage with a great man is, describe those great Parisian ladies,
+especially those who write. Oh! I should _so_ much like to know what
+they are made of! Finally don’t forget anything, unless you forget that
+you are loved, as ever, by your poor
+
+“CLAIRE JUGAULT.”
+
+
+From Madame Adolphe de Chodoreille to Madame la Presidente de la
+Roulandiere, at Viviers.
+
+“PARIS.
+
+
+“Ah! my poor Claire, could you have known how many wretched little
+griefs your innocent letter would awaken, you never would have written
+it. Certainly no friend, and not even an enemy, on seeing a woman with
+a thousand mosquito-bites and a plaster over them, would amuse herself
+by tearing it off and counting the stings.
+
+“I will begin by telling you that for a woman of twenty-seven, with a
+face still passable, but with a form a little too much like that of the
+Emperor Nicholas for the humble part I play, I am happy! Let me tell
+you why: Adolphe, rejoicing in the deceptions which have fallen upon me
+like a hail-storm, smoothes over the wounds in my self-love by so much
+affection, so many attentions, and such charming things, that, in good
+truth, women—so far as they are simply women—would be glad to find in
+the man they marry defects so advantageous. But all men of letters
+(Adolphe, alas! is barely a man of letters), who are beings not a bit
+less irritable, nervous, fickle and eccentric than women, are far from
+possessing such solid qualities as those of Adolphe, and I hope they
+have not all been as unfortunate as he.
+
+“Ah! Claire, we love each other well enough for me to tell you the
+simple truth. I have saved my husband, dear, from profound but
+skillfully concealed poverty. Far from receiving twenty thousand francs
+a year, he has not earned that sum in the entire fifteen years that he
+has been at Paris. We occupy a third story in the rue Joubert, and pay
+twelve hundred francs for it; we have some eighty-five hundred francs
+left, with which I endeavor to keep house honorably.
+
+“I have brought Adolphe luck; for since our marriage, he has obtained
+the control of a feuilleton which is worth four hundred francs a month
+to him, though it takes but a small portion of his time. He owes this
+situation to an investment. We employed the seventy thousand francs
+left me by my Aunt Carabas in giving security for a newspaper; on this
+we get nine per cent, and we have stock besides. Since this
+transaction, which was concluded some ten months ago, our income has
+doubled, and we now possess a competence, I can complain of my marriage
+in a pecuniary point of view no more than as regards my affections. My
+vanity alone has suffered, and my ambition has been swamped. You will
+understand the various petty troubles which have assailed me, by a
+single specimen.
+
+“Adolphe, you remember, appeared to us on intimate terms with the
+famous Baroness Schinner, so renowned for her wit, her influence, her
+wealth and her connection with celebrated men. I supposed that he was
+welcomed at her house as a friend: my husband presented me, and I was
+coldly received. I saw that her rooms were furnished with extravagant
+luxury; and instead of Madame Schinner’s returning my call, I received
+a card, twenty days afterward, and at an insolently improper hour.
+
+“On arriving at Paris, I went to walk upon the boulevard, proud of my
+anonymous great man. He nudged me with his elbow, and said, pointing
+out a fat little ill-dressed man, ‘There’s so and so!’ He mentioned one
+of the seven or eight illustrious men in France. I got ready my look of
+admiration, and I saw Adolphe rapturously doffing his hat to the truly
+great man, who replied by the curt little nod that you vouchsafe a
+person with whom you have doubtless exchanged hardly four words in ten
+years. Adolphe had begged a look for my sake. ‘Doesn’t he know you?’ I
+said to my husband. ‘Oh, yes, but he probably took me for somebody
+else,’ replied he.
+
+“And so of poets, so of celebrated musicians, so of statesmen. But, as
+a compensation, we stop and talk for ten minutes in front of some
+arcade or other, with Messieurs Armand du Cantal, George Beaunoir,
+Felix Verdoret, of whom you have never heard. Mesdames Constantine
+Ramachard, Anais Crottat, and Lucienne Vouillon threaten me with their
+_blue_ friendship. We dine editors totally unknown in our province.
+Finally I have had the painful happiness of seeing Adolphe decline an
+invitation to an evening party to which I was not bidden.
+
+“Oh! Claire dear, talent is still the rare flower of spontaneous
+growth, that no greenhouse culture can produce. I do not deceive
+myself: Adolphe is an ordinary man, known, estimated as such: he has no
+other chance, as he himself says, than to take his place among the
+_utilities_ of literature. He was not without wit at Viviers: but to be
+a man of wit at Paris, you must possess every kind of wit in formidable
+doses.
+
+“I esteem Adolphe: for, after some few fibs, he frankly confessed his
+position, and, without humiliating himself too deeply, he promised that
+I should be happy. He hopes, like numerous other ordinary men, to
+obtain some place, that of an assistant librarian, for instance, or the
+pecuniary management of a newspaper. Who knows but we may get him
+elected deputy for Viviers, in the course of time?
+
+“We live in obscurity; we have five or six friends of either sex whom
+we like, and such is the brilliant style of life which your letter
+gilded with all the social splendors.
+
+“From time to time I am caught in a squall, or am the butt of some
+malicious tongue. Thus, yesterday, at the opera, I heard one of our
+most ill-natured wits, Leon de Lora, say to one of our most famous
+critics, ‘It takes Chodoreille to discover the Caroline poplar on the
+banks of the Rhone!’ They had heard my husband call me by my Christian
+name. At Viviers I was considered handsome. I am tall, well made, and
+fat enough to satisfy Adolphe! In this way I learn that the beauty of
+women from the country is, at Paris, precisely like the wit of country
+gentleman.
+
+“In short, I am absolutely nobody, if that is what you wish to know:
+but if you desire to learn how far my philosophy goes, understand that
+I am really happy in having found an ordinary man in my pretended great
+one.
+
+“Farewell, dear Claire! It is still I, you see, who, in spite of my
+delusions and the petty troubles of my life, am the most favorably
+situated: for Adolphe is young, and a charming fellow.
+
+“CAROLINE HEURTAUT.”
+
+
+Claire’s reply contained, among other passages, the following: “I hope
+that the indescribable happiness which you enjoy, will continue, thanks
+to your philosophy.” Claire, as any intimate female friend would have
+done, consoled herself for her president by insinuations respecting
+Adolphe’s prospects and future conduct.
+
+II. ANOTHER GLANCE AT CHODOREILLE.
+
+(Letter discovered one day in a casket, while she was making me wait a
+long time and trying to get rid of a hanger-on who could not be made to
+understand hidden meanings. I caught cold—but I got hold of this
+letter.)
+
+This fatuous note was found on a paper which the notary’s clerks had
+thought of no importance in the inventory of the estate of M. Ferdinand
+de Bourgarel, who was mourned of late by politics, arts and amours, and
+in whom is ended the great Provencal house of Borgarelli; for as is
+generally known the name Bourgarel is a corruption of Borgarelli just
+as the French Girardin is the Florentine Gherardini.
+
+An intelligent reader will find little difficulty in placing this
+letter in its proper epoch in the lives of Adolphe and Caroline.
+
+“My dear Friend:
+
+“I thought myself lucky indeed to marry an artist as superior in his
+talent as in his personal attributes, equally great in soul and mind,
+worldly-wise, and likely to rise by following the public road without
+being obliged to wander along crooked, doubtful by-paths. However, you
+knew Adolphe; you appreciated his worth. I am loved, he is a father, I
+idolize our children. Adolphe is kindness itself to me; I admire and
+love him. But, my dear, in this complete happiness lurks a thorn. The
+roses upon which I recline have more than one fold. In the heart of a
+woman, folds speedily turn to wounds. These wounds soon bleed, the evil
+spreads, we suffer, the suffering awakens thoughts, the thoughts swell
+and change the course of sentiment.
+
+“Ah, my dear, you shall know all about it, though it is a cruel thing
+to say—but we live as much by vanity as by love. To live by love alone,
+one must dwell somewhere else than in Paris. What difference would it
+make to us whether we had only one white percale gown, if the man we
+love did not see other women dressed differently, more elegantly than
+we—women who inspire ideas by their ways, by a multitude of little
+things which really go to make up great passions? Vanity, my dear, is
+cousin-german to jealousy, to that beautiful and noble jealousy which
+consists in not allowing one’s empire to be invaded, in reigning
+undisturbed in a soul, and passing one’s life happily in a heart.
+
+“Ah, well, my woman’s vanity is on the rack. Though some troubles may
+seem petty indeed, I have learned, unfortunately, that in the home
+there are no petty troubles. For everything there is magnified by
+incessant contact with sensations, with desires, with ideas. Such then
+is the secret of that sadness which you have surprised in me and which
+I did not care to explain. It is one of those things in which words go
+too far, and where writing holds at least the thought within bounds by
+establishing it. The effects of a moral perspective differ so radically
+between what is said and what is written! All is so solemn, so serious
+on paper! One cannot commit any more imprudences. Is it not this fact
+which makes a treasure out of a letter where one gives one’s self over
+to one’s thoughts?
+
+“You doubtless thought me wretched, but I am only wounded. You
+discovered me sitting alone by the fire, and no Adolphe. I had just
+finished putting the children to bed; they were asleep. Adolphe for the
+tenth time had been invited out to a house where I do not go, where
+they want Adolphe without his wife. There are drawing-rooms where he
+goes without me, just at there are many pleasures in which he alone is
+the guest. If he were M. de Navarreins and I a d’Espard, society would
+never think of separating us; it would want us always together. His
+habits are formed; he does not suspect the humiliation which weighs
+upon my heart. Indeed, if he had the slightest inkling of this small
+sorrow which I am ashamed to own, he would drop society, he would
+become more of a prig than the people who come between us. But he would
+hamper his progress, he would make enemies, he would raise up obstacles
+by imposing me upon the salons where I would be subject to a thousand
+slights. That is why I prefer my sufferings to what would happen were
+they discovered.
+
+“Adolphe will succeed! He carries my revenge in his beautiful head,
+does this man of genius. One day the world shall pay for all these
+slights. But when? Perhaps I shall be forty-five. My beautiful youth
+will have passed in my chimney-corner, and with this thought: Adolphe
+smiles, he is enjoying the society of fair women, he is playing the
+devoted to them, while none of these attentions come my way.
+
+“It may be that these will finally take him from me!
+
+“No one undergoes slight without feeling it, and I feel that I am
+slighted, though young, beautiful and virtuous. Now, can I keep from
+thinking this way? Can I control my anger at the thought that Adolphe
+is dining in the city without me? I take no part in his triumphs; I do
+not hear the witty or profound remarks made to others! I could no
+longer be content with bourgeois receptions whence he rescued me, upon
+finding me _distinguee_, wealthy, young, beautiful and witty. There
+lies the evil, and it is irremediable.
+
+“In a word, for some cause, it is only since I cannot go to a certain
+salon that I want to go there. Nothing is more natural of the ways of a
+human heart. The ancients were wise in having their _gyneceums_. The
+collisions between the pride of the women, caused by these gatherings,
+though it dates back only four centuries, has cost our own day much
+disaffection and numerous bitter debates.
+
+“Be that as it may, my dear, Adolphe is always warmly welcomed when he
+comes back home. Still, no nature is strong enough to await always with
+the same ardor. What a morrow that will be, following the evening when
+his welcome is less warm!
+
+“Now do you see the depth of the fold which I mentioned? A fold in the
+heart is an abyss, like a crevasse in the Alps—a profundity whose depth
+and extent we have never been able to calculate. Thus it is between two
+beings, no matter how near they may be drawn to each other. One never
+realizes the weight of suffering which oppresses his friend. This seems
+such a little thing, yet one’s life is affected by it in all its
+length, in all its breadth. I have thus argued with myself; but the
+more I have argued, the more thoroughly have I realized the extent of
+this hidden sorrow. And I can only let the current carry me whither it
+will.
+
+“Two voices struggle for supremacy when—by a rarely fortunate chance —I
+am alone in my armchair waiting for Adolphe. One, I would wager, comes
+from Eugene Delacroix’s _Faust_ which I have on my table.
+Mephistopheles speaks, that terrible aide who guides the swords so
+dexterously. He leaves the engraving, and places himself diabolically
+before me, grinning through the hole which the great artist has placed
+under his nose, and gazing at me with that eye whence fall rubies,
+diamonds, carriages, jewels, laces, silks, and a thousand luxuries to
+feed the burning desire within me.
+
+“‘Are you not fit for society?’ he asks. ‘You are the equal of the
+fairest duchesses. Your voice is like a siren’s, your hands command
+respect and love. Ah! that arm!—place bracelets upon it, and how
+pleasingly it would rest upon the velvet of a robe! Your locks are
+chains which would fetter all men. And you could lay all your triumphs
+at Adolphe’s feet, show him your power and never use it. Then he would
+fear, where now he lives in insolent certainty. Come! To action! Inhale
+a few mouthfuls of disdain and you will exhale clouds of incense. Dare
+to reign! Are you not next to nothing here in your chimney-corner?
+Sooner or later the pretty spouse, the beloved wife will die, if you
+continue like this, in a dressing-gown. Come, and you shall perpetuate
+your sway through the arts of coquetry! Show yourself in salons, and
+your pretty foot shall trample down the love of your rivals.’
+
+“The other voice comes from my white marble mantel, which rustles like
+a garment. I think I see a veritable goddess crowned with white roses,
+and bearing a palm-branch in her hand. Two blue eyes smile down on me.
+This simple image of virtue says to me:
+
+“‘Be content! Remain good always, and make this man happy. That is the
+whole of your mission. The sweetness of angels triumphs over all pain.
+Faith in themselves has enabled the martyrs to obtain solace even on
+the brasiers of their tormentors. Suffer a moment; you shall be happy
+in the end.’
+
+“Sometimes Adolphe enters at that moment and I am content. But, my
+dear, I have less patience than love. I almost wish to tear in pieces
+the woman who can go everywhere, and whose society is sought out by men
+and women alike. What profound thought lies in the line of Moliere:
+
+“‘The world, dear Agnes, is a curious thing!’
+
+“You know nothing of this petty trouble, you fortunate Mathilde! You
+are well born. You can do a great deal for me. Just think! I can write
+you things that I dared not speak about. Your visits mean so much; come
+often to see your poor
+
+“Caroline.”
+
+“Well,” said I to the notary’s clerk, “do you know what was the nature
+of this letter to the late Bourgarel?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“A note of exchange.”
+
+Neither clerk nor notary understood my meaning. Do you?
+
+THE PANGS OF INNOCENCE.
+
+“Yes, dear, in the married state, many things will happen to you which
+you are far from expecting: but then others will happen which you
+expect still less. For instance—”
+
+The author (may we say the ingenious author?) _qui castigat ridendo
+mores_, and who has undertaken the _Petty Troubles of Married Life_,
+hardly needs to remark, that, for prudence’ sake, he here allows a lady
+of high distinction to speak, and that he does not assume the
+responsibility of her language, though he professes the most sincere
+admiration for the charming person to whom he owes his acquaintance
+with this petty trouble.
+
+“For instance—” she says.
+
+He nevertheless thinks proper to avow that this person is neither
+Madame Foullepointe, nor Madame de Fischtaminel, nor Madame Deschars.
+
+Madame Deschars is too prudish, Madame Foullepointe too absolute in her
+household, and she knows it; indeed, what doesn’t she know? She is
+good-natured, she sees good society, she wishes to have the best:
+people overlook the vivacity of her witticisms, as, under louis XIV,
+they overlooked the remarks of Madame Cornuel. They overlook a good
+many things in her; there are some women who are the spoiled children
+of public opinion.
+
+As to Madame de Fischtaminel, who is, in fact, connected with the
+affair, as you shall see, she, being unable to recriminate, abstains
+from words and recriminates in acts.
+
+We give permission to all to think that the speaker is Caroline
+herself, not the silly little Caroline of tender years. But Caroline
+when she has become a woman of thirty.
+
+“For instance,” she remarks to a young woman whom she is edifying, “you
+will have children, God willing.”
+
+“Madame,” I say, “don’t let us mix the deity up in this, unless it is
+an allusion—”
+
+“You are impertinent,” she replies, “you shouldn’t interrupt a woman—”
+
+“When she is busy with children, I know: but, madame, you ought not to
+trifle with the innocence of young ladies. Mademoiselle is going to be
+married, and if she were led to count upon the intervention of the
+Supreme Being in this affair, she would fall into serious errors. We
+should not deceive the young. Mademoiselle is beyond the age when girls
+are informed that their little brother was found under a cabbage.”
+
+“You evidently want to get me confused,” she replies, smiling and
+showing the loveliest teeth in the world. “I am not strong enough to
+argue with you, so I beg you to let me go on with Josephine. What was I
+saying?”
+
+“That if I get married, I shall have children,” returns the young lady.
+
+“Very well. I will not represent things to you worse than they are, but
+it is extremely probable that each child will cost you a tooth. With
+every baby I have lost a tooth.”
+
+“Happily,” I remark at this, “this trouble was with you less than
+petty, it was positively nothing.”—They were side teeth.—“But take
+notice, miss, that this vexation has no absolute, unvarying character
+as such. The annoyance depends upon the condition of the tooth. If the
+baby causes the loss of a decayed tooth, you are fortunate to have a
+baby the more and a bad tooth the less. Don’t let us confound blessings
+with bothers. Ah! if you were to lose one of your magnificent front
+teeth, that would be another thing! And yet there is many a woman that
+would give the best tooth in her head for a fine, healthy boy!”
+
+“Well,” resumes Caroline, with animation, “at the risk of destroying
+your illusions, poor child, I’ll just show you a petty trouble that
+counts! Ah, it’s atrocious! And I won’t leave the subject of dress
+which this gentleman considers the only subject we women are equal to.”
+
+I protest by a gesture.
+
+“I had been married about two years,” continues Caroline, “and I loved
+my husband. I have got over it since and acted differently for his
+happiness and mine. I can boast of having one of the happiest homes in
+Paris. In short, my dear, I loved the monster, and, even when out in
+society, saw no one but him. My husband had already said to me several
+times, ‘My dear, young women never dress well; your mother liked to
+have you look like a stick,—she had her reasons for it. If you care for
+my advice, take Madame de Fischtaminel for a model: she is a lady of
+taste.’ I, unsuspecting creature that I was, saw no perfidy in the
+recommendation.
+
+“One evening as we returned from a party, he said, ‘Did you notice how
+Madame de Fischtaminel was dressed!’ ‘Yes, very neatly.’ And I said to
+myself, ‘He’s always talking about Madame de Fischtaminel; I must
+really dress just like her.’ I had noticed the stuff and the make of
+the dress, and the style of the trimmings. I was as happy as could be,
+as I went trotting about town, doing everything I could to obtain the
+same articles. I sent for the very same dressmaker.
+
+“‘You work for Madame de Fischtaminel,’ I said.
+
+“‘Yes, madame.’
+
+“‘Well, I will employ you as my dressmaker, but on one condition: you
+see I have procured the stuff of which her gown is made, and I want you
+to make me one exactly like it.’
+
+“I confess that I did not at first pay any attention to a rather shrewd
+smile of the dressmaker, though I saw it and afterwards accounted for
+it. ‘So like it,’ I added, ‘that you can’t tell them apart.’
+
+“Oh,” says Caroline, interrupting herself and looking at me, “you men
+teach us to live like spiders in the depths of their webs, to see
+everything without seeming to look at it, to investigate the meaning
+and spirit of words, movements, looks. You say, ‘How cunning women
+are!’ But you should say, ‘How deceitful men are!’
+
+“I can’t tell you how much care, how many days, how many manoeuvres, it
+cost me to become Madame de Fischtaminel’s duplicate! But these are our
+battles, child,” she adds, returning to Josephine. “I could not find a
+certain little embroidered neckerchief, a very marvel! I finally
+learned that it was made to order. I unearthed the embroideress, and
+ordered a kerchief like Madame de Fischtaminel’s. The price was a mere
+trifle, one hundred and fifty francs! It had been ordered by a
+gentleman who had made a present of it to Madame de Fischtaminel. All
+my savings were absorbed by it. Now we women of Paris are all of us
+very much restricted in the article of dress. There is not a man worth
+a hundred thousand francs a year, that loses ten thousand a winter at
+whist, who does not consider his wife extravagant, and is not alarmed
+at her bills for what he calls ‘rags’! ‘Let my savings go,’ I said. And
+they went. I had the modest pride of a woman in love: I would not speak
+a word to Adolphe of my dress; I wanted it to be a surprise, goose that
+I was! Oh, how brutally you men take away our blessed ignorance!”
+
+This remark is meant for me, for me who had taken nothing from the
+lady, neither tooth, nor anything whatever of the things with a name
+and without a name that may be taken from a woman.
+
+“I must tell you that my husband took me to Madame de Fischtaminel’s,
+where I dined quite often. I heard her say to him, ‘Why, your wife
+looks very well!’ She had a patronizing way with me that I put up with:
+Adolphe wished that I could have her wit and preponderance in society.
+In short, this phoenix of women was my model. I studied and copied her,
+I took immense pains not to be myself—oh!—it was a poem that no one but
+us women can understand! Finally, the day of my triumph dawned. My
+heart beat for joy, as if I were a child, as if I were what we all are
+at twenty-two. My husband was going to call for me for a walk in the
+Tuileries: he came in, I looked at him radiant with joy, but he took no
+notice. Well, I can confess it now, it was one of those frightful
+disasters—but I will say nothing about it —this gentleman here would
+make fun of me.”
+
+I protest by another movement.
+
+“It was,” she goes on, for a woman never stops till she has told the
+whole of a thing, “as if I had seen an edifice built by a fairy crumble
+into ruins. Adolphe manifested not the slightest surprise. We got into
+the carriage. Adolphe noticed my sadness, and asked me what the matter
+was: I replied as we always do when our hearts are wrung by these petty
+vexations, ‘Oh, nothing!’ Then he took his eye-glass, and stared at the
+promenaders on the Champs Elysees, for we were to go the rounds of the
+Champs Elysees, before taking our walk at the Tuileries. Finally, a fit
+of impatience seized me. I felt a slight attack of fever, and when I
+got home, I composed myself to smile. ‘You haven’t said a word about my
+dress!’ I muttered. ‘Ah, yes, your gown is somewhat like Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s.’ He turned on his heel and went away.
+
+“The next day I pouted a little, as you may readily imagine. Just as we
+were finishing breakfast by the fire in my room—I shall never forget
+it—the embroideress called to get her money for the neckerchief. I paid
+her. She bowed to my husband as if she knew him. I ran after her on
+pretext of getting her to receipt the bill, and said: ‘You didn’t ask
+_him_ so much for Madame de Fischtaminel’s kerchief!’ ‘I assure you,
+madame, it’s the same price, the gentleman did not beat me down a
+mite.’ I returned to my room where I found my husband looking as
+foolish as—”
+
+She hesitates and then resumes: “As a miller just made a bishop. ‘I
+understand, love, now, that I shall never be anything more than
+_somewhat like_ Madame de Fischtaminel.’ ‘You refer to her neckerchief,
+I suppose: well, I _did_ give it to her,—it was for her birthday. You
+see, we were formerly—’ ‘Ah, you were formerly more intimate than you
+are now!’ Without replying to this, he added, ‘_But it’s altogether
+moral._’
+
+“He took his hat and went out, leaving me with this fine declaration of
+the Rights of Man. He did not return and came home late at night. I
+remained in my chamber and wept like a Magdalen, in the chimney-corner.
+You may laugh at me, if you will,” she adds, looking at me, “but I shed
+tears over my youthful illusions, and I wept, too, for spite, at having
+been taken for a dupe. I remembered the dressmaker’s smile! Ah, that
+smile reminded me of the smiles of a number of women, who laughed at
+seeing me so innocent and unsuspecting at Madame de Fischtaminel’s! I
+wept sincerely. Until now I had a right to give my husband credit for
+many things which he did not possess, but in the existence of which
+young married women pertinaciously believe.
+
+“How many great troubles are included in this petty one! You men are a
+vulgar set. There is not a woman who does not carry her delicacy so far
+as to embroider her past life with the most delightful fibs, while
+you—but I have had my revenge.”
+
+“Madame,” I say, “you are giving this young lady too much information.”
+
+“True,” she returns, “I will tell you the sequel some other time.”
+
+“Thus, you see, mademoiselle,” I say, “you imagine you are buying a
+neckerchief and you find a _petty trouble_ round your neck: if you get
+it given to you—”
+
+“It’s a _great_ trouble,” retorts the woman of distinction. “Let us
+stop here.”
+
+The moral of this fable is that you must wear your neckerchief without
+thinking too much about it. The ancient prophets called this world,
+even in their time, a valley of woe. Now, at that period, the Orientals
+had, with the permission of the constituted authorities, a swarm of
+comely slaves, besides their wives! What shall we call the valley of
+the Seine between Calvary and Charenton, where the law allows but one
+lawful wife.
+
+THE UNIVERSAL AMADIS.
+
+You will understand at once that I began to gnaw the head of my cane,
+to consult the ceiling, to gaze at the fire, to examine Caroline’s
+foot, and I thus held out till the marriageable young lady was gone.
+
+“You must excuse me,” I said, “if I have remained behind, perhaps in
+spite of you: but your vengeance would lose by being recounted by and
+by, and if it constituted a petty trouble for your husband, I have the
+greatest interest in hearing it, and you shall know why.”
+
+“Ah,” she returned, “that expression, ‘_it’s altogether moral,_’ which
+he gave as an excuse, shocked me to the last degree. It was a great
+consolation, truly, to me, to know that I held the place, in his
+household, of a piece of furniture, a block; that my kingdom lay among
+the kitchen utensils, the accessories of my toilet, and the physicians’
+prescriptions; that our conjugal love had been assimilated to dinner
+pills, to veal soup and white mustard; that Madame de Fischtaminel
+possessed my husband’s soul, his admiration, and that she charmed and
+satisfied his intellect, while I was a kind of purely physical
+necessity! What do you think of a woman’s being degraded to the
+situation of a soup or a plate of boiled beef, and without parsley, at
+that! Oh, I composed a catilinic, that evening—”
+
+“Philippic is better.”
+
+“Well, either. I’ll say anything you like, for I was perfectly furious,
+and I don’t remember what I screamed in the desert of my bedroom. Do
+you suppose that this opinion that husbands have of their wives, the
+parts they give them, is not a singular vexation for us? Our petty
+troubles are always pregnant with greater ones. My Adolphe needed a
+lesson. You know the Vicomte de Lustrac, a desperate amateur of women
+and music, an epicure, one of those ex-beaux of the Empire, who live
+upon their earlier successes, and who cultivate themselves with
+excessive care, in order to secure a second crop?”
+
+“Yes,” I said, “one of those laced, braced, corseted old fellows of
+sixty, who work such wonders by the grace of their forms, and who might
+give a lesson to the youngest dandies among us.”
+
+“Monsieur de Lustrac is as selfish as a king, but gallant and
+pretentious, spite of his jet black wig.”
+
+“As to his whiskers, he dyes them.”
+
+“He goes to ten parties in an evening: he’s a butterfly.”
+
+“He gives capital dinners and concerts, and patronizes inexperienced
+songstresses.”
+
+“He takes bustle for pleasure.”
+
+“Yes, but he makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune
+occurs. Are you in mourning, he avoids you. Are you confined, he awaits
+your churching before he visits you. He possesses a mundane frankness
+and a social intrepidity which challenge admiration.”
+
+“But does it not require courage to appear to be what one really is?” I
+asked.
+
+“Well,” she resumed, after we had exchanged our observations on this
+point, “this young old man, this universal Amadis, whom we call among
+ourselves Chevalier _Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore_, became the object of
+my admiration. I made him a few of those advances which never
+compromise a woman; I spoke of the good taste exhibited in his latest
+waistcoats and in his canes, and he thought me a lady of extreme
+amiability. I thought him a chevalier of extreme youth; he called upon
+me; I put on a number of little airs, and pretended to be unhappy at
+home, and to have deep sorrows. You know what a woman means when she
+talks of her sorrows, and complains that she is not understood. The old
+ape replied much better than a young man would, and I had the greatest
+difficulty in keeping a straight face while I listened to him.
+
+“‘Ah, that’s the way with husbands, they pursue the very worst polity,
+they respect their wives, and, sooner or later, every woman is enraged
+at finding herself respected, and divines the secret education to which
+she is entitled. Once married, you ought not to live like a little
+school-girl, etc.’
+
+“As he spoke, he leaned over me, he squirmed, he was horrible to see.
+He looked like a wooden Nuremberg doll, he stuck out his chin, he stuck
+out his chair, he stuck out his hand—in short, after a variety of
+marches and countermarches, of declarations that were perfectly
+angelic—”
+
+“No!”
+
+“Yes. _Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore_ had abandoned the classicism of his
+youth for the romanticism now in fashion: he spoke of the soul, of
+angels, of adoration, of submission, he became ethereal, and of the
+darkest blue. He took me to the opera, and handed me to my carriage.
+This old young man went when I went, his waistcoats multiplied, he
+compressed his waist, he excited his horse to a gallop in order to
+catch and accompany my carriage to the promenade: he compromised me
+with the grace of a young collegian, and was considered madly in love
+with me. I was steadfastly cruel, but accepted his arm and his
+bouquets. We were talked about. I was delighted, and managed before
+long to be surprised by my husband, with the viscount on the sofa in my
+boudoir, holding my hands in his, while I listened in a sort of
+external ecstasy. It is incredible how much a desire for vengeance will
+induce us to put up with! I appeared vexed at the entrance of my
+husband, who made a scene on the viscount’s departure: ‘I assure you,
+sir,’ said I, after having listened to his reproaches, ‘that _it’s
+altogether moral_.’ My husband saw the point and went no more to Madame
+de Fischtaminel’s. I received Monsieur de Lustrac no more, either.”
+
+“But,” I interrupted, “this Lustrac that you, like many others, take
+for a bachelor, is a widower, and childless.”
+
+“Really!”
+
+“No man ever buried his wife deeper than he buried his: she will hardly
+be found at the day of judgment. He married before the Revolution, and
+your _altogether moral_ reminds me of a speech of his that I shall have
+to repeat for your benefit. Napoleon appointed Lustrac to an important
+office, in a conquered province. Madame de Lustrac, abandoned for
+governmental duties, took a private secretary for her private affairs,
+though it was altogether moral: but she was wrong in selecting him
+without informing her husband. Lustrac met this secretary in a state of
+some excitement, in consequence of a lively discussion in his wife’s
+chamber, and at an exceedingly early hour in the morning. The city
+desired nothing better than to laugh at its governor, and this
+adventure made such a sensation that Lustrac himself begged the Emperor
+to recall him. Napoleon desired his representatives to be men of
+morality, and he held that such disasters as this must inevitably take
+from a man’s consideration. You know that among the Emperor’s unhappy
+passions, was that of reforming his court and his government. Lustrac’s
+request was granted, therefore, but without compensation. When he
+returned to Paris, he reappeared at his mansion, with his wife; he took
+her into society—a step which is certainly conformable to the most
+refined habits of the aristocracy —but then there are always people who
+want to find out about it. They inquired the reason of this chivalrous
+championship. ‘So you are reconciled, you and Madame de Lustrac,’ some
+one said to him in the lobby of the Emperor’s theatre, ‘you have
+pardoned her, have you? So much the better.’ ‘Oh,’ replied he, with a
+satisfied air, ‘I became convinced—’ ‘Ah, that she was innocent, very
+good.’ ‘No, I became convinced that it was altogether physical.’”
+
+Caroline smiled.
+
+“The opinion of your admirer reduced this weighty trouble to what is,
+in this case as in yours, a very petty one.”
+
+“A petty trouble!” she exclaimed, “and pray for what do you take the
+fatigue of coquetting with a de Lustrac, of whom I have made an enemy!
+Ah, women often pay dearly enough for the bouquets they receive and the
+attentions they accept. Monsieur de Lustrac said of me to Monsieur de
+Bourgarel, ‘I would not advise you to pay court to that woman; she is
+too dear.’”
+
+WITHOUT AN OCCUPATION.
+
+“PARIS, 183-
+
+“You ask me, dear mother, whether I am happy with my husband. Certainly
+Monsieur de Fischtaminel was not the ideal of my dreams. I submitted to
+your will, as you know. His fortune, that supreme consideration, spoke,
+indeed, sufficiently loud. With these arguments, —a marriage, without
+stooping, with the Count de Fischtaminel, his having thirty thousand a
+year, and a home at Paris—you were strongly armed against your poor
+daughter. Besides, Monsieur de Fischtaminel is good looking for a man
+of thirty-six years; he received the cross of the Legion of Honor from
+Napoleon upon the field of battle, he is an ex-colonel, and had it not
+been for the Restoration, which put him upon half-pay, he would be a
+general. These are certainly extenuating circumstances.
+
+“Many women consider that I have made a good match, and I am bound to
+confess that there is every appearance of happiness,—for the public,
+that is. But you will acknowledge that if you had known of the return
+of my Uncle Cyrus and of his intention to leave me his money, you would
+have given me the privilege of choosing for myself.
+
+“I have nothing to say against Monsieur de Fischtaminel: he does not
+gamble, he is indifferent to women, he doesn’t like wine, and he has no
+expensive fancies: he possesses, as you said, all the negative
+qualities which make husbands passable. Then, what is the matter with
+him? Well, mother, he has nothing to do. We are together the whole
+blessed day! Would you believe that it is during the night, when we are
+the most closely united, that I am the most alone? His sleep is my
+asylum, my liberty begins when he slumbers. This state of siege will
+yet make me sick: I am never alone. If Monsieur de Fischtaminel were
+jealous, I should have a resource. There would then be a struggle, a
+comedy: but how could the aconite of jealousy have taken root in his
+soul? He has never left me since our marriage. He feels no shame in
+stretching himself out upon a sofa and remaining there for hours
+together.
+
+“Two felons pinioned to the same chain do not find time hang heavy: for
+they have their escape to think of. But we have no subject of
+conversation; we have long since talked ourselves out. A little while
+ago he was so far reduced as to talk politics. But even politics are
+exhausted, Napoleon, unfortunately for me, having died at St. Helena,
+as is well known.
+
+“Monsieur de Fischtaminel abhors reading. If he sees me with a book, he
+comes and says a dozen times an hour—‘Nina, dear, haven’t you finished
+yet?’
+
+“I endeavored to persuade this innocent persecutor to ride out every
+day on horseback, and I alleged a consideration usually conclusive with
+men of forty years,—his health! But he said that after having been
+twelve years on horseback, he felt the need of repose.
+
+“My husband, dear mother, is a man who absorbs you, he uses up the
+vital fluid of his neighbor, his ennui is gluttonous: he likes to be
+amused by those who call upon us, and, after five years of wedlock, no
+one ever comes: none visit us but those whose intentions are evidently
+dishonorable for him, and who endeavor, unsuccessfully, to amuse him,
+in order to earn the right to weary his wife.
+
+“Monsieur de Fischtaminel, mother, opens the door of my chamber, or of
+the room to which I have flown for refuge, five or six times an hour,
+and comes up to me in an excited way, and says, ‘Well, what are you
+doing, my belle?’ (the expression in fashion during the Empire) without
+perceiving that he is constantly repeating the same phrase, which is to
+me like the one pint too much that the executioner formerly poured into
+the torture by water.
+
+“Then there’s another bore! We can’t go to walk any more. A promenade
+without conversation, without interest, is impossible. My husband walks
+with me for the walk, as if he were alone. I have the fatigue without
+the pleasure.
+
+“The interval between getting up and breakfast is employed in my
+toilet, in my household duties; and I manage to get through with this
+part of the day. But between breakfast and dinner, there is a whole
+desert to plough, a waste to traverse. My husband’s want of occupation
+does not leave me a moment of repose, he overpowers me by his
+uselessness; his idle life positively wears me out. His two eyes always
+open and gazing at mine compel me to keep them lowered. Then his
+monotonous remarks:
+
+“‘What o’clock is it, love? What are you doing now? What are you
+thinking of? What do you mean to do? Where shall we go this evening?
+Anything new? What weather! I don’t feel well, etc., etc.’
+
+“All these variations upon the same theme—the interrogation point
+—which compose Fischtaminel’s repertory, will drive me mad. Add to
+these leaden arrows everlastingly shot off at me, one last trait which
+will complete the description of my happiness, and you will understand
+my life.
+
+“Monsieur de Fischtaminel, who went away in 1809, with the rank of
+sub-lieutenant, at the age of eighteen, has had no other education than
+that due to discipline, to the natural sense of honor of a noble and a
+soldier: but though he possesses tact, the sentiment of probity, and a
+proper subordination, his ignorance is gross, he knows absolutely
+nothing, and he has a horror of learning anything. Oh, dear mother,
+what an accomplished door-keeper this colonel would have made, had he
+been born in indigence! I don’t think a bit the better of him for his
+bravery, for he did not fight against the Russians, the Austrians, or
+the Prussians: he fought against ennui. When he rushed upon the enemy,
+Captain Fischtaminel’s purpose was to get away from himself. He married
+because he had nothing else to do.
+
+“We have another slight difficulty to content with: my husband harasses
+the servants to such a degree that we change them every six months.
+
+“I so ardently desire, dear mother, to remain a virtuous woman, that I
+am going to try the effect of traveling for half the year. During the
+winter, I shall go every evening to the Italian or the French opera, or
+to parties: but I don’t know whether our fortune will permit such an
+expenditure. Uncle Cyrus ought to come to Paris—I would take care of
+him as I would of an inheritance.
+
+“If you discover a cure for my woes, let your daughter know of it —your
+daughter who loves you as much as she deplores her misfortunes, and who
+would have been glad to call herself by some other name than that of
+
+“NINA FISCHTAMINEL.”
+
+
+Besides the necessity of describing this petty trouble, which could
+only be described by the pen of a woman,—and what a woman she was! —it
+was necessary to make you acquainted with a character whom you saw only
+in profile in the first half of this book, the queen of the particular
+set in which Caroline lived,—a woman both envied and adroit, who
+succeeded in conciliating, at an early date, what she owed to the world
+with the requirements of the heart. This letter is her absolution.
+
+INDISCRETIONS.
+
+Women are either chaste—or vain—or simply proud. They are therefore all
+subject to the following petty trouble:
+
+Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a
+woman to themselves,—a possession exclusively due to the legal
+ceremony,—that they dread the public’s making a mistake, and they
+hasten to brand their consort, as lumber-dealers brand their logs while
+floating down stream, or as the Berry stock-raisers brand their sheep.
+They bestow names of endearment, right before people, upon their wives:
+names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella), from the animal
+kingdom, as: my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or, choosing from the
+vegetable kingdom, they call them: my cabbage, my fig (this only in
+Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia). Never: —My flower! Pray note
+this discretion.
+
+Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:—Bobonne,
+—mother,—daughter,—good woman,—old lady: this last when she is very
+young.
+
+Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as: Mon bichon, ma
+niniche, Tronquette!
+
+We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for
+his ugliness, call his wife, _Moumoutte_!
+
+“I would rather he would strike me,” said this unfortunate to her
+neighbor.
+
+“Poor little woman, she is really unhappy,” resumed the neighbor,
+looking at me when Moumoutte had gone: “when she is in company with her
+husband she is upon pins and needles, and keeps out of his way. One
+evening, he actually seized her by the neck and said: ‘Come fatty,
+let’s go home!’”
+
+It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning
+with arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions
+like these that the wife had to bear in society. This husband used to
+give the woman he had won at the point of the Code, public little taps
+on her shoulder, he would startle her by a resounding kiss, he
+dishonored her by a conspicuous tenderness, seasoned by those
+impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French
+savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners are
+very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction. It
+was, it is said, this shocking situation,—one perfectly appreciated by
+a discerning jury,—which won the prisoner a verdict softened by the
+extenuating circumstances.
+
+The jurymen said to themselves:
+
+“For a wife to murder her husband for these conjugal offences, is
+certainly going rather far; but then a woman is very excusable, when
+she is so harassed!”
+
+We deeply regret, in the interest of elegant manners, that these
+arguments are not more generally known. Heaven grant, therefore, that
+our book may have an immense success, as women will obtain this
+advantage from it, that they will be treated as they deserve, that is,
+as queens.
+
+In this respect, love is much superior to marriage, it is proud of
+indiscreet sayings and doings. There are some women that seek them,
+fish for them, and woe to the man who does not now and then commit one!
+
+What passion lies in an accidental _thou_!
+
+Out in the country I heard a husband call his wife: “Ma berline!” She
+was delighted with it, and saw nothing ridiculous in it: she called her
+husband, “Mon fiston!” This delicious couple were ignorant of the
+existence of such things as petty troubles.
+
+It was in observing this happy pair that the author discovered this
+axiom:
+
+Axiom:—In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of
+genius married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a
+chance which is not as common as might be supposed, you must both of
+you be exceedingly stupid.
+
+The too celebrated history of the cure of a wounded self-love by
+arsenic, proves that, properly speaking, there are no petty troubles
+for women in married life.
+
+Axiom.—Woman exists by sentiment where man exists by action.
+
+Now, sentiment can at any moment render a petty trouble either a great
+misfortune, or a wasted life, or an eternal misery. Should Caroline
+begin, in her ignorance of life and the world, by inflicting upon her
+husband the vexations of her stupidity (re-read REVELATIONS), Adolphe,
+like any other man, may find a compensation in social excitement: he
+goes out, comes back, goes here and there, has business. But for
+Caroline, the question everywhere is, To love or not to love, to be or
+not to be loved.
+
+Indiscretions are in harmony with the character of the individuals,
+with times and places. Two examples will suffice.
+
+Here is the first. A man is by nature dirty and ugly: he is ill-made
+and repulsive. There are men, and often rich ones, too, who, by a sort
+of unobserved constitution, soil a new suit of clothes in twenty-four
+hours. They were born disgusting. It is so disgraceful for a women to
+be anything more than just simply a wife to this sort of Adolphe, that
+a certain Caroline had long ago insisted upon the suppression of the
+modern _thee_ and _thou_ and all other insignia of the wifely dignity.
+Society had been for five or six years accustomed to this sort of
+thing, and supposed Madame and Monsieur completely separated, and all
+the more so as it had noticed the accession of a Ferdinand II.
+
+One evening, in the presence of a dozen persons, this man said to his
+wife: “Caroline, hand me the tongs, there’s a love.” It is nothing, and
+yet everything. It was a domestic revelation.
+
+Monsieur de Lustrac, the Universal Amadis, hurried to Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s, narrated this little scene with all the spirit at his
+command, and Madame de Fischtaminel put on an air something like
+Celimene’s and said: “Poor creature, what an extremity she must be in!”
+
+I say nothing of Caroline’s confusion,—you have already divined it.
+
+Here is the second. Think of the frightful situation in which a lady of
+great refinement was lately placed: she was conversing agreeably at her
+country seat near Paris, when her husband’s servant came and whispered
+in her ear, “Monsieur has come, madame.”
+
+“Very well, Benoit.”
+
+Everybody had heard the rumblings of the vehicle. It was known that the
+husband had been at Paris since Monday, and this took place on
+Saturday, at four in the afternoon.
+
+“He’s got something important to say to you, madame.”
+
+Though this dialogue was held in a whisper, it was perfectly
+understood, and all the more so from the fact that the lady of the
+house turned from the pale hue of the Bengal rose to the brilliant
+crimson of the wheatfield poppy. She nodded and went on with the
+conversation, and managed to leave her company on the pretext of
+learning whether her husband had succeeded in an important undertaking
+or not: but she seemed plainly vexed at Adolphe’s want of consideration
+for the company who were visiting her.
+
+During their youth, women want to be treated as divinities, they love
+the ideal; they cannot bear the idea of being what nature intended them
+to be.
+
+Some husbands, on retiring to the country, after a week in town, are
+worse than this: they bow to the company, put their arm round their
+wife’s waist, take a little walk with her, appear to be talking
+confidentially, disappear in a clump of trees, get lost, and reappear
+half an hour afterward.
+
+This, ladies, is a genuine petty trouble for a young woman, but for a
+woman beyond forty, this sort of indiscretion is so delightful, that
+the greatest prudes are flattered by it, for, be it known:
+
+That women of a certain age, women on the shady side, want to be
+treated as mortals, they love the actual; they cannot bear the idea of
+no longer being what nature intended them to be.
+
+Axiom.—Modesty is a relative virtue; there is the modesty of the woman
+of twenty, the woman of thirty, the woman of forty-five.
+
+Thus the author said to a lady who told him to guess at her age:
+“Madame, yours is the age of indiscretion.”
+
+This charming woman of thirty-nine was making a Ferdinand much too
+conspicuous, while her daughter was trying to conceal her Ferdinand I.
+
+BRUTAL DISCLOSURES.
+
+FIRST STYLE. Caroline adores Adolphe, she thinks him handsome, she
+thinks him superb, especially in his National Guard uniform. She starts
+when a sentinel presents arms to him, she considers him moulded like a
+model, she regards him as a man of wit, everything he does is right,
+nobody has better taste than he, in short, she is crazy about Adolphe.
+
+It’s the old story of Cupid’s bandage. This is washed every ten years,
+and newly embroidered by the altered manners of the period, but it has
+been the same old bandage since the days of Greece.
+
+Caroline is at a ball with one of her young friends. A man well known
+for his bluntness, whose acquaintance she is to make later in life, but
+whom she now sees for the first time, Monsieur Foullepointe, has
+commenced a conversation with Caroline’s friend. According to the
+custom of society, Caroline listens to this conversation without
+mingling in it.
+
+“Pray tell me, madame,” says Monsieur Foullepointe, “who is that queer
+man who has been talking about the Court of Assizes before a gentleman
+whose acquittal lately created such a sensation: he is all the while
+blundering, like an ox in a bog, against everybody’s sore spot. A lady
+burst into tears at hearing him tell of the death of a child, as she
+lost her own two months ago.”
+
+“Who do you mean?”
+
+“Why, that fat man, dressed like a waiter in a cafe, frizzled like a
+barber’s apprentice, there, he’s trying now to make himself agreeable
+to Madame de Fischtaminel.”
+
+“Hush,” whispers the lady quite alarmed, “it’s the husband of the
+little woman next to me!”
+
+“Ah, it’s your husband?” says Monsieur Foullepointe. “I am delighted,
+madame, he’s a charming man, so vivacious, gay and witty. I am going to
+make his acquaintance immediately.”
+
+And Foullepointe executes his retreat, leaving a bitter suspicion in
+Caroline’s soul, as to the question whether her husband is really as
+handsome as she thinks him.
+
+SECOND STYLE. Caroline, annoyed by the reputation of Madame Schinner,
+who is credited with the possession of epistolary talents, and styled
+the “Sevigne of the note”, tired of hearing about Madame de
+Fischtaminel, who has ventured to write a little 32mo book on the
+education of the young, in which she has boldly reprinted Fenelon,
+without the style:—Caroline has been working for six months upon a tale
+tenfold poorer than those of Berquin, nauseatingly moral, and
+flamboyant in style.
+
+After numerous intrigues such as women are skillful in managing in the
+interest of their vanity, and the tenacity and perfection of which
+would lead you to believe that they have a third sex in their head,
+this tale, entitled “The Lotus,” appears in three installments in a
+leading daily paper. It is signed Samuel Crux.
+
+When Adolphe takes up the paper at breakfast, Caroline’s heart beats up
+in her very throat: she blushes, turns pale, looks away and stares at
+the ceiling. When Adolphe’s eyes settle upon the feuilleton, she can
+bear it no longer: she gets up, goes out, comes back, having
+replenished her stock of audacity, no one knows where.
+
+“Is there a feuilleton this morning?” she asks with an air that she
+thinks indifferent, but which would disturb a husband still jealous of
+his wife.
+
+“Yes, one by a beginner, Samuel Crux. The name is a disguise, clearly:
+the tale is insignificant enough to drive an insect to despair, if he
+could read: and vulgar, too: the style is muddy, but then it’s—”
+
+Caroline breathes again. “It’s—” she suggests.
+
+“It’s incomprehensible,” resumes Adolphe. “Somebody must have paid
+Chodoreille five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it’s the
+production of a blue-stocking in high society who has promised to
+invite Madame Chodoreille to her house; or perhaps it’s the work of a
+woman in whom the editor is personally interested. Such a piece of
+stupidity cannot be explained any other way. Imagine, Caroline, that
+it’s all about a little flower picked on the edge of a wood in a
+sentimental walk, which a gentleman of the Werther school has sworn to
+keep, which he has had framed, and which the lady claims again eleven
+years after (the poor man has had time to change his lodgings three
+times). It’s quite new, about as old as Sterne or Gessner. What makes
+me think it’s a woman, is that the first literary idea of the whole sex
+is to take vengeance on some one.”
+
+Adolphe might go on pulling “The Lotus” to pieces; Caroline’s ears are
+full of the tinkling of bells. She is like the woman who threw herself
+over the Pont des Arts, and tried to find her way ten feet below the
+level of the Seine.
+
+ANOTHER STYLE. Caroline, in her paroxysms of jealousy, has discovered a
+hiding place used by Adolphe, who, as he can’t trust his wife, and as
+he knows she opens his letters and rummages in his drawers, has
+endeavored to save his correspondence with Hector from the hooked
+fingers of the conjugal police.
+
+Hector is an old schoolmate, who has married in the Loire Inferieure.
+
+Adolphe lifts up the cloth of his writing desk, a cloth the border of
+which has been embroidered by Caroline, the ground being blue, black or
+red velvet,—the color, as you see, is perfectly immaterial,—and he
+slips his unfinished letters to Madame de Fischtaminel, to his friend
+Hector, between the table and the cloth.
+
+The thickness of a sheet of paper is almost nothing, velvet is a downy,
+discreet material, but, no matter, these precautions are in vain. The
+male devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet will furnish
+them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her side, the demon
+who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with his ironic finger
+points out the hiding place of keys—the secret of secrets.
+
+Caroline has noticed the thickness of a letter sheet between this
+velvet and this table: she hits upon a letter to Hector instead of
+hitting upon one to Madame de Fischtaminel, who has gone to Plombieres
+Springs, and reads the following:
+
+“My dear Hector:
+
+“I pity you, but you have acted wisely in entrusting me with a
+knowledge of the difficulties in which you have voluntarily involved
+yourself. You never would see the difference between the country woman
+and the woman of Paris. In the country, my dear boy, you are always
+face to face with your wife, and, owing to the ennui which impels you,
+you rush headforemost into the enjoyment of your bliss. This is a great
+error: happiness is an abyss, and when you have once reached the
+bottom, you never get back again, in wedlock.
+
+“I will show you why. Let me take, for your wife’s sake, the shortest
+path—the parable.
+
+“I remember having made a journey from Paris to Ville-Parisis, in that
+vehicle called a ’bus: distance, twenty miles: ’bus, lumbering: horse,
+lame. Nothing amuses me more than to draw from people, by the aid of
+that gimlet called the interrogation, and to obtain, by means of an
+attentive air, the sum of information, anecdotes and learning that
+everybody is anxious to part with: and all men have such a sum, the
+peasant as well as the banker, the corporal as well as the marshal of
+France.
+
+“I have often noticed how ready these casks, overflowing with wit, are
+to open their sluices while being transported by diligence or ’bus, or
+by any vehicle drawn by horses, for nobody talks in a railway car.
+
+“At the rate of our exit from Paris, the journey would take full seven
+hours: so I got an old corporal to talk, for my diversion. He could
+neither read nor write: he was entirely illiterate. Yet the journey
+seemed short. The corporal had been through all the campaigns, he told
+me of things perfectly unheard of, that historians never trouble
+themselves about.
+
+“Ah! Hector, how superior is practice to theory! Among other things,
+and in reply to a question relative to the infantry, whose courage is
+much more tried by marching than by fighting, he said this, which I
+give you free from circumlocution:
+
+“‘Sir, when Parisians were brought to our 45th, which Napoleon called
+The Terrible (I am speaking of the early days of the Empire, when the
+infantry had legs of steel, and when they needed them), I had a way of
+telling beforehand which of them would remain in the 45th. They marched
+without hurrying, they did their little six leagues a day, neither more
+nor less, and they pitched camp in condition to begin again on the
+morrow. The plucky fellows who did ten leagues and wanted to run to the
+victory, stopped half way at the hospital.’
+
+“The worthy corporal was talking of marriage while he thought he was
+talking of war, and you have stopped half way, Hector, at the hospital.
+
+“Remember the sympathetic condolence of Madame de Sevigne counting out
+three hundred thousand francs to Monsieur de Grignan, to induce him to
+marry one of the prettiest girls in France! ‘Why,’ said she to herself,
+‘he will have to marry her every day, as long as she lives! Decidedly,
+I don’t think three hundred francs too much.’ Is it not enough to make
+the bravest tremble?
+
+“My dear fellow, conjugal happiness is founded, like that of nations,
+upon ignorance. It is a felicity full of negative conditions.
+
+“If I am happy with my little Caroline, it is due to the strictest
+observance of that salutary principle so strongly insisted upon in the
+_Physiology of Marriage_. I have resolved to lead my wife through paths
+beaten in the snow, until the happy day when infidelity will be
+difficult.
+
+“In the situation in which you have placed yourself, and which
+resembles that of Duprez, who, on his first appearance at Paris, went
+to singing with all the voice his lungs would yield, instead of
+imitating Nourrit, who gave the audience just enough to enchant them,
+the following, I think, is your proper course to—”
+
+The letter broke off here: Caroline returned it to its place, at the
+same time wondering how she would make her dear Adolphe expiate his
+obedience to the execrable precepts of the _Physiology of Marriage_.
+
+A TRUCE.
+
+This trouble doubtless occurs sufficiently often and in different ways
+enough in the existence of married women, for this personal incident to
+become the type of the genus.
+
+The Caroline in question here is very pious, she loves her husband very
+much, her husband asserts that she loves him too much, even: but this
+is a piece of marital conceit, if, indeed, it is not a provocation, as
+he only complains to his wife’s young lady friends.
+
+When a person’s conscience is involved, the least thing becomes
+exceedingly serious. Madame de ——- has told her young friend, Madame de
+Fischtaminel, that she had been compelled to make an extraordinary
+confession to her spiritual director, and to perform penance, the
+director having decided that she was in a state of mortal sin. This
+lady, who goes to mass every morning, is a woman of thirty-six years,
+thin and slightly pimpled. She has large soft black eyes, her upper lip
+is strongly shaded: still her voice is sweet, her manners gentle, her
+gait noble—she is a woman of quality.
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel, whom Madame de ——- has made her friend (nearly
+all pious women patronize a woman who is considered worldly, on the
+pretext of converting her),—Madame de Fischtaminel asserts that these
+qualities, in this Caroline of the Pious Sort, are a victory of
+religion over a rather violent natural temper.
+
+These details are necessary to describe the trouble in all its horror.
+
+This lady’s Adolphe had been compelled to leave his wife for two
+months, in April, immediately after the forty days’ fast that Caroline
+scrupulously observes. Early in June, therefore, madame expected her
+husband, she expected him day by day. From one hope to another,
+
+“Conceived every morn and deferred every eve.”
+
+She got along as far as Sunday, the day when her presentiments, which
+had now reached a state of paroxysm, told her that the longed-for
+husband would arrive at an early hour.
+
+When a pious woman expects her husband, and that husband has been
+absent from home nearly four months, she takes much more pains with her
+toilet than a young girl does, though waiting for her first betrothed.
+
+This virtuous Caroline was so completely absorbed in exclusively
+personal preparations, that she forgot to go to eight o’clock mass. She
+proposed to hear a low mass, but she was afraid of losing the delight
+of her dear Adolphe’s first glance, in case he arrived at early dawn.
+Her chambermaid—who respectfully left her mistress alone in the
+dressing-room where pious and pimpled ladies let no one enter, not even
+their husbands, especially if they are thin—her chambermaid heard her
+exclaim several times, “If it’s your master, let me know!”
+
+The rumbling of a vehicle having made the furniture rattle, Caroline
+assumed a mild tone to conceal the violence of her legitimate emotions.
+
+“Oh! ’tis he! Run, Justine: tell him I am waiting for him here.”
+Caroline trembled so that she dropped into an arm-chair.
+
+The vehicle was a butcher’s wagon.
+
+It was in anxieties like this that the eight o’clock mass slipped by,
+like an eel in his slime. Madame’s toilet operations were resumed, for
+she was engaged in dressing. The chambermaid’s nose had already been
+the recipient of a superb muslin chemise, with a simple hem, which
+Caroline had thrown at her from the dressing-room, though she had given
+her the same kind for the last three months.
+
+“What are you thinking of, Justine? I told you to choose from the
+chemises that are not numbered.”
+
+The unnumbered chemises were only seven or eight, in the most
+magnificent trousseau. They are chemises gotten up and embroidered with
+the greatest care: a woman must be a queen, a young queen, to have a
+dozen. Each one of Caroline’s was trimmed with valenciennes round the
+bottom, and still more coquettishly garnished about the neck. This
+feature of our manners will perhaps serve to suggest a suspicion, in
+the masculine world, of the domestic drama revealed by this exceptional
+chemise.
+
+Caroline had put on a pair of Scotch thread stockings, little prunella
+buskins, and her most deceptive corsets. She had her hair dressed in
+the fashion that most became her, and embellished it with a cap of the
+most elegant form. It is unnecessary to speak of her morning gown. A
+pious lady who lives at Paris and who loves her husband, knows as well
+as a coquette how to choose those pretty little striped patterns, have
+them cut with an open waist, and fastened by loops to buttons in a way
+which compels her to refasten them two or three times in an hour, with
+little airs more or less charming, as the case may be.
+
+The nine o’clock mass, the ten o’clock mass, every mass, went by in
+these preparations, which, for women in love, are one of their twelve
+labors of Hercules.
+
+Pious women rarely go to church in a carriage, and they are right.
+Except in the case of a pouring shower, or intolerably bad weather, a
+person ought not to appear haughty in the place where it is becoming to
+be humble. Caroline was afraid to compromise the freshness of her dress
+and the purity of her thread stockings. Alas! these pretexts concealed
+a reason.
+
+“If I am at church when Adolphe comes, I shall lose the pleasure of his
+first glance: and he will think I prefer high mass to him.”
+
+She made this sacrifice to her husband in a desire to please him—a
+fearfully worldly consideration. Prefer the creature to the Creator! A
+husband to heaven! Go and hear a sermon and you will learn what such an
+offence will cost you.
+
+“After all,” says Caroline, quoting her confessor, “society is founded
+upon marriage, which the Church has included among its sacraments.”
+
+And this is the way in which religious instruction may be put aside in
+favor of a blind though legitimate love. Madame refused breakfast, and
+ordered the meal to be kept hot, just as she kept herself ready, at a
+moment’s notice, to welcome the precious absentee.
+
+Now these little things may easily excite a laugh: but in the first
+place they are continually occurring with couples who love each other,
+or where one of them loves the other: besides, in a woman so
+strait-laced, so reserved, so worthy, as this lady, these
+acknowledgments of affection went beyond the limits imposed upon her
+feelings by the lofty self-respect which true piety induces. When
+Madame de Fischtaminel narrated this little scene in a devotee’s life,
+dressing it up with choice by-play, acted out as ladies of the world
+know how to act out their anecdotes, I took the liberty of saying that
+it was the Canticle of canticles in action.
+
+“If her husband doesn’t come,” said Justine to the cook, “what will
+become of us? She has already thrown her chemise in my face.”
+
+At last, Caroline heard the crack of a postilion’s whip, the well-known
+rumbling of a traveling carriage, the racket made by the hoofs of
+post-horses, and the jingling of their bells! Oh, she could doubt no
+longer, the bells made her burst forth, as thus:
+
+“The door! Open the door! ’Tis he, my husband! Will you never go to the
+door!” And the pious woman stamped her foot and broke the bell-rope.
+
+“Why, madame,” said Justine, with the vivacity of a servant doing her
+duty, “it’s some people going away.”
+
+“Upon my word,” replied Caroline, half ashamed, to herself, “I will
+never let Adolphe go traveling again without me.”
+
+A Marseilles poet—it is not known whether it was Mery or Barthelemy
+—acknowledged that if his best fried did not arrive punctually at the
+dinner hour, he waited patiently five minutes: at the tenth minute, he
+felt a desire to throw the napkin in his face: at the twelfth he hoped
+some great calamity would befall him: at the fifteenth, he would not be
+able to restrain himself from stabbing him several times with a dirk.
+
+All women, when expecting somebody, are Marseilles poets, if, indeed,
+we may compare the vulgar throes of hunger to the sublime Canticle of
+canticles of a pious wife, who is hoping for the joys of a husband’s
+first glance after a three months’ absence. Let all those who love and
+who have met again after an absence ten thousand times accursed, be
+good enough to recall their first glance: it says so many things that
+the lovers, if in the presence of a third party, are fain to lower
+their eyes! This poem, in which every man is as great as Homer, in
+which he seems a god to the woman who loves him, is, for a pious, thin
+and pimpled lady, all the more immense, from the fact that she has not,
+like Madame de Fischtaminel, the resource of having several copies of
+it. In her case, her husband is all she’s got!
+
+So you will not be surprised to learn that Caroline missed every mass
+and had no breakfast. This hunger and thirst for Adolphe gave her a
+violent cramp in the stomach. She did not think of religion once during
+the hours of mass, nor during those of vespers. She was not comfortable
+when she sat, and she was very uncomfortable when she stood: Justine
+advised her to go to bed. Caroline, quite overcome, retired at about
+half past five in the evening, after having taken a light soup: but she
+ordered a dainty supper at ten.
+
+“I shall doubtless sup with my husband,” she said.
+
+This speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally
+fulminated. She had reached the Marseilles poet’s several stabs with a
+dirk. So she spoke in a tone that was really terrible. At three in the
+morning Caroline was in a profound sleep: Adolphe arrived without her
+hearing either carriage, or horse, or bell, or opening door!
+
+Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the
+spare room. When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two tears
+issued from her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the
+slightest preparatory toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the
+threshold, informed her that her husband, having traveled two hundred
+leagues and been two nights without sleep, requested that he might not
+be awakened: he was exceedingly tired.
+
+Caroline—pious woman that she was—opened the door violently without
+being able to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and then
+hastened to church to listen to a thanksgiving mass.
+
+As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in
+reply to an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid’s finesse:
+
+“Why, madame, your husband’s got back!”
+
+“He has only got back to Paris,” returned the pious Caroline.
+
+USELESS CARE.
+
+Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes
+her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite
+pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and
+follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and
+yet economically—a house, too, not easy to manage—who, from morality
+and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no
+other study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to express
+all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment _to the sentiment of her
+duties_. This underlined circumlocution is the paraphrase of the word
+love in the language of prudes.
+
+Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband
+by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel’s, that he
+was very fond of mushrooms _a l’Italienne_.
+
+If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good,
+great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there
+is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing
+his favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upon which
+the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all his
+pleasures, big and little. Love animates everything in life, and
+conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial
+details.
+
+Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how
+the Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells
+her that at Biffi’s, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn
+how the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain
+some Milanese mushrooms. Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini,
+and resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.
+
+Caroline’s cook goes to Biffi’s, comes back from Biffi’s, and exhibits
+to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman’s ears.
+
+“Very good,” she says, “did he explain to you how to cook them?”
+
+“Oh, for us cooks, them’s a mere nothing,” replies the cook.
+
+As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except
+how a cook may feather his nest.
+
+At evening, during the second course, all Caroline’s fibres quiver with
+pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain
+suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had
+waited for her husband.
+
+But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure,
+there is, to the souls of the elect—and everybody will include a woman
+who adores her husband among the elect—there is, between these two
+worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine night
+and a fine day.
+
+The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges his
+spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline’s extreme
+emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers
+who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for
+some kind of shell-fish.
+
+“Well, Adolphe?”
+
+“Well, dear.”
+
+“Don’t you recognize them?”
+
+“Recognize what?”
+
+“Your mushrooms _a l’Italienne_?”
+
+“These mushrooms! I thought they were—well, yes, they _are_ mushrooms!”
+
+“Yes, and _a l’Italienne_, too.”
+
+“Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, _a la milanaise_. I abominate
+them!”
+
+“What kind is it you like, then?”
+
+“_Fungi trifolati_.”
+
+Let us observe—to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels
+everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this
+moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects,
+giving them all the termination _us_, so that a _Silbermanus_ is the
+same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a
+butterfly’s legs with pincers—that we still want a nomenclature for the
+chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to
+produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed
+that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been
+adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were
+desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen
+Latin.
+
+“My dear,” resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face
+of his chaste Caroline, “in France the dish in question is called
+Mushrooms _a l’Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise_. The
+mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names I
+have forgotten. You add a taste of garlic, I believe—”
+
+Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a
+woman’s heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of
+eight. _Ab uno disce omnes_: which means, “There’s one of them: find
+the rest in your memory.” For we have taken this culinary description
+as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently
+loved women.
+
+SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.
+
+A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer’s fancy. This
+feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman’s
+confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and
+disappears in a trice like a shooting star.
+
+With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from
+any marshy country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for
+the superabundant powers of their imaginations and their nerves.
+
+Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who is
+really loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do her
+the justice to say that her first idea is to enjoy it. All who possess
+treasures are in dread of thieves, but they do not, like women, lend
+wings and feet to their golden stores.
+
+The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the
+heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to
+abandon it.
+
+Axiom.—A woman is never deserted without a reason.
+
+This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman. Hence the
+rage of a woman deserted.
+
+Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love: we live in a
+calculating epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may:
+for, of all wives or women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least
+expensive. Now, every woman who is loved, has gone through the petty
+annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion, whether just or unjust,
+engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of
+all.
+
+Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves her
+rather too often upon a matter of business, that eternal Chaumontel’s
+affair, which never comes to an end.
+
+Axiom.—Every household has its Chaumontel’s affair. (See TROUBLE WITHIN
+TROUBLE.)
+
+In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business
+than publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and
+authors. The moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has
+rendered him even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he
+has hurried away to some easy conquest. In this respect, women endow
+men with superhuman faculties. Fear magnifies everything, it dilates
+the eyes and the heart: it makes a woman mad.
+
+“Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left
+me? Why did he not take me with him?”
+
+These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of
+suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these
+frightful tempests which ravage a woman’s heart springs an ignoble,
+unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the
+shopkeeper’s wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker’s lady, the
+angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate,
+at once puts into execution. They imitate the government, every one of
+them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the
+public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in
+the interest of their love. This fatal woman’s curiosity reduces them
+to the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in
+this situation, has not lost her self-respect,—a situation in which her
+jealousy will not permit her to respect anything: neither your little
+boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of your
+desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with private
+compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling dressing-case, nor
+your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way that her husband
+dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your india-rubber
+girdles—her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman trusts, is her
+maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and approves her.
+
+In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman
+makes no calculations, takes no observations. She simply wishes to know
+the whole truth.
+
+And Justine is delighted: she sees her mistress compromising herself
+with her, and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her
+suspicions, with terrible friendship. Justine and Caroline hold
+councils and have secret interviews. All espionage involves such
+relationships. In this pass, a maid becomes the arbitress of the fate
+of the married couple. Example: Lord Byron.
+
+“Madame,” Justine one day observes, “monsieur really _does_ go out to
+see a woman.”
+
+Caroline turns pale.
+
+“But don’t be alarmed, madame, it’s an old woman.”
+
+“Ah, Justine, to some men no women are old: men are inexplicable.”
+
+“But, madame, it isn’t a lady, it’s a woman, quite a common woman.”
+
+“Ah, Justine, Lord Byron loved a fish-wife at Venice, Madame de
+Fischtaminel told me so.”
+
+And Caroline bursts into tears.
+
+“I’ve been pumping Benoit.”
+
+“What is Benoit’s opinion?”
+
+“Benoit thinks that the woman is a go-between, for monsieur keeps his
+secret from everybody, even from Benoit.”
+
+For a week Caroline lives the life of the damned; all her savings go to
+pay spies and to purchase reports.
+
+Finally, Justine goes to see the woman, whose name is Madame Mahuchet;
+she bribes her and learns at last that her master has preserved a
+witness of his youthful follies, a nice little boy that looks very much
+like him, and that this woman is his nurse, the second-hand mother who
+has charge of little Frederick, who pays his quarterly school-bills,
+and through whose hands pass the twelve hundred or two thousand francs
+which Adolphe is supposed annually to lose at cards.
+
+“What of the mother?” exclaims Caroline.
+
+To end the matter, Justine, Caroline’s good genius, proves to her that
+M’lle Suzanne Beauminet, formerly a grisette and somewhat later Madame
+Sainte-Suzanne, died at the hospital, or else that she has made her
+fortune, or else, again, that her place in society is so low there is
+no danger of madame’s ever meeting her.
+
+Caroline breathes again: the dirk has been drawn from her heart, she is
+quite happy; but she had no children but daughters, and would like a
+boy. This little drama of unjust suspicions, this comedy of the
+conjectures to which Mother Mahuchet gives rise, these phases of a
+causeless jealousy, are laid down here as the type of a situation, the
+varieties of which are as innumerable as characters, grades and sorts.
+
+This source of petty troubles is pointed out here, in order that women
+seated upon the river’s bank may contemplate in it the course of their
+own married life, following its ascent or descent, recalling their own
+adventures to mind, their untold disasters, the foibles which caused
+their errors, and the peculiar fatalities to which were due an instant
+of frenzy, a moment of unnecessary despair, or sufferings which they
+might have spared themselves, happy in their self-delusions.
+
+This vexation has a corollary in the following, one which is much more
+serious and often without remedy, especially when its root lies among
+vices of another kind, and which do not concern us, for, in this work,
+women are invariably esteemed honest—until the end.
+
+THE DOMESTIC TYRANT.
+
+“My dear Caroline,” says Adolphe one day to his wife, “are you
+satisfied with Justine?”
+
+“Yes, dear, quite so.”
+
+“Don’t you think she speaks to you rather impertinently?”
+
+“Do you suppose I would notice a maid? But it seems _you_ notice her!”
+
+“What do you say?” asks Adolphe in an indignant way that is always
+delightful to women.
+
+Justine is a genuine maid for an actress, a woman of thirty stamped by
+the small-pox with innumerable dimples, in which the loves are far from
+sporting: she is as brown as opium, has a good deal of leg and not much
+body, gummy eyes, and a tournure to match. She would like to have
+Benoit marry her, but at this unexpected suggestion, Benoit asked for
+his discharge. Such is the portrait of the domestic tyrant enthroned by
+Caroline’s jealousy.
+
+Justine takes her coffee in the morning, in bed, and manages to have it
+as good as, not to say better than, that of her mistress. Justine
+sometimes goes out without asking leave, dressed like the wife of a
+second-class banker. She sports a pink hat, one of her mistress’ old
+gowns made over, an elegant shawl, shoes of bronze kid, and jewelry of
+doubtful character.
+
+Justine is sometimes in a bad humor, and makes her mistress feel that
+she too is a woman like herself, though she is not married. She has her
+whims, her fits of melancholy, her caprices. She even dares to have her
+nerves! She replies curtly, she makes herself insupportable to the
+other servants, and, to conclude, her wages have been considerably
+increased.
+
+“My dear, this girl is getting more intolerable every day,” says
+Adolphe one morning to his wife, on noticing Justine listening at the
+key-hole, “and if you don’t send her away, I will!”
+
+Caroline, greatly alarmed, is obliged to give Justine a talking to,
+while her husband is out.
+
+“Justine, you take advantage of my kindness to you: you have high
+wages, here, you have perquisites, presents: try to keep your place,
+for my husband wants to send you away.”
+
+The maid humbles herself to the earth, she sheds tears: she is so
+attached to madame! Ah! she would rush into the fire for her: she would
+let herself be chopped into mince-meat: she is ready for anything.
+
+“If you had anything to conceal, madame, I would take it on myself and
+say it was me!”
+
+“Very well, Justine, very good, my girl,” says Caroline, terrified:
+“but that’s not the point: just try to keep in your place.”
+
+“Ah, ha!” says Justine to herself, “monsieur wants to send me away,
+does he? Wait and see the deuce of a life I’ll lead you, you old
+curmudgeon!”
+
+A week after, Justine, who is dressing her mistress’ hair, looks in the
+glass to make sure that Caroline can see all the grimaces of her
+countenance: and Caroline very soon inquires, “Why, what’s the matter,
+Justine?”
+
+“I would tell you, readily, madame, but then, madame, you are so weak
+with monsieur!”
+
+“Come, go on, what is it?”
+
+“I know now, madame, why master wanted to show me the door: he has
+confidence in nobody but Benoit, and Benoit is playing the mum with
+me.”
+
+“Well, what does that prove? Has anything been discovered?”
+
+“I’m sure that between the two they are plotting something against you
+madame,” returns the maid with authority.
+
+Caroline, whom Justine watches in the glass, turns pale: all the
+tortures of the previous petty trouble return, and Justine sees that
+she has become as indispensable to her mistress as spies are to the
+government when a conspiracy is discovered. Still, Caroline’s friends
+do not understand why she keeps so disagreeable a servant girl, one who
+wears a hat, whose manners are impertinent, and who gives herself the
+airs of a lady.
+
+This stupid domination is talked of at Madame Deschars’, at Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s, and the company consider it funny. A few ladies think
+they can see certain monstrous reasons for it, reasons which compromise
+Caroline’s honor.
+
+Axiom.—In society, people can put cloaks on every kind of truth, even
+the prettiest.
+
+In short the _aria della calumnia_ is executed precisely as if Bartholo
+were singing it.
+
+It is averred that Caroline cannot discharge her maid.
+
+Society devotes itself desperately to discovering the secret of this
+enigma. Madame de Fischtaminel makes fun of Adolphe who goes home in a
+rage, has a scene with Caroline and discharges Justine.
+
+This produces such an effect upon Justine, that she falls sick, and
+takes to her bed. Caroline observes to her husband, that it would be
+awkward to turn a girl in Justine’s condition into the street, a girl
+who is so much attached to them, too, and who has been with them sine
+their marriage.
+
+“Let her go then as soon as she is well!” says Adolphe.
+
+Caroline, reassured in regard to Adolphe, and indecently swindled by
+Justine, at last comes to desire to get rid of her: she applies a
+violent remedy to the disease, and makes up her mind to go under the
+Caudine Forks of another petty trouble, as follows:
+
+THE AVOWAL.
+
+One morning, Adolphe is petted in a very unusual manner. The too happy
+husband wonders what may be the cause of this development of affection,
+and he hears Caroline, in her most winning tones, utter the word:
+“Adolphe?”
+
+“Well?” he replies, in alarm at the internal agitation betrayed by
+Caroline’s voice.
+
+“Promise not to be angry.”
+
+“Well.”
+
+“Not to be vexed with me.”
+
+“Never. Go on.”
+
+“To forgive me and never say anything about it.”
+
+“But tell me what it is!”
+
+“Besides, you are the one that’s in the wrong—”
+
+“Speak, or I’ll go away.”
+
+“There’s no one but you that can get me out of the scrape—and it was
+you that got me into it.”
+
+“Come, come.”
+
+“It’s about—”
+
+“About—”
+
+“About Justine!”
+
+“Don’t speak of her, she’s discharged. I won’t see her again, her style
+of conduct exposes your reputation—”
+
+“What can people say—what have they said?”
+
+The scene changes, the result of which is a secondary explanation which
+makes Caroline blush, as she sees the bearing of the suppositions of
+her best friends.
+
+“Well, now, Adolphe, it’s to you I owe all this. Why didn’t you tell me
+about Frederick?”
+
+“Frederick the Great? The King of Prussia?”
+
+“What creatures men are! Hypocrite, do you want to make me believe that
+you have forgotten your son so soon, M’lle Suzanne Beauminet’s son?”
+
+“Then you know—?”
+
+“The whole thing! And old other Mahuchet, and your absences from home
+to give him a good dinner on holidays.”
+
+“How like moles you pious women can be if you try!” exclaims Adolphe,
+in his terror.
+
+“It was Justine that found it out.”
+
+“Ah! Now I understand the reason of her insolence.”
+
+“Oh, your Caroline has been very wretched, dear, and this spying
+system, which was produced by my love for you, for I do love you, and
+madly too,—if you deceived me, I would fly to the extremity of
+creation,—well, as I was going to say, this unfounded jealousy has put
+me in Justine’s power, so, my precious, get me out of it the best way
+you can!”
+
+“Let this teach you, my angel, never to make use of your servants, if
+you want them to be of use to you. It is the lowest of tyrannies, this
+being at the mercy of one’s people.”
+
+Adolphe takes advantage of this circumstance to alarm Caroline, he
+thinks of future Chaumontel’s affairs, and would be glad to have no
+more espionage.
+
+Justine is sent for, Adolphe peremptorily dismisses her without waiting
+to hear her explanation. Caroline imagines her vexations at an end. She
+gets another maid.
+
+Justine, whose twelve or fifteen thousand francs have attracted the
+notice of a water carrier, becomes Madame Chavagnac, and goes into the
+apple business. Ten months after, in Adolphe’s absence, Caroline
+receives a letter written upon school-boy paper, in strides which would
+require orthopedic treatment for three months, and thus conceived:
+
+“Madam!
+
+“Yu ar shaimphoolly diseeved bi yure huzban fur mame Deux
+fischtaminelle, hee goze their evry eavning, yu ar az blynde az a Batt.
+Your gott wott yu dizzurv, and I am Glad ovit, and I have thee honur ov
+prezenting yu the assurunz ov Mi moaste ds Sting guischt respecks.”
+
+Caroline starts like a lion who has been stung by a bumble-bee; she
+places herself once more, and of her own accord, upon the griddle of
+suspicion, and begins her struggle with the unknown all over again.
+
+When she has discovered the injustice of her suspicions, there comes
+another letter with an offer to furnish her with details relative to a
+Chaumontel’s affair which Justine has unearthed.
+
+The petty trouble of avowals, ladies, is often more serious than this,
+as you perhaps have occasion to remember.
+
+HUMILIATIONS.
+
+To the glory of women, let it be said, they care for their husbands
+even when their husbands care no more for them, not only because there
+are more ties, socially speaking, between a married woman and a man,
+than between the man and the wife; but also because woman has more
+delicacy and honor than man, the chief conjugal question apart, as a
+matter of course.
+
+Axiom.—In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is
+a man, a father, a mother and a woman.
+
+A married woman has sensibility enough for four, or for five even, if
+you look closely.
+
+Now, it is not improper to observe in this place, that, in a woman’s
+eyes, love is a general absolution: the man who is a good lover may
+commit crimes, if he will, he is always as pure as snow in the eyes of
+her who loves him, if he truly loves her. As to a married woman, loved
+or not, she feels so deeply that the honor and consideration of her
+husband are the fortune of her children, that she acts like the woman
+in love,—so active is the sense of community of interest.
+
+This profound sentiment engenders, for certain Carolines, petty
+troubles which, unfortunately for this book, have their dismal side.
+
+Adolphe is compromised. We will not enumerate all the methods of
+compromising oneself, for we might become personal. Let us take, as an
+example, the social error which our epoch excuses, permits, understands
+and commits the most of any—the case of an honest robbery, of
+skillfully concealed corruption in office, or of some misrepresentation
+that becomes excusable when it has succeeded, as, for instance, having
+an understanding with parties in power, for the sale of property at the
+highest possible price to a city, or a country.
+
+Thus, in a bankruptcy, Adolphe, in order to protect himself (this means
+to recover his claims), has become mixed up in certain unlawful doings
+which may bring a man to the necessity of testifying before the Court
+of Assizes. In fact, it is not known that the daring creditor will not
+be considered a party.
+
+Take notice that in all cases of bankruptcy, protecting oneself is
+regarded as the most sacred of duties, even by the most respectable
+houses: the thing is to keep the bad side of the protection out of
+sight, as they do in prudish England.
+
+Adolphe does not know what to do, as his counsel has told him not to
+appear in the matter: so he has recourse to Caroline. He gives her a
+lesson, he coaches her, he teaches her the Code, he examines her dress,
+he equips her as a brig sent on a voyage, and despatches her to the
+office of some judge, or some syndic. The judge is apparently a man of
+severe morality, but in reality a libertine: he retains his serious
+expression on seeing a pretty woman enter, and makes sundry very
+uncomplimentary remarks about Adolphe.
+
+“I pity you, madame, you belong to a man who may involve you in
+numerous unpleasant affairs: a few more matters like this, and he will
+be quite disgraced. Have you any children? Excuse my asking; you are so
+young, it is perfectly natural.” And the judge comes as near to
+Caroline as possible.
+
+“Yes, sir.”
+
+“Ah, great heavens! what a prospect is yours! My first thought was for
+the woman, but now I pity you doubly, I think of the mother. Ah, how
+you must have suffered in coming here! Poor, poor woman!”
+
+“Ah, sir, you take an interest in me, do you not?”
+
+“Alas, what can I do?” says the judge, darting a glance sidewise at
+Caroline. “What you ask of me is a dereliction of duty, and I am a
+magistrate before I am a man.”
+
+“Oh, sir, only be a man—”
+
+“Are you aware of the full bearing of that request, fair creature?” At
+this point the magistrate tremblingly takes Caroline’s hand.
+
+Caroline, who remembers that the honor of her husband and children is
+at stake, says to herself that this is not the time to play the prude.
+She abandons her hand, making just resistance enough for the old man
+(happily he is an old man) to consider it a favor.
+
+“Come, come, my beauty,” resumes the judge, “I should be loath to cause
+so lovely a woman to shed tears; we’ll see about it. You shall come
+to-morrow evening and tell me the whole affair. We must look at the
+papers, we will examine them together—”
+
+“Sir—”
+
+“It’s indispensable.”
+
+“But, sir—”
+
+“Don’t be alarmed, my dear, a judge is likely to know how to grant what
+is due to justice and—” he puts on a shrewd look here—“to beauty.”
+
+“But, sir—”
+
+“Be quite at your ease,” he adds, holding her hand closely in his, “and
+we’ll try to reduce this great crime down to a peccadillo.” And he goes
+to the door with Caroline, who is frightened to death at an appointment
+thus proposed.
+
+The syndic is a lively young man, and he receives Madame Adolphe with a
+smile. He smiles at everything, and he smiles as he takes her round the
+waist with an agility which leaves Caroline no time to resist,
+especially as she says to herself, “Adolphe particularly recommended me
+not to vex the syndic.”
+
+Nevertheless Caroline escapes, in the interest of the syndic himself,
+and again pronounces the “Sir!” which she had said three times to the
+judge.
+
+“Don’t be angry with me, you are irresistible, you are an angel, and
+your husband is a monster: for what does he mean by sending a siren to
+a young man whom he knows to be inflammable!”
+
+“Sir, my husband could not come himself; he is in bed, very sick, and
+you threatened him so terribly that the urgency of the matter—”
+
+“Hasn’t he got a lawyer, an attorney?”
+
+Caroline is terrified by this remark which reveals Adolphe’s profound
+rascality.
+
+“He supposed, sir, that you would have pity upon the mother of a
+family, upon her children—”
+
+“Ta, ta, ta,” returns the syndic. “You have come to influence my
+independence, my conscience, you want me to give the creditors up to
+you: well, I’ll do more, I give you up my heart, my fortune! Your
+husband wants to save _his_ honor, _my_ honor is at your disposal!”
+
+“Sir,” cries Caroline, as she tries to raise the syndic who has thrown
+himself at her feet. “You alarm me!”
+
+She plays the terrified female and thus reaches the door, getting out
+of a delicate situation as women know how to do it, that is, without
+compromising anything or anybody.
+
+“I will come again,” she says smiling, “when you behave better.”
+
+“You leave me thus! Take care! Your husband may yet find himself seated
+at the bar of the Court of Assizes: he is accessory to a fraudulent
+bankruptcy, and we know several things about him that are not by any
+means honorable. It is not his first departure from rectitude; he has
+done a good many dirty things, he has been mixed up in disgraceful
+intrigues, and you are singularly careful of the honor of a man who
+cares as little for his own honor as he does for yours.”
+
+Caroline, alarmed by these words, lets go the door, shuts it and comes
+back.
+
+“What do you mean, sir?” she exclaims, furious at this outrageous
+broadside.
+
+“Why, this affair—”
+
+“Chaumontel’s affair?”
+
+“No, his speculations in houses that he had built by people that were
+insolvent.”
+
+Caroline remembers the enterprise undertaken by Adolphe to double his
+income: (See _The Jesuitism of Women_) she trembles. Her curiosity is
+in the syndic’s favor.
+
+“Sit down here. There, at this distance, I will behave well, but I can
+look at you.”
+
+And he narrates, at length, the conception due to du Tillet the banker,
+interrupting himself to say: “Oh, what a pretty, cunning, little foot;
+no one but you could have such a foot as that—_Du Tillet, therefore,
+compromised._ What an ear, too! You have been doubtless told that you
+had a delicious ear—_And du Tillet was right, for judgment had already
+been given_—I love small ears, but let me have a model of yours, and I
+will do anything you like—_du Tillet profited by this to throw the
+whole loss on your idiotic husband_: oh, what a charming silk, you are
+divinely dressed!”
+
+“Where were we, sir?”
+
+“How can I remember while admiring your Raphaelistic head?”
+
+At the twenty-seventh compliment, Caroline considers the syndic a man
+of wit: she makes him a polite speech, and goes away without learning
+much more of the enterprise which, not long before had swallowed up
+three hundred thousand francs.
+
+There are many huge variations of this petty trouble.
+
+EXAMPLE. Adolphe is brave and susceptible: he is walking on the Champs
+Elysees, where there is a crowd of people; in this crowd are several
+ill-mannered young men who indulge in jokes of doubtful propriety:
+Caroline puts up with them and pretends not to hear them, in order to
+keep her husband out of a duel.
+
+ANOTHER EXAMPLE. A child belonging to the genus Terrible, exclaims in
+the presence of everybody:
+
+“Mamma, would you let Justine hit me?”
+
+“Certainly not.”
+
+“Why do you ask, my little man?” inquires Madame Foullepointe.
+
+“Because she just gave father a big slap, and he’s ever so much
+stronger than me.”
+
+Madame Foullepointe laughs, and Adolphe, who intended to pay court to
+her, is cruelly joked by her, after having had a first last quarrel
+with Caroline.
+
+THE LAST QUARREL.
+
+In every household, husbands and wives must one day hear the striking
+of a fatal hour. It is a knell, the death and end of jealousy, a great,
+noble and charming passion, the only true symptom of love, if it is not
+even its double. When a woman is no longer jealous of her husband, all
+is over, she loves him no more. So, conjugal love expires in the last
+quarrel that a woman gives herself the trouble to raise.
+
+Axiom.—When a woman ceases to quarrel with her husband, the Minotaur
+has seated himself in a corner arm-chair, tapping his boots with his
+cane.
+
+Every woman must remember her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble
+which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some
+occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell
+to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree
+as capricious as life itself. Like life it varies in every house.
+
+Here, the author ought perhaps to search out all the varieties of
+quarrels, if he desires to be precise.
+
+Thus, Caroline may have discovered that the judicial robe of the syndic
+in Chaumontel’s affair, hides a robe of infinitely softer stuff, of an
+agreeable, silky color: that Chaumontel’s hair, in short, is fair, and
+that his eyes are blue.
+
+Or else Caroline, who arose before Adolphe, may have seen his greatcoat
+thrown wrong side out across a chair; the edge of a little perfumed
+paper, just peeping out of the side-pocket, may have attracted her by
+its whiteness, like a ray of the sun entering a dark room through a
+crack in the window: or else, while taking Adolphe in her arms and
+feeling his pocket, she may have caused the note to crackle: or else
+she may have been informed of the state of things by a foreign odor
+that she has long noticed upon him, and may have read these lines:
+
+“Ungraitfull wun, wot du yu supoz I no About Hipolite. Kum, and yu shal
+se whether I Love yu.”
+
+Or this:
+
+“Yesterday, love, you made me wait for you: what will it be to-morrow?”
+
+Or this:
+
+“The women who love you, my dear sir, are very unhappy in hating you
+so, when you are not with them: take care, for the hatred which exists
+during your absence, may possibly encroach upon the hours you spend in
+their company.”
+
+Or this:
+
+“You traitorous Chodoreille, what were you doing yesterday on the
+boulevard with a woman hanging on your arm? If it was your wife, accept
+my compliments of condolence upon her absent charms: she has doubtless
+deposited them at the pawnbroker’s, and the ticket to redeem them with
+is lost.”
+
+Four notes emanating from the grisette, the lady, the pretentious woman
+in middle life, and the actress, among whom Adolphe has chosen his
+_belle_ (according to the Fischtaminellian vocabulary).
+
+Or else Caroline, taken veiled by Ferdinand to Ranelagh Garden, sees
+with her own eyes Adolphe abandoning himself furiously to the polka,
+holding one of the ladies of honor to Queen Pomare in his arms; or
+else, again, Adolphe has for the seventh time, made a mistake in the
+name, and called his wife Juliette, Charlotte or Lisa: or, a grocer or
+restaurateur sends to the house, during Adolphe’s absence, certain
+damning bills which fall into Caroline’s hands.
+
+PAPERS RELATING TO CHAUMONTEL’S AFFAIR.
+
+(Private Tables Served.)
+
+M. Adolphe to Perrault,
+
+To 1 Pate de Foie Gras delivered at Madame Schontz’s, the 6th of
+January, fr.    22.50
+Six bottle of assorted wines,                              70.00
+To one special breakfast delivered at Congress
+Hotel, the 11th of February, at No. 21——
+Stipulated price,                                    100.00
+______
+
+Total,                                Francs,   192.50
+
+Caroline examines the dates and remembers them as appointments made for
+business connected with Chaumontel’s affair. Adolphe had designated the
+sixth of January as the day fixed for a meeting at which the creditors
+in Chaumontel’s affair were to receive the sums due them. On the
+eleventh of February he had an appointment with the notary, in order to
+sign a receipt relative to Chaumontel’s affair.
+
+Or else—but an attempt to mention all the chances of discovery would be
+the undertaking of a madman.
+
+Every woman will remember to herself how the bandage with which her
+eyes were bound fell off: how, after many doubts, and agonies of heart,
+she made up her mind to have a final quarrel for the simple purpose of
+finishing the romance, putting the seal to the book, stipulating for
+her independence, or beginning life over again.
+
+Some women are fortunate enough to have anticipated their husbands, and
+they then have the quarrel as a sort of justification.
+
+Nervous women give way to a burst of passion and commit acts of
+violence.
+
+Women of mild temper assume a decided tone which appalls the most
+intrepid husbands. Those who have no vengeance ready shed a great many
+tears.
+
+Those who love you forgive you. Ah, they conceive so readily, like the
+woman called “Ma berline,” that their Adolphe must be loved by the
+women of France, that they are rejoiced to possess, legally, a man
+about whom everybody goes crazy.
+
+Certain women with lips tight shut like a vise, with a muddy complexion
+and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of
+promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and
+contradiction: they question him (see _Troubles within Troubles_), like
+a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful enjoyment of
+crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive moment. Generally,
+in this supreme scene of conjugal life, the fair sex is the
+executioner, while, in the contrary case, man is the assassin.
+
+This is the way of it: This last quarrel (you shall know why the author
+has called it the _last_), is always terminated by a solemn, sacred
+promise, made by scrupulous, noble, or simply intelligent women (that
+is to say, by all women), and which we give here in its grandest form.
+
+“Enough, Adolphe! We love each other no more; you have deceived me, and
+I shall never forget it. I may forgive it, but I can never forget it.”
+
+Women represent themselves as implacable only to render their
+forgiveness charming: they have anticipated God.
+
+“We have now to live in common like two friends,” continues Caroline.
+“Well, let us live like two comrades, two brothers, I do not wish to
+make your life intolerable, and I never again will speak to you of what
+has happened—”
+
+Adolphe gives Caroline his hand: she takes it, and shakes it in the
+English style. Adolphe thanks Caroline, and catches a glimpse of bliss:
+he has converted his wife into a sister, and hopes to be a bachelor
+again.
+
+The next day Caroline indulges in a very witty allusion (Adolphe cannot
+help laughing at it) to Chaumontel’s affair. In society she makes
+general remarks which, to Adolphe, are very particular remarks, about
+their last quarrel.
+
+At the end of a fortnight a day never passes without Caroline’s
+recalling their last quarrel by saying: “It was the day when I found
+Chaumontel’s bill in your pocket:” or “it happened since our last
+quarrel:” or, “it was the day when, for the first time, I had a clear
+idea of life,” etc. She assassinates Adolphe, she martyrizes him! In
+society she gives utterance to terrible things.
+
+“We are happy, my dear [to a lady], when we love each other no longer:
+it’s then that we learn how to make ourselves beloved,” and she looks
+at Ferdinand.
+
+In short, the last quarrel never comes to an end, and from this fact
+flows the following axiom:
+
+Axiom.—Putting yourself in the wrong with your lawful wife, is solving
+the problem of Perpetual Motion.
+
+A SIGNAL FAILURE.
+
+Women, and especially married women, stick ideas into their brain-pan
+precisely as they stick pins into a pincushion, and the devil himself,
+—do you mind?—could not get them out: they reserve to themselves the
+exclusive right of sticking them in, pulling them out, and sticking
+them in again.
+
+Caroline is riding home one evening from Madame Foullepointe’s in a
+violent state of jealousy and ambition.
+
+Madame Foullepointe, the lioness—but this word requires an explanation.
+It is a fashionable neologism, and gives expression to certain rather
+meagre ideas relative to our present society: you must use it, if you
+want to describe a woman who is all the rage. This lioness rides on
+horseback every day, and Caroline has taken it into her head to learn
+to ride also.
+
+Observe that in this conjugal phase, Adolphe and Caroline are in the
+season which we have denominated _A Household Revolution_, and that
+they have had two or three _Last Quarrels_.
+
+“Adolphe,” she says, “do you want to do me a favor?”
+
+“Of course.”
+
+“Won’t you refuse?”
+
+“If your request is reasonable, I am willing—”
+
+“Ah, already—that’s a true husband’s word—if—”
+
+“Come, what is it?”
+
+“I want to learn to ride on horseback.”
+
+“Now, is it a possible thing, Caroline?”
+
+Caroline looks out of the window, and tries to wipe away a dry tear.
+
+“Listen,” resumes Adolphe; “I cannot let you go alone to the
+riding-school; and I cannot go with you while business gives me the
+annoyance it does now. What’s the matter? I think I have given you
+unanswerable reasons.”
+
+Adolphe foresees the hiring of a stable, the purchase of a pony, the
+introduction of a groom and of a servant’s horse into the
+establishment—in short, all the nuisance of female lionization.
+
+When a man gives a woman reasons instead of giving her what she wants
+—well, few men have ventured to descend into that small abyss called
+the heart, to test the power of the tempest that suddenly bursts forth
+there.
+
+“Reasons! If you want reasons, here they are!” exclaims Caroline. “I am
+your wife: you don’t seem to care to please me any more. And as to the
+expenses, you greatly overrate them, my dear.”
+
+Women have as many inflections of voice to pronounce these words, _My
+dear_, as the Italians have to say _Amico_. I have counted twenty-nine
+which express only various degrees of hatred.
+
+“Well, you’ll see,” resumes Caroline, “I shall be sick, and you will
+pay the apothecary and the doctor as much as the price of a horse. I
+shall be walled up here at home, and that’s all you want. I asked the
+favor of you, though I was sure of a refusal: I only wanted to know how
+you would go to work to give it.”
+
+“But, Caroline—”
+
+“Leave me alone at the riding-school!” she continues without listening.
+“Is that a reason? Can’t I go with Madame de Fischtaminel? Madame de
+Fischtaminel is learning to ride on horseback, and I don’t imagine that
+Monsieur de Fischtaminel goes with her.”
+
+“But, Caroline—”
+
+“I am delighted with your solicitude. You think a great deal of me,
+really. Monsieur de Fischtaminel has more confidence in his wife, than
+you have in yours. He does not go with her, not he! Perhaps it’s on
+account of this confidence that you don’t want me at the school, where
+I might see your goings on with the fair Fischtaminel.”
+
+Adolphe tries to hide his vexation at this torrent of words, which
+begins when they are still half way from home, and has no sea to empty
+into. When Caroline is in her room, she goes on in the same way.
+
+“You see that if reasons could restore my health or prevent me from
+desiring a kind of exercise pointed out by nature herself, I should not
+be in want of reasons, and that I know all the reasons that there are,
+and that I went over with the reasons before I spoke to you.”
+
+This, ladies, may with the more truth be called the prologue to the
+conjugal drama, from the fact that it is vigorously delivered,
+embellished with a commentary of gestures, ornamented with glances and
+all the other vignettes with which you usually illustrate such
+masterpieces.
+
+Caroline, when she has once planted in Adolphe’s heart the apprehension
+of a scene of constantly reiterated demands, feels her hatred for his
+control largely increase. Madame pouts, and she pouts so fiercely, that
+Adolphe is forced to notice it, on pain of very disagreeable
+consequences, for all is over, be sure of that, between two beings
+married by the mayor, or even at Gretna Green, when one of them no
+longer notices the sulkings of the other.
+
+Axiom.—A sulk that has struck in is a deadly poison.
+
+It was to prevent this suicide of love that our ingenious France
+invented boudoirs. Women could not well have Virgil’s willows in the
+economy of our modern dwellings. On the downfall of oratories, these
+little cubbies become boudoirs.
+
+This conjugal drama has three acts. The act of the prologue is already
+played. Then comes the act of false coquetry: one of those in which
+French women have the most success.
+
+Adolphe is walking about the room, divesting himself of his apparel,
+and the man thus engaged, divests himself of his strength as well as of
+his clothing. To every man of forty, this axiom will appear profoundly
+just:
+
+Axiom.—The ideas of a man who has taken his boots and his suspenders
+off, are no longer those of a man who is still sporting these two
+tyrants of the mind.
+
+Take notice that this is only an axiom in wedded life. In morals, it is
+what we call a relative theorem.
+
+Caroline watches, like a jockey on the race course, the moment when she
+can distance her adversary. She makes her preparations to be
+irresistibly fascinating to Adolphe.
+
+Women possess a power of mimicking pudicity, a knowledge of secrets
+which might be those of a frightened dove, a particular register for
+singing, like Isabella, in the fourth act of _Robert le Diable: “Grace
+pour toi! Grace pour moi!”_ which leave jockeys and horse trainers
+whole miles behind. As usual, the _Diable_ succumbs. It is the eternal
+history, the grand Christian mystery of the bruised serpent, of the
+delivered woman becoming the great social force, as the Fourierists
+say. It is especially in this that the difference between the Oriental
+slave and the Occidental wife appears.
+
+Upon the conjugal pillow, the second act ends by a number of
+onomatopes, all of them favorable to peace. Adolphe, precisely like
+children in the presence of a slice of bread and molasses, promises
+everything that Caroline wants.
+
+THIRD ACT. As the curtain rises, the stage represents a chamber in a
+state of extreme disorder. Adolphe, in his dressing gown, tries to go
+out furtively and without waking Caroline, who is sleeping profoundly,
+and finally does go out.
+
+Caroline, exceedingly happy, gets up, consults her mirror, and makes
+inquiries about breakfast. An hour afterward, when she is ready she
+learns that breakfast is served.
+
+“Tell monsieur.”
+
+“Madame, he is in the little parlor.”
+
+“What a nice man he is,” she says, going up to Adolphe, and talking the
+babyish, caressing language of the honey-moon.
+
+“What for, pray?”
+
+“Why, to let his little Liline ride the horsey.”
+
+OBSERVATION. During the honey-moon, some few married couples,—very
+young ones,—make use of languages, which, in ancient days, Aristotle
+classified and defined. (See his Pedagogy.) Thus they are perpetually
+using such terminations as _lala_, _nana_, _coachy-poachy_, just as
+mothers and nurses use them to babies. This is one of the secret
+reasons, discussed and recognized in big quartos by the Germans, which
+determined the Cabires, the creators of the Greek mythology, to
+represent Love as a child. There are other reasons very well known to
+women, the principal of which is, that, in their opinion, love in men
+is always _small_.
+
+“Where did you get that idea, my sweet? You must have dreamed it!”
+
+“What!”
+
+Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already
+considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says
+not a word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of
+their gaze, Adolphe turns half way round toward the dining-room; but he
+asks himself whether it would not be well to let Caroline take one
+lesson, and to tip the wink to the riding-master, to disgust her with
+equestrianism by the harshness of his style of instruction.
+
+There is nothing so terrible as an actress who reckons upon a success,
+and who _fait four_.
+
+In the language of the stage, to _faire four_ is to play to a
+wretchedly thin house, or to obtain not the slightest applause. It is
+taking great pains for nothing, in short a _signal failure_.
+
+This petty trouble—it is very petty—is reproduced in a thousand ways in
+married life, when the honey-moon is over, and when the wife has no
+personal fortune.
+
+In spite of the author’s repugnance to inserting anecdotes in an
+exclusively aphoristic work, the tissue of which will bear nothing but
+the most delicate and subtle observations,—from the nature of the
+subject at least,—it seems to him necessary to illustrate this page by
+an incident narrated by one of our first physicians. This repetition of
+the subject involves a rule of conduct very much in use with the
+doctors of Paris.
+
+A certain husband was in our Adolphe’s situation. His Caroline, having
+once made a signal failure, was determined to conquer, for Caroline
+often does conquer! (See _The Physiology of Marriage_, Meditation XXVI,
+Paragraph _Nerves_.) She had been lying about on the sofas for two
+months, getting up at noon, taking no part in the amusements of the
+city. She would not go to the theatre,—oh, the disgusting
+atmosphere!—the lights, above all, the lights! Then the bustle, coming
+out, going in, the music,—it might be fatal, it’s so terribly exciting!
+
+She would not go on excursions to the country, oh, certainly it was her
+desire to do so!—but she would like (desiderata) a carriage of her own,
+horses of her own—her husband would not give her an equipage. And as to
+going in hacks, in hired conveyances, the bare thought gave her a
+rising at the stomach!
+
+She would not have any cooking—the smell of the meats produced a sudden
+nausea. She drank innumerable drugs that her maid never saw her take.
+
+In short, she expended large amounts of time and money in attitudes,
+privations, effects, pearl-white to give her the pallor of a corpse,
+machinery, and the like, precisely as when the manager of a theatre
+spreads rumors about a piece gotten up in a style of Oriental
+magnificence, without regard to expense!
+
+This couple had got so far as to believe that even a journey to the
+springs, to Ems, to Hombourg, to Carlsbad, would hardly cure the
+invalid: but madame would not budge, unless she could go in her own
+carriage. Always that carriage!
+
+Adolphe held out, and would not yield.
+
+Caroline, who was a woman of great sagacity, admitted that her husband
+was right.
+
+“Adolphe is right,” she said to her friends, “it is I who am
+unreasonable: he can not, he ought not, have a carriage yet: men know
+better than we do the situation of their business.”
+
+At times Adolphe was perfectly furious! Women have ways about them that
+demand the justice of Tophet itself. Finally, during the third month,
+he met one of his school friends, a lieutenant in the corps of
+physicians, modest as all young doctors are: he had had his epaulettes
+one day only, and could give the order to fire!
+
+“For a young woman, a young doctor,” said our Adolphe to himself.
+
+And he proposed to the future Bianchon to visit his wife and tell him
+the truth about her condition.
+
+“My dear, it is time that you should have a physician,” said Adolphe
+that evening to his wife, “and here is the best for a pretty woman.”
+
+The novice makes a conscientious examination, questions madame, feels
+her pulse discreetly, inquires into the slightest symptoms, and, at the
+end, while conversing, allows a smile, an expression, which, if not
+ironical, are extremely incredulous, to play involuntarily upon his
+lips, and his lips are quite in sympathy with his eyes. He prescribes
+some insignificant remedy, and insists upon its importance, promising
+to call again to observe its effect. In the ante-chamber, thinking
+himself alone with his school-mate, he indulges in an inexpressible
+shrug of the shoulders.
+
+“There’s nothing the matter with your wife, my boy,” he says: “she is
+trifling with both you and me.”
+
+“Well, I thought so.”
+
+“But if she continues the joke, she will make herself sick in earnest:
+I am too sincerely your friend to enter into such a speculation, for I
+am determined that there shall be an honest man beneath the physician,
+in me—”
+
+“My wife wants a carriage.”
+
+As in the _Solo on the Hearse_, this Caroline listened at the door.
+
+Even at the present day, the young doctor is obliged to clear his path
+of the calumnies which this charming woman is continually throwing into
+it: and for the sake of a quiet life, he has been obliged to confess
+his little error—a young man’s error—and to mention his enemy by name,
+in order to close her lips.
+
+THE CHESTNUTS IN THE FIRE.
+
+No one can tell how many shades and gradations there are in misfortune,
+for everything depends upon the character of the individual, upon the
+force of the imagination, upon the strength of the nerves. If it is
+impossible to catch these so variable shades, we may at least point out
+the most striking colors, and the principal attendant incidents. The
+author has therefore reserved this petty trouble for the last, for it
+is the only one that is at once comic and disastrous.
+
+The author flatters himself that he has mentioned the principal
+examples. Thus, women who have arrived safely at the haven, the happy
+age of forty, the period when they are delivered from scandal, calumny,
+suspicion, when their liberty begins: these women will certainly do him
+the justice to state that all the critical situations of a family are
+pointed out or represented in this book.
+
+Caroline has her Chaumontel’s affair. She has learned how to induce
+Adolphe to go out unexpectedly, and has an understanding with Madame de
+Fischtaminel.
+
+In every household, within a given time, ladies like Madame de
+Fischtaminel become Caroline’s main resource.
+
+Caroline pets Madame de Fischtaminel with all the tenderness that the
+African army is now bestowing upon Abd-el-Kader: she is as solicitous
+in her behalf as a physician is anxious to avoid curing a rich
+hypochondriac. Between the two, Caroline and Madame de Fischtaminel
+invent occupations for dear Adolphe, when neither of them desire the
+presence of that demigod among their penates. Madame de Fischtaminel
+and Caroline, who have become, through the efforts of Madame
+Foullepointe, the best friends in the world, have even gone so far as
+to learn and employ that feminine free-masonry, the rites of which
+cannot be made familiar by any possible initiation.
+
+If Caroline writes the following little note to Madame de Fischtaminel:
+
+“Dearest Angel:
+
+“You will probably see Adolphe to-morrow, but do not keep him too long,
+for I want to go to ride with him at five: but if you are desirous of
+taking him to ride yourself, do so and I will take him up. You ought to
+teach me your secret for entertaining used-up people as you do.”
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel says to herself: “Gracious! So I shall have that
+fellow on my hands to-morrow from twelve o’clock to five.”
+
+Axiom.—Men do not always know a woman’s positive request when they see
+it; but another woman never mistakes it: she does the contrary.
+
+Those sweet little beings called women, and especially Parisian women,
+are the prettiest jewels that social industry has invented. Those who
+do not adore them, those who do not feel a constant jubilation at
+seeing them laying their plots while braiding their hair, creating
+special idioms for themselves and constructing with their slender
+fingers machines strong enough to destroy the most powerful fortunes,
+must be wanting in a positive sense.
+
+On one occasion Caroline takes the most minute precautions. She writes
+the day before to Madame Foullepointe to go to St. Maur with Adolphe,
+to look at a piece of property for sale there. Adolphe would go to
+breakfast with her. She aids Adolphe in dressing. She twits him with
+the care he bestows upon his toilet, and asks absurd questions about
+Madame Foullepointe.
+
+“She’s real nice, and I think she is quite tired of Charles: you’ll
+inscribe her yet upon your catalogue, you old Don Juan: but you won’t
+have any further need of Chaumontel’s affair; I’m no longer jealous,
+you’ve got a passport. Do you like that better than being adored?
+Monster, observe how considerate I am.”
+
+So soon as her husband has gone, Caroline, who had not omitted, the
+previous evening, to write to Ferdinand to come to breakfast with her,
+equips herself in a costume which, in that charming eighteenth century
+so calumniated by republicans, humanitarians and idiots, women of
+quality called their fighting-dress.
+
+Caroline has taken care of everything. Love is the first house servant
+in the world, so the table is set with positively diabolic coquetry.
+There is the white damask cloth, the little blue service, the silver
+gilt urn, the chiseled milk pitcher, and flowers all round!
+
+If it is winter, she has got some grapes, and has rummaged the cellar
+for the very best old wine. The rolls are from the most famous baker’s.
+The succulent dishes, the _pate de foie gras_, the whole of this
+elegant entertainment, would have made the author of the Glutton’s
+Almanac neigh with impatience: it would make a note-shaver smile, and
+tell a professor of the old University what the matter in hand is.
+
+Everything is prepared. Caroline has been ready since the night before:
+she contemplates her work. Justine sighs and arranges the furniture.
+Caroline picks off the yellow leaves of the plants in the windows. A
+woman, in these cases, disguises what we may call the prancings of the
+heart, by those meaningless occupations in which the fingers have all
+the grip of pincers, when the pink nails burn, and when this unspoken
+exclamation rasps the throat: “He hasn’t come yet!”
+
+What a blow is this announcement by Justine: “Madame, here’s a letter!”
+
+A letter in place of Ferdinand! How does she ever open it? What ages of
+life slip by as she unfolds it! Women know this by experience! As to
+men, when they are in such maddening passes, they murder their
+shirt-frills.
+
+“Justine, Monsieur Ferdinand is ill!” exclaims Caroline. “Send for a
+carriage.”
+
+As Justine goes down stairs, Adolphe comes up.
+
+“My poor mistress!” observes Justine. “I guess she won’t want the
+carriage now.”
+
+“Oh my! Where have you come from?” cries Caroline, on seeing Adolphe
+standing in ecstasy before her voluptuous breakfast.
+
+Adolphe, whose wife long since gave up treating _him_ to such charming
+banquets, does not answer. But he guesses what it all means, as he sees
+the cloth inscribed with the delightful ideas which Madame de
+Fischtaminel or the syndic of Chaumontel’s affair have often inscribed
+for him upon tables quite as elegant.
+
+“Whom are you expecting?” he asks in his turn.
+
+“Who could it be, except Ferdinand?” replies Caroline.
+
+“And is he keeping you waiting?”
+
+“He is sick, poor fellow.”
+
+A quizzical idea enters Adolphe’s head, and he replies, winking with
+one eye only: “I have just seen him.”
+
+“Where?”
+
+“In front of the Cafe de Paris, with some friends.”
+
+“But why have you come back?” says Caroline, trying to conceal her
+murderous fury.
+
+“Madame Foullepointe, who was tired of Charles, you said, has been with
+him at Ville d’Avray since yesterday.”
+
+Adolphe sits down, saying: “This has happened very appropriately, for
+I’m as hungry as two bears.”
+
+Caroline sits down, too, and looks at Adolphe stealthily: she weeps
+internally: but she very soon asks, in a tone of voice that she manages
+to render indifferent, “Who was Ferdinand with?”
+
+“With some fellows who lead him into bad company. The young man is
+getting spoiled: he goes to Madame Schontz’s. You ought to write to
+your uncle. It was probably some breakfast or other, the result of a
+bet made at M’lle Malaga’s.” He looks slyly at Caroline, who drops her
+eyes to conceal her tears. “How beautiful you have made yourself this
+morning,” Adolphe resumes. “Ah, you are a fair match for your
+breakfast. I don’t think Ferdinand will make as good a meal as I
+shall,” etc., etc.
+
+Adolphe manages the joke so cleverly that he inspires his wife with the
+idea of punishing Ferdinand. Adolphe, who claims to be as hungry as two
+bears, causes Caroline to forget that a carriage waits for her at the
+door.
+
+The female that tends the gate at the house Ferdinand lives in, arrives
+at about two o’clock, while Adolphe is asleep on a sofa. That Iris of
+bachelors comes to say to Caroline that Monsieur Ferdinand is very much
+in need of some one.
+
+“He’s drunk, I suppose,” says Caroline in a rage.
+
+“He fought a duel this morning, madame.”
+
+Caroline swoons, gets up and rushes to Ferdinand, wishing Adolphe at
+the bottom of the sea.
+
+When women are the victims of these little inventions, which are quite
+as adroit as their own, they are sure to exclaim, “What abominable
+monsters men are!”
+
+ULTIMA RATIO.
+
+We have come to our last observation. Doubtless this work is beginning
+to tire you quite as much as its subject does, if you are married.
+
+This work, which, according to the author, is to the _Physiology of
+Marriage_ what Fact is to Theory, or History to Philosophy, has its
+logic, as life, viewed as a whole, has its logic, also.
+
+This logic—fatal, terrible—is as follows. At the close of the first
+part of the book—a book filled with serious pleasantry—Adolphe has
+reached, as you must have noticed, a point of complete indifference in
+matrimonial matters.
+
+He has read novels in which the writers advise troublesome husbands to
+embark for the other world, or to live in peace with the fathers of
+their children, to pet and adore them: for if literature is the
+reflection of manners, we must admit that our manners recognize the
+defects pointed out by the _Physiology of Marriage_ in this fundamental
+institution. More than one great genius has dealt this social basis
+terrible blows, without shaking it.
+
+Adolphe has especially read his wife too closely, and disguises his
+indifference by this profound word: indulgence. He is indulgent with
+Caroline, he sees in her nothing but the mother of his children, a good
+companion, a sure friend, a brother.
+
+When the petty troubles of the wife cease, Caroline, who is more clever
+than her husband, has come to profit by this advantageous indulgence:
+but she does not give her dear Adolphe up. It is woman’s nature never
+to yield any of her rights. DIEU ET MON DROIT—CONJUGAL! is, as is well
+known, the motto of England, and is especially so to-day.
+
+Women have such a love of domination that we will relate an anecdote,
+not ten years old, in point. It is a very young anecdote.
+
+One of the grand dignitaries of the Chamber of Peers had a Caroline, as
+lax as Carolines usually are. The name is an auspicious one for women.
+This dignitary, extremely old at the time, was on one side of the
+fireplace, and Caroline on the other. Caroline was hard upon the
+lustrum when women no longer tell their age. A friend came in to inform
+them of the marriage of a general who had lately been intimate in their
+house.
+
+Caroline at once had a fit of despair, with genuine tears; she screamed
+and made the grand dignitary’s head ache to such a degree, that he
+tried to console her. In the midst of his condolences, the count forgot
+himself so far as to say—“What can you expect, my dear, he really could
+not marry you!”
+
+And this was one of the highest functionaries of the state, but a
+friend of Louis XVIII, and necessarily a little bit Pompadour.
+
+The whole difference, then, between the situation of Adolphe and that
+of Caroline, consists in this: though he no longer cares about her, she
+retains the right to care about him.
+
+Now, let us listen to “What _they_ say,” the theme of the concluding
+chapter of this work.
+
+COMMENTARY.
+
+IN WHICH IS EXPLAINED LA FELICITA OF FINALES.
+
+
+Who has not heard an Italian opera in the course of his life? You must
+then have noticed the musical abuse of the word _felicita_, so lavishly
+used by the librettist and the chorus at the moment when everybody is
+deserting his box or leaving the house.
+
+Frightful image of life. We quit it just when we hear _la felicita_.
+
+Have you reflected upon the profound truth conveyed by this finale, at
+the instant when the composer delivers his last note and the author his
+last line, when the orchestra gives the last pull at the fiddle-bow and
+the last puff at the bassoon, when the principal singers say “Let’s go
+to supper!” and the chorus people exclaim “How lucky, it doesn’t rain!”
+Well, in every condition in life, as in an Italian opera, there comes a
+time when the joke is over, when the trick is done, when people must
+make up their minds to one thing or the other, when everybody is
+singing his own _felicita_ for himself. After having gone through with
+all the duos, the solos, the stretti, the codas, the concerted pieces,
+the duettos, the nocturnes, the phases which these few scenes, chosen
+from the ocean of married life, exhibit you, and which are themes whose
+variations have doubtless been divined by persons with brains as well
+as by the shallow—for so far as suffering is concerned, we are all
+equal—the greater part of Parisian households reach, without a given
+time, the following final chorus:
+
+THE WIFE, _to a young woman in the conjugal Indian Summer_. My dear, I
+am the happiest woman in the world. Adolphe is the model of husbands,
+kind, obliging, not a bit of a tease. Isn’t he, Ferdinand?
+
+Caroline addresses Adolphe’s cousin, a young man with a nice cravat,
+glistening hair and patent leather boots: his coat is cut in the most
+elegant fashion: he has a crush hat, kid gloves, something very choice
+in the way of a waistcoat, the very best style of moustaches, whiskers,
+and a goatee a la Mazarin; he is also endowed with a profound, mute,
+attentive admiration of Caroline.
+
+FERDINAND. Adolphe is happy to have a wife like you! What does he want?
+Nothing.
+
+THE WIFE. In the beginning, we were always vexing each other: but now
+we get along marvelously. Adolphe no longer does anything but what he
+likes, he never puts himself out: I never ask him where he is going nor
+what he has seen. Indulgence, my dear, is the great secret of
+happiness. You, doubtless, are still in the period of petty troubles,
+causeless jealousies, cross-purposes, and all sorts of little
+botherations. What is the good of all this? We women have but a short
+life, at the best. How much? Ten good years! Why should we fill them
+with vexation? I was like you. But, one fine morning, I made the
+acquaintance of Madame de Fischtaminel, a charming woman, who taught me
+how to make a husband happy. Since then, Adolphe has changed radically;
+he has become perfectly delightful. He is the first to say to me, with
+anxiety, with alarm, even, when I am going to the theatre, and he and I
+are still alone at seven o’clock: “Ferdinand is coming for you, isn’t
+he?” Doesn’t he, Ferdinand?
+
+FERDINAND. We are the best cousins in the world.
+
+THE INDIAN SUMMER WIFE, _very much affected_. Shall I ever come to
+that?
+
+THE HUSBAND, _on the Italian Boulevard_. My dear boy [he has
+button-holed Monsieur de Fischtaminel], you still believe that marriage
+is based upon passion. Let me tell you that the best way, in conjugal
+life, is to have a plenary indulgence, one for the other, on condition
+that appearances be preserved. I am the happiest husband in the world.
+Caroline is a devoted friend, she would sacrifice everything for me,
+even my cousin Ferdinand, if it were necessary: oh, you may laugh, but
+she is ready to do anything. You entangle yourself in your laughable
+ideas of dignity, honor, virtue, social order. We can’t have our life
+over again, so we must cram it full of pleasure. Not the smallest
+bitter word has been exchanged between Caroline and me for two years
+past. I have, in Caroline, a friend to whom I can tell everything, and
+who would be amply able to console me in a great emergency. There is
+not the slightest deceit between us, and we know perfectly well what
+the state of things is. We have thus changed our duties into pleasures.
+We are often happier, thus, than in that insipid season called the
+honey-moon. She says to me, sometimes, “I’m out of humor, go away.” The
+storm then falls upon my cousin. Caroline never puts on her airs of a
+victim, now, but speaks in the kindest manner of me to the whole world.
+In short, she is happy in my pleasures. And as she is a scrupulously
+honest woman, she is conscientious to the last degree in her use of our
+fortune. My house is well kept. My wife leaves me the right to dispose
+of my reserve without the slightest control on her part. That’s the way
+of it. We have oiled our wheels and cogs, while you, my dear
+Fischtaminel, have put gravel in yours.
+
+CHORUS, _in a parlor during a ball_. Madame Caroline is a charming
+woman.
+
+A WOMAN IN A TURBAN. Yes, she is very proper, very dignified.
+
+A WOMAN WHO HAS SEVEN CHILDREN. Ah! she learned early how to manage her
+husband.
+
+ONE OF FERDINAND’S FRIENDS. But she loves her husband exceedingly.
+Besides, Adolphe is a man of great distinction and experience.
+
+ONE OF MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL’S FRIENDS. He adores his wife. There’s no
+fuss at their house, everybody is at home there.
+
+MONSIEUR FOULLEPOINTE. Yes, it’s a very agreeable house.
+
+A WOMAN ABOUT WHOM THERE IS A GOOD DEAL OF SCANDAL. Caroline is kind
+and obliging, and never talks scandal of anybody.
+
+A YOUNG LADY, _returning to her place after a dance_. Don’t you
+remember how tiresome she was when she visited the Deschars?
+
+MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL. Oh! She and her husband were two bundles of
+briars—continually quarreling. [She goes away.]
+
+AN ARTIST. I hear that the individual known as Deschars is getting
+dissipated: he goes round town—
+
+A WOMAN, _alarmed at the turn the conversation is taking, as her
+daughter can hear_. Madame de Fischtaminel is charming, this evening.
+
+A WOMAN OF FORTY, _without employment_. Monsieur Adolphe appears to be
+as happy as his wife.
+
+A YOUNG LADY. Oh! what a sweet man Monsieur Ferdinand is! [Her mother
+reproves her by a sharp nudge with her foot.] What’s the matter, mamma?
+
+HER MOTHER, _looking at her fixedly_. A young woman should not speak
+so, my dear, of any one but her betrothed, and Monsieur Ferdinand is
+not a marrying man.
+
+A LADY DRESSED RATHER LOW IN THE NECK, _to another lady dressed equally
+low, in a whisper_. The fact is, my dear, the moral of all this is that
+there are no happy couples but couples of four.
+
+A FRIEND, _whom the author was so imprudent as to consult_. Those last
+words are false.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Do you think so?
+
+THE FRIEND, _who has just been married_. You all of you use your ink in
+depreciating social life, on the pretext of enlightening us! Why, there
+are couples a hundred, a thousand times happier than your boasted
+couples of four.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Well, shall I deceive the marrying class of the population,
+and scratch the passage out?
+
+THE FRIEND. No, it will be taken merely as the point of a song in a
+vaudeville.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Yes, a method of passing truths off upon society.
+
+THE FRIEND, _who sticks to his opinion_. Such truths as are destined to
+be passed off upon it.
+
+THE AUTHOR, _who wants to have the last word_. Who and what is there
+that does not pass off, or become passe? When your wife is twenty years
+older, we will resume this conversation.
+
+THE FRIEND. You revenge yourself cruelly for your inability to write
+the history of happy homes.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
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+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Analytical Studies, by Honoré de Balzac</div>
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+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Analytical Studies</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Honoré de Balzac</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: July 4, 2005 [eBook #16206]<br />
+[Most recently updated: April 20, 2023]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Dagny and John Bickers</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANALYTICAL STUDIES ***</div>
+
+<h1>ANALYTICAL STUDIES</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">BY HONORÉ DE BALZAC</h2>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3>DEDICATION</h3>
+
+<p>
+Notice the words: <i>The man of distinction to whom this book is dedicated</i>.
+Need I say: “You are that man.”—T<small>HE</small> A<small>UTHOR</small>.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+The woman who may be induced by the title of this book to open it, can save
+herself the trouble; she has already read the work without knowing it. A man,
+however malicious he may possibly be, can never say about a woman as much good
+or as much evil as they themselves think. If, in spite of this notice, a woman
+will persist in reading the volume, she ought to be prevented by delicacy from
+despising the author, from the very moment that he, forfeiting the praise which
+most artists welcome, has in a certain way engraved on the title page of his
+book the prudent inscription written on the portal of certain establishments:
+<i>Ladies must not enter</i>.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">INTRODUCTION</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<p>
+The two Analytical Studies, <i>Physiology of Marriage</i> and <i>Petty Troubles
+of Married Life</i>, belong quite apart from the action of the <i>Comedie
+Humaine</i>, and can only be included therein by virtue of a special
+dispensation on the part of their author, who made for them an eighth division
+therein, thus giving them a local habitation and a name. Although they come far
+down in the list of titles, their creation belongs almost to the formative era.
+Balzac had just shaken his skirts clear of the immature dust of the <i>Oeuvres
+de Jeunesse</i>, and by the publication, in 1829, of <i>The Chouans</i>, had
+made his first real bow to his larger public. In December of that same year
+appeared the <i>Physiology of Marriage</i>, followed eleven months later by a
+few papers belonging to <i>Petty Troubles of Married Life</i>. Meanwhile,
+between these two Analytical Studies, came a remarkable novelette, <i>At the
+Sign of the Cat and Racket</i>, followed soon after by one of the most famous
+stories of the entire <i>Comedie</i>, <i>The Magic Skin</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are thus particular to place the two Analytical Studies in time and in
+environment, that the wonderful versatility of the author may become
+apparent—and more: that Balzac may be vindicated from the charge of dullness
+and inaccuracy at this period. Such traits might have been charged against him
+had he left only the Analytical Studies. But when they are preceded by the
+faithful though heavy scene of military life, and succeeded by the searching
+and vivid philosophical study, their faults and failures may be considered for
+the sake of their company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is hard to determine Balzac’s full purpose in including the Analytical
+Studies in the <i>Comedie</i>. They are not novels. The few, lightly-sketched
+characters are not connected with those of the <i>Comedie</i>, save in one or
+two remote instances. They must have been included in order to make one more
+room in the gigantic mansion which the author had planned. His seventh sense of
+subdivision saw here fresh material to classify. And so these grim, almost
+sardonic essays were placed where they now appear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all kindness, the Balzac novitiate is warned against beginning an
+acquaintance with the author through the medium of the Analytical Studies. He
+would be almost certain to misjudge Balzac’s attitude, and might even be
+tempted to forsake his further cultivation. The mistake would be serious for
+the reader and unjust to the author. These studies are chiefly valuable as
+outlining a peculiar—and, shall we say, forced?—mood that sought expression in
+an isolated channel. All his life long, Balzac found time for miscellaneous
+writings —critiques, letters, reviews, essays, political diatribes and
+sketches. In early life they were his “pot-boilers,” and he never ceased
+writing them, probably urged partly by continued need of money, partly through
+fondness for this sort of thing. His <i>Physiology</i> is fairly representative
+of the material, being analysis in satirical vein of sundry foibles of society.
+This class of composition was very popular in the time of Louis Philippe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Physiology of Marriage</i> is couched in a spirit of pseudo-seriousness
+that leaves one in doubt as to Balzac’s faith with the reader. At times he
+seems honestly to be trying to analyze a particular phase of his subject; at
+other times he appears to be ridiculing the whole institution of marriage. If
+this be not the case, then he would seem unfitted for his task—through the
+ignorance of a bachelor—and adds to error the element of slander. He is at
+fault through lack of intimate experience. And yet the flashes of keen
+penetration preclude such a charge as this. A few bold touches of his pen, and
+a picture is drawn which glows with convincing reality. While here and there
+occur paragraphs of powerful description or searching philosophy which proclaim
+Balzac the mature, Balzac the observant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the publication of <i>Petty Troubles of Married Life</i> in <i>La
+Presse</i>, the publishers of that periodical had this to say: “M. de Balzac
+has already produced, as you know, the <i>Physiology of Marriage</i>, a book
+full of diabolical ingenuity and an analysis of society that would drive to
+despair Leuwenhoech and Swammerdam, who beheld the entire universe in a drop of
+water. This inexhaustible subject has again inspired an entertaining book full
+of Gallic malice and English humor, where Rabelais and Sterne meet and greet
+him at the same moment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In <i>Petty Troubles</i> we have the sardonic vein fully developed. The whole
+edifice of romance seems but a card house, and all virtue merely a question of
+utility. We must not err, however, in taking sentiments at their apparent
+value, for the real Balzac lies deeper; and here and there a glimpse of his
+true spirit and greater power becomes apparent. The bitter satire yields place
+to a vein of feeling true and fine, and gleaming like rich gold amid baser
+metal. Note “Another Glimpse of Adolphus” with its splendid vein of reverie and
+quiet inspiration to higher living. It is touches like this which save the book
+and reveal the author.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Petty Troubles of Married Life</i> is a pendant or sequel to <i>Physiology
+of Marriage</i>. It is, as Balzac says, to the <i>Physiology</i> “what Fact is
+to Theory, or History to Philosophy, and has its logic, as life, viewed as a
+whole, has its logic also.” We must then say with the author, that “if
+literature is the reflection of manners, we must admit that our manners
+recognize the defects pointed out by the <i>Physiology of Marriage</i> in this
+fundamental institution;” and we must concede for <i>Petty Troubles</i> one of
+those “terrible blows dealt this social basis.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Physiologie du Mariage, ou Meditations de philosophie eclectique sur le
+bonheur et le malheur conjugal</i> is dated at Paris, 1824-29. It first
+appeared anonymously, December, 1829, dated 1830, from the press of Charles
+Gosselin and Urbain Canel, in two octavo volumes with its present introduction
+and a note of correction now omitted. Its next appearance was signed, in 1834,
+in a two-volume edition of Ollivier. In 1846 it was entered, with its
+dedication to the reader, in the first edition of <i>Etudes Analytiques</i>—the
+first edition also of the <i>Comedie Humaine</i>—as Volume XVI. All the
+subsequent editions have retained the original small division heads, called
+Meditations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Petites Miseres de la Vie Conjugale</i> is not dated. Its composition was
+achieved piecemeal, beginning shortly after its predecessor appeared. But it
+was not till long after—in 1845-46—that its present two-part form was published
+in a single octavo volume by Chlendowski. A break had ensued between the first
+and second parts, the latter having appeared practically in full in <i>La
+Presse</i> of December, 1845. The sub-headings have remained unchanged since
+the original printing.
+</p>
+
+<h5>J. WALKER MCSPADDEN.</h5>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE;<br/>
+OR,<br/>
+THE MUSINGS OF AN ECLECTIC PHILOSOPHER ON THE HAPPINESS AND<br/>
+UNHAPPINESS OF MARRIED LIFE</h2>
+
+<h2>INTRODUCTION</h2>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Marriage must therefore undergo the gradual development towards perfection to
+which all human affairs submit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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, <i>Physiology of Marriage</i>! 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<i>Art</i> of preserving foods; on the <i>Art</i> of curing smoky chimneys; on
+the <i>Art</i> of making good mortar; on the <i>Art</i> of tying a cravat; on
+the <i>Art</i> of carving meat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a moment he had named such a prodigious number of books that the author felt
+his head go round.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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: <i>Physiology of
+Marriage</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My aunt made a sign,” said the youngest of the heirs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The afflicted relations discovered exactly on the spot where the brand had
+fallen a certain object artistically enveloped in a mass of plaster.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Proceed,” said the eldest of the heirs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you noticed, dear, that women in general bestow their love only upon a
+fool?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“These women are absolute tyrants!” said the author to himself. “Has the devil
+again turned up in a mob cap?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s enough, duchess! You have absolutely startled me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I swear by my virtue,” she said, “their husbands are worth more.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But these are the sort of people they choose for husbands,” the duchess
+answered gravely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tell me,” asked the author, “is the disaster which threatens the husband in
+France quite inevitable?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the author got home he said at once to his demon:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come! I am ready; let us sign the compact.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the demon never returned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is our work completed?” asked the younger of the two feminine assistants of
+the author.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alas! madame,” I said, “will you ever requite me for all the hatreds which
+that work will array against me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She waved her hand, and then the author replied to her doubt by a look of
+indifference.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<i>Physiology of Taste</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="letter">
+DECEMBER 5, 1829.
+</p>
+
+<h2>FIRST PART.</h2>
+
+<h3>A GENERAL CONSIDERATION.</h3>
+
+<p>
+We will declaim against stupid laws until they are changed, and in the meantime
+blindly submit to them.—Diderot, <i>Supplement to the Voyage of
+Bougainville</i>.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION I.</h3>
+
+<h5>THE SUBJECT.</h5>
+
+<p>
+Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is not your object to prove that marriage unites for life two beings who do not
+know each other?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That life consists in passion, and that no passion survives marriage?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That marriage is an institution necessary for the preservation of society, but
+that it is contrary to the laws of nature?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That divorce, this admirable release from the misfortunes of marriage, should
+with one voice be reinstated?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That, in spite of all its inconveniences, marriage is the foundation on which
+property is based?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That it furnishes invaluable pledges for the security of government?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That there is something touching in the association of two human beings for the
+purpose of supporting the pains of life?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That there is something ridiculous in the wish that one and the same thoughts
+should control two wills?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the wife is treated as a slave?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That there has never been a marriage entirely happy?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That marriage is filled with crimes and that the known murders are not the
+worst?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That fidelity is impossible, at least to the man?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That an investigation if it could be undertaken would prove that in the
+transmission of patrimonial property there was more risk than security?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That adultery does more harm than marriage does good?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That infidelity in a woman may be traced back to the earliest ages of society,
+and that marriage still survives this perpetuation of treachery?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the laws of love so strongly link together two human beings that no human
+law can put them asunder?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All these questions furnish material for books; but the books have been written
+and the questions are constantly reappearing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Physiology, what must I take you to mean?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Can it possibly be right to confine women? The Ottomans once did so, and
+nowadays they give them their liberty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>De Matrimonio</i> were thus represented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Legions of doctors have marshaled their legions of books on the subject of
+marriage in its relation to medicine and surgery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the nineteenth century the <i>Physiology of Marriage</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Shall I say that you intend to publish pictures more or less skillfully drawn,
+for the purpose of convincing us that a man marries:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From ambition—that is well known;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From kindness, in order to deliver a girl from the tyranny of her mother;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From rage, in order to disinherit his relations;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From scorn of a faithless mistress;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From weariness of a pleasant bachelor life;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From folly, for each man always commits one;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In consequence of a wager, which was the case with Lord Byron;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From interest, which is almost always the case;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From youthfulness on leaving college, like a blockhead;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From ugliness,—fear of some day failing to secure a wife;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Through Machiavelism, in order to be the heir of some old woman at an early
+date;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From necessity, in order to secure the standing to <i>our</i> son;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From obligation, the damsel having shown herself weak;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From passion, in order to become more surely cured of it;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On account of a quarrel, in order to put an end to a lawsuit;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From gratitude, by which he gives more than he has received;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From goodness, which is the fate of doctrinaires;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the condition of a will when a dead uncle attaches his legacy to some
+girl, marriage with whom is the condition of succession;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From custom, in imitation of his ancestors;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From old age, in order to make an end of life;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From <i>yatidi</i>, that is the hour of going to bed and signifies amongst the
+Turks all bodily needs;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From religious zeal, like the Duke of Saint-Aignan, who did not wish to commit
+sin?[*]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+[*] The foregoing queries came in (untranslatable) alphabetic order in the
+original.—Editor
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these incidents of marriage have furnished matter for thirty thousand
+comedies and a hundred thousand romances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Physiology, for the third and last time I ask you—What is your meaning?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Allow me to say to you like Rabelais, who is in every sense our master:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it is not for you that I am writing. Since you have grown-up children that
+ends the matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not for you that the <i>Physiology of Marriage</i> 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 <i>Pease and the Lard</i> with commentary of
+Rabelais, or in the one entitled <i>The Dignity of Breeches</i>, and who esteem
+highly the fair books of high degree, a quarry hard to run down and redoubtable
+to wrestle with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Undoubtedly. But do you see in this a fresh idea?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>speculum vitae humanae</i>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION II.</h3>
+
+<h5>MARRIAGE STATISTICS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inhabitants of France are generally reckoned at thirty millions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us explain:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Naturalists consider man to be no more than a unique species of the order
+bimana, established by Dumeril in his <i>Analytic Zoology</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>olim</i>; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>femmes comme il faut</i>; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us subject this social elite to a philosophic examination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be easy to prove the fairness of our analysis: let one reflection be
+sufficient.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us put this million of women, already winnowed by our fan, through another
+examination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another twentieth will be in ill-health. This will be to make a very modest
+allowance for human infirmities.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is in the midst of this million we are bound to investigate:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The number of honest women;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The number of virtuous women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION III.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE HONEST WOMAN.</h5>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This inquiry suggests certain digressions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What, is this you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, dear boy; it looks like me, doesn’t it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they laugh, with more or less intelligence, according to the nature of the
+joke which opens the conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Whom are you living with now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a general rule she is a charming woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Zounds! Mine has dressing-gowns of batiste and diamond rings for the evening!”
+said a lawyer’s clerk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But she has a box at the Francais!” said an army officer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he patted his companion lightly on the shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a pleasant thing for a married man to hear!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! what an angel you are, my dear!” is the answer to a request discreetly
+whispered into the ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can you tell me her name or point her out to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! no; she is an honest woman.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>bon ton</i> from vulgarity. What then is meant by an
+honest woman?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<h4>APHORISMS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+I.<br/>
+An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+II.<br/>
+An honest woman is under forty years old.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+III.<br/>
+A married woman whose favors are to be paid for is not an honest<br/>
+woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+IV.<br/>
+A married woman who keeps a private carriage is an honest woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+V.<br/>
+A woman who does her own cooking is not an honest woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+VIII.<br/>
+An honest woman ought to be in a financial condition such as forbids<br/>
+her lover to think she will ever cost him anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+IX.<br/>
+A woman who lives on the third story of any street excepting the Rue<br/>
+de Rivoli and the Rue de Castiglione is not an honest woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XII.<br/>
+An honest woman is one whom her lover fears to compromise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XIII.<br/>
+The wife of an artist is always an honest woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By the application of these principles even a man from Ardeche can resolve all
+the difficulties which our subject presents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three hundred thousand landed proprietors enjoy an income of three thousand
+five hundred francs and represent all territorial wealth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here we have a million husbands represented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<i>amour-propre</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is it the conversation of a shop-girl which makes you expect boundless
+delights?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In your intercourse with a woman who is beneath you, the delight of flattered
+<i>amour-propre</i> is on her side. You are not in the secret of the happiness
+which you give.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION IV.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE VIRTUOUS WOMAN.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The question, perhaps, is not so much how many virtuous women there are, as
+what possibility there is of an honest woman remaining virtuous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to throw light upon a point so important, let us cast a rapid glance
+over the male population.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the six millions of privileged men, we must exclude three millions of old
+men and children.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be affirmed by some one that this subtraction leaves a remainder of
+four millions in the case of women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This difference at first sight seems singular, but is easily accounted for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The average age at which women are married is twenty years and at forty they
+cease to belong to the world of love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XIV.<br/>
+Physically a man is a man much longer than a woman is a woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our remainder of two millions do not require five sous to make love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not necessary that he should have a handsome face nor even a good figure;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The charms of youth are the unique equipage of love;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How did you manage it? What did you tell your husband?” you ask.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your husband!”—Ah! this brings us back again into the depths of our subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XV.<br/>
+Morally the man is more often and longer a man than the woman is a women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That there are men more stupid and actually more ugly than God would have made
+them;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That there are those whose character is like a chestnut without a kernel;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the clergy are generally chaste;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here then we have a people, a society which has been sifted, and you see the
+result!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XVI.<br/>
+Manners are the hypocrisy of nations, and hypocrisy is more or less perfect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XVII.<br/>
+Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That would be a mournful way of solving the difficulty!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<i>in petto</i> over their secret adventures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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; <i>foenum habet in cornu</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>comme il faut</i>,
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, virtuous women there certainly are:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, those who have never been tempted and those who die at their first
+child-birth, assuming that their husbands had married them virgins;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, those who are ugly as the Kaifakatadary of the Arabian Nights;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will not attempt to enumerate the women who are virtuous from stupidity, for
+it is acknowledged that in love all women have intellect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XVIII.<br/>
+A virtuous woman has in her heart one fibre less or one fibre more than other
+women; she is either stupid or sublime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XIX.<br/>
+The virtue of women is perhaps a question of temperament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XX.<br/>
+The most virtuous women have in them something which is never chaste.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXI.<br/>
+“That a man of intellect has doubts about his mistress is conceivable, but
+about his wife!—that would be too stupid.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXII.<br/>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a startling conclusion!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On this point the purist in morality, the <i>collets montes</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why don’t they get married?” cries a religious woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what father of good sense would wish his son to be married at twenty years
+of age?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cannot these men, the religious women will always ask, abide in continence like
+the priests?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly, madame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXIII.<br/>
+The courtesan is an institution if she is a necessity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXIV.<br/>
+In the social order, inevitable abuses are laws of nature, in accordance with
+which mankind should frame their civil and political institutes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXV.<br/>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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? <i>Caveant consules</i>!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION V.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE PREDESTINED.</h5>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Present company always excepted.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then every one will have the right to believe, <i>in petto</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Sentimental Journey</i>, plainly shows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>should</i>
+go!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the men whose noses are stained with snuff;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But those who, to their misfortune, have a perpetual cold in their head;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the sailors who smoke or chew;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But those men whose dry and bilious temperament makes them always look as if
+they had eaten a sour apple;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the men who in private life have certain cynical habits, ridiculous fads,
+and who always, in spite of everything, look unwashed;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the husbands who have obtained the degrading name of “hen-pecked”;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally the old men who marry young girls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All these people are <i>par excellence</i> among the predestined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXVI.<br/>
+Do not begin marriage by a violation of law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us try to penetrate more deeply into the causes of this conjugal
+sickliness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But to feel this passion is always to feel desire. Can a man always desire his
+wife?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h4>CATECHISM OF MARRIAGE.</h4>
+
+<p>
+XXVII.<br/>
+Marriage is a science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXVIII.<br/>
+A man ought not to marry without having studied anatomy, and dissected at least
+one woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXIX.<br/>
+The fate of the home depends on the first night.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXX.<br/>
+A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making a
+sacrifice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXXIII.<br/>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXXV.<br/>
+As ideas are capable of infinite combination, it ought to be the same with
+pleasures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXXVI.<br/>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXXVII.<br/>
+If there are differences between one moment of pleasure and another, a man can
+always be happy with the same woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XXXIX. Between two beings who do not love each other this genius is
+licentiousness; but the caresses over which love presides are always pure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XL.<br/>
+The married woman who is the most chaste may be also the most voluptuous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XLI.<br/>
+The most virtuous woman can be forward without knowing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XLIII.<br/>
+Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in
+striking true.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XLVI.<br/>
+Each night ought to have its <i>menu</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XLVII.<br/>
+Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster which devours everything, that
+is, familiarity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XLVIII.<br/>
+If a man cannot distinguish the difference between the pleasures of two
+consecutive nights, he has married too early.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+L.<br/>
+A husband ought never to be the first to go to sleep and the last to awaken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LI.<br/>
+The man who enters his wife’s dressing-room is either a philosopher or an
+imbecile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LII.<br/>
+The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LIII.<br/>
+The married woman is a slave whom one must know how to set upon a throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LIV.<br/>
+A man must not flatter himself that he knows his wife, and is making her happy
+unless he sees her often at his knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, the letter written by Walter Shandy to
+his brother Toby, when this last proposed to marry the widow Wadman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h4>“MY DEAR BROTHER TOBY,</h4>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Twere better to keep ideas of baldness out of her fancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Always carry it in thy mind, and act upon it as a sure maxim, Toby—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>‘That women are timid.’</i> And ’tis well they are—else there would be no
+dealing with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let not thy breeches be too tight, or hang too loose about thy thighs, like
+the trunk-hose of our ancestors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A just medium prevents all conclusions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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
+<i>Rabelais</i>, or <i>Scarron</i>, or <i>Don Quixote</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They are all books which excite laughter; and thou knowest, dear Toby, that
+there is no passion so serious as lust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stick a pin in the bosom of thy shirt, before thou enterest her parlor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Avicenna</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There is nothing further for thee, which occurs to me at present—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Unless the breaking out of a fresh war.—So wishing everything, dear Toby, for
+the best,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I rest thy affectionate brother,
+</p>
+
+<h5>“WALTER SHANDY.”</h5>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is our answer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION VI.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF BOARDING SCHOOLS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I mean to say that you should call to mind the secret and profound instruction
+which the pupils have acquired <i>de natura rerum</i>,—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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us stop here!—The mother-in-law requires a whole Meditation for herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So that, whichever way you turn, the bed of marriage, in this connection, is
+equally full of thorns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Vicar of
+Wakefield</i>, 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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is, for example, beyond doubt that the probabilities will be in your favor:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I. If you have chosen a young lady whose temperament resembles that of the
+women of Louisiana or the Carolinas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+II. If you choose a young lady who, without being plain, does not belong to the
+class of pretty women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Among people of fixed principles the girls are careless, the women severe; the
+contrary is the case among people of no principle.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in good faith, would the emancipation of girls set free such a host of
+dangers?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When there are ten of us, we cross ourselves.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h4>PROBLEM.</h4>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man would find himself in a position of danger even more critical if his wife
+drank nothing but water [see the Meditation entitled <i>Conjugal Hygiene</i>];
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION VII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE HONEYMOON.</h5>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The expression <i>honeymoon</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How can the honeymoon rise upon two beings who cannot possibly love each other?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How can it set, when once it has risen?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Have all marriages their honeymoon?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us proceed to answer these questions in order.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LVIII. We do not attach ourselves permanently to any possessions, excepting in
+proportion to the trouble, toil and longing which they have cost us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LIX.<br/>
+In every case we receive only in proportion to what we give.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<h4>THEOREM.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Man goes from aversion to love; but if he has begun by loving, and afterwards
+comes to feel aversion, he never returns to love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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
+<i>ritornello</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FIRST EPOCH.—Is it possible that I shall ever have white hair?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One morning you hear a young voice, which love much oftener makes to vibrate
+than lulls to silence, exclaiming:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I declare! You have a white hair!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FOURTH EPOCH.—The wig is so skillfully put on that you deceive every one who
+does not know you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wig takes up all your attention, and <i>amour-propre</i> makes you every
+morning as busy as the most skillful hairdresser.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+SEVENTH EPOCH.—Your wig is as scraggy as dog’s tooth grass; and —excuse the
+expression—you are making fun of your wig.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then, madame, he would doubtless be indifferent to his wig!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We looked at each other, she with a well-assumed air of dignity, I with a
+suppressed smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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 <i>Dictionary of Mythology</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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 <i>inconsistent</i> the
+husband must be, according to me, <i>minotaurized</i>. 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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have dried the green wood in preparation for a fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>grande passion</i>,
+who has not dreamed of it, and who does not believe that it is easily kindled,
+for there is always found a certain <i>amour-propre</i> ready to reinforce that
+conquered enemy—a jaded wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION VIII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE FIRST SYMPTOMS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>roues</i>; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alas!<br/>
+Is it right to be heir of the man who we slay?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>amour-propre</i> by drawing all
+eyes upon her in the midst of parties and public entertainments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She will adroitly distinguish between the duties which are all she has to
+perform and the rights which she can demand to exercise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LX.<br/>
+The more a man judges the less he loves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>varium et mutabile
+femina</i> 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 <i>la bete feroce</i>; but we never see these whims in a woman
+who is happy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now here we will lay down a principle, and you must engrave it on your memory
+in letters of fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>ego</i> which made her a being distinct from yours. She had identified
+herself with your nature and was obedient to that vow of the heart, <i>Una
+caro</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Physiology of Pleasure</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>Home Instruction</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then your wife begins to say, “<i>My</i> chamber, <i>my</i> bed, <i>my</i>
+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.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The number of things which you do not understand increases day by day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+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 <i>rattle-power</i>.
+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 them over and over again you will admit
+them, in order to be delivered from the discussion. Thus the power of the
+rattle will prove to you:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That you are very fortunate to have such an excellent wife;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That she has done you too much honor in marrying you;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That women often see clearer than men;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That you ought to take the advice of your wife in everything, and almost always
+ought to follow it;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That you ought to respect the mother of your children, to honor her and have
+confidence in her;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the best way to escape being deceived, is to rely upon a wife’s
+refinement, for according to certain old ideas which we have had the weakness
+to give credit, it is impossible for a man to prevent his wife from
+minotaurizing him;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That a lawful wife is a man’s best friend;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That a woman is mistress in her own house and queen in her drawing-room, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those who wish to oppose a firm resistance to a woman’s conquest, effected by
+means of her dignity over man’s power, fall into the category of the
+predestined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first, quarrels arise which in the eye of wives give an air of tyranny to
+husbands. The tyranny of a husband is always a terrible excuse for
+inconsistency in a wife. Then, in their frivolous discussions they are enabled
+to prove to their families and to ours, to everybody and to ourselves, that we
+are in the wrong. If, for the sake of peace, or from love, you acknowledge the
+pretended rights of women, you yield an advantage to your wife by which she
+will profit eternally. A husband, like a government, ought never to acknowledge
+a mistake. In case you do so, your power will be outflanked by the subtle
+artifices of feminine dignity; then all will be lost; from that moment she will
+advance from concession to concession until she has driven you from her bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The woman being shrewd, intelligent, sarcastic and having leisure to meditate
+over an ironical phrase, can easily turn you into ridicule during a momentary
+clash of opinions. The day on which she turns you into ridicule, sees the end
+of your happiness. Your power has expired. A woman who has laughed at her
+husband cannot henceforth love him. A man should be, to the woman who is in
+love with him, a being full of power, of greatness, and always imposing. A
+family cannot exist without despotism. Think of that, ye nations!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the difficult course which a man has to steer in presence of such serious
+incidents as these, is what we may call the <i>haute politique</i> of marriage,
+and is the subject of the second and third parts of our book. That breviary of
+marital Machiavelism will teach you the manner in which you may grow to
+greatness within that frivolous mind, within that soul of lacework, to use
+Napoleon’s phrase. You may learn how a man may exhibit a soul of steel, may
+enter upon this little domestic war without ever yielding the empire of his
+will, and may do so without compromising his happiness. For if you exhibit any
+tendency to abdication, your wife will despise you, for the sole reason that
+she has discovered you to be destitute of mental vigor; you are no longer a
+<i>man</i> to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But we have not yet reached the point at which are to be developed those
+theories and principles, by means of which a man may unite elegance of manners
+with severity of measures; let it suffice us, for the moment, to point out the
+importance of impending events and let us pursue our theme.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this fatal epoch, you will see that she is adroitly setting up a right to go
+out alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You were at one time her god, her idol. She has now reached that height of
+devotion at which it is permitted to see holes in the garments of the saints.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, mon Dieu! My dear,” said Madame de la Valliere to her husband, “how badly
+you wear your sword! M. de Richelieu has a way of making it hang straight at
+his side, which you ought to try to imitate; it is in much better taste.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear, you could not tell me in a more tactful manner that we have been
+married five months!” replied the Duke, whose repartee made his fortune in the
+reign of Louis XV.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She will study your character in order to find weapons against you. Such a
+study, which love would hold in horror, reveals itself in the thousand little
+traps which she lays purposely to make you scold her; when a woman has no
+excuse for minotaurizing her husband she sets to work to make one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She will perhaps begin dinner without waiting for you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you drive through the middle of the town, she will point out certain objects
+which escaped your notice; she will sing before you without feeling afraid; she
+will interrupt you, sometimes vouchsafe no reply to you, and will prove to you,
+in a thousand different ways, that she is enjoying at your side the use of all
+her faculties and exercising her private judgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She will try to abolish entirely your influence in the management of the house
+and to become sole mistress of your fortune. At first this struggle will serve
+as a distraction for her soul, whether it be empty or in too violent commotion;
+next, she will find in your opposition a new motive for ridicule. Slang
+expressions will not fail her, and in France we are so quickly vanquished by
+the ironical smile of another!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At other times headaches and nervous attacks make their appearance; but these
+symptoms furnish matter for a whole future Meditation. In the world she will
+speak of you without blushing, and will gaze at you with assurance. She will
+begin to blame your least actions because they are at variance with her ideas,
+or her secret intentions. She will take no care of what pertains to you, she
+will not even know whether you have all you need. You are no longer her
+paragon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In imitation of Louis XIV, who carried to his mistresses the bouquets of orange
+blossoms which the head gardener of Versailles put on his table every morning,
+M. de Vivonne used almost every day to give his wife choice flowers during the
+early period of his marriage. One morning he found the bouquet lying on the
+side table without having been placed, as usual, in a vase of water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Oh!” said he, “if I am not a cuckold, I shall very soon be one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You go on a journey for eight days and you receive no letters, or you receive
+one, three pages of which are blank.—Symptom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You come home mounted on a valuable horse which you like very much, and between
+her kisses your wife shows her uneasiness about the horse and his
+fodder.—Symptom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To these features of the case, you will be able to add others. We shall
+endeavor in the present volume always to paint things in bold fresco style and
+leave the miniatures to you. According to the characters concerned, the
+indications which we are describing, veiled under the incidents of ordinary
+life, are of infinite variety. One man may discover a symptom in the way a
+shawl is put on, while another needs to receive a fillip to his intellect, in
+order to notice the indifference of his mate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some fine spring morning, the day after a ball, or the eve of a country party,
+this situation reaches its last phase; your wife is listless and the happiness
+within her reach has no more attractions for her. Her mind, her imagination,
+perhaps her natural caprices call for a lover. Nevertheless, she dare not yet
+embark upon an intrigue whose consequences and details fill her with dread. You
+are still there for some purpose or other; you are a weight in the balance,
+although a very light one. On the other hand, the lover presents himself
+arrayed in all the graces of novelty and all the charms of mystery. The
+conflict which has arisen in the heart of your wife becomes, in presence of the
+enemy, more real and more full of peril than before. Very soon the more dangers
+and risks there are to be run, the more she burns to plunge into that delicious
+gulf of fear, enjoyment, anguish and delight. Her imagination kindles and
+sparkles, her future life rises before her eyes, colored with romantic and
+mysterious hues. Her soul discovers that existence has already taken its tone
+from this struggle which to a woman has so much solemnity in it. All is
+agitation, all is fire, all is commotion within her. She lives with three times
+as much intensity as before, and judges the future by the present. The little
+pleasure which you have lavished upon her bears witness against you; for she is
+not excited as much by the pleasures which she has received, as by those which
+she is yet to enjoy; does not imagination show her that her happiness will be
+keener with this lover, whom the laws deny her, than with you? And then, she
+finds enjoyment even in her terror and terror in her enjoyment. Then she falls
+in love with this imminent danger, this sword of Damocles hung over her head by
+you yourself, thus preferring the delirious agonies of such a passion, to that
+conjugal inanity which is worse to her than death, to that indifference which
+is less a sentiment than the absence of all sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You, who must go to pay your respects to the Minister of Finance, to write
+memorandums at the bank, to make your reports at the Bourse, or to speak in the
+Chamber; you, young men, who have repeated with many others in our first
+Meditation the oath that you will defend your happiness in defending your wife,
+what can you oppose to these desires of hers which are so natural? For, with
+these creatures of fire, to live is to feel; the moment they cease to
+experience emotion they are dead. The law in virtue of which you take your
+position produces in her this involuntary act of minotaurism. “There is one
+sequel,” said D’Alembert, “to the laws of movement.” Well, then, where are your
+means of defence?— Where, indeed?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! if your wife has not yet kissed the apple of the Serpent, the Serpent
+stands before her; you sleep, we are awake, and our book begins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Without inquiring how many husbands, among the five hundred thousand which this
+book concerns, will be left with the predestined; how many have contracted
+unfortunate marriages; how many have made a bad beginning with their wives; and
+without wishing to ask if there be many or few of this numerous band who can
+satisfy the conditions required for struggling against the danger which is
+impending, we intend to expound in the second and third part of this work the
+methods of fighting the Minotaur and keeping intact the virtue of wives. But if
+fate, the devil, the celibate, opportunity, desire your ruin, in recognizing
+the progress of all intrigues, in joining in the battles which are fought by
+every home, you will possibly be able to find some consolation. Many people
+have such a happy disposition, that on showing to them the condition of things
+and explaining to them the why and the wherefore, they scratch their foreheads,
+rub their hands, stamp on the ground, and are satisfied.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION IX.</h3>
+
+<h5>EPILOGUE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+Faithful to our promise, this first part has indicated the general causes which
+bring all marriages to the crises which we are about to describe; and, in
+tracing the steps of this conjugal preamble, we have also pointed out the way
+in which the catastrophe is to be avoided, for we have pointed out the errors
+by which it is brought about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these first considerations would be incomplete if, after endeavoring to
+throw some light upon the inconsistency of our ideas, of our manners and of our
+laws, with regard to a question which concerns the life of almost all living
+beings, we did not endeavor to make plain, in a short peroration, the political
+causes of the infirmity which pervades all modern society. After having exposed
+the secret vices of marriage, would it not be an inquiry worthy of philosophers
+to search out the causes which have rendered it so vicious?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The system of law and of manners which so far directs women and controls
+marriage in France, is the outcome of ancient beliefs and traditions which are
+no longer in accordance with the eternal principles of reason and of justice,
+brought to light by the great Revolution of 1789.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three great disturbances have agitated France; the conquest of the country by
+the Romans, the establishment of Christianity and the invasion of the Franks.
+Each of these events has left a deep impress upon the soil, upon the laws, upon
+the manners and upon the intellect of the nation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Greece having one foot on Europe and the other on Asia, was influenced by her
+voluptuous climate in the choice of her marriage institutions; she received
+them from the East, where her philosophers, her legislators and her poets went
+to study the abstruse antiquities of Egypt and Chaldea. The absolute seclusion
+of women which was necessitated under the burning sun of Asia prevailed under
+the laws of Greece and Ionia. The women remained in confinement within the
+marbles of the gyneceum. The country was reduced to the condition of a city, to
+a narrow territory, and the courtesans who were connected with art and religion
+by so many ties, were sufficient to satisfy the first passions of the young
+men, who were few in number, since their strength was elsewhere taken up in the
+violent exercises of that training which was demanded of them by the military
+system of those heroic times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the beginning of her royal career Rome, having sent to Greece to seek such
+principles of legislation as might suit the sky of Italy, stamped upon the
+forehead of the married woman the brand of complete servitude. The senate
+understood the importance of virtue in a republic, hence the severity of
+manners in the excessive development of the marital and paternal power. The
+dependence of the woman on her husband is found inscribed on every code. The
+seclusion prescribed by the East becomes a duty, a moral obligation, a virtue.
+On these principles were raised temples to modesty and temples consecrated to
+the sanctity of marriage; hence, sprang the institution of censors, the law of
+dowries, the sumptuary laws, the respect for matrons and all the
+characteristics of the Roman law. Moreover, three acts of feminine violation
+either accomplished or attempted, produced three revolutions! And was it not a
+grand event, sanctioned by the decrees of the country, that these illustrious
+women should make their appearances on the political arena! Those noble Roman
+women, who were obliged to be either brides or mothers, passed their life in
+retirement engaged in educating the masters of the world. Rome had no
+courtesans because the youth of the city were engaged in eternal war. If, later
+on, dissoluteness appeared, it merely resulted from the despotism of emperors;
+and still the prejudices founded upon ancient manners were so influential that
+Rome never saw a woman on a stage. These facts are not put forth idly in
+scanning the history of marriage in France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the conquest of Gaul, the Romans imposed their laws upon the conquered;
+but they were incapable of destroying both the profound respect which our
+ancestors entertained for women and the ancient superstitions which made women
+the immediate oracles of God. The Roman laws ended by prevailing, to the
+exclusion of all others, in this country once known as the “land of written
+law,” or <i>Gallia togata</i>, and their ideas of marriage penetrated more or
+less into the “land of customs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, during the conflict of laws with manners, the Franks invaded the Gauls and
+gave to the country the dear name of France. These warriors came from the North
+and brought the system of gallantry which had originated in their western
+regions, where the mingling of the sexes did not require in those icy climates
+the jealous precautions of the East. The women of that time elevated the
+privations of that kind of life by the exaltation of their sentiments. The
+drowsy minds of the day made necessary those varied forms of delicate
+solicitation, that versatility of address, the fancied repulse of coquetry,
+which belong to the system whose principles have been unfolded in our First
+Part, as admirably suited to the temperate clime of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the East, then, belong the passion and the delirium of passion, the long
+brown hair, the harem, the amorous divinities, the splendor, the poetry of love
+and the monuments of love.— To the West, the liberty of wives, the sovereignty
+of their blond locks, gallantry, the fairy life of love, the secrecy of
+passion, the profound ecstasy of the soul, the sweet feelings of melancholy and
+the constancy of love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These two systems, starting from opposite points of the globe, have come into
+collision in France; in France, where one part of the country, Languedoc, was
+attracted by Oriental traditions, while the other, Languedoil, was the native
+land of a creed which attributes to woman a magical power. In the Languedoil,
+love necessitates mystery, in the Languedoc, to see is to love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the height of this struggle came the triumphant entry of Christianity into
+France, and there it was preached by women, and there it consecrated the
+divinity of a woman who in the forests of Brittany, of Vendee and of Ardennes
+took, under the name of Notre-Dame, the place of more than one idol in the
+hollow of old Druidic oaks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the religion of Christ, which is above all things a code of morality and
+politics, gave a soul to all living beings, proclaimed that equality of all in
+the sight of God, and by such principles as these fortified the chivalric
+sentiments of the North, this advantage was counterbalanced by the fact, that
+the sovereign pontiff resided at Rome, of which seat he considered himself the
+lawful heir, through the universality of the Latin tongue, which became that of
+Europe during the Middle Ages, and through the keen interest taken by monks,
+writers and lawyers in establishing the ascendency of certain codes, discovered
+by a soldier in the sack of Amalfi.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These two principles of the servitude and the sovereignty of women retain
+possession of the ground, each of them defended by fresh arguments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Salic law, which was a legal error, was a triumph for the principle of
+political and civil servitude for women, but it did not diminish the power
+which French manners accorded them, for the enthusiasm of chivalry which
+prevailed in Europe supplanted the party of manners against the party of law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in this way was created that strange phenomenon which since that time has
+characterized both our national despotism and our legislation; for ever since
+those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution, when the spirit of
+philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of the past, France has been the
+prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the
+struggle between the monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft
+have so closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still
+remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from one of the
+three great movements to which we have referred. Was it possible that the woman
+question should be discussed and woman’s political education and marriage
+should be ventilated when feudalism threatened the throne, when reform menaced
+both king and barons, and the people, between the hierarchy and the empire,
+were forgotten? According to a saying of Madame Necker, women, amid these great
+movements, were like the cotton wool put into a case of porcelain. They were
+counted for nothing, but without them everything would have been broken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out at
+service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner; a collision between these two
+principles which frequently occurred, produced odd situations by the thousand.
+And then, woman was physically little understood, and what was actually
+sickness in her, was considered a prodigy, witchcraft or monstrous turpitude.
+In those days these creatures, treated by the law as reckless children, and put
+under guardianship, were by the manners of the time deified and adored. Like
+the freedmen of emperors, they disposed of crowns, they decided battles, they
+awarded fortunes, they inspired crimes and revolutions, wonderful acts of
+virtue, by the mere flash of their glances, and yet they possessed nothing and
+were not even possessors of themselves. They were equally fortunate and
+unfortunate. Armed with their weakness and strong in instinct, they launched
+out far beyond the sphere which the law allotted them, showing themselves
+omnipotent for evil, but impotent for good; without merit in the virtues that
+were imposed upon them, without excuse in their vices; accused of ignorance and
+yet denied an education; neither altogether mothers nor altogether wives.
+Having all the time to conceal their passions, while they fostered them, they
+submitted to the coquetry of the Franks, while they were obliged like Roman
+women, to stay within the ramparts of their castles and bring up those who were
+to be warriors. While no system was definitely decided upon by legislation as
+to the position of women, their minds were left to follow their inclinations,
+and there are found among them as many who resemble Marion Delorme as those who
+resemble Cornelia; there are vices among them, but there are as many virtues.
+These were creatures as incomplete as the laws which governed them; they were
+considered by some as a being midway between man and the lower animals, as a
+malignant beast which the laws could not too closely fetter, and which nature
+had destined, with so many other things, to serve the pleasure of men; while
+others held woman to be an angel in exile, a source of happiness and love, the
+only creature who responded to the highest feelings of man, while her miseries
+were to be recompensed by the idolatry of every heart. How could the
+consistency, which was wanting in a political system, be expected in the
+general manners of the nation?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so woman became what circumstances and men made her, instead of being what
+the climate and native institutions should have made her; sold, married against
+her taste, in accordance with the <i>Patria potestas</i> of the Romans, at the
+same time that she fell under the marital despotism which desired her
+seclusion, she found herself tempted to take the only reprisals which were
+within her power. Then she became a dissolute creature, as soon as men ceased
+to be intently occupied in intestine war, for the same reason that she was a
+virtuous woman in the midst of civil disturbances. Every educated man can fill
+in this outline, for we seek from movements like these the lessons and not the
+poetic suggestion which they yield.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Revolution was too entirely occupied in breaking down and building up, had
+too many enemies, or followed perhaps too closely on the deplorable times
+witnessed under the regency and under Louis XV, to pay any attention to the
+position which women should occupy in the social order.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The remarkable men who raised the immortal monument which our codes present
+were almost all old-fashioned students of law deeply imbued with a spirit of
+Roman jurisprudence; and moreover they were not the founders of any political
+institutions. Sons of the Revolution, they believed, in accordance with that
+movement, that the law of divorce wisely restricted and the bond of dutiful
+submission were sufficient ameliorations of the previous marriage law. When
+that former order of things was remembered, the change made by the new
+legislation seemed immense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the present day the question as to which of these two principles shall
+triumph rests entirely in the hands of our wise legislators. The past has
+teaching which should bear fruit in the future. Have we lost all sense of the
+eloquence of fact?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The principles of the East resulted in the existence of eunuchs and seraglios;
+the spurious social standing of France has brought in the plague of courtesans
+and the more deadly plague of our marriage system; and thus, to use the
+language of a contemporary, the East sacrifices to paternity men and the
+principle of justice; France, women and modesty. Neither the East nor France
+has attained the goal which their institutions point to; for that is happiness.
+The man is not more loved by the women of a harem than the husband is sure of
+being in France, as the father of his children; and marrying is not worth what
+it costs. It is time to offer no more sacrifice to this institution, and to
+amass a larger sum of happiness in the social state by making our manners and
+our institution conformable to our climate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Constitutional government, a happy mixture of two extreme political systems,
+despotism and democracy, suggests by the necessity of blending also the two
+principles of marriage, which so far clash together in France. The liberty
+which we boldly claim for young people is the only remedy for the host of evils
+whose source we have pointed out, by exposing the inconsistencies resulting
+from the bondage in which girls are kept. Let us give back to youth the
+indulgence of those passions, those coquetries, love and its terrors, love and
+its delights, and that fascinating company which followed the coming of the
+Franks. At this vernal season of life no fault is irreparable, and Hymen will
+come forth from the bosom of experiences, armed with confidence, stripped of
+hatred, and love in marriage will be justified, because it will have had the
+privilege of comparison.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this change of manners the disgraceful plague of public prostitution will
+perish of itself. It is especially at the time when the man possesses the
+frankness and timidity of adolescence, that in his pursuit of happiness he is
+competent to meet and struggle with great and genuine passions of the heart.
+The soul is happy in making great efforts of whatever kind; provided that it
+can act, that it can stir and move, it makes little difference, even though it
+exercise its power against itself. In this observation, the truth of which
+everybody can see, there may be found one secret of successful legislation, of
+tranquillity and happiness. And then, the pursuit of learning has now become so
+highly developed that the most tempestuous of our coming Mirabeaus can consume
+his energy either in the indulgence of a passion or the study of a science. How
+many young people have been saved from debauchery by self-chosen labors or the
+persistent obstacles put in the way of a first love, a love that was pure! And
+what young girl does not desire to prolong the delightful childhood of
+sentiment, is not proud to have her nature known, and has not felt the secret
+tremblings of timidity, the modesty of her secret communings with herself, and
+wished to oppose them to the young desires of a lover inexperienced as herself!
+The gallantry of the Franks and the pleasures which attend it should then be
+the portion of youth, and then would naturally result a union of soul, of mind,
+of character, of habits, of temperament and of fortune, such as would produce
+the happy equilibrium necessary for the felicity of the married couple. This
+system would rest upon foundations wider and freer, if girls were subjected to
+a carefully calculated system of disinheritance; or if, in order to force men
+to choose only those who promised happiness by their virtues, their character
+or their talents, they married as in the United States without dowry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that case, the system adopted by the Romans could advantageously be applied
+to the married women who when they were girls used their liberty. Being
+exclusively engaged in the early education of their children, which is the most
+important of all maternal obligations, occupied in creating and maintaining the
+happiness of the household, so admirably described in the fourth book of
+<i>Julie</i>, they would be in their houses like the women of ancient Rome,
+living images of Providence, which reigns over all, and yet is nowhere visible.
+In this case, the laws covering the infidelity of the wife should be extremely
+severe. They should make the penalty disgrace, rather than inflict painful or
+coercive sentences. France has witnessed the spectacle of women riding asses
+for the pretended crime of magic, and many an innocent woman has died of shame.
+In this may be found the secret of future marriage legislation. The young girls
+of Miletus delivered themselves from marriage by voluntary death; the senate
+condemned the suicides to be dragged naked on a hurdle, and the other virgins
+condemned themselves for life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women and marriage will never be respected until we have that radical change in
+manners which we are now begging for. This profound thought is the ruling
+principle in the two finest productions of an immortal genius. <i>Emile</i> and
+<i>La Nouvelle Heloise</i> are nothing more than two eloquent pleas for the
+system. The voice there raised will resound through the ages, because it points
+to the real motives of true legislation, and the manners which will prevail in
+the future. By placing children at the breast of their mothers, Jean-Jacques
+rendered an immense service to the cause of virtue; but his age was too deeply
+gangrened with abuses to understand the lofty lessons unfolded in those two
+poems; it is right to add also that the philosopher was in these works
+overmastered by the poet, and in leaving in the heart of <i>Julie</i> after her
+marriage some vestiges of her first love, he was led astray by the
+attractiveness of a poetic situation, more touching indeed, but less useful
+than the truth which he wished to display.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, if marriage in France is an unlimited contract to which men agree
+with a silent understanding that they may thus give more relish to passion,
+more curiosity, more mystery to love, more fascination to women; if a woman is
+rather an ornament to the drawing-room, a fashion-plate, a portmanteau, than a
+being whose functions in the order politic are an essential part of the
+country’s prosperity and the nation’s glory, a creature whose endeavors in life
+vie in utility with those of men—I admit that all the above theory, all these
+long considerations sink into nothingness at the prospect of such an important
+destiny!——
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But after having squeezed a pound of actualities in order to obtain one drop of
+philosophy, having paid sufficient homage to that passion for the historic,
+which is so dominant in our time, let us turn our glance upon the manners of
+the present period. Let us take the cap and bells and the coxcomb of which
+Rabelais once made a sceptre, and let us pursue the course of this inquiry
+without giving to one joke more seriousness than comports with it, and without
+giving to serious things the jesting tone which ill befits them.
+</p>
+
+<h2>SECOND PART</h2>
+
+<h3>MEANS OF DEFENCE, INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR.</h3>
+
+<p>
+“To be or not to be,<br/>
+That is the question.”<br/>
+—Shakspeare, <i>Hamlet</i>.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION X.</h3>
+
+<h5>A TREATISE ON MARITAL POLICY.</h5>
+
+<p>
+When a man reaches the position in which the first part of this book sets him,
+we suppose that the idea of his wife being possessed by another makes his heart
+beat, and rekindles his passion, either by an appeal to his <i>amour
+propre</i>, his egotism, or his self-interest, for unless he is still on his
+wife’s side, he must be one of the lowest of men and deserves his fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this trying moment it is very difficult for a husband to avoid making
+mistakes; for, with regard to most men, the art of ruling a wife is even less
+known than that of judiciously choosing one. However, marital policy consists
+chiefly in the practical application of three principles which should be the
+soul of your conduct. The first is never to believe what a woman says; the
+second, always to look for the spirit without dwelling too much upon the letter
+of her actions; and the third, not to forget that a woman is never so garrulous
+as when she holds her tongue, and is never working with more energy than when
+she keeps quiet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the moment that your suspicions are aroused, you ought to be like a man
+mounted on a tricky horse, who always watches the ears of the beast, in fear of
+being thrown from the saddle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the manner
+of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a razor in the
+hand of a monkey. Moreover, the first and most vital of your duties consists in
+perpetual dissimulation, an accomplishment in which most husbands are sadly
+lacking. In detecting the symptoms of minotaurism a little too plainly marked
+in the conduct of their wives, most men at once indulge in the most insulting
+suspicions. Their minds contract a tinge of bitterness which manifests itself
+in their conversation, and in their manners; and the alarm which fills their
+heart, like the gas flame in a glass globe, lights up their countenances so
+plainly, that it accounts for their conduct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now a woman, who has twelve hours more than you have each day to reflect and to
+study you, reads the suspicion written upon your face at the very moment that
+it arises. She will never forget this gratuitous insult. Nothing can ever
+remedy that. All is now said and done, and the very next day, if she has
+opportunity, she will join the ranks of inconsistent women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You ought then to begin under these circumstances to affect towards your wife
+the same boundless confidence that you have hitherto had in her. If you begin
+to lull her anxieties by honeyed words, you are lost, she will not believe you;
+for she has her policy as you have yours. Now there is as much need for tact as
+for kindliness in your behavior, in order to inculcate in her, without her
+knowing it, a feeling of security, which will lead her to lay back her ears,
+and prevent you from using rein or spur at the wrong moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But how can we compare a horse, the frankest of all animals, to a being, the
+flashes of whose thought, and the movements of whose impulses render her at
+moments more prudent than the Servite Fra-Paolo, the most terrible adviser that
+the Ten at Venice ever had; more deceitful than a king; more adroit than Louis
+XI; more profound than Machiavelli; as sophistical as Hobbes; as acute as
+Voltaire; as pliant as the fiancee of Mamolin; and distrustful of no one in the
+whole wide world but you?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, to this dissimulation, by means of which the springs that move your
+conduct ought to be made as invisible as those that move the world, must be
+added absolute self-control. That diplomatic imperturbability, so boasted of by
+Talleyrand, must be the least of your qualities; his exquisite politeness and
+the grace of his manners must distinguish your conversation. The professor here
+expressly forbids you to use your whip, if you would obtain complete control
+over your gentle Andalusian steed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXI.<br/>
+If a man strike his mistress it is a self-inflicted wound; but if he strike his
+wife it is suicide!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How can we think of a government without police, an action without force, a
+power without weapons?—Now this is exactly the problem which we shall try to
+solve in our future meditations. But first we must submit two preliminary
+observations. They will furnish us with two other theories concerning the
+application of all the mechanical means which we propose you should employ. An
+instance from life will refresh these arid and dry dissertations: the hearing
+of such a story will be like laying down a book, to work in the field.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the year 1822, on a fine morning in the month of February, I was traversing
+the boulevards of Paris, from the quiet circles of the Marais to the
+fashionable quarters of the Chaussee-d’Antin, and I observed for the first
+time, not without a certain philosophic joy, the diversity of physiognomy and
+the varieties of costume which, from the Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule even to the
+Madeleine, made each portion of the boulevard a world of itself, and this whole
+zone of Paris, a grand panorama of manners. Having at that time no idea of what
+the world was, and little thinking that one day I should have the audacity to
+set myself up as a legislator on marriage, I was going to take lunch at the
+house of a college friend, who was perhaps too early in life afflicted with a
+wife and two children. My former professor of mathematics lived at a short
+distance from the house of my college friend, and I promised myself the
+pleasure of a visit to this worthy mathematician before indulging my appetite
+for the dainties of friendship. I accordingly made my way to the heart of a
+study, where everything was covered with a dust which bore witness to the lofty
+abstraction of the scholar. But a surprise was in store for me there. I
+perceived a pretty woman seated on the arm of an easy chair, as if mounted on
+an English horse; her face took on the look of conventional surprise worn by
+mistresses of the house towards those they do not know, but she did not
+disguise the expression of annoyance which, at my appearance, clouded her
+countenance with the thought that I was aware how ill-timed was my presence. My
+master, doubtless absorbed in an equation, had not yet raised his head; I
+therefore waved my right hand towards the young lady, like a fish moving his
+fin, and on tiptoe I retired with a mysterious smile which might be translated
+“I will not be the one to prevent him committing an act of infidelity to
+Urania.” She nodded her head with one of those sudden gestures whose graceful
+vivacity is not to be translated into words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My good friend, don’t go away,” cried the geometrician. “This is my wife!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I bowed for the second time!—Oh, Coulon! Why wert thou not present to applaud
+the only one of thy pupils who understood from that moment the expression,
+“anacreontic,” as applied to a bow?—The effect must have been very
+overwhelming; for Madame the Professoress, as the Germans say, rose hurriedly
+as if to go, making me a slight bow which seemed to say: “Adorable!——” Her
+husband stopped her, saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t go, my child, this is one of my pupils.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young woman bent her head towards the scholar as a bird perched on a bough
+stretches its neck to pick up a seed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is not possible,” said the husband, heaving a sigh, “and I am going to
+prove it to you by A plus B.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let us drop that, sir, I beg you,” she answered, pointing with a wink to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If it had been a problem in algebra, my master would have understood this look,
+but it was Chinese to him, and so he went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look here, child, I constitute you judge in the matter; our income is ten
+thousand francs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At these words I retired to the door, as if I were seized with a wild desire to
+examine the framed drawings which had attracted my attention. My discretion was
+rewarded by an eloquent glance. Alas! she did not know that in Fortunio I could
+have played the part of Sharp-Ears, who heard the truffles growing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In accordance with the principles of general economy,” said my master, “no one
+ought to spend in rent and servant’s wages more than two-tenths of his income;
+now our apartment and our attendance cost altogether a hundred louis. I give
+you twelve hundred francs to dress with” [in saying this he emphasized every
+syllable]. “Your food,” he went on, takes up four thousand francs, our children
+demand at lest twenty-five louis; I take for myself only eight hundred francs;
+washing, fuel and light mount up to about a thousand francs; so that there does
+not remain, as you see, more than six hundred francs for unforeseen expenses.
+In order to buy the cross of diamonds, we must draw a thousand crowns from our
+capital, and if once we take that course, my little darling, there is no reason
+why we should not leave Paris which you love so much, and at once take up our
+residence in the country, in order to retrench. Children and household expenses
+will increase fast enough! Come, try to be reasonable!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suppose I must,” she said, “but you will be the only husband in Paris who
+has not given a New Year’s gift to his wife.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she stole away like a school-boy who goes to finish an imposed duty. My
+master made a gesture of relief. When he saw the door close he rubbed his
+hands, he talked of the war in Spain; and I went my way to the Rue de Provence,
+little knowing that I had received the first installment of a great lesson in
+marriage, any more than I dreamt of the conquest of Constantinople by General
+Diebitsch. I arrived at my host’s house at the very moment they were sitting
+down to luncheon, after having waited for me the half hour demanded by usage.
+It was, I believe, as she opened a <i>pate de foie gras</i> that my pretty
+hostess said to her husband, with a determined air:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alexander, if you were really nice you would give me that pair of ear-rings
+that we saw at Fossin’s.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You shall have them,” cheerfully replied my friend, drawing from his
+pocketbook three notes of a thousand francs, the sight of which made his wife’s
+eyes sparkle. “I can no more resist the pleasure of offering them to you,” he
+added, “than you can that of accepting them. This is the anniversary of the day
+I first saw you, and the diamonds will perhaps make you remember it!——”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You bad man!” said she, with a winning smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She poked two fingers into her bodice, and pulling out a bouquet of violets she
+threw them with childlike contempt into the face of my friend. Alexander gave
+her the price of the jewels, crying out:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I had seen the flowers!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall never forget the lively gesture and the eager joy with which, like a
+cat which lays its spotted paw upon a mouse, the little woman seized the three
+bank notes; she rolled them up blushing with pleasure, and put them in the
+place of the violets which before had perfumed her bosom. I could not help
+thinking about my old mathematical master. I did not then see any difference
+between him and his pupil, than that which exists between a frugal man and a
+prodigal, little thinking that he of the two who seemed to calculate the
+better, actually calculated the worse. The luncheon went off merrily. Very
+soon, seated in a little drawing-room newly decorated, before a cheerful fire
+which gave warmth and made our hearts expand as in spring time, I felt
+compelled to make this loving couple a guest’s compliments on the furnishing of
+their little bower.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is a pity that all this costs so dear,” said my friend, “but it is right
+that the nest be worthy of the bird; but why the devil do you compliment me
+upon curtains which are not paid for?—You make me remember, just at the time I
+am digesting lunch, that I still owe two thousand francs to a Turk of an
+upholsterer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At these words the mistress of the house made a mental inventory of the pretty
+room with her eyes, and the radiancy of her face changed to thoughtfulness.
+Alexander took me by the hand and led me to the recess of a bay window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you happen,” he said in a low voice, “to have a thousand crowns to lend me?
+I have only twelve thousand francs income, and this year—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alexander,” cried the dear creature, interrupting her husband, while, rushing
+up, she offered him the three banknotes, “I see now that it is a piece of
+folly—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean?” answered he, “keep your money.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, my love, I am ruining you! I ought to know that you love me so much, that
+I ought not to tell you all that I wish for.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Keep it, my darling, it is your lawful property—nonsense, I shall gamble this
+winter and get all that back again!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gamble!” cried she, with an expression of horror. “Alexander, take back these
+notes! Come, sir, I wish you to do so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, no,” replied my friend, repulsing the white and delicious little hand.
+“Are you not going on Thursday to a ball of Madame de B——-?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will think about what you asked of me,” said I to my comrade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I went away bowing to his wife, but I saw plainly after that scene that my
+anacreontic salutation did not produce much effect upon her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He must be mad,” thought I as I went away, “to talk of a thousand crowns to a
+law student.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Five days later I found myself at the house of Madame de B——-, whose balls were
+becoming fashionable. In the midst of the quadrilles I saw the wife of my
+friend and that of the mathematician. Madame Alexander wore a charming dress;
+some flowers and white muslin were all that composed it. She wore a little
+cross <i>a la Jeannette</i>, hanging by a black velvet ribbon which set off the
+whiteness of her scented skin; long pears of gold decorated her ears. On the
+neck of Madame the Professoress sparkled a superb cross of diamonds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How funny that is,” said I to a personage who had not yet studied the world’s
+ledger, nor deciphered the heart of a single woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That personage was myself. If I had then the desire to dance with those fair
+women, it was simply because I knew a secret which emboldened my timidity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So after all, madame, you have your cross?” I said to her first.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I fairly won it!” she replied, with a smile hard to describe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is this! no ear-rings?” I remarked to the wife of my friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah!” she replied, “I have enjoyed possession of them during a whole luncheon
+time, but you see that I have ended by converting Alexander.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He allowed himself to be easily convinced?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She answered with a look of triumph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eight years afterwards, this scene suddenly rose to my memory, though I had
+long since forgotten it, and in the light of the candles I distinctly discerned
+the moral of it. Yes, a woman has a horror of being convinced of anything; when
+you try to persuade her she immediately submits to being led astray and
+continues to play the role which nature gave her. In her view, to allow herself
+to be won over is to grant a favor, but exact arguments irritate and confound
+her; in order to guide her you must employ the power which she herself so
+frequently employs and which lies in an appeal to sensibility. It is therefore
+in his wife, and not in himself, that a husband can find the instruments of his
+despotism; as diamond cuts diamond so must the woman be made to tyrannize over
+herself. To know how to offer the ear-rings in such a way that they will be
+returned, is a secret whose application embraces the slightest details of life.
+And now let us pass to the second observation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He who can manage property of one toman, can manage one of an hundred
+thousand,” says an Indian proverb; and I, for my part, will enlarge upon this
+Asiatic adage and declare, that he who can govern one woman can govern a
+nation, and indeed there is very much similarity between these two governments.
+Must not the policy of husbands be very nearly the same as the policy of kings?
+Do not we see kings trying to amuse the people in order to deprive them of
+their liberty; throwing food at their heads for one day, in order to make them
+forget the misery of a whole year; preaching to them not to steal and at the
+same time stripping them of everything; and saying to them: “It seems to me
+that if I were the people I should be virtuous”? It is from England that we
+obtain the precedent which husbands should adopt in their houses. Those who
+have eyes ought to see that when the government is running smoothly the Whigs
+are rarely in power. A long Tory ministry has always succeeded an ephemeral
+Liberal cabinet. The orators of a national party resemble the rats which wear
+their teeth away in gnawing the rotten panel; they close up the hole as soon as
+they smell the nuts and the lard locked up in the royal cupboard. The woman is
+the Whig of our government. Occupying the situation in which we have left her
+she might naturally aspire to the conquest of more than one privilege. Shut
+your eyes to the intrigues, allow her to waste her strength in mounting half
+the steps of your throne; and when she is on the point of touching your
+sceptre, fling her back to the ground, quite gently and with infinite grace,
+saying to her: “Bravo!” and leaving her to expect success in the hereafter. The
+craftiness of this manoeuvre will prove a fine support to you in the employment
+of any means which it may please you to choose from your arsenal, for the
+object of subduing your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such are the general principles which a husband should put into practice, if he
+wishes to escape mistakes in ruling his little kingdom. Nevertheless, in spite
+of what was decided by the minority at the council of Macon (Montesquieu, who
+had perhaps foreseen the coming of constitutional government has remarked, I
+forget in what part of his writings, that good sense in public assemblies is
+always found on the side of the minority), we discern in a woman a soul and a
+body, and we commence by investigating the means to gain control of her moral
+nature. The exercise of thought, whatever people may say, is more noble than
+the exercise of bodily organs, and we give precedence to science over cookery
+and to intellectual training over hygiene.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XI.</h3>
+
+<h5>INSTRUCTION IN THE HOME.</h5>
+
+<p>
+Whether wives should or should not be put under instruction—such is the
+question before us. Of all those which we have discussed this is the only one
+which has two extremes and admits of no compromise. Knowledge and ignorance,
+such are the two irreconcilable terms of this problem. Between these two
+abysses we seem to see Louis XVIII reckoning up the felicities of the
+eighteenth century, and the unhappiness of the nineteenth. Seated in the centre
+of the seesaw, which he knew so well how to balance by his own weight, he
+contemplates at one end of it the fanatic ignorance of a lay brother, the
+apathy of a serf, the shining armor on the horses of a banneret; he thinks he
+hears the cry, “France and Montjoie-Saint-Denis!” But he turns round, he smiles
+as he sees the haughty look of a manufacturer, who is captain in the national
+guard; the elegant carriage of a stock broker; the simple costume of a peer of
+France turned journalist and sending his son to the Polytechnique; then he
+notices the costly stuffs, the newspapers, the steam engines; and he drinks his
+coffee from a cup of Sevres, at the bottom of which still glitters the “N”
+surmounted by a crown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Away with civilization! Away with thought!”—That is your cry. You ought to
+hold in horror the education of women for the reason so well realized in Spain,
+that it is easier to govern a nation of idiots than a nation of scholars. A
+nation degraded is happy: if she has not the sentiment of liberty, neither has
+she the storms and disturbances which it begets; she lives as polyps live; she
+can be cut up into two or three pieces and each piece is still a nation,
+complete and living, and ready to be governed by the first blind man who arms
+himself with the pastoral staff.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What is it that produces this wonderful characteristic of humanity? Ignorance;
+ignorance is the sole support of despotism, which lives on darkness and
+silence. Now happiness in the domestic establishment as in a political state is
+a negative happiness. The affection of a people for a king, in an absolute
+monarchy, is perhaps less contrary to nature than the fidelity of a wife
+towards her husband, when love between them no longer exists. Now we know that,
+in your house, love at this moment has one foot on the window-sill. It is
+necessary for you, therefore, to put into practice that salutary rigor by which
+M. de Metternich prolongs his <i>statu quo</i>; but we would advise you to do
+so with more tact and with still more tenderness; for your wife is more crafty
+than all the Germans put together, and as voluptuous as the Italians.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You should, therefore, try to put off as long as possible the fatal moment when
+your wife asks you for a book. This will be easy. You will first of all
+pronounce in a tone of disdain the phrase “Blue stocking;” and, on her request
+being repeated, you will tell her what ridicule attaches, among the neighbors,
+to pedantic women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will then repeat to her, very frequently, that the most lovable and the
+wittiest women in the world are found at Paris, where women never read;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That women are like people of quality who, according to Mascarillo, know
+everything without having learned anything; that a woman while she is dancing,
+or while she is playing cards, without even having the appearance of listening,
+ought to know how to pick up from the conversation of talented men the
+ready-made phrases out of which fools manufacture their wit at Paris;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That in this country decisive judgments on men and affairs are passed round
+from hand to hand; and that the little cutting phrase with which a woman
+criticises an author, demolishes a work, or heaps contempt on a picture, has
+more power in the world than a court decision;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That women are beautiful mirrors, which naturally reflect the most brilliant
+ideas;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That natural wit is everything, and the best education is gained rather from
+what we learn in the world than by what we read in books;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That, above all, reading ends in making the eyes dull, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To think of leaving a woman at liberty to read the books which her character of
+mind may prompt her to choose! This is to drop a spark in a powder magazine; it
+is worse than that, it is to teach your wife to separate herself from you; to
+live in an imaginary world, in a Paradise. For what do women read? Works of
+passion, the <i>Confessions</i> of Rousseau, romances, and all those
+compositions which work most powerfully on their sensibility. They like neither
+argument nor the ripe fruits of knowledge. Now have you ever considered the
+results which follow these poetical readings?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Romances, and indeed all works of imagination, paint sentiments and events with
+colors of a very different brilliancy from those presented by nature. The
+fascination of such works springs less from the desire which each author feels
+to show his skill in putting forth choice and delicate ideas than from the
+mysterious working of the human intellect. It is characteristic of man to
+purify and refine everything that he lays up in the treasury of his thoughts.
+What human faces, what monuments of the dead are not made more beautiful than
+actual nature in the artistic representation? The soul of the reader assists in
+this conspiracy against the truth, either by means of the profound silence
+which it enjoys in reading or by the fire of mental conception with which it is
+agitated or by the clearness with which imagery is reflected in the mirror of
+the understanding. Who has not seen on reading the <i>Confessions</i> of
+Jean-Jacques, that Madame de Warens is described as much prettier than she ever
+was in actual life? It might almost be said that our souls dwell with delight
+upon the figures which they had met in a former existence, under fairer skies;
+that they accept the creations of another soul only as wings on which they may
+soar into space; features the most delicate they bring to perfection by making
+them their own; and the most poetic expression which appears in the imagery of
+an author brings forth still more ethereal imagery in the mind of a reader. To
+read is to join with the writer in a creative act. The mystery of the
+transubstantiation of ideas, originates perhaps in the instinctive
+consciousness that we have of a vocation loftier than our present destiny. Or,
+is it based on the lost tradition of a former life? What must that life have
+been, if this slight residuum of memory offers us such volumes of delight?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, in reading plays and romances, woman, a creature much more
+susceptible than we are to excitement, experiences the most violent transport.
+She creates for herself an ideal existence beside which all reality grows pale;
+she at once attempts to realize this voluptuous life, to take to herself the
+magic which she sees in it. And, without knowing it, she passes from spirit to
+letter and from soul to sense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And would you be simple enough to believe that the manners, the sentiments of a
+man like you, who usually dress and undress before your wife, can
+counterbalance the influence of these books and outshine the glory of their
+fictitious lovers, in whose garments the fair reader sees neither hole nor
+stain?—Poor fool! too late, alas! for her happiness and for yours, your wife
+will find out that the <i>heroes</i> of poetry are as rare in real life as the
+<i>Apollos</i> of sculpture!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very many husbands will find themselves embarrassed in trying to prevent their
+wives from reading, yet there are certain people who allege that reading has
+this advantage, that men know what their wives are about when they have a book
+in hand. In the first place you will see, in the next Meditation, what a
+tendency the sedentary life has to make a woman quarrelsome; but have you never
+met those beings without poetry, who succeed in petrifying their unhappy
+companions by reducing life to its most mechanical elements? Study great men in
+their conversation and learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they
+condemn poetry and the pleasures of imagination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if, after all your efforts, your wife persists in wishing to read, put at
+her disposal at once all possible books from the A B C of her little boy to
+<i>Rene</i>, a book more dangerous to you when in her hands than <i>Therese
+Philosophe</i>. You might create in her an utter disgust for reading by giving
+her tedious books; and plunge her into utter idiocy with <i>Marie Alacoque</i>,
+<i>The Brosse de Penitence</i>, or with the chansons which were so fashionable
+in the time of Louis XV; but later on you will find, in the present volume, the
+means of so thoroughly employing your wife’s time, that any kind of reading
+will be quite out of the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And first of all, consider the immense resources which the education of women
+has prepared for you in your efforts to turn your wife from her fleeting taste
+for science. Just see with what admirable stupidity girls lend themselves to
+reap the benefit of the education which is imposed upon them in France; we give
+them in charge to nursery maids, to companions, to governesses who teach them
+twenty tricks of coquetry and false modesty, for every single noble and true
+idea which they impart to them. Girls are brought up as slaves, and are
+accustomed to the idea that they are sent into the world to imitate their
+grandmothers, to breed canary birds, to make herbals, to water little Bengal
+rose-bushes, to fill in worsted work, or to put on collars. Moreover, if a
+little girl in her tenth year has more refinement than a boy of twenty, she is
+timid and awkward. She is frightened at a spider, chatters nonsense, thinks of
+dress, talks about the fashions and has not the courage to be either a watchful
+mother or a chaste wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Notice what progress she had made; she has been shown how to paint roses, and
+to embroider ties in such a way as to earn eight sous a day. She has learned
+the history of France in <i>Ragois</i> and chronology in the <i>Tables du
+Citoyen Chantreau</i>, and her young imagination has been set free in the realm
+of geography; all without any aim, excepting that of keeping away all that
+might be dangerous to her heart; but at the same time her mother and her
+teachers repeat with unwearied voice the lesson, that the whole science of a
+woman lies in knowing how to arrange the fig leaf which our Mother Eve wore.
+“She does not hear for fifteen years,” says Diderot, “anything else but ‘my
+daughter, your fig leaf is on badly; my daughter, your fig leaf is on well; my
+daughter, would it not look better so?’”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Keep your wife then within this fine and noble circle of knowledge. If by
+chance your wife wishes to have a library, buy for her Florian, Malte-Brun,
+<i>The Cabinet des Fees</i>, <i>The Arabian Nights</i>, Redoute’s <i>Roses</i>,
+<i>The Customs of China</i>, <i>The Pigeons</i>, by Madame Knip, the great work
+on Egypt, etc. Carry out, in short, the clever suggestion of that princess who,
+when she was told of a riot occasioned by the dearness of bread, said, “Why
+don’t they eat cake?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps, one evening, your wife will reproach you for being sullen and not
+speaking to her; perhaps she will say that you are ridiculous, when you have
+just made a pun; but this is one of the slight annoyances incident to our
+system; and, moreover, what does it matter to you that the education of women
+in France is the most pleasant of absurdities, and that your marital
+obscurantism has brought a doll to your arms? As you have not sufficient
+courage to undertake a fairer task, would it not be better to lead your wife
+along the beaten track of married life in safety, than to run the risk of
+making her scale the steep precipices of love? She is likely to be a mother:
+you must not exactly expect to have Gracchi for sons, but to be really <i>pater
+quem nuptiae demonstrant</i>; now, in order to aid you in reaching this
+consummation, we must make this book an arsenal from which each one, in
+accordance with his wife’s character and his own, may choose weapons fit to
+employ against the terrible genius of evil, which is always ready to rise up in
+the soul of a wife; and since it may fairly be considered that the ignorant are
+the most cruel opponents of feminine education, this Meditation will serve as a
+breviary for the majority of husbands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If a woman has received a man’s education, she possesses in very truth the most
+brilliant and most fertile sources of happiness both to herself and to her
+husband; but this kind of woman is as rare as happiness itself; and if you do
+not possess her for your wife, your best course is to confine the one you do
+possess, for the sake of your common felicity, to the region of ideas she was
+born in, for you must not forget that one moment of pride in her might destroy
+you, by setting on the throne a slave who would immediately be tempted to abuse
+her power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After all, by following the system prescribed in this Meditation, a man of
+superiority will be relieved from the necessity of putting his thoughts into
+small change, when he wishes to be understood by his wife, if indeed this man
+of superiority has been guilty of the folly of marrying one of those poor
+creatures who cannot understand him, instead of choosing for his wife a young
+girl whose mind and heart he has tested and studied for a considerable time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our aim in this last matrimonial observation has not been to advise all men of
+superiority to seek for women of superiority and we do not wish each one to
+expound our principles after the manner of Madame de Stael, who attempted in
+the most indelicate manner to effect a union between herself and Napoleon.
+These two beings would have been very unhappy in their domestic life; and
+Josephine was a wife accomplished in a very different sense from this virago of
+the nineteenth century.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, indeed, when we praise those undiscoverable girls so happily educated by
+chance, so well endowed by nature, whose delicate souls endure so well the rude
+contact of the great soul of him we call <i>a man</i>, we mean to speak of
+those rare and noble creatures of whom Goethe has given us a model in his
+Claire of <i>Egmont</i>; we are thinking of those women who seek no other glory
+than that of playing their part well; who adapt themselves with amazing pliancy
+to the will and pleasure of those whom nature has given them for masters;
+soaring at one time into the boundless sphere of their thought and in turn
+stooping to the simple task of amusing them as if they were children;
+understanding well the inconsistencies of masculine and violent souls,
+understanding also their slightest word, their most puzzling looks; happy in
+silence, happy also in the midst of loquacity; and well aware that the
+pleasures, the ideas and the moral instincts of a Lord Byron cannot be those of
+a bonnet-maker. But we must stop; this fair picture has led us too far from our
+subject; we are treating of marriage and not of love.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XII.</h3>
+
+<h5>THE HYGIENE OF MARRIAGE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The aim of this Meditation is to call to your attention a new method of
+defence, by which you may reduce the will of your new wife to a condition of
+utter and abject submission. This is brought about by the reaction upon her
+moral nature of physical changes, and the wise lowering of her physical
+condition by a diet skillfully controlled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This great and philosophical question of conjugal medicine will doubtless be
+regarded favorably by all who are gouty, are impotent, or suffer from catarrh;
+and by that legion of old men whose dullness we have quickened by our article
+on the predestined. But it principally concerns those husbands who have courage
+enough to enter into those paths of machiavelism, such as would not have been
+unworthy of that great king of France who endeavored to secure the happiness of
+the nation at the expense of certain noble heads. Here, the subject is the
+same. The amputation or the weakening of certain members is always to the
+advantage of the whole body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Do you think seriously that a celibate who has been subject to a diet
+consisting of the herb hanea, of cucumbers, of purslane and the applications of
+leeches to his ears, as recommended by Sterne, would be able to carry by storm
+the honor of your wife? Suppose that a diplomat had been clever enough to affix
+a permanent linen plaster to the head of Napoleon, or to purge him every
+morning: Do you think that Napoleon, Napoleon the Great, would ever have
+conquered Italy? Was Napoleon, during his campaign in Russia, a prey to the
+most horrible pangs of dysuria, or was he not? That is one of the questions
+which has weighed upon the minds of the whole world. Is it not certain that
+cooling applications, douches, baths, etc., produce great changes in more or
+less acute affections of the brain? In the middle of the heat of July when each
+one of your pores slowly filters out and returns to the devouring atmosphere
+the glasses of iced lemonade which you have drunk at a single draught, have you
+ever felt the flame of courage, the vigor of thought, the complete energy which
+rendered existence light and sweet to you some months before?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No, no; the iron most closely cemented into the hardest stone will raise and
+throw apart the most durable monument, by reason of the secret influence
+exercised by the slow and invisible variations of heat and cold, which vex the
+atmosphere. In the first place, let us be sure that if atmospheric mediums have
+an influence over man, there is still a stronger reason for believing that man,
+in turn, influences the imagination of his kind, by the more or less vigor with
+which he projects his will and thus produces a veritable atmosphere around him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is in this fact that the power of the actor’s talent lies, as well as that
+of poetry and of fanaticism; for the former is the eloquence of words, as the
+latter is the eloquence of actions; and in this lies the foundation of a
+science, so far in its infancy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This will, so potent in one man against another, this nervous and fluid force,
+eminently mobile and transmittable, is itself subject to the changing condition
+of our organization, and there are many circumstances which make this frail
+organism of ours to vary. At this point, our metaphysical observation shall
+stop and we will enter into an analysis of the circumstances which develop the
+will of man and impart to it a grater degree of strength or weakness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Do not believe, however, that it is our aim to induce you to put cataplasms on
+the honor of your wife, to lock her up in a sweating house, or to seal her up
+like a letter; no. We will not even attempt to teach you the magnetic theory
+which would give you the power to make your will triumph in the soul of your
+wife; there is not a single husband who would accept the happiness of an
+eternal love at the price of this perpetual strain laid upon his animal forces.
+But we shall attempt to expound a powerful system of hygiene, which will enable
+you to put out the flame when your chimney takes fire. The elegant women of
+Paris and the provinces (and these elegant women form a very distinguished
+class among the honest women) have plenty of means of attaining the object
+which we propose, without rummaging in the arsenal of medicine for the four
+cold specifics, the water-lily and the thousand inventions worthy only of
+witches. We will leave to Aelian his herb hanea and to Sterne the purslane and
+cucumber which indicate too plainly his antiphlogistic purpose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You should let your wife recline all day long on soft armchairs, in which she
+sinks into a veritable bath of eiderdown or feathers; you should encourage in
+every way that does no violence to your conscience, the inclination which women
+have to breathe no other air but the scented atmosphere of a chamber seldom
+opened, where daylight can scarcely enter through the soft, transparent
+curtains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will obtain marvelous results from this system, after having previously
+experienced the shock of her excitement; but if you are strong enough to
+support this momentary transport of your wife you will soon see her artificial
+energy die away. In general, women love to live fast, but, after their tempest
+of passion, return to that condition of tranquillity which insures the
+happiness of a husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jean-Jacques, through the instrumentality of his enchanting Julie, must have
+proved to your wife that it was infinitely becoming to refrain from affronting
+her delicate stomach and her refined palate by making chyle out of coarse lumps
+of beef, and enormous collops of mutton. Is there anything purer in the world
+than those interesting vegetables, always fresh and scentless, those tinted
+fruits, that coffee, that fragrant chocolate, those oranges, the golden apples
+of Atalanta, the dates of Arabia and the biscuits of Brussels, a wholesome and
+elegant food which produces satisfactory results, at the same time that it
+imparts to a woman an air of mysterious originality? By the regimen which she
+chooses she becomes quite celebrated in her immediate circle, just as she would
+be by a singular toilet, a benevolent action or a <i>bon mot</i>. Pythagoras
+must needs have cast his spell over her, and become as much petted by her as a
+poodle or an ape.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never commit the imprudence of certain men who, for the sake of putting on the
+appearance of wit, controvert the feminine dictum, <i>that the figure is
+preserved by meagre diet</i>. Women on such a diet never grow fat, that is
+clear and positive; do you stick to that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Praise the skill with which some women, renowned for their beauty, have been
+able to preserve it by bathing themselves in milk, several times a day, or in
+water compounded of substances likely to render the skin softer and to lower
+the nervous tension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Advise her above all things to refrain from washing herself in cold water;
+because water warm or tepid is the proper thing for all kinds of ablutions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let Broussais be your idol. At the least indisposition of your wife, and on the
+slightest pretext, order the application of leeches; do not even shrink from
+applying from time to time a few dozen on yourself, in order to establish the
+system of that celebrated doctor in your household. You will constantly be
+called upon from your position as husband to discover that your wife is too
+ruddy; try even sometimes to bring the blood to her head, in order to have the
+right to introduce into the house at certain intervals a squad of leeches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife ought to drink water, lightly tinged with a Burgundy wine agreeable
+to her taste, but destitute of any tonic properties; every other kind of wine
+would be bad for her. Never allow her to drink water alone; if you do, you are
+lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Impetuous fluid! As soon as you press against the floodgates of the brain, how
+quickly do they yield to your power! Then Curiosity comes swimming by, making
+signs to her companions to follow; they plunge into the current. Imagination
+sits dreaming on the bank. She follows the torrent with her eyes and transforms
+the fragments of straw and reed into masts and bowsprit. And scarcely has the
+transformation taken place, before Desire, holding in one hand her skirt drawn
+up even to her knees, appears, sees the vessel and takes possession of it. O ye
+drinkers of water, it is by means of that magic spring that you have so often
+turned and turned again the world at your will, throwing beneath your feet the
+weak, trampling on his neck, and sometimes changing even the form and aspect of
+nature!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If by this system of inaction, in combination with our system of diet, you fail
+to obtain satisfactory results, throw yourself with might and main into another
+system, which we will explain to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Man has a certain degree of energy given to him. Such and such a man or woman
+stands to another as ten is to thirty, as one to five; and there is a certain
+degree of energy which no one of us ever exceeds. The quantity of energy, or
+willpower, which each of us possesses diffuses itself like sound; it is
+sometimes weak, sometimes strong; it modifies itself according to the octaves
+to which it mounts. This force is unique, and although it may be dissipated in
+desire, in passion, in toils of intellect or in bodily exertion, it turns
+towards the object to which man directs it. A boxer expends it in blows of the
+fist, the baker in kneading his bread, the poet in the enthusiasm which
+consumes and demands an enormous quantity of it; it passes to the feet of the
+dancer; in fact, every one diffuses it at will, and may I see the Minotaur
+tranquilly seated this very evening upon my bed, if you do not know as well as
+I do how he expends it. Almost all men spend in necessary toils, or in the
+anguish of direful passions, this fine sum of energy and of will, with which
+nature has endowed them; but our honest women are all the prey to the caprices
+and the struggles of this power which knows not what to do with itself. If, in
+the case of your wife, this energy has not been subdued by the prescribed
+dietary regimen, subject her to some form of activity which will constantly
+increase in violence. Find some means by which her sum of force which
+inconveniences you may be carried off, by some occupation which shall entirely
+absorb her strength. Without setting your wife to work the crank of a machine,
+there are a thousand ways of tiring her out under the load of constant work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In leaving it to you to find means for carrying out our design—and these means
+vary with circumstances—we would point out that dancing is one of the very best
+abysses in which love may bury itself. This point having been very well treated
+by a contemporary, we will give him here an opportunity of speaking his mind:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The poor victim who is the admiration of an enchanted audience pays dear for
+her success. What result can possibly follow on exertions so ill-proportioned
+to the resources of the delicate sex? The muscles of the body,
+disproportionately wearied, are forced to their full power of exertion. The
+nervous forces, intended to feed the fire of passions, and the labor of the
+brain, are diverted from their course. The failure of desire, the wish for
+rest, the exclusive craving for substantial food, all point to a nature
+impoverished, more anxious to recruit than to enjoy. Moreover, a denizen of the
+side scenes said to me one day, ‘Whoever has lived with dancers has lived with
+sheep; for in their exhaustion they can think of nothing but strong food.’
+Believe me, then, the love which a ballet girl inspires is very delusive; in
+her we find, under an appearance of an artificial springtime, a soil which is
+cold as well as greedy, and senses which are utterly dulled. The Calabrian
+doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric affections which are
+common among the women of their country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar
+recipe for the highbred mares, whose too lively temperament hinders their
+fecundity. ‘Dull as a dancer’ is a familiar proverb at the theatre. In fact,
+the best brains of Europe are convinced that dancing brings with it a result
+eminently cooling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In support of this it may be necessary to add other observations. The life of
+shepherds gives birth to irregular loves. The morals of weavers were horribly
+decried in Greece. The Italians have given birth to a proverb concerning the
+lubricity of lame women. The Spanish, in whose veins are found many mixtures of
+African incontinence, have expressed their sentiments in a maxim which is
+familiar with them: <i>Muger y gallina pierna quebrantada</i> [it is good that
+a woman and a hen have one broken leg]. The profound sagacity of the Orientals
+in the art of pleasure is altogether expressed by this ordinance of the caliph
+Hakim, founder of the Druses, who forbade, under pain of death, the making in
+his kingdom of any shoes for women. It seems that over the whole globe the
+tempests of the heart wait only to break out after the limbs are at rest!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What an admirable manoeuvre it would be to make a wife dance, and to feed her
+on vegetables!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Do not believe that these observations, which are as true as they are wittily
+stated, contradict in any way the system which we have previously prescribed;
+by the latter, as by the former, we succeed in producing in a woman that needed
+listlessness, which is the pledge of repose and tranquility. By the latter you
+leave a door open, that the enemy may flee; by the former, you slay him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now at this point it seems to us that we hear timorous people and those of
+narrow views rising up against our idea of hygiene in the name of morality and
+sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is not woman endowed with a soul? Has she not feelings as we have? What right
+has any one, without regard to her pain, her ideas, or her requirements, to
+hammer her out, as a cheap metal, out of which a workman fashions a candlestick
+or an extinguisher? Is it because the poor creatures are already so feeble and
+miserable that a brute claims the power to torture them, merely at the dictate
+of his own fancies, which may be more or less just? And, if by this weakening
+or heating system of yours, which draws out, softens, hardens the fibres, you
+cause frightful and cruel sickness, if you bring to the tomb a woman who is
+dear to you; if, if,—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is our answer:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Have you never noticed into how many different shapes harlequin and columbine
+change their little white hats? They turn and twist them so well that they
+become, one after another, a spinning-top, a boat, a wine-glass, a half-moon, a
+cap, a basket, a fish, a whip, a dagger, a baby, and a man’s head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is an exact image of the despotism with which you ought to shape and
+reshape your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wife is a piece of property, acquired by contract; she is part of your
+furniture, for possession is nine-tenths of the law; in fact, the woman is not,
+to speak correctly, anything but an adjunct to the man; therefore abridge, cut,
+file this article as you choose; she is in every sense yours. Take no notice at
+all of her murmurs, of her cries, of her sufferings; nature has ordained her
+for your use, that she may bear everything—children, griefs, blows and pains
+from man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Don’t accuse yourself of harshness. In the codes of all the nations which are
+called civilized, man has written the laws which govern the destiny of women in
+these cruel terms: <i>Vae victis!</i> Woe to the conquered!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, think upon this last observation, the most weighty, perhaps, of all
+that we have made up to this time: if you, her husband, do not break under the
+scourge of your will this weak and charming reed, there will be a celibate,
+capricious and despotic, ready to bring her under a yoke more cruel still; and
+she will have to endure two tyrannies instead of one. Under all considerations,
+therefore, humanity demands that you should follow the system of our hygiene.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XIII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF PERSONAL MEASURES.</h5>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps the preceding Meditations will prove more likely to develop general
+principles of conduct, than to repel force by force. They furnish, however, the
+pharmacopoeia of medicine and not the practice of medicine. Now consider the
+personal means which nature has put into your hands for self-defence; for
+Providence has forgotten no one; if to the sepia (that fish of the Adriatic)
+has been given the black dye by which he produces a cloud in which he
+disappears from his enemy, you should believe that a husband has not been left
+without a weapon; and now the time has come for you to draw yours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You ought to have stipulated before you married that your wife should nurse her
+own children; in this case, as long as she is occupied in bearing children or
+in nursing them you will avoid the danger from one or two quarters. The wife
+who is engaged in bringing into the world and nursing a baby has not really the
+time to bother with a lover, not to speak of the fact that before and after her
+confinement she cannot show herself in the world. In short, how can the most
+bold of the distinguished women who are the subject of this work show herself
+under these circumstances in public? O Lord Byron, thou didst not wish to see
+women even eat!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Six months after her confinement, and when the child is on the eve of being
+weaned, a woman just begins to feel that she can enjoy her restoration and her
+liberty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If your wife has not nursed her first child, you have too much sense not to
+notice this circumstance, and not to make her desire to nurse her next one. You
+will read to her the <i>Emile</i> of Jean-Jacques; you will fill her
+imagination with a sense of motherly duties; you will excite her moral
+feelings, etc.: in a word, you are either a fool or a man of sense; and in the
+first case, even after reading this book, you will always be minotaurized;
+while in the second, you will understand how to take a hint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This first expedient is in reality your own personal business. It will give you
+a great advantage in carrying out all the other methods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since Alcibiades cut the ears and the tail of his dog, in order to do a service
+to Pericles, who had on his hands a sort of Spanish war, as well as an Ouvrard
+contract affair, such as was then attracting the notice of the Athenians, there
+is not a single minister who has not endeavored to cut the ears of some dog or
+other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So in medicine, when inflammation takes place at some vital point of the
+system, counter-irritation is brought about at some other point, by means of
+blisters, scarifications and cupping.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another method consists in blistering your wife, or giving her, with a mental
+needle, a prod whose violence is such as to make a diversion in your favor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man of considerable mental resources had made his honeymoon last for about
+four years; the moon began to wane, and he saw appearing the fatal hollow in
+its circle. His wife was exactly in that state of mind which we attributed at
+the close of our first part to every honest woman; she had taken a fancy to a
+worthless fellow who was both insignificant in appearance and ugly; the only
+thing in his favor was, he was not her own husband. At this juncture, her
+husband meditated the cutting of some dog’s tail, in order to renew, if
+possible, his lease of happiness. His wife had conducted herself with such
+tact, that it would have been very embarrassing to forbid her lover the house,
+for she had discovered some slight tie of relationship between them. The danger
+became, day by day, more imminent. The scent of the Minotaur was all around.
+One evening the husband felt himself plunged into a mood of deep vexation so
+acute as to be apparent to his wife. His wife had begun to show him more
+kindness than she had ever exhibited, even during the honeymoon; and hence
+question after question racked his mind. On her part a dead silence reigned.
+The anxious questionings of his mind were redoubled; his suspicions burst
+forth, and he was seized with forebodings of future calamity! Now, on this
+occasion, he deftly applied a Japanese blister, which burned as fiercely as an
+<i>auto-da-fe</i> of the year 1600. At first his wife employed a thousand
+stratagems to discover whether the annoyance of her husband was caused by the
+presence of her lover; it was her first intrigue and she displayed a thousand
+artifices in it. Her imagination was aroused; it was no longer taken up with
+her lover; had she not better, first of all, probe her husband’s secret?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One evening the husband, moved by the desire to confide in his loving helpmeet
+all his troubles, informed her that their whole fortune was lost. They would
+have to give up their carriage, their box at the theatre, balls, parties, even
+Paris itself; perhaps, by living on their estate in the country a year or two,
+they might retrieve all! Appealing to the imagination of his wife, he told her
+how he pitied her for her attachment to a man who was indeed deeply in love
+with her, but was now without fortune; he tore his hair, and his wife was
+compelled in honor to be deeply moved; then in this first excitement of their
+conjugal disturbance he took her off to his estate. Then followed
+scarifications, mustard plaster upon mustard plaster, and the tails of fresh
+dogs were cut: he caused a Gothic wing to be built to the chateau; madame
+altered the park ten time over in order to have fountains and lakes and
+variations in the grounds; finally, the husband in the midst of her labors did
+not forget his own, which consisted in providing her with interesting reading,
+and launching upon her delicate attentions, etc. Notice, he never informed his
+wife of the trick he had played on her; and if his fortune was recuperated, it
+was directly after the building of the wing, and the expenditure of enormous
+sums in making water-courses; but he assured her that the lake provided a
+water-power by which mills might be run, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, there was a conjugal blister well conceived, for this husband neither
+neglected to rear his family nor to invite to his house neighbors who were
+tiresome, stupid or old; and if he spent the winter in Paris, he flung his wife
+into the vortex of balls and races, so that she had not a minute to give to
+lovers, who are usually the fruit of a vacant life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Journeys to Italy, Switzerland or Greece, sudden complaints which require a
+visit to the waters, and the most distant waters, are pretty good blisters. In
+fact, a man of sense should know how to manufacture a thousand of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us continue our examination of such personal methods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here we would have you observe that we are reasoning upon a hypothesis,
+without which this book will be unintelligible to you; namely, we suppose that
+your honeymoon has lasted for a respectable time and that the lady that you
+married was not a widow, but a maid; on the opposite supposition, it is at
+least in accordance with French manners to think that your wife married you
+merely for the purpose of becoming inconsistent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the moment when the struggle between virtue and inconsistency begins in
+your home, the whole question rests upon the constant and involuntary
+comparison which your wife is instituting between you and her lover.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here you may find still another mode of defence, entirely personal, seldom
+employed by husbands, but the men of superiority will not fear to attempt it.
+It is to belittle the lover without letting your wife suspect your intention.
+You ought to be able to bring it about so that she will say to herself some
+evening while she is putting her hair in curl-papers, “My husband is superior
+to him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to succeed, and you ought to be able to succeed, since you have the
+immense advantage over the lover in knowing the character of your wife, and how
+she is most easily wounded, you should, with all the tact of a diplomat, lead
+this lover to do silly things and cause him to annoy her, without his being
+aware of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the first place, this lover, as usual, will seek your friendship, or you
+will have friends in common; then, either through the instrumentality of these
+friends or by insinuations adroitly but treacherously made, you will lead him
+astray on essential points; and, with a little cleverness, you will succeed in
+finding your wife ready to deny herself to her lover when he calls, without
+either she or he being able to tell the reason. Thus you will have created in
+the bosom of your home a comedy in five acts, in which you play, to your
+profit, the brilliant role of Figaro or Almaviva; and for some months you will
+amuse yourself so much the more, because your <i>amour-propre</i>, your vanity,
+your all, were at stake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I had the good fortune in my youth to win the confidence of an old
+<i>emigre</i> who gave me those rudiments of education which are generally
+obtained by young people from women. This friend, whose memory will always be
+dear to me, taught me by his example to put into practice those diplomatic
+stratagems which require tact as well as grace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Comte de Noce had returned from Coblenz at a time when it was dangerous for
+the nobility to be found in France. No one had such courage and such kindness,
+such craft and such recklessness as this aristocrat. Although he was sixty
+years old he had married a woman of twenty-five, being compelled to this act of
+folly by soft-heartedness; for he thus delivered this poor child from the
+despotism of a capricious mother. “Would you like to be my widow?” this amiable
+old gentleman had said to Mademoiselle de Pontivy, but his heart was too
+affectionate not to become more attached to his wife than a sensible man ought
+to be. As in his youth he had been under the influence of several among the
+cleverest women in the court of Louis XV, he thought he would have no
+difficulty in keeping his wife from any entanglement. What man excepting him
+have I ever seen, who could put into successful practice the teachings which I
+am endeavoring to give to husbands! What charm could he impart to life by his
+delightful manners and fascinating conversation!—His wife never knew until
+after his death what she then learned from me, namely, that he had the gout. He
+had wisely retired to a home in the hollow of a valley, close to a forest. God
+only knows what rambles he used to take with his wife!—His good star decreed
+that Mademoiselle de Pontivy should possess an excellent heart and should
+manifest in a high degree that exquisite refinement, that sensitive modesty
+which renders beautiful the plainest girl in the world. All of a sudden, one of
+his nephews, a good-looking military man, who had escaped from the disasters of
+Moscow, returned to his uncle’s house, as much for the sake of learning how far
+he had to fear his cousins, as heirs, as in the hope of laying siege to his
+aunt. His black hair, his moustache, the easy small-talk of the staff officer,
+a certain freedom which was elegant as well as trifling, his bright eyes,
+contrasted favorably with the faded graces of his uncle. I arrived at the
+precise moment when the young countess was teaching her newly found relation to
+play backgammon. The proverb says that “women never learn this game excepting
+from their lovers, and vice versa.” Now, during a certain game, M. de Noce had
+surprised his wife and the viscount in the act of exchanging one of those looks
+which are full of mingled innocence, fear, and desire. In the evening he
+proposed to us a hunting-party, and we agreed. I never saw him so gay and so
+eager as he appeared on the following morning, in spite of the twinges of gout
+which heralded an approaching attack. The devil himself could not have been
+better able to keep up a conversation on trifling subjects than he was. He had
+formerly been a musketeer in the Grays and had known Sophie Arnoud. This
+explains all. The conversation after a time became so exceedingly free among us
+three, that I hope God may forgive me for it!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I would never have believed that my uncle was such a dashing blade?” said the
+nephew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We made a halt, and while we were sitting on the edge of a green forest
+clearing, the count led us on to discourse about women just as Brantome and
+Aloysia might have done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You fellows are very happy under the present government!—the women of the time
+are well mannered” (in order to appreciate the exclamation of the old
+gentleman, the reader should have heard the atrocious stories which the captain
+had been relating). “And this,” he went on, “is one of the advantages resulting
+from the Revolution. The present system gives very much more charm and mystery
+to passion. In former times women were easy; ah! indeed, you would not believe
+what skill it required, what daring, to wake up those worn-out hearts; we were
+always on the <i>qui vive</i>. But yet in those days a man became celebrated
+for a broad joke, well put, or for a lucky piece of insolence. That is what
+women love, and it will always be the best method of succeeding with them!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These last words were uttered in a tone of profound contempt; he stopped, and
+began to play with the hammer of his gun as if to disguise his deep feeling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But nonsense,” he went on, “my day is over! A man ought to have the body as
+well as the imagination young. Why did I marry? What is most treacherous in
+girls educated by mothers who lived in that brilliant era of gallantry, is that
+they put on an air of frankness, of reserve; they look as if butter would not
+melt in their mouths, and those who know them well feel that they would swallow
+anything!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He rose, lifted his gun with a gesture of rage, and dashing it to the ground
+thrust it far up the butt in the moist sod.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It would seem as if my dear aunt were fond of a little fun,” said the officer
+to me in a low voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Or of denouements that do not come off!” I added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nephew tightened his cravat, adjusted his collar and gave a jump like a
+Calabrian goat. We returned to the chateau at about two in the afternoon. The
+count kept me with him until dinner-time, under the pretext of looking for some
+medals, of which he had spoken during our return home. The dinner was dull. The
+countess treated her nephew with stiff and cold politeness. When we entered the
+drawing-room the count said to his wife:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you going to play backgammon?—We will leave you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young countess made no reply. She gazed at the fire, as if she had not
+heard. Her husband took some steps towards the door, inviting me by the wave of
+his hand to follow him. At the sound of his footsteps, his wife quickly turned
+her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you leave us?” said she, “you will have all tomorrow to show your
+friend the reverse of the medals.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The count remained. Without paying any attention to the awkwardness which had
+succeeded the former military aplomb of his nephew, the count exercised during
+the whole evening his full powers as a charming conversationalist. I had never
+before seen him so brilliant or so gracious. We spoke a great deal about women.
+The witticisms of our host were marked by the most exquisite refinement. He
+made me forget that his hair was white, for he showed the brilliancy which
+belonged to a youthful heart, a gaiety which effaces the wrinkles from the
+cheek and melts the snow of wintry age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day the nephew went away. Even after the death of M. de Noce, I tried
+to profit by the intimacy of those familiar conversations in which women are
+sometimes caught off their guard to sound her, but I could never learn what
+impertinence the viscount had exhibited towards his aunt. His insolence must
+have been excessive, for since that time Madame de Noce has refused to see her
+nephew, and up to the present moment never hears him named without a slight
+movement of her eyebrows. I did not at once guess the end at which the Comte de
+Noce aimed, in inviting us to go shooting; but I discovered later that he had
+played a pretty bold game.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, if you happen at last, like M. de Noce, to carry off a decisive
+victory, do not forget to put into practice at once the system of blisters; and
+do not for a moment imagine that such <i>tours de force</i> are to be repeated
+with safety. If that is the way you use your talents, you will end by losing
+caste in your wife’s estimation; for she will demand of you, reasonably enough,
+double what you would give her, and the time will come when you declare
+bankruptcy. The human soul in its desires follows a sort of arithmetical
+progression, the end and origin of which are equally unknown. Just as the
+opium-eater must constantly increase his doses in order to obtain the same
+result, so our mind, imperious as it is weak, desires that feeling, ideas and
+objects should go on ever increasing in size and in intensity. Hence the
+necessity of cleverly distributing the interest in a dramatic work, and of
+graduating doses in medicine. Thus you see, if you always resort to the
+employment of means like these, that you must accommodate such daring measures
+to many circumstances, and success will always depend upon the motives to which
+you appeal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And finally, have you influence, powerful friends, an important post? The last
+means I shall suggest cuts to the root of the evil. Would you have the power to
+send your wife’s lover off by securing his promotion, or his change of
+residence by an exchange, if he is a military man? You cut off by this means
+all communication between them; later on we will show you how to do it; for
+<i>sublata causa tollitur effectus</i>,—Latin words which may be freely
+translated “there is no effect without a cause.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, you feel that your wife may easily choose another lover; but in
+addition to these preliminary expedients, you will always have a blister ready,
+in order to gain time, and calculate how you may bring the affair to an end by
+fresh devices.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Study how to combine the system of blisters with the mimic wiles of Carlin, the
+immortal Carlin of the <i>Comedie-Italienne</i> who always held and amused an
+audience for whole hours, by uttering the same words, varied only by the art of
+pantomime and pronounced with a thousand inflections of different tone,—“The
+queen said to the king!” Imitate Carlin, discover some method of always keeping
+your wife in check, so as not to be checkmated yourself. Take a degree among
+constitutional ministers, a degree in the art of making promises. Habituate
+yourself to show at seasonable times the punchinello which makes children run
+after you without knowing the distance they run. We are all children, and women
+are all inclined through their curiosity to spend their time in pursuit of a
+will-o’-the-wisp. The flame is brilliant and quickly vanishes, but is not the
+imagination at hand to act as your ally? Finally, study the happy art of being
+near her and yet not being near her; of seizing the opportunity which will
+yield you pre-eminence in her mind without ever crushing her with a sense of
+your superiority, or even of her own happiness. If the ignorance in which you
+have kept her does not altogether destroy her intellect, you must remain in
+such relations with her that each of you will still desire the company of the
+other.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XIV.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF APARTMENTS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The preceding methods and systems are in a way purely moral; they share the
+nobility of the soul, there is nothing repulsive in them; but now we must
+proceed to consider precautions <i>a la Bartholo</i>. Do not give way to
+timidity. There is a marital courage, as there is a civil and military courage,
+as there is the courage of the National Guard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What is the first course of a young girl after having purchased a parrot? Is it
+not to fasten it up in a pretty cage, from which it cannot get out without
+permission?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may learn your duty from this child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything that pertains to the arrangement of your house and of your
+apartments should be planned so as not to give your wife any advantage, in case
+she has decided to deliver you to the Minotaur; half of all actual mischances
+are brought about by the deplorable facilities which the apartments furnish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before everything else determine to have for your porter a <i>single man</i>
+entirely devoted to your person. This is a treasure easily to be found. What
+husband is there throughout the world who has not either a foster-father or
+some old servant, upon whose knees he has been dandled! There ought to exist by
+means of your management, a hatred like that of Artreus and Thyestes between
+your wife and this Nestor —guardian of your gate. This gate is the Alpha and
+Omega of an intrigue. May not all intrigues in love be confined in these words
+—entering and leaving?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your house will be of no use to you if it does not stand between a court and a
+garden, and so constructed as to be detached from all other buildings. You must
+abolish all recesses in your apartments. A cupboard, if it contain but six pots
+of preserves, should be walled in. You are preparing yourself for war, and the
+first thought of a general is to cut his enemy off from supplies. Moreover, all
+the walls must be smooth, in order to present to the eye lines which may be
+taken in at a glance, and permit the immediate recognition of the least strange
+object. If you consult the remains of antique monuments you will see that the
+beauty of Greek and Roman apartments sprang principally from the purity of
+their lines, the clear sweep of their walls and scantiness of furniture. The
+Greeks would have smiled in pity, if they had seen the gaps which our closets
+make in our drawing-rooms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This magnificent system of defence should above all be put in active operation
+in the apartment of your wife; never let her curtain her bed in such a way that
+one can walk round it amid a maze of hangings; be inexorable in the matter of
+connecting passages, and let her chamber be at the bottom of your
+reception-rooms, so as to show at a glance those who come and go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Marriage of Figaro</i> will no doubt have taught you to put your wife’s
+chamber at a great height from the ground. All celibates are Cherubins.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your means, doubtless, will permit your wife to have a dressing-room, a
+bath-room, and a room for her chambermaid. Think then on Susanne, and never
+commit the fault of arranging this little room below that of madame’s, but
+place it always above, and do not shrink from disfiguring your mansion by
+hideous divisions in the windows.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If, by ill luck, you see that this dangerous apartment communicates with that
+of your wife by a back staircase, earnestly consult your architect; let his
+genius exhaust itself in rendering this dangerous staircase as innocent as the
+primitive garret ladder; we conjure you let not this staircase have appended to
+it any treacherous lurking-place; its stiff and angular steps must not be
+arranged with that tempting curve which Faublas and Justine found so useful
+when they waited for the exit of the Marquis de B——-. Architects nowadays make
+such staircases as are absolutely preferable to ottomans. Restore rather the
+virtuous garret steps of our ancestors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Concerning the chimneys in the apartment of madame, you must take care to place
+in the flue, five feet from the ground, an iron grill, even though it be
+necessary to put up a fresh one every time the chimney is swept. If your wife
+laughs at this precaution, suggest to her the number of murders that have been
+committed by means of chimneys. Almost all women are afraid of robbers. The bed
+is one of those important pieces of furniture whose structure will demand long
+consideration. Everything concerning it is of vital importance. The following
+is the result of long experience in the construction of beds. Give to this
+piece of furniture a form so original that it may be looked upon without
+disgust, in the midst of changes of fashion which succeed so rapidly in
+rendering antiquated the creations of former decorators, for it is essential
+that your wife be unable to change, at pleasure, this theatre of married
+happiness. The base should be plain and massive and admit of no treacherous
+interval between it and the floor; and bear in mind always that the Donna Julia
+of Byron hid Don Juan under her pillow. But it would be ridiculous to treat
+lightly so delicate a subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXII.<br/>
+The bed is the whole of marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, we must not delay to direct your attention to this wonderful creation
+of human genius, an invention which claims our recognition much more than
+ships, firearms, matches, wheeled carriages, steam engines of all kinds, more
+than even barrels and bottles. In the first place, a little thought will
+convince us that this is all true of the bed; but when we begin to think that
+it is our second father, that the most tranquil and most agitated half of our
+existence is spent under its protecting canopy, words fail in eulogizing it.
+(See Meditation XVII, entitled “Theory of the Bed.”)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the war, of which we shall speak in our third part, breaks out between you
+and madame, you will always have plenty of ingenious excuses for rummaging in
+the drawers and escritoires; for if your wife is trying to hide from you some
+statue of her adoration, it is your interest to know where she has hidden it. A
+gyneceum, constructed on the method described, will enable you to calculate at
+a glance, whether there is present in it two pounds of silk more than usual.
+Should a single closet be constructed there, you are a lost man! Above all,
+accustom your wife, during the honeymoon, to bestow especial pains in the
+neatness of her apartment; let nothing put off that. If you do not habituate
+her to be minutely particular in this respect, if the same objects are not
+always found in the same places, she will allow things to become so untidy,
+that you will not be able to see that there are two pounds of silk more or less
+in her room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The curtains of your apartments ought to be of a stuff which is quite
+transparent, and you ought to contract the habit in the evenings of walking
+outside so that madame may see you come right up to the window just out of
+absent-mindedness. In a word, with regard to windows, let the sills be so
+narrow that even a sack of flour cannot be set up on them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If the apartment of your wife can be arranged on these principles, you will be
+in perfect safety, even if there are niches enough there to contain all the
+saints of Paradise. You will be able, every evening, with the assistance of
+your porter, to strike the balance between the entrances and exits of visitors;
+and, in order to obtain accurate results, there is nothing to prevent your
+teaching him to keep a book of visitors, in double entry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you have a garden, cultivate a taste for dogs, and always keep at large one
+of these incorruptible guardians under your windows; you will thus gain the
+respect of the Minotaur, especially if you accustom your four-footed friend to
+take nothing substantial excepting from the hand of your porter, so that
+hard-hearted celibates may not succeed in poisoning him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all these precautions must be taken as a natural thing so that they may not
+arouse suspicions. If husbands are so imprudent as to neglect precautions from
+the moment they are married, they ought at once to sell their house and buy
+another one, or, under the pretext of repairs, alter their present house in the
+way prescribed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will without scruple banish from your apartment all sofas, ottomans,
+lounges, sedan chairs and the like. In the first place, this is the kind of
+furniture that adorns the homes of grocers, where they are universally found,
+as they are in those of barbers; but they are essentially the furniture of
+perdition; I can never see them without alarm. It has always seemed to me that
+there the devil himself is lurking with his horns and cloven foot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After all, nothing is so dangerous as a chair, and it is extremely unfortunate
+that women cannot be shut up within the four walls of a bare room! What husband
+is there, who on sitting down on a rickety chair is not always forced to
+believe that this chair has received some of the lessons taught by the
+<i>Sofa</i> of Crebillion junior? But happily we have arranged your apartment
+on such a system of prevention that nothing so fatal can happen, or, at any
+rate, not without your contributory negligence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One fault which you must contract, and which you must never correct, will
+consist in a sort of heedless curiosity, which will make you examine
+unceasingly all the boxes, and turn upside down the contents of all
+dressing-cases and work-baskets. You must proceed to this domiciliary visit in
+a humorous mood, and gracefully, so that each time you will obtain pardon by
+exciting the amusement of your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You must always manifest a most profound astonishment on noticing any piece of
+furniture freshly upholstered in her well-appointed apartment. You must
+immediately make her explain to you the advantages of the change; and then you
+must ransack your mind to discover whether there be not some underhand motive
+in the transaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is by no means all. You have too much sense to forget that your pretty
+parrot will remain in her cage only so long as that cage is beautiful. The
+least accessory of her apartment ought, therefore, to breathe elegance and
+taste. The general appearance should always present a simple, at the same time
+a charming picture. You must constantly renew the hangings and muslin curtains.
+The freshness of the decorations is too essential to permit of economy on this
+point. It is the fresh chickweed each morning carefully put into the cage of
+their birds, that makes their pets believe it is the verdure of the meadows. An
+apartment of this character is then the <i>ultima ratio</i> of husbands; a wife
+has nothing to say when everything is lavished on her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Husbands who are condemned to live in rented apartments find themselves in the
+most terrible situation possible. What happy or what fatal influence cannot the
+porter exercise upon their lot?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is not their home flanked on either side by other houses? It is true that by
+placing the apartment of their wives on one side of the house the danger is
+lessened by one-half; but are they not obliged to learn by heart and to ponder
+the age, the condition, the fortune, the character, the habits of the tenants
+of the next house and even to know their friends and relations?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A husband will never take lodgings on the ground floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every man, however, can apply in his apartments the precautionary methods which
+we have suggested to the owner of a house, and thus the tenant will have this
+advantage over the owner, that the apartment, which is less spacious than the
+house, is more easily guarded.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XV.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+“But no, madame, no—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, for there is such inconvenience in the arrangement.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you think, madame, that we wish, as at the frontier, to watch the visits of
+persons who cross the threshold of your apartments, or furtively leave them, in
+order to see whether they bring to you articles of contraband? That would not
+be proper; and there is nothing odious in our proceeding, any more than there
+is anything of a fiscal character; do not be alarmed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Custom House of the marriage state is, of all the expedients prescribed in
+this second part, that which perhaps demands the most tact and the most skill
+as well as the most knowledge acquired <i>a priori</i>, that is to say before
+marriage. In order to carry it out, a husband ought to have made a profound
+study of Lavater’s book, and to be imbued with all his principles; to have
+accustomed his eye to judge and to apprehend with the most astonishing
+promptitude, the slightest physical expressions by which a man reveals his
+thoughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lavater’s <i>Physiognomy</i> originated a veritable science, which has won a
+place in human investigation. If at first some doubts, some jokes greeted the
+appearance of this book, since then the celebrated Doctor Gall is come with his
+noble theory of the skull and has completed the system of the Swiss savant, and
+given stability to his fine and luminous observations. People of talent,
+diplomats, women, all those who are numbered among the choice and fervent
+disciples of these two celebrated men, have often had occasion to recognize
+many other evident signs, by which the course of human thought is indicated.
+The habits of the body, the handwriting, the sound of the voice, have often
+betrayed the woman who is in love, the diplomat who is attempting to deceive,
+the clever administrator, or the sovereign who is compelled to distinguish at a
+glance love, treason or merit hitherto unknown. The man whose soul operates
+with energy is like a poor glowworm, which without knowing it irradiates light
+from every pore. He moves in a brilliant sphere where each effort makes a
+burning light and outlines his actions with long streamers of fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These, then, are all the elements of knowledge which you should possess, for
+the conjugal custom house insists simply in being able by a rapid but searching
+examination to know the moral and physical condition of all who enter or leave
+your house—all, that is, who have seen or intend to see your wife. A husband
+is, like a spider, set at the centre of an invisible net, and receives a shock
+from the least fool of a fly who touches it, and from a distance, hears, judges
+and sees what is either his prey or his enemy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus you must obtain means to examine the celibate who rings at your door under
+two circumstances which are quite distinct, namely, when he is about to enter
+and when he is inside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the moment of entering how many things does he utter without even opening
+his mouth!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may be by a slight wave of his hand, or by his plunging his fingers many
+times into his hair, he sticks up or smoothes down his characteristic bang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or he hums a French or an Italian air, merry or sad, in a voice which may be
+either tenor, contralto, soprano or baritone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he takes care to see that the ends of his necktie are properly
+adjusted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or he smoothes down the ruffles or front of his shirt or evening-dress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or he tries to find out by a questioning and furtive glance whether his wig,
+blonde or brown, curled or plain, is in its natural position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he looks at his nails to see whether they are clean and duly cut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps with a hand which is either white or untidy, well-gloved or otherwise,
+he twirls his moustache, or his whiskers, or picks his teeth with a little
+tortoise-shell toothpick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or by slow and repeated movements he tries to place his chin exactly over the
+centre of his necktie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or perhaps he crosses one foot over the other, putting his hands in his
+pockets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or perhaps he gives a twist to his shoe, and looks at it as if he thought,
+“Now, there’s a foot that is not badly formed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or according as he has come on foot or in a carriage, he rubs off or he does
+not rub off the slight patches of mud which soil his shoes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or perhaps he remains as motionless as a Dutchman smoking his pipe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or perhaps he fixes his eyes on the door and looks like a soul escaped from
+Purgatory and waiting for Saint Peter with the keys.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he hesitates to pull the bell; perhaps he seizes it negligently,
+precipitately, familiarly, or like a man who is quite sure of himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he pulls it timidly, producing a faint tinkle which is lost in the
+silence of the apartments, as the first bell of matins in winter-time, in a
+convent of Minims; or perhaps after having rung with energy, he rings again
+impatient that the footman has not heard him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he exhales a delicate scent, as he chews a pastille.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps with a solemn air he takes a pinch of snuff, brushing off with care the
+grains that might mar the whiteness of his linen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps he looks around like a man estimating the value of the staircase lamp,
+the balustrade, the carpet, as if he were a furniture dealer or a contractor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps this celibate seems a young or an old man, is cold or hot, arrives
+slowly, with an expression of sadness or merriment, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You see that here, at the very foot of your staircase, you are met by an
+astonishing mass of things to observe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The light pencil-strokes, with which we have tried to outline this figure, will
+suggest to you what is in reality a moral kaleidoscope with millions of
+variations. And yet we have not even attempted to bring any woman on to the
+threshold which reveals so much; for in that case our remarks, already
+considerable in number, would have been countless and light as the grains of
+sand on the seashore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For as a matter of fact, when he stands before the shut door, a man believes
+that he is quite alone; and he would have no hesitation in beginning a silent
+monologue, a dreamy soliloquy, in which he revealed his desires, his
+intentions, his personal qualities, his faults, his virtues, etc.; for
+undoubtedly a man on a stoop is exactly like a young girl of fifteen at
+confession, the evening before her first communion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Do you want any proof of this? Notice the sudden change of face and manner in
+this celibate from the very moment he steps within the house. No machinist in
+the Opera, no change in the temperature in the clouds or in the sun can more
+suddenly transform the appearance of a theatre, the effect of the atmosphere,
+or the scenery of the heavens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On reaching the first plank of your antechamber, instead of betraying with so
+much innocence the myriad thoughts which were suggested to you on the steps,
+the celibate has not a single glance to which you could attach any
+significance. The mask of social convention wraps with its thick veil his whole
+bearing; but a clever husband must already have divined at a single look the
+object of his visit, and he reads the soul of the new arrival as if it were a
+printed book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The manner in which he approaches your wife, in which he addresses her, looks
+at her, greets her and retires—there are volumes of observations, more or less
+trifling, to be made on these subjects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tone of his voice, his bearing, his awkwardness, it may be his smile, even
+his gloom, his avoidance of your eye,—all are significant, all ought to be
+studied, but without apparent attention. You ought to conceal the most
+disagreeable discovery you may make by an easy manner and remarks such as are
+ready at hand to a man of society. As we are unable to detail the minutiae of
+this subject we leave them entirely to the sagacity of the reader, who must by
+this time have perceived the drift of our investigation, as well as the extent
+of this science which begins at the analysis of glances and ends in the
+direction of such movements as contempt may inspire in a great toe hidden under
+the satin of a lady’s slipper or the leather of a man’s boot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the exit!—for we must allow for occasions where you have omitted your rigid
+scrutiny at the threshold of the doorway, and in that case the exit becomes of
+vital importance, and all the more so because this fresh study of the celibate
+ought to be made on the same lines, but from an opposite point of view, from
+that which we have already outlined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the exit the situation assumes a special gravity; for then is the moment in
+which the enemy has crossed all the intrenchments within which he was subject
+to our examination and has escaped into the street! At this point a man of
+understanding when he sees a visitor passing under the <i>porte-cochere</i>
+should be able to divine the import of the whole visit. The indications are
+indeed fewer in number, but how distinct is their character! The denouement has
+arrived and the man instantly betrays the importance of it by the frankest
+expression of happiness, pain or joy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These revelations are therefore easy to apprehend; they appear in the glance
+cast either at the building or at the windows of the apartment; in a slow or
+loitering gait, in the rubbing of hands, on the part of a fool, in the bounding
+gait of a coxcomb, or the involuntary arrest of his footsteps, which marks the
+man who is deeply moved; in a word, you see upon the stoop certain questions as
+clearly proposed to you as if a provincial academy had offered a hundred crowns
+for an essay; but in the exit you behold the solution of these questions
+clearly and precisely given to you. Our task would be far above the power of
+human intelligence if it consisted in enumerating the different ways by which
+men betray their feelings, the discernment of such things is purely a matter of
+tact and sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If strangers are the subject of these principles of observation, you have a
+still stronger reason for submitting your wife to the formal safeguards which
+we have outlined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A married man should make a profound study of his wife’s countenance. Such a
+study is easy, it is even involuntary and continuous. For him the pretty face
+of his wife must needs contain no mysteries, he knows how her feelings are
+depicted there and with what expression she shuns the fire of his glance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The slightest movement of the lips, the faintest contraction of the nostrils,
+scarcely perceptible changes in the expression of the eye, an altered voice,
+and those indescribable shades of feeling which pass over her features, or the
+light which sometimes bursts forth from them, are intelligible language to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole woman nature stands before you; all look at her, but none can
+interpret her thoughts. But for you, the eye is more or less dimmed,
+wide-opened or closed; the lid twitches, the eyebrow moves; a wrinkle, which
+vanishes as quickly as a ripple on the ocean, furrows her brow for one moment;
+the lip tightens, it is slightly curved or it is wreathed with animation—for
+you the woman has spoken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If in those puzzling moments in which a woman tries dissimulation in presence
+of her husband, you have the spirit of a sphinx in seeing through her, you will
+plainly observe that your custom-house restrictions are mere child’s play to
+her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she comes home or goes out, when in a word she believes she is alone, your
+wife will exhibit all the imprudence of a jackdaw and will tell her secret
+aloud to herself; moreover, by her sudden change of expression the moment she
+notices you (and despite the rapidity of this change, you will not fail to have
+observed the expression she wore behind your back) you may read her soul as if
+you were reading a book of Plain Song. Moreover, your wife will often find
+herself just on the point of indulging in soliloquies, and on such occasions
+her husband may recognize the secret feelings of his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is there a man as heedless of love’s mysteries as not to have admired, over and
+over again, the light, mincing, even bewitching gait of a woman who flies on
+her way to keep an assignation? She glides through the crowd, like a snake
+through the grass. The costumes and stuffs of the latest fashion spread out
+their dazzling attractions in the shop windows without claiming her attention;
+on, on she goes like the faithful animal who follows the invisible tracks of
+his master; she is deaf to all compliments, blind to all glances, insensible
+even to the light touch of the crowd, which is inevitable amid the circulation
+of Parisian humanity. Oh, how deeply she feels the value of a minute! Her gait,
+her toilet, the expression of her face, involve her in a thousand
+indiscretions, but oh, what a ravishing picture she presents to the idler, and
+what an ominous page for the eye of a husband to read, is the face of this
+woman when she returns from the secret place of rendezvous in which her heart
+ever dwells! Her happiness is impressed even on the unmistakable disarray of
+her hair, the mass of whose wavy tresses has not received from the broken comb
+of the celibate that radiant lustre, that elegant and well-proportioned
+adjustment which only the practiced hand of her maid can give. And what
+charming ease appears in her gait! How is it possible to describe the emotion
+which adds such rich tints to her complexion!—which robs her eyes of all their
+assurance and gives to them an expression of mingled melancholy and delight, of
+shame which is yet blended with pride!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These observations, stolen from our Meditation, <i>Of the Last Symptoms</i>,
+and which are really suggested by the situation of a woman who tries to conceal
+everything, may enable you to divine by analogy the rich crop of observation
+which is left for you to harvest when your wife arrives home, or when, without
+having committed the great crime she innocently lets out the secrets of her
+thoughts. For our own part we never see a landing without wishing to set up
+there a mariner’s card and a weather-cock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the means to be employed for constructing a sort of domestic observatory
+depend altogether on places and circumstances, we must leave to the address of
+a jealous husband the execution of the methods suggested in this Meditation.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XVI.</h3>
+
+<h5>THE CHARTER OF MARRIAGE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+I acknowledge that I really know of but one house in Paris which is managed in
+accordance with the system unfolded in the two preceding Meditations. But I
+ought to add, also, that I have built up my system on the example of that
+house. The admirable fortress I allude to belonged to a young councillor of
+state, who was mad with love and jealousy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As soon as he learned that there existed a man who was exclusively occupied in
+bringing to perfection the institution of marriage in France, he had the
+generosity to open the doors of his mansion to me and to show me his gyneceum.
+I admired the profound genius which so cleverly disguised the precautions of
+almost oriental jealousy under the elegance of furniture, beauty of carpets and
+brightness of painted decorations. I agreed with him that it was impossible for
+his wife to render his home a scene of treachery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” said I, to this Othello of the council of state who did not seem to me
+peculiarly strong in the <i>haute politique</i> of marriage, “I have no doubt
+that the viscountess is delighted to live in this little Paradise; she ought
+indeed to take prodigious pleasure in it, especially if you are here often. But
+the time will come when she will have had enough of it; for, my dear sir, we
+grow tired of everything, even of the sublime. What will you do then, when
+madame, failing to find in all your inventions their primitive charm, shall
+open her mouth in a yawn, and perhaps make a request with a view to the
+exercise of two rights, both of which are indispensable to her happiness:
+individual liberty, that is, the privilege of going and coming according to the
+caprice of her will; and the liberty of the press, that is, the privilege of
+writing and receiving letters without fear of your censure?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarcely had I said these words when the Vicomte de V——- grasped my arm tightly
+and cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, such is the ingratitude of woman! If there is any thing more ungrateful
+than a king, it is a nation; but, sir, woman is more ungrateful than either of
+them. A married woman treats us as the citizens of a constitutional monarchy
+treat their king; every measure has been taken to give these citizens a life of
+prosperity in a prosperous country; the government has taken all the pains in
+the world with its gendarmes, its churches, its ministry and all the
+paraphernalia of its military forces, to prevent the people from dying of
+hunger, to light the cities by gas at the expense of the citizens, to give
+warmth to every one by means of the sun which shines at the forty-fifth degree
+of latitude, and to forbid every one, excepting the tax-gatherers, to ask for
+money; it has labored hard to give to all the main roads a more or less
+substantial pavement—but none of these advantages of our fair Utopia is
+appreciated! The citizens want something else. They are not ashamed to demand
+the right of traveling over the roads at their own will, and of being informed
+where that money given to the tax-gatherers goes. And, finally, the monarch
+will soon be obliged, if we pay any attention to the chatter of certain
+scribblers, to give to every individual a share in the throne or to adopt
+certain revolutionary ideas, which are mere Punch and Judy shows for the
+public, manipulated by a band of self-styled patriots, riff-raff, always ready
+to sell their conscience for a million francs, for an honest woman, or for a
+ducal coronet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, monsieur,” I said, interrupting him, “while I perfectly agree with you on
+this last point, the question remains, how will you escape giving an answer to
+the just demands of your wife?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir” he replied, “I shall do—I shall answer as the government answers, that
+is, those governments which are not so stupid as the opposition would make out
+to their constituents. I shall begin by solemnly interdicting any arrangement,
+by virtue of which my wife will be declared entirely free. I fully recognize
+her right to go wherever it seems good to her, to write to whom she chooses,
+and to receive letters, the contents of which I do not know. My wife shall have
+all the rights that belong to an English Parliament; I shall let her talk as
+much as she likes, discuss and propose strong and energetic measures, but
+without the power to put them into execution, and then after that—well, we
+shall see!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By St. Joseph!” said I to myself, “Here is a man who understands the science
+of marriage as well as I myself do. And then, you will see, sir,” I answered
+aloud, in order to obtain from him the fullest revelation of his experience;
+“you will see, some fine morning, that you are as big a fool as the next man.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” he gravely replied, “allow me to finish what I was saying. Here is what
+the great politicians call a theory, but in practice they can make that theory
+vanish in smoke; and ministers possess in a greater degree than even the
+lawyers of Normandy, the art of making fact yield to fancy. M. de Metternich
+and M. de Pilat, men of the highest authority, have been for a long time asking
+each other whether Europe is in its right senses, whether it is dreaming,
+whether it knows whither it is going, whether it has ever exercised its reason,
+a thing impossible on the part of the masses, of nations and of women. M. de
+Metternich and M. de Pilat are terrified to see this age carried away by a
+passion for constitutions, as the preceding age was by the passion for
+philosophy, as that of Luther was for a reform of abuses in the Roman religion;
+for it truly seems as if different generations of men were like those
+conspirators whose actions are directed to the same end, as soon as the
+watchword has been given them. But their alarm is a mistake, and it is on this
+point alone that I condemn them, for they are right in their wish to enjoy
+power without permitting the middle class to come on a fixed day from the depth
+of each of their six kingdoms, to torment them. How could men of such
+remarkable talent fail to divine that the constitutional comedy has in it a
+moral of profound meaning, and to see that it is the very best policy to give
+the age a bone to exercise its teeth upon! I think exactly as they do on the
+subject of sovereignty. A power is a moral being as much interested as a man is
+in self-preservation. This sentiment of self-preservation is under the control
+of an essential principle which may be expressed in three words—<i>to lose
+nothing</i>. But in order to lose nothing, a power must grow or remain
+indefinite, for a power which remains stationary is nullified. If it
+retrogrades, it is under the control of something else, and loses its
+independent existence. I am quite as well aware, as are those gentlemen, in
+what a false position an unlimited power puts itself by making concessions; it
+allows to another power whose essence is to expand a place within its own
+sphere of activity. One of them will necessarily nullify the other, for every
+existing thing aims at the greatest possible development of its own forces. A
+power, therefore, never makes concessions which it does not afterwards seek to
+retract. This struggle between two powers is the basis on which stands the
+balance of government, whose elasticity so mistakenly alarmed the patriarch of
+Austrian diplomacy, for comparing comedy with comedy the least perilous and the
+most advantageous administration is found in the seesaw system of the English
+and of the French politics. These two countries have said to the people, ‘You
+are free;’ and the people have been satisfied; they enter the government like
+the zeros which give value to the unit. But if the people wish to take an
+active part in the government, immediately they are treated, like Sancho Panza,
+on that occasion when the squire, having become sovereign over an island on
+terra firma, made an attempt at dinner to eat the viands set before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now we ought to parody this admirable scene in the management of our homes.
+Thus, my wife has a perfect right to go out, provided she tell me where she is
+going, how she is going, what is the business she is engaged in when she is out
+and at what hour she will return. Instead of demanding this information with
+the brutality of the police, who will doubtless some day become perfect, I take
+pains to speak to her in the most gracious terms. On my lips, in my eyes, in my
+whole countenance, an expression plays, which indicates both curiosity and
+indifference, seriousness and pleasantry, harshness and tenderness. These
+little conjugal scenes are so full of vivacity, of tact and address that it is
+a pleasure to take part in them. The very day on which I took from the head of
+my wife the wreath of orange blossoms which she wore, I understood that we were
+playing at a royal coronation—the first scene in a comic pantomime!—I have my
+gendarmes!—I have my guard royal!—I have my attorney general—that I do!” he
+continued enthusiastically. “Do you think that I would allow madame to go
+anywhere on foot unaccompanied by a lackey in livery? Is not that the best
+style? Not to count the pleasure she takes in saying to everybody, ‘I have my
+people here.’ It has always been a conservative principle of mine that my times
+of exercise should coincide with those of my wife, and for two years I have
+proved to her that I take an ever fresh pleasure in giving her my arm. If the
+weather is not suitable for walking, I try to teach her how to drive with
+success a frisky horse; but I swear to you that I undertake this in such a
+manner that she does not learn very quickly!—If either by chance, or prompted
+by a deliberate wish, she takes measures to escape without a passport, that is
+to say, alone in the carriage, have I not a driver, a footman, a groom? My
+wife, therefore, go where she will, takes with her a complete <i>Santa
+Hermandad</i>, and I am perfectly easy in mind—But, my dear sir, there is
+abundance of means by which to annul the charter of marriage by our manner of
+fulfilling it! I have remarked that the manners of high society induce a habit
+of idleness which absorbs half of the life of a woman without permitting her to
+feel that she is alive. For my part, I have formed the project of dexterously
+leading my wife along, up to her fortieth year, without letting her think of
+adultery, just as poor Musson used to amuse himself in leading some simple
+fellow from the Rue Saint-Denis to Pierrefitte without letting him think that
+he had left the shadows of St. Lew’s tower.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is it,” I said, interrupting him, “that you have hit upon those admirable
+methods of deception which I was intending to describe in a Meditation entitled
+<i>The Act of Putting Death into Life!</i> Alas! I thought I was the first man
+to discover that science. The epigrammatic title was suggested to me by an
+account which a young doctor gave me of an excellent composition of Crabbe, as
+yet unpublished. In this work, the English poet has introduced a fantastic
+being called <i>Life in Death</i>. This personage crosses the oceans of the
+world in pursuit of a living skeleton called <i>Death in Life</i>—I recollect
+at the time very few people, among the guests of a certain elegant translator
+of English poetry, understood the mystic meaning of a fable as true as it was
+fanciful. Myself alone, perhaps, as I sat buried in silence, thought of the
+whole generations which as they were hurried along by life, passed on their way
+without living. Before my eyes rose faces of women by the million, by the
+myriad, all dead, all disappointed and shedding tears of despair, as they
+looked back upon the lost moments of their ignorant youth. In the distance I
+saw a playful Meditation rise to birth, I heard the satanic laughter which ran
+through it, and now you doubtless are about to kill it.—But come, tell me in
+confidence what means you have discovered by which to assist a woman to
+squander the swift moments during which her beauty is at its full flower and
+her desires at their full strength.—Perhaps you have some stratagems, some
+clever devices, to describe to me—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The viscount began to laugh at this literary disappointment of mine, and he
+said to me, with a self-satisfied air:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My wife, like all the young people of our happy century, has been accustomed,
+for three or four consecutive years, to press her fingers on the keys of a
+piano, a long-suffering instrument. She has hammered out Beethoven, warbled the
+airs of Rossini and run through the exercises of Crammer. I had already taken
+pains to convince her of the excellence of music; to attain this end, I have
+applauded her, I have listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in
+the world, and I have at last consented to give her a box at the Bouffons. I
+have thus gained three quiet evenings out of the seven which God has created in
+the week. I am the mainstay of the music shops. At Paris there are
+drawing-rooms which exactly resemble the musical snuff-boxes of Germany. They
+are a sort of continuous orchestra to which I regularly go in search of that
+surfeit of harmony which my wife calls a concert. But most part of the time my
+wife keeps herself buried in her music-books—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, my dear sir, do you not recognize the danger that lies in cultivating in
+a woman a taste for singing, and allowing her to yield to all the excitements
+of a sedentary life? It is only less dangerous to make her feed on mutton and
+drink cold water.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My wife never eats anything but the white meat of poultry, and I always take
+care that a ball shall come after a concert and a reception after an Opera! I
+have also succeeded in making her lie down between one and two in the day. Ah!
+my dear sir, the benefits of this nap are incalculable! In the first place each
+necessary pleasure is accorded as a favor, and I am considered to be constantly
+carrying out my wife’s wishes. And then I lead her to imagine, without saying a
+single word, that she is being constantly amused every day from six o’clock in
+the evening, the time of our dinner and of her toilet, until eleven o’clock in
+the morning, the time when we get up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! sir, how grateful you ought to be for a life which is so completely filled
+up!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have scarcely more than three dangerous hours a day to pass; but she has, of
+course, sonatas to practice and airs to go over, and there are always rides in
+the Bois de Boulogne, carriages to try, visits to pay, etc. But this is not
+all. The fairest ornament of a woman is the most exquisite cleanliness. A woman
+cannot be too particular in this respect, and no pains she takes can be laughed
+at. Now her toilet has also suggested to me a method of thus consuming the best
+hours of the day in bathing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How lucky I am in finding a listener like you!” I cried; “truly, sir, you
+could waste for her four hours a day, if only you were willing to teach her an
+art quite unknown to the most fastidious of our modern fine ladies. Why don’t
+you enumerate to the viscountess the astonishing precautions manifest in the
+Oriental luxury of the Roman dames? Give her the names of the slaves merely
+employed for the bath in Poppea’s palace: the <i>unctores</i>, the
+<i>fricatores</i>, the <i>alipilarili</i>, the <i>dropacistae</i>, the
+<i>paratiltriae</i>, the <i>picatrices</i>, the <i>tracatrices</i>, the swan
+whiteners, and all the rest. —Talk to her about this multitude of slaves whose
+names are given by Mirabeau in his <i>Erotika Biblion</i>. If she tries to
+secure the services of all these people you will have the fine times of
+quietness, not to speak of the personal satisfaction which will redound to you
+yourself from the introduction into your house of the system invented by these
+illustrious Romans, whose hair, artistically arranged, was deluged with
+perfumes, whose smallest vein seemed to have acquired fresh blood from the
+myrrh, the lint, the perfume, the douches, the flowers of the bath, all of
+which were enjoyed to the strains of voluptuous music.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! sir,” continued the husband, who was warming to his subject, “can I not
+find also admirable pretexts in my solicitude for her heath? Her health, so
+dear and precious to me, forces me to forbid her going out in bad weather, and
+thus I gain a quarter of the year. And I have also introduced the charming
+custom of kissing when either of us goes out, this parting kiss being
+accompanied with the words, ‘My sweet angel, I am going out.’ Finally, I have
+taken measures for the future to make my wife as truly a prisoner in the house
+as the conscript in his sentry box! For I have inspired her with an incredible
+enthusiasm for the sacred duties of maternity.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You do it by opposing her?” I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have guessed it,” he answered, laughing. “I have maintained to her that it
+is impossible for a woman of the world to discharge her duties towards society,
+to manage her household, to devote herself to fashion, as well as to the wishes
+of her husband, whom she loves, and, at the same time, to rear children. She
+then avers that, after the example of Cato, who wished to see how the nurse
+changed the swaddling bands of the infant Pompey, she would never leave to
+others the least of the services required in shaping the susceptible minds and
+tender bodies of these little creatures whose education begins in the cradle.
+You understand, sir, that my conjugal diplomacy would not be of much service to
+me unless, after having put my wife in solitary confinement, I did not also
+employ a certain harmless machiavelism, which consists in begging her to do
+whatever she likes, and asking her advice in every circumstance and on every
+contingency. As this delusive liberty has entirely deceived a creature so
+high-minded as she is, I have taken pains to stop at no sacrifice which would
+convince Madame de V——- that she is the freest woman in Paris; and, in order to
+attain this end, I take care not to commit those gross political blunders into
+which our ministers so often fall.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can see you,” said I, “when you wish to cheat your wife out of some right
+granted her by the charter, I can see you putting on a mild and deliberate air,
+hiding your dagger under a bouquet of roses, and as you plunge it cautiously
+into her heart, saying to her with a friendly voice, ‘My darling, does it
+hurt?’ and she, like those on whose toes you tread in a crowd, will probably
+reply, ‘Not in the least.’”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could not restrain a laugh and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Won’t my wife be astonished at the Last Judgment?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I scarcely know,” I replied, “whether you or she will be most astonished.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The jealous man frowned, but his face resumed its calmness as I added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am truly grateful, sir, to the chance which has given me the pleasure of
+your acquaintance. Without the assistance of your remarks I should have been
+less successful than you have been in developing certain ideas which we possess
+in common. I beg of you that you will give me leave to publish this
+conversation. Statements which you and I find pregnant with high political
+conceptions, others perhaps will think characterized by more or less cutting
+irony, and I shall pass for a clever fellow in the eyes of both parties.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While I thus tried to express my thanks to the viscount (the first husband
+after my heart that I had met with), he took me once more through his
+apartments, where everything seemed to be beyond criticism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was about to take leave of him, when opening the door of a little boudoir he
+showed me a room with an air which seemed to say, “Is there any way by which
+the least irregularity should occur without my seeing it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I replied to this silent interrogation by an inclination of the head, such as
+guests make to their Amphytrion when they taste some exceptionally choice dish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My whole system,” he said to me in a whisper, “was suggested to me by three
+words which my father heard Napoleon pronounce at a crowded council of state,
+when divorce was the subject of conversation. ‘Adultery,’ he exclaimed, ‘is
+merely a matter of opportunity!’ See, then, I have changed these accessories of
+crime, so that they become spies,” added the councillor, pointing out to me a
+divan covered with tea-colored cashmere, the cushions of which were slightly
+pressed. “Notice that impression,—I learn from it that my wife has had a
+headache, and has been reclining there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We stepped toward the divan, and saw the word FOOL lightly traced upon the
+fatal cushion, by four
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Things that I know not, plucked by lover’s hand<br/>
+From Cypris’ orchard, where the fairy band<br/>
+Are dancing, once by nobles thought to be<br/>
+Worthy an order of new chivalry,<br/>
+A brotherhood, wherein, with script of gold,<br/>
+More mortal men than gods should be enrolled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nobody in my house has black hair!” said the husband, growing pale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I hurried away, for I was seized with an irresistible fit of laughter, which I
+could not easily overcome.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That man has met his judgment day!” I said to myself; “all the barriers by
+which he has surrounded her have only been instrumental in adding to the
+intensity of her pleasures!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This idea saddened me. The adventure destroyed from summit to foundation three
+of my most important Meditations, and the catholic infallibility of my book was
+assailed in its most essential point. I would gladly have paid to establish the
+fidelity of the Viscountess V——- a sum as great as very many people would have
+offered to secure her surrender. But alas! my money will now be kept by me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three days afterwards I met the councillor in the foyer of the Italiens. As
+soon as he saw me he rushed up. Impelled by a sort of modesty I tried to avoid
+him, but grasping my arm: “Ah! I have just passed three cruel days,” he
+whispered in my ear. “Fortunately my wife is as innocent as perhaps a new-born
+babe—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have already told me that the viscountess was extremely ingenious,” I
+said, with unfeeling gaiety.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” he said, “I gladly take a joke this evening; for this morning I had
+irrefragable proofs of my wife’s fidelity. I had risen very early to finish a
+piece of work for which I had been rushed, and in looking absently in my
+garden, I suddenly saw the <i>valet de chambre</i> of a general, whose house is
+next to mine, climbing over the wall. My wife’s maid, poking her head from the
+vestibule, was stroking my dog and covering the retreat of the gallant. I took
+my opera glass and examined the intruder—his hair was jet black!—Ah! never have
+I seen a Christian face that gave me more delight! And you may well believe
+that during the day all my perplexities vanished. So, my dear sir,” he
+continued, “if you marry, let your dog loose and put broken bottles over the
+top of your walls.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And did the viscountess perceive your distress during these three days?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you take me for a child?” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “I have never
+been so merry in all my life as I have been since we met.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are a great man unrecognized,” I cried, “and you are not—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not permit me to conclude; for he had disappeared on seeing one of his
+friends who approached as if to greet the viscountess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now what can we add that would not be a tedious paraphrase of the lessons
+suggested by this conversation? All is included in it, either as seed or fruit.
+Nevertheless, you see, O husband! that your happiness hangs on a hair.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XVII.</h3>
+
+<h5>THE THEORY OF THE BED.</h5>
+
+<p>
+It was about seven o’clock in the evening. They were seated upon the academic
+armchairs, which made a semi-circle round a huge hearth, on which a coal fire
+was burning fitfully—symbol of the burning subject of their important
+deliberations. It was easy to guess, on seeing the grave but earnest faces of
+all the members of this assembly, that they were called upon to pronounce
+sentence upon the life, the fortunes and the happiness of people like
+themselves. They had no commission excepting that of their conscience, and they
+gathered there as the assessors of an ancient and mysterious tribunal; but they
+represented interests much more important than those of kings or of peoples;
+they spoke in the name of the passions and on behalf of the happiness of the
+numberless generations which should succeed them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The grandson of the celebrated Boulle was seated before a round table on which
+were placed the criminal exhibits which had been collected with remarkable
+intelligence. I, the insignificant secretary of the meeting, occupied a place
+at this desk, where it was my office to take down a report of the meeting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gentlemen,” said an old man, “the first question upon which we have to
+deliberate is found clearly stated in the following passage of a letter. The
+letter was written to the Princess of Wales, Caroline of Anspach, by the widow
+of the Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV, mother of the Regent: ‘The Queen
+of Spain has a method of making her husband say exactly what she wishes. The
+king is a religious man; he believes that he will be damned if he touched any
+woman but his wife, and still this excellent prince is of a very amorous
+temperament. Thus the queen obtains her every wish. She has placed castors on
+her husband’s bed. If he refuses her anything, she pushes the bed away. If he
+grants her request, the beds stand side by side, and she admits him into hers.
+And so the king is highly delighted, since he likes ——-’ I will not go any
+further, gentlemen, for the virtuous frankness of the German princess might in
+this assembly be charged with immorality.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Should wise husbands adopt these beds on castors? This is the problem which we
+have to solve.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unanimity of the vote left no doubt about the opinion of the assembly. I
+was ordered to inscribe in the records, that if two married people slept on two
+separate beds in the same room the beds ought not to be set on castors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With this proviso,” put in one of the members, “that the present decision
+should have no bearing on any subsequent ruling upon the best arrangement of
+the beds of married people.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The president passed to me a choicely bound volume, in which was contained the
+original edition, published in 1788, of the letters of Charlotte Elizabeth de
+Baviere, widow of the Duke of Orleans, the only brother of Louis XIV, and,
+while I was transcribing the passage already quoted, he said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, gentlemen, you must all have received at your houses the notification in
+which the second question is stated.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I rise to make an observation,” exclaimed the youngest of the jealous husbands
+there assembled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The president took his seat with a gesture of assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Gentlemen,” said the young husband, “are we quite prepared to deliberate upon
+so grave a question as that which is presented by the universally bad
+arrangement of the beds? Is there not here a much wider question than that of
+mere cabinet-making to decide? For my own part I see in it a question which
+concerns that of universal human intellect. The mysteries of conception,
+gentlemen, are still enveloped in a darkness which modern science has but
+partially dissipated. We do not know how far external circumstances influence
+the microscopic beings whose discovery is due to the unwearied patience of
+Hill, Baker, Joblot, Eichorn, Gleichen, Spallanzani, and especially of Muller,
+and last of all of M. Bory de Saint Vincent. The imperfections of the bed opens
+up a musical question of the highest importance, and for my part I declare I
+shall write to Italy to obtain clear information as to the manner in which beds
+are generally arranged. We do not know whether there are in the Italian bed
+numerous curtain rods, screws and castors, or whether the construction of beds
+is in this country more faulty than everywhere else, or whether the dryness of
+timber in Italy, due to the influence of the sun, does not <i>ab ovo</i>
+produce the harmony, the sense of which is to so large an extent innate in
+Italians. For these reasons I move that we adjourn.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What!” cried a gentleman from the West, impatiently rising to his feet, “are
+we here to dilate upon the advancement of music? What we have to consider first
+of all is manners, and the moral question is paramount in this discussion.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nevertheless,” remarked one of the most influential members of the council,
+“the suggestion of the former speaker is not in my opinion to be passed by. In
+the last century, gentlemen, Sterne, one of the writers most philosophically
+delightful and most delightfully philosophic, complained of the carelessness
+with which human beings were procreated; ‘Shame!’ he cried ‘that he who copies
+the divine physiognomy of man receives crowns and applause, but he who achieves
+the masterpiece, the prototype of mimic art, feels that like virtue he must be
+his own reward.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ought we not to feel more interest in the improvement of the human race than
+in that of horses? Gentlemen, I passed through a little town of Orleanais where
+the whole population consisted of hunchbacks, of glum and gloomy people,
+veritable children of sorrow, and the remark of the former speaker caused me to
+recollect that all the beds were in a very bad condition and the bedchambers
+presented nothing to the eyes of the married couple but what was hideous and
+revolting. Ah! gentlemen, how is it possible that our minds should be in an
+ideal state, when instead of the music of angels flying here and there in the
+bosom of that heaven to which we have attained, our ears are assailed by the
+most detestable, the most angry, the most piercing of human cries and
+lamentations? We are perhaps indebted for the fine geniuses who have honored
+humanity to beds which are solidly constructed; and the turbulent population
+which caused the French Revolution were conceived perhaps upon a multitude of
+tottering couches, with twisted and unstable legs; while the Orientals, who are
+such a beautiful race, have a unique method of making their beds. I vote for
+the adjournment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the gentleman sat down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man belonging to the sect of Methodists arose. “Why should we change the
+subject of debate? We are not dealing here with the improvement of the race nor
+with the perfecting of the work. We must not lose sight of the interests of the
+jealous husband and the principles on which moral soundness is based. Don’t you
+know that the noise of which you complain seems more terrible to the wife
+uncertain of her crime, than the trumpet of the Last Judgment? Can you forget
+that a suit for infidelity could never be won by a husband excepting through
+this conjugal noise? I will undertake, gentlemen, to refer to the divorces of
+Lord Abergavenny, of Viscount Bolingbroke, of the late Queen Caroline, of Eliza
+Draper, of Madame Harris, in fact, of all those who are mentioned in the twenty
+volumes published by—.” (The secretary did not distinctly hear the name of the
+English publisher.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The motion to adjourn was carried. The youngest member proposed to make up a
+purse for the author producing the best dissertation addressed to the society
+upon a subject which Sterne considered of such importance; but at the end of
+the seance eighteen shillings was the total sum found in the hat of the
+president.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The above debate of the society, which had recently been formed in London for
+the improvement of manners and of marriage and which Lord Byron scoffed at, was
+transmitted to us by the kindness of W. Hawkins, Esq., cousin-german of the
+famous Captain Clutterbuck. The extract may serve to solve any difficulties
+which may occur in the theory of bed construction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the author of the book considers that the English society has given too
+much importance to this preliminary question. There exists in fact quite as
+many reasons for being a <i>Rossinist</i> as for being a <i>Solidist</i> in the
+matter of beds, and the author acknowledges that it is either beneath or above
+him to solve this difficulty. He thinks with Laurence Sterne that it is a
+disgrace to European civilization that there exist so few physiological
+observations on callipedy, and he refuses to state the results of his
+Meditations on this subject, because it would be difficult to formulate them in
+terms of prudery, and they would be but little understood, and misinterpreted.
+Such reserve produces an hiatus in this part of the book; but the author has
+the pleasant satisfaction of leaving a fourth work to be accomplished by the
+next century, to which he bequeaths the legacy of all that he has not
+accomplished, a negative munificence which may well be followed by all those
+who may be troubled by an overplus of ideas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The theory of the bed presents questions much more important than those put
+forth by our neighbors with regard to castors and the murmurs of criminal
+conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We know only three ways in which a bed (in the general sense of this term) may
+be arranged among civilized nations, and particularly among the privileged
+classes to whom this book is addressed. These three ways are as follows:
+</p>
+
+<h4>1. TWIN BEDS. 2. SEPARATE ROOMS. 3. ONE BED FOR BOTH.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Before applying ourselves to the examination of these three methods of living
+together, which must necessarily have different influences upon the happiness
+of husbands and wives, we must take a rapid survey of the practical object
+served by the bed and the part it plays in the political economy of human
+existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The most incontrovertible principle which can be laid down in this matter is,
+<i>that the bed was made to sleep upon</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be easy to prove that the practice of sleeping together was
+established between married people but recently, in comparison with the
+antiquity of marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By what reasonings has man arrived at that point in which he brought in vogue a
+practice so fatal to happiness, to health, even to <i>amour-propre</i>? Here we
+have a subject which it would be curious to investigate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you knew one of your rivals who had discovered a method of placing you in a
+position of extreme absurdity before the eyes of those who were dearest to
+you—for instance, while you had your mouth crooked like that of a theatrical
+mask, or while your eloquent lips, like the copper faucet of a scanty fountain,
+dripped pure water—you would probably stab him. This rival is sleep. Is there a
+man in the world who knows how he appears to others, and what he does when he
+is asleep?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In sleep we are living corpses, we are the prey of an unknown power which
+seizes us in spite of ourselves, and shows itself in the oddest shapes; some
+have a sleep which is intellectual, while the sleep of others is mere stupor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are some people who slumber with their mouths open in the silliest
+fashion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are others who snore loud enough to make the timbers shake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Most people look like the impish devils that Michael Angelo sculptured, putting
+out their tongues in silent mockery of the passers-by.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The only person I know of in the world who sleeps with a noble air is
+Agamemnon, whom Guerin has represented lying on his bed at the moment when
+Clytemnestra, urged by Egisthus, advances to slay him. Moreover, I have always
+had an ambition to hold myself on my pillow as the king of kings Agamemnon
+holds himself, from the day that I was seized with dread of being seen during
+sleep by any other eyes than those of Providence. In the same way, too, from
+the day I heard my old nurse snorting in her sleep “like a whale,” to use a
+slang expression, I have added a petition to the special litany which I address
+to Saint-Honoré, my patron saint, to the effect that he would save me from
+indulging in this sort of eloquence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a man wakes up in the morning, his drowsy face grotesquely surmounted by
+the folds of a silk handkerchief which falls over his left temple like a police
+cap, he is certainly a laughable object, and it is difficult to recognize in
+him the glorious spouse, celebrated in the strophes of Rousseau; but,
+nevertheless, there is a certain gleam of life to illume the stupidity of a
+countenance half dead—and if you artists wish to make fine sketches, you should
+travel on the stage-coach and, when the postilion wakes up the postmaster, just
+examine the physiognomies of the departmental clerks! But, were you a hundred
+times as pleasant to look upon as are these bureaucratic physiognomies, at
+least, while you have your mouth shut, your eyes are open, and you have some
+expression in your countenance. Do you know how you looked an hour before you
+awoke, or during the first hour of your sleep, when you were neither a man nor
+an animal, but merely a thing, subject to the dominion of those dreams which
+issue from the gate of horn? But this is a secret between your wife and God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is it for the purpose of insinuating the imbecility of slumber that the Romans
+decorated the heads of their beds with the head of an ass? We leave to the
+gentlemen who form the academy of inscriptions the elucidation of this point.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Assuredly, the first man who took it into his head, at the inspiration of the
+devil, not to leave his wife, even while she was asleep, should know how to
+sleep in the very best style; but do not forget to reckon among the sciences
+necessary to a man on setting up an establishment, the art of sleeping with
+elegance. Moreover, we will place here as a corollary to Axiom XXV of our
+Marriage Catechism the two following aphorisms:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A husband should sleep as lightly as a watch-dog, so as never to be caught with
+his eyes shut.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man should accustom himself from childhood to go to bed bareheaded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain poets discern in modesty, in the alleged mysteries of love, some reason
+why the married couple should share the same bed; but the fact must be
+recognized that if primitive men sought the shade of caverns, the mossy couch
+of deep ravines, the flinty roof of grottoes to protect his pleasure, it was
+because the delight of love left him without defence against his enemies. No,
+it is not more natural to lay two heads upon the same pillow, than it is
+reasonable to tie a strip of muslin round the neck. Civilization is come. It
+has shut up a million of men within an area of four square leagues; it has
+stalled them in streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet
+square; after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like the tubes
+of a telescope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From this cause and from many others, such as thrift, fear, and ill-concealed
+jealousy, has sprung the custom of the sleeping together of the married couple;
+and this custom has given rise to punctuality and simultaneity in rising and
+retiring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here you find the most capricious thing in the world, the feeling most
+pre-eminently fickle, the thing which is worthless without its own spontaneous
+inspiration, which takes all its charm from the suddenness of its desires,
+which owes its attractions to the genuineness of its outbursts—this thing we
+call love, subjugated to a monastic rule, to that law of geometry which belongs
+to the Board of Longitude!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock, had
+every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me good-day and
+good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in this way that all that
+is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment becomes strangled at its birth.
+You may judge from this what love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Only the Author of everything can make the sun rise and set, morn and eve, with
+a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here below, if we may be
+permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, can play the role of
+the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From these preliminary observations, we conclude that it is not natural for two
+to lie under the canopy in the same bed;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That a man is almost always ridiculous when he is asleep;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And that this constant living together threatens the husband with inevitable
+dangers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are going to try, therefore, to find out a method which will bring our
+customs in harmony with the laws of nature, and to combine custom and nature in
+a way that will enable a husband to find in the mahogany of his bed a useful
+ally, and an aid in defending himself.
+</p>
+
+<h4>1. TWIN BEDS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+If the most brilliant, the best-looking, the cleverest of husbands wishes to
+find himself minotaurized just as the first year of his married life ends, he
+will infallibly attain that end if he is unwise enough to place two beds side
+by side, under the voluptuous dome of the same alcove.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The argument in support of this may be briefly stated. The following are its
+main lines:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The first husband who invented the twin beds was doubtless an obstetrician, who
+feared that in the involuntary struggles of some dream he might kick the child
+borne by his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no, he was rather some predestined one who distrusted his power of checking
+a snore.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps it was some young man who, fearing the excess of his own tenderness,
+found himself always lying at the edge of the bed and in danger of tumbling
+off, or so near to a charming wife that he disturbed her slumber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But may it not have been some Maintenon who received the suggestion from her
+confessor, or, more probably, some ambitious woman who wished to rule her
+husband? Or, more undoubtedly, some pretty little Pompadour overcome by that
+Parisian infirmity so pleasantly described by M. de Maurepas in that quatrain
+which cost him his protracted disgrace and certainly contributed to the
+disasters of Louis XVI’s reign:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Iris, we love those features sweet,<br/>
+Your graces all are fresh and free;<br/>
+And flowerets spring beneath your feet,<br/>
+Where naught, alas! but flowers are seen.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But why should it not have been a philosopher who dreaded the disenchantment
+which a woman would experience at the sight of a man asleep? And such a one
+would always roll himself up in a coverlet and keep his head bare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unknown author of this Jesuitical method, whoever thou art, in the devil’s
+name, we hail thee as a brother! Thou hast been the cause of many disasters.
+Thy work has the character of all half measures; it is satisfactory in no
+respect, and shares the bad points of the two other methods without yielding
+the advantages of either. How can the man of the nineteenth century, how can
+this creature so supremely intelligent, who has displayed a power well-nigh
+supernatural, who has employed the resources of his genius in concealing the
+machinery of his life, in deifying his necessary cravings in order that he
+might not despise them, going so far as to wrest from Chinese leaves, from
+Egyptian beans, from seeds of Mexico, their perfume, their treasure, their
+soul; going so far as to chisel the diamond, chase the silver, melt the gold
+ore, paint the clay and woo every art that may serve to decorate and to dignify
+the bowl from which he feeds!—how can this king, after having hidden under
+folds of muslin covered with diamonds, studded with rubies, and buried under
+linen, under folds of cotton, under the rich hues of silk, under the fairy
+patterns of lace, the partner of his wretchedness, how can he induce her to
+make shipwreck in the midst of all this luxury on the decks of two beds. What
+advantage is it that we have made the whole universe subserve our existence,
+our delusions, the poesy of our life? What good is it to have instituted law,
+morals and religion, if the invention of an upholsterer [for probably it was an
+upholsterer who invented the twin beds] robs our love of all its illusions,
+strips it bare of the majestic company of its delights and gives it in their
+stead nothing but what is ugliest and most odious? For this is the whole
+history of the two bed system.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXIII.<br/>
+That it shall appear either sublime or grotesque are the alternatives to which
+we have reduced a desire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If it be shared, our love is sublime; but should you sleep in twin beds, your
+love will always be grotesque. The absurdities which this half separation
+occasions may be comprised in either one of two situations, which will give us
+occasion to reveal the causes of very many marital misfortunes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Midnight is approaching as a young woman is putting on her curl papers and
+yawning as she did so. I do not know whether her melancholy proceeded from a
+headache, seated in the right or left lobe of her brain, or whether she was
+passing through one of those seasons of weariness during which all things
+appear black to us; but to see her negligently putting up her hair for the
+night, to see her languidly raising her leg to take off her garter, it seemed
+to me that she would prefer to be drowned rather than to be denied the relief
+of plunging her draggled life into the slumber that might restore it. At this
+instant, I know not to what degree from the North Pole she stands, whether at
+Spitzberg or in Greenland. Cold and indifferent she goes to bed thinking, as
+Mistress Walter Shandy might have thought, that the morrow would be a day of
+sickness, that her husband is coming home very late, that the beaten eggs which
+she has just eaten were not sufficiently sweetened, that she owes more than
+five hundred francs to her dressmaker; in fine, thinking about everything which
+you may suppose would occupy the mind of a tired woman. In the meanwhile
+arrives her great lout of a husband, who, after some business meeting, has
+drunk punch, with a consequent elation. He takes off his boots, leaves his
+stockings on a lounge, his bootjack lies before the fireplace; and wrapping his
+head up in a red silk handkerchief, without giving himself the trouble to tuck
+in the corners, he fires off at his wife certain interjectory phrases, those
+little marital endearments, which form almost the whole conversation at those
+twilight hours, where drowsy reason is no longer shining in this mechanism of
+ours. “What, in bed already! It was devilish cold this evening! Why don’t you
+speak, my pet? You’ve already rolled yourself up in bed, then! Ah! you are in
+the dumps and pretend to be asleep!” These exclamations are mingled with yawns;
+and after numberless little incidents which according to the usage of each home
+vary this preface of the night, our friend flings himself into his own bed with
+a heavy thud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! before a woman who is cold, how mad a man must appear when desire renders
+him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting as an epigram and
+soothing as a madrigal; when he enacts with more or less sprightliness the
+scene where, in <i>Venice Preserved</i>, the genius of Orway has represented
+the senator Antonio, repeating a hundred times over at the feet of Aquilina:
+“Aquilina, Quilina, Lina, Aqui, Nacki!” without winning from her aught save the
+stroke of her whip, inasmuch as he has undertaken to fawn upon her like a dog.
+In the eyes of every woman, even of a lawful wife, the more a man shows eager
+passion under these circumstances, the more silly he appears. He is odious when
+he commands, he is minotaurized if he abuses his power. On this point I would
+remind you of certain aphorisms in the marriage catechism from which you will
+see that you are violating its most sacred precepts. Whether a woman yields, or
+does not yield, this institution of twin beds gives to marriage such an element
+of roughness and nakedness that the most chaste wife and the most intelligent
+husband are led to immodesty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This scene, which is enacted in a thousand ways and which may originate in a
+thousand different incidents, has a sequel in that other situation which, while
+it is less pleasant, is far more terrible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One evening when I was talking about these serious matters with the late Comte
+de Noce, of whom I have already had occasion to speak, a tall white-haired old
+man, his intimate friend, whose name I will not give, because he is still
+alive, looked at us with a somewhat melancholy air. We guessed that he was
+about to relate some tale of scandal, and we accordingly watched him, somewhat
+as the stenographer of the <i>Moniteur</i> might watch, as he mounted the
+tribune, a minister whose speech had already been written out for the reporter.
+The story-teller on this occasion was an old marquis, whose fortune, together
+with his wife and children, had perished in the disasters of the Revolution.
+The marchioness had been one of the most inconsistent women of the past
+generation; the marquis accordingly was not wanting in observations on feminine
+human nature. Having reached an age in which he saw nothing before him but the
+gulf of the grave, he spoke about himself as if the subject of his talk were
+Mark Antony or Cleopatra.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My young friend”—he did me the honor to address me, for it was I who made the
+last remark in this discussion—“your reflections make me think of a certain
+evening, in the course of which one of my friends conducted himself in such a
+manner as to lose forever the respect of his wife. Now, in those days a woman
+could take vengeance with marvelous facility—for it was always a word and a
+blow. The married couple I speak of were particular in sleeping on separate
+beds, with their head under the arch of the same alcove. They came home one
+night from a brilliant ball given by the Comte de Mercy, ambassador of the
+emperor. The husband had lost a considerable sum at play, so he was completely
+absorbed in thought. He had to pay a debt, the next day, of six thousand
+crowns!—and you will recollect, Noce, that a hundred crowns couldn’t be made up
+from scraping together the resources of ten such musketeers. The young woman,
+as generally happens under such circumstances, was in a gale of high spirits.
+‘Give to the marquis,’ she said to a <i>valet de chambre</i>, ‘all that he
+requires for his toilet.’ In those days people dressed for the night. These
+extraordinary words did not rouse the husband from his mood of abstraction, and
+then madame, assisted by her maid, began to indulge in a thousand coquetries.
+‘Was my appearance to your taste this evening?’ ‘You are always to my taste,’
+answered the marquis, continuing to stride up and down the room. ‘You are very
+gloomy! Come and talk to me, you frowning lover,’ said she, placing herself
+before him in the most seductive negligee. But you can have no idea of the
+enchantments of the marchioness unless you had known her. Ah! you have seen
+her, Noce!” he said with a mocking smile. “Finally, in spite of all her
+allurements and beauty, the marchioness was lost sight of amid thoughts of the
+six thousand crowns which this fool of a husband could not get out of his head,
+and she went to bed all alone. But women always have one resource left; so that
+the moment that the good husband made as though he would get into his bed, the
+marchioness cried, ‘Oh, how cold I am!’ ‘So am I,’ he replied. ‘How is it that
+the servants have not warmed our beds?’—And then I rang.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Comte de Noce could not help laughing, and the old marquis, quite put out
+of countenance, stopped short.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not to divine the desire of a wife, to snore while she lies awake, to be in
+Siberia when she is in the tropics, these are the slighter disadvantages of
+twin beds. What risks will not a passionate woman run when she becomes aware
+that her husband is a heavy sleeper?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am indebted to Beyle for an Italian anecdote, to which his dry and sarcastic
+manner lent an infinite charm, as he told me this tale of feminine hardihood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ludovico had his palace at one end of the town of Milan; at the other was that
+of the Countess of Pernetti. At midnight, on a certain occasion, Ludovico
+resolved, at the peril of his life, to make a rash expedition for the sake of
+gazing for one second on the face he adored, and accordingly appeared as if by
+magic in the palace of his well-beloved. He reached the nuptial chamber. Elisa
+Pernetti, whose heart most probably shared the desire of her lover, heard the
+sound of his footsteps and divined his intention. She saw through the walls of
+her chamber a countenance glowing with love. She rose from her marriage bed,
+light as a shadow she glided to the threshold of her door, with a look she
+embraced him, she seized his hand, she made a sign to him, she drew him in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But he will kill you!” said he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all this amounts to nothing. Let us grant that most husbands sleep lightly.
+Let us grant that they sleep without snoring, and that they always discern the
+degree of latitude at which their wives are to be found. Moreover, all the
+reasons which we have given why twin beds should be condemned, let us consider
+but dust in the balance. But, after all, a final consideration would make us
+also proscribe the use of beds ranged within the limits of the same alcove.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To a man placed in the position of a husband, there are circumstances which
+have led us to consider the nuptial couch as an actual means of defence. For it
+is only in bed that a man can tell whether his wife’s love is increasing or
+decreasing. It is the conjugal barometer. Now to sleep in twin beds is to wish
+for ignorance. You will understand, when we come to treat of <i>civil war</i>
+(See Part Third) of what extreme usefulness a bed is and how many secrets a
+wife reveals in bed, without knowing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Do not therefore allow yourself to be led astray by the specious good nature of
+such an institution as that of twin beds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is the silliest, the most treacherous, the most dangerous in the world.
+Shame and anathema to him who conceived it!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in proportion as this method is pernicious in the case of young married
+people, it is salutary and advantageous for those who have reached the
+twentieth year of married life. Husband and wife can then most conveniently
+indulge their duets of snoring. It will, moreover, be more convenient for their
+various maladies, whether rheumatism, obstinate gout, or even the taking of a
+pinch of snuff; and the cough or the snore will not in any respect prove a
+greater hindrance than it is found to be in any other arrangement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have not thought it necessary to mention the exceptional cases which
+authorize a husband to resort to twin beds. However, the opinion of Bonaparte
+was that when once there had taken place an interchange of life and breath
+(such are his words), nothing, not even sickness, should separate married
+people. This point is so delicate that it is not possible here to treat it
+methodically.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain narrow minds will object that there are certain patriarchal families
+whose legislation of love is inflexible in the matter of two beds and an
+alcove, and that, by this arrangement, they have been happy from generation to
+generation. But, the only answer that the author vouchsafes to this is that he
+knows a great many respectable people who pass their lives in watching games of
+billiards.
+</p>
+
+<h4>2. SEPARATE ROOMS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+There cannot be found in Europe a hundred husbands of each nation sufficiently
+versed in the science of marriage, or if you like, of life, to be able to dwell
+in an apartment separate from that of their wives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The power of putting this system into practice shows the highest degree of
+intellectual and masculine force.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The married couple who dwell in separate apartments have become either
+divorced, or have attained to the discovery of happiness. They either abominate
+or adore each other. We will not undertake to detail here the admirable
+precepts which may be deduced from this theory whose end is to make constancy
+and fidelity easy and delightful. It may be sufficient to declare that by this
+system alone two married people can realize the dream of many noble souls. This
+will be understood by all the faithful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for the profane, their curious questionings will be sufficiently answered by
+the remark that the object of this institution is to give happiness to one
+woman. Which among them will be willing to deprive general society of any share
+in the talents with which they think themselves endowed, to the advantage of
+one woman? Nevertheless, the rendering of his mistress happy gives any one the
+fairest title to glory which can be earned in this valley of Jehosaphat, since,
+according to Genesis, Eve was not satisfied even with a terrestrial Paradise.
+She desired to taste the forbidden fruit, the eternal emblem of adultery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there is an insurmountable reason why we should refrain from developing
+this brilliant theory. It would cause a digression from the main theme of our
+work. In the situation which we have supposed to be that of a married
+establishment, a man who is sufficiently unwise to sleep apart from his wife
+deserves no pity for the disaster which he himself invites.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us then resume our subject. Every man is not strong enough to undertake to
+occupy an apartment separate from that of his wife; although any man might
+derive as much good as evil from the difficulties which exist in using but one
+bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We now proceed to solve the difficulties which superficial minds may detect in
+this method, for which our predilection is manifest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this paragraph, which is in some sort a silent one, inasmuch as we leave it
+to the commentaries which will be made in more than one home, may serve as a
+pedestal for the imposing figure of Lycurgus, that ancient legislator, to whom
+the Greeks are indebted for their profoundest thoughts on the subject of
+marriage. May his system be understood by future generations! And if modern
+manners are too much given to softness to adopt his system in its entirety,
+they may at least be imbued with the robust spirit of this admirable code.
+</p>
+
+<h4>3. ONE BED FOR BOTH.</h4>
+
+<p>
+On a night in December, Frederick the Great looked up at the sky, whose stars
+were twinkling with that clear and living light which presages heavy frost, and
+he exclaimed, “This weather will result in a great many soldiers to Prussia.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The king expressed here, by a single phrase, the principal disadvantage which
+results from the constant living together of married people. Although it may be
+permitted to Napoleon and to Frederick to estimate the value of a woman more or
+less according to the number of her children, yet a husband of talent ought,
+according to the maxims of the thirteenth Meditation, to consider
+child-begetting merely as a means of defence, and it is for him to know to what
+extent it may take place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The observation leads into mysteries from which the physiological Muse recoils.
+She has been quite willing to enter the nuptial chambers while they are
+occupied, but she is a virgin and a prude, and there are occasions on which she
+retires. For, since it is at this passage in my book that the Muse is inclined
+to put her white hands before her eyes so as to see nothing, like the young
+girl looking through the interstices of her tapering fingers, she will take
+advantage of this attack of modesty, to administer a reprimand to our manners.
+In England the nuptial chamber is a sacred place. The married couple alone have
+the privilege of entering it, and more than one lady, we are told, makes her
+bed herself. Of all the crazes which reign beyond the sea, why should the only
+one which we despise be precisely that, whose grace and mystery ought
+undoubtedly to meet the approval of all tender souls on this continent? Refined
+women condemn the immodesty with which strangers are introduced into the
+sanctuary of marriage. As for us, who have energetically anathematized women
+who walk abroad at the time when they expect soon to be confined, our opinion
+cannot be doubted. If we wish the celibate to respect marriage, married people
+ought to have some regard for the inflammability of bachelors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To sleep every night with one’s wife may seem, we confess, an act of the most
+insolent folly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many husbands are inclined to ask how a man, who desires to bring marriage to
+perfection, dare prescribe to a husband a rule of conduct which would be fatal
+in a lover.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, such is the decision of a doctor of arts and sciences conjugal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the first place, without making a resolution never to sleep by himself, this
+is the only course left to a husband, since we have demonstrated the dangers of
+the preceding systems. We must now try to prove that this last method yields
+more advantage and less disadvantage than the two preceding methods, that is,
+so far as relates to the critical position in which a conjugal establishment
+stands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our observations on the twin beds ought to have taught husbands that they
+should always be strung into the same degree of fervor as that which prevails
+in the harmonious organization of their wives. Now it seems to us that this
+perfect equality in feelings would naturally be created under the white Aegis,
+which spreads over both of them its protecting sheet; this at the outset is an
+immense advantage, and really nothing is easier to verify at any moment than
+the degree of love and expansion which a woman reaches when the same pillow
+receives the heads of both spouses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Man [we speak now of the species] walks about with a memorandum always
+totalized, which shows distinctly and without error the amount of passion which
+he carries within him. This mysterious gynometer is traced in the hollow of the
+hand, for the hand is really that one of our members which bears the impress
+most plainly of our characters. Chirology is a fifth work which I bequeath to
+my successors, for I am contented here to make known but the elements of this
+interesting science.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hand is the essential organ of touch. Touch is the sense which very nearly
+takes the place of all the others, and which alone is indispensable. Since the
+hand alone can carry out all that a man desires, it is to an extent action
+itself. The sum total of our vitality passes through it; and men of powerful
+intellects are usually remarkable for their shapely hands, perfection in that
+respect being a distinguishing trait of their high calling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Jesus Christ performed all His miracles by the imposition of hands. The hand is
+the channel through which life passes. It reveals to the physician all the
+mysteries of our organism. It exhales more than any other part of our bodies
+the nervous fluid, or that unknown substance, which for want of another term we
+style <i>will</i>. The eye can discover the mood of our soul but the hand
+betrays at the same time the secrets of the body and those of the soul. We can
+acquire the faculty of imposing silence on our eyes, on our lips, on our brows,
+and on our forehead; but the hand never dissembles and nothing in our features
+can be compared to the richness of its expression. The heat and cold which it
+feels in such delicate degrees often escape the notice of other senses in
+thoughtless people; but a man knows how to distinguish them, however little
+time he may have bestowed in studying the anatomy of sentiments and the affairs
+of human life. Thus the hand has a thousand ways of becoming dry, moist, hot,
+cold, soft, rough, unctuous. The hand palpitates, becomes supple, grows hard
+and again is softened. In fine it presents a phenomenon which is inexplicable
+so that one is tempted to call it the incarnation of thought. It causes the
+despair of the sculptor and the painter when they wish to express the changing
+labyrinth of its mysterious lineaments. To stretch out your hand to a man is to
+save him, it serves as a ratification of the sentiments we express. The
+sorcerers of every age have tried to read our future destines in those lines
+which have nothing fanciful in them, but absolutely correspond with the
+principles of each one’s life and character. When she charges a man with want
+of tact, which is merely touch, a woman condemns him without hope. We use the
+expressions, the “Hand of Justice,” the “Hand of God;” and a <i>coup de
+main</i> means a bold undertaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To understand and recognize the hidden feelings by the atmospheric variations
+of the hand, which a woman almost always yields without distrust, is a study
+less unfruitful and surer than that of physiognomy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this way you will be able, if you acquire this science, to wield vast power,
+and to find a clue which will guide you through the labyrinth of the most
+impenetrable heart. This will render your living together free from very many
+mistakes, and, at the same time, rich in the acquisition of many a treasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Buffon and certain physiologists affirm that our members are more completely
+exhausted by desire than by the most keen enjoyments. And really, does not
+desire constitute of itself a sort of intuitive possession? Does it not stand
+in the same relation to visible action, as those incidents in our mental life,
+in which we take part in a dream, stand to the incidents of our actual life?
+This energetic apprehension of things, does it not call into being an internal
+emotion more powerful than that of the external action? If our gestures are
+only the accomplishment of things already enacted by our thought, you may
+easily calculate how desire frequently entertained must necessarily consume the
+vital fluids. But the passions which are no more than the aggregation of
+desires, do they not furrow with the wrinkle of their lightning the faces of
+the ambitious, of gamblers, for instance, and do they not wear out their bodies
+with marvelous swiftness?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These observations, therefore, necessarily contain the germs of a mysterious
+system equally favored by Plato and by Epicurus; we will leave it for you to
+meditate upon, enveloped as it is in the veil which enshrouds Egyptian statues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the greatest mistake that a man commits is to believe that love can belong
+only to those fugitive moments which, according to the magnificent expression
+of Bossuet, are like to the nails scattered over a wall: to the eye they appear
+numerous; but when they are collected they make but a handful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Love consists almost always in conversation. There are few things inexhaustible
+in a lover: goodness, gracefulness and delicacy. To feel everything, to divine
+everything, to anticipate everything; to reproach without bringing affliction
+upon a tender heart; to make a present without pride; to double the value of a
+certain action by the way in which it is done; to flatter rather by actions
+than by words; to make oneself understood rather than to produce a vivid
+impression; to touch without striking; to make a look and the sound of the
+voice produce the effect of a caress; never to produce embarrassment; to amuse
+without offending good taste; always to touch the heart; to speak to the
+soul—this is all that women ask. They will abandon all the delights of all the
+nights of Messalina, if only they may live with a being who will yield them
+those caresses of the soul, for which they are so eager, and which cost nothing
+to men if only they have a little consideration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This outline comprises a great portion of such secrets as belong to the nuptial
+couch. There are perhaps some witty people who may take this long definition of
+politeness for a description of love, while in any case it is no more than a
+recommendation to treat your wife as you would treat the minister on whose
+good-will depends your promotion to the post you covet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I hear numberless voices crying out that this book is a special advocate for
+women and neglects the cause of men;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the majority of women are unworthy of these delicate attentions and would
+abuse them;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That there are women given to licentiousness who would not lend themselves to
+very much of what they would call mystification;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That women are nothing but vanity and think of nothing but dress;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That they have notions which are truly unreasonable;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That they are very often annoyed by an attention;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That they are fools, they understand nothing, are worth nothing, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In answer to all these clamors we will write here the following phrases, which,
+placed between two spaces, will perhaps have the air of a thought, to quote an
+expression of Beaumarchais.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXIV.<br/>
+A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reasons why the single bed must triumph over the other two methods of
+organizing the nuptial couch are as follows: In the single couch we have a
+faithful interpreter to translate with profound truthfulness the sentiments of
+a woman, to render her a spy over herself, to keep her at the height of her
+amorous temperature, never to leave her, to have the power of hearing her
+breathe in slumber, and thus to avoid all the nonsense which is the ruin of so
+many marriages.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As it is impossible to receive benefits without paying for them, you are bound
+to learn how to sleep gracefully, to preserve your dignity under the silk
+handkerchief that wraps your head, to be polite, to see that your slumber is
+light, not to cough too much, and to imitate those modern authors who write
+more prefaces than books.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XVIII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF MARITAL REVOLUTIONS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The time always comes in which nations and women even the most stupid perceive
+that their innocence is being abused. The cleverest policy may for a long time
+proceed in a course of deceit; but it would be very happy for men if they could
+carry on their deceit to an infinite period; a vast amount of bloodshed would
+then be avoided, both in nations and in families.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, we hope that the means of defence put forth in the preceding
+Meditations will be sufficient to deliver a certain number of husbands from the
+clutches of the Minotaur! You must agree with the doctor that many a love
+blindly entered upon perishes under the treatment of hygiene or dies away,
+thanks to marital policy. Yes [what a consoling mistake!] many a lover will be
+driven away by personal efforts, many a husband will learn how to conceal under
+an impenetrable veil the machinery of his machiavelism, and many a man will
+have better success than the old philosopher who cried: <i>Nolo coronari!</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But we are here compelled to acknowledge a mournful truth. Despotism has its
+moments of secure tranquillity. Her reign seems like the hour which precedes
+the tempest, and whose silence enables the traveler, stretched upon the faded
+grass, to hear at a mile’s distance, the song of the cicada. Some fine morning
+an honest woman, who will be imitated by a great portion of our own women,
+discerns with an eagle eye the clever manoeuvres which have rendered her the
+victim of an infernal policy. She is at first quite furious at having for so
+long a time preserved her virtue. At what age, in what day, does this terrible
+revolution occur? This question of chronology depends entirely upon the genius
+of each husband; for it is not the vocation of all to put in practice with the
+same talent the precepts of our conjugal gospel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A man must have very little love,” the mystified wife will exclaim, “to enter
+upon such calculations as these! What! From the first day I have been to him
+perpetually an object of suspicion! It is monstrous, even a woman would be
+incapable of such artful and cruel treachery!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the question. Each husband will be able to understand the variations of
+this complaint which will be made in accordance with the character of the young
+Fury, of whom he has made a companion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A woman by no means loses her head under these circumstances; she holds her
+tongue and dissembles. Her vengeance will be concealed. Only you will have some
+symptoms of hesitation to contend with on the arrival of the crisis, which we
+presume you to have reached on the expiration of the honeymoon; but you will
+also have to contend against a resolution. She has determined to revenge
+herself. From that day, so far as regards you, her mask, like her heart, has
+turned to bronze. Formerly you were an object of indifference to her; you are
+becoming by degrees absolutely insupportable. The Civil War commences only at
+the moment in which, like the drop of water which makes the full glass
+overflow, some incident, whose more or less importance we find difficulty in
+determining, has rendered you odious. The lapse of time which intervenes
+between this last hour, the limit of your good understanding, and the day when
+your wife becomes cognizant of your artifices, is nevertheless quite sufficient
+to permit you to institute a series of defensive operations, which we will now
+explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Up to this time you have protected your honor solely by the exertion of a power
+entirely occult. Hereafter the wheels of your conjugal machinery must be set
+going in sight of every one. In this case, if you would prevent a crime you
+must strike a blow. You have begun by negotiating, you must end by mounting
+your horse, sabre in hand, like a Parisian gendarme. You must make your horse
+prance, you must brandish your sabre, you must shout strenuously, and you must
+endeavor to calm the revolt without wounding anybody.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just as the author has found a means of passing from occult methods to methods
+that are patent, so it is necessary for the husband to justify the sudden
+change in his tactics; for in marriage, as in literature, art consists entirely
+in the gracefulness of the transitions. This is of the highest importance for
+you. What a frightful position you will occupy if your wife has reason to
+complain of your conduct at the moment, which is, perhaps, the most critical of
+your whole married life!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You must therefore find some means or other to justify the secret tyranny of
+your initial policy; some means which still prepare the mind of your wife for
+the severe measures which you are about to take; some means which so far from
+forfeiting her esteem will conciliate her; some means which will gain her
+pardon, which will restore some little of that charm of yours, by which you won
+her love before your marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But what policy is it that demands this course of action? Is there such a
+policy?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certainly there is.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what address, what tact, what histrionic art must a husband possess in
+order to display the mimic wealth of that treasure which we are about to reveal
+to him! In order to counterfeit the passion whose fire is to make you a new man
+in the presence of your wife, you will require all the cunning of Talma.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This passion is JEALOUSY.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My husband is jealous. He has been so from the beginning of our marriage. He
+has concealed this feeling from me by his usual refined delicacy. Does he love
+me still? I am going to do as I like with him!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such are the discoveries which a woman is bound to make, one after another, in
+accordance with the charming scenes of the comedy which you are enacting for
+your amusement; and a man of the world must be an actual fool, if he fails in
+making a woman believe that which flatters her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With what perfection of hypocrisy must you arrange, step by step, your
+hypocritical behavior so as to rouse the curiosity of your wife, to engage her
+in a new study, and to lead her astray among the labyrinths of your thought!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ye sublime actors! Do ye divine the diplomatic reticence, the gestures of
+artifice, the veiled words, the looks of doubtful meaning which some evening
+may induce your wife to attempt the capture of your secret thoughts?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah! to laugh in your sleeve while you are exhibiting the fierceness of a tiger;
+neither to lie nor to tell the truth; to comprehend the capricious mood of a
+woman, and yet to make her believe that she controls you, while you intend to
+bind her with a collar of iron! O comedy that has no audience, which yet is
+played by one heart before another heart and where both of you applaud because
+both of you think that you have obtained success!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She it is who will tell you that you are jealous, who will point out to you
+that she knows you better than you know yourself, who will prove to you the
+uselessness of your artifices and who perhaps will defy you. She triumphs in
+the excited consciousness of the superiority which she thinks she possesses
+over you; you of course are ennobled in her eyes; for she finds your conduct
+quite natural. The only thing she feels is that your want of confidence was
+useless; if she wished to betray, who could hinder her?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, some evening, you will burst into a passion, and, as some trifle affords
+you a pretext, you will make a scene, in the course of which your anger will
+make you divulge the secret of your distress. And here comes in the
+promulgation of our new code.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Have no fear that a woman is going to trouble herself about this. She needs
+your jealousy, she rather likes your severity. This comes from the fact that in
+the first place she finds there a justification for her own conduct; and then
+she finds immense satisfaction in playing before other people the part of a
+victim. What delightful expressions of sympathy will she receive! Afterwards
+she will use this as a weapon against you, in the expectation thereby of
+leading you into a pitfall.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sees in your conduct the source of a thousand more pleasures in her future
+treachery, and her imagination smiles at all the barricades with which you
+surround her, for will she not have the delight of surmounting them all?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women understand better than we do the art of analyzing the two human feelings,
+which alternately form their weapons of attack, or the weapons of which they
+are victims. They have the instinct of love, because it is their whole life,
+and of jealousy, because it is almost the only means by which they can control
+us. Within them jealousy is a genuine sentiment and springs from the instinct
+of self-preservation; it is vital to their life or death. But with men this
+feeling is absolutely absurd when it does not subserve some further end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To entertain feelings of jealousy towards the woman you love, is to start from
+a position founded on vicious reasoning. We are loved, or we are not loved; if
+a man entertains jealousy under either of these circumstances, it is a feeling
+absolutely unprofitable to him; jealousy may be explained as fear, fear in
+love. But to doubt one’s wife is to doubt one’s self.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To be jealous is to exhibit, at once, the height of egotism, the error of
+<i>amour-propre</i>, the vexation of morbid vanity. Women rather encourage this
+ridiculous feeling, because by means of it they can obtain cashmere shawls,
+silver toilet sets, diamonds, which for them mark the high thermometer mark of
+their power. Moreover, unless you appear blinded by jealousy, your wife will
+not keep on her guard; for there is no pitfall which she does not distrust,
+excepting that which she makes for herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the wife becomes the easy dupe of a husband who is clever enough to give
+to the inevitable revolution, which comes sooner or later, the advantageous
+results we have indicated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You must import into your establishment that remarkable phenomenon whose
+existence is demonstrated in the asymptotes of geometry. Your wife will always
+try to minotaurize you without being successful. Like those knots which are
+never so tight as when one tries to loosen them, she will struggle to the
+advantage of your power over her, while she believes that she is struggling for
+her independence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The highest degree of good play on the part of a prince lies in persuading his
+people that he goes to war for them, while all the time he is causing them to
+be killed for his throne.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But many husbands will find a preliminary difficulty in executing this plan of
+campaign. If your wife is a woman of profound dissimulation, the question is,
+what signs will indicate to her the motives of your long mystification?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be seen that our Meditation on the Custom House, as well as that on the
+Bed, has already revealed certain means of discerning the thought of a woman;
+but we make no pretence in this book of exhaustively stating the resources of
+human wit, which are immeasurable. Now here is a proof of this. On the day of
+the Saturnalia the Romans discovered more features in the character of their
+slaves, in ten minutes, than they would have found out during the rest of the
+year! You ought therefore to ordain Saturnalia in your establishment, and to
+imitate Gessler, who, when he saw William Tell shoot the apple off his son’s
+head, was forced to remark, “Here is a man whom I must get rid of, for he could
+not miss his aim if he wished to kill me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You understand, then, that if your wife wishes to drink Roussillon wine, to eat
+mutton chops, to go out at all hours and to read the encyclopaedia, you are
+bound to take her very seriously. In the first place, she will begin to
+distrust you against her own wish, on seeing that your behaviour towards her is
+quite contrary to your previous proceedings. She will suppose that you have
+some ulterior motive in this change of policy, and therefore all the liberty
+that you give her will make her so anxious that she cannot enjoy it. As regards
+the misfortunes that this change may bring, the future will provide for them.
+In a revolution the primary principle is to exercise a control over the evil
+which cannot be prevented and to attract the lightning by rods which shall lead
+it to the earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the last act of the comedy is in preparation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lover who, from the day when the feeblest of all first symptoms shows
+itself in your wife until the moment when the marital revolution takes place,
+has jumped upon the stage, either as a material creature or as a being of the
+imagination—the LOVER, summoned by a sign from her, now declares: “Here I am!”
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XIX.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE LOVER.</h5>
+
+<p>
+We offer the following maxims for your consideration:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We should despair of the human race if these maxims had been made before 1830;
+but they set forth in so clear a manner the agreements and difficulties which
+distinguish you, your wife and a lover; they so brilliantly describe what your
+policy should be, and demonstrate to you so accurately the strength of the
+enemy, that the teacher has put his <i>amour-propre</i> aside, and if by chance
+you find here a single new thought, send it to the devil, who suggested this
+work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXV.<br/>
+To speak of love is to make love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXVI.<br/>
+In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of honest
+admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXVII.<br/>
+A lover has all the good points and all the bad points which are lacking in a
+husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXVIII.<br/>
+A lover not only gives life to everything, he makes one forget life; the
+husband does not give life to anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXIX. All the affected airs of sensibility which a woman puts on invariably
+deceive a lover; and on occasions when a husband shrugs his shoulders, a lover
+is in ecstasies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXX.<br/>
+A lover betrays by his manner alone the degree of intimacy in which he stands
+to a married woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXI. A woman does not always know why she is in love. It is rarely that a man
+falls in love without some selfish purpose. A husband should discover this
+secret motive of egotism, for it will be to him the lever of Archimedes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXII.<br/>
+A clever husband never betrays his supposition that his wife has a lover.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXIII. The lover submits to all the caprices of a woman; and as a man is never
+vile while he lies in the arms of his mistress, he will take the means to
+please her that a husband would recoil from.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXIV.<br/>
+A lover teaches a wife all that her husband has concealed from her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXV. All the sensations which a woman yields to her lover, she gives in
+exchange; they return to her always intensified; they are as rich in what they
+give as in what they receive. This is the kind of commerce in which almost all
+husbands end by being bankrupt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXVI. A lover speaks of nothing to a woman but that which exalts her; while a
+husband, although he may be a loving one, can never refrain from giving advice
+which always has the appearance of reprimand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXVII.<br/>
+A lover always starts from his mistress to himself; with a husband the contrary
+is the case.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXVIII. A lover always has a desire to appear amiable. There is in this
+sentiment an element of exaggeration which leads to ridicule; study how to take
+advantage of this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXIX. When a crime has been committed the magistrate who investigates the case
+knows [excepting in the case of a released convict who commits murder in jail]
+that there are not more than five persons to whom he can attribute the act. He
+starts from this premise a series of conjectures. The husband should reason
+like the judge; there are only three people in society whom he can suspect when
+seeking the lover of his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXX.<br/>
+A lover is never in the wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXI. The lover of a married woman says to her: “Madame, you have need of
+rest. You have to give an example of virtue to your children. You have sworn to
+make your husband happy, and although he has some faults—he has fewer than I
+have—he is worthy of your esteem. Nevertheless you have sacrificed everything
+for me. Do not let a single murmur escape you; for regret is an offence which I
+think worthy of a severer penalty than the law decrees against infidelity. As a
+reward for these sacrifices, I will bring you as much pleasure as pain.” And
+the incredible part about it is, that the lover triumphs. The form which his
+speech takes carries it. He says but one phrase: “I love you.” A lover is a
+herald who proclaims either the merit, the beauty, or the wit of a woman. What
+does a husband proclaim?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To sum up all, the love which a married woman inspires, or that which she gives
+back, is the least creditable sentiment in the world; in her it is boundless
+vanity; in her lover it is selfish egotism. The lover of a married woman
+contracts so many obligations, that scarcely three men in a century are met
+with who are capable of discharging them. He ought to dedicate his whole life
+to his mistress, but he always ends by deserting her; both parties are aware of
+this, and, from the beginning of social life, the one has always been sublime
+in self-sacrifice, the other an ingrate. The infatuation of love always rouses
+the pity of the judges who pass sentence on it. But where do you find such love
+genuine and constant? What power must a husband possess to struggle
+successfully against a man who casts over a woman a spell strong enough to make
+her submit to such misfortunes!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We think, then, as a general rule, a husband, if he knows how to use the means
+of defence which we have outlined, can lead his wife up to her twenty-seventh
+year, not without her having chosen a lover, but without her having committed
+the great crime. Here and there we meet with men endowed with deep marital
+genius, who can keep their wives, body and soul to themselves alone up to their
+thirtieth or thirty-fifth year; but these exceptions cause a sort of scandal
+and alarm. The phenomenon scarcely ever is met with excepting in the country,
+where life is transparent and people live in glass houses and the husband
+wields immense power. The miraculous assistance which men and things thus give
+to a husband always vanishes in the midst of a city whose population reaches to
+two hundred and fifty thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would therefore almost appear to be demonstrated that thirty is the age of
+virtue. At that critical period, a woman becomes so difficult to guard, that in
+order successfully to enchain her within the conjugal Paradise, resort must be
+had to those last means of defence which remain to be described, and which we
+will reveal in the <i>Essay on Police</i>, the <i>Art of Returning Home</i>,
+and <i>Catastrophes</i>.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XX.</h3>
+
+<h5>ESSAY ON POLICE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The police of marriage consist of all those means which are given you by law,
+manners, force, and stratagem for preventing your wife in her attempt to
+accomplish those three acts which in some sort make up the life of love:
+writing, seeing and speaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The police combine in greater or less proportion the means of defence put forth
+in the preceding Meditations. Instinct alone can teach in what proportions and
+on what occasions these compounded elements are to be employed. The whole
+system is elastic; a clever husband will easily discern how it must be bent,
+stretched or retrenched. By the aid of the police a man can guide his wife to
+her fortieth year pure from any fault.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will divide this treatise on Police into five captions:
+</p>
+
+<h4>1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS. 2. OF CORRESPONDENCE. 3. OF SPIES. 4. THE INDEX. 5. OF
+THE BUDGET.</h4>
+
+<h4>1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+In spite of the grave crisis which the husband has reached, we do not suppose
+that the lover has completely acquired the freedom of the city in the marital
+establishment. Many husbands often suspect that their wives have a lover, and
+yet they do not know upon which of the five or six chosen ones of whom we have
+spoken their suspicions ought to fall. This hesitation doubtless springs from
+some moral infirmity, to whose assistance the professor must come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fouche had in Paris three or four houses resorted to by people of the highest
+distinction; the mistresses of these dwellings were devoted to him. This
+devotion cost a great deal of money to the state. The minister used to call
+these gatherings, of which nobody at the time had any suspicion, his
+<i>mouse-traps</i>. More than one arrest was made at the end of the ball at
+which the most brilliant people of Paris had been made accomplices of this
+oratorian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The act of offering some fragments of roasted nuts, in order to see your wife
+put her white hand in the trap, is certainly exceedingly delicate, for a woman
+is certain to be on her guard; nevertheless, we reckon upon at least three
+kinds of mouse-traps: <i>The Irresistible</i>, <i>The Fallacious</i>, and that
+which is <i>Touch and Go</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Irresistible.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suppose two husbands, we will call them A and B, wish to discover who are the
+lovers of their wives. We will put the husband A at the centre of a table
+loaded with the finest pyramids of fruit, of crystals, of candies and of
+liqueurs, and the husband B shall be at whatever point of this brilliant circle
+you may please to suppose. The champagne has gone round, every eye is sparkling
+and every tongue is wagging.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND A. (peeling a chestnut)—Well, as for me, I admire literary people, but
+from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation they are despotic; I
+do not know what displeases me more, their faults or their good qualities. In
+short (he swallows his chestnut), people of genius are like tonics—you like,
+but you must use them temperately.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+WIFE B. (who has listened attentively)—But, M. A., you are very exacting (with
+an arch smile); it seems to me that dull people have as many faults as people
+of talent, with this difference perhaps, that the former have nothing to atone
+for them!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND A. (irritably)—You will agree at least, madame, that they are not very
+amiable to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+WIFE B. (with vivacity)—Who told you so?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND A. (smiling)—Don’t they overwhelm you all the time with their
+superiority? Vanity so dominates their souls that between you and them the
+effort is reciprocal—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE MISTRESS OF THE HOUSE. (aside to Wife A)—You well deserved it, my dear.
+(Wife A shrugs her shoulders.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND A. (still continuing)—Then the habit they have of combining ideas which
+reveal to them the mechanism of feeling! For them love is purely physical and
+every one knows that they do not shine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+WIFE B. (biting her lips, interrupting him)—It seems to me, sir, that we are
+the sole judges in this matter. I can well understand why men of the world do
+not like men of letters! But it is easier to criticise than to imitate them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND A. (disdainfully)—Oh, madame, men of the world can assail the authors
+of the present time without being accused of envy. There is many a gentleman of
+the drawing-room, who if he undertook to write—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+WIFE B. (with warmth)—Unfortunately for you, sir, certain friends of yours in
+the Chamber have written romances; have you been able to read them?—But really,
+in these days, in order to attain the least originality, you must undertake
+historic research, you must—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND B. (making no answer to the lady next him and speaking aside) —Oh! Oh!
+Can it be that it is M. de L——-, author of the <i>Dreams of a Young Girl</i>,
+whom my wife is in love with?—That is singular; I thought that it was Doctor
+M——-. But stay! (Aloud.) Do you know, my dear, that you are right in what you
+say? (All laugh.) Really, I should prefer to have always artists and men of
+letters in my drawing-room—(aside) when we begin to receive!—rather than to see
+there other professional men. In any case artists speak of things about which
+every one is enthusiastic, for who is there who does not believe in good taste?
+But judges, lawyers, and, above all, doctors—Heavens! I confess that to hear
+them constantly speaking about lawsuits and diseases, those two human ills—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+WIFE A. (sitting next to Husband B, speaking at the same time)—What is that you
+are saying, my friend? You are quite mistaken. In these days nobody wishes to
+wear a professional manner; doctors, since you have mentioned doctors, try to
+avoid speaking of professional matters. They talk politics, discuss the
+fashions and the theatres, they tell anecdotes, they write books better than
+professional authors do; there is a vast difference between the doctors of
+to-day and those of Moliere—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND A. (aside)—Whew! Is it possible my wife is in love with Dr. M——-? That
+would be odd. (Aloud.) That is quite possible, my dear, but I would not give a
+sick dog in charge of a physician who writes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+WIFE A. (interrupting her husband)—I know people who have five or six offices,
+yet the government has the greatest confidence in them; anyway, it is odd that
+you should speak in this way, you who were one of Dr. M——-’s great cases—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HUSBAND A. (aside)—There can be no doubt of it!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Fallacious.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A HUSBAND. (as he reaches home)—My dear, we are invited by Madame de
+Fischtaminel to a concert which she is giving next Tuesday. I reckoned on going
+there, as I wanted to speak with a young cousin of the minister who was among
+the singers; but he is gone to Frouville to see his aunt. What do you propose
+doing?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HIS WIFE.—These concerts tire me to death!—You have to sit nailed to your chair
+whole hours without saying a word.—Besides, you know quite well that we dine
+with my mother on that day, and it is impossible to miss paying her a visit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HER HUSBAND. (carelessly)—Ah! that is true.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>(Three days afterwards.)</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE HUSBAND. (as he goes to bed)—What do you think, my darling? To-morrow I
+will leave you at your mother’s, for the count has returned from Frouville and
+will be at Madame de Fischtaminel’s concert.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HIS WIFE. (vivaciously)—But why should you go alone? You know how I adore
+music!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Touch and Go Mouse-Trap.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE WIFE.—Why did you go away so early this evening?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE HUSBAND. (mysteriously)—Ah! It is a sad business, and all the more so
+because I don’t know how I can settle it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE WIFE.—What is it all about, Adolph? You are a wretch if you do not tell me
+what you are going to do!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE HUSBAND.—My dear, that ass of a Prosper Magnan is fighting a duel with M.
+de Fontanges, on account of an Opera singer.—But what is the matter with you?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE WIFE.—Nothing.—It is very warm in this room and I don’t know what ails me,
+for the whole day I have been suffering from sudden flushing of the face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE HUSBAND. (aside)—She is in love with M. de Fontanges. (Aloud.) Celestine!
+(He shouts out still louder.) Celestine! Come quick, madame is ill!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will understand that a clever husband will discover a thousand ways of
+setting these three kinds of traps.
+</p>
+
+<h4>2. OF CORRESPONDENCE.</h4>
+
+<p>
+To write a letter, and to have it posted; to get an answer, to read it and burn
+it; there we have correspondence stated in the simplest terms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet consider what immense resources are given by civilization, by our manners
+and by our love to the women who wish to conceal these material actions from
+the scrutiny of a husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives its
+epistolary provender from all hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is also the fatal invention of the General Delivery. A lover finds in the
+world a hundred charitable persons, male and female, who, for a slight
+consideration, will slip the billets-doux into the amorous and intelligent hand
+of his fair mistress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A correspondence is a variable as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks. A young
+celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a letter on the fly-leaf
+of a new book, which, when the husband asked for it of the bookseller, reached
+the hands of his mistress, who had been prepared the evening before for this
+charming article.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A woman in love, who fears her husband’s jealousy, will write and read
+billets-doux during the time consecrated to those mysterious occupations during
+which the most tyrannical husband must leave her alone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, all lovers have the art of arranging a special code of signals, whose
+arbitrary import it is difficult to understand. At a ball, a flower placed in
+some odd way in the hair; at the theatre, a pocket handkerchief unfolded on the
+front of the box; rubbing the nose, wearing a belt of a particular color,
+putting the hat on one side, wearing one dress oftener than another, singing a
+certain song in a concert or touching certain notes on the piano; fixing the
+eyes on a point agreed; everything, in fact, from the hurdy-gurdy which passes
+your windows and goes away if you open the shutter, to the newspaper
+announcement of a horse for sale—all may be reckoned as correspondence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How many times, in short, will a wife craftily ask her husband to do such and
+such commission for her, to go to such and such a shop or house, having
+previously informed her lover that your presence at such or such a place means
+yes or no?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On this point the professor acknowledges with shame that there is no possible
+means of preventing correspondence between lovers. But a little machiavelism on
+the part of the husband will be much more likely to remedy the difficulty than
+any coercive measures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An agreement, which should be kept sacred between married people, is their
+solemn oath that they will respect each other’s sealed letters. Clever is the
+husband who makes this pledge on his wedding-day and is able to keep it
+conscientiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In giving your wife unrestrained liberty to write and to receive letters, you
+will be enabled to discern the moment she begins to correspond with a lover.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But suppose your wife distrusts you and covers with impenetrable clouds the
+means she takes to conceal from you her correspondence. Is it not then time to
+display that intellectual power with which we armed you in our Meditation
+entitled <i>Of the Custom House</i>? The man who does not see when his wife
+writes to her lover, and when she receives an answer, is a failure as a
+husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The proposed study which you ought to bestow upon the movements, the actions,
+the gestures, the looks of your wife, will be perhaps troublesome and wearying,
+but it will not last long; the only point is to discover when your wife and her
+lover correspond and in what way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We cannot believe that a husband, even of moderate intelligence, will fail to
+see through this feminine manoeuvre, when once he suspects its existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, you can judge from a single incident what means of police and of
+restraint remain to you in the event of such a correspondence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A young lawyer, whose ardent passion exemplified certain of the principles
+dwelt upon in this important part of our work, had married a young person whose
+love for him was but slight; yet this circumstance he looked upon as an
+exceedingly happy one; but at the end of his first year of marriage he
+perceived that his dear Anna [for Anna was her name] had fallen in love with
+the head clerk of a stock-broker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolph was a young man of about twenty-five, handsome in face and as fond of
+amusement as any other celibate. He was frugal, discreet, possessed of an
+excellent heart, rode well, talked well, had fine black hair always curled, and
+dressed with taste. In short, he would have done honor and credit to a duchess.
+The advocate was ugly, short, stumpy, square-shouldered, mean-looking, and,
+moreover, a husband. Anna, tall and pretty, had almond eyes, white skin and
+refined features. She was all love; and passion lighted up her glance with a
+bewitching expression. While her family was poor, Maitre Lebrun had an income
+of twelve thousand francs. That explains all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One evening Lebrun got home looking extremely chop-fallen. He went into his
+study to work; but he soon came back shivering to his wife, for he had caught a
+fever and hurriedly went to bed. There he lay groaning and lamenting for his
+clients and especially for a poor widow whose fortune he was to save the very
+next day by effecting a compromise. An appointment had been made with certain
+business men and he was quite incapable of keeping it. After having slept for a
+quarter of an hour, he begged his wife in a feeble voice to write to one of his
+intimate friends, asking him to take his (Lebrun’s) place next day at the
+conference. He dictated a long letter and followed with his eye the space taken
+up on the paper by his phrases. When he came to begin the second page of the
+last sheet, the advocate set out to describe to his confrere the joy which his
+client would feel on the signing of the compromise, and the fatal page began
+with these words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My good friend, go for Heaven’s sake to Madame Vernon’s at once; you are
+expected with impatience there; she lives at No. 7 Rue de Sentier. Pardon my
+brevity; but I count on your admirable good sense to guess what I am unable to
+explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tout a vous,”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Give me the letter,” said the lawyer, “that I may see whether it is correct
+before signing it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unfortunate wife, who had been taken off her guard by this letter, which
+bristled with the most barbarous terms of legal science, gave up the letter. As
+soon as Lebrun got possession of the wily script he began to complain, to twist
+himself about, as if in pain, and to demand one little attention after another
+of his wife. Madame left the room for two minutes during which the advocate
+leaped from his bed, folded a piece of paper in the form of a letter and hid
+the missive written by his wife. When Anna returned, the clever husband seized
+the blank paper, made her address it to the friend of his, to whom the letter
+which he had taken out was written, and the poor creature handed the blank
+letter to his servant. Lebrun seemed to grow gradually calmer; he slept or
+pretended to do so, and the next morning he still affected to feel strange
+pains. Two days afterwards he tore off the first leaf of the letter and put an
+“e” to the word <i>tout</i> in the phrase “tout a vous.”[*] He folded
+mysteriously the paper which contained the innocent forgery, sealed it, left
+his bedroom and called the maid, saying to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+[*] Thus giving a feminine ending to the signature, and lending the impression
+that the note emanated from the wife personally—J.W.M.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame begs that you will take this to the house of M. Adolph; now, be quick
+about it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw the chambermaid leave the house and soon afterwards he, on a plea of
+business, went out, hurried to Rue de Sentier, to the address indicated, and
+awaited the arrival of his rival at the house of a friend who was in the secret
+of his stratagem. The lover, intoxicated with happiness, rushed to the place
+and inquired for Madame de Vernon; he was admitted and found himself face to
+face with Maitre Lebrun, who showed a countenance pale but chill, and gazed at
+him with tranquil but implacable glance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” he said in a tone of emotion to the young clerk, whose heart palpitated
+with terror, “you are in love with my wife, and you are trying to please her; I
+scarcely know how to treat you in return for this, because in your place and at
+your age I should have done exactly the same. But Anna is in despair; you have
+disturbed her happiness, and her heart is filled with the torments of hell.
+Moreover, she has told me all, a quarrel soon followed by a reconciliation
+forced her to write the letter which you have received, and she has sent me
+here in her place. I will not tell you, sir, that by persisting in your plan of
+seduction you will cause the misery of her you love, that you will forfeit her
+my esteem, and eventually your own; that your crime will be stamped on the
+future by causing perhaps sorrow to my children. I will not even speak to you
+of the bitterness you will infuse into my life;—unfortunately these are
+commonplaces! But I declare to you, sir, that the first step you take in this
+direction will be the signal for a crime; for I will not trust the risk of a
+duel in order to stab you to the heart!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And the eyes of the lawyer flashed ominously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, sir,” he went on in a gentler voice, “you are young, you have a generous
+heart. Make a sacrifice for the future happiness of her you love; leave her and
+never see her again. And if you must needs be a member of my family, I have a
+young aunt who is yet unsettled in life; she is charming, clever and rich. Make
+her acquaintance, and leave a virtuous woman undisturbed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This mixture of raillery and intimidation, together with the unwavering glance
+and deep voice of the husband, produced a remarkable impression on the lover.
+He remained for a moment utterly confused, like people overcome with passion
+and deprived of all presence of mind by a sudden shock. If Anna has since then
+had any lovers [which is a pure hypothesis] Adolph certainly is not one of
+them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This occurrence may help you to understand that correspondence is a
+double-edged weapon which is of as much advantage for the defence of the
+husband as for the inconsistency of the wife. You should therefore encourage
+correspondence for the same reason that the prefect of police takes special
+care that the street lamps of Paris are kept lighted.
+</p>
+
+<h4>3. OF SPIES.</h4>
+
+<p>
+To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to fall lower
+still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is perhaps not even a
+dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of folly; for nothing will ever
+guarantee to you the honesty of a servant who betrays her mistress, and you can
+never feel certain whether she is operating in your interest or in that of your
+wife. This point therefore may be looked upon as beyond controversy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of a family
+the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most truthful and at the
+same time the most discreet in the world. They are silent and yet they speak,
+they see everything and appear to see nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day I met a friend of mine on the boulevard. He invited me to dinner, and
+we went to his house. Dinner had been already served, and the mistress of the
+house was helping her two daughters to plates of soup.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I see here my first symptoms,” I said to myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We sat down. The first word of the husband, who spoke without thinking, and for
+the sake of talking, was the question:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Has any one been here to-day?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not a soul,” replied his wife, without lifting her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I shall never forget the quickness with which the two daughters looked up to
+their mother. The elder girl, aged eight, had something especially peculiar in
+her glance. There was at the same time revelation and mystery, curiosity and
+silence, astonishment and apathy in that look. If there was anything that could
+be compared to the speed with which the light of candor flashed from their
+eyes, it was the prudent reserve with which both of them closed down, like
+shutters, the folds of their white eyelids.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ye sweet and charming creatures, who from the age of nine even to the age of
+marriage too often are the torment of a mother even when she is not a coquette,
+is it by the privilege of your years or the instinct of your nature that your
+young ears catch the faint sound of a man’s voice through walls and doors, that
+your eyes are awake to everything, and that your young spirit busies itself in
+divining all, even the meaning of a word spoken in the air, even the meaning of
+your mother’s slightest gesture?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is something of gratitude, something in fact instinctive, in the
+predilection of fathers for their daughters and mothers for their sons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere dotage,
+and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of the beadle, who
+took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and who obtained no other
+sympathy from his confederate than the words, “You are not very successful in
+breaking them.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Marshal de Saxe did not give much consolation to his Popeliniere when they
+discovered in company that famous revolving chimney, invented by the Duc de
+Richelieu.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is the finest piece of horn work that I have ever seen!” cried the victor
+of Fontenoy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us hope that your espionage will not give you so troublesome a lesson. Such
+misfortunes are the fruits of the civil war and we do not live in that age.
+</p>
+
+<h4>4. THE INDEX.</h4>
+
+<p>
+The Pope puts books only on the Index; you will mark with a stigma of
+reprobation men and things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is forbidden to madame to go into a bath except in her own house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is forbidden to madame to receive into her house him whom you suspect of
+being her lover, and all those who are the accomplices of their love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is forbidden to madame to take a walk without you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the peculiarities which in each household originate from the diversity of
+characters, the numberless incidents of passion, and the habits of the married
+people give to this black book so many variations, the lines in it are
+multiplied or erased with such rapidity that a friend of the author has called
+this Index <i>The History of Changes in the Marital Church</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are only two things which can be controlled or prescribed in accordance
+with definite rules; the first is the country, the second is the promenade.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A husband ought never to take his wife to the country nor permit her to go
+there. Have a country home if you like, live there, entertain there nobody
+excepting ladies or old men, but never leave your wife alone there. But to take
+her, for even half a day, to the house of another man is to show yourself as
+stupid as an ostrich.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To keep guard over a wife in the country is a task most difficult of
+accomplishment. Do you think that you will be able to be in the thickets, to
+climb the trees, to follow the tracks of a lover over the grass trodden down at
+night, but straightened by the dew in the morning and refreshed by the rays of
+the sun? Can you keep your eye on every opening in the fence of the park? Oh!
+the country and the Spring! These are the two right arms of the celibate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a woman reaches the crisis at which we suppose her to be, a husband ought
+to remain in town till the declaration of war, or to resolve on devoting
+himself to all the delights of a cruel espionage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With regard to the promenade: Does madame wish to go to parties, to the
+theatre, to the Bois de Boulogne, to purchase her dresses, to find out what is
+the fashion? Madame shall go, shall see everything in the respectable company
+of her lord and master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If she take advantage of the moment when a business appointment, which you
+cannot fail to keep, detains you, in order to obtain your tacit permission to
+some meditated expedition; if in order to obtain that permission she displays
+all the witcheries of those cajoleries in which women excel and whose powerful
+influence you ought already to have known, well, well, the professor implores
+you to allow her to win you over, while at the same time you sell dear the boon
+she asks; and above all convince this creature, whose soul is at once as
+changeable as water and as firm as steel, that it is impossible for you from
+the importance of your work to leave your study.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as soon as your wife has set foot upon the street, if she goes on foot,
+don’t give her time to make fifty steps; follow and track her in such a way
+that you will not be noticed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is possible that there exist certain Werthers whose refined and delicate
+souls recoil from this inquisition. But this is not more blamable than that of
+a landed proprietor who rises at night and looks through the windows for the
+purpose of keeping watch over the peaches on his <i>espaliers</i>. You will
+probably by this course of action obtain, before the crime is committed, exact
+information with regard to the apartments which so many lovers rent in the city
+under fictitious names. If it happens [which God forbid!] that your wife enters
+a house suspected by you, try to find out if the place has several exits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Should your wife take a hack, what have you to fear? Is there not a prefect of
+police, to whom all husbands ought to decree a crown of solid gold, and has he
+not set up a little shed or bench where there is a register, an incorruptible
+guardian of public morality? And does he not know all the comings and goings of
+these Parisian gondolas?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the vital principles of our police will consist in always following your
+wife to the furnishers of your house, if she is accustomed to visit them. You
+will carefully find out whether there is any intimacy between her and her
+draper, her dressmaker or her milliner, etc. In this case you will apply the
+rules of the conjugal Custom House, and draw your own conclusions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If in your absence your wife, having gone out against your will, tells you that
+she had been to such a place, to such a shop, go there yourself the next day
+and try to find out whether she has spoken the truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But passion will dictate to you, even better than the Meditation, the various
+resources of conjugal tyranny, and we will here cut short these tiresome
+instructions.
+</p>
+
+<h4>5. OF THE BUDGET.</h4>
+
+<p>
+In outlining the portrait of a sane and sound husband (See <i>Meditation on the
+Predestined</i>), we urgently advise that he should conceal from his wife the
+real amount of his income.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In relying upon this as the foundation stone of our financial system we hope to
+do something towards discounting the opinion, so very generally held, that a
+man ought not to give the handling of his income to his wife. This principle is
+one of the many popular errors and is one of the chief causes of
+misunderstanding in the domestic establishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But let us, in the first place, deal with the question of heart, before we
+proceed to that of money.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To draw up a little civil list for your wife and for the requirements of the
+house and to pay her money as if it were a contribution, in twelve equal
+portions month by month, has something in it that is a little mean and close,
+and cannot be agreeable to any but sordid and mistrustful souls. By acting in
+this way you prepare for yourself innumerable annoyances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I could wish that during the first year of your mellifluous union, scenes more
+or less delightful, pleasantries uttered in good taste, pretty purses and
+caresses might accompany and might decorate the handing over of this monthly
+gift; but the time will come when the self-will of your wife or some unforeseen
+expenditure will compel her to ask a loan of the Chamber; I presume that you
+will always grant her the bill of indemnity, as our unfaithful deputies never
+fail to do. They pay, but they grumble; you must pay and at the same time
+compliment her. I hope it will be so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in the crisis which we have reached, the provisions of the annual budget
+can never prove sufficient. There must be an increase of fichus, of bonnets, of
+frocks; there is an expense which cannot be calculated beforehand demanded by
+the meetings, by the diplomatic messengers, by the ways and means of love, even
+while the receipts remain the same as usual. Then must commence in your
+establishment a course of education the most odious, and the most dreadful
+which a woman can undergo. I know but few noble and generous souls who value,
+more than millions, purity of heart, frankness of soul, and who would a
+thousand times more readily pardon a passion than a lie, whose instinctive
+delicacy has divined the existence of this plague of the soul, the lowest step
+in human degradation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under these circumstances there occur in the domestic establishment the most
+delightful scenes of love. It is then that a woman becomes utterly pliant and
+like to the most brilliant of all the strings of a harp, when thrown before the
+fire; she rolls round you, she clasps you, she holds you tight; she defers to
+all your caprices; never was her conversation so full of tenderness; she
+lavishes her endearments upon you, or rather she sells them to you; she at last
+becomes lower than a chorus girl, for she prostitutes herself to her husband.
+In her sweetest kisses there is money; in all her words there is money. In
+playing this part her heart becomes like lead towards you. The most polished,
+the most treacherous usurer never weighs so completely with a single glance the
+future value in bullion of a son of a family who may sign a note to him, than
+your wife appraises one of your desires as she leaps from branch to branch like
+an escaping squirrel, in order to increase the sum of money she may demand by
+increasing the appetite which she rouses in you. You must not expect to get
+scot-free from such seductions. Nature has given boundless gifts of coquetry to
+a woman, the usages of society have increased them tenfold by its fashions, its
+dresses, its embroideries and its tippets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If I ever marry,” one of the most honorable generals of our ancient army used
+to say, “I won’t put a sou among the wedding presents—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What will you put there then, general?” asked a young girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The key of my safe.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young girl made a curtsey of approbation. She moved her little head with a
+quiver like that of the magnetic needle; raised her chin slightly as if she
+would have said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I would gladly marry the general in spite of his forty-five years.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But with regard to money, what interest can you expect your wife to take in a
+machine in which she is looked upon as a mere bookkeeper?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now look at the other system.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In surrendering to your wife, with an avowal of absolute confidence in her,
+two-thirds of your fortune and letting her as mistress control the conjugal
+administration, you win from her an esteem which nothing can destroy, for
+confidence and high-mindedness find powerful echoes in the heart of a woman.
+Madame will be loaded with a responsibility which will often raise a barrier
+against extravagances, all the stronger because it is she herself who has
+created it in her heart. You yourself have made a portion of the work, and you
+may be sure that from henceforth your wife will never perhaps dishonor herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, by seeking in this way a method of defence, consider what admirable
+aids are offered to you by this plan of finances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will have in your house an exact estimate of the morality of your wife,
+just as the quotations of the Bourse give you a just estimate of the degree of
+confidence possessed by the government.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And doubtless, during the first years of your married life, your wife will take
+pride in giving you every luxury and satisfaction which your money can afford.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She will keep a good table, she will renew the furniture, and the carriages;
+she will always keep in her drawer a sum of money sacred to her well-beloved
+and ready for his needs. But of course, in the actual circumstances of life,
+the drawer will be very often empty and monsieur will spend a great deal too
+much. The economies ordered by the Chamber never weigh heavily upon the clerks
+whose income is twelve hundred francs; and you will be the clerk at twelve
+hundred francs in your own house. You will laugh in your sleeve, because you
+will have saved, capitalized, invested one-third of your income during a long
+time, like Louis XV, who kept for himself a little separate treasury, “against
+a rainy day,” he used to say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, if your wife speaks of economy, her discourse will be equal to the
+varying quotations of the money-market. You will be able to divine the whole
+progress of the lover by these financial fluctuations, and you will have
+avoided all difficulties. <i>E sempre bene.</i>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If your wife fails to appreciate the excessive confidence, and dissipates in
+one day a large proportion of your fortune, in the first place it is not
+probable that this prodigality will amount to one-third of the revenue which
+you have been saving for ten years; moreover you will learn, from the
+Meditation on <i>Catastrophes</i>, that in the very crisis produced by the
+follies of your wife, you will have brilliant opportunities of slaying the
+Minotaur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the secret of the treasure which has been amassed by your thoughtfulness
+need never be known till after your death; and if you have found it necessary
+to draw upon it, in order to assist your wife, you must always let it be
+thought that you have won at play, or made a loan from a friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These are the true principles which should govern the conjugal budget.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The police of marriage has its martyrology. We will cite but one instance which
+will make plain how necessary it is for husbands who resort to severe measures
+to keep watch over themselves as well as over their wives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An old miser who lived at T——-, a pleasure resort if there ever was one, had
+married a young and pretty woman, and he was so wrapped up in her and so
+jealous that love triumphed over avarice; he actually gave up trade in order to
+guard his wife more closely, but his only real change was that his covetousness
+took another form. I acknowledge that I owe the greater portion of the
+observations contained in this essay, which still is doubtless incomplete, to
+the person who made a study of this remarkable marital phenomenon, to portray
+which, one single detail will be amply sufficient. When he used to go to the
+country, this husband never went to bed without secretly raking over the
+pathways of his park, and he had a special rake for the sand of his terraces.
+He had made a close study of the footprints made by the different members of
+his household; and early in the morning he used to go and identify the tracks
+that had been made there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All this is old forest land,” he used to say to the person I have referred to,
+as he showed him over the park; “for nothing can be seen through the
+brushwood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His wife fell in love with one of the most charming young men of the town. This
+passion had continued for nine years bright and fresh in the hearts of the two
+lovers, whose sole avowal had been a look exchanged in a crowded ball-room; and
+while they danced together their trembling hands revealed through the scented
+gloves the depth of their love. From that day they had both of them taken great
+delight on those trifles which happy lovers never disdain. One day the young
+man led his only confidant, with a mysterious air, into a chamber where he kept
+under glass globes upon his table, with more care than he would have bestowed
+upon the finest jewels in the world, the flowers that, in the excitement of the
+dance, had fallen from the hair of his mistress, and the finery which had been
+caught in the trees which she had brushed through in the park. He also
+preserved there the narrow footprint left upon the clay soil by the lady’s
+step.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I could hear,” said this confidant to me afterwards, “the violent and
+repressed palpitations of his heart sounding in the silence which we preserved
+before the treasures of this museum of love. I raised my eyes to the ceiling,
+as if to breathe to heaven the sentiment which I dared not utter. ‘Poor
+humanity!’ I thought. ‘Madame de ——- told me that one evening at a ball you had
+been found nearly fainting in her card-room?’ I remarked to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘I can well believe it,’ said he casting down his flashing glance, ‘I had
+kissed her arm!—But,’ he added as he pressed my hand and shot at me a glance
+that pierced my heart, ‘her husband at that time had the gout which threatened
+to attack his stomach.’”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some time afterwards, the old man recovered and seemed to take a new lease of
+life; but in the midst of his convalescence he took to his bed one morning and
+died suddenly. There were such evident symptoms of poisoning in the condition
+of the dead man that the officers of justice were appealed to, and the two
+lovers were arrested. Then was enacted at the court of assizes the most
+heartrending scene that ever stirred the emotions of the jury. At the
+preliminary examination, each of the two lovers without hesitation confessed to
+the crime, and with one thought each of them was solely bent on saving, the one
+her lover, the other his mistress. There were two found guilty, where justice
+was looking for but a single culprit. The trial was entirely taken up with the
+flat contradictions which each of them, carried away by the fury of devoted
+love, gave to the admissions of the other. There they were united for the first
+time, but on the criminals’ bench with a gendarme seated between them. They
+were found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a weeping jury. No one among
+those who had the barbarous courage to witness their conveyance to the scaffold
+can mention them to-day without a shudder. Religion had won for them a
+repentance for their crime, but could not induce them to abjure their love. The
+scaffold was their nuptial bed, and there they slept together in the long night
+of death.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXI.</h3>
+
+<h5>THE ART OF RETURNING HOME.</h5>
+
+<p>
+Finding himself incapable of controlling the boiling transports of his anxiety,
+many a husband makes the mistake of coming home and rushing into the presence
+of his wife, with the object of triumphing over her weakness, like those bulls
+of Spain, which, stung by the red <i>banderillo</i>, disembowel with furious
+horns horses, matadors, picadors, toreadors and their attendants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But oh! to enter with a tender gentle mien, like Mascarillo, who expects a
+beating and becomes merry as a lark when he finds his master in a good humor!
+Well—that is the mark of a wise man!—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, my darling, I know that in my absence you could have behaved badly!
+Another in your place would have turned the house topsy-turvy, but you have
+only broken a pane of glass! God bless you for your considerateness. Go on in
+the same way and you will earn my eternal gratitude.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such are the ideas which ought to be expressed by your face and bearing, but
+perhaps all the while you say to yourself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Probably he has been here!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Always to bring home a pleasant face, is a rule which admits of no exception.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the art of never leaving your house without returning when the police have
+revealed to you a conspiracy—to know how to return at the right time—this is
+the lesson which is hard to learn. In this matter everything depends upon tact
+and penetration. The actual events of life always transcend anything that is
+imaginable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The manner of coming home is to be regulated in accordance with a number of
+circumstances. For example:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lord Catesby was a man of remarkable strength. It happened one day that he was
+returning from a fox hunt, to which he had doubtless promised to go, with some
+ulterior view, for he rode towards the fence of his park at a point where, he
+said, he saw an extremely fine horse. As he had a passion for horses, he drew
+near to examine this one close at hand, There he caught sight of Lady Catesby,
+to whose rescue it was certainly time to go, if he were in the slightest degree
+jealous for his own honor. He rushed upon the gentleman he saw there, and
+seizing him by the belt he hurled him over the fence on to the road side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Remember, sir,” he said calmly, “it rests with me to decide whether it well be
+necessary to address you hereafter and ask for satisfaction on this spot.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, my lord; but would you have the goodness to throw over my horse
+also?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the phlegmatic nobleman had already taken the arm of his wife as he gravely
+said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I blame you very much, my dear creature, for not having told me that I was to
+love you for two. Hereafter every other day I shall love you for the gentleman
+yonder, and all other days for myself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This adventure is regarded in England as one of the best returns home that were
+ever known. It is true it consisted in uniting, with singular felicity,
+eloquence of deed to that of word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the art of re-entering your home, principles of which are nothing else but
+natural deductions from the system of politeness and dissimulation which have
+been commended in preceding Meditations, is after all merely to be studied in
+preparation for the conjugal catastrophes which we will now consider.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF CATASTROPHES.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The word <i>Catastrophe</i> is a term of literature which signifies the final
+climax of a play.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To bring about a catastrophe in the drama which you are playing is a method of
+defence which is as easy to undertake as it is certain to succeed. In advising
+to employ it, we would not conceal from you its perils.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The conjugal catastrophe may be compared to one of those high fevers which
+either carry off a predisposed subject or completely restore his health. Thus,
+when the catastrophe succeeds, it keeps a woman for years in the prudent realms
+of virtue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, this method is the last of all those which science has been able to
+discover up to this present moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Sicilian Vespers, the death of Lucretia,
+the two embarkations of Napoleon at Frejus are examples of political
+catastrophe. It will not be in your power to act on such a large scale;
+nevertheless, within their own area, your dramatic climaxes in conjugal life
+will not be less effective than these.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But since the art of creating a situation and of transforming it, by the
+introduction of natural incidents, constitutes genius; since the return to
+virtue of a woman, whose foot has already left some tracks upon the sweet and
+gilded sand which mark the pathway of vice, is the most difficult to bring
+about of all denouements, and since genius neither knows it nor teaches it, the
+practitioner in conjugal laws feels compelled to confess at the outset that he
+is incapable of reducing to definite principles a science which is as
+changeable as circumstances, as delusive as opportunity, and as indefinable as
+instinct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If we may use an expression which neither Diderot, d’Alembert nor Voltaire, in
+spite of every effort, have been able to engraft on our language, a conjugal
+catastrophe <i>se subodore</i> is scented from afar; so that our only course
+will be to sketch out imperfectly certain conjugal situations of an analogous
+kind, thus imitating the philosopher of ancient time who, seeking in vain to
+explain motion, walked forward in his attempt to comprehend laws which were
+incomprehensible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A husband, in accordance with the principles comprised in our Meditation on
+<i>Police</i>, will expressly forbid his wife to receive the visits of a
+celibate whom he suspects of being her lover, and whom she has promised never
+again to see. Some minor scenes of the domestic interior we leave for
+matrimonial imaginations to conjure up; a husband can delineate them much
+better than we can; he will betake himself in thought back to those days when
+delightful longings invited sincere confidences and when the workings of his
+policy put into motion certain adroitly handled machinery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us suppose, in order to make more interesting the natural scene to which I
+refer, that you who read are a husband, whose carefully organized police has
+made the discovery that your wife, profiting by the hours devoted by you to a
+ministerial banquet, to which she probably procured you an invitation, received
+at your house M. A——z.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here we find all the conditions necessary to bring about the finest possible of
+conjugal catastrophes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You return home just in time to find your arrival has coincided with that of M.
+A——z, for we would not advise you to have the interval between acts too long.
+But in what mood should you enter? Certainly not in accordance with the rules
+of the previous Meditation. In a rage then? Still less should you do that. You
+should come in with good-natured carelessness, like an absent-minded man who
+has forgotten his purse, the statement which he has drawn up for the minister,
+his pocket-handkerchief or his snuff-box.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that case you will either catch two lovers together, or your wife,
+forewarned by the maid, will have hidden the celibate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now let us consider these two unique situations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But first of all we will observe that husbands ought always to be in a position
+to strike terror in their homes and ought long before to make preparations for
+the matrimonial second of September.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus a husband, from the moment that his wife has caused him to perceive
+certain <i>first symptoms</i>, should never fail to give, time after time, his
+personal opinion on the course of conduct to be pursued by a husband in a great
+matrimonial crisis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As for me,” you should say, “I should have no hesitation in killing the man I
+caught at my wife’s feet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With regard to the discussion that you will thus give rise to, you will be led
+on to aver that the law ought to have given to the husband, as it did in
+ancient Rome, the right of life and death over his children, so that he could
+slay those who were spurious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These ferocious opinions, which really do not bind you to anything, will
+impress your wife with salutary terror; you will enumerate them lightly, even
+laughingly—and say to her, “Certainly, my dear, I would kill you right gladly.
+Would you like to be murdered by me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A woman cannot help fearing that this pleasantry may some day become a very
+serious matter, for in these crimes of impulse there is a certain proof of
+love; and then women who know better than any one else how to say true things
+laughingly at times suspect their husbands of this feminine trick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a husband surprises his wife engaged in even innocent conversation with
+her lover, his face still calm, should produce the effect mythologically
+attributed to the celebrated Gorgon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to produce a favorable catastrophe at this juncture, you must act in
+accordance with the character of your wife, either play a pathetic scene a la
+Diderot, or resort to irony like Cicero, or rush to your pistols loaded with a
+blank charge, or even fire them off, if you think that a serious row is
+indispensable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A skillful husband may often gain a great advantage from a scene of
+unexaggerated sentimentality. He enters, he sees the lover and transfixes him
+with a glance. As soon as the celibate retires, he falls at the feet of his
+wife, he declaims a long speech, in which among other phrases there occurs
+this:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, my dear Caroline, I have never been able to love you as I should!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He weeps, and she weeps, and this tearful catastrophe leaves nothing to be
+desired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We would explain, apropos of the second method by which the catastrophe may be
+brought about, what should be the motives which lead a husband to vary this
+scene, in accordance with the greater or less degree of strength which his
+wife’s character possesses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us pursue this subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If by good luck it happens that your wife has put her lover in a place of
+concealment, the catastrophe will be very much more successful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even if the apartment is not arranged according to the principles prescribed in
+the Meditation, you will easily discern the place into which the celibate has
+vanished, although he be not, like Lord Byron’s Don Juan, bundled up under the
+cushion of a divan. If by chance your apartment is in disorder, you ought to
+have sufficient discernment to know that there is only one place in which a man
+could bestow himself. Finally, if by some devilish inspiration he has made
+himself so small that he has squeezed into some unimaginable lurking-place (for
+we may expect anything from a celibate), well, either your wife cannot help
+casting a glance towards this mysterious spot, or she will pretend to look in
+an exactly opposite direction, and then nothing is easier for a husband than to
+set a mouse-trap for his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hiding-place being discovered, you must walk straight up to the lover. You
+must meet him face to face!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now you must endeavor to produce a fine effect. With your face turned
+three-quarters towards him, you must raise your head with an air of
+superiority. This attitude will enhance immensely the effect which you aim at
+producing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The most essential thing to do at this moment, is to overwhelm the celibate by
+some crushing phrase which you have been manufacturing all the time; when you
+have thus floored him, you will coldly show him the door. You will be very
+polite, but as relentless as the executioner’s axe, and as impassive as the
+law. This freezing contempt will already probably have produced a revolution in
+the mind of your wife. There must be no shouts, no gesticulations, no
+excitement. “Men of high social rank,” says a young English author, “never
+behave like their inferiors, who cannot lose a fork without sounding the alarm
+throughout the whole neighborhood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the celibate has gone, you will find yourself alone with your wife, and
+then is the time when you must subjugate her forever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You should therefore stand before her, putting on an air whose affected
+calmness betrays the profoundest emotion; then you must choose from among the
+following topics, which we have rhetorically amplified, and which are most
+congenial to your feelings: “Madame,” you must say, “I will speak to you
+neither of your vows, nor of my love; for you have too much sense and I have
+too much pride to make it possible that I should overwhelm you with those
+execrations, which all husbands have a right to utter under these
+circumstances; for the least of the mistakes that I should make, if I did so,
+is that I would be fully justified. I will not now, even if I could, indulge
+either in wrath or resentment. It is not I who have been outraged; for I have
+too much heart to be frightened by that public opinion which almost always
+treats with ridicule and condemnation a husband whose wife has misbehaved. When
+I examine my life, I see nothing there that makes this treachery deserved by
+me, as it is deserved by many others. I still love you. I have never been
+false, I will not say to my duty, for I have found nothing onerous in adoring
+you, but not even to those welcome obligations which sincere feeling imposes
+upon us both. You have had all my confidence and you have also had the
+administration of my fortune. I have refused you nothing. And now this is the
+first time that I have turned to you a face, I will not say stern, but which is
+yet reproachful. But let us drop this subject, for it is of no use for me to
+defend myself at a moment when you have proved to me with such energy that
+there is something lacking in me, and that I am not intended by nature to
+accomplish the difficult task of rendering you happy. But I would ask you, as a
+friend speaking to a friend, how could you have the heart to imperil at the
+same time the lives of three human creatures: that of the mother of my
+children, who will always be sacred to me; that of the head of the family; and
+finally of him—who loves—[she perhaps at these words will throw herself at your
+feet; you must not permit her to do so; she is unworthy of kneeling there]. For
+you no longer love me, Eliza. Well, my poor child [you must not call her <i>my
+poor child</i> excepting when the crime has not been committed]—why deceive
+ourselves? Why do you not answer me? If love is extinguished between a married
+couple, cannot friendship and confidence still survive? Are we not two
+companions united in making the same journey? Can it be said that during the
+journey the one must never hold out his hand to the other to raise up a comrade
+or to prevent a comrade’s fall? But I have perhaps said too much and I am
+wounding your pride—Eliza! Eliza!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now what the deuce would you expect a woman to answer? Why a catastrophe
+naturally follows, without a single word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a hundred women there may be found at least a good half dozen of feeble
+creatures who under this violent shock return to their husbands never perhaps
+again to leave them, like scorched cats that dread the fire. But this scene is
+a veritable alexipharmaca, the doses of which should be measured out by prudent
+hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For certain women of delicate nerves, whose souls are soft and timid, it would
+be sufficient to point out the lurking-place where the lover lies, and say: “M.
+A——z is there!” [at this point shrug your shoulders]. “How can you thus run the
+risk of causing the death of two worthy people? I am going out; let him escape
+and do not let this happen again.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there are women whose hearts, too violently strained in these terrible
+catastrophes, fail them and they die; others whose blood undergoes a change,
+and they fall a prey to serious maladies; others actually go out of their
+minds. These are examples of women who take poison or die suddenly—and we do
+not suppose that you wish the death of the sinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, the most beautiful and impressionable of all the queens of
+France, the charming and unfortunate Mary Stuart, after having seen Rizzio
+murdered almost in her arms, fell in love, nevertheless, with the Earl of
+Bothwell; but she was a queen and queens are abnormal in disposition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will suppose, then, that the woman whose portrait adorns our first
+Meditation is a little Mary Stuart, and we will hasten to raise the curtain for
+the fifth act in this grand drama entitled <i>Marriage</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A conjugal catastrophe may burst out anywhere, and a thousand incidents which
+we cannot describe may give it birth. Sometimes it is a handkerchief, as in
+<i>Othello</i>; or a pair of slippers, as in <i>Don Juan</i>; sometimes it is
+the mistake of your wife, who cries out—“Dear Alphonse!” instead of “Dear
+Adolph!” Sometimes a husband, finding out that his wife is in debt, will go and
+call on her chief creditor, and will take her some morning to his house, as if
+by chance, in order to bring about a catastrophe. “Monsieur Josse, you are a
+jeweler and you sell your jewels with a readiness which is not equaled by the
+readiness of your debtors to pay for them. The countess owes you thirty
+thousand francs. If you wish to be paid to-morrow [tradesmen should always be
+visited at the end of the month] come to her at noon; her husband will be in
+the chamber. Do not attend to any sign which she may make to impose silence
+upon you—speak out boldly. I will pay all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So that the catastrophe in the science of marriage is what figures are in
+arithmetic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the principles of higher conjugal philosophy, on which are based the means
+of defence outlined in this second part of our book, are derived from the
+nature of human sentiments, and we have found them in different places in the
+great book of the world. Just as persons of intellect instinctively apply the
+laws of taste whose principles they would find difficulty in formulating, so we
+have seen numberless people of deep feeling employing with singular felicity
+the precepts which we are about to unfold, yet none of them consciously acted
+on a definite system. The sentiments which this situation inspired only
+revealed to them incomplete fragments of a vast system; just as the scientific
+men of the sixteenth century found that their imperfect microscopes did not
+enable them to see all the living organisms, whose existence had yet been
+proved to them by the logic of their patient genius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We hope that the observations already made in this book, and in those which
+follow, will be of a nature to destroy the opinion which frivolous men
+maintain, namely that marriage is a sinecure. According to our view, a husband
+who gives way to ennui is a heretic, and more than that, he is a man who lives
+quite out of sympathy with the marriage state, of whose importance he has no
+conception. In this connection, these Meditations perhaps will reveal to very
+many ignorant men the mysteries of a world before which they stand with open
+eyes, yet without seeing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We hope, moreover, that these principles when well applied will produce many
+conversions, and that among the pages that separate this second part from that
+entitled <i>Civil War</i> many tears will be shed and many vows of repentance
+breathed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, among the four hundred thousand honest women whom we have so carefully
+sifted out from all the European nations, we indulge the belief that there are
+a certain number, say three hundred thousand, who will be sufficiently
+self-willed, charming, adorable, and bellicose to raise the standard of
+<i>Civil War</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To arms then, to arms!
+</p>
+
+<h2>THIRD PART</h2>
+
+<h3>RELATING TO CIVIL WAR.</h3>
+
+<p>
+“Lovely as the seraphs of Klopstock,<br/>
+Terrible as the devils of Milton.”<br/>
+—DIDEROT.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXIII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF MANIFESTOES.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The Preliminary precepts, by which science has been enabled at this point to
+put weapons into the hand of a husband, are few in number; it is not of so much
+importance to know whether he will be vanquished, as to examine whether he can
+offer any resistance in the conflict.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile, we will set up here certain beacons to light up the arena where a
+husband is soon to find himself, in alliance with religion and law, engaged
+single-handed in a contest with his wife, who is supported by her native craft
+and the whole usages of society as her allies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXII.<br/>
+Anything may be expected and anything may be supposed of a woman who is in
+love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXIII.<br/>
+The actions of a woman who intends to deceive her husband are almost always the
+result of study, but never dictated by reason.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXIV. The greater number of women advance like the fleas, by erratic leaps
+and bounds, They owe their escape to the height or depth of their first ideas,
+and any interruption of their plans rather favors their execution. But they
+operate only within a narrow area which it is easy for the husband to make
+still narrower; and if he keeps cool he will end by extinguishing this piece of
+living saltpetre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXV.<br/>
+A husband should never allow himself to address a single disparaging remark to
+his wife, in presence of a third party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXVI. The moment a wife decides to break her marriage vow she reckons her
+husband as everything or nothing. All defensive operations must start from this
+proposition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXVII. The life of a woman is either of the head, of the heart, or of
+passion. When a woman reaches the age to form an estimate of life, her husband
+ought to find out whether the primary cause of her intended infidelity proceeds
+from vanity, from sentiment or from temperament. Temperament may be remedied
+like disease; sentiment is something in which the husband may find great
+opportunities of success; but vanity is incurable. A woman whose life is of the
+head may be a terrible scourge. She combines the faults of a passionate woman
+with those of the tender-hearted woman, without having their palliations. She
+is destitute alike of pity, love, virtue or sex.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXVIII. A woman whose life is of the head will strive to inspire her husband
+with indifference; the woman whose life is of the heart, with hatred; the
+passionate woman, with disgust.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+LXXXIX.<br/>
+A husband never loses anything by appearing to believe in the fidelity of his
+wife, by preserving an air of patience and by keeping silence. Silence
+especially troubles a woman amazingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XC. To show himself aware of the passion of his wife is the mark of a fool; but
+to affect ignorance of all proves that a man has sense, and this is in fact the
+only attitude to take. We are taught, moreover, that everybody in France is
+sensible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XCI. The rock most to be avoided is ridicule.—“At least, let us be affectionate
+in public,” ought to be the maxim of a married establishment. For both the
+married couple to lose honor, esteem, consideration, respect and all that is
+worth living for in society, is to become a nonentity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These axioms relate to the contest alone. As for the catastrophe, others will
+be needed for that.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have called this crisis <i>Civil War</i> for two reasons; never was a war
+more really intestine and at the same time so polite as this war. But in what
+point and in what manner does this fatal war break out? You do not believe that
+your wife will call out regiments and sound the trumpet, do you? She will,
+perhaps, have a commanding officer, but that is all. And this feeble army corps
+will be sufficient to destroy the peace of your establishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You forbid me to see the people that I like!” is an exordium which has served
+for a manifesto in most homes. This phrase, with all the ideas that are
+concomitant, is oftenest employed by vain and artificial women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The most usual manifesto is that which is proclaimed in the conjugal bed, the
+principal theatre of war. This subject will be treated in detail in the
+Meditation entitled: <i>Of Various Weapons</i>, in the paragraph, <i>Of Modesty
+in its Connection with Marriage</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain women of a lymphatic temperament will pretend to have the spleen and
+will even feign death, if they can only gain thereby the benefit of a secret
+divorce.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But most of them owe their independence to the execution of a plan, whose
+effect upon the majority of husbands is unfailing and whose perfidies we will
+now reveal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the greatest of human errors springs from the belief that our honor and
+our reputation are founded upon our actions, or result from the approbation
+which the general conscience bestows upon on conduct. A man who lives in the
+world is born to be a slave to public opinion. Now a private man in France has
+less opportunity of influencing the world than his wife, although he has ample
+occasion for ridiculing it. Women possess to a marvelous degree the art of
+giving color by specious arguments to the recriminations in which they indulge.
+They never set up any defence, excepting when they are in the wrong, and in
+this proceeding they are pre-eminent, knowing how to oppose arguments by
+precedents, proofs by assertions, and thus they very often obtain victory in
+minor matters of detail. They see and know with admirable penetration, when one
+of them presents to another a weapon which she herself is forbidden to whet. It
+is thus that they sometimes lose a husband without intending it. They apply the
+match and long afterwards are terror-stricken at the conflagration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a general thing, all women league themselves against a married man who is
+accused of tyranny; for a secret tie unites them all, as it unites all priests
+of the same religion. They hate each other, yet shield each other. You can
+never gain over more than one of them; and yet this act of seduction would be a
+triumph for your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are, therefore, outlawed from the feminine kingdom. You see ironical smiles
+on every lip, you meet an epigram in every answer. These clever creatures force
+their daggers and amuse themselves by sculpturing the handle before dealing you
+a graceful blow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The treacherous art of reservation, the tricks of silence, the malice of
+suppositions, the pretended good nature of an inquiry, all these arts are
+employed against you. A man who undertakes to subjugate his wife is an example
+too dangerous to escape destruction from them, for will not his conduct call up
+against them the satire of every husband? Moreover, all of them will attack
+you, either by bitter witticisms, or by serious arguments, or by the hackneyed
+maxims of gallantry. A swarm of celibates will support all their sallies and
+you will be assailed and persecuted as an original, a tyrant, a bad bed-fellow,
+an eccentric man, a man not to be trusted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife will defend you like the bear in the fable of La Fontaine; she will
+throw paving stones at your head to drive away the flies that alight on it. She
+will tell you in the evening all the things that have been said about you, and
+will ask an explanation of acts which you never committed, and of words which
+you never said. She professes to have justified you for faults of which you are
+innocent; she has boasted of a liberty which she does not possess, in order to
+clear you of the wrong which you have done in denying that liberty. The
+deafening rattle which your wife shakes will follow you everywhere with its
+obtrusive din. Your darling will stun you, will torture you, meanwhile arming
+herself by making you feel only the thorns of married life. She will greet you
+with a radiant smile in public, and will be sullen at home. She will be dull
+when you are merry, and will make you detest her merriment when you are moody.
+Your two faces will present a perpetual contrast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very few men have sufficient force of mind not to succumb to this preliminary
+comedy, which is always cleverly played, and resembles the <i>hourra</i> raised
+by the Cossacks, as they advance to battle. Many husbands become irritated and
+fall into irreparable mistakes. Others abandon their wives. And, indeed, even
+those of superior intelligence do not know how to get hold of the enchanted
+ring, by which to dispel this feminine phantasmagoria.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two-thirds of such women are enabled to win their independence by this single
+manoeuvre, which is no more than a review of their forces. In this case the war
+is soon ended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But a strong man who courageously keeps cool throughout this first assault will
+find much amusement in laying bare to his wife, in a light and bantering way,
+the secret feelings which make her thus behave, in following her step by step
+through the labyrinth which she treads, and telling her in answer to her every
+remark, that she is false to herself, while he preserves throughout a tone of
+pleasantry and never becomes excited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile war is declared, and if her husband has not been dazzled by these
+first fireworks, a woman has yet many other resources for securing her triumph;
+and these it is the purpose of the following Meditations to discover.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXIV.</h3>
+
+<h5>PRINCIPLES OF STRATEGY.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The Archduke Charles published a very fine treatise on military under the title
+<i>Principles of Strategy in Relation to the Campaigns of 1796</i>. These
+principles seem somewhat to resemble poetic canons prepared for poems already
+published. In these days we are become very much more energetic, we invent
+rules to suit works and works to suit rules. But of what use were ancient
+principles of military art in presence of the impetuous genius of Napoleon? If,
+to-day, however, we reduce to a system the lessons taught by this great captain
+whose new tactics have destroyed the ancient ones, what future guarantee do we
+possess that another Napoleon will not yet be born? Books on military art meet,
+with few exceptions, the fate of ancient works on Chemistry and Physics.
+Everything is subject to change, either constant or periodic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This, in a few words, is the history of our work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So long as we have been dealing with a woman who is inert or lapped in slumber,
+nothing has been easier than to weave the meshes with which we have bound her;
+but the moment she wakes up and begins to struggle, all is confusion and
+complication. If a husband would make an effort to recall the principles of the
+system which we have just described in order to involve his wife in the nets
+which our second part has set for her, he would resemble Wurmser, Mack and
+Beaulieu arranging their halts and their marches while Napoleon nimbly turns
+their flank, and makes use of their own tactics to destroy them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is just what your wife will do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How is it possible to get at the truth when each of you conceals it under the
+same lie, each setting the same trap for the other? And whose will be the
+victory when each of you is caught in a similar snare?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear, I have to go out; I have to pay a visit to Madame So and So. I have
+ordered the carriage. Would you like to come with me? Come, be good, and go
+with your wife.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You say to yourself:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She would be nicely caught if I consented! She asks me only to be refused.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then you reply to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just at the moment I have some business with Monsieur Blank, for he has to
+give a report in a business matter which deeply concerns us both, and I must
+absolutely see him. Then I must go to the Minister of Finance. So your
+arrangement will suit us both.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, dearest, go and dress yourself, while Celine finishes dressing me;
+but don’t keep me waiting.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am ready now, love,” you cry out, at the end of ten minutes, as you stand
+shaved and dressed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But all is changed. A letter has arrived; madame is not well; her dress fits
+badly; the dressmaker has come; if it is not the dressmaker it is your mother.
+Ninety-nine out of a hundred husbands will leave the house satisfied, believing
+that their wives are well guarded, when, as a matter of fact, the wives have
+gotten rid of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A lawful wife who from her husband cannot escape, who is not distressed by
+pecuniary anxiety, and who in order to give employment to a vacant mind,
+examines night and day the changing tableaux of each day’s experience, soon
+discovers the mistake she has made in falling into a trap or allowing herself
+to be surprised by a catastrophe; she will then endeavor to turn all these
+weapons against you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is a man in society, the sight of whom is strangely annoying to your
+wife; she can tolerate neither his tone, his manners nor his way of regarding
+things. Everything connected with him is revolting to her; she is persecuted by
+him, he is odious to her; she hopes that no one will tell him this. It seems
+almost as if she were attempting to oppose you; for this man is one for whom
+you have the highest esteem. You like his disposition because he flatters you;
+and thus your wife presumes that your esteem for him results from flattered
+vanity. When you give a ball, an evening party or a concert, there is almost a
+discussion on this subject, and madame picks a quarrel with you, because you
+are compelling her to see people who are not agreeable to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At least, sir, I shall never have to reproach myself with omitting to warn
+you. That man will yet cause you trouble. You should put some confidence in
+women when they pass sentence on the character of a man. And permit me to tell
+you that this baron, for whom you have such a predilection, is a very dangerous
+person, and you are doing very wrong to bring him to your house. And this is
+the way you behave; you absolutely force me to see one whom I cannot tolerate,
+and if I ask you to invite Monsieur A——-, you refuse to do so, because you
+think that I like to have him with me! I admit that he talks well, that he is
+kind and amiable; but you are more to me than he can ever be.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These rude outlines of feminine tactics, which are emphasized by insincere
+gestures, by looks of feigned ingenuousness, by artful intonations of the voice
+and even by the snare of cunning silence, are characteristic to some degree of
+their whole conduct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are few husbands who in such circumstances as these do not form the idea
+of setting a mouse-trap; they welcome as their guests both Monsieur A——- and
+the imaginary baron who represents the person whom their wives abhor, and they
+do so in the hope of discovering a lover in the celibate who is apparently
+beloved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh yes, I have often met in the world young men who were absolutely starlings
+in love and complete dupes of a friendship which women pretended to show them,
+women who felt themselves obliged to make a diversion and to apply a blister to
+their husbands as their husbands had previously done to them! These poor
+innocents pass their time in running errands, in engaging boxes at the theatre,
+in riding in the Bois de Boulogne by the carriages of their pretended
+mistresses; they are publicly credited with possessing women whose hands they
+have not even kissed. Vanity prevents them from contradicting these flattering
+rumors, and like the young priests who celebrate masses without a Host, they
+enjoy a mere show passion, and are veritable supernumeraries of love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Under these circumstances sometimes a husband on returning home asks the
+porter: “Has no one been here?”—“M. le Baron came past at two o’clock to see
+monsieur; but as he found no one was in but madame he went away; but Monsieur
+A——- is with her now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You reach the drawing-room, you see there a young celibate, sprightly, scented,
+wearing a fine necktie, in short a perfect dandy. He is a man who holds you in
+high esteem; when he comes to your house your wife listens furtively for his
+footsteps; at a ball she always dances with him. If you forbid her to see him,
+she makes a great outcry and it is not till many years afterwards [see
+Meditation on <i>Las Symptoms</i>] that you see the innocence of Monsieur A——-
+and the culpability of the baron.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have observed and noted as one of the cleverest manoeuvres, that of a young
+woman who, carried away by an irresistible passion, exhibited a bitter hatred
+to the man she did not love, but lavished upon her lover secret intimations of
+her love. The moment that her husband was persuaded that she loved the
+<i>Cicisbeo</i> and hated the <i>Patito</i>, she arranged that she and the
+<i>Patito</i> should be found in a situation whose compromising character she
+had calculated in advance, and her husband and the execrated celibate were thus
+induced to believe that her love and her aversion were equally insincere. When
+she had brought her husband into the condition of perplexity, she managed that
+a passionate letter should fall into his hands. One evening in the midst of the
+admirable catastrophe which she had thus brought to a climax, madame threw
+herself at her husband’s feet, wet them with her tears, and thus concluded the
+climax to her own satisfaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I esteem and honor you profoundly,” she cried, “for keeping your own counsel
+as you have done. I am in love! Is this a sentiment which is easy for me to
+repress? But what I can do is to confess the fact to you; to implore you to
+protect me from myself, to save me from my own folly. Be my master and be a
+stern master to me; take me away from this place, remove me from what has
+caused all this trouble, console me; I will forget him, I desire to do so. I do
+not wish to betray you. I humbly ask your pardon for the treachery love has
+suggested to me. Yes, I confess to you that the love which I pretended to have
+for my cousin was a snare set to deceive you. I love him with the love of
+friendship and no more.—Oh! forgive me! I can love no one but”—her voice was
+choked in passionate sobs—“Oh! let us go away, let us leave Paris!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She began to weep; her hair was disheveled, her dress in disarray; it was
+midnight, and her husband forgave her. From henceforth, the cousin made his
+appearance without risk, and the Minotaur devoured one victim more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What instructions can we give for contending with such adversaries as these?
+Their heads contain all the diplomacy of the congress of Vienna; they have as
+much power when they are caught as when they escape. What man has a mind supple
+enough to lay aside brute force and strength and follow his wife through such
+mazes as these?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To make a false plea every moment, in order to elicit the truth, a true plea in
+order to unmask falsehood; to charge the battery when least expected, and to
+spike your gun at the very moment of firing it; to scale the mountain with the
+enemy, in order to descend to the plain again five minutes later; to accompany
+the foe in windings as rapid, as obscure as those of a plover on the breezes;
+to obey when obedience is necessary, and to oppose when resistance is inertial;
+to traverse the whole scale of hypotheses as a young artist with one stroke
+runs from the lowest to the highest note of his piano; to divine at last the
+secret purpose on which a woman is bent; to fear her caresses and to seek
+rather to find out what are the thoughts that suggested them and the pleasure
+which she derived from them—this is mere child’s pay for the man of intellect
+and for those lucid and searching imaginations which possess the gift of doing
+and thinking at the same time. But there are a vast number of husbands who are
+terrified at the mere idea of putting in practice these principles in their
+dealings with a woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such men as these prefer passing their lives in making huge efforts to become
+second-class chess-players, or to pocket adroitly a ball in billiards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of them will tell you that they are incapable of keeping their minds on
+such a constant strain and breaking up the habits of their life. In that case
+the woman triumphs. She recognizes that in mind and energy she is her husband’s
+superior, although the superiority may be but temporary; and yet there rises in
+her a feeling of contempt for the head of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If many man fail to be masters in their own house this is not from lack of
+willingness, but of talent. As for those who are ready to undergo the toils of
+this terrible duel, it is quite true that they must needs possess great moral
+force.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And really, as soon as it is necessary to display all the resources of this
+secret strategy, it is often useless to attempt setting any traps for these
+satanic creatures. Once women arrive at a point when they willfully deceive,
+their countenances become as inscrutable as vacancy. Here is an example which
+came within my own experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A very young, very pretty, and very clever coquette of Paris had not yet risen.
+Seated by her bed was one of her dearest friends. A letter arrived from
+another, a very impetuous fellow, to whom she had allowed the right of speaking
+to her like a master. The letter was in pencil and ran as follows:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I understand that Monsieur C——- is with you at this moment. I am waiting for
+him to blow his brains out.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame D——- calmly continued the conversation with Monsieur C——-. She asked him
+to hand her a little writing desk of red leather which stood on the table, and
+he brought it to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thanks, my dear,” she said to him; “go on talking, I am listening to you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+C——- talked away and she replied, all the while writing the following note:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As soon as you become jealous of C——- you two can blow out each other’s brains
+at your pleasure. As for you, you may die; but brains —you haven’t any brains
+to blow out.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear friend,” she said to C——-, “I beg you will light this candle. Good,
+you are charming. And now be kind enough to leave me and let me get up, and
+give this letter to Monsieur d’H——-, who is waiting at the door.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this was said with admirable coolness. The tones and intonations of her
+voice, the expression of her face showed no emotion. Her audacity was crowned
+with complete success. On receiving the answer from the hand of Monsieur C——-,
+Monsieur d’H——- felt his wrath subside. He was troubled with only one thing and
+that was how to disguise his inclination to laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The more torch-light one flings into the immense cavern which we are now trying
+to illuminate, the more profound it appears. It is a bottomless abyss. It
+appears to us that our task will be accomplished more agreeably and more
+instructively if we show the principles of strategy put into practice in the
+case of a woman, when she has reached a high degree of vicious accomplishment.
+An example suggests more maxims and reveals the existence of more methods than
+all possible theories.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day at the end of a dinner given to certain intimate friends by Prince
+Lebrun, the guests, heated by champagne, were discussing the inexhaustible
+subject of feminine artifice. The recent adventure which was credited to the
+Countess R. D. S. J. D. A——-, apropos of a necklace, was the subject first
+broached. A highly esteemed artist, a gifted friend of the emperor, was
+vigorously maintaining the opinion, which seemed somewhat unmanly, that it was
+forbidden to a man to resist successfully the webs woven by a woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is my happy experience,” he said, “that to them nothing is sacred.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ladies protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I can cite an instance in point.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is an exception!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let us hear the story,” said a young lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, tell it to us,” cried all the guests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The prudent old gentleman cast his eyes around, and, after having formed his
+conclusions as to the age of the ladies, smiled and said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Since we are all experienced in life, I consent to relate the adventure.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dead silence followed, and the narrator read the following from a little book
+which he had taken from his pocket:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was head over ears in love with the Comtesse de ——-. I was twenty and I was
+ingenuous. She deceived me. I was angry; she threw me over. I was ingenuous, I
+repeat, and I was grieved to lose her. I was twenty; she forgave me. And as I
+was twenty, as I was always ingenuous, always deceived, but never again thrown
+over by her, I believed myself to have been the best beloved of lovers,
+consequently the happiest of men. The countess had a friend, Madame de T——-,
+who seemed to have some designs on me, but without compromising her dignity;
+for she was scrupulous and respected the proprieties. One day while I was
+waiting for the countess in her Opera box, I heard my name called from a
+contiguous box. It was Madame de T——-.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What,” she said, “already here? Is this fidelity or merely a want of something
+to do? Won’t you come to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her voice and her manner had a meaning in them, but I was far from inclined at
+that moment to indulge in a romance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you any plans for this evening?” she said to me. “Don’t make any! If I
+cheer your tedious solitude you ought to be devoted to me. Don’t ask any
+questions, but obey. Call my servants.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I answered with a bow and on being requested to leave the Opera box, I obeyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Go to this gentleman’s house,” she said to the lackey. “Say he will not be
+home till to-morrow.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made a sign to him, he went to her, she whispered in his ear, and he left
+us. The Opera began. I tried to venture on a few words, but she silenced me;
+some one might be listening. The first act ended, the lackey brought back a
+note, and told her that everything was ready. Then she smiled, asked for my
+hand, took me off, put me in her carriage, and I started on my journey quite
+ignorant of my destination. Every inquiry I made was answered by a peal of
+laughter. If I had not been aware that this was a woman of great passion, that
+she had long loved the Marquis de V——-, that she must have known I was aware of
+it, I should have believed myself in good luck; but she knew the condition of
+my heart, and the Comtesse de ——-. I therefore rejected all presumptuous ideas
+and bided my time. At the first stop, a change of horses was supplied with the
+swiftness of lightning and we started afresh. The matter was becoming serious.
+I asked with some insistency, where this joke was to end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where?” she said, laughing. “In the pleasantest place in the world, but can’t
+you guess? I’ll give you a thousand chances. Give it up, for you will never
+guess. We are going to my husband’s house. Do you know him?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not in the least.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So much the better, I thought you didn’t. But I hope you will like him. We
+have lately become reconciled. Negotiations went on for six months; and we have
+been writing to one another for a month. I think it is very kind of me to go
+and look him up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It certainly is, but what am I going to do there? What good will I be in this
+reconciliation?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, that is my business. You are young, amiable, unconventional; you suit me
+and will save me from the tediousness of a tete-a-tete.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But it seems odd to me, to choose the day or the night of a reconciliation to
+make us acquainted; the awkwardness of the first interview, the figure all
+three of us will cut,—I don’t see anything particularly pleasant in that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have taken possession of you for my own amusement!” she said with an
+imperious air, “so please don’t preach.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I saw she was decided, so surrendered myself to circumstances. I began to laugh
+at my predicament and we became exceedingly merry. We again changed horses. The
+mysterious torch of night lit up a sky of extreme clearness and shed around a
+delightful twilight. We were approaching the spot where our tete-a-tete must
+end. She pointed out to me at intervals the beauty of the landscape, the
+tranquillity of the night, the all-pervading silence of nature. In order to
+admire these things in company as it was natural we should, we turned to the
+same window and our faces touched for a moment. In a sudden shock she seized my
+hand, and by a chance which seemed to me extraordinary, for the stone over
+which our carriage had bounded could not have been very large, I found Madame
+de T——- in my arms. I do not know what we were trying to see; what I am sure of
+is that the objects before our eyes began in spite of the full moon to grow
+misty, when suddenly I was released from her weight, and she sank into the back
+cushions of the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your object,” she said, rousing herself from a deep reverie, “is possibly to
+convince me of the imprudence of this proceeding. Judge, therefore, of my
+embarrassment!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My object!” I replied, “what object can I have with regard to you? What a
+delusion! You look very far ahead; but of course the sudden surprise or turn of
+chance may excuse anything.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have counted, then, upon that chance, it seems to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We had reached our destination, and before we were aware of it, we had entered
+the court of the chateau. The whole place was brightly lit up. Everything wore
+a festal air, excepting the face of its master, who at the sight of me seemed
+anything but delighted. He came forward and expressed in somewhat hesitating
+terms the tenderness proper to the occasion of a reconciliation. I understood
+later on that this reconciliation was absolutely necessary from family reasons.
+I was presented to him and was coldly greeted. He extended his hand to his
+wife, and I followed the two, thinking of my part in the past, in the present
+and in the future. I passed through apartments decorated with exquisite taste.
+The master in this respect had gone beyond all the ordinary refinement of
+luxury, in the hope of reanimating, by the influence of voluptuous imagery, a
+physical nature that was dead. Not knowing what to say, I took refuge in
+expressions of admiration. The goddess of the temple, who was quite ready to do
+the honors, accepted my compliments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have not seen anything,” she said. “I must take you to the apartments of
+my husband.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame, five years ago I caused them to be pulled down.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Indeed!” said she.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the dinner, what must she do but offer the master some fish, on which he
+said to her:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame, I have been living on milk for the last three years.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Indeed!” she said again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Can any one imagine three human beings as astonished as we were to find
+ourselves gathered together? The husband looked at me with a supercilious air,
+and I paid him back with a look of audacity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame de T——- smiled at me and was charming to me; Monsieur de T——- accepted
+me as a necessary evil. Never in all my life have I taken part in a dinner
+which was so odd as that. The dinner ended, I thought that we would go to bed
+early—that is, I thought that Monsieur de T——- would. As we entered the
+drawing-room:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I appreciate, madame,” said he, “your precaution in bringing this gentleman
+with you. You judged rightly that I should be but poor company for the evening,
+and you have done well, for I am going to retire.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then turning to me, he added in a tone of profound sarcasm:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You will please to pardon me, and obtain also pardon from madame.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He left us. My reflections? Well, the reflections of a twelvemonth were then
+comprised in those of a minute. When we were left alone, Madame de T——- and I,
+we looked at each other so curiously that, in order to break through the
+awkwardness, she proposed that we should take a turn on the terrace while we
+waited, as she said, until the servants had supped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a superb night. It was scarcely possible to discern surrounding objects,
+they seemed to be covered with a veil, that imagination might be permitted to
+take a loftier flight. The gardens, terraced on the side of a mountain, sloped
+down, platform after platform, to the banks of the Seine, and the eye took in
+the many windings of the stream covered with islets green and picturesque.
+These variations in the landscape made up a thousand pictures which gave to the
+spot, naturally charming, a thousand novel features. We walked along the most
+extensive of these terraces, which was covered with a thick umbrage of trees.
+She had recovered from the effects of her husband’s persiflage, and as we
+walked along she gave me her confidence. Confidence begets confidence, and as I
+told her mine, all she said to me became more intimate and more interesting.
+Madame de T——- at first gave me her arm; but soon this arm became interlaced in
+mine, I know not how, but in some way almost lifted her up and prevented her
+from touching the ground. The position was agreeable, but became at last
+fatiguing. We had been walking for a long time and we still had much to say to
+each other. A bank of turf appeared and she sat down without withdrawing her
+arm. And in this position we began to sound the praises of mutual confidence,
+its charms and its delights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah!” she said to me, “who can enjoy it more than we and with less cause of
+fear? I know well the tie that binds you to another, and therefore have nothing
+to fear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps she wished to be contradicted. But I answered not a word. We were then
+mutually persuaded that it was possible for us to be friends without fear of
+going further.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I was afraid, however,” I said, “that that sudden jolt in the carriage and
+the surprising consequences may have frightened you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I am not so easily alarmed!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I fear it has left a little cloud on your mind?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What must I do to reassure you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Give me the kiss here which chance—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will gladly do so; for if I do not, your vanity will lead you to think that
+I fear you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I took the kiss.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is with kisses as with confidences, the first leads to another. They are
+multiplied, they interrupt conversation, they take its place; they scarce leave
+time for a sigh to escape. Silence followed. We could hear it, for silence may
+be heard. We rose without a word and began to walk again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We must go in,” said she, “for the air of the river is icy, and it is not
+worth while—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think to go in would be more dangerous,” I answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps so! Never mind, we will go in.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, is this out of consideration for me? You wish doubtless to save me from
+the impressions which I may receive from such a walk as this —the consequences
+which may result. Is it for me—for me only—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are modest,” she said smiling, “and you credit me with singular
+consideration.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you think so? Well, since you take it in this way, we will go in; I demand
+it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A stupid proposition, when made by two people who are forcing themselves to say
+something utterly different from what they think.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she compelled me to take the path that led back to the chateau. I do not
+know, at least I did not then know, whether this course was one which she
+forced upon herself, whether it was the result of a vigorous resolution, or
+whether she shared my disappointment in seeing an incident which had begun so
+well thus suddenly brought to a close but by a mutual instinct our steps
+slackened and we pursued our way gloomily dissatisfied the one with the other
+and with ourselves. We knew not the why and the wherefore of what we were
+doing. Neither of us had the right to demand or even to ask anything. We had
+neither of us any ground for uttering a reproach. O that we had got up a
+quarrel! But how could I pick one with her? Meanwhile we drew nearer and
+nearer, thinking how we might evade the duty which we had so awkwardly imposed
+upon ourselves. We reached the door, when Madame de T——- said to me:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am angry with you! After the confidences I have given you, not to give me a
+single one! You have not said a word about the countess. And yet it is so
+delightful to speak of the one we love! I should have listened with such
+interest! It was the very best I could do after I had taken you away from her!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Cannot I reproach you with the same thing?” I said, interrupting her, “and if
+instead of making me a witness to this singular reconciliation in which I play
+so odd a part, you had spoken to me of the marquis—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Stop,” she said, “little as you know of women, you are aware that their
+confidences must be waited for, not asked. But to return to yourself. Are you
+very happy with my friend? Ah! I fear the contrary—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, madame, should everything that the public amuses itself by saying claim
+our belief?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You need not dissemble. The countess makes less a mystery of things than you
+do. Women of her stamp do not keep the secrets of their loves and of their
+lovers, especially when you are prompted by discretion to conceal her triumph.
+I am far from accusing her of coquetry; but a prude has as much vanity as a
+coquette.—Come, tell me frankly, have you not cause of complaint against her?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, madame, the air is really too icy for us to stay here. Would you like to
+go in?” said I with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you find it so?—That is singular. The air is quite warm.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had taken my arm again, and we continued to walk, although I did not know
+the direction which we took. All that she had hinted at concerning the lover of
+the countess, concerning my mistress, together with this journey, the incident
+which took place in the carriage, our conversation on the grassy bank, the time
+of night, the moonlight—all made me feel anxious. I was at the same time
+carried along by vanity, by desire, and so distracted by thought, that I was
+too excited perhaps to take notice of all that I was experiencing. And, while I
+was overwhelmed with these mingled feelings, she continued talking to me of the
+countess, and my silence confirmed the truth of all that she chose to say about
+her. Nevertheless, certain passages in her talk recalled me to myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What an exquisite creature she is!” she was saying. “How graceful! On her lips
+the utterances of treachery sound like witticism; an act of infidelity seems
+the prompting of reason, a sacrifice to propriety; while she is never reckless,
+she is always lovable; she is seldom tender and never sincere; amorous by
+nature, prudish on principle; sprightly, prudent, dexterous though utterly
+thoughtless, varied as Proteus in her moods, but charming as the Graces in her
+manner; she attracts but she eludes. What a number of parts I have seen her
+play! <i>Entre nous</i>, what a number of dupes hang round her! What fun she
+has made of the baron, what a life she has led the marquis! When she took you,
+it was merely for the purpose of throwing the two rivals off the scent; they
+were on the point of a rupture; for she had played with them too long, and they
+had had time to see through her. But she brought you on the scene. Their
+attention was called to you, she led them to redouble their pursuit, she was in
+despair over you, she pitied you, she consoled you— Ah! how happy is a clever
+woman when in such a game as this she professes to stake nothing of her own!
+But yet, is this true happiness?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This last phrase, accompanied by a significant sigh, was a master-stroke. I
+felt as if a bandage had fallen from my eyes, without seeing who had put it
+there. My mistress appeared to me the falsest of women, and I believed that I
+held now the only sensible creature in the world. Then I sighed without knowing
+why. She seemed grieved at having given me pain and at having in her excitement
+drawn a picture, the truth of which might be open to suspicion, since it was
+the work of a woman. I do not know how I answered; for without realizing the
+drift of all I heard, I set out with her on the high road of sentiment, and we
+mounted to such lofty heights of feeling that it was impossible to guess what
+would be the end of our journey. It was fortunate that we also took the path
+towards a pavilion which she pointed out to me at the end of the terrace, a
+pavilion, the witness of many sweet moments. She described to me the furnishing
+of it. What a pity that she had not the key! As she spoke we reached the
+pavilion and found that it was open. The clearness of the moonlight outside did
+not penetrate, but darkness has many charms. We trembled as we went in. It was
+a sanctuary. Might it not be the sanctuary of love? We drew near a sofa and sat
+down, and there we remained a moment listening to our heart-beats. The last ray
+of the moon carried away the last scruple. The hand which repelled me felt my
+heart beat. She struggled to get away, but fell back overcome with tenderness.
+We talked together through that silence in the language of thought. Nothing is
+more rapturous than these mute conversations. Madame de T——- took refuge in my
+arms, hid her head in my bosom, sighed and then grew calm under my caresses.
+She grew melancholy, she was consoled, and she asked of love all that love had
+robbed her of. The sound of the river broke the silence of night with a gentle
+murmur, which seemed in harmony with the beating of our hearts. Such was the
+darkness of the place it was scarcely possible to discern objects; but through
+the transparent crepe of a fair summer’s night, the queen of that lovely place
+seemed to me adorable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” she said to me with an angelic voice, “let us leave this dangerous spot.
+Resistance here is beyond our strength.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She drew me away and we left the pavilion with regret.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! how happy is she!” cried Madame de T——-.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Whom do you mean?” I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did I speak?” said she with a look of alarm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then we reached the grassy bank, and stopped there involuntarily. “What a
+distance there is,” she said to me, “between this place and the pavilion!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes indeed,” said I. “But must this bank be always ominous? Is there a regret?
+Is there—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not know by what magic it took place; but at this point the conversation
+changed and became less serious. She ventured even to speak playfully of the
+pleasures of love, to eliminate from them all moral considerations, to reduce
+them to their simplest elements, and to prove that the favors of lovers were
+mere pleasure, that there were no pledges—philosophically speaking—excepting
+those which were given to the world, when we allowed it to penetrate our
+secrets and joined it in the acts of indiscretion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How mild is the night,” she said, “which we have by chance picked out! Well,
+if there are reasons, as I suppose there are, which compel us to part
+to-morrow, our happiness, ignored as it is by all nature, will not leave us any
+ties to dissolve. There will, perhaps, be some regrets, the pleasant memory of
+which will give us reparation; and then there will be a mutual understanding,
+without all the delays, the fuss and the tyranny of legal proceedings. We are
+such machines—and I blush to avow it—that in place of all the shrinkings that
+tormented me before this scene took place, I was half inclined to embrace the
+boldness of these principles, and I felt already disposed to indulge in the
+love of liberty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This beautiful night,” she continued, “this lovely scenery at this moment have
+taken on fresh charms. O let us never forget this pavilion! The chateau,” she
+added smilingly, “contains a still more charming place, but I dare not show you
+anything; you are like a child, who wishes to touch everything and breaks
+everything that he touches.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moved by a sentiment of curiosity I protested that I was a very good child. She
+changed the subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This night,” she said, “would be for me without a regret if I were not vexed
+with myself for what I said to you about the countess. Not that I wish to find
+fault with you. Novelty attracts me. You have found me amiable, I should like
+to believe in your good faith. But the dominion of habit takes a long time to
+break through and I have not learned the secret of doing this—By the bye, what
+do you think of my husband?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, he is rather cross, but I suppose he could not be otherwise to me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, that is true, but his way of life isn’t pleasant, and he could not see you
+here with indifference. He might be suspicious even of our friendship.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! he is so already.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Confess that he has cause. Therefore you must not prolong this visit; he might
+take it amiss. As soon as any one arrives—” and she added with a smile, “some
+one is going to arrive—you must go. You have to keep up appearance, you know.
+Remember his manner when he left us to-night.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was tempted to interpret this adventure as a trap, but as she noticed the
+impression made by her words, she added:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, he was very much gayer when he was superintending the arrangement of the
+cabinet I told you about. That was before my marriage. This passage leads to my
+apartment. Alas! it testifies to the cunning artifices to which Monsieur de
+T——- has resorted in protecting his love for me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How pleasant it would be,” I said to her, keenly excited by the curiosity she
+had roused in me, “to take vengeance in this spot for the insults which your
+charms have suffered, and to seek to make restitution for the pleasures of
+which you have been robbed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She doubtless thought this remark in good taste, but she said: “You promised to
+be good!”
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p>
+I threw a veil over the follies which every age will pardon to youth, on the
+ground of so many balked desires and bitter memories. In the morning, scarcely
+raising her liquid eyes, Madame de T——-, fairer than ever, said to me:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now will you ever love the countess as much as you do me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I was about to answer when her maid, her confidante, appeared saying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must go. It is broad daylight, eleven o’clock, and the chateau is already
+awake.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All had vanished like a dream! I found myself wandering through the corridors
+before I had recovered my senses. How could I regain my apartment, not knowing
+where it was? Any mistake might bring about an exposure. I resolved on a
+morning walk. The coolness of the fresh air gradually tranquilized my
+imagination and brought me back to the world of reality; and now instead of a
+world of enchantment I saw myself in my soul, and my thoughts were no longer
+disturbed but followed each other in connected order; in fact, I breathed once
+more. I was, above all things, anxious to learn what I was to her so lately
+left—I who knew that she had been desperately in love with the Marquis de V——-.
+Could she have broken with him? Had she taken me to be his successor, or only
+to punish him? What a night! What an adventure! Yes, and what a delightful
+woman! While I floated on the waves of these thoughts, I heard a sound near at
+hand. I raised my eyes, I rubbed them, I could not believe my senses. Can you
+guess who it was? The Marquis de V——-!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You did not expect to see me so early, did you?” he said. “How has it all gone
+off?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you know that I was here?” I asked in utter amazement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, I received word just as you left Paris. Have you played your part
+well? Did not the husband think your visit ridiculous? Was he put out? When are
+you going to take leave? You had better go, I have made every provision for
+you. I have brought you a good carriage. It is at your service. This is the way
+I requite you, my dear friend. You may rely on me in the future, for a man is
+grateful for such services as yours.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These last words gave me the key to the whole mystery, and I saw how I stood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But why should you have come so soon?” I asked him; “it would have been more
+prudent to have waited a few days.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I foresaw that; and it is only chance that has brought me here. I am supposed
+to be on my way back from a neighboring country house. But has not Madame de
+T——- taken you into her secret? I am surprised at her want of confidence, after
+all you have done for us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear friend,” I replied, “she doubtless had her reasons. Perhaps I did not
+play my part very well.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Has everything been very pleasant? Tell me the particulars; come, tell me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now wait a moment. I did not know that this was to be a comedy; and although
+Madame de T——- gave me a part in the play—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It wasn’t a very nice one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do not worry yourself; there are no bad parts for good actors.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I understand, you acquitted yourself well.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Admirably.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And Madame de T——-?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is adorable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To think of being able to win such a woman!” said he, stopping short in our
+walk, and looking triumphantly at me. “Oh, what pains I have taken with her!
+And I have at last brought her to a point where she is perhaps the only woman
+in Paris on whose fidelity a man may infallibly count!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have succeeded—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes; in that lies my special talent. Her inconstancy was mere frivolity,
+unrestrained imagination. It was necessary to change that disposition of hers,
+but you have no idea of her attachment to me. But really, is she not charming?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I quite agree with you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And yet <i>entre nous</i> I recognize one fault in her. Nature in giving her
+everything, has denied her that flame divine which puts the crown on all other
+endowments; while she rouses in others the ardor of passion, she feels none
+herself, she is a thing of marble.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am compelled to believe you, for I have had no opportunity of judging, but
+do you think that you know that woman as well as if you were her husband? It is
+possible to be deceived. If I had not dined yesterday with the veritable—I
+should take you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“By the way, has he been good?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I was received like a dog!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I understand. Let us go in, let us look for Madame de T——-. She must be up by
+this time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But should we not out of decency begin with the husband?” I said to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are right. Let us go to your room, I wish to put on a little powder. But
+tell me, did he really take you for her lover?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You may judge by the way he receives me; but let us go at once to his
+apartment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I wished to avoid having to lead him to an apartment whose whereabouts I did
+not know; but by chance we found it. The door was open and there I saw my
+<i>valet de chambre</i> asleep on an armchair. A candle was going out on a
+table beside him. He drowsily offered a night robe to the marquis. I was on
+pins and needles; but the marquis was in a mood to be easily deceived, took the
+man for a mere sleepy-head, and made a joke of the matter. We passed on to the
+apartment of Monsieur de T——-. There was no misunderstanding the reception
+which he accorded me, and the welcome, the compliments which he addressed to
+the marquis, whom he almost forced to stay. He wished to take him to madame in
+order that she might insist on his staying. As for me, I received no such
+invitation. I was reminded that my health was delicate, the country was damp,
+fever was in the air, and I seemed so depressed that the chateau would prove
+too gloomy for me. The marquis offered me his chaise and I accepted it. The
+husband seemed delighted and we were all satisfied. But I could not refuse
+myself the pleasure of seeing Madame de T——- once more. My impatience was
+wonderful. My friend conceived no suspicions from the late sleep of his
+mistress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Isn’t this fine?” he said to me as we followed Monsieur de T——-. “He couldn’t
+have spoken more kindly if she had dictated his words. He is a fine fellow. I
+am not in the least annoyed by this reconciliation; they will make a good home
+together, and you will agree with me, that he could not have chosen a wife
+better able to do the honors.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly,” I replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“However pleasant the adventure has been,” he went on with an air of mystery,
+“you must be off! I will let Madame de T——- understand that her secret will be
+well kept.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“On that point, my friend, she perhaps counts more on me than on you; for you
+see her sleep is not disturbed by the matter.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! I quite agree that there is no one like you for putting a woman to sleep.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, and a husband too, and if necessary a lover, my dear friend.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last Monsieur de T——- was admitted to his wife’s apartment, and there we
+were all summoned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I trembled,” said Madame de T——- to me, “for fear you would go before I awoke,
+and I thank you for saving me the annoyance which that would have caused me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame,” I said, and she must have perceived the feeling that was in my
+tones—“I come to say good-bye.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at me and at the marquis with an air of disquietude; but the
+self-satisfied, knowing look of her lover reassured her. She laughed in her
+sleeve with me as if she would console me as well as she could, without
+lowering herself in my eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He has played his part well,” the marquis said to her in a low voice, pointing
+to me, “and my gratitude—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let us drop the subject,” interrupted Madame de T——-; “you may be sure that I
+am well aware of all I owe him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last Monsieur de T——-, with a sarcastic remark, dismissed me; my friend
+threw the dust in his eyes by making fun of me; and I paid back both of them by
+expressing my admiration for Madame de T——-, who made fools of us all without
+forfeiting her dignity. I took myself off; but Madame de T——- followed me,
+pretending to have a commission to give me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adieu, monsieur!” she said, “I am indebted to you for the very great pleasure
+you have given me; but I have paid you back with a beautiful dream,” and she
+looked at me with an expression of subtle meaning. “But adieu, and forever! You
+have plucked a solitary flower, blossoming in its loveliness, which no man—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stopped and her thought evaporated in a sigh; but she checked the rising
+flood of sensibility and smiled significantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The countess loves you,” she said. “If I have robbed her of some transports, I
+give you back to her less ignorant than before. Adieu! Do not make mischief
+between my friend and me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She wrung my hand and left me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More than once the ladies who had mislaid their fans blushed as they listened
+to the old gentleman, whose brilliant elocution won their indulgence for
+certain details which we have suppressed, as too erotic for the present age;
+nevertheless, we may believe that each lady complimented him in private; for
+some time afterwards he gave to each of them, as also to the masculine guests,
+a copy of this charming story, twenty-five copies of which were printed by
+Pierre Didot. It is from copy No. 24 that the author has transcribed this tale,
+hitherto unpublished, and, strange to say, attributed to Dorat. It has the
+merit of yielding important lessons for husbands, while at the same time it
+gives the celibates a delightful picture of morals in the last century.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXV.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF ALLIES.</h5>
+
+<p>
+Of all the miseries that civil war can bring upon a country the greatest lies
+in the appeal which one of the contestants always ends by making to some
+foreign government.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unhappily we are compelled to confess that all women make this great mistake,
+for the lover is only the first of their soldiers. It may be a member of their
+family or at least a distant cousin. This Meditation, then, is intended to
+answer the inquiry, what assistance can each of the different powers which
+influence human life give to your wife? or better than that, what artifices
+will she resort to to arm them against you?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two beings united by marriage are subject to the laws of religion and society;
+to those of private life, and, from considerations of health, to those of
+medicine. We will therefore divide this important Meditation into six
+paragraphs:
+</p>
+
+<h4>1. OF RELIGIONS AND OF CONFESSION; CONSIDERED IN THEIR CONNECTION WITH
+MARRIAGE. 2. OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW. 3. OF BOARDING SCHOOL FRIENDS AND INTIMATE
+FRIENDS. 4. OF THE LOVER’S ALLIES. 5. OF THE MAID. 6. OF THE DOCTOR.</h4>
+
+<h4>1. OF RELIGIONS AND OF CONFESSION; CONSIDERED IN THEIR CONNECTION
+WITH MARRIAGE.</h4>
+
+<p>
+La Bruyere has very wittily said, “It is too much for a husband to have ranged
+against him both devotion and gallantry; a woman ought to choose but one of
+them for her ally.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author thinks that La Bruyere is mistaken.
+</p>
+
+<h4>2. OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Up to the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign
+tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the <i>feminisms</i> of
+the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble
+riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is another old woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some diplomats have attempted on more than one occasion the diabolical task of
+gaining over the dowagers who opposed their machinations; but if they have ever
+succeeded it was only after making enormous concessions to them; for diplomats
+are practiced people and we do not think that you can employ their recipe in
+dealing with your mother-in-law. She will be the first aid-de-camp of her
+daughter, for if the mother did not take her daughter’s side, it would be one
+of those monstrous and unnatural exceptions, which unhappily for husbands are
+extremely rare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a man is so happy as to possess a mother-in-law who is well-preserved, he
+may easily keep her in check for a certain time, although he may not know any
+young celibate brave enough to assail her. But generally husbands who have the
+slightest conjugal genius will find a way of pitting their own mother against
+that of their wife, and in that case they will naturally neutralize each
+other’s power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in Paris, and
+vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too rarely meets with.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What of making mischief between the mother and the daughter?—That may be
+possible; but in order to accomplish such an enterprise he must have the
+metallic heart of Richelieu, who made a son and a mother deadly enemies to each
+other. However, the jealousy of a husband who forbids his wife to pray to male
+saints and wishes her to address only female saints, would allow her liberty to
+see her mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many sons-in-law take an extreme course which settles everything, which
+consists in living on bad terms with their mothers-in-law. This unfriendliness
+would be very adroit policy, if it did not inevitably result in drawing tighter
+the ties that unite mother and daughter. These are about all the means which
+you have for resisting maternal influence in your home. As for the services
+which your wife can claim from her mother, they are immense; and the assistance
+which she may derive from the neutrality of her mother is not less powerful.
+But on this point everything passes out of the domain of science, for all is
+veiled in secrecy. The reinforcements which a mother brings up in support of a
+daughter are so varied in nature, they depend so much on circumstances, that it
+would be folly to attempt even a nomenclature for them. Yet you may write out
+among the most valuable precepts of this conjugal gospel, the following maxims.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A husband should never let his wife visit her mother unattended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A husband ought to study all the reasons why all the celibates under forty who
+form her habitual society are so closely united by ties of friendship to his
+mother-in-law; for, if a daughter rarely falls in love with the lover of her
+mother, her mother has always a weak spot for her daughter’s lover.
+</p>
+
+<h4>3. OF BOARDING SCHOOL FRIENDS AND INTIMATE FRIENDS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Louise de L——-, daughter of an officer killed at Wagram, had been the object of
+Napoleon’s special protection. She left Ecouen to marry a commissary general,
+the Baron de V——-, who is very rich.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Louise was eighteen and the baron forty. She was ordinary in face and her
+complexion could not be called white, but she had a charming figure, good eyes,
+a small foot, a pretty hand, good taste and abundant intelligence. The baron,
+worn out by the fatigues of war and still more by the excesses of a stormy
+youth, had one of those faces upon which the Republic, the Directory, the
+Consulate and the Empire seemed to have set their impress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He became so deeply in love with his wife, that he asked and obtained from the
+Emperor a post at Paris, in order that he might be enabled to watch over his
+treasure. He was as jealous as Count Almaviva, still more from vanity than from
+love. The young orphan had married her husband from necessity, and, flattered
+by the ascendancy she wielded over a man much older than herself, waited upon
+his wishes and his needs; but her delicacy was offended from the first days of
+their marriage by the habits and ideas of a man whose manners were tinged with
+republican license. He was a predestined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not know exactly how long the baron made his honeymoon last, nor when war
+was declared in his household; but I believe it happened in 1816, at a very
+brilliant ball given by Monsieur D——-, a commissariat officer, that the
+commissary general, who had been promoted head of the department, admired the
+beautiful Madame B——-, the wife of a banker, and looked at her much more
+amorously than a married man should have allowed himself to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At two o’clock in the morning it happened that the banker, tired of waiting any
+longer, went home leaving his wife at the ball.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We are going to take you home to your house,” said the baroness to Madame
+B——-. “Monsieur de V——-, offer your arm to Emilie!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now the baron is seated in his carriage next to a woman who, during the
+whole evening, had been offered and had refused a thousand attentions, and from
+whom he had hoped in vain to win a single look. There she was, in all the
+lustre of her youth and beauty, displaying the whitest shoulders and the most
+ravishing lines of beauty. Her face, which still reflected the pleasures of the
+evening, seemed to vie with the brilliancy of her satin gown; her eyes to rival
+the blaze of her diamonds; and her skin to cope with the soft whiteness of the
+marabouts which tied in her hair, set off the ebon tresses and the ringlets
+dangling from her headdress. Her tender voice would stir the chords of the most
+insensible hearts; in a word, so powerfully did she wake up love in the human
+breast that Robert d’Abrissel himself would perhaps have yielded to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The baron glanced at his wife, who, overcome with fatigue, had sunk to sleep in
+a corner of the carriage. He compared, in spite of himself, the toilette of
+Louise and that of Emilie. Now on occasions of this kind the presence of a wife
+is singularly calculated to sharpen the unquenchable desires of a forbidden
+love. Moreover, the glances of the baron, directed alternately to his wife and
+to her friend, were easy to interpret, and Madame B——- interpreted them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poor Louise,” she said, “she is overtired. Going out does not suit her, her
+tastes are so simple. At Ecouen she was always reading—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And you, what used you to do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I, sir? Oh, I thought about nothing but acting comely. It was my passion!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But why do you so rarely visit Madame de V——-? We have a country house at
+Saint-Prix, where we could have a comedy acted, in a little theatre which I
+have built there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If I have not visited Madame de V——-, whose fault is it?” she replied. “You
+are so jealous that you will not allow her either to visit her friends or to
+receive them.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I jealous!” cried Monsieur de V——-, “after four years of marriage, and after
+having had three children!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hush,” said Emilie, striking the fingers of the baron with her fan, “Louise is
+not asleep!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage stopped, and the baron offered his hand to his wife’s fair friend
+and helped her to get out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I hope,” said Madame B——-, “that you will not prevent Louise from coming to
+the ball which I am giving this week.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The baron made her a respectful bow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This ball was a triumph of Madame B——-’s and the ruin of the husband of Louise;
+for he became desperately enamored of Emilie, to whom he would have sacrificed
+a hundred lawful wives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some months after that evening on which the baron gained some hopes of
+succeeding with his wife’s friend, he found himself one morning at the house of
+Madame B——-, when the maid came to announce the Baroness de V——-.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah!” cried Emilie, “if Louise were to see you with me at such an hour as this,
+she would be capable of compromising me. Go into that closet and don’t make the
+least noise.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The husband, caught like a mouse in a trap, concealed himself in the closet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good-day, my dear!” said the two women, kissing each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why are you come so early?” asked Emilie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! my dear, cannot you guess? I came to have an understanding with you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What, a duel?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Precisely, my dear. I am not like you, not I! I love my husband and am jealous
+of him. You! you are beautiful, charming, you have the right to be a coquette,
+you can very well make fun of B——-, to whom your virtue seems to be of little
+importance. But as you have plenty of lovers in society, I beg you that you
+will leave me my husband. He is always at your house, and he certainly would
+not come unless you were the attraction.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What a very pretty jacket you have on.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you think so? My maid made it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then I shall get Anastasia to take a lesson from Flore—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So, then, my dear, I count on your friendship to refrain from bringing trouble
+in my house.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, my child, I do not know how you can conceive that I should fall in love
+with your husband; he is coarse and fat as a deputy of the centre. He is short
+and ugly—Ah! I will allow that he is generous, but that is all you can say for
+him, and this is a quality which is all in all only to opera girls; so that you
+can understand, my dear, that if I were choosing a lover, as you seem to
+suppose I am, I wouldn’t choose an old man like your baron. If I have given him
+any hopes, if I have received him, it was certainly for the purpose of amusing
+myself, and of giving you liberty; for I believed you had a weakness for young
+Rostanges.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I?” exclaimed Louise, “God preserve me from it, my dear; he is the most
+intolerable coxcomb in the world. No, I assure you, I love my husband! You may
+laugh as you choose; it is true. I know it may seem ridiculous, but consider,
+he has made my fortune, he is no miser, and he is everything to me, for it has
+been my unhappy lot to be left an orphan. Now even if I did not love him, I
+ought to try to preserve his esteem. Have I a family who will some day give me
+shelter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, my darling, let us speak no more about it,” said Emilie, interrupting
+her friend, “for it tires me to death.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a few trifling remarks the baroness left.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is this, monsieur?” cried Madame B——-, opening the door of the closet
+where the baron was frozen with cold, for this incident took place in winter;
+“how is this? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for not adoring a little wife who
+is so interesting? Don’t speak to me of love; you may idolize me, as you say
+you do, for a certain time, but you will never love me as you love Louise. I
+can see that in your heart I shall never outweigh the interest inspired by a
+virtuous wife, children, and a family circle. I should one day be deserted and
+become the object of your bitter reflections. You would coldly say of me ‘I
+have had that woman!’ That phrase I have heard pronounced by men with the most
+insulting indifference. You see, monsieur, that I reason in cold blood, and
+that I do not love you, because you never would be able to love me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What must I do then to convince you of my love?” cried the baron, fixing his
+gaze on the young woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had never appeared to him so ravishingly beautiful as at that moment, when
+her soft voice poured forth a torrent of words whose sternness was belied by
+the grace of her gestures, by the pose of her head and by her coquettish
+attitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, when I see Louise in possession of a lover,” she replied, “when I know
+that I am taking nothing away from her, and that she has nothing to regret in
+losing your affection; when I am quite sure that you love her no longer, and
+have obtained certain proof of your indifference towards her—Oh, then I may
+listen to you!—These words must seem odious to you,” she continued in an
+earnest voice; “and so indeed they are, but do not think that they have been
+pronounced by me. I am the rigorous mathematician who makes his deductions from
+a preliminary proposition. You are married, and do you deliberately set about
+making love to some one else? I should be mad to give any encouragement to a
+man who cannot be mine eternally.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Demon!” exclaimed the husband. “Yes, you are a demon, and not a woman!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come now, you are really amusing!” said the young woman as she seized the
+bell-rope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! no, Emilie,” continued the lover of forty, in a calmer voice. “Do not
+ring; stop, forgive me! I will sacrifice everything for you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But I do not promise you anything!” she answered quickly with a laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My God! How you make me suffer!” he exclaimed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, and have not you in your life caused the unhappiness of more than one
+person?” she asked. “Remember all the tears which have been shed through you
+and for you! Oh, your passion does not inspire me with the least pity. If you
+do not wish to make me laugh, make me share your feelings.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adieu, madame, there is a certain clemency in your sternness. I appreciate the
+lesson you have taught me. Yes, I have many faults to expiate.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well then, go and repent of them,” she said with a mocking smile; “in making
+Louise happy you will perform the rudest penance in your power.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They parted. But the love of the baron was too violent to allow of Madame
+B——-’s harshness failing to accomplish her end, namely, the separation of the
+married couple.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of some months the Baron de V——- and his wife lived apart, though
+they lived in the same mansion. The baroness was the object of universal pity,
+for in public she always did justice to her husband and her resignation seemed
+wonderful. The most prudish women of society found nothing to blame in the
+friendship which united Louise to the young Rostanges. And all was laid to the
+charge of Monsieur de V——-’s folly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When this last had made all the sacrifices that a man could make for Madame
+B——-, his perfidious mistress started for the waters of Mount Dore, for
+Switzerland and for Italy, on the pretext of seeking the restoration of her
+health.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The baron died of inflammation of the liver, being attended during his sickness
+by the most touching ministrations which his wife could lavish upon him; and
+judging from the grief which he manifested at having deserted her, he seemed
+never to have suspected her participation in the plan which had been his ruin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This anecdote, which we have chosen from a thousand others, exemplifies the
+services which two women can render each other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the words—“Let me have the pleasure of bringing my husband” up to the
+conception of the drama, whose denouement was inflammation of the liver, every
+female perfidy was assembled to work out the end. Certain incidents will, of
+course, be met with which diversify more or less the typical example which we
+have given, but the march of the drama is almost always the same. Moreover a
+husband ought always to distrust the woman friends of his wife. The subtle
+artifices of these lying creatures rarely fail of their effect, for they are
+seconded by two enemies, who always keep close to a man—and these are vanity
+and desire.
+</p>
+
+<h4>4. OF THE LOVER’S ALLIES.</h4>
+
+<p>
+The man who hastens to tell another man that he has dropped a thousand franc
+bill from his pocket-book, or even that the handkerchief is coming out of his
+pocket, would think it a mean thing to warn him that some one was carrying off
+his wife. There is certainly something extremely odd in this moral
+inconsistency, but after all it admits of explanation. Since the law cannot
+exercise any interference with matrimonial rights, the citizens have even less
+right to constitute themselves a conjugal police; and when one restores a
+thousand franc bill to him who has lost it, he acts under a certain kind of
+obligation, founded on the principle which says, “Do unto others as ye would
+they should do unto you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But by what reasoning can justification be found for the help which one
+celibate never asks in vain, but always receives from another celibate in
+deceiving a husband, and how shall we qualify the rendering of such help? A man
+who is incapable of assisting a gendarme in discovering an assassin, has no
+scruple in taking a husband to a theatre, to a concert or even to a
+questionable house, in order to help a comrade, whom he would not hesitate to
+kill in a duel to-morrow, in keeping an assignation, the result of which is to
+introduce into a family a spurious child, and to rob two brothers of a portion
+of their fortune by giving them a co-heir whom they never perhaps would
+otherwise have had; or to effect the misery of three human beings. We must
+confess that integrity is a very rare virtue, and, very often, the man that
+thinks he has most actually has least. Families have been divided by feuds, and
+brothers have been murdered, which events would never have taken place if some
+friend had refused to perform what passes to the world as a harmless trick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is impossible for a man to be without some hobby or other, and all of us are
+devoted either to hunting, fishing, gambling, music, money, or good eating.
+Well, your ruling passion will always be an accomplice in the snare which a
+lover sets for you, the invisible hand of this passion will direct your
+friends, or his, whether they consent or not, to play a part in the little
+drama when they want to take you away from home, or to induce you to leave your
+wife to the mercy of another. A lover will spend two whole months, if
+necessary, in planning the construction of the mouse-trap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I have seen the most cunning men on earth thus taken in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a certain retired lawyer of Normandy. He lived in the little town of
+B——-, where a regiment of the chasseurs of Cantal were garrisoned. A
+fascinating officer of this regiment had fallen in love with the wife of this
+pettifogger, and the regiment was leaving before the two lovers had been able
+to enjoy the least privacy. It was the fourth military man over whom the lawyer
+had triumphed. As he left the dinner-table one evening, about six o’clock, the
+husband took a walk on the terrace of his garden from which he could see the
+whole country side. The officers arrived at this moment to take leave of him.
+Suddenly the flame of a conflagration burst forth on the horizon. “Heavens! La
+Daudiniere is on fire!” exclaimed the major. He was an old simple-minded
+soldier, who had dined at home. Every one mounted horse. The young wife smiled
+as she found herself alone, for her lover, hidden in the coppice, had said to
+her, “It is a straw stack on fire!” The flank of the husband was turned with
+all the more facility in that a fine courser was provided for him by the
+captain, and with a delicacy very rare in the cavalry, the lover actually
+sacrificed a few moments of his happiness in order to catch up with the
+cavalcade, and return in company with the husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marriage is a veritable duel, in which persistent watchfulness is required in
+order to triumph over an adversary; for, if you are unlucky enough to turn your
+head, the sword of the celibate will pierce you through and through.
+</p>
+
+<h4>5. OF THE MAID.</h4>
+
+<p>
+The prettiest waiting-maid I have ever seen is that of Madame V——y, a lady who
+to-day plays at Paris a brilliant part among the most fashionable women, and
+passes for a wife who keeps on excellent terms with her husband. Mademoiselle
+Celestine is a person whose points of beauty are so numerous that, in order to
+describe her, it would be necessary to translate the thirty verses which we are
+told form an inscription in the seraglio of the Grand Turk and contain each of
+them an excellent description of one of the thirty beauties of women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You show a great deal of vanity in keeping near you such an accomplished
+creature,” said a lady to the mistress of the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! my dear, some day perhaps you will find yourself jealous of me in
+possessing Celestine.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She must be endowed with very rare qualities, I suppose? She perhaps dresses
+you well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, no, very badly!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She sews well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She never touches her needle.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She is faithful?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She is one of those whose fidelity costs more than the most cunning
+dishonesty.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You astonish me, my dear; she is then your foster-sister?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not at all; she is positively good for nothing, but she is more useful to me
+than any other member of my household. If she remains with me ten years, I have
+promised her twenty thousand francs. It will be money well earned, and I shall
+not forget to give it!” said the young woman, nodding her head with a meaning
+gesture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last the questioner of Madame V——y understood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a woman has no friend of her own sex intimate enough to assist her in
+proving false to marital love, her maid is a last resource which seldom fails
+in bringing about the desired result.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh! after ten years of marriage to find under his roof, and to see all the
+time, a young girl of from sixteen to eighteen, fresh, dressed with taste, the
+treasures of whose beauty seem to breathe defiance, whose frank bearing is
+irresistibly attractive, whose downcast eyes seem to fear you, whose timid
+glance tempts you, and for whom the conjugal bed has no secrets, for she is at
+once a virgin and an experienced woman! How can a man remain cold, like St.
+Anthony, before such powerful sorcery, and have the courage to remain faithful
+to the good principles represented by a scornful wife, whose face is always
+stern, whose manners are always snappish, and who frequently refuses to be
+caressed? What husband is stoical enough to resist such fires, such frosts?
+There, where you see a new harvest of pleasure, the young innocent sees an
+income, and your wife her liberty. It is a little family compact, which is
+signed in the interest of good will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this case, your wife acts with regard to marriage as young fashionables do
+with regard to their country. If they are drawn for the army, they buy a man to
+carry the musket, to die in their place and to spare them the hardships of
+military life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In compromises of this sort there is not a single woman who does not know how
+to put her husband in the wrong. I have noticed that, by a supreme stroke of
+diplomacy, the majority of wives do not admit their maids into the secret of
+the part which they give them to play. They trust to nature, and assume an
+affected superiority over the lover and his mistress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These secret perfidies of women explain to a great degree the odd features of
+married life which are to be observed in the world; and I have heard women
+discuss, with profound sagacity, the dangers which are inherent in this
+terrible method of attack, and it is necessary to know thoroughly both the
+husband and the creature to whom he is to be abandoned, in order to make
+successful use of her. Many a woman, in this connection, has been the victim of
+her own calculations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Moreover, the more impetuous and passionate a husband shows himself, the less
+will a woman dare to employ this expedient; but a husband caught in this snare
+will never have anything to say to his stern better-half, when the maid, giving
+evidence of the fault she has committed, is sent into the country with an
+infant and a dowry.
+</p>
+
+<h4>6. OF THE DOCTOR.</h4>
+
+<p>
+The doctor is one of the most potent auxiliaries of an honest woman, when she
+wishes to acquire a friendly divorce from her husband. The services that the
+doctor renders, most of the time without knowing it, to a woman, are of such
+importance that there does not exist a single house in France where the doctor
+is chosen by any one but the wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All doctors know what great influence women have on their reputation; thus we
+meet with few doctors who do not study to please the ladies. When a man of
+talent has become celebrated it is true that he does not lend himself to the
+crafty conspiracies which women hatch; but without knowing it he becomes
+involved in them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I suppose that a husband taught by the adventures of his own youth makes up his
+mind to pick out a doctor for his wife, from the first days of his marriage. So
+long as his feminine adversary fails to conceive the assistance that she may
+derive from this ally, she will submit in silence; but later on, if all her
+allurements fail to win over the man chosen by her husband, she will take a
+more favorable opportunity to give her husband her confidence, in the following
+remarkable manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t like the way in which the doctor feels my pulse!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And of course the doctor is dropped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus it happens that either a woman chooses her doctor, wins over the man who
+has been imposed upon her, or procures his dismissal. But this contest is very
+rare; the majority of young men who marry are acquainted with none but
+beardless doctors whom they have no anxiety to procure for their wives, and
+almost always the Esculapius of the household is chosen by the feminine power.
+Thus it happens that some fine morning the doctor, when he leaves the chamber
+of madame, who has been in bed for a fortnight, is induced by her to say to
+you:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not say that the condition of madame presents any serious symptoms; but
+this constant drowsiness, this general listlessness, and her natural tendency
+to a spinal affection demand great care. Her lymph is inspissated. She wants a
+change of air. She ought to be sent either to the waters of Bareges or to the
+waters of Plombieres.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All right, doctor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You allow your wife to go to Plombieres; but she goes there because Captain
+Charles is quartered in the Vosges. She returns in capital health and the
+waters of Plombieres have done wonders for her. She has written to you every
+day, she has lavished upon you from a distance every possible caress. The
+danger of a spinal affection has utterly disappeared.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is extant a little pamphlet, whose publication was prompted doubtless by
+hate. It was published in Holland, and it contains some very curious details of
+the manner in which Madame de Maintenon entered into an understanding with
+Fagon, for the purposes of controlling Louis XIV. Well, some morning your
+doctor will threaten you, as Fagon threatened his master, with a fit of
+apoplexy, if you do not diet yourself. This witty work of satire, doubtless the
+production of some courtier, entitled “Madame de Saint Tron,” has been
+interpreted by the modern author who has become proverbial as “the young
+doctor.” But his delightful sketch is very much superior to the work whose
+title I cite for the benefit of the book-lovers, and we have great pleasure in
+acknowledging that the work of our clever contemporary has prevented us, out of
+regard for the glory of the seventeenth century, from publishing the fragment
+of the old pamphlet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very frequently a doctor becomes duped by the judicious manoeuvres of a young
+and delicate wife, and comes to you with the announcement:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir, I would not wish to alarm madame with regard to her condition; but I will
+advise you, if you value her health, to keep her in perfect tranquillity. The
+irritation at this moment seems to threaten the chest, and we must gain control
+of it; there is need of rest for her, perfect rest; the least agitation might
+change the seat of the malady. At this crisis, the prospect of bearing a child
+would be fatal to her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, doctor—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, yes! I know that!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He laughs and leaves the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like the rod of Moses, the doctor’s mandate makes and unmakes generations. The
+doctor will restore you to your marriage bed with the same arguments that he
+used in debarring you. He treats your wife for complaints which she has not, in
+order to cure her of those which she has, and all the while you have no idea of
+it; for the scientific jargon of doctors can only be compared to the layers in
+which they envelop their pills.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An honest woman in her chamber with the doctor is like a minister sure of a
+majority; she has it in her power to make a horse, or a carriage, according to
+her good pleasure and her taste; she will send you away or receive you, as she
+likes. Sometimes she will pretend to be ill in order to have a chamber separate
+from yours; sometimes she will surround herself with all the paraphernalia of
+an invalid; she will have an old woman for a nurse, regiments of vials and of
+bottles, and, environed by these ramparts, will defy you by her invalid airs.
+She will talk to you in such a depressing way of the electuaries and of the
+soothing draughts which she has taken, of the agues which she has had, of her
+plasters and cataplasms, that she will fill you with disgust at these sickly
+details, if all the time these sham sufferings are not intended to serve as
+engines by means of which, eventually, a successful attack may be made on that
+singular abstraction known as <i>your honor</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this way your wife will be able to fortify herself at every point of contact
+which you possess with the world, with society and with life. Thus everything
+will take arms against you, and you will be alone among all these enemies. But
+suppose that it is your unprecedented privilege to possess a wife who is
+without religious connections, without parents or intimate friends; that you
+have penetration enough to see through all the tricks by which your wife’s
+lover tries to entrap you; that you still have sufficient love for your fair
+enemy to resist all the Martons of the earth; that, in fact, you have for your
+doctor a man who is so celebrated that he has no time to listen to the
+maunderings of your wife; or that if your Esculapius is madame’s vassal, you
+demand a consultation, and an incorruptible doctor intervenes every time the
+favorite doctor prescribes a remedy that disquiets you; even in that case, your
+prospects will scarcely be more brilliant. In fact, even if you do not succumb
+to this invasion of allies, you must not forget that, so far, your adversary
+has not, so to speak, struck the decisive blow. If you hold out still longer,
+your wife, having flung round you thread upon thread, as a spider spins his
+web, an invisible net, will resort to the arms which nature has given her,
+which civilization has perfected, and which will be treated of in the next
+Meditation.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXVI.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF DIFFERENT WEAPONS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+A weapon is anything which is used for the purpose of wounding. From this point
+of view, some sentiments prove to be the most cruel weapons which man can
+employ against his fellow man. The genius of Schiller, lucid as it was
+comprehensive, seems to have revealed all the phenomena which certain ideas
+bring to light in the human organization by their keen and penetrating action.
+A man may be put to death by a thought. Such is the moral of those heartrending
+scenes, when in <i>The Brigands</i> the poet shows a young man, with the aid of
+certain ideas, making such powerful assaults on the heart of an old man, that
+he ends by causing the latter’s death. The time is not far distant when science
+will be able to observe the complicated mechanism of our thoughts and to
+apprehend the transmission of our feelings. Some developer of the occult
+sciences will prove that our intellectual organization constitutes nothing more
+than a kind of interior man, who projects himself with less violence than the
+exterior man, and that the struggle which may take place between two such
+powers as these, although invisible to our feeble eyes, is not a less mortal
+struggle than that in which our external man compels us to engage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these considerations belong to a different department of study from that in
+which we are now engaged; these subjects we intend to deal with in a future
+publication; some of our friends are already acquainted with one of the most
+important,—that, namely, entitled “THE PATHOLOGY OF SOCIAL LIFE, <i>or
+Meditations mathematical, physical, chemical and transcendental on the
+manifestations of thought, taken under all the forms which are produced by the
+state of society, whether by living, marriage, conduct, veterinary medicine, or
+by speech and action, etc.</i>,” in which all these great questions are fully
+discussed. The aim of this brief metaphysical observation is only to remind you
+that the higher classes of society reason too well to admit of their being
+attacked by any other than intellectual arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although it is true that tender and delicate souls are found enveloped in a
+body of metallic hardness, at the same time there are souls of bronze enveloped
+in bodies so supple and capricious that their grace attracts the friendship of
+others, and their beauty calls for a caress. But if you flatter the exterior
+man with your hand, the <i>Homo duplex</i>, the interior man, to use an
+expression of Buffon, immediately rouses himself and rends you with his keen
+points of contact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This description of a special class of human creatures, which we hope you will
+not run up against during your earthly journey, presents a picture of what your
+wife may be to you. Every one of the sentiments which nature has endowed your
+heart with, in their gentlest form, will become a dagger in the hand of your
+wife. You will be stabbed every moment, and you will necessarily succumb; for
+your love will flow like blood from every wound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the last struggle, but for her it also means victory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to carry out the distinction which we think we have established among
+three sorts of feminine temperament, we will divide this Meditation into three
+parts, under the following titles:
+</p>
+
+<h4>1. OF HEADACHES. 2. OF NERVOUS AFFECTATIONS. 3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS
+CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.</h4>
+
+<h4>1. OF HEADACHES.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Women are constantly the dupes or the victims of excessive sensibility; but we
+have already demonstrated that with the greater number of them this delicacy of
+soul must needs, almost without their knowing it, receive many rude blows, from
+the very fact of their marriage. (See Meditations entitled <i>The
+Predestined</i> and <i>Of the Honeymoon</i>.) Most of the means of defence
+instinctively employed by husbands are nothing but traps set for the liveliness
+of feminine affections.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now the moment comes when the wife, during the Civil War, traces by a single
+act of thought the history of her moral life, and is irritated on perceiving
+the prodigious way in which you have taken advantage of her sensibility. It is
+very rarely that women, moved either by an innate feeling for revenge, which
+they themselves can never explain, or by their instinct of domination, fail to
+discover that this quality in their natural machinery, when brought into play
+against the man, is inferior to no other instrument for obtaining ascendancy
+over him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With admirable cleverness, they proceed to find out what chords in the hearts
+of their husbands are most easily touched; and when once they discover this
+secret, they eagerly proceed to put it into practice; then, like a child with a
+mechanical toy, whose spring excites their curiosity, they go on employing it,
+carelessly calling into play the movements of the instrument, and satisfied
+simply with their success in doing so. If they kill you, they will mourn over
+you with the best grace in the world, as the most virtuous, the most excellent,
+the most sensible of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this way your wife will first arm herself with that generous sentiment which
+leads us to respect those who are in pain. The man most disposed to quarrel
+with a woman full of life and health becomes helpless before a woman who is
+weak and feeble. If your wife has not attained the end of her secret designs,
+by means of those various methods already described, she will quickly seize
+this all-powerful weapon. In virtue of this new strategic method, you will see
+the young girl, so strong in life and beauty, whom you had wedded in her
+flower, metamorphosing herself into a pale and sickly woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now headache is an affection which affords infinite resources to a woman. This
+malady, which is the easiest of all to feign, for it is destitute of any
+apparent symptom, merely obliges her to say: “I have a headache.” A woman
+trifles with you and there is no one in the world who can contradict her skull,
+whose impenetrable bones defy touch or ocular test. Moreover, headache is, in
+our opinion, the queen of maladies, the pleasantest and the most terrible
+weapon employed by wives against their husbands. There are some coarse and
+violent men who have been taught the tricks of women by their mistresses, in
+the happy hours of their celibacy, and so flatter themselves that they are
+never to be caught by this vulgar trap. But all their efforts, all their
+arguments end by being vanquished before the magic of these words: “I have a
+headache.” If a husband complains, or ventures on a reproach, if he tries to
+resist the power of this <i>Il buondo cani</i> of marriage, he is lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine a young woman, voluptuously lying on a divan, her head softly supported
+by a cushion, one hand hanging down; on a small table close at hand is her
+glass of lime-water. Now place by her side a burly husband. He has made five or
+six turns round the room; but each time he has turned on his heels to begin his
+walk all over again, the little invalid has made a slight movement of her
+eyebrows in a vain attempt to remind him that the slightest noise fatigues her.
+At last he musters all his courage and utters a protest against her pretended
+malady, in the bold phrase:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And have you really a headache?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At these words the young woman slightly raises her languid head, lifts an arm,
+which feebly falls back again upon her divan, raises her eyes to the ceiling,
+raises all that she has power to raise; then darting at you a leaden glance,
+she says in a voice of remarkable feebleness:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! What can be the matter with me? I suffer the agonies of death! And this is
+all the comfort you give me! Ah! you men, it is plainly seen that nature has
+not given you the task of bringing children into the world. What egoists and
+tyrants you are! You take us in all the beauty of our youth, fresh, rosy, with
+tapering waist, and then all is well! When your pleasures have ruined the
+blooming gifts which we received from nature, you never forgive us for having
+forfeited them to you! That was all understood. You will allow us to have
+neither the virtues nor the sufferings of our condition. You must needs have
+children, and we pass many nights in taking care of them. But child-bearing has
+ruined our health, and left behind the germs of serious maladies.—Oh, what pain
+I suffer! There are few women who are not subject to headaches; but your wife
+must be an exception. You even laugh at our sufferings; that is
+generosity!—please don’t walk about —I should not have expected this of
+you!—Stop the clock; the click of the pendulum rings in my head. Thanks! Oh,
+what an unfortunate creature I am! Have you a scent-bottle with you? Yes, oh!
+for pity’s sake, allow me to suffer in peace, and go away; for this scent
+splits my head!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What can you say in reply? Do you not hear within you a voice which cries, “And
+what if she is actually suffering?” Moreover, almost all husbands evacuate the
+field of battle very quietly, while their wives watch them from the corner of
+their eyes, marching off on tip-toe and closing the door quietly on the chamber
+henceforth to be considered sacred by them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such is the headache, true or false, which is patronized at your home. Then the
+headache begins to play a regular role in the bosom of your family. It is a
+theme on which a woman can play many admirable variations. She sets it forth in
+every key. With the aid of the headache alone a wife can make a husband
+desperate. A headache seizes madame when she chooses, where she chooses, and as
+much as she chooses. There are headaches of five days, of ten minutes, periodic
+or intermittent headaches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You sometimes find your wife in bed, in pain, helpless, and the blinds of her
+room are closed. The headache has imposed silence on every one, from the
+regions of the porter’s lodge, where he is cutting wood, even to the garret of
+your groom, from which he is throwing down innocent bundles of straw. Believing
+in this headache, you leave the house, but on your return you find that madame
+has decamped! Soon madame returns, fresh and ruddy:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The doctor came,” she says, “and advised me to take exercise, and I find
+myself much better!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another day you wish to enter madame’s room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, sir,” says the maid, showing the most profound astonishment, “madame has
+her usual headache, and I have never seen her in such pain! The doctor has been
+sent for.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are a happy man,” said Marshal Augereau to General R——-, “to have such a
+pretty wife!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To have!” replied the other. “If I have my wife ten days in the year, that is
+about all. These confounded women have always either the headache or some other
+thing!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The headache in France takes the place of the sandals, which, in Spain, the
+Confessor leaves at the door of the chamber in which he is with his penitent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If your wife, foreseeing some hostile intentions on your part, wishes to make
+herself as inviolable as the charter, she immediately gets up a little headache
+performance. She goes to bed in a most deliberate fashion, she utters shrieks
+which rend the heart of the hearer. She goes gracefully through a series of
+gesticulations so cleverly executed that you might think her a professional
+contortionist. Now what man is there so inconsiderate as to dare to speak to a
+suffering woman about desires which, in him, prove the most perfect health?
+Politeness alone demands of him perfect silence. A woman knows under these
+circumstances that by means of this all-powerful headache, she can at her will
+paste on her bed the placard which sends back home the amateurs who have been
+allured by the announcement of the Comedie Francaise, when they read the words:
+“Closed through the sudden indisposition of Mademoiselle Mars.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+O headache, protectress of love, tariff of married life, buckler against which
+all married desires expire! O mighty headache! Can it be possible that lovers
+have never sung thy praises, personified thee, or raised thee to the skies? O
+magic headache, O delusive headache, blest be the brain that first invented
+thee! Shame on the doctor who shall find out thy preventive! Yes, thou art the
+only ill that women bless, doubtless through gratitude for the good things thou
+dispensest to them, O deceitful headache! O magic headache!
+</p>
+
+<h4>2. OF NERVOUS AFFECTATIONS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+There is, however, a power which is superior even to that of the headache; and
+we must avow to the glory of France, that this power is one of the most recent
+which has been won by Parisian genius. As in the case with all the most useful
+discoveries of art and science, no one knows to whose intellect it is due.
+Only, it is certain that it was towards the middle of the last century that
+“Vapors” made their first appearance in France. Thus while Papin was applying
+the force of vaporized water in mechanical problems, a French woman, whose name
+unhappily is unknown, had the glory of endowing her sex with the faculty of
+vaporizing their fluids. Very soon the prodigious influence obtained by vapors
+was extended to the nerves; it was thus in passing from fibre to fibre that the
+science of neurology was born. This admirable science has since then led such
+men as Philips and other clever physiologists to the discovery of the nervous
+fluid in its circulation; they are now perhaps on the eve of identifying its
+organs, and the secret of its origin and of its evaporation. And thus, thanks
+to certain quackeries of this kind, we may be enabled some day to penetrate the
+mysteries of that unknown power which we have already called more than once in
+the present book, the <i>Will</i>. But do not let us trespass on the territory
+of medical philosophy. Let us consider the nerves and the vapors solely in
+their connection with marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Victims of Neurosis (a pathological term under which are comprised all
+affections of the nervous system) suffer in two ways, as far as married women
+are concerned; for our physiology has the loftiest disdain for medical
+classifications. Thus we recognize only:
+</p>
+
+<h4>1. CLASSIC NEUROSIS. 2. ROMANTIC NEUROSIS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+The classic affection has something bellicose and excitable on it. Those who
+thus suffer are as violent in their antics as pythonesses, as frantic as
+<i>monads</i>, as excited as <i>bacchantes</i>; it is a revival of antiquity,
+pure and simple.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The romantic sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid the
+mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their bier by the
+dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they breathe all the
+melancholy of the North.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That woman with black hair, with piercing eye, with high color, with dry lips
+and a powerful hand, will become excited and convulsive; she represents the
+genius of classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman, with white skin, is the
+genius of romantic neurosis; to one belongs the empire gained by nerves, to the
+other the empire gained by vapors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is the matter, my darling?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is nothing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you are in tears!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the clouds, and
+those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some disaster—I think I
+must be going to die.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead uncle, of
+her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all these mournful
+shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses, she is attacked with all
+the pains they felt, she feels her heart palpitate with excessive violence, she
+feels her spleen swelling. You say to yourself, with a self-satisfied air:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know exactly what this is all about!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns like an open
+box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew, who implores you to
+leave her to her melancholy and her mournful memories. She talks to you about
+her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is buried, plants over her tomb the
+green canopy of a weeping willow, and at the very time when you would like to
+raise a joyful epithalamium, you find an epitaph to greet you all in black.
+Your wish to console her melts away in the cloud of Ixion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from their feeling
+husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their debts, or the rent of
+a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors are employed as decisive weapons
+in Civil War.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the plea of her spinal affection or of her weak chest, a woman takes pains
+to seek out some distraction or other; you see her dressing herself in soft
+fabrics like an invalid with all the symptoms of spleen; she never goes out
+because an intimate friend, her mother or her sister, has tried to tear her
+away from that divan which monopolizes her and on which she spends her life in
+improvising elegies. Madame is going to spend a fortnight in the country
+because the doctor orders it. In short, she goes where she likes and does what
+she likes. Is it possible that there can be a husband so brutal as to oppose
+such desires, by hindering a wife from going to seek a cure for her cruel
+sufferings? For it has been established after many long discussions that in the
+nerves originate the most fearful torture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it is especially in bed that vapors play their part. There when a woman has
+not a headache she has her vapors; and when she has neither vapors nor
+headache, she is under the protection of the girdle of Venus, which, as you
+know, is a myth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the women who fight with you the battle of vapors, are some more blonde,
+more delicate, more full of feeling than others, and who possess the gift of
+tears. How admirably do they know how to weep! They weep when they like, as
+they like and as much as they like. They organize a system of offensive warfare
+which consists of manifesting sublime resignation, and they gain victories
+which are all the more brilliant, inasmuch as they remain all the time in
+excellent health.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Does a husband, irritated beyond all measure, at last express his wishes to
+them? They regard him with an air of submission, bow their heads and keep
+silence. This pantomime almost always puts a husband to rout. In conjugal
+struggles of this kind, a man prefers a woman should speak and defend herself,
+for then he may show elation or annoyance; but as for these women, not a word.
+Their silence distresses you and you experience a sort of remorse, like the
+murderer who, when he finds his victim offers no resistance, trembles with
+redoubled fear. He would prefer to slay him in self-defence. You return to the
+subject. As you draw near, your wife wipes away her tears and hides her
+handkerchief, so as to let you see that she has been weeping. You are melted,
+you implore your little Caroline to speak, your sensibility has been touched
+and you forget everything; then she sobs while she speaks, and speaks while she
+sobs. This is a sort of machine eloquence; she deafens you with her tears, with
+her words which come jerked out in confusion; it is the clapper and torrent of
+a mill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+French women and especially Parisians possess in a marvelous degree the secret
+by which such scenes are enacted, and to these scenes their voices, their sex,
+their toilet, their manner give a wonderful charm. How often do the tears upon
+the cheeks of these adorable actresses give way to a piquant smile, when they
+see their husbands hasten to break the silk lace, the weak fastening of their
+corsets, or to restore the comb which holds together the tresses of their hair
+and the bunch of golden ringlets always on the point of falling down?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But how all these tricks of modernity pale before the genius of antiquity,
+before nervous attacks which are violent, before the Pyrrhic dance of married
+life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the vivacity of those
+convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances, in the strength of those
+limbs, beautiful even in contortion! It is then that a woman is carried away
+like an impetuous wind, darts forth like the flames of a conflagration,
+exhibits a movement like a billow which glides over the white pebbles. She is
+overcome with excess of love, she sees the future, she is the seer who
+prophesies, but above all, she sees the present moment and tramples on her
+husband, and impresses him with a sort of terror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sight of his wife flinging off vigorous men as if they were so many
+feathers, is often enough to deter a man from ever striving to wrong her. He
+will be like the child who, having pulled the trigger of some terrific engine,
+has ever afterwards an incredible respect for the smallest spring. I have known
+a man, gentle and amiable in his ways, whose eyes were fixed upon those of his
+wife, exactly as if he had been put into a lion’s cage, and some one had said
+to him that he must not irritate the beast, if he would escape with his life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nervous attacks of this kind are very fatiguing and become every day more rare.
+Romanticism, however, has maintained its ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes, we meet with phlegmatic husbands, those men whose love is long
+enduring, because they store up their emotions, whose genius gets the upper
+hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these sublime creatures are
+rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St. Thomas, who wished to put his
+finger into the wound, they are endowed with an incredulity worthy of an
+atheist. Imperturbable in the midst of all these fraudulent headaches and all
+these traps set by neurosis, they concentrate their attention on the comedy
+which is being played before them, they examine the actress, they search for
+one of the springs that sets her going; and when they have discovered the
+mechanism of this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight impulse to
+the puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either of the reality of
+the disease or the artifices of these conjugal mummeries.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband escapes
+all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to women, he will
+beyond doubt be overcome by the employment of a terrible weapon, the last which
+a woman would resort to, for she never destroys with her own hands her empire
+over her husband without some sort of repugnance. But this is a poisoned weapon
+as powerful as the fatal knife of the executioner. This reflection brings us to
+the last paragraph of the present Meditation.
+</p>
+
+<h4>3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary to inquire
+whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but well understood
+coquetry? Is it anything but a sentiment that claims the right, on a woman’s
+part, to dispose of her own body as she chooses, as one may well believe, when
+we consider that half the women in the world go almost naked? Is it anything
+but a social chimera, as Diderot supposed, reminding us that this sentiment
+always gives way before sickness and before misery?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justice may be done to all these questions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An ingenious author has recently put forth the view that men are much more
+modest than women. He supports this contention by a great mass of surgical
+experiences; but, in order that his conclusions merit our attention, it would
+be necessary that for a certain time men were subjected to treatment by women
+surgeons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The opinion of Diderot is of still less weight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To deny the existence of modesty, because it disappears during those crises in
+which almost all human sentiments are annihilated, is as unreasonable as to
+deny that life exists because death sooner or later comes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us grant, then, that one sex has as much modesty as the other, and let us
+inquire in what modesty consists.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rousseau makes modesty the outcome of all those coquetries which females
+display before males. This opinion appears to us equally mistaken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The writers of the eighteenth century have doubtless rendered immense services
+to society; but their philosophy, based as it is upon sensualism, has never
+penetrated any deeper than the human epidermis. They have only considered the
+exterior universe; and so they have retarded, for some time, the moral
+development of man and the progress of science which will always draw its first
+principles from the Gospel, principles hereafter to be best understood by the
+fervent disciples of the Son of Man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The study of thought’s mysteries, the discovery of those organs which belong to
+the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of its active power,
+the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem to have an independent power
+of bodily movement, so as to transport ourselves whither we will and to see
+without the aid of bodily organs, —in a word the laws of thought’s dynamic and
+those of its physical influence,—these things will fall to the lot of the next
+century, as their portion in the treasury of human sciences. And perhaps we, of
+the present time, are merely occupied in quarrying the enormous blocks which
+later on some mighty genius will employ in the building of a glorious edifice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the error of Rousseau is simply the error of his age. He explains modesty
+by the relations of different human beings to each other instead of explaining
+it by the moral relations of each one with himself. Modesty is no more
+susceptible of analysis than conscience; and this perhaps is another way of
+saying that modesty is the conscience of the body; for while conscience directs
+our sentiments and the least movement of our thoughts towards the good, modesty
+presides over external movements. The actions which clash with our interests
+and thus disobey the laws of conscience wound us more than any other; and if
+they are repeated call forth our hatred. It is the same with acts which violate
+modesty in their relations to love, which is nothing but the expression of our
+whole sensibility. If extreme modesty is one of the conditions on which the
+reality of marriage is based, as we have tried to prove [See <i>Conjugal
+Catechism, Meditation IV.</i>], it is evident that immodesty will destroy it.
+But this position, which would require long deductions for the acceptance of
+the physiologist, women generally apply, as it were, mechanically; for society,
+which exaggerates everything for the benefit of the exterior man, develops this
+sentiment of women from childhood, and around it are grouped almost every other
+sentiment. Moreover, the moment that this boundless veil, which takes away the
+natural brutality from the least gesture, is dragged down, woman disappears.
+Heart, mind, love, grace, all are in ruins. In a situation where the virginal
+innocence of a daughter of Tahiti is most brilliant, the European becomes
+detestable. In this lies the last weapon which a wife seizes, in order to
+escape from the sentiment which her husband still fosters towards her. She is
+powerful because she had made herself loathsome; and this woman, who would
+count it as the greatest misfortune that her lover should be permitted to see
+the slightest mystery of her toilette, is delighted to exhibit herself to her
+husband in the most disadvantageous situation that can possibly be imagined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is by means of this rigorous system that she will try to banish you from the
+conjugal bed. Mrs. Shandy may be taken to mean us harm in bidding the father of
+Tristram wind up the clock; so long as your wife is not blamed for the pleasure
+she takes in interrupting you by the most imperative questions. Where there
+formerly was movement and life is now lethargy and death. An act of love
+becomes a transaction long discussed and almost, as it were, settled by
+notarial seal. But we have in another place shown that we never refuse to seize
+upon the comic element in a matrimonial crisis, although here we may be
+permitted to disdain the diversion which the muse of Verville and of Marshall
+have found in the treachery of feminine manoeuvres, the insulting audacity of
+their talk, amid the cold-blooded cynicism which they exhibit in certain
+situations. It is too sad to laugh at, and too funny to mourn over. When a
+woman resorts to such extreme measures, worlds at once separate her from her
+husband. Nevertheless, there are some women to whom Heaven has given the gift
+of being charming under all circumstances, who know how to put a certain witty
+and comic grace into these performances, and who have such smooth tongues, to
+use the expression of Sully, that they obtain forgiveness for their caprices
+and their mockeries, and never estrange the hearts of their husbands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What soul is so robust, what man so violently in love as to persist in his
+passion, after ten years of marriage, in presence of a wife who loves him no
+longer, who gives him proofs of this every moment, who repulses him, who
+deliberately shows herself bitter, caustic, sickly and capricious, and who will
+abjure her vows of elegance and cleanliness, rather than not see her husband
+turn away from her; in presence of a wife who will stake the success of her
+schemes upon the horror caused by her indecency?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this, my dear sir, is so much more horrible because—
+</p>
+
+<h4>XCII. LOVERS IGNORE MODESTY.</h4>
+
+<p>
+We have now arrived at the last infernal circle in the Divine Comedy of
+Marriage. We are at the very bottom of Hell. There is something inexpressibly
+terrible in the situation of a married woman at the moment when unlawful love
+turns her away from her duties as mother and wife. As Diderot has very well put
+it, “infidelity in a woman is like unbelief in a priest, the last extreme of
+human failure; for her it is the greatest of social crimes, since it implies in
+her every other crime besides, and indeed either a wife profanes her lawless
+love by continuing to belong to her husband, or she breaks all the ties which
+attach her to her family, by giving herself over altogether to her lover. She
+ought to choose between the two courses, for her sole possible excuse lies in
+the intensity of her love.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She lives then between the claims of two obligations. It is a dilemma; she will
+work either the unhappiness of her lover, if he is sincere in his passion, or
+that of her husband, if she is still beloved by him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is to this frightful dilemma of feminine life that all the strange
+inconsistencies of women’s conduct is to be attributed. In this lies the origin
+of all their lies, all their perfidies; here is the secret of all their
+mysteries. It is something to make one shudder. Moreover, even as simply based
+upon cold-blooded calculations, the conduct of a woman who accepts the
+unhappiness which attends virtue and scorns the bliss which is bought by crime,
+is a hundred times more reasonable. Nevertheless, almost all women will risk
+suffering in the future and ages of anguish for the ecstasy of one half hour.
+If the human feeling of self-preservation, if the fear of death does not check
+them, how fruitless must be the laws which send them for two years to the
+Madelonnettes? O sublime infamy! And when one comes to think that he for whom
+these sacrifices are to be made is one of our brethren, a gentleman to whom we
+would not trust our fortune, if we had one, a man who buttons his coat just as
+all of us do, it is enough to make one burst into a roar of laughter so loud,
+that starting from the Luxembourg it would pass over the whole of Paris and
+startle an ass browsing in the pasture at Montmartre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we have
+touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole of human
+life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the addition of a figure
+to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the chances a hundredfold, so one single
+life united to another life multiplies by a startling progression the risks of
+human life, which are in any case so manifold.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXVII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF THE LAST SYMPTOMS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The author of this book has met in the world so many people possessed by a
+fanatic passion for a knowledge of the mean time, for watches with a second
+hand, and for exactness in the details of their existence, that he has
+considered this Meditation too necessary for the tranquillity of a great number
+of husbands, to be omitted. It would have been cruel to leave men, who are
+possessed with the passion for learning the hour of the day, without a compass
+whereby to estimate the last variations in the matrimonial zodiac, and to
+calculate the precise moment when the sign of the Minotaur appears on the
+horizon. The knowledge of conjugal time would require a whole book for its
+exposition, so fine and delicate are the observations required by the task. The
+master admits that his extreme youth has not permitted him as yet to note and
+verify more than a few symptoms; but he feels a just pride, on his arrival at
+the end of his difficult enterprise, from the consciousness that he is leaving
+to his successors a new field of research; and that in a matter apparently so
+trite, not only was there much to be said, but also very many points are found
+remaining which may yet be brought into the clear light of observation. He
+therefore presents here without order or connection the rough outlines which he
+has so far been able to execute, in the hope that later he may have leisure to
+co-ordinate them and to arrange them in a complete system. If he has been so
+far kept back in the accomplishment of a task of supreme national importance,
+he believes, he may say, without incurring the charge of vanity, that he has
+here indicated the natural division of those symptoms. They are necessarily of
+two kinds: the unicorns and the bicorns. The unicorn Minotaur is the least
+mischievous. The two culprits confine themselves to a platonic love, in which
+their passion, at least, leaves no visible traces among posterity; while the
+bicorn Minotaur is unhappiness with all its fruits.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We have marked with an asterisk the symptoms which seem to concern the latter
+kind.
+</p>
+
+<h4>MINOTAURIC OBSERVATIONS.</h4>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<p>
+*When, after remaining a long time aloof from her husband, a woman makes
+overtures of a very marked character in order to attract his love, she acts in
+accordance with the axiom of maritime law, which says: <i>The flag protects the
+cargo</i>.
+</p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<p>
+A woman is at a ball, one of her friends comes up to her and says:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your husband has much wit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You find it so?”
+</p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Your wife discovers that it is time to send your boy to a boarding school, with
+whom, a little time ago, she was never going to part.
+</p>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p>
+*In Lord Abergavenny’s suit for divorce, the <i>valet de chambre</i> deposed
+that “the countess had such a detestation of all that belonged to my lord that
+he had very often seen her burning the scraps of paper which he had touched in
+her room.”
+</p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<p>
+If an indolent woman becomes energetic, if a woman who formerly hated study
+learns a foreign language; in short, every appearance of a complete change in
+character is a decisive symptom.
+</p>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<p>
+The woman who is happy in her affections does not go much into the world.
+</p>
+
+<h4>VII.</h4>
+
+<p>
+The woman who has a lover becomes very indulgent in judging others.
+</p>
+
+<h4>VIII.</h4>
+
+<p>
+*A husband gives to his wife a hundred crowns a month for dress; and, taking
+everything into account, she spends at least five hundred francs without being
+a sou in debt; the husband is robbed every night with a high hand by escalade,
+but without burglarious breaking in.
+</p>
+
+<h4>IX.</h4>
+
+<p>
+*A married couple slept in the same bed; madame was always sick. Now they sleep
+apart, she has no more headache, and her health becomes more brilliant than
+ever; an alarming symptom!
+</p>
+
+<h4>X.</h4>
+
+<p>
+A woman who was a sloven suddenly develops extreme nicety in her attire. There
+is a Minotaur at hand!
+</p>
+
+<h4>XI.</h4>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! my dear, I know no greater torment than not to be understood.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, my dear, but when one is—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, that scarcely ever happens.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I agree with you that it very seldom does. Ah! it is great happiness, but
+there are not two people in the world who are able to understand you.”
+</p>
+
+<h4>XII.</h4>
+
+<p>
+*The day when a wife behaves nicely to her husband—all is over.
+</p>
+
+<h4>XIII.</h4>
+
+<p>
+I asked her: “Where have you been, Jeanne?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have been to your friend’s to get your plate that you left there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, indeed! everything is still mine,” I said. The following year I repeated
+the question under similar circumstances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have been to bring back our plate.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, well, part of the things are still mine,” I said. But after that, when I
+questioned her, she spoke very differently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You wish to know everything, like great people, and you have only three
+shirts. I went to get my plate from my friend’s house, where I had stopped.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I see,” I said, “nothing is left me.”
+</p>
+
+<h4>XIV.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.
+</p>
+
+<h4>XV.</h4>
+
+<p>
+Some one said to the Duchess of Chaulnes, whose life was despaired of:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Duke of Chaulnes would like to see you once more.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is he there?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let him wait; he shall come in with the sacraments.” This minotauric anecdote
+has been published by Chamfort, but we quote it here as typical.
+</p>
+
+<h4>XVI.</h4>
+
+<p>
+*Some women try to persuade their husbands that they have duties to perform
+towards certain persons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am sure that you ought to pay a visit to such and such a man. . . . We
+cannot avoid asking such and such a man to dinner.”
+</p>
+
+<h4>XVII.</h4>
+
+<p>
+“Come, my son, hold yourself straight: try to acquire good manners! Watch such
+and such a man! See how he walks! Notice the way in which he dresses.”
+</p>
+
+<h4>XVIII.</h4>
+
+<p>
+When a woman utters the name of a man but twice a day, there is perhaps some
+uncertainty about her feelings toward him—but if thrice? —Oh! oh!
+</p>
+
+<h4>XIX.</h4>
+
+<p>
+When a woman goes home with a man who is neither a lawyer nor a minister, to
+the door of his apartment, she is very imprudent.
+</p>
+
+<h4>XX.</h4>
+
+<p>
+It is a terrible day when a husband fails to explain to himself the motive of
+some action of his wife.
+</p>
+
+<h4>XXI.</h4>
+
+<p>
+*The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What should be the conduct of a husband, when he recognizes a last symptom
+which leaves no doubt as to the infidelity of his wife? There are only two
+courses open; that of resignation or that of vengeance; there is no third
+course. If vengeance is decided upon, it should be complete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The husband who does not separate himself forever from his wife is a veritable
+simpleton. If a wife and husband think themselves fit for that union of
+friendship which exists between men, it is odious in the husband to make his
+wife feel his superiority over her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here are some anecdotes, most of them as yet unpublished, which indicate pretty
+plainly, in my opinion, the different shades of conduct to be observed by a
+husband in like case.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. de Roquemont slept once a month in the chamber of his wife, and he used to
+say, as he went away:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wash my hands of anything that may happen.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is something disgusting in that remark, and perhaps something profound in
+its suggestion of conjugal policy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A diplomat, when he saw his wife’s lover enter, left his study and, going to
+his wife’s chamber, said to the two:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I hope you will at least refrain from fighting.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was good humor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. de Boufflers was asked what he would do if on returning after a long absence
+he found his wife with child?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I would order my night dress and slippers to be taken to her room.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was magnanimity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame, if this man ill treats you when you are alone, it is your own fault;
+but I will not permit him to behave ill towards you in my presence, for this is
+to fail in politeness in me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This was nobility.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sublime is reached in this connection when the square cap of the judge is
+placed by the magistrate at the foot of the bed wherein the two culprits are
+asleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are some fine ways of taking vengeance. Mirabeau has admirably described
+in one of the books he wrote to make a living the mournful resignation of that
+Italian lady who was condemned by her husband to perish with him in the
+Maremma.
+</p>
+
+<h4>LAST AXIOMS.</h4>
+
+<p>
+XCIII.<br/>
+It is no act of vengeance to surprise a wife and her lover and to kill them
+locked in each other’s arms; it is a great favor to them both.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+XCIV.<br/>
+A husband will be best avenged by his wife’s lover.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXVIII.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF COMPENSATIONS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+The marital catastrophe which a certain number of husbands cannot avoid, almost
+always forms the closing scene of the drama. At that point all around you is
+tranquil. Your resignation, if you are resigned, has the power of awakening
+keen remorse in the soul of your wife and of her lover; for their happiness
+teaches them the depth of the wound they have inflicted upon you. You are, you
+may be sure, a third element in all their pleasures. The principle of
+kindliness and goodness which lies at the foundation of the human soul, is not
+so easily repressed as people think; moreover the two people who are causing
+you tortures are precisely those for whom you wish the most good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the conversations so sweetly familiar which link together the pleasures of
+love, and form in some way to lovers the caresses of thought, your wife often
+says to your rival:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I assure you, Auguste, that in any case I should like to see my poor
+husband happy; for at bottom he is good; if he were not my husband, but were
+only my brother, there are so many things I would do to please him! He loves
+me, and—his friendship is irksome to me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, he is a fine fellow!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then you become an object of respect to the celibate, who would yield to you
+all the indemnity possible for the wrong he has done you; but he is repelled by
+the disdainful pride which gives a tone to your whole conversation, and is
+stamped upon your face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So that actually, during the first moments of the Minotaur’s arrival, a man is
+like an actor who feels awkward in a theatre where he is not accustomed to
+appear. It is very difficult to bear the affront with dignity; but though
+generosity is rare, a model husband is sometimes found to possess it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eventually you are little by little won over by the charming way in which your
+wife makes herself agreeable to you. Madame assumes a tone of friendship which
+she never henceforth abandons. The pleasant atmosphere of your home is one of
+the chief compensations which renders the Minotaur less odious to a husband.
+But as it is natural to man to habituate himself to the hardest conditions, in
+spite of the sentiment of outraged nobility which nothing can change, you are
+gradually induced by a fascination whose power is constantly around you, to
+accept the little amenities of your position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Suppose that conjugal misfortune has fallen upon an epicure. He naturally
+demands the consolations which suit his taste. His sense of pleasure takes
+refuge in other gratifications, and forms other habits. You shape your life in
+accordance with the enjoyment of other sensations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day, returning from your government office, after lingering for a long time
+before the rich and tasteful book shop of Chevet, hovering in suspense between
+the hundred francs of expense, and the joys of a Strasbourg <i>pate de fois
+gras</i>, you are struck dumb on finding this <i>pate</i> proudly installed on
+the sideboard of your dining-room. Is this the vision offered by some
+gastronomic mirage? In this doubting mood you approach with firm step, for a
+<i>pate</i> is a living creature, and seem to neigh as you scent afar off the
+truffles whose perfumes escape through the gilded enclosure. You stoop over it
+two distinct times; all the nerve centres of your palate have a soul; you taste
+the delights of a genuine feast, etc.; and during this ecstasy a feeling of
+remorse seizes upon you, and you go to your wife’s room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Really, my dear girl, we have not means which warrant our buying
+<i>pates</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But it costs us nothing!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! ho!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, it is M. Achille’s brother who sent it to him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You catch sight of M. Achille in a corner. The celibate greets you, he is
+radiant on seeing that you have accepted the <i>pate</i>. You look at your
+wife, who blushes; you stroke your beard a few times; and, as you express no
+thanks, the two lovers divine your acceptance of the compensation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sudden change in the ministry takes place. A husband, who is Councillor of
+State, trembles for fear of being wiped from the roll, when the night before he
+had been made director-general; all the ministers are opposed to him and he has
+turned Constitutionalist. Foreseeing his disgrace he has betaken himself to
+Auteuil, in search of consolation from an old friend who quotes Horace and
+Tibullus to him. On returning home he sees the table laid as if to receive the
+most influential men of the assembly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In truth, madame,” he says with acrimony as he enters his wife’s room, where
+she is finishing her toilette, “you seem to have lost your habitual tact. This
+is a nice time to be giving dinner parties! Twenty persons will soon learn—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That you are director-general!” she cries, showing him a royal despatch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He is thunderstruck. He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now another;
+he opens it. He sits down and spreads it out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I well know,” he says, “that justice would be rendered me under whatever
+ministers I served.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, my dear! But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life, and his
+eminence the Cardinal de ——- of whom he is the—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“M. de Villeplaine?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the smile of a
+director-general:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! don’t thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring rain, or
+tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the cafe, or in the
+world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried away by an impulse to
+follow his wife to the conjugal chamber. There he sank into an arm-chair and
+like any sultan awaited his coffee, as if he would say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, after all, she is my wife!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fair siren herself prepares the favorite draught; she strains it with
+special care, sweetens it, tastes it, and hands it to him; then, with a smile,
+she ventures like a submissive odalisque to make a joke, with a view to
+smoothing the wrinkles on the brow of her lord and master. Up to that moment he
+had thought his wife stupid; but on hearing a sally as witty as that which even
+you would cajole with, madame, he raises his head in the way peculiar to dogs
+who are hunting the hare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where the devil did she get that—but it’s a random shot!” he says to himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the pinnacle of his own greatness he makes a piquant repartee. Madame
+retorts, the conversation becomes as lively as it is interesting, and this
+husband, a very superior man, is quite astonished to discover the wit of his
+wife, in other respects, an accomplished woman; the right word occurs to her
+with wonderful readiness; her tact and keenness enable her to meet an innuendo
+with charming originality. She is no longer the same woman. She notices the
+effect she produces upon her husband, and both to avenge herself for his
+neglect and to win his admiration for the lover from whom she has received, so
+to speak, the treasures of her intellect, she exerts herself, and becomes
+actually dazzling. The husband, better able than any one else to appreciate a
+species of compensation which may have some influence on his future, is led to
+think that the passions of women are really necessary to their mental culture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But how shall we treat those compensations which are most pleasing to husbands?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between the moment when the last symptoms appear, and the epoch of conjugal
+peace, which we will not stop to discuss, almost a dozen years have elapsed.
+During this interval and before the married couple sign the treaty which, by
+means of a sincere reconciliation of the feminine subject with her lawful lord,
+consecrates their little matrimonial restoration, in order to close in, as
+Louis XVIII said, the gulf of revolutions, it is seldom that the honest woman
+has but one lover. Anarchy has its inevitable phases. The stormy domination of
+tribunes is supplanted by that of the sword and the pen, for few loves are met
+with whose constancy outlives ten years. Therefore, since our calculations
+prove that an honest woman has merely paid strictly her physiological or
+diabolical dues by rendering but three men happy, it is probable that she has
+set foot in more than one region of love. Sometimes it may happen that in an
+interregnum of love too long protracted, the wife, whether from whim,
+temptation or the desire of novelty, undertakes to seduce her own husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine charming Mme. de T——-, the heroine of our Meditation of
+<i>Strategy</i>, saying with a fascinating smile:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I never before found you so agreeable!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By flattery after flattery, she tempts, she rouses curiosity, she soothes, she
+rouses in you the faintest spark of desire, she carries you away with her, and
+makes you proud of yourself. Then the right of indemnifications for her husband
+comes. On this occasion the wife confounds the imagination of her husband. Like
+cosmopolitan travelers she tells tales of all the countries which she had
+traversed. She intersperses her conversation with words borrowed from several
+languages. The passionate imagery of the Orient, the unique emphasis of Spanish
+phraseology, all meet and jostle one another. She opens out the treasures of
+her notebook with all the mysteries of coquetry, she is delightful, you never
+saw her thus before! With that remarkable art which women alone possess of
+making their own everything that has been told them, she blends all shades and
+variations of character so as to create a manner peculiarly her own. You
+received from the hands of Hymen only one woman, awkward and innocent; the
+celibate returns you a dozen of them. A joyful and rapturous husband sees his
+bed invaded by the giddy and wanton courtesans, of whom we spoke in the
+Meditation on <i>The First Symptoms</i>. These goddesses come in groups, they
+smile and sport under the graceful muslin curtains of the nuptial bed. The
+Phoenician girl flings to you her garlands, gently sways herself to and fro;
+the Chalcidian woman overcomes you by the witchery of her fine and snowy feet;
+the Unelmane comes and speaking the dialect of fair Ionia reveals the treasures
+of happiness unknown before, and in the study of which she makes you experience
+but a single sensation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Filled with regret at having disdained so many charms, and frequently tired of
+finding too often as much perfidiousness in priestesses of Venus as in honest
+women, the husband sometimes hurries on by his gallantry the hour of
+reconciliation desired of worthy people. The aftermath of bliss is gathered
+even with greater pleasure, perhaps, than the first crop. The Minotaur took
+your gold, he makes restoration in diamonds. And really now seems the time to
+state a fact of the utmost importance. A man may have a wife without possessing
+her. Like most husbands you had hitherto received nothing from yours, and the
+powerful intervention of the celibate was needed to make your union complete.
+How shall we give a name to this miracle, perhaps the only one wrought upon a
+patient during his absence? Alas, my brothers, we did not make Nature!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But how many other compensations, not less precious, are there, by which the
+noble and generous soul of the young celibate may many a time purchase his
+pardon! I recollect witnessing one of the most magnificent acts of reparation
+which a lover should perform toward the husband he is minotaurizing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One warm evening in the summer of 1817, I saw entering one of the rooms of
+Tortoni one of the two hundred young men whom we confidently style our friends;
+he was in the full bloom of his modesty. A lovely woman, dressed in perfect
+taste, and who had consented to enter one of the cool parlors devoted to people
+of fashion, had stepped from an elegant carriage which had stopped on the
+boulevard, and was approaching on foot along the sidewalk. My young friend, the
+celibate, then appeared and offered his arm to his queen, while the husband
+followed holding by the hand two little boys, beautiful as cupids. The two
+lovers, more nimble than the father of the family, reached in advance of him
+one of the small rooms pointed out by the attendant. In crossing the vestibule
+the husband knocked up against some dandy, who claimed that he had been
+jostled. Then arose a quarrel, whose seriousness was betrayed by the sharp
+tones of the altercation. The moment the dandy was about to make a gesture
+unworthy of a self-respecting man, the celibate intervened, seized the dandy by
+the arm, caught him off his guard, overcame and threw him to the ground; it was
+magnificent. He had done the very thing the aggressor was meditating, as he
+exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Monsieur!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This “Monsieur” was one of the finest things I have ever heard. It was as if
+the young celibate had said: “This father of a family belongs to me; as I have
+carried off his honor, it is mine to defend him. I know my duty, I am his
+substitute and will fight for him.” The young woman behaved superbly! Pale, and
+bewildered, she took the arm of her husband, who continued his objurgations;
+without a word she led him away to the carriage, together with her children.
+She was one of those women of the aristocracy, who also know how to retain
+their dignity and self-control in the midst of violent emotions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“O Monsieur Adolphe!” cried the young lady as she saw her friend with an air of
+gayety take his seat in the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is nothing, madame, he is one of my friends; we have shaken hands.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, the next morning, the courageous celibate received a sword thrust
+which nearly proved fatal, and confined him six months to his bed. The
+attentions of the married couple were lavished upon him. What numerous
+compensations do we see here! Some years afterwards, an old uncle of the
+husband, whose opinions did not fit in with those of the young friend of the
+house, and who nursed a grudge against him on account of some political
+discussion, undertook to have him driven from the house. The old fellow went so
+far as to tell his nephew to choose between being his heir and sending away the
+presumptuous celibate. It was then that the worthy stockbroker said to his
+uncle:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, you must never think, uncle, that you will succeed in making me
+ungrateful! But if I tell him to do so this young man will let himself be
+killed for you. He has saved my credit, he would go through fire and water for
+me, he has relieved me of my wife, he has brought me clients, he has procured
+for me almost all the business in the Villele loans—I owe my life to him, he is
+the father of my children; I can never forget all this.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this case the compensations may be looked upon as complete; but
+unfortunately there are compensations of all kinds. There are those which must
+be considered negative, deluding, and those which are both in one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I knew a husband of advanced years who was possessed by the demon of gambling.
+Almost every evening his wife’s lover came and played with him. The celibate
+gave him a liberal share of the pleasures which come from games of hazard, and
+knew how to lose to him a certain number of francs every month; but madame used
+to give them to him, and the compensation was a deluding one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are a peer of France, and you have no offspring but daughters. Your wife is
+brought to bed of a boy! The compensation is negative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The child who is to save your name from oblivion is like his mother. The
+duchess persuades you that the child is yours. The negative compensation
+becomes deluding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is one of the most charming compensations known. One morning the Prince de
+Ligne meets his wife’s lover and rushes up to him, laughing wildly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My friend,” he says to him, “I cuckolded you, last night!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If some husbands attain to conjugal peace by quiet methods, and carry so
+gracefully the imaginary ensigns of matrimonial pre-eminence, their philosophy
+is doubtless based on the <i>comfortabilisme</i> of accepting certain
+compensations, a <i>comfortabilisme</i> which indifferent men cannot imagine.
+As years roll by the married couple reach the last stage in that artificial
+existence to which their union has condemned them.
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXIX.</h3>
+
+<h5>OF CONJUGAL PEACE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+My imagination has followed marriage through all the phases of its fantastic
+life in so fraternal a spirit, that I seem to have grown old with the house I
+made my home so early in life at the commencement of this work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After experiencing in thought the ardor of man’s first passion; and outlining,
+in however imperfect a way, the principal incidents of married life; after
+struggling against so many wives that did not belong to me, exhausting myself
+in conflict with so many personages called up from nothingness, and joining so
+many battles, I feel an intellectual lassitude, which makes me see everything
+in life hang, as it were, in mournful crape. I seem to have a catarrh, to look
+at everything through green spectacles, I feel as if my hands trembled, as if I
+must needs employ the second half of my existence and of my book in apologizing
+for the follies of the first half.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I see myself surrounded by tall children of whom I am not the father, and
+seated beside a wife I never married. I think I can feel wrinkles furrowing my
+brow. The fire before which I am placed crackles, as if in derision, the room
+is ancient in its furniture; I shudder with sudden fright as I lay my hand upon
+my heart, and ask myself: “Is that, too, withered?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never accept
+any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic maxim of Lord
+Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses. No face can delude me.
+I am melancholy and overcast with gloom. I know the world and it has no more
+illusions for me. My closest friends have proved traitors. My wife and myself
+exchange glances of profound meaning and the slightest word either of us utters
+is a dagger which pierces the heart of the other through and through. I
+stagnate in a dreary calm. This then is the tranquillity of old age! The old
+man possesses in himself the cemetery which shall soon possess him. He is
+growing accustomed to the chill of the tomb. Man, according to philosophers,
+dies in detail; at the same time he may be said even to cheat death; for that
+which his withered hand has laid hold upon, can it be called life?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, to die young and throbbing with life! ’Tis a destiny enviable indeed! For
+is not this, as a delightful poet has said, “to take away with one all one’s
+illusions, to be buried like an Eastern king, with all one’s jewels and
+treasures, with all that makes the fortune of humanity!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How many thank-offerings ought we to make to the kind and beneficent spirit
+that breathes in all things here below! Indeed, the care which nature takes to
+strip us piece by piece of our raiment, to unclothe the soul by enfeebling
+gradually our hearing, sight, and sense of touch, in making slower the
+circulation of our blood, and congealing our humors so as to make us as
+insensible to the approach of death as we were to the beginnings of life, this
+maternal care which she lavishes on our frail tabernacle of clay, she also
+exhibits in regard to the emotions of man, and to the double existence which is
+created by conjugal love. She first sends us Confidence, which with extended
+hand and open heart says to us: “Behold, I am thine forever!” Lukewarmness
+follows, walking with languid tread, turning aside her blonde face with a yawn,
+like a young widow obliged to listen to the minister of state who is ready to
+sign for her a pension warrant. Then Indifference comes; she stretches herself
+on the divan, taking no care to draw down the skirts of her robe which Desire
+but now lifted so chastely and so eagerly. She casts a glance upon the nuptial
+bed, with modesty and without shamelessness; and, if she longs for anything, it
+is for the green fruit that calls up again to life the dulled papillae with
+which her blase palate is bestrewn. Finally the philosophical Experience of
+Life presents herself, with careworn and disdainful brow, pointing with her
+finger to the results, and not the causes of life’s incidents; to the tranquil
+victory, not to the tempestuous combat. She reckons up the arrearages, with
+farmers, and calculates the dowry of a child. She materializes everything. By a
+touch of her wand, life becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid,
+now it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts, it
+has received its sentence, ’twas but mere sensation, a passing paroxysm. What
+the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is
+permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which
+eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the sluggish organs perform their
+functions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This is horrible!” I cried; “I am young and full of life! Perish all the books
+in the world rather than my illusions should perish!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I left my laboratory and plunged into the whirl of Paris. As I saw the fairest
+faces glide by before me, I felt that I was not old. The first young woman who
+appeared before me, lovely in face and form and dressed to perfection, with one
+glance of fire made all the sorcery whose spells I had voluntarily submitted to
+vanish into thin air. Scarcely had I walked three steps in the Tuileries
+gardens, the place which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the
+prototype of the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this
+book. Had I desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as I
+conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator himself to
+have produced so complete a symbol of it as I then saw before me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine a woman of fifty, dressed in a jacket of reddish brown merino, holding
+in her left hand a green cord, which was tied to the collar of an English
+terrier, and with her right arm linked with that of a man in knee-breeches and
+silk stockings, whose hat had its brim whimsically turned up, while snow-white
+tufts of hair like pigeon plumes rose at its sides. A slender queue, thin as a
+quill, tossed about on the back of his sallow neck, which was thick, as far as
+it could be seen above the turned down collar of a threadbare coat. This couple
+assumed the stately tread of an ambassador; and the husband, who was at least
+seventy, stopped complaisantly every time the terrier began to gambol. I
+hastened to pass this living impersonation of my Meditation, and was surprised
+to the last degree to recognize the Marquis de T——-, friend of the Comte de
+Noce, who had owed me for a long time the end of the interrupted story which I
+related in the <i>Theory of the Bed</i>. [See Meditation XVII.]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have the honor to present to you the Marquise de T——-,” he said to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I made a low bow to a lady whose face was pale and wrinkled; her forehead was
+surmounted by a toupee, whose flattened ringlets, ranged around it, deceived no
+one, but only emphasized, instead of concealing, the wrinkles by which it was
+deeply furrowed. The lady was slightly roughed, and had the appearance of an
+old country actress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I do not see, sir, what you can say against a marriage such as ours,” said the
+old man to me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The laws of Rome forefend!” I cried, laughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The marchioness gave me a look filled with inquietude as well as
+disapprobation, which seemed to say, “Is it possible that at my age I have
+become but a concubine?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We sat down upon a bench, in the gloomy clump of trees planted at the corner of
+the high terrace which commands La Place Louis XV, on the side of the
+Garde-Meuble. Autumn had already begun to strip the trees of their foliage, and
+was scattering before our eyes the yellow leaves of his garland; but the sun
+nevertheless filled the air with grateful warmth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, is your work finished?” asked the old man, in the unctuous tones
+peculiar to men of the ancient aristocracy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And with these words he gave a sardonic smile, as if for commentary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very nearly, sir,” I replied. “I have come to the philosophic situation, which
+you appear to have reached, but I confess that I—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are searching for ideas?” he added—finishing for me a sentence, which I
+confess I did not know how to end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” he continued, “you may boldly assume, that on arriving at the winter of
+his life, a man—a man who thinks, I mean—ends by denying that love has any
+existence, in the wild form with which our illusions invested it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What! would you deny the existence of love on the day after that of marriage?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the first place, the day after would be the very reason; but my marriage
+was a commercial speculation,” replied he, stooping to speak into my ear. “I
+have thereby purchased the care, the attention, the services which I need; and
+I am certain to obtain all the consideration my age demands; for I have willed
+all my property to my nephew, and as my wife will be rich only during my life,
+you can imagine how—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I turned on the old marquis a look so piercing that he wrung my hand and said:
+“You seem to have a good heart, for nothing is certain in this life—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, you may be sure that I have arranged a pleasant surprise for her in my
+will,” he replied, gayly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come here, Joseph,” cried the marchioness, approaching a servant who carried
+an overcoat lined with silk. “The marquis is probably feeling the cold.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old marquis put on his overcoat, buttoned it up, and taking my arm, led me
+to the sunny side of the terrace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In your work,” he continued, “you have doubtless spoken of the love of a young
+man. Well, if you wish to act up to the scope which you give to your work—in
+the word ec—elec—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eclectic,” I said, smiling, seeing he could not remember this philosophic
+term.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know the word well!” he replied. “If then you wish to keep your vow of
+eclecticism, you should be willing to express certain virile ideas on the
+subject of love which I will communicate to you, and I will not grudge you the
+benefit of them, if benefit there be; I wish to bequeath my property to you,
+but this will be all that you will get of it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There is no money fortune which is worth as much as a fortune of ideas if they
+be valuable ideas! I shall, therefore, listen to you with a grateful mind.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There is no such thing as love,” pursued the old man, fixing his gaze upon me.
+“It is not even a sentiment, it is an unhappy necessity, which is midway
+between the needs of the body and those of the soul. But siding for a moment
+with your youthful thoughts, let us try to reason upon this social malady. I
+suppose that you can only conceive of love as either a need or a sentiment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I made a sign of assent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Considered as a need,” said the old man, “love makes itself felt last of all
+our needs, and is the first to cease. We are inclined to love in our twentieth
+year, to speak in round numbers, and we cease to do so at fifty. During these
+thirty years, how often would the need be felt, if it were not for the
+provocation of city manners, and the modern custom of living in the presence of
+not one woman, but of women in general? What is our debt to the perpetuation of
+the race? It probably consists in producing as many children as we have
+breasts—so that if one dies the other may live. If these two children were
+always faithfully produced, what would become of nations? Thirty millions of
+people would constitute a population too great for France, for the soil is not
+sufficient to guarantee more than ten millions against misery and hunger.
+Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of throwing its children into
+the water, according to the accounts of travelers. Now this production of two
+children is really the whole of marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage
+are not only profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now
+demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness of
+duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our existence.
+Nature reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, on the other hand, refuses
+absolutely to grant the excess which our imagination sometimes craves in love.
+It is, therefore, the last of our needs, and the only one which may be
+forgotten without causing any disturbance in the economy of the body. Love is a
+social luxury like lace and diamonds. But if we analyze it as a sentiment, we
+find two distinct elements in it; namely, pleasure and passion. Now analyze
+pleasure. Human affections rest upon two foundations, attraction and repulsion.
+Attraction is a universal feeling for those things which flatter our instinct
+of self-preservation; repulsion is the exercise of the same instinct when it
+tells us that something is near which threatens it with injury. Everything
+which profoundly moves our organization gives us a deeper sense of our
+existence; such a thing is pleasure. It is contracted of desire, of effort, and
+the joy of possessing something or other. Pleasure is a unique element in life,
+and our passions are nothing but modifications, more or less keen, of pleasure;
+moreover, familiarity with one pleasure almost always precludes the enjoyment
+of all others. Now, love is the least keen and the least durable of our
+pleasures. In what would you say the pleasure of love consists? Does it lie in
+the beauty of the beloved? In one evening you may obtain for money the
+loveliest odalisques; but at the end of a month you will in this way have burnt
+out all your sentiment for all time. Would you love a women because she is well
+dressed, elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has commercial credit? Do not call
+this love, for it is vanity, avarice, egotism. Do you love her because she is
+intellectual? You are in that case merely obeying the dictates of literary
+sentiment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But,” I said, “love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in one
+their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls, their lives—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh dear, dear!” cried the old man, in a jeering tone. “Can you show me five
+men in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman? I do not say their
+life, for that is a slight thing,—the price of a human life under Napoleon was
+never more than twenty thousand francs; and there are in France to-day two
+hundred and fifty thousand brave men who would give theirs for two inches of
+red ribbon; while seven men have sacrificed for a woman ten millions on which
+they might have slept in solitude for a whole night. Dubreuil and Phmeja are
+still rarer than is the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke. These sentiments
+proceed from an unknown cause. But you have brought me thus to consider love as
+a passion. Yes, indeed, it is the last of them all and the most contemptible.
+It promises everything, and fulfils nothing. It comes, like love, as a need,
+the last, and dies away the first. Ah, talk to me of revenge, hatred, avarice,
+of gaming, of ambition, of fanaticism. These passions have something virile in
+them; these sentiments are imperishable; they make sacrifices every day, such
+as love only makes by fits and starts. But,” he went on, “suppose you abjure
+love. At first there will be no disquietudes, no anxieties, no worry, none of
+those little vexations that waste human life. A man lives happy and tranquil;
+in his social relations he becomes infinitely more powerful and influential.
+This divorce from the thing called love is the primary secret of power in all
+men who control large bodies of men; but this is a mere trifle. Ah! if you knew
+with what magic influence a man is endowed, what wealth of intellectual force,
+what longevity in physical strength he enjoys, when detaching himself from
+every species of human passion he spends all his energy to the profit of his
+soul! If you could enjoy for two minutes the riches which God dispenses to the
+enlightened men who consider love as merely a passing need which it is
+sufficient to satisfy for six months in their twentieth year; to the men who,
+scorning the luxurious and surfeiting beefsteaks of Normandy, feed on the roots
+which God has given in abundance, and take their repose on a bed of withered
+leaves, like the recluses of the Thebaid!—ah! you would not keep on three
+seconds the wool of fifteen merinos which covers you; you would fling away your
+childish switch, and go to live in the heaven of heavens! There you would find
+the love you sought in vain amid the swine of earth; there you would hear a
+concert of somewhat different melody from that of M. Rossini, voices more
+faultless than that of Malibran. But I am speaking as a blind man might, and
+repeating hearsays. If I had not visited Germany about the year 1791, I should
+know nothing of all this. Yes!—man has a vocation for the infinite. There
+dwells within him an instinct that calls him to God. God is all, gives all,
+brings oblivion on all, and thought is the thread which he has given us as a
+clue to communication with himself!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He suddenly stopped, and fixed his eyes upon the heavens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The poor fellow has lost his wits!” I thought to myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” I said to him, “it would be pushing my devotion to eclectic philosophy
+too far to insert your ideas in my book; they would destroy it. Everything in
+it is based on love, platonic and sensual. God forbid that I should end my book
+by such social blasphemies! I would rather try to return by some pantagruelian
+subtlety to my herd of celibates and honest women, with many an attempt to
+discover some social utility in their passions and follies. Oh! if conjugal
+peace leads us to arguments so disillusionizing and so gloomy as these, I know
+a great many husbands who would prefer war to peace.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At any rate, young man,” the old marquis cried, “I shall never have to
+reproach myself with refusing to give true directions to a traveler who had
+lost his way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adieu, thou old carcase!” I said to myself; “adieu, thou walking marriage!
+Adieu, thou stick of a burnt-out fire-work! Adieu, thou machine! Although I
+have given thee from time to time some glimpses of people dear to me, old
+family portraits,—back with you to the picture dealer’s shop, to Madame de
+T——-, and all the rest of them; take your place round the bier with
+undertaker’s mutes, for all I care!”
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEDITATION XXX.</h3>
+
+<h5>CONCLUSION.</h5>
+
+<p>
+A recluse, who was credited with the gift of second sight, having commanded the
+children of Israel to follow him to a mountain top in order to hear the
+revelation of certain mysteries, saw that he was accompanied by a crowd which
+took up so much room on the road that, prophet as he was, his
+<i>amour-propre</i> was vastly tickled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But as the mountain was a considerable distance off, it happened that at the
+first halt, an artisan remembered that he had to deliver a new pair of slippers
+to a duke and peer, a publican fell to thinking how he had some specie to
+negotiate, and off they went.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A little further on two lovers lingered under the olive trees and forgot the
+discourse of the prophet; for they thought that the promised land was the spot
+where they stood, and the divine word was heard when they talked to one
+another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fat people, loaded with punches a la Sancho, had been wiping their
+foreheads with their handkerchiefs, for the last quarter of an hour, and began
+to grow thirsty, and therefore halted beside a clear spring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain retired soldiers complained of the corns which tortured them, and spoke
+of Austerlitz, and of their tight boots.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the second halt, certain men of the world whispered together:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But this prophet is a fool.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you ever heard him?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I? I came from sheer curiosity.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And I because I saw the fellow had a large following.” (The last man who spoke
+was a fashionable.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He is a mere charlatan.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The prophet kept marching on. But when he reached the plateau, from which a
+wide horizon spread before him, he turned back, and saw no one but a poor
+Israelite, to whom he might have said as the Prince de Ligne to the wretched
+little bandy-legged drummer boy, whom he found on the spot where he expected to
+see a whole garrison awaiting him: “Well, my readers, it seems that you have
+dwindled down to one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thou man of God who has followed me so far—I hope that a short recapitulation
+will not terrify thee, and I have traveled on under the impression that thou,
+like me, hast kept saying to thyself, “Where the deuce are we going?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, well, this is the place and the time to ask you, respected reader, what
+your opinion is with regard to the renewal of the tobacco monopoly, and what
+you think of the exorbitant taxes on wines, on the right to carry firearms, on
+gaming, on lotteries, on playing cards, on brandy, on soap, cotton, silks, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think that since all these duties make up one-third of the public revenues,
+we should be seriously embarrassed if—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So that, my excellent model husband, if no one got drunk, or gambled, or
+smoked, or hunted, in a word if we had neither vices, passions, nor maladies in
+France, the State would be within an ace of bankruptcy; for it seems that the
+capital of our national income consists of popular corruptions, as our commerce
+is kept alive by national luxury. If you cared to look a little closer into the
+matter you would see that all taxes are based upon some moral malady. As a
+matter of fact, if we continue this philosophical scrutiny it will appear that
+the gendarmes would want horses and leather breeches, if every one kept the
+peace, and if there were neither foes nor idle people in the world. Therefore
+impose virtue on mankind! Well, I consider that there are more parallels than
+people think between my honest woman and the budget, and I will undertake to
+prove this by a short essay on statistics, if you will permit me to finish my
+book on the same lines as those on which I have begun it. Will you grant that a
+lover must put on more clean shirts than are worn by either a husband, or a
+celibate unattached? This to me seems beyond doubt. The difference between a
+husband and a lover is seen even in the appearance of their toilette. The one
+is careless, he is unshaved, and the other never appears excepting in full
+dress. Sterne has pleasantly remarked that the account book of the laundress
+was the most authentic record he knew, as to the life of Tristram Shandy; and
+that it was easy to guess from the number of shirts he wore what passages of
+his book had cost him most. Well, with regard to lovers the account book of
+their laundresses is the most faithful historic record as well as the most
+impartial account of their various amours. And really a prodigious quantity of
+tippets, cravats, dresses, which are absolutely necessary to coquetry, is
+consumed in the course of an amour. A wonderful prestige is gained by white
+stockings, the lustre of a collar, or a shirt-waist, the artistically arranged
+folds of a man’s shirt, or the taste of his necktie or his collar. This will
+explain the passages in which I said of the honest woman [Meditation II], “She
+spends her life in having her dresses starched.” I have sought information on
+this point from a lady in order to learn accurately at what sum was to be
+estimated the tax thus imposed by love, and after fixing it at one hundred
+francs per annum for a woman, I recollect what she said with great good humor:
+“It depends on the character of the man, for some are so much more particular
+than others.” Nevertheless, after a very profound discussion, in which I
+settled upon the sum for the celibates, and she for her sex, it was agreed
+that, one thing with another, since the two lovers belong to the social sphere
+which this work concerns, they ought to spend between them, in the matter
+referred to, one hundred and fifty francs more than in time of peace.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By a like treaty, friendly in character and long discussed, we arranged that
+there should be a collective difference of four hundred francs between the
+expenditure for all parts of the dress on a war footing, and for that on a
+peace footing. This provision was considered very paltry by all the powers,
+masculine or feminine, whom we consulted. The light thrown upon these delicate
+matters by the contributions of certain persons suggested to us the idea of
+gathering together certain savants at a dinner party, and taking their wise
+counsels for our guidance in these important investigations. The gathering took
+place. It was with glass in hand and after listening to many brilliant speeches
+that I received for the following chapters on the budget of love, a sort of
+legislative sanction. The sum of one hundred francs was allowed for porters and
+carriages. Fifty crowns seemed very reasonable for the little patties that
+people eat on a walk, for bouquets of violets and theatre tickets. The sum of
+two hundred francs was considered necessary for the extra expense of dainties
+and dinners at restaurants. It was during this discussion that a young
+cavalryman, who had been made almost tipsy by the champagne, was called to
+order for comparing lovers to distilling machines. But the chapter that gave
+occasion for the most violent discussion, and the consideration of which was
+adjourned for several weeks, when a report was made, was that concerning
+presents. At the last session, the refined Madame de D——- was the first
+speaker; and in a graceful address, which testified to the nobility of her
+sentiments, she set out to demonstrate that most of the time the gifts of love
+had no intrinsic value. The author replied that all lovers had their portraits
+taken. A lady objected that a portrait was invested capital, and care should
+always be taken to recover it for a second investment. But suddenly a gentleman
+of Provence rose to deliver a philippic against women. He spoke of the
+greediness which most women in love exhibited for furs, satins, silks, jewels
+and furniture; but a lady interrupted him by asking if Madame d’O——-y, his
+intimate friend, had not already paid his debts twice over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are mistaken, madame,” said the Provencal, “it was her husband.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The speaker is called to order,” cried the president, “and condemned to dine
+the whole party, for having used the word <i>husband</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Provencal was completely refuted by a lady who undertook to prove that
+women show much more self-sacrifice in love than men; that lovers cost very
+dear, and that the honest woman may consider herself very fortunate if she gets
+off with spending on them two thousand francs for a single year. The discussion
+was in danger of degenerating into an exchange of personalities, when a
+division was called for. The conclusions of the committee were adopted by vote.
+The conclusions were, in substance, that the amount for presents between lovers
+during the year should be reckoned at five hundred francs, but that in this
+computation should be included: (1) the expense of expeditions into the
+country; (2) the pharmaceutical expenses, occasioned by the colds caught from
+walking in the damp pathways of parks, and in leaving the theatre, which
+expenses are veritable presents; (3) the carrying of letters, and law expenses;
+(4) journeys, and expenses whose items are forgotten, without counting the
+follies committed by the spenders; inasmuch as, according to the investigations
+of the committee, it had been proved that most of a man’s extravagant
+expenditure profited the opera girls, rather than the married women. The
+conclusion arrived at from this pecuniary calculation was that, in one way or
+another, a passion costs nearly fifteen hundred francs a year, which were
+required to meet the expense borne more unequally by lovers, but which would
+not have occurred, but for their attachment. There was also a sort of unanimity
+in the opinion of the council that this was the lowest annual figure which
+would cover the cost of a passion. Now, my dear sir, since we have proved, by
+the statistics of our conjugal calculations [See Meditations I, II, and III.]
+and proved irrefragably, that there exists a floating total of at least fifteen
+hundred thousand unlawful passions, it follows:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the criminal conversations of a third among the French population
+contribute a sum of nearly three thousand millions to that vast circulation of
+money, the true blood of society, of which the budget is the heart;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the honest woman not only gives life to the children of the peerage, but
+also to its financial funds;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That manufacturers owe their prosperity to this <i>systolic</i> movement;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the honest woman is a being essentially <i>budgetative</i>, and active as
+a consumer;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the least decline in public love would involve incalculable miseries to
+the treasury, and to men of invested fortunes;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That a husband has at least a third of his fortune invested in the inconstancy
+of his wife, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I am well aware that you are going to open your mouth and talk to me about
+manners, politics, good and evil. But, my dear victim of the Minotaur, is not
+happiness the object which all societies should set before them? Is it not this
+axiom that makes these wretched kings give themselves so much trouble about
+their people? Well, the honest woman has not, like them, thrones, gendarmes and
+tribunals; she has only a bed to offer; but if our four hundred thousand women
+can, by this ingenious machine, make a million celibates happy, do not they
+attain in a mysterious manner, and without making any fuss, the end aimed at by
+a government, namely, the end of giving the largest possible amount of
+happiness to the mass of mankind?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, but the annoyances, the children, the troubles—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ah, you must permit me to proffer the consolatory thought with which one of our
+wittiest caricaturists closes his satiric observations: “Man is not perfect!”
+It is sufficient, therefore, that our institutions have no more disadvantages
+than advantages in order to be reckoned excellent; for the human race is not
+placed, socially speaking, between the good and the bad, but between the bad
+and the worse. Now if the work, which we are at present on the point of
+concluding, has had for its object the diminution of the worse, as it is found
+in matrimonial institutions, in laying bare the errors and absurdities due to
+our manners and our prejudices, we shall certainly have won one of the fairest
+titles that can be put forth by a man to a place among the benefactors of
+humanity. Has not the author made it his aim, by advising husbands, to make
+women more self-restrained and consequently to impart more violence to
+passions, more money to the treasury, more life to commerce and agriculture?
+Thanks to this last Meditation he can flatter himself that he has strictly kept
+the vow of eclecticism, which he made in projecting the work, and he hopes he
+has marshaled all details of the case, and yet like an attorney-general
+refrained from expressing his personal opinion. And really what do you want
+with an axiom in the present matter? Do you wish that this book should be a
+mere development of the last opinion held by Tronchet, who in his closing days
+thought that the law of marriage had been drawn up less in the interest of
+husbands than of children? I also wish it very much. Would you rather desire
+that this book should serve as proof to the peroration of the Capuchin, who
+preached before Anne of Austria, and when he saw the queen and her ladies
+overwhelmed by his triumphant arguments against their frailty, said as he came
+down from the pulpit of truth, “Now you are all honorable women, and it is we
+who unfortunately are sons of Samaritan women”? I have no objection to that
+either. You may draw what conclusion you please; for I think it is very
+difficult to put forth two contrary opinions, without both of them containing
+some grains of truth. But the book has not been written either for or against
+marriage; all I have thought you needed was an exact description of it. If an
+examination of the machine shall lead us to make one wheel of it more perfect;
+if by scouring away some rust we have given more elastic movement to its
+mechanism; then give his wage to the workman. If the author has had the
+impertinence to utter truths too harsh for you, if he has too often spoken of
+rare and exceptional facts as universal, if he has omitted the commonplaces
+which have been employed from time immemorial to offer women the incense of
+flattery, oh, let him be crucified! But do not impute to him any motive of
+hostility to the institution itself; he is concerned merely for men and women.
+He knows that from the moment marriage ceases to defeat the purpose of
+marriage, it is unassailable; and, after all, if there do arise serious
+complaints against this institution, it is perhaps because man has no memory
+excepting for his disasters, that he accuses his wife, as he accuses his life,
+for marriage is but a life within a life. Yet people whose habit it is to take
+their opinions from newspapers would perhaps despise a book in which they see
+the mania of eclecticism pushed too far; for then they absolutely demand
+something in the shape of a peroration, it is not hard to find one for them.
+And since the words of Napoleon served to start this book, why should it not
+end as it began? Before the whole Council of State the First Consul pronounced
+the following startling phrase, in which he at the same time eulogized and
+satirized marriage, and summed up the contents of this book:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!”
+</p>
+
+<h3>POSTSCRIPT.</h3>
+
+<p>
+“And so you are going to be married?” asked the duchess of the author who had
+read his manuscript to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was one of those ladies to whom the author has already paid his respects in
+the introduction of this work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly, madame,” I replied. “To meet a woman who has courage enough to
+become mine, would satisfy the wildest of my hopes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is this resignation or infatuation?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That is my affair.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, sir, as you are doctor of conjugal arts and sciences, allow me to tell
+you a little Oriental fable, that I read in a certain sheet, which is published
+annually in the form of an almanac. At the beginning of the Empire ladies used
+to play at a game in which no one accepted a present from his or her partner in
+the game, without saying the word, <i>Diadeste</i>. A game lasted, as you may
+well suppose, during a week, and the point was to catch some one receiving some
+trifle or other without pronouncing the sacramental word.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Even a kiss?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, I have won the <i>Diadeste</i> twenty times in that way,” she laughingly
+replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was, I believe, from the playing of this game, whose origin is Arabian or
+Chinese, that my apologue takes its point. But if I tell you,” she went on,
+putting her finger to her nose, with a charming air of coquetry, “let me
+contribute it as a finale to your work.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This would indeed enrich me. You have done me so many favors already, that I
+cannot repay—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled slyly, and replied as follows:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A philosopher had compiled a full account of all the tricks that women could
+possibly play, and in order to verify it, he always carried it about with him.
+One day he found himself in the course of his travels near an encampment of
+Arabs. A young woman, who had seated herself under the shade of a palm tree,
+rose on his approach. She kindly asked him to rest himself in her tent, and he
+could not refuse. Her husband was then absent. Scarcely had the traveler seated
+himself on a soft rug, when the graceful hostess offered him fresh dates, and a
+cup of milk; he could not help observing the rare beauty of her hands as she
+did so. But, in order to distract his mind from the sensations roused in him by
+the fair young Arabian girl, whose charms were most formidable, the sage took
+his book, and began to read.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The seductive creature piqued by this slight said to him in a melodious voice:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That book must be very interesting since it seems to be the sole object worthy
+of your attention. Would it be taking a liberty to ask what science it treats
+of?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The philosopher kept his eyes lowered as he replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The subject of this book is beyond the comprehension of ladies.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This rebuff excited more than ever the curiosity of the young Arabian woman.
+She put out the prettiest little foot that had ever left its fleeting imprint
+on the shifting sands of the desert. The philosopher was perturbed, and his
+eyes were too powerfully tempted to resist wandering from these feet, which
+betokened so much, up to the bosom, which was still more ravishingly fair; and
+soon the flame of his admiring glance was mingled with the fire that sparkled
+in the pupils of the young Asiatic. She asked again the name of the book in
+tones so sweet that the philosopher yielded to the fascination, and replied:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am the author of the book; but the substance of it is not mine: it contains
+an account of all the ruses and stratagems of women.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What! Absolutely all?” said the daughter of the desert.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, all! And it has been only by a constant study of womankind that I have
+come to regard them without fear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah!” said the young Arabian girl, lowering the long lashes of her white
+eyelids.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then, suddenly darting the keenest of her glances at the pretended sage, she
+made him in one instant forget the book and all its contents. And now our
+philosopher was changed to the most passionate of men. Thinking he saw in the
+bearing of the young woman a faint trace of coquetry, the stranger was
+emboldened to make an avowal. How could he resist doing so? The sky was blue,
+the sand blazed in the distance like a scimitar of gold, the wind of the desert
+breathed love, and the woman of Arabia seemed to reflect all the fire with
+which she was surrounded; her piercing eyes were suffused with a mist; and by a
+slight nod of the head she seemed to make the luminous atmosphere undulate, as
+she consented to listen to the stranger’s words of love. The sage was
+intoxicated with delirious hopes, when the young woman, hearing in the distance
+the gallop of a horse which seemed to fly, exclaimed:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We are lost! My husband is sure to catch us. He is jealous as a tiger, and
+more pitiless than one. In the name of the prophet, if you love your life,
+conceal yourself in this chest!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author, frightened out of his wits, seeing no other way of getting out of a
+terrible fix, jumped into the box, and crouched down there. The woman closed
+down the lid, locked it, and took the key. She ran to meet her husband, and
+after some caresses which put him into a good humor, she said:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I must relate to you a very singular adventure I have just had.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am listening, my gazelle,” replied the Arab, who sat down on a rug and
+crossed his feet after the Oriental manner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There arrived here to-day a kind of philosopher,” she began, “he professes to
+have compiled a book which describes all the wiles of which my sex is capable;
+and then this sham sage made love to me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, go on!” cried the Arab.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I listened to his avowal. He was young, ardent—and you came just in time to
+save my tottering virtue.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Arab leaped to his feet like a lion, and drew his scimitar with a shout of
+fury. The philosopher heard all from the depths of the chest and consigned to
+Hades his book, and all the men and women of Arabia Petraea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fatima!” cried the husband, “if you would save your life, answer me —Where is
+the traitor?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Terrified at the tempest which she had roused, Fatima threw herself at her
+husband’s feet, and trembling beneath the point of his sword, she pointed out
+the chest with a prompt though timid glance of her eye. Then she rose to her
+feet, as if in shame, and taking the key from her girdle presented it to the
+jealous Arab; but, just as he was about to open the chest, the sly creature
+burst into a peal of laughter. Faroun stopped with a puzzled expression, and
+looked at his wife in amazement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So I shall have my fine chain of gold, after all!” she cried, dancing for joy.
+“You have lost the <i>Diadeste</i>. Be more mindful next time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The husband, thunderstruck, let fall the key, and offered her the longed-for
+chain on bended knee, and promised to bring to his darling Fatima all the
+jewels brought by the caravan in a year, if she would refrain from winning the
+<i>Diadeste</i> by such cruel stratagems. Then, as he was an Arab, and did not
+like forfeiting a chain of gold, although his wife had fairly won it, he
+mounted his horse again, and galloped off, to complain at his will, in the
+desert, for he loved Fatima too well to let her see his annoyance. The young
+woman then drew forth the philosopher from the chest, and gravely said to him,
+“Do not forget, Master Doctor, to put this feminine trick into your
+collection.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame,” said I to the duchess, “I understand! If I marry, I am bound to be
+unexpectedly outwitted by some infernal trick or other; but I shall in that
+case, you may be quite sure, furnish a model household for the admiration of my
+contemporaries.”
+</p>
+
+<h3>PARIS, 1824-29.</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE</h2>
+
+<h5>BY</h5>
+
+<h5>HONORÉ DE BALZAC</h5>
+
+<h2>PART FIRST</h2>
+
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+<h5>IN WHICH EVERY ONE WILL FIND HIS OWN IMPRESSIONS OF MARRIAGE.</h5>
+
+<p>
+A friend, in speaking to you of a young woman, says: “Good family, well bred,
+pretty, and three hundred thousand in her own right.” You have expressed a
+desire to meet this charming creature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Usually, chance interviews are premeditated. And you speak with this object,
+who has now become very timid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+YOU.—“A delightful evening!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+SHE.—“Oh! yes, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are allowed to become the suitor of this young person.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE MOTHER-IN-LAW (to the intended groom).—“You can’t imagine how susceptible
+the dear girl is of attachment.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile there is a delicate pecuniary question to be discussed by the two
+families.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+YOUR FATHER (to the mother-in-law).—“My property is valued at five hundred
+thousand francs, my dear madame!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+YOUR FUTURE MOTHER-IN-LAW.—“And our house, my dear sir, is on a corner lot.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A contract follows, drawn up by two hideous notaries, a small one, and a big
+one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the two families judge it necessary to convoy you to the civil
+magistrate’s and to the church, before conducting the bride to her chamber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then what? . . . . . Why, then come a crowd of petty unforeseen troubles, like
+the following:
+</p>
+
+<h2>PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE</h2>
+
+<h3>THE UNKINDEST CUT OF ALL.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Is it a petty or a profound trouble? I knew not; it is profound for your
+sons-in-law or daughters-in-law, but exceedingly petty for you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Petty! You must be joking; why, a child costs terribly dear!” exclaims a
+ten-times-too-happy husband, at the baptism of his eleventh, called the little
+last newcomer,—a phrase with which women beguile their families.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What trouble is this?” you ask me. Well! this is, like many petty troubles of
+married life, a blessing for some one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have, four months since, married off your daughter, whom we will call by
+the sweet name of CAROLINE, and whom we will make the type of all wives.
+Caroline is, like all other young ladies, very charming, and you have found for
+her a husband who is either a lawyer, a captain, an engineer, a judge, or
+perhaps a young viscount. But he is more likely to be what sensible families
+must seek,—the ideal of their desires—the only son of a rich landed proprietor.
+(See the <i>Preface</i>.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This phoenix we will call ADOLPHE, whatever may be his position in the world,
+his age, and the color of his hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lawyer, the captain, the engineer, the judge, in short, the son-in-law,
+Adolphe, and his family, have seen in Miss Caroline:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I.—Miss Caroline;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+II.—The only daughter of your wife and you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, as in the Chamber of Deputies, we are compelled to call for a division of
+the house:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+1.—As to your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife is to inherit the property of a maternal uncle, a gouty old fellow
+whom she humors, nurses, caresses, and muffles up; to say nothing of her
+father’s fortune. Caroline has always adored her uncle, —her uncle who trotted
+her on his knee, her uncle who—her uncle whom—her uncle, in short,—whose
+property is estimated at two hundred thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Further, your wife is well preserved, though her age has been the subject of
+mature reflection on the part of your son-in-law’s grandparents and other
+ancestors. After many skirmishes between the mothers-in-law, they have at last
+confided to each other the little secrets peculiar to women of ripe years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How is it with you, my dear madame?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I, thank heaven, have passed the period; and you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I really hope I have, too!” says your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You can marry Caroline,” says Adolphe’s mother to your future son-in-law;
+“Caroline will be the sole heiress of her mother, of her uncle, and her
+grandfather.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+2.—As to yourself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are also the heir of your maternal grandfather, a good old man whose
+possessions will surely fall to you, for he has grown imbecile, and is
+therefore incapable of making a will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are an amiable man, but you have been very dissipated in your youth.
+Besides, you are fifty-nine years old, and your head is bald, resembling a bare
+knee in the middle of a gray wig.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+III.—A dowry of three hundred thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+IV.—Caroline’s only sister, a little dunce of twelve, a sickly child, who bids
+fair to fill an early grave.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+V.—Your own fortune, father-in-law (in certain kinds of society they say
+<i>papa father-in-law</i>) yielding an income of twenty thousand, and which
+will soon be increased by an inheritance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+VI.—Your wife’s fortune, which will be increased by two inheritances —from her
+uncle and her grandfather. In all, thus:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Three inheritances and interest,      750,000<br/>
+Your fortune,                         250,000<br/>
+Your wife’s fortune,                  250,000<br/>
+_________
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Total,                          1,250,000
+</p>
+
+<p>
+which surely cannot take wing!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such is the autopsy of all those brilliant marriages that conduct their
+processions of dancers and eaters, in white gloves, flowering at the
+button-hole, with bouquets of orange flowers, furbelows, veils, coaches and
+coach-drivers, from the magistrate’s to the church, from the church to the
+banquet, from the banquet to the dance, from the dance to the nuptial chamber,
+to the music of the orchestra and the accompaniment of the immemorial
+pleasantries uttered by relics of dandies, for are there not, here and there in
+society, relics of dandies, as there are relics of English horses? To be sure,
+and such is the osteology of the most amorous intent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The majority of the relatives have had a word to say about this marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those on the side of the bridegroom:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe has made a good thing of it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those on the side of the bride:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline has made a splendid match. Adolphe is an only son, and will have an
+income of sixty thousand, <i>some day or other</i>!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some time afterwards, the happy judge, the happy engineer, the happy captain,
+the happy lawyer, the happy only son of a rich landed proprietor, in short
+Adolphe, comes to dine with you, accompanied by his family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your daughter Caroline is exceedingly proud of the somewhat rounded form of her
+waist. All women display an innocent artfulness, the first time they find
+themselves facing motherhood. Like a soldier who makes a brilliant toilet for
+his first battle, they love to play the pale, the suffering; they rise in a
+certain manner, and walk with the prettiest affectation. While yet flowers,
+they bear a fruit; they enjoy their maternity by anticipation. All those little
+ways are exceedingly charming—the first time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife, now the mother-in-law of Adolphe, subjects herself to the pressure
+of tight corsets. When her daughter laughs, she weeps; when Caroline wishes her
+happiness public, she tries to conceal hers. After dinner, the discerning eye
+of the co-mother-in-law divines the work of darkness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife also is an expectant mother! The news spreads like lightning, and
+your oldest college friend says to you laughingly: “Ah! so you are trying to
+increase the population again!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have some hope in a consultation that is to take place to-morrow. You,
+kind-hearted man that you are, you turn red, you hope it is merely the dropsy;
+but the doctors confirm the arrival of a <i>little last one</i>!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In such circumstances some timorous husbands go to the country or make a
+journey to Italy. In short, a strange confusion reigns in your household; both
+you and your wife are in a false position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, you old rogue, you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!” says a friend
+to you on the Boulevard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well! do as much if you can,” is your angry retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s as bad as being robbed on the highway!” says your son-in-law’s family.
+“Robbed on the highway” is a flattering expression for the mother-in-law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The family hopes that the child which divides the expected fortune in three
+parts, will be, like all old men’s children, scrofulous, feeble, an abortion.
+Will it be likely to live? The family awaits the delivery of your wife with an
+anxiety like that which agitated the house of Orleans during the confinement of
+the Duchess de Berri: a second son would secure the throne to the younger
+branch without the onerous conditions of July; Henry V would easily seize the
+crown. From that moment the house of Orleans was obliged to play double or
+quits: the event gave them the game.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The mother and the daughter are put to bed nine days apart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline’s first child is a pale, cadaverous little girl that will not live.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her mother’s last child is a splendid boy, weighing twelve pounds, with two
+teeth and luxuriant hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For sixteen years you have desired a son. This conjugal annoyance is the only
+one that makes you beside yourself with joy. For your rejuvenated wife has
+attained what must be called the <i>Indian Summer</i> of women; she nurses, she
+has a full breast of milk! Her complexion is fresh, her color is pure pink and
+white. In her forty-second year, she affects the young woman, buys little baby
+stockings, walks about followed by a nurse, embroiders caps and tries on the
+cunningest headdresses. Alexandrine has resolved to instruct her daughter by
+her example; she is delightful and happy. And yet this is a trouble, a petty
+one for you, a serious one for your son-in-law. This annoyance is of the two
+sexes, it is common to you and your wife. In short, in this instance, your
+paternity renders you all the more proud from the fact that it is
+incontestable, my dear sir!
+</p>
+
+<h3>REVELATIONS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Generally speaking, a young woman does not exhibit her true character till she
+has been married two or three years. She hides her faults, without intending
+it, in the midst of her first joys, of her first parties of pleasure. She goes
+into society to dance, she visits her relatives to show you off, she journeys
+on with an escort of love’s first wiles; she is gradually transformed from
+girlhood to womanhood. Then she becomes mother and nurse, and in this
+situation, full of charming pangs, that leaves neither a word nor a moment for
+observation, such are its multiplied cares, it is impossible to judge of a
+woman. You require, then, three or four years of intimate life before you
+discover an exceedingly melancholy fact, one that gives you cause for constant
+terror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife, the young lady in whom the first pleasures of life and love supplied
+the place of grace and wit, so arch, so animated, so vivacious, whose least
+movements spoke with delicious eloquence, has cast off, slowly, one by one, her
+natural artifices. At last you perceive the truth! You try to disbelieve it,
+you think yourself deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she
+can neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are frightened.
+You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling through the thorny
+paths, where you must perforce leave your self-esteem in tatters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have already been annoyed several times by replies that, in society, were
+politely received: people have held their tongues instead of smiling; but you
+were certain that after your departure the women looked at each other and said:
+“Did you hear Madame Adolphe?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your little woman, she is—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A regular cabbage-head.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How could he, who is certainly a man of sense, choose—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He should educate, teach his wife, or make her hold her tongue.”
+</p>
+
+<h3>AXIOMS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—In our system of civilization a man is entirely responsible for his
+wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—The husband does not mould the wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline has one day obstinately maintained, at the house of Madame de
+Fischtaminel, a very distinguished lady, that her little last one resembled
+neither its father nor its mother, but looked like a certain friend of the
+family. She perhaps enlightens Monsieur de Fischtaminel, and overthrows the
+labors of three years, by tearing down the scaffolding of Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s assertions, who, after this visit, will treat you will coolness,
+suspecting, as she does, that you have been making indiscreet remarks to your
+wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On another occasion, Caroline, after having conversed with a writer about his
+works, counsels the poet, who is already a prolific author, to try to write
+something likely to live. Sometimes she complains of the slow attendance at the
+tables of people who have but one servant and have put themselves to great
+trouble to receive her. Sometimes she speaks ill of widows who marry again,
+before Madame Deschars who has married a third time, and on this occasion, an
+ex-notary, Nicolas-Jean-Jerome-Nepomucene-Ange-Marie-Victor-Joseph Deschars, a
+friend of your father’s.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, you are no longer yourself when you are in society with your wife.
+Like a man who is riding a skittish horse and glares straight between the
+beast’s two ears, you are absorbed by the attention with which you listen to
+your Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In order to compensate herself for the silence to which young ladies are
+condemned, Caroline talks; or rather babbles. She wants to make a sensation,
+and she does make a sensation; nothing stops her. She addresses the most
+eminent men, the most celebrated women. She introduces herself, and puts you on
+the rack. Going into society is going to the stake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She begins to think you are cross-grained, moody. The fact is, you are watching
+her, that’s all! In short, you keep her within a small circle of friends, for
+she has already embroiled you with people on whom your interests depended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How many times have you recoiled from the necessity of a remonstrance, in the
+morning, on awakening, when you had put her in a good humor for listening! A
+woman rarely listens. How many times have you recoiled from the burthen of your
+imperious obligations!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The conclusion of your ministerial communication can be no other than: “You
+have no sense.” You foresee the effect of your first lesson. Caroline will say
+to herself: “Ah I have no sense! Haven’t I though?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No woman ever takes this in good part. Both of you must draw the sword and
+throw away the scabbard. Six weeks after, Caroline may prove to you that she
+has quite sense enough to <i>minotaurize</i> you without your perceiving it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Frightened at such a prospect, you make use of all the eloquent phrases to gild
+this pill. In short, you find the means of flattering Caroline’s various
+self-loves, for:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—A married woman has several self-loves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You say that you are her best friend, the only one well situated to enlighten
+her; the more careful you are, the more watchful and puzzled she is. At this
+moment she has plenty of sense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You ask your dear Caroline, whose waist you clasp, how she, who is so brilliant
+when alone with you, who retorts so charmingly (you remind her of sallies that
+she has never made, which you put in her mouth, and, which she smilingly
+accepts), how she can say this, that, and the other, in society. She is,
+doubtless, like many ladies, timid in company.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know,” you say, “many very distinguished men who are just the same.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You cite the case of some who are admirable tea-party oracles, but who cannot
+utter half a dozen sentences in the tribune. Caroline should keep watch over
+herself; you vaunt silence as the surest method of being witty. In society, a
+good listener is highly prized.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have broken the ice, though you have not even scratched its glossy surface:
+you have placed your hand upon the croup of the most ferocious and savage, the
+most wakeful and clear-sighted, the most restless, the swiftest, the most
+jealous, the most ardent and violent, the simplest and most elegant, the most
+unreasonable, the most watchful chimera of the moral world—THE VANITY OF A
+WOMAN!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline clasps you in her arms with a saintly embrace, thanks you for your
+advice, and loves you the more for it; she wishes to be beholden to you for
+everything, even for her intellect; she may be a dunce, but, what is better
+than saying fine things, she knows how to do them! But she desires also to be
+your pride! It is not a question of taste in dress, of elegance and beauty; she
+wishes to make you proud of her intelligence. You are the luckiest of men in
+having successfully managed to escape from this first dangerous pass in
+conjugal life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We are going this evening to Madame Deschars’, where they never know what to
+do to amuse themselves; they play all sorts of forfeit games on account of a
+troop of young women and girls there; you shall see!” she says.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are so happy at this turn of affairs, that you hum airs and carelessly chew
+bits of straw and thread, while still in your shirt and drawers. You are like a
+hare frisking on a flowering dew-perfumed meadow. You leave off your morning
+gown till the last extremity, when breakfast is on the table. During the day,
+if you meet a friend and he happens to speak of women, you defend them; you
+consider women charming, delicious, there is something divine about them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How often are our opinions dictated to us by the unknown events of our life!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You take your wife to Madame Deschars’. Madame Deschars is a mother and is
+exceedingly devout. You never see any newspapers at her house: she keeps watch
+over her daughters by three different husbands, and keeps them all the more
+closely from the fact that she herself has, it is said, some little things to
+reproach herself with during the career of her two former lords. At her house,
+no one dares risk a jest. Everything there is white and pink and perfumed with
+sanctity, as at the houses of widows who are approaching the confines of their
+third youth. It seems as if every day were Sunday there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You, a young husband, join the juvenile society of young women and girls,
+misses and young people, in the chamber of Madame Deschars. The serious people,
+politicians, whist-players, and tea-drinkers, are in the parlor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Madame Deschars’ room they are playing a game which consists in hitting upon
+words with several meanings, to fit the answers that each player is to make to
+the following questions:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How do you like it?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What do you do with it?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Where do you put it?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your turn comes to guess the word, you go into the parlor, take part in a
+discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They have selected
+a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical replies. Everybody knows
+that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads, the best way is to choose a very
+ordinary word, and to invent phrases that will send the parlor Oedipus a
+thousand leagues from each of his previous thoughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This game is a poor substitute for lansquenet or dice, but it is not very
+expensive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The word MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion. Every one
+has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations,
+has that of <i>mal</i> [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the
+opposite of good; of <i>mal</i> [pain, disease, complaint], a substantive that
+enters into a thousand pathological expressions; then <i>malle</i> [a
+mail-bag], and finally <i>malle</i> [a trunk], that box of various forms,
+covered with all kinds of skin, made of every sort of leather, with handles,
+that journeys rapidly, for it serves to carry travelling effects in, as a man
+of Delille’s school would say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For you, a man of some sharpness, the Sphinx displays his wiles; he spreads his
+wings and folds them up again; he shows you his lion’s paws, his woman’s neck,
+his horse’s loins, and his intellectual head; he shakes his sacred fillets, he
+strikes an attitude and runs away, he comes and goes, and sweeps the place with
+his terrible equine tail; he shows his shining claws, and draws them in; he
+smiles, frisks, and murmurs. He puts on the looks of a joyous child and those
+of a matron; he is, above all, there to make fun of you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You ask the group collectively, “How do you like it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it for love’s sake,” says one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it regular,” says another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it with a long mane.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it with a spring lock.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it unmasked.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it on horseback.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it as coming from God,” says Madame Deschars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How do you like it?” you say to your wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I like it legitimate.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This response of your wife is not understood, and sends you a journey into the
+constellated fields of the infinite, where the mind, dazzled by the multitude
+of creations, finds it impossible to make a choice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where do you put it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In a carriage.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In a garret.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In a steamboat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the closet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“On a cart.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In prison.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the ears.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In a shop.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife says to you last of all: “In bed.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You were on the point of guessing it, but you know no word that fits this
+answer, Madame Deschars not being likely to have allowed anything improper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you do with it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I make it my sole happiness,” says your wife, after the answers of all the
+rest, who have sent you spinning through a whole world of linguistic
+suppositions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This response strikes everybody, and you especially; so you persist in seeking
+the meaning of it. You think of the bottle of hot water that your wife has put
+to her feet when it is cold,—of the warming pan, above all! Now of her
+night-cap,—of her handkerchief,—of her curling paper,—of the hem of her
+chemise,—of her embroidery,—of her flannel jacket,—of your bandanna,—of the
+pillow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, as the greatest pleasure of the respondents is to see their Oedipus
+mystified, as each word guessed by you throws them into fits of laughter,
+superior men, perceiving no word that will fit all the explanations, will
+sooner give it up than make three unsuccessful attempts. According to the law
+of this innocent game you are condemned to return to the parlor after leaving a
+forfeit; but you are so exceedingly puzzled by your wife’s answers, that you
+ask what the word was.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mal,” exclaims a young miss.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You comprehend everything but your wife’s replies: she has not played the game.
+Neither Madame Deschars, nor any one of the young women understand. She has
+cheated. You revolt, there is an insurrection among the girls and young women.
+They seek and are puzzled. You want an explanation, and every one participates
+in your desire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In what sense did you understand the word, my dear?” you say to Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, <i>male</i>!” [male.]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Deschars bites her lips and manifests the greatest displeasure; the
+young women blush and drop their eyes; the little girls open theirs, nudge each
+other and prick up their ears. Your feet are glued to the carpet, and you have
+so much salt in your throat that you believe in a repetition of the event which
+delivered Lot from his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You see an infernal life before you; society is out of the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To remain at home with this triumphant stupidity is equivalent to condemnation
+to the state’s prison.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Moral tortures exceed physical sufferings by all the difference which
+exists between the soul and the body.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE ATTENTIONS OF A WIFE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Among the keenest pleasures of bachelor life, every man reckons the
+independence of his getting up. The fancies of the morning compensate for the
+glooms of evening. A bachelor turns over and over in his bed: he is free to
+gape loud enough to justify apprehensions of murder, and to scream at a pitch
+authorizing the suspicion of joys untold. He can forget his oaths of the day
+before, let the fire burn upon the hearth and the candle sink to its socket,—in
+short, go to sleep again in spite of pressing work. He can curse the expectant
+boots which stand holding their black mouths open at him and pricking up their
+ears. He can pretend not to see the steel hooks which glitter in a sunbeam
+which has stolen through the curtains, can disregard the sonorous summons of
+the obstinate clock, can bury himself in a soft place, saying: “Yes, I was in a
+hurry, yesterday, but am so no longer to-day. Yesterday was a dotard. To-day is
+a sage: between them stands the night which brings wisdom, the night which
+gives light. I ought to go, I ought to do it, I promised I would—I am weak, I
+know. But how can I resist the downy creases of my bed? My feet feel flaccid, I
+think I must be sick, I am too happy just here. I long to see the ethereal
+horizon of my dreams again, those women without claws, those winged beings and
+their obliging ways. In short, I have found the grain of salt to put upon the
+tail of that bird that was always flying away: the coquette’s feet are caught
+in the line. I have her now—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your servant, meantime, reads your newspaper, half-opens your letters, and
+leaves you to yourself. And you go to sleep again, lulled by the rumbling of
+the morning wagons. Those terrible, vexatious, quivering teams, laden with
+meat, those trucks with big tin teats bursting with milk, though they make a
+clatter most infernal and even crush the paving stones, seem to you to glide
+over cotton, and vaguely remind you of the orchestra of Napoleon Musard. Though
+your house trembles in all its timbers and shakes upon its keel, you think
+yourself a sailor cradled by a zephyr.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You alone have the right to bring these joys to an end by throwing away your
+night-cap as you twist up your napkin after dinner, and by sitting up in bed.
+Then you take yourself to task with such reproaches as these: “Ah, mercy on me,
+I must get up!” “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy—!” “Get
+up, lazy bones!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this time you remain perfectly tranquil. You look round your chamber, you
+collect your wits together. Finally, you emerge from the bed, spontaneously!
+Courageously! of your own accord! You go to the fireplace, you consult the most
+obliging of timepieces, you utter hopeful sentences thus couched: “Whatshisname
+is a lazy creature, I guess I shall find him in. I’ll run. I’ll catch him if
+he’s gone. He’s sure to wait for me. There is a quarter of an hour’s grace in
+all appointments, even between debtor and creditor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You put on your boots with fury, you dress yourself as if you were afraid of
+being caught half-dressed, you have the delight of being in a hurry, you call
+your buttons into action, you finally go out like a conqueror, whistling,
+brandishing your cane, pricking up your ears and breaking into a canter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After all, you say to yourself, you are responsible to no one, you are your own
+master!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But you, poor married man, you were stupid enough to say to your wife,
+“To-morrow, my dear” (sometimes she knows it two days beforehand), “I have got
+to get up early.” Unfortunate Adolphe, you have especially proved the
+importance of this appointment: “It’s to—and to—and above all to—in short to—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two hours before dawn, Caroline wakes you up gently and says to you softly:
+“Adolphy dear, Adolphy love!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter? Fire?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, go to sleep again, I’ve made a mistake; but the hour hand was on it, any
+way! It’s only four, you can sleep two hours more.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Is not telling a man, “You’ve only got two hours to sleep,” the same thing, on
+a small scale, as saying to a criminal, “It’s five in the morning, the ceremony
+will be performed at half-past seven”? Such sleep is troubled by an idea
+dressed in grey and furnished with wings, which comes and flaps, like a bat,
+upon the windows of your brain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A woman in a case like this is as exact as a devil coming to claim a soul he
+has purchased. When the clock strikes five, your wife’s voice, too well known,
+alas! resounds in your ear; she accompanies the stroke, and says with an
+atrocious calmness, “Adolphe, it’s five o’clock, get up, dear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ye-e-e-s, ah-h-h-h!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe, you’ll be late for your business, you said so yourself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah-h-h-h, ye-e-e-e-s.” You turn over in despair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, come, love. I got everything ready last night; now you must, my dear; do
+you want to miss him? There, up, I say; it’s broad daylight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline throws off the blankets and gets up: she wants to show you that
+<i>she</i> can rise without making a fuss. She opens the blinds, she lets in
+the sun, the morning air, the noise of the street, and then comes back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, Adolphe, you <i>must</i> get up! Who ever would have supposed you had no
+energy! But it’s just like you men! I am only a poor, weak woman, but when I
+say a thing, I do it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You get up grumbling, execrating the sacrament of marriage. There is not the
+slightest merit in your heroism; it wasn’t you, but your wife, that got up.
+Caroline gets you everything you want with provoking promptitude; she foresees
+everything, she gives you a muffler in winter, a blue-striped cambric shirt in
+summer, she treats you like a child; you are still asleep, she dresses you and
+has all the trouble. She finally thrusts you out of doors. Without her nothing
+would go straight! She calls you back to give you a paper, a pocketbook, you
+had forgotten. You don’t think of anything, she thinks of everything!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You return five hours afterwards to breakfast, between eleven and noon. The
+chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the landing, talking with
+somebody’s valet: she runs in on hearing or seeing you. Your servant is laying
+the cloth in a most leisurely style, stopping to look out of the window or to
+lounge, and coming and going like a person who knows he has plenty of time. You
+ask for your wife, supposing that she is up and dressed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame is still in bed,” says the maid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep. She had been awake all
+night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is quite hungry
+now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are the cause of all these disarrangements. If breakfast is not ready, she
+says it’s because you went out. If she is not dressed, and if everything is in
+disorder, it’s all your fault. For everything which goes awry she has this
+answer: “Well, you would get up so early!” “He would get up so early!” is the
+universal reason. She makes you go to bed early, because you got up early. She
+can do nothing all day, because you would get up so unusually early.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, “Without me, you would never
+get up!” To her friends she says, “My husband get up! If it weren’t for me, he
+never <i>would</i> get up!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, “A graceful
+compliment to you, madame!” This slightly indelicate comment puts an end to her
+boasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone in the
+bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no confidant but
+yourself: and it often seems to you a question whether the inconveniences of
+the married state do not exceed its advantages.
+</p>
+
+<h3>SMALL VEXATIONS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the bachelor to
+the heavy andante of the father of a family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the polished
+shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving his glistening croup
+under the quadruple network of the reins and ribbons that you so skillfully
+manage with what grace and elegance the Champs Elysees can bear witness—you
+drive a good solid Norman horse with a steady, family gait.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have learned what paternal patience is, and you let no opportunity slip of
+proving it. Your countenance, therefore, is serious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By your side is a domestic, evidently for two purposes like the carriage. The
+vehicle is four-wheeled and hung upon English springs: it is corpulent and
+resembles a Rouen scow: it has glass windows, and an infinity of economical
+arrangements. It is a barouche in fine weather, and a brougham when it rains.
+It is apparently light, but, when six persons are in it, it is heavy and tires
+out your only horse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the back seat, spread out like flowers, is your young wife in full bloom,
+with her mother, a big marshmallow with a great many leaves. These two flowers
+of the female species twitteringly talk of you, though the noise of the wheels
+and your attention to the horse, joined to your fatherly caution, prevent you
+from hearing what they say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the front seat, there is a nice tidy nurse holding a little girl in her lap:
+by her side is a boy in a red plaited shirt, who is continually leaning out of
+the carriage and climbing upon the cushions, and who has a thousand times drawn
+down upon himself those declarations of every mother, which he knows to be
+threats and nothing else: “Be a good boy, Adolphe, or else—” “I declare I’ll
+never bring you again, so there!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mamma is secretly tired to death of this noisy little boy: he has provoked
+her twenty times, and twenty times the face of the little girl asleep has
+calmed her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am his mother,” she says to herself. And so she finally manages to keep her
+little Adolphe quiet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into execution.
+You left your home in the morning, all the opposite neighbors having come to
+their windows, envying you the privilege which your means give you of going to
+the country and coming back again without undergoing the miseries of a public
+conveyance. So you have dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to
+Vincennes, from Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from
+Charenton opposite some island or other which struck your wife and
+mother-in-law as being prettier than all the landscapes through which you had
+driven them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s go to Maison’s!” somebody exclaims.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So you go to Maison’s, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of the
+Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The horse drags
+your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled, and you look without
+emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones which stick out on each side
+of his belly. His coat is roughened by the sweat which has repeatedly come out
+and dried upon him, and which, no less than the dust, has made him gummy,
+sticky and shaggy. The horse looks like a wrathy porcupine: you are afraid he
+will be foundered, and you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way
+that he perfectly understands, for he moves his head about like an omnibus
+horse, tired of his deplorable existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You think a good deal of this horse; your consider him an excellent one and he
+cost you twelve hundred francs. When a man has the honor of being the father of
+a family, he thinks as much of twelve hundred francs as you think of this
+horse. You see at once the frightful amount of your extra expenses, in case
+Coco should have to lie by. For two days you will have to take hackney coaches
+to go to your business. You wife will pout if she can’t go out: but she will go
+out, and take a carriage. The horse will cause the purchase of numerous extras,
+which you will find in your coachman’s bill,—your only coachman, a model
+coachman, whom you watch as you do a model anybody.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To these thoughts you give expression in the gentle movement of the whip as it
+falls upon the animal’s ribs, up to his knees in the black dust which lines the
+road in front of La Verrerie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this moment, little Adolphe, who doesn’t know what to do in this rolling
+box, has sadly twisted himself up into a corner, and his grandmother anxiously
+asks him, “What is the matter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m hungry,” says the child.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He’s hungry,” says the mother to her daughter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And why shouldn’t he be hungry? It is half-past five, we are not at the
+barrier, and we started at two!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your husband might have treated us to dinner in the country.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He’d rather make his horse go a couple of leagues further, and get back to the
+house.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The cook might have had the day to herself. But Adolphe is right, after all:
+it’s cheaper to dine at home,” adds the mother-in-law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe,” exclaims your wife, stimulated by the word “cheaper,” “we go so slow
+that I shall be seasick, and you keep driving right in this nasty dust. What
+are you thinking of? My gown and hat will be ruined!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Would you rather ruin the horse?” you ask, with the air of a man who can’t be
+answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, no matter for your horse; just think of your son who is dying of hunger:
+he hasn’t tasted a thing for seven hours. Whip up your old horse! One would
+really think you cared more for your nag than for your child!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You dare not give your horse a single crack with the whip, for he might still
+have vigor enough left to break into a gallop and run away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, Adolphe tries to vex me, he’s going slower,” says the young wife to her
+mother. “My dear, go as slow as you like. But I know you’ll say I am
+extravagant when you see me buying another hat.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon this you utter a series of remarks which are lost in the racket made by
+the wheels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the use of replying with reasons that haven’t got an ounce of
+common-sense?” cries Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You talk, turning your face to the carriage and then turning back to the horse,
+to avoid an accident.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s right, run against somebody and tip us over, do, you’ll be rid of us.
+Adolphe, your son is dying of hunger. See how pale he is!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But Caroline,” puts in the mother-in-law, “he’s doing the best he can.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing annoys you so much as to have your mother-in-law take your part. She is
+a hypocrite and is delighted to see you quarreling with her daughter. Gently
+and with infinite precaution she throws oil on the fire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When you arrive at the barrier, your wife is mute. She says not a word, she
+sits with her arms crossed, and will not look at you. You have neither soul,
+heart, nor sentiment. No one but you could have invented such a party of
+pleasure. If you are unfortunate enough to remind Caroline that it was she who
+insisted on the excursion, that morning, for her children’s sake, and in behalf
+of her milk—she nurses the baby—you will be overwhelmed by an avalanche of
+frigid and stinging reproaches.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You bear it all so as “not to turn the milk of a nursing mother, for whose sake
+you must overlook some little things,” so your atrocious mother-in-law whispers
+in your ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All the furies of Orestes are rankling in your heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In reply to the sacramental words pronounced by the officer of the customs,
+“Have you anything to declare?” your wife says, “I declare a great deal of
+ill-humor and dust.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She laughs, the officer laughs, and you feel a desire to tip your family into
+the Seine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unluckily for you, you suddenly remember the joyous and perverse young woman
+who wore a pink bonnet and who made merry in your tilbury six years before, as
+you passed this spot on your way to the chop-house on the river’s bank. What a
+reminiscence! Was Madame Schontz anxious about babies, about her bonnet, the
+lace of which was torn to pieces in the bushes? No, she had no care for
+anything whatever, not even for her dignity, for she shocked the rustic police
+of Vincennes by the somewhat daring freedom of her style of dancing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You return home, you have frantically hurried your Norman horse, and have
+neither prevented an indisposition of the animal, nor an indisposition of your
+wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That evening, Caroline has very little milk. If the baby cries and if your head
+is split in consequence, it is all your fault, as you preferred the health of
+your horse to that of your son who was dying of hunger, and of your daughter
+whose supper has disappeared in a discussion in which your wife was right,
+<i>as she always is</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, well,” she says, “men are not mothers!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As you leave the chamber, you hear your mother-in-law consoling her daughter by
+these terrible words: “Come, be calm, Caroline: that’s the way with them all:
+they are a selfish lot: your father was just like that!”
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE ULTIMATUM.</h3>
+
+<p>
+It is eight o’clock; you make your appearance in the bedroom of your wife.
+There is a brilliant light. The chambermaid and the cook hover lightly about.
+The furniture is covered with dresses and flowers tried on and laid aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hair-dresser is there, an artist par excellence, a sovereign authority, at
+once nobody and everything. You hear the other domestics going and coming:
+orders are given and recalled, errands are well or ill performed. The disorder
+is at its height. This chamber is a studio from whence to issue a parlor Venus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife desires to be the fairest at the ball which you are to attend. Is it
+still for your sake, or only for herself, or is it for somebody else? Serious
+questions these.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The idea does not even occur to you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are squeezed, hampered, harnessed in your ball accoutrement: you count your
+steps as you walk, you look around, you observe, you contemplate talking
+business on neutral ground with a stock-broker, a notary or a banker, to whom
+you would not like to give an advantage over you by calling at their house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A singular fact which all have probably observed, but the causes of which can
+hardly be determined, is the peculiar repugnance which men dressed and ready to
+go to a party have for discussions or to answer questions. At the moment of
+starting, there are few husbands who are not taciturn and profoundly absorbed
+in reflections which vary with their characters. Those who reply give curt and
+peremptory answers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But women, at this time, are exceedingly aggravating. They consult you, they
+ask your advice upon the best way of concealing the stem of a rose, of giving a
+graceful fall to a bunch of briar, or a happy turn to a scarf. As a neat
+English expression has it, “they fish for compliments,” and sometimes for
+better than compliments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A boy just out of school would discern the motive concealed behind the willows
+of these pretexts: but your wife is so well known to you, and you have so often
+playfully joked upon her moral and physical perfections, that you are harsh
+enough to give your opinion briefly and conscientiously: you thus force
+Caroline to put that decisive question, so cruel to women, even those who have
+been married twenty years:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So I don’t suit you then?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Drawn upon the true ground by this inquiry, you bestow upon her such little
+compliments as you can spare and which are, as it were, the small change, the
+sous, the liards of your purse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The best gown you ever wore!” “I never saw you so well dressed.” “Blue, pink,
+yellow, cherry [take your pick], becomes you charmingly.” “Your head-dress is
+quite original.” “As you go in, every one will admire you.” “You will not only
+be the prettiest, but the best dressed.” “They’ll all be mad not to have your
+taste.” “Beauty is a natural gift: taste is like intelligence, a thing that we
+may be proud of.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you think so? Are you in earnest, Adolphe?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife is coquetting with you. She chooses this moment to force from you
+your pretended opinion of one and another of her friends, and to insinuate the
+price of the articles of her dress you so much admire. Nothing is too dear to
+please you. She sends the cook out of the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s go,” you say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She sends the chambermaid out after having dismissed the hair-dresser, and
+begins to turn round and round before her glass, showing off to you her most
+glorious beauties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let’s go,” you say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are in a hurry,” she returns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she goes on exhibiting herself with all her little airs, setting herself
+off like a fine peach magnificently exhibited in a fruiterer’s window. But
+since you have dined rather heartily, you kiss her upon the forehead merely,
+not feeling able to countersign your opinions. Caroline becomes serious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The carriage waits. All the household looks at Caroline as she goes out: she is
+the masterpiece to which all have contributed, and everybody admires the common
+work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife departs highly satisfied with herself, but a good deal displeased
+with you. She proceeds loftily to the ball, just as a picture, caressed by the
+painter and minutely retouched in the studio, is sent to the annual exhibition
+in the vast bazaar of the Louvre. Your wife, alas! sees fifty women handsomer
+than herself: they have invented dresses of the most extravagant price, and
+more or less original: and that which happens at the Louvre to the masterpiece,
+happens to the object of feminine labor: your wife’s dress seems pale by the
+side of another very much like it, but the livelier color of which crushes it.
+Caroline is nobody, and is hardly noticed. When there are sixty handsome women
+in a room, the sentiment of beauty is lost, beauty is no longer appreciated.
+Your wife becomes a very ordinary affair. The petty stratagem of her smile,
+made perfect by practice, has no meaning in the midst of countenances of noble
+expression, of self-possessed women of lofty presence. She is completely put
+down, and no one asks her to dance. She tries to force an expression of
+pretended satisfaction, but, as she is not satisfied, she hears people say,
+“Madame Adolphe is looking very ill to-night.” Women hypocritically ask her if
+she is indisposed and “Why don’t you dance?” They have a whole catalogue of
+malicious remarks veneered with sympathy and electroplated with charity, enough
+to damn a saint, to make a monkey serious, and to give the devil the shudders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You, who are innocently playing cards or walking backwards and forwards, and so
+have not seen one of the thousand pin-pricks with which your wife’s self-love
+has been tattooed, you come and ask her in a whisper, “What is the matter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Order <i>my</i> carriage!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This <i>my</i> is the consummation of marriage. For two years she has said
+“<i>my husband’s</i> carriage,” “<i>the</i> carriage,” “<i>our</i> carriage,”
+and now she says “<i>my</i> carriage.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are in the midst of a game, you say, somebody wants his revenge, or you
+must get your money back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, Adolphe, we allow that you have sufficient strength of mind to say yes,
+to disappear, and <i>not</i> to order the carriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have a friend, you send him to dance with your wife, for you have commenced
+a system of concessions which will ruin you. You already dimly perceive the
+advantage of a friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, you order the carriage. You wife gets in with concentrated rage, she
+hurls herself into a corner, covers her face with her hood, crosses her arms
+under her pelisse, and says not a word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+O husbands! Learn this fact; you may, at this fatal moment, repair and redeem
+everything: and never does the impetuosity of lovers who have been caressing
+each other the whole evening with flaming gaze fail to do it! Yes, you can
+bring her home in triumph, she has now nobody but you, you have one more
+chance, that of taking your wife by storm! But no, idiot, stupid and
+indifferent that you are, you ask her, “What is the matter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—A husband should always know what is the matter with his wife, for she
+always knows what is not.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m cold,” she says.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The ball was splendid.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pooh! nobody of distinction! People have the mania, nowadays, to invite all
+Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs: their gowns were
+horribly smashed, and mine is ruined.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We had a good time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, you men, you play and that’s the whole of it. Once married, you care about
+as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we arrived.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, you never understand us women. I begged you to go home, and you left me
+there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason. You are not without
+intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I don’t know what you are
+thinking about.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter. When you give your
+wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman of wood: she
+gives you a “thank you” which puts you in the same rank as her servant. You
+understood your wife no better before than you do after the ball: you find it
+difficult to follow her, for instead of going up stairs, she flies up. The
+rupture is complete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace: she is received with blunt No’s
+and Yes’s, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows with a slanting glance
+at you. “Monsieur’s always doing these things,” she mutters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You alone might have changed Madame’s temper. She goes to bed; she has her
+revenge to take: you did not comprehend her. Now she does not comprehend you.
+She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the most hostile and offensive
+posture: she is wrapped up in her chemise, in her sack, in her night-cap, like
+a bale of clocks packed for the East Indies. She says neither good-night, nor
+good-day, nor dear, nor Adolphe: you don’t exist, you are a bag of wheat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber where she
+frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead. Were you the Tropical Zone in
+person, astride of the Equator, you could not melt the ice of this little
+personified Switzerland that pretends to be asleep, and who could freeze you
+from head to foot, if she liked. Ask her one hundred times what is the matter
+with her, Switzerland replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference
+of London.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing is the matter with her: she is tired: she is going to sleep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the more she
+isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise. If you get impatient, Caroline begins to
+dream! You grumble, you are lost.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their strong
+points, they leave us to guess at their weak ones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline will perhaps also condescend to assure you that she does not feel
+well. But she laughs in her night-cap when you have fallen asleep, and hurls
+imprecations upon your slumbering body.
+</p>
+
+<h3>WOMEN’S LOGIC.</h3>
+
+<p>
+You imagine you have married a creature endowed with reason: you are woefully
+mistaken, my friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Sensitive beings are not sensible beings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sentiment is not argument, reason is not pleasure, and pleasure is certainly
+not a reason.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! sir!” she says.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Reply “Ah! yes! Ah!” You must bring forth this “ah!” from the very depths of
+your thoracic cavern, as you rush in a rage from the house, or return,
+confounded, to your study.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Why? Now? Who has conquered, killed, overthrown you! Your wife’s logic, which
+is not the logic of Aristotle, nor that of Ramus, nor that of Kant, nor that of
+Condillac, nor that of Robespierre, nor that of Napoleon: but which partakes of
+the character of all these logics, and which we must call the universal logic
+of women, the logic of English women as it is that of Italian women, of the
+women of Normandy and Brittany (ah, these last are unsurpassed!), of the women
+of Paris, in short, that of the women in the moon, if there are women in that
+nocturnal land, with which the women of the earth have an evident
+understanding, angels that they are!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The discussion began after breakfast. Discussions can never take place in a
+household save at this hour. A man could hardly have a discussion with his wife
+in bed, even if he wanted to: she has too many advantages over him, and can too
+easily reduce him to silence. On leaving the nuptial chamber with a pretty
+woman in it, a man is apt to be hungry, if he is young. Breakfast is usually a
+cheerful meal, and cheerfulness is not given to argument. In short, you do not
+open the business till you have had your tea or your coffee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have taken it into your head, for instance, to send your son to school. All
+fathers are hypocrites and are never willing to confess that their own flesh
+and blood is very troublesome when it walks about on two legs, lays its
+dare-devil hands on everything, and is everywhere at once like a frisky
+pollywog. Your son barks, mews, and sings; he breaks, smashes and soils the
+furniture, and furniture is dear; he makes toys of everything, he scatters your
+papers, and he cuts paper dolls out of the morning’s newspaper before you have
+read it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His mother says to him, referring to anything of yours: “Take it!” but in
+reference to anything of hers she says: “Take care!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She cunningly lets him have your things that she may be left in peace. Her bad
+faith as a good mother seeks shelter behind her child, your son is her
+accomplice. Both are leagued against you like Robert Macaire and Bertrand
+against the subscribers to their joint stock company. The boy is an axe with
+which foraging excursions are performed in your domains. He goes either boldly
+or slyly to maraud in your wardrobe: he reappears caparisoned in the drawers
+you laid aside that morning, and brings to the light of day many articles
+condemned to solitary confinement. He brings the elegant Madame Fischtaminel, a
+friend whose good graces you cultivate, your girdle for checking corpulency,
+bits of cosmetic for dyeing your moustache, old waistcoats discolored at the
+arm-holes, stockings slightly soiled at the heels and somewhat yellow at the
+toes. It is quite impossible to remark that these stains are caused by the
+leather!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife looks at your friend and laughs; you dare not be angry, so you laugh
+too, but what a laugh! The unfortunate all know that laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your son, moreover, gives you a cold sweat, if your razors happen to be out of
+their place. If you are angry, the little rebel laughs and shows his two rows
+of pearls: if you scold him, he cries. His mother rushes in! And what a mother
+she is! A mother who will detest you if you don’t give him the razor! With
+women there is no middle ground; a man is either a monster or a model.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At certain times you perfectly understand Herod and his famous decrees relative
+to the Massacre of the Innocents, which have only been surpassed by those of
+the good Charles X!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife has returned to her sofa, you walk up and down, and stop, and you
+boldly introduce the subject by this interjectional remark:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline, we must send Charles to boarding school.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Charles cannot go to boarding school,” she returns in a mild tone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Charles is six years old, the age at which a boy’s education begins.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the first place,” she replies, “it begins at seven. The royal princes are
+handed over to their governor by their governess when they are seven. That’s
+the law and the prophets. I don’t see why you shouldn’t apply to the children
+of private people the rule laid down for the children of princes. Is your son
+more forward than theirs? The king of Rome—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The king of Rome is not a case in point.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What! Is not the king of Rome the son of the Emperor? [Here she changes the
+subject.] Well, I declare, you accuse the Empress, do you? Why, Doctor Dubois
+himself was present, besides—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I said nothing of the kind.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How you do interrupt, Adolphe.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I say that the king of Rome [here you begin to raise your voice], the king of
+Rome, who was hardly four years old when he left France, is no example for us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That doesn’t prevent the fact of the Duke de Bordeaux’s having been placed in
+the hands of the Duke de Riviere, his tutor, at seven years.” [Logic.]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The case of the young Duke of Bordeaux is different.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then you confess that a boy can’t be sent to school before he is seven years
+old?” she says with emphasis. [More logic.]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, my dear, I don’t confess that at all. There is a great deal of difference
+between private and public education.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s precisely why I don’t want to send Charles to school yet. He ought to
+be much stronger than he is, to go there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Charles is very strong for his age.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Charles? That’s the way with men! Why, Charles has a very weak constitution;
+he takes after you. [Here she changes from <i>tu</i> to <i>vous</i>.] But if
+you are determined to get rid of your son, why put him out to board, of course.
+I have noticed for some time that the dear child annoys you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Annoys me? The idea! But we are answerable for our children, are we not? It is
+time Charles’ education was began: he is getting very bad habits here, he obeys
+no one, he thinks himself perfectly free to do as he likes, he hits everybody
+and nobody dares to hit him back. He ought to be placed in the midst of his
+equals, or he will grow up with the most detestable temper.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thank you: so I am bringing Charles up badly!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I did not say that: but you will always have excellent reasons for keeping him
+at home.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here the <i>vous</i> becomes reciprocal and the discussion takes a bitter turn
+on both sides. Your wife is very willing to wound you by saying <i>vous</i>,
+but she feels cross when it becomes mutual.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The long and the short of it is that you want to get my child away, you find
+that he is between us, you are jealous of your son, you want to tyrannize over
+me at your ease, and you sacrifice your boy! Oh, I am smart enough to see
+through you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You make me out like Abraham with his knife! One would think there were no
+such things as schools! So the schools are empty; nobody sends their children
+to school!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are trying to make me appear ridiculous,” she retorts. “I know that there
+are schools well enough, but people don’t send boys of six there, and Charles
+shall not start now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t get angry, my dear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As if I ever get angry! I am a woman and know how to suffer in silence.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, let us reason together.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have talked nonsense enough.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is time that Charles should learn to read and write; later in life, he will
+find difficulties sufficient to disgust him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, you talk for ten minutes without interruption, and you close with an
+appealing “Well?” armed with an intonation which suggests an interrogation
+point of the most crooked kind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well!” she replies, “it is not yet time for Charles to go to school.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You have gained nothing at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, my dear, Monsieur Deschars certainly sent his little Julius to school at
+six years. Go and examine the schools and you will find lots of little boys of
+six there.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You talk for ten minutes more without the slightest interruption, and then you
+ejaculate another “Well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Little Julius Deschars came home with chilblains,” she says.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But Charles has chilblains here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Never,” she replies, proudly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a quarter of an hour, the main question is blocked by a side discussion on
+this point: “Has Charles had chilblains or not?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You bandy contradictory allegations; you no longer believe each other; you must
+appeal to a third party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Every household has its Court of Appeals which takes no notice of the
+merits, but judges matters of form only.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nurse is sent for. She comes, and decides in favor of your wife. It is
+fully decided that Charles has never had chilblains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline glances triumphantly at you and utters these monstrous words: “There,
+you see Charles can’t possibly go to school!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You go out breathless with rage. There is no earthly means of convincing your
+wife that there is not the slightest reason for your son’s not going to school
+in the fact that he has never had chilblains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That evening, after dinner, you hear this atrocious creature finishing a long
+conversation with a woman with these words: “He wanted to send Charles to
+school, but I made him see that he would have to wait.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some husbands, at a conjuncture like this, burst out before everybody; their
+wives take their revenge six weeks later, but the husbands gain this by it,
+that Charles is sent to school the very day he gets into any mischief. Other
+husbands break the crockery, and keep their rage to themselves. The knowing
+ones say nothing and bide their time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A woman’s logic is exhibited in this way upon the slightest occasion, about a
+promenade or the proper place to put a sofa. This logic is extremely simple,
+inasmuch as it consists in never expressing but one idea, that which contains
+the expression of their will. Like everything pertaining to female nature, this
+system may be resolved into two algebraic terms—Yes: no. There are also certain
+little movements of the head which mean so much that they may take the place of
+either.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE JESUITISM OF WOMEN.</h3>
+
+<p>
+The most jesuitical Jesuit of Jesuits is yet a thousand times less jesuitical
+than the least jesuitical woman,—so you may judge what Jesuits women are! They
+are so jesuitical that the cunningest Jesuit himself could never guess to what
+extent of jesuitism a woman may go, for there are a thousand ways of being
+jesuitical, and a woman is such an adroit Jesuit, that she has the knack of
+being a Jesuit without having a jesuitical look. You can rarely, though you can
+sometimes, prove to a Jesuit that he is one: but try once to demonstrate to a
+woman that she acts or talks like a Jesuit. She would be cut to pieces rather
+than confess herself one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She, a Jesuit! The very soul of honor and loyalty! She a Jesuit! What do you
+mean by “Jesuit?” She does not know what a Jesuit is: what is a Jesuit? She has
+never seen or heard of a Jesuit! It’s you who are a Jesuit! And she proves with
+jesuitical demonstration that you are a subtle Jesuit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is one of the thousand examples of a woman’s jesuitism, and this example
+constitutes the most terrible of the petty troubles of married life; it is
+perhaps the most serious.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Induced by a desire the thousandth time expressed by Caroline, who complained
+that she had to go on foot or that she could not buy a new hat, a new parasol,
+a new dress, or any other article of dress, often enough:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That she could not dress her baby as a sailor, as a lancer, as an artilleryman
+of the National Guard, as a Highlander with naked legs and a cap and feather,
+in a jacket, in a roundabout, in a velvet sack, in boots, in trousers: that she
+could not buy him toys enough, nor mechanical moving mice and Noah’s Arks
+enough:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That she could not return Madame Deschars or Madame de Fischtaminel their
+civilities, a ball, a party, a dinner: nor take a private box at the theatre,
+thus avoiding the necessity of sitting cheek by jowl with men who are either
+too polite or not enough so, and of calling a cab at the close of the
+performance; apropos of which she thus discourses:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You think it cheaper, but you are mistaken: men are all the same! I soil my
+shoes, I spoil my hat, my shawl gets wet and my silk stockings get muddy. You
+economize twenty francs by not having a carriage,—no not twenty, sixteen, for
+your pay four for the cab—and you lose fifty francs’ worth of dress, besides
+being wounded in your pride on seeing a faded bonnet on my head: you don’t see
+why it’s faded, but it’s those horrid cabs. I say nothing of the annoyance of
+being tumbled and jostled by a crowd of men, for it seems you don’t care for
+that!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That she could not buy a piano instead of hiring one, nor keep up with the
+fashions; (there are some women, she says, who have all the new styles, but
+just think what they give in return! She would rather throw herself out of the
+window than imitate them! She loves you too much. Here she sheds tears. She
+does not understand such women). That she could not ride in the Champs Elysees,
+stretched out in her own carriage, like Madame de Fischtaminel. (There’s a
+woman who understands life: and who has a well-taught, well-disciplined and
+very contented husband: his wife would go through fire and water for him!)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, beaten in a thousand conjugal scenes, beaten by the most logical
+arguments (the late logicians Tripier and Merlin were nothing to her, as the
+preceding chapter has sufficiently shown you), beaten by the most tender
+caresses, by tears, by your own words turned against you, for under
+circumstances like these, a woman lies in wait in her house like a jaguar in
+the jungle; she does not appear to listen to you, or to heed you; but if a
+single word, a wish, a gesture, escapes you, she arms herself with it, she
+whets it to an edge, she brings it to bear upon you a hundred times over;
+beaten by such graceful tricks as “If you will do so and so, I will do this and
+that;” for women, in these cases, become greater bargainers than the Jews and
+Greeks (those, I mean, who sell perfumes and little girls), than the Arabs
+(those, I mean, who sell little boys and horses), greater higglers than the
+Swiss and the Genevese, than bankers, and, what is worse than all, than the
+Genoese!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, beaten in a manner which may be called beaten, you determine to risk a
+certain portion of your capital in a business undertaking. One evening, at
+twilight, seated side by side, or some morning on awakening, while Caroline,
+half asleep, a pink bud in her white linen, her face smiling in her lace, is
+beside you, you say to her, “You want this, you say, or you want that: you told
+me this or you told me that:” in short, you hastily enumerate the numberless
+fancies by which she has over and over again broken your heart, for there is
+nothing more dreadful than to be unable to satisfy the desires of a beloved
+wife, and you close with these words:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, my dear, an opportunity offers of quintupling a hundred thousand francs,
+and I have decided to make the venture.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She is wide awake now, she sits up in bed, and gives you a kiss, ah! this time,
+a real good one!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are a dear boy!” is her first word.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will not mention her last, for it is an enormous and unpronounceable
+onomatope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now,” she says, “tell me all about it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You try to explain the nature of the affair. But in the first place, women do
+not understand business, and in the next they do not wish to seem to understand
+it. Your dear, delighted Caroline says you were wrong to take her desires, her
+groans, her sighs for new dresses, in earnest. She is afraid of your venture,
+she is frightened at the directors, the shares, and above all at the running
+expenses, and doesn’t exactly see where the dividend comes in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Women are always afraid of things that have to be divided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, Caroline suspects a trap: but she is delighted to know that she can
+have her carriage, her box, the numerous styles of dress for her baby, and the
+rest. While dissuading you from engaging in the speculation, she is visibly
+glad to see you investing your money in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FIRST PERIOD.—“Oh, I am the happiest woman on the face of the earth! Adolphe
+has just gone into the most splendid venture. I am going to have a carriage,
+oh! ever so much handsomer than Madame de Fischtaminel’s; hers is out of
+fashion. Mine will have curtains with fringes. My horses will be mouse-colored,
+hers are bay,—they are as common as coppers.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is this venture, madame?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, it’s splendid—the stock is going up; he explained it to me before he went
+into it, for Adolphe never does anything without consulting me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are very fortunate.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Marriage would be intolerable without entire confidence, and Adolphe tells me
+everything.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, Adolphe, you are the best husband in Paris, you are adorable, you are a
+man of genius, you are all heart, an angel. You are petted to an uncomfortable
+degree. You bless the marriage tie. Caroline extols men, calling them “kings of
+creation,” women were made for them, man is naturally generous, and matrimony
+is a delightful institution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For three, sometimes six, months, Caroline executes the most brilliant
+concertos and solos upon this delicious theme: “I shall be rich! I shall have a
+thousand a month for my dress: I am going to keep my carriage!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If your son is alluded to, it is merely to ask about the school to which he
+shall be sent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+SECOND PERIOD.—“Well, dear, how is your business getting on?—What has become of
+it?—How about that speculation which was to give me a carriage, and other
+things?—It is high time that affair should come to something.—It is a good
+while cooking.—When <i>will</i> it begin to pay? Is the stock going up?—There’s
+nobody like you for hitting upon ventures that never amount to anything.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day she says to you, “Is there really an affair?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you mention it eight or ten months after, she returns:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! Then there really <i>is</i> an affair!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This woman, whom you thought dull, begins to show signs of extraordinary wit,
+when her object is to make fun of you. During this period, Caroline maintains a
+compromising silence when people speak of you, or else she speaks disparagingly
+of men in general: “Men are not what they seem: to find them out you must try
+them.” “Marriage has its good and its bad points.” “Men never can finish
+anything.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THIRD PERIOD.—<i>Catastrophe</i>.—This magnificent affair which was to yield
+five hundred per cent, in which the most cautious, the best informed persons
+took part—peers, deputies, bankers—all of them Knights of the Legion of
+Honor—this venture has been obliged to liquidate! The most sanguine expect to
+get ten per cent of their capital back. You are discouraged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline has often said to you, “Adolphe, what is the matter? Adolphe, there is
+something wrong.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, you acquaint Caroline with the fatal result: she begins by consoling
+you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One hundred thousand francs lost! We shall have to practice the strictest
+economy,” you imprudently add.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The jesuitism of woman bursts out at this word “economy.” It sets fire to the
+magazine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! that’s what comes of speculating! How is it that <i>you, ordinarily so
+prudent</i>, could go and risk a hundred thousand francs! <i>You know I was
+against it from the beginning!</i> BUT YOU WOULD NOT LISTEN TO ME!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon this, the discussion grows bitter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are good for nothing—you have no business capacity; women alone take clear
+views of things. You have risked your children’s bread, though she tried to
+dissuade you from it.—You cannot say it was for her. Thank God, she has nothing
+to reproach herself with. A hundred times a month she alludes to your disaster:
+“If my husband had not thrown away his money in such and such a scheme, I could
+have had this and that.” “The next time you want to go into an affair, perhaps
+you’ll consult me!” Adolphe is accused and convicted of having foolishly lost
+one hundred thousand francs, without an object in view, like a dolt, and
+without having consulted his wife. Caroline advises her friends not to marry.
+She complains of the incapacity of men who squander the fortunes of their
+wives. Caroline is vindictive, she makes herself generally disagreeable. Pity
+Adolphe! Lament, ye husbands! O bachelors, rejoice and be exceeding glad!
+</p>
+
+<h3>MEMORIES AND REGRETS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+After several years of wedded life, your love has become so placid, that
+Caroline sometimes tries, in the evening, to wake you up by various little
+coquettish phrases. There is about you a certain calmness and tranquillity
+which always exasperates a lawful wife. Women see in it a sort of insolence:
+they look upon the indifference of happiness as the fatuity of confidence, for
+of course they never imagine their inestimable equalities can be regarded with
+disdain: their virtue is therefore enraged at being so cordially trusted in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this situation, which is what every couple must come to, and which both
+husband and wife must expect, no husband dares confess that the constant
+repetition of the same dish has become wearisome; but his appetite certainly
+requires the condiments of dress, the ideas excited by absence, the stimulus of
+an imaginary rivalry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, at this period, you walk very comfortably with your wife on your arm,
+without pressing hers against your heart with the solicitous and watchful
+cohesion of a miser grasping his treasure. You gaze carelessly round upon the
+curiosities in the street, leading your wife in a loose and distracted way, as
+if you were towing a Norman scow. Come now, be frank! If, on passing your wife,
+an admirer were gently to press her, accidentally or purposely, would you have
+the slightest desire to discover his motives? Besides, you say, no woman would
+seek to bring about a quarrel for such a trifle. Confess this, too, that the
+expression “such a trifle” is exceedingly flattering to both of you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are in this position, but you have as yet proceeded no farther. Still, you
+have a horrible thought which you bury in the depths of your heart and
+conscience: Caroline has not come up to your expectations. Caroline has
+imperfections, which, during the high tides of the honey-moon, were concealed
+under the water, but which the ebb of the gall-moon has laid bare. You have
+several times run against these breakers, your hopes have been often
+shipwrecked upon them, more than once your desires—those of a young marrying
+man—(where, alas, is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to
+pieces there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the
+marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression, as you
+talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at Caroline, “<i>She
+is not what I took her to be!</i>”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some evening, at a ball, in society, at a friend’s house, no matter where, you
+meet a sublime young woman, beautiful, intellectual and kind: with a soul, oh!
+a soul of celestial purity, and of miraculous beauty! Yes, there is that
+unchangeable oval cut of face, those features which time will never impair,
+that graceful and thoughtful brow. The unknown is rich, well-educated, of noble
+birth: she will always be what she should be, she knows when to shine, when to
+remain in the background: she appears in all her glory and power, the being you
+have dreamed of, your wife that should have been, she whom you feel you could
+love forever. She would always have flattered your little vanities, she would
+understand and admirably serve your interests. She is tender and gay, too, this
+young lady who reawakens all your better feelings, who rekindles your
+slumbering desires.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You look at Caroline with gloomy despair, and here are the phantom-like
+thoughts which tap, with wings of a bat, the beak of a vulture, the body of a
+death’s-head moth, upon the walls of the palace in which, enkindled by desire,
+glows your brain like a lamp of gold:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FIRST STANZA. Ah, dear me, why did I get married? Fatal idea! I allowed myself
+to be caught by a small amount of cash. And is it really over? Cannot I have
+another wife? Ah, the Turks manage things better! It is plain enough that the
+author of the Koran lived in the desert!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+SECOND STANZA. My wife is sick, she sometimes coughs in the morning. If it is
+the design of Providence to remove her from the world, let it be speedily done
+for her sake and for mine. The angel has lived long enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THIRD STANZA. I am a monster! Caroline is the mother of my children!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You go home, that night, in a carriage with your wife: you think her perfectly
+horrible: she speaks to you, but you answer in monosyllables. She says, “What
+is the matter?” and you answer, “Nothing.” She coughs, you advise her to see
+the doctor in the morning. Medicine has its hazards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FOURTH STANZA. I have been told that a physician, poorly paid by the heirs of
+his deceased patient, imprudently exclaimed, “What! they cut down my bill, when
+they owe me forty thousand a year.” <i>I</i> would not haggle over fees!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline,” you say to her aloud, “you must take care of yourself; cross your
+shawl, be prudent, my darling angel.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Your wife is delighted with you since you seem to take such an interest in her.
+While she is preparing to retire, you lie stretched out upon the sofa. You
+contemplate the divine apparition which opens to you the ivory portals of your
+castles in the air. Delicious ecstasy! ’Tis the sublime young woman that you
+see before you! She is as white as the sail of the treasure-laden galleon as it
+enters the harbor of Cadiz. Your wife, happy in your admiration, now
+understands your former taciturnity. You still see, with closed eyes, the
+sublime young woman; she is the burden of your thoughts, and you say aloud:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FIFTH AND LAST STANZA. Divine! Adorable! Can there be another woman like her?
+Rose of Night! Column of ivory! Celestial maiden! Morning and Evening Star!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everyone says his prayers; you have said four.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next morning, your wife is delightful, she coughs no more, she has no need
+of a doctor; if she dies, it will be of good health; you launched four
+maledictions upon her, in the name of your sublime young woman, and four times
+she blessed you for it. Caroline does not know that in the depths of your heart
+there wriggles a little red fish like a crocodile, concealed beneath conjugal
+love like the other would be hid in a basin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal terms to
+Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her, and Caroline
+compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you and says she never
+was happier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You rush out in a rage, you are beside yourself, and are glad to meet a friend,
+that you may work off your bile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you ever marry, George; it’s better to see your heirs carrying away your
+furniture while the death-rattle is in your throat, better to go through an
+agony of two hours without a drop to cool your tongue, better to be
+assassinated by inquiries about your will by a nurse like the one in Henry
+Monnier’s terrible picture of a ‘Bachelor’s Last Moments!’ Never marry under
+any pretext!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fortunately you see the sublime young woman no more. You are saved from the
+tortures to which a criminal passion was leading you. You fall back again into
+the purgatory of your married bliss; but you begin to be attentive to Madame de
+Fischtaminel, with whom you were dreadfully in love, without being able to get
+near her, while you were a bachelor.
+</p>
+
+<h3>OBSERVATIONS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+When you have arrived at this point in the latitude or longitude of the
+matrimonial ocean, there appears a slight chronic, intermittent affection, not
+unlike the toothache. Here, I see, you stop me to ask, “How are we to find the
+longitude in this sea? When can a husband be sure he has attained this nautical
+point? And can the danger be avoided?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You may arrive at this point, look you, as easily after ten months as ten years
+of wedlock; it depends upon the speed of the vessel, its style of rigging, upon
+the trade winds, the force of the currents, and especially upon the composition
+of the crew. You have this advantage over the mariner, that he has but one
+method of calculating his position, while husbands have at least a thousand of
+reckoning theirs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+EXAMPLE: Caroline, your late darling, your late treasure, who is now merely
+your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while walking on the
+boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to take your arm at all;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or else she notices men, older or younger as the case may be, dressed with more
+or less taste, whereas she formerly saw no one whatever, though the sidewalk
+was black with hats and traveled by more boots than slippers;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or, when you come home, she says, “It’s no one but my husband:” instead of
+saying “Ah! ’tis Adolphe!” as she used to say with a gesture, a look, an accent
+which caused her admirers to think, “Well, here’s a happy woman at last!” This
+last exclamation of a woman is suitable for two eras,—first, while she is
+sincere; second, while she is hypocritical, with her “Ah! ’tis Adolphe!” When
+she exclaims, “It’s only my husband,” she no longer deigns to play a part.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or, if you come home somewhat late—at eleven, or at midnight—you find
+her—snoring! Odious symptom!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or else she puts on her stockings in your presence. Among English couples, this
+never happens but once in a lady’s married life; the next day she leaves for
+the Continent with some captain or other, and no longer thinks of putting on
+her stockings at all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or else—but let us stop here.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is intended for the use of mariners and husbands who are weatherwise.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE MATRIMONIAL GADFLY.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Very well! In this degree of longitude, not far from a tropical sign upon the
+name of which good taste forbids us to make a jest at once coarse and unworthy
+of this thoughtful work, a horrible little annoyance appears, ingeniously
+called the Matrimonial Gadfly, the most provoking of all gnats, mosquitoes,
+blood-suckers, fleas and scorpions, for no net was ever yet invented that could
+keep it off. The gadfly does not immediately sting you; it begins by buzzing in
+your ears, and <i>you do not at first know what it is</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, apropos of nothing, in the most natural way in the world, Caroline says:
+“Madame Deschars had a lovely dress on, yesterday.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She is a woman of taste,” returns Adolphe, though he is far from thinking so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Her husband gave it to her,” resumes Caroline, with a shrug of her shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, a four hundred franc dress! It’s the very finest quality of velvet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Four hundred francs!” cries Adolphe, striking the attitude of the apostle
+Thomas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But then there are two extra breadths and enough for a high waist!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Monsieur Deschars does things on a grand scale,” replies Adolphe, taking
+refuge in a jest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All men don’t pay such attentions to their wives,” says Caroline, curtly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What attentions?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, Adolphe, thinking of extra breadths and of a waist to make the dress good
+again, when it is no longer fit to be worn low in the neck.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe says to himself, “Caroline wants a dress.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poor man!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some time afterward, Monsieur Deschars furnishes his wife’s chamber anew. Then
+he has his wife’s diamonds set in the prevailing fashion. Monsieur Deschars
+never goes out without his wife, and never allows his wife to go out without
+offering her his arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you bring Caroline anything, no matter what, it is never equal to what
+Monsieur Deschars has done. If you allow yourself the slightest gesture or
+expression a little livelier than usual, if you speak a little bit loud, you
+hear the hissing and viper-like remark:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You wouldn’t see Monsieur Deschars behaving like this! Why don’t you take
+Monsieur Deschars for a model?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, this idiotic Monsieur Deschars is forever looming up in your
+household on every conceivable occasion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The expression—“Do you suppose Monsieur Deschars ever allows himself” —is a
+sword of Damocles, or what is worse, a Damocles pin: and your self-love is the
+cushion into which your wife is constantly sticking it, pulling it out, and
+sticking it in again, under a variety of unforeseen pretexts, at the same time
+employing the most winning terms of endearment, and with the most agreeable
+little ways.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe, stung till he finds himself tattooed, finally does what is done by
+police authorities, by officers of government, by military tacticians. He casts
+his eye on Madame de Fischtaminel, who is still young, elegant and a little bit
+coquettish, and places her (this had been the rascal’s intention for some time)
+like a blister upon Caroline’s extremely ticklish skin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+O you, who often exclaim, “I don’t know what is the matter with my wife!” you
+will kiss this page of transcendent philosophy, for you will find in it <i>the
+key to every woman’s character</i>! But as to knowing women as well as I know
+them, it will not be knowing them much; they don’t know themselves! In fact, as
+you well know, God was Himself mistaken in the only one that He attempted to
+manage and to whose manufacture He had given personal attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is very willing to sting Adolphe at all hours, but this privilege of
+letting a wasp off now and then upon one’s consort (the legal term), is
+exclusively reserved to the wife. Adolphe is a monster if he starts off a
+single fly at Caroline. On her part, it is a delicious joke, a new jest to
+enliven their married life, and one dictated by the purest intentions; while on
+Adolphe’s part, it is a piece of cruelty worthy a Carib, a disregard of his
+wife’s heart, and a deliberate plan to give her pain. But that is nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So you are really in love with Madame de Fischtaminel?” Caroline asks. “What
+is there so seductive in the mind or the manners of the spider?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, Caroline—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, don’t undertake to deny your eccentric taste,” she returns, checking a
+negation on Adolphe’s lips. “I have long seen that you prefer that Maypole
+[Madame de Fischtaminel is thin] to me. Very well! go on; you will soon see the
+difference.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Do you understand? You cannot suspect Caroline of the slightest inclination for
+Monsieur Deschars, a low, fat, red-faced man, formerly a notary, while you are
+in love with Madame de Fischtaminel! Then Caroline, the Caroline whose
+simplicity caused you such agony, Caroline who has become familiar with
+society, Caroline becomes acute and witty: you have two gadflies instead of
+one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day she asks you, with a charming air of interest, “How are you coming
+on with Madame de Fischtaminel?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When you go out, she says: “Go and drink something calming, my dear.” For, in
+their anger with a rival, all women, duchesses even, will use invectives, and
+even venture into the domain of Billingsgate; they make an offensive weapon of
+anything and everything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To try to convince Caroline that she is mistaken and that you are indifferent
+to Madame de Fischtaminel, would cost you dear. This is a blunder that no
+sensible man commits; he would lose his power and spike his own guns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh! Adolphe, you have arrived unfortunately at that season so ingeniously
+called the <i>Indian Summer of Marriage</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You must now—pleasing task!—win your wife, your Caroline, over again, seize her
+by the waist again, and become the best of husbands by trying to guess at
+things to please her, so as to act according to her whims instead of according
+to your will. This is the whole question henceforth.
+</p>
+
+<h3>HARD LABOR.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Let us admit this, which, in our opinion, is a truism made as good as new:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Most men have some of the wit required by a difficult position, when
+they have not the whole of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for those husbands who are not up to their situation, it is impossible to
+consider their case here: without any struggle whatever they simply enter the
+numerous class of the <i>Resigned</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe says to himself: “Women are children: offer them a lump of sugar, and
+you will easily get them to dance all the dances that greedy children dance;
+but you must always have a sugar plum in hand, hold it up pretty high, and—take
+care that their fancy for sweetmeats does not leave them. Parisian women—and
+Caroline is one—are very vain, and as for their voracity—don’t speak of it. Now
+you cannot govern men and make friends of them, unless you work upon them
+through their vices, and flatter their passions: my wife is mine!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some days afterward, during which Adolphe has been unusually attentive to his
+wife, he discourses to her as follows:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline, dear, suppose we have a bit of fun: you’ll put on your new gown—the
+one like Madame Deschars!—and we’ll go to see a farce at the Varieties.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This kind of proposition always puts a wife in the best possible humor. So away
+you go! Adolphe has ordered a dainty little dinner for two, at Borrel’s
+<i>Rocher de Cancale</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As we are going to the Varieties, suppose we dine at the tavern,” exclaims
+Adolphe, on the boulevard, with the air of a man suddenly struck by a generous
+idea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, delighted with this appearance of good fortune, enters a little
+parlor where she finds the cloth laid and that neat little service set, which
+Borrel places at the disposal of those who are rich enough to pay for the
+quarters intended for the great ones of the earth, who make themselves small
+for an hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women eat little at a formal dinner: their concealed harness hampers them, they
+are laced tightly, and they are in the presence of women whose eyes and whose
+tongues are equally to be dreaded. They prefer fancy eating to good eating,
+then: they will suck a lobster’s claw, swallow a quail or two, punish a
+woodcock’s wing, beginning with a bit of fresh fish, flavored by one of those
+sauces which are the glory of French cooking. France is everywhere sovereign in
+matters of taste: in painting, fashions, and the like. Gravy is the triumph of
+taste, in cookery. So that grisettes, shopkeepers’ wives and duchesses are
+delighted with a tasty little dinner washed down with the choicest wines, of
+which, however, they drink but little, the whole concluded by fruit such as can
+only be had at Paris; and especially delighted when they go to the theatre to
+digest the little dinner, and listen, in a comfortable box, to the nonsense
+uttered upon the stage, and to that whispered in their ears to explain it. But
+then the bill of the restaurant is one hundred francs, the box costs thirty,
+the carriage, dress, gloves, bouquet, as much more. This gallantry amounts to
+the sum of one hundred and sixty francs, which is hard upon four thousand
+francs a month, if you go often to the Comic, the Italian, or the Grand, Opera.
+Four thousand francs a month is the interest of a capital of two millions. But
+then the honor of being a husband is fully worth the price!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline tells her friends things which she thinks exceedingly flattering, but
+which cause a sagacious husband to make a wry face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe has been delightful for some time past. I don’t know what I have done
+to deserve so much attention, but he overpowers me. He gives value to
+everything by those delicate ways which have such an effect upon us women.
+After taking me Monday to the <i>Rocher de Cancale</i> to dine, he declared
+that Very was as good a cook as Borrel, and he gave me the little party of
+pleasure that I told you of all over again, presenting me at dessert with a
+ticket for the opera. They sang ‘William Tell,’ which, you know, is my craze.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are lucky indeed,” returns Madame Deschars with evident jealousy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Still, a wife who discharges all her duties, deserves such luck, it seems to
+me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When this terrible sentiment falls from the lips of a married woman, it is
+clear that she <i>does her duty</i>, after the manner of school-boys, for the
+reward she expects. At school, a prize is the object: in marriage, a shawl or a
+piece of jewelry. No more love, then!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As for me,”—Madame Deschars is piqued—“I am reasonable. Deschars committed
+such follies once, but I put a stop to it. You see, my dear, we have two
+children, and I confess that one or two hundred francs are quite a
+consideration for me, as the mother of a family.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dear me, madame,” says Madame de Fischtaminel, “it’s better that our husbands
+should have cosy little times with us than with—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Deschars!—” suddenly puts in Madame Deschars, as she gets up and says
+good-bye.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The individual known as Deschars (a man nullified by his wife) does not hear
+the end of the sentence, by which he might have learned that a man may spend
+his money with other women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, flattered in every one of her vanities, abandons herself to the
+pleasures of pride and high living, two delicious capital sins. Adolphe is
+gaining ground again, but alas! (this reflection is worth a whole sermon in
+Lent) sin, like all pleasure, contains a spur. Vice is like an Autocrat, and
+let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate it, it forgets a thousand
+charming bygone flatteries. With Vice a man’s course must always be
+crescendo!—and forever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Vice, Courtiers, Misfortune and Love, care only for the PRESENT.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of a period of time difficult to determine, Caroline looks in the
+glass, at dessert, and notices two or three pimples blooming upon her cheeks,
+and upon the sides, lately so pure, of her nose. She is out of humor at the
+theatre, and you do not know why, you, so proudly striking an attitude in your
+cravat, you, displaying your figure to the best advantage, as a complacent man
+should.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few days after, the dressmaker arrives. She tries on a gown, she exerts all
+her strength, but cannot make the hooks and eyes meet. The waiting maid is
+called. After a two horse-power pull, a regular thirteenth labor of Hercules, a
+hiatus of two inches manifests itself. The inexorable dressmaker cannot conceal
+from Caroline the fact that her form is altered. Caroline, the aerial Caroline,
+threatens to become like Madame Deschars. In vulgar language, she is getting
+stout. The maid leaves her in a state of consternation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What! am I to have, like that fat Madame Deschars, cascades of flesh a la
+Rubens! That Adolphe is an awful scoundrel. Oh, I see, he wants to make me an
+old mother Gigogne, and destroy my powers of fascination!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thenceforward Caroline is willing to go to the opera, she accepts two seats in
+a box, but she considers it very distingue to eat sparingly, and declines the
+dainty dinners of her husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear,” she says, “a well-bred woman should not go often to these places;
+you may go once for a joke; but as for making a habitual thing of it—fie, for
+shame!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Borrel and Very, those masters of the art, lose a thousand francs a day by not
+having a private entrance for carriages. If a coach could glide under an
+archway, and go out by another door, after leaving its fair occupants on the
+threshold of an elegant staircase, how many of them would bring the landlord
+fine, rich, solid old fellows for customers!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Vanity is the death of good living.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can tell the
+cause of her disgust. Pray excuse Adolphe! A husband is not the devil.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Fully one-third of the women of Paris are bored by the theatre. Many of them
+are tired to death of music, and go to the opera for the singers merely, or
+rather to notice the difference between them in point of execution. What
+supports the theatre is this: the women are a spectacle before and after the
+play. Vanity alone will pay the exorbitant price of forty francs for three
+hours of questionable pleasure, in a bad atmosphere and at great expense,
+without counting the colds caught in going out. But to exhibit themselves, to
+see and be seen, to be the observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious
+mouthful! as Rabelais would say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must be looked
+at. Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at. Caroline is
+chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women who are <i>not</i>
+with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short. Now, as the very slight
+return she gets from her efforts, her dresses, and her attitudes, does not
+compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue, her display and her weariness, it is
+very soon the same with the theatre as it was with the good cheer; high living
+made her fat, the theatre is making her yellow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Adolphe—or any other man in Adolphe’s place—resembles a certain
+Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in French,
+corn,—but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don’t you think so? This
+peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into the sharpest stones along
+the roadside, saying to the agacin, “Devil take you! Make me suffer again, will
+you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Upon my word,” says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he receives
+from his wife a refusal, “I should like very much to know what would please
+you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline looks loftily down upon her husband, and says, after a pause worthy of
+an actress, “I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“’Tis true, I might lay out four thousand francs a month to better effect,”
+returns Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With the quarter of that sum, presented to estimable burglars, youthful
+jail-birds and honorable criminals, I might become somebody, a Man in the Blue
+Cloak on a small scale; and then a young woman is proud of her husband,”
+Adolphe replies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This answer is the grave of love, and Caroline takes it in very bad part. An
+explanation follows. This must be classed among the thousand pleasantries of
+the following chapter, the title of which ought to make lovers smile as well as
+husbands. If there are yellow rays of light, why should there not be whole days
+of this extremely matrimonial color?
+</p>
+
+<h3>FORCED SMILES.</h3>
+
+<p>
+On your arrival in this latitude, you enjoy numerous little scenes, which, in
+the grand opera of marriage, represent the intermezzos, and of which the
+following is a type:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You are one evening alone after dinner, and you have been so often alone
+already that you feel a desire to say sharp little things to each other, like
+this, for instance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Take care, Caroline,” says Adolphe, who has not forgotten his many vain
+efforts to please her. “I think your nose has the impertinence to redden at
+home quite well as at the restaurant.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This is not one of your amiable days!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+General Rule.—No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly advice to
+any woman, not even to his own wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Perhaps it’s because you are laced too tight. Women make themselves sick that
+way.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moment a man utters these words to a woman, no matter whom, that woman,—who
+knows that stays will bend,—seizes her corset by the lower end, and bends it
+out, saying, with Caroline:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look, you can get your hand in! I never lace tight.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then it must be your stomach.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What has the stomach got to do with the nose?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The stomach is a centre which communicates with all the organs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So the nose is an organ, is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your organ is doing you a poor service at this moment.” She raises her eyes
+and shrugs her shoulders. “Come, Adolphe, what have I done?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing. I’m only joking, and I am unfortunate enough not to please you,”
+returns Adolphe, smiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My misfortune is being your wife! Oh, why am I not somebody else’s!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s what <i>I</i> say!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If I were, and if I had the innocence to say to you, like a coquette who
+wishes to know how far she has got with a man, ‘the redness of my nose really
+gives me anxiety,’ you would look at me in the glass with all the affectations
+of an ape, and would reply, ‘O madame, you do yourself an injustice; in the
+first place, nobody sees it: besides, it harmonizes with your complexion; then
+again we are all so after dinner!’ and from this you would go on to flatter me.
+Do I ever tell you that you are growing fat, that you are getting the color of
+a stone-cutter, and that I prefer thin and pale men?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They say in London, “Don’t touch the axe!” In France we ought to say, “Don’t
+touch a woman’s nose.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And all this about a little extra natural vermilion!” exclaims Adolphe.
+“Complain about it to Providence, whose office it is to put a little more color
+in one place than another, not to me, who loves you, who desires you to be
+perfect, and who merely says to you, take care!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You love me too much, then, for you’ve been trying, for some time past, to
+find disagreeable things to say to me. You want to run me down under the
+pretext of making me perfect—people said I <i>was</i> perfect, five years ago.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I think you are better than perfect, you are stunning!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With too much vermilion?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe, who sees the atmosphere of the north pole upon his wife’s face, sits
+down upon a chair by her side. Caroline, unable decently to go away, gives her
+gown a sort of flip on one side, as if to produce a separation. This motion is
+performed by some women with a provoking impertinence: but it has two
+significations; it is, as whist players would say, either a signal <i>for
+trumps</i> or a <i>renounce</i>. At this time, Caroline renounces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is the matter?” says Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Will you have a glass of sugar and water?” asks Caroline, busying herself
+about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What for?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain. Perhaps you would
+like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water? The doctor spoke of it as an
+excellent remedy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How anxious you are about my stomach!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act upon your
+heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects upon the
+acuteness which his wife is acquiring: he sees her daily gaining in strength
+and in acrimony: she is getting to display an art in vexation and a military
+capacity for disputation which reminds him of Charles XII and the Russians.
+Caroline, during this time, is busy with an alarming piece of mimicry: she
+looks as if she were going to faint.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you sick?” asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place where women
+always have us.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back and
+forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it’s just like you: you are always
+in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men are more or less
+cracked.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there pensive:
+marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with its crop of nettles
+and mullen stalks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What, are you pouting?” asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour’s
+observation of her husband’s countenance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, I am meditating,” replied Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, what an infernal temper you’ve got!” she returns, with a shrug of the
+shoulders. “Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape and your
+digestion? Don’t you see that I was only paying you back for your vermilion?
+You’ll make me think that men are as vain as women. [Adolphe remains frigid.]
+It is really quite kind in you to take our qualities. [Profound silence.] I
+made a joke and you got angry [she looks at Adolphe], for you are angry. I am
+not like you: I cannot bear the idea of having given you pain! Nevertheless,
+it’s an idea that a man never would have had, that of attributing your
+impertinence to something wrong in your digestion. It’s not my Dolph, it’s his
+stomach that was bold enough to speak. I did not know you were a ventriloquist,
+that’s all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles: Adolphe is as stiff as if he were glued.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, he won’t laugh! And, in your jargon, you call this having character. Oh,
+how much better we are!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She goes and sits down in Adolphe’s lap, and Adolphe cannot help smiling. This
+smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has been on the watch for,
+in order to make a weapon of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong,” she says. “Why pout? Dear me, I
+like you just as you are: in my eyes you are as slender as when I married you,
+and slenderer perhaps.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline, when people get to deceive themselves in these little matters, where
+one makes concessions and the other does not get angry, do you know what it
+means?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What does it mean?” asks Caroline, alarmed at Adolphe’s dramatic attitude.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That they love each other less.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! you monster, I understand you: you were angry so as to make me believe you
+loved me!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! let us confess it, Adolphe tells the truth in the only way he can—by a
+laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why give me pain?” she says. “If I am wrong in anything, isn’t it better to
+tell me of it kindly, than brutally to say [here she raises her voice], ‘Your
+nose is getting red!’ No, that is not right! To please you, I will use an
+expression of the fair Fischtaminel, ‘It’s not the act of a gentleman!’”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe laughs and pays the expenses of the reconciliation; but instead of
+discovering therein what will please Caroline and what will attach her to him,
+he finds out what attaches him to her.
+</p>
+
+<h3>NOSOGRAPHY OF THE VILLA.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Is it advantageous for a man not to know what will please his wife after their
+marriage? Some women (this still occurs in the country) are innocent enough to
+tell promptly what they want and what they like. But in Paris, nearly every
+woman feels a kind of enjoyment in seeing a man wistfully obedient to her
+heart, her desires, her caprices—three expressions for the same thing!—and
+anxiously going round and round, half crazy and desperate, like a dog that has
+lost his master.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They call this <i>being loved</i>, poor things! And a good many of them say to
+themselves, as did Caroline, “How will he manage?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and excellent
+Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the couple known as
+Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife inaugurate a delightful country
+house. It is an opportunity that the Deschars have seized upon, the folly of a
+man of letters, a charming villa upon which he lavished one hundred thousand
+francs and which has been sold at auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a
+new dress to air, or a hat with a weeping willow plume—things which a tilbury
+will set off to a charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother. The
+servants have a holiday. The youthful pair start beneath the smile of a blue
+sky, flecked with milk-while clouds merely to heighten the effect. They breathe
+the pure air, through which trots the heavy Norman horse, animated by the
+influence of spring. They soon reach Marnes, beyond Ville d’Avray, where the
+Deschars are spreading themselves in a villa copied from one at Florence, and
+surrounded by Swiss meadows, though without all the objectionable features of
+the Alps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dear me! what a delightful thing a country house like this must be!” exclaims
+Caroline, as she walks in the admirable wood that skirts Marnes and Ville
+d’Avray. “It makes your eyes as happy as if they had a heart in them.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, having no one to take but Adolphe, takes Adolphe, who becomes her
+Adolphe again. And then you should see her run about like a fawn, and act once
+more the sweet, pretty, innocent, adorable school-girl that she was! Her braids
+come down! She takes off her bonnet, and holds it by the strings! She is young,
+pink and white again. Her eyes smile, her mouth is a pomegranate endowed with
+sensibility, with a sensibility which seems quite fresh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So a country house would please you very much, would it, darling?” says
+Adolphe, clasping Caroline round the waist, and noticing that she leans upon
+him as if to show the flexibility of her form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What, will you be such a love as to buy me one? But remember, no extravagance!
+Seize an opportunity like the Deschars.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To please you and to find out what is likely to give you pleasure, such is the
+constant study of your own Dolph.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They are alone, at liberty to call each other their little names of endearment,
+and run over the whole list of their secret caresses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Does he really want to please his little girly?” says Caroline, resting her
+head on the shoulder of Adolphe, who kisses her forehead, saying to himself,
+“Gad! I’ve got her now!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—When a husband and a wife have got each other, the devil only knows
+which has got the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young couple are captivating, whereupon the stout Madame Deschars gives
+utterance to a remark somewhat equivocal for her, usually so stern, prudish and
+devout.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Country air has one excellent property: it makes husbands very amiable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Deschars points out an opportunity for Adolphe to seize. A house is to be
+sold at Ville d’Avray, for a song, of course. Now, the country house is a
+weakness peculiar to the inhabitant of Paris. This weakness, or disease, has
+its course and its cure. Adolphe is a husband, but not a doctor. He buys the
+house and takes possession with Caroline, who has become once more his
+Caroline, his Carola, his fawn, his treasure, his girly girl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The following alarming symptoms now succeed each other with frightful rapidity:
+a cup of milk, baptized, costs five sous; when it is anhydrous, as the chemists
+say, ten sous. Meat costs more at Sevres than at Paris, if you carefully
+examine the qualities. Fruit cannot be had at any price. A fine pear costs more
+in the country than in the (anhydrous!) garden that blooms in Chevet’s window.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before being able to raise fruit for oneself, from a Swiss meadow measuring two
+square yards, surrounded by a few green trees which look as if they were
+borrowed from the scenic illusions of a theatre, the most rural authorities,
+being consulted on the point, declare that you must spend a great deal of
+money, and—wait five years! Vegetables dash out of the husbandman’s garden to
+reappear at the city market. Madame Deschars, who possesses a gate-keeper that
+is at the same time a gardener, confesses that the vegetables raised on her
+land, beneath her glass frames, by dint of compost and top-soil, cost her twice
+as much as those she used to buy at Paris, of a woman who had rent and taxes to
+pay, and whose husband was an elector. Despite the efforts and pledges of the
+gate-keeper-gardener, early peas and things at Paris are a month in advance of
+those in the country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From eight in the evening to eleven our couple don’t know what to do, on
+account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and the
+questions of self-love which arise out of the merest trifles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monsieur Deschars remarks, with that profound knowledge of figures which
+distinguishes the ex-notary, that the cost of going to Paris and back, added to
+the interest of the cost of his villa, to the taxes, wages of the gate-keeper
+and his wife, are equal to a rent of three thousand francs a year. He does not
+see how he, an ex-notary, allowed himself to be so caught! For he has often
+drawn up leases of chateaux with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a
+year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a country
+house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated nuisance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has to be
+watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it,” says Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The way to get along in the country,” replies a little retired grocer, “is to
+stay there, to live there, to become country-folks, and then everything
+changes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On going home, Caroline says to her poor Adolphe, “What an idea that was of
+yours, to buy a country house! The best way to do about the country is to go
+there on visits to other people.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe remembers an English proverb, which says, “Don’t have a newspaper or a
+country seat of your own: there are plenty of idiots who will have them for
+you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bah!” returns Adolph, who was enlightened once for all upon women’s logic by
+the Matrimonial Gadfly, “you are right: but then you know the baby is in
+splendid health, here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though Adolphe has become prudent, this reply awakens Caroline’s
+susceptibilities. A mother is very willing to think exclusively of her child,
+but she does not want him to be preferred to herself. She is silent; the next
+day, she is tired to death of the country. Adolphe being absent on business,
+she waits for him from five o’clock to seven, and goes alone with little
+Charles to the coach office. She talks for three-quarters of an hour of her
+anxieties. She was afraid to go from the house to the office. Is it proper for
+a young woman to be left alone, so? She cannot support such an existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The country house now creates a very peculiar phase; one which deserves a
+chapter to itself.
+</p>
+
+<h3>TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—There are parentheses in worry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+EXAMPLE—A great deal of evil has been said of the stitch in the side; but it is
+nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the pleasures of the
+matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving, like the hammer of a note
+in the piano. This constitutes an irritant, which never flourishes except at
+the period when the young wife’s timidity gives place to that fatal equality of
+rights which is at once devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every
+season has its peculiar vexation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, after a week spent in taking note of her husband’s absences,
+perceives that he passes seven hours a day away from her. At last, Adolphe, who
+comes home as gay as an actor who has been applauded, observes a slight coating
+of hoar frost upon Caroline’s visage. After making sure that the coldness of
+her manner has been observed, Caroline puts on a counterfeit air of
+interest,—the well-known expression of which possesses the gift of making a man
+inwardly swear,—and says: “You must have had a good deal of business to-day,
+dear?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, lots!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you take many cabs?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I took seven francs’ worth.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did you find everybody in?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, those with whom I had appointments.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When did you make appointments with them? The ink in your inkstand is dried
+up; it’s like glue; I wanted to write, and spent a whole hour in moistening it,
+and even then only produced a thick mud fit to mark bundles with for the East
+Indies.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here any and every husband looks suspiciously at his better half.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is probable that I wrote them at Paris—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What business was it, Adolphe?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, I thought you knew. Shall I run over the list? First, there’s
+Chaumontel’s affair—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought Monsieur Chaumontel was in Switzerland—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, but he has representatives, a lawyer—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Didn’t you do anything else but business?” asks Caroline, interrupting
+Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here she gives him a direct, piercing look, by which she plunges into her
+husband’s eyes when he least expects it: a sword in a heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What could I have done? Made a little counterfeit money, run into debt, or
+embroidered a sampler?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, dear, I don’t know. And I can’t even guess. I am too dull, you’ve told me
+so a hundred times.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There you go, and take an expression of endearment in bad part. How like a
+woman that is!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you concluded anything?” she asks, pretending to take an interest in
+business.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, nothing,”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How many persons have you seen?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Eleven, without counting those who were walking in the streets.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How you answer me!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, and how you question me! As if you’d been following the trade of an
+examining judge for the last ten years!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, tell me all you’ve done to-day, it will amuse me. You ought to try to
+please me while you are here! I’m dull enough when you leave me alone all day
+long.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You want me to amuse you by telling you about business?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Formerly, you told me everything—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This friendly little reproach disguises the certitude that Caroline wishes to
+enjoy respecting the serious matters which Adolphe wishes to conceal. Adolphe
+then undertakes to narrate how he has spent the day. Caroline affects a sort of
+distraction sufficiently well played to induce the belief that she is not
+listening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you said just now,” she exclaims, at the moment when Adolphe is getting
+into a snarl, “that you had paid seven francs for cabs, and you now talk of a
+hack! You took it by the hour, I suppose? Did you do your business in a hack?”
+she asks, railingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why should hacks be interdicted?” inquires Adolphe, resuming his narrative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Haven’t you been to Madame de Fischtaminel’s?” she asks in the middle of an
+exceedingly involved explanation, insolently taking the words out of your
+mouth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why should I have been there?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It would have given me pleasure: I wanted to know whether her parlor is done.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! then you <i>have</i> been there?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, her upholsterer told me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you know her upholsterer?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Braschon.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So you met the upholsterer?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You said you only went in carriages.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, my dear, but to get carriages, you have to go and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pooh! I dare say Braschon was in the carriage, or the parlor was—one or the
+other is equally probable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You won’t listen,” exclaims Adolphe, who thinks that a long story will lull
+Caroline’s suspicions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve listened too much already. You’ve been lying for the last hour, worse
+than a drummer.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I’ll say nothing more.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know enough. I know all I wanted to know. You say you’ve seen lawyers,
+notaries, bankers: now you haven’t seen one of them! Suppose I were to go
+to-morrow to see Madame de Fischtaminel, do you know what she would say?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, Caroline watches Adolphe closely: but Adolphe affects a delusive
+calmness, in the middle of which Caroline throws out her line to fish up a
+clue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, she would say that she had had the pleasure of seeing you! How wretched
+we poor creatures are! We never know what you are doing: here we are stuck,
+chained at home, while you are off at your business! Fine business, truly! If I
+were in your place, I would invent business a little bit better put together
+than yours! Ah, you set us a worthy example! They say women are perverse. Who
+perverted them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the torrent of
+words. Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up by the lash, starts
+off anew, and with the animation of one of Rossini’s codas:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, it’s a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so that you
+may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause of your passion
+for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in the trap! You are right,
+sir, a villa is very convenient: it serves two objects. But the wife can get
+along with it as well as the husband. You may take Paris and its hacks! I’ll
+take the woods and their shady groves! Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so
+let’s say no more about it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you done, dear?” he asks, profiting by an instant in which she tosses her
+head after a pointed interrogation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Caroline concludes thus: “I’ve had enough of the villa, and I’ll never set
+foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you’ll keep it, probably, and
+leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least amuse myself, while you go
+with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods. What is a <i>Villa Adolphini</i>
+where you get nauseated if you go six times round the lawn? where they’ve
+planted chair-legs and broom-sticks on the pretext of producing shade? It’s
+like a furnace: the walls are six inches thick! and my gentleman is absent
+seven hours a day! That’s what a country seat means!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Listen to me, Caroline.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wouldn’t so much mind, if you would only confess what you did to-day. You
+don’t know me yet: come, tell me, I won’t scold you. I pardon you beforehand
+for all that you’ve done.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make one to his
+wife, replies—“Well, I’ll tell you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That’s a good fellow—I shall love you better.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was three hours—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I was sure of it—at Madame de Fischtaminel’s!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, at our notary’s, as he had got me a purchaser; but we could not come to
+terms: he wanted our villa furnished. When I left there, I went to Braschon’s,
+to see how much we owed him—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You made up this romance while I was talking to you! Look me in the face! I’ll
+go to see Braschon to-morrow.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe cannot restrain a nervous shudder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You can’t help laughing, you monster!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I laugh at your obstinacy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll go to-morrow to Madame de Fischtaminel’s.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, go wherever you like!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What brutality!” says Caroline, rising and going away with her handkerchief at
+her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become a
+diabolical invention of Adolphe’s, a trap into which the fawn has fallen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since Adolphe’s discovery that it is impossible to reason with Caroline, he
+lets her say whatever she pleases.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two months after, he sells the villa which cost him twenty-two thousand francs
+for seven thousand! But he gains this by the adventure—he finds out that the
+country is not the thing that Caroline wants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question is becoming serious. Nature, with its woods, its forests, its
+valleys, the Switzerland of the environs of Paris, the artificial rivers, have
+amused Caroline for barely six months. Adolphe is tempted to abdicate and take
+Caroline’s part himself.
+</p>
+
+<h3>A HOUSEHOLD REVOLUTION.</h3>
+
+<p>
+One morning, Adolphe is seized by the triumphant idea of letting Caroline find
+out for herself what she wants. He gives up to her the control of the house,
+saying, “Do as you like.” He substitutes the constitutional system for the
+autocratic system, a responsible ministry for an absolute conjugal monarchy.
+This proof of confidence —the object of much secret envy—is, to women, a
+field-marshal’s baton. Women are then, so to speak, mistresses at home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After this, nothing, not even the memory of the honey-moon, can be compared to
+Adolphe’s happiness for several days. A woman, under such circumstances, is all
+sugar. She is too sweet: she would invent the art of petting and cosseting and
+of coining tender little names, if this matrimonial sugar-plummery had not
+existed ever since the Terrestrial Paradise. At the end of the month, Adolphe’s
+condition is like that of children towards the close of New Year’s week. So
+Caroline is beginning to say, not in words, but in acts, in manner, in mimetic
+expressions: “It’s difficult to tell <i>what</i> to do to please a man!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Giving up the helm of the boat to one’s wife, is an exceedingly ordinary idea,
+and would hardly deserve the qualification of “triumphant,” which we have given
+it at the commencement of this chapter, if it were not accompanied by that of
+taking it back again. Adolphe was seduced by a wish, which invariably seizes
+persons who are the prey of misfortune, to know how far an evil will go!—to try
+how much damage fire will do when left to itself, the individual possessing, or
+thinking he possesses, the power to arrest it. This curiosity pursues us from
+the cradle to the grave. Then, after his plethora of conjugal felicity,
+Adolphe, who is treating himself to a farce in his own house, goes through the
+following phases:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FIRST EPOCH. Things go on altogether too well. Caroline buys little account
+books to keep a list of her expenses in, she buys a nice little piece of
+furniture to store her money in, she feeds Adolphe superbly, she is happy in
+his approbation, she discovers that very many articles are needed in the house.
+It is her ambition to be an incomparable housekeeper. Adolphe, who arrogates to
+himself the right of censorship, no longer finds the slightest suggestion to
+make.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he dresses himself, everything is ready to his hands. Not even in Armide’s
+garden was more ingenious tenderness displayed than that of Caroline. For her
+phoenix husband, she renews the wax upon his razor strap, she substitutes new
+suspenders for old ones. None of his button-holes are ever widowed. His linen
+is as well cared for as that of the confessor of the devotee, all whose sins
+are venial. His stockings are free from holes. At table, his tastes, his
+caprices even, are studied, consulted: he is getting fat! There is ink in his
+inkstand, and the sponge is always moist. He never has occasion to say, like
+Louis XIV, “I came near having to wait!” In short, he hears himself continually
+called <i>a love of a man</i>. He is obliged to reproach Caroline for
+neglecting herself: she does not pay sufficient attention to her own needs. Of
+this gentle reproach Caroline takes note.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+SECOND EPOCH. The scene changes, at table. Everything is exceedingly dear.
+Vegetables are beyond one’s means. Wood sells as if it came from Campeche.
+Fruit? Oh! as to fruit, princes, bankers and great lords alone can eat it.
+Dessert is a cause of ruin. Adolphe often hears Caroline say to Madame
+Deschars: “How do you manage?” Conferences are held in your presence upon the
+proper way to keep cooks under the thumb.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A cook who entered your service without effects, without clothes, and without
+talent, has come to get her wages in a blue merino gown, set off by an
+embroidered neckerchief, her ears embellished with a pair of ear-rings enriched
+with small pearls, her feet clothed in comfortable shoes which give you a
+glimpse of neat cotton stockings. She has two trunks full of property, and
+keeps an account at the savings bank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon this Caroline complains of the bad morals of the lower classes: she
+complains of the education and the knowledge of figures which distinguish
+domestics. From time to time she utters little axioms like the following: There
+are some mistakes you <i>must</i> make!—It’s only those who do nothing who do
+everything well.—She has the anxieties that belong to power.—Ah! men are
+fortunate in not having a house to keep.—Women bear the burden of the
+innumerable details.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THIRD EPOCH. Caroline, absorbed in the idea that you should eat merely to live,
+treats Adolphe to the delights of a cenobitic table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe’s stockings are either full of holes or else rough with the lichen of
+hasty mendings, for the day is not long enough for all that his wife has to do.
+He wears suspenders blackened by use. His linen is old and gapes like a
+door-keeper, or like the door itself. At a time when Adolphe is in haste to
+conclude a matter of business, it takes him an hour to dress: he has to pick
+out his garments one by one, opening many an article before finding one fit to
+wear. But Caroline is charmingly dressed. She has pretty bonnets, velvet boots,
+mantillas. She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration in virtue
+of this principle: Charity well understood begins at home. When Adolphe
+complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken wardrobe and Caroline’s
+splendor, she says, “Why, you reproached me with buying nothing for myself!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The husband and the wife here begin to bandy jests more or less acrimonious.
+One evening Caroline makes herself very agreeable, in order to insinuate an
+avowal of a rather large deficit, just as the ministry begins to eulogize the
+tax-payers, and boast of the wealth of the country, when it is preparing to
+bring forth a bill for an additional appropriation. There is this further
+similitude that both are done in the chamber, whether in administration or in
+housekeeping. From this springs the profound truth that the constitutional
+system is infinitely dearer than the monarchical system. For a nation as for a
+household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity, of
+chicanery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe, enlightened by his past annoyances, waits for an opportunity to
+explode, and Caroline slumbers in a delusive security.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What starts the quarrel? Do we ever know what electric current precipitates the
+avalanche or decides a revolution? It may result from anything or nothing. But
+finally, Adolphe, after a period to be determined in each case by the
+circumstances of the couple, utters this fatal phrase, in the midst of a
+discussion: “Ah! when I was a bachelor!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her husband’s bachelor life is to a woman what the phrase, “My dear deceased,”
+is to a widow’s second husband. These two stings produce wounds which are never
+completely healed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then Adolphe goes on like General Bonaparte haranguing the Five Hundred: “We
+are on a volcano!—The house no longer has a head, the time to come to an
+understanding has arrived.—You talk of happiness, Caroline, but you have
+compromised, imperiled it by your exactions, you have violated the civil code:
+you have mixed yourself up in the discussions of business, and you have invaded
+the conjugal authority. —We must reform our internal affairs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline does not shout, like the Five Hundred, “Down with the dictator!” For
+people never shout a man down, when they feel that they can put him down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When I was a bachelor I had none but new stockings! I had a clean napkin every
+day on my plate. The restaurateur only fleeced me of a determinate sum. I have
+given up to you my beloved liberty! What have you done with it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Am I then so very wrong, Adolphe, to have sought to spare you numerous cares?”
+says Caroline, taking an attitude before her husband. “Take the key of the
+money-box back,—but do you know what will happen? I am ashamed, but you will
+compel me to go on to the stage to get the merest necessaries of life. Is this
+what you want? Degrade your wife, or bring in conflict two contrary, hostile
+interests—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such, for three quarters of the French people is an exact definition of
+marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Be perfectly easy, dear,” resumes Caroline, seating herself in her chair like
+Marius on the ruins of Carthage, “I will never ask you for anything. I am not a
+beggar! I know what I’ll do—you don’t know me yet.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, what will you do?” asks Adolphe; “it seems impossible to joke or have an
+explanation with you women. What will you do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It doesn’t concern you at all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Excuse me, madame, quite the contrary. Dignity, honor—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, have no fear of that, sir. For your sake more than for my own, I will keep
+it a dead secret.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, Caroline, my own Carola, what do you mean to do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline darts a viper-like glance at Adolphe, who recoils and proceeds to walk
+up and down the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There now, tell me, what will you do?” he repeats after much too prolonged a
+silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I shall go to work, sir!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At this sublime declaration, Adolphe executes a movement in retreat, detecting
+a bitter exasperation, and feeling the sharpness of a north wind which had
+never before blown in the matrimonial chamber.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE ART OF BEING A VICTIM.</h3>
+
+<p>
+On and after the Revolution, our vanquished Caroline adopts an infernal system,
+the effect of which is to make you regret your victory every hour. She becomes
+the opposition! Should Adolphe have one more such triumph, he would appear
+before the Court of Assizes, accused of having smothered his wife between two
+mattresses, like Shakespeare’s Othello. Caroline puts on the air of a martyr;
+her submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates
+Adolphe with a “Just as you like!” uttered in tones whose sweetness is
+something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who utters
+elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile is elegiac, her
+silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are a few examples, wherein
+every household will find some of its impressions recorded:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+AFTER BREAKFAST. “Caroline, we go to-night to the Deschars’ grand ball you
+know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, love.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+AFTER DINNER. “What, not dressed yet, Caroline?” exclaims Adolphe, who has just
+made his appearance, magnificently equipped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He finds Caroline arrayed in a gown fit for an elderly lady of strong
+conversational powers, a black moire with an old-fashioned fan-waist. Flowers,
+too badly imitated to deserve the name of artificial, give a gloomy aspect to a
+head of hair which the chambermaid has carelessly arranged. Caroline’s gloves
+have already seen wear and tear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am ready, my dear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What, in that dress?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have no other. A new dress would have cost three hundred francs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why did you not tell me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I, ask you for anything, after what has happened!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll go alone,” says Adolphe, unwilling to be humiliated in his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I dare say you are very glad to,” returns Caroline, in a captious tone, “it’s
+plain enough from the way you are got up.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Eleven persons are in the parlor, all invited to dinner by Adolphe. Caroline is
+there, looking as if her husband had invited her too. She is waiting for dinner
+to be served.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” says the parlor servant in a whisper to his master, “the cook doesn’t
+know what on earth to do!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You said nothing to her, sir: and she has only two side-dishes, the beef, a
+chicken, a salad and vegetables.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline, didn’t you give the necessary orders?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How did I know that you had company, and besides I can’t take it upon myself
+to give orders here! You delivered me from all care on that point, and I thank
+heaven for it every day of my life.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame de Fischtaminel has called to pay Madame Caroline a visit. She finds her
+coughing feebly and nearly bent double over her embroidery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, so you are working those slippers for your dear Adolphe?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe is standing before the fire-place as complacently as may be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, madame, it’s for a tradesman who pays me for them: like the convicts, my
+labor enables me to treat myself to some little comforts.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe reddens; he can’t very well beat his wife, and Madame de Fischtaminel
+looks at him as much as to say, “What does this mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You cough a good deal, my darling,” says Madame de Fischtaminel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh!” returns Caroline, “what is life to me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is seated, conversing with a lady of your acquaintance, whose good
+opinion you are exceedingly anxious to retain. From the depths of the embrasure
+where you are talking with some friends, you gather, from the mere motion of
+her lips, these words: “My husband would have it so!” uttered with the air of a
+young Roman matron going to the circus to be devoured. You are profoundly
+wounded in your several vanities, and wish to attend to this conversation while
+listening to your guests: you thus make replies which bring you back such
+inquiries as: “Why, what are you thinking of?” For you have lost the thread of
+the discourse, and you fidget nervously with your feet, thinking to yourself,
+“What is she telling her about me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe is dining with the Deschars: twelve persons are at table, and Caroline
+is seated next to a nice young man named Ferdinand, Adolphe’s cousin. Between
+the first and second course, conjugal happiness is the subject of conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There is nothing easier than for a woman to be happy,” says Caroline in reply
+to a woman who complains of her husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tell us your secret, madame,” says M. de Fischtaminel agreeably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A woman has nothing to do but to meddle with nothing to consider herself as
+the first servant in the house or as a slave that the master takes care of, to
+have no will of her own, and never to make an observation: thus all goes well.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This, delivered in a bitter tone and with tears in her voice, alarms Adolphe,
+who looks fixedly at his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You forget, madame, the happiness of telling about one’s happiness,” he
+returns, darting at her a glance worthy of the tyrant in a melodrama.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quite satisfied with having shown herself assassinated or on the point of being
+so, Caroline turns her head aside, furtively wipes away a tear, and says:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Happiness cannot be described!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This incident, as they say at the Chamber, leads to nothing, but Ferdinand
+looks upon his cousin as an angel about to be offered up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some one alludes to the frightful prevalence of inflammation of the stomach, or
+to the nameless diseases of which young women die.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, too happy they!” exclaims Caroline, as if she were foretelling the manner
+of her death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe’s mother-in-law comes to see her daughter. Caroline says, “My husband’s
+parlor:” “Your master’s chamber.” Everything in the house belongs to “My
+husband.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, what’s the matter, children?” asks the mother-in-law; “you seem to be at
+swords’ points.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, dear me,” says Adolphe, “nothing but that Caroline has had the management
+of the house and didn’t manage it right, that’s all.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She got into debt, I suppose?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, dearest mamma.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look here, Adolphe,” says the mother-in-law, after having waited to be left
+alone with her son, “would you prefer to have my daughter magnificently
+dressed, to have everything go on smoothly, <i>without its costing you
+anything</i>?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Imagine, if you can, the expression of Adolphe’s physiognomy, as he hears
+<i>this declaration of woman’s rights</i>!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline abandons her shabby dress and appears in a splendid one. She is at the
+Deschars’: every one compliments her upon her taste, upon the richness of her
+materials, upon her lace, her jewels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! you have a charming husband!” says Madame Deschars. Adolphe tosses his
+head proudly, and looks at Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My husband, madame! I cost that gentleman nothing, thank heaven! All I have
+was given me by my mother.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe turns suddenly about and goes to talk with Madame de Fischtaminel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After a year of absolute monarchy, Caroline says very mildly one morning:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How much have you spent this year, dear?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t know.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Examine your accounts.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe discovers that he has spent a third more than during Caroline’s worst
+year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And I’ve cost you nothing for my dress,” she adds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is playing Schubert’s melodies. Adolphe takes great pleasure in
+hearing these compositions well-executed: he gets up and compliments Caroline.
+She bursts into tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What’s the matter?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nothing, I’m nervous.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I didn’t know you were subject to that.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“O Adolphe, you won’t see anything! Look, my rings come off my fingers: you
+don’t love me any more—I’m a burden to you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She weeps, she won’t listen, she weeps afresh at every word Adolphe utters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Suppose you take the management of the house back again?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah!” she exclaims, rising sharply to her feet, like a spring figure in a box,
+“now that you’ve had enough of your experience! Thank you! Do you suppose it’s
+money that I want? Singular method, yours, of pouring balm upon a wounded
+heart. No, go away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, just as you like, Caroline.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This “just as you like” is the first expression of indifference towards a wife:
+and Caroline sees before her an abyss towards which she had been walking of her
+own free will.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE FRENCH CAMPAIGN.</h3>
+
+<p>
+The disasters of 1814 afflict every species of existence. After brilliant days
+of conquest, after the period during which obstacles change to triumphs, and
+the slightest check becomes a piece of good fortune, there comes a time when
+the happiest ideas turn out blunders, when courage leads to destruction, and
+when your very fortifications are a stumbling-block. Conjugal love, which,
+according to authors, is a peculiar phase of love, has, more than anything
+else, its French Campaign, its fatal 1814. The devil especially loves to dangle
+his tail in the affairs of poor desolate women, and to this Caroline has come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband back. She
+spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her imagination works.
+She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands pensively at the window,
+looking at the street and seeing nothing, her face glued to the panes, and
+feeling as if in a desert, in the midst of her friends, in the bosom of her
+luxuriously furnished apartments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed between a
+court and a garden, all life is double. At every story, a family sees another
+family in the opposite house. Everybody plunges his gaze at will into his
+neighbor’s domains. There is a necessity for mutual observation, a common right
+of search from which none can escape. At a given time, in the morning, you get
+up early, the servant opposite is dusting the parlor, she has left the windows
+open and has put the rugs on the railing; you divine a multitude of things, and
+vice-versa. Thus, in a given time, you are acquainted with the habits of the
+pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman opposite, or the
+caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old bachelor, the color of the
+furniture, and the cat of the two pair front. Everything furnishes a hint, and
+becomes matter for divination. At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by
+surprise, finds herself—too late, like the chaste Susanne,—the prey of the
+delighted lorgnette of an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year,
+and who becomes criminal gratis. On the other hand, a handsome young gentleman,
+who, for the present, works without wages, and is only nineteen years old,
+appears before the sight of a pious old lady, in the simple apparel of a man
+engaged in shaving. The watch thus kept up is never relaxed, while prudence, on
+the contrary, has its moments of forgetfulness. Curtains are not always let
+down in time. A woman, just before dark, approaches the window to thread her
+needle, and the married man opposite may then admire a head that Raphael might
+have painted, and one that he considers worthy of himself—a National Guard
+truly imposing when under arms. Oh, sacred private life, where art thou! Paris
+is a city ever ready to exhibit itself half naked, a city essentially libertine
+and devoid of modesty. For a person’s life to be decorous in it, the said
+person should have a hundred thousand a year. Virtues are dearer than vices in
+Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, whose gaze sometimes steals between the protecting muslins which hide
+her domestic life from the five stories opposite, at last discovers a young
+couple plunged in the delights of the honey-moon, and newly established in the
+first story directly in view of her window. She spends her time in the most
+exciting observations. The blinds are closed early, and opened late. One day,
+Caroline, who has arisen at eight o’clock notices, by accident, of course, the
+maid preparing a bath or a morning dress, a delicious deshabille. Caroline
+sighs. She lies in ambush like a hunter at the cover; she surprises the young
+woman, her face actually illuminated with happiness. Finally, by dint of
+watching the charming couple, she sees the gentleman and lady open the window,
+and lean gently one against the other, as, supported by the railing, they
+breathe the evening air. Caroline gives herself a nervous headache, by
+endeavoring to interpret the phantasmagorias, some of them having an
+explanation and others not, made by the shadows of these two young people on
+the curtains, one night when they have forgotten to close the shutters. The
+young woman is often seated, melancholy and pensive, waiting for her absent
+husband; she hears the tread of a horse, or the rumble of a cab at the street
+corner; she starts from the sofa, and from her movements, it is easy for
+Caroline to see that she exclaims: “’Tis he!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How they love each other!” says Caroline to herself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By dint of nervous headache, Caroline conceives an exceedingly ingenious plan:
+this plan consists in using the conjugal bliss of the opposite neighbors as a
+tonic to stimulate Adolphe. The idea is not without depravity, but then
+Caroline’s intention sanctifies the means!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe,” she says, “we have a neighbor opposite, the loveliest woman, a
+brunette—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, yes,” returns Adolphe, “I know her. She is a friend of Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s: Madame Foullepointe, the wife of a broker, a charming man and a
+good fellow, very fond of his wife: he’s crazy about her. His office and rooms
+are here, in the court, while those on the street are madame’s. I know of no
+happier household. Foullepointe talks about his happiness everywhere, even at
+the Exchange; he’s really quite tiresome.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, then, be good enough to present Monsieur and Madame Foullepointe to me.
+I should be delighted to learn how she manages to make her husband love her so
+much: have they been married long?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Five years, just like us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“O Adolphe, dear, I am dying to know her: make us intimately acquainted. Am I
+as pretty as she?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, if I were to meet you at an opera ball, and if you weren’t my wife, I
+declare, I shouldn’t know which—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are real sweet to-day. Don’t forget to invite them to dinner Saturday.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ll do it to-night. Foullepointe and I often meet on ’Change.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now,” says Caroline, “this young woman will doubtless tell me what her method
+of action is.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline resumes her post of observation. At about three she looks through the
+flowers which form as it were a bower at the window, and exclaims, “Two perfect
+doves!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the Saturday in question, Caroline invites Monsieur and Madame Deschars,
+the worthy Monsieur Fischtaminel, in short, the most virtuous couples of her
+society. She has brought out all her resources: she has ordered the most
+sumptuous dinner, she has taken the silver out of the chest: she means to do
+all honor to the model of wives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear, you will see to-night,” she says to Madame Deschars, at the moment
+when all the women are looking at each other in silence, “the most admirable
+young couple in the world, our opposite neighbors: a young man of fair
+complexion, so graceful and with <i>such</i> manners! His head is like Lord
+Byron’s, and he’s a real Don Juan, only faithful: he’s discovered the secret of
+making love eternal: I shall perhaps obtain a second crop of it from her
+example. Adolphe, when he sees them, will blush at his conduct, and—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The servant announces: “Monsieur and Madame Foullepointe.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Foullepointe, a pretty brunette, a genuine Parisian, slight and erect in
+form, the brilliant light of her eye quenched by her long lashes, charmingly
+dressed, sits down upon the sofa. Caroline bows to a fat gentleman with thin
+gray hair, who follows this Paris Andalusian, and who exhibits a face and
+paunch fit for Silenus, a butter-colored pate, a deceitful, libertine smile
+upon his big, heavy lips,—in short, a philosopher! Caroline looks upon this
+individual with astonishment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Monsieur Foullepointe, my dear,” says Adolphe, presenting the worthy
+quinquagenarian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am delighted, madame,” says Caroline, good-naturedly, “that you have brought
+your father-in-law [profound sensation], but we shall soon see your husband, I
+trust—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame—!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everybody listens and looks. Adolphe becomes the object of every one’s
+attention; he is literally dumb with amazement: if he could, he would whisk
+Caroline off through a trap, as at the theatre.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“This is Monsieur Foullepointe, my husband,” says Madame Foullepointe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline turns scarlet as she sees her ridiculous blunder, and Adolphe scathes
+her with a look of thirty-six candlepower.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You said he was young and fair,” whispers Madame Deschars. Madame
+Foullepointe,—knowing lady that she is,—boldly stares at the ceiling.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A month after, Madame Foullepointe and Caroline become intimate. Adolphe, who
+is taken up with Madame de Fischtaminel, pays no attention to this dangerous
+friendship, a friendship which will bear its fruits, for—pray learn this—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Women have corrupted more women than men have ever loved.
+</p>
+
+<h3>A SOLO ON THE HEARSE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+After a period, the length of which depends on the strength of Caroline’s
+principles, she appears to be languishing; and when Adolphe, anxious for
+decorum’s sake, as he sees her stretched out upon the sofa like a snake in the
+sun, asks her, “What is the matter, love? What do you want?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I wish I was dead!” she replies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Quite a merry and agreeable wish!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It isn’t death that frightens me, it’s suffering.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I suppose that means that I don’t make you happy! That’s the way with women!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe strides about the room, talking incoherently: but he is brought to a
+dead halt by seeing Caroline dry her tears, which are really flowing
+artistically, in an embroidered handkerchief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you feel sick?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t feel well. [Silence.] I only hope that I shall live long enough to see
+my daughter married, for I know the meaning, now, of the expression so little
+understood by the young—<i>the choice of a husband</i>! Go to your amusements,
+Adolphe: a woman who thinks of the future, a woman who suffers, is not at all
+diverting: come, go and have a good time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where do you feel bad?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t feel bad, dear: I never was better. I don’t feel anything. No, really,
+I am better. There, leave me to myself.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This time, being the first, Adolphe goes away almost sad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A week passes, during which Caroline orders all the servants to conceal from
+her husband her deplorable situation: she languishes, she rings when she feels
+she is going off, she uses a great deal of ether. The domestics finally
+acquaint their master with madame’s conjugal heroism, and Adolphe remains at
+home one evening after dinner, and sees his wife passionately kissing her
+little Marie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poor child! I regret the future only for your sake! What is life, I should
+like to know?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, my dear,” says Adolphe, “don’t take on so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m not taking on. Death doesn’t frighten me—I saw a funeral this morning, and
+I thought how happy the body was! How comes it that I think of nothing but
+death? Is it a disease? I have an idea that I shall die by my own hand.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The more Adolphe tries to divert Caroline, the more closely she wraps herself
+up in the crape of her hopeless melancholy. This second time, Adolphe stays at
+home and is wearied to death. At the third attack of forced tears, he goes out
+without the slightest compunction. He finally gets accustomed to these
+everlasting murmurs, to these dying postures, these crocodile tears. So he
+says:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you are sick, Caroline, you’d better have a doctor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Just as you like! It will end quicker, so. But bring a famous one, if you
+bring any.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of a month, Adolphe, worn out by hearing the funereal air that
+Caroline plays him on every possible key, brings home a famous doctor. At
+Paris, doctors are all men of discernment, and are admirably versed in conjugal
+nosography.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, madame,” says the great physician, “how happens it that so pretty a
+woman allows herself to be sick?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! sir, like the nose of old father Aubry, I aspire to the tomb—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, out of consideration for Adolphe, makes a feeble effort to smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tut, tut! But your eyes are clear: they don’t seem to need our infernal
+drugs.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Look again, doctor, I am eaten up with fever, a slow, imperceptible fever—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she fastens her most roguish glance upon the illustrious doctor, who says
+to himself, “What eyes!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, let me see your tongue.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline puts out her taper tongue between two rows of teeth as white as those
+of a dog.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It is a little bit furred at the root: but you have breakfasted—” observes the
+great physician, turning toward Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, a mere nothing,” returns Caroline; “two cups of tea—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe and the illustrious leech look at each other, for the doctor wonders
+whether it is the husband or the wife that is trifling with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you feel?” gravely inquires the physician.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I don’t sleep.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have no appetite.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have a pain, here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor examines the part indicated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good, we’ll look at that by and by.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now and then a shudder passes over me—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have melancholy fits, I am always thinking of death, I feel promptings of
+suicide—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dear me! Really!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have rushes of heat to the face: look, there’s a constant trembling in my
+eyelid.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Capital! We call that a trismus.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor goes into an explanation, which lasts a quarter of an hour, of the
+trismus, employing the most scientific terms. From this it appears that the
+trismus is the trismus: but he observes with the greatest modesty that if
+science knows that the trismus is the trismus, it is entirely ignorant of the
+cause of this nervous affection, which comes and goes, appears and
+disappears—“and,” he adds, “we have decided that it is altogether nervous.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is it very dangerous?” asks Caroline, anxiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not at all. How do you lie at night?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Doubled up in a heap.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good. On which side?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The left.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well. How many mattresses are there on your bed?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Three.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good. Is there a spring bed?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is the spring bed stuffed with?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Horse hair.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Capital. Let me see you walk. No, no, naturally, and as if we weren’t looking
+at you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline walks like Fanny Elssler, communicating the most Andalusian little
+motions to her tournure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you feel a sensation of heaviness in your knees?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, no—” she returns to her place. “Ah, no that I think of it, it seems to
+me that I do.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good. Have you been in the house a good deal lately?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, yes, sir, a great deal too much—and alone.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good. I thought so. What do you wear on your head at night?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“An embroidered night-cap, and sometimes a handkerchief over it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you feel a heat there, a slight perspiration?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How can I, when I’m asleep?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you find your night-cap moist on your forehead, when you wake up?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sometimes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Capital. Give me your hand.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The doctor takes out his watch.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Did I tell you that I have a vertigo?” asks Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hush!” says the doctor, counting the pulse. “In the evening?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, in the morning.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, bless me, a vertigo in the morning,” says the doctor, looking at Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The Duke of G. has not gone to London,” says the great physician, while
+examining Caroline’s skin, “and there’s a good deal to be said about it in the
+Faubourg St. Germain.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you patients there?” asks Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Nearly all my patients are there. Dear me, yes; I’ve got seven to see this
+morning; some of them are in danger.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you think of me, sir?” says Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame, you need attention, a great deal of attention, you must take quieting
+liquors, plenty of syrup of gum, a mild diet, white meat, and a good deal of
+exercise.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There go twenty francs,” says Adolphe to himself with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great physician takes Adolphe by the arm, and draws him out with him, as he
+takes his leave: Caroline follows them on tiptoe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear sir,” says the great physician, “I have just prescribed very
+insufficiently for your wife. I did not wish to frighten her: this affair
+concerns you more nearly than you imagine. Don’t neglect her; she has a
+powerful temperament, and enjoys violent health; all this reacts upon her.
+Nature has its laws, which, when disregarded, compel obedience. She may get
+into a morbid state, which would cause you bitterly to repent having neglected
+her. If you love her, why, love her: but if you don’t love her, and
+nevertheless desire to preserve the mother of your children, the resolution to
+come to is a matter of hygiene, but it can only proceed from you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How well he understand me!” says Caroline to herself. She opens the door and
+says: “Doctor, you did not write down the doses!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great physician smiles, bows and slips the twenty franc piece into his
+pocket; he then leaves Adolphe to his wife, who takes him and says:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is the fact about my condition? Must I prepare for death?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Bah! He says you’re too healthy!” cries Adolphe, impatiently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline retires to her sofa to weep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is it, now?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So I am to live a long time—I am in the way—you don’t love me any more—I won’t
+consult that doctor again—I don’t know why Madame Foullepointe advised me to
+see him, he told me nothing but trash—I know better than he what I need!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you need?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Can you ask, ungrateful man?” and Caroline leans her head on Adolphe’s
+shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe, very much alarmed, says to himself: “The doctor’s right, she may get
+to be morbidly exacting, and then what will become of me? Here I am compelled
+to choose between Caroline’s physical extravagance, or some young cousin or
+other.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Meanwhile Caroline sits down and sings one of Schubert’s melodies with all the
+agitation of a hypochondriac.
+</p>
+
+<h2>PART SECOND</h2>
+
+<h3>PREFACE</h3>
+
+<p>
+If, reader, you have grasped the intent of this book,—and infinite honor is
+done you by the supposition: the profoundest author does not always comprehend,
+I may say never comprehends, the different meanings of his book, nor its
+bearing, nor the good nor the harm it may do—if, then, you have bestowed some
+attention upon these little scenes of married life, you have perhaps noticed
+their color—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What color?” some grocer will doubtless ask; “books are bound in yellow, blue,
+green, pearl-gray, white—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alas! books possess another color, they are dyed by the author, and certain
+writers borrow their dye. Some books let their color come off on to others.
+More than this. Books are dark or fair, light brown or red. They have a sex,
+too! I know of male books, and female books, of books which, sad to say, have
+no sex, which we hope is not the case with this one, supposing that you do this
+collection of nosographic sketches the honor of calling it a book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus far, the troubles we have described have been exclusively inflicted by the
+wife upon the husband. You have therefore seen only the masculine side of the
+book. And if the author really has the sense of hearing for which we give him
+credit, he has already caught more than one indignant exclamation or
+remonstrance:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He tells us of nothing but vexations suffered by our husbands, as if we didn’t
+have our petty troubles, too!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Oh, women! You have been heard, for if you do not always make yourselves
+understood, you are always sure to make yourselves heard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would therefore be signally unjust to lay upon you alone the reproaches that
+every being brought under the yoke (<i>conjugium</i>) has the right to heap
+upon that necessary, sacred, useful, eminently conservative institution,—one,
+however, that is often somewhat of an encumbrance, and tight about the joints,
+though sometimes it is also too loose there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I will go further! Such partiality would be a piece of idiocy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A man,—not a writer, for in a writer there are many men,—an author, rather,
+should resemble Janus, see behind and before, become a spy, examine an idea in
+all its phases, delve alternately into the soul of Alceste and into that of
+Philaenete, know everything though he does not tell it, never be tiresome, and—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We will not conclude this programme, for we should tell the whole, and that
+would be frightful for those who reflect upon the present condition of
+literature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Furthermore, an author who speaks for himself in the middle of his book,
+resembles the old fellow in “The Speaking Picture,” when he puts his face in
+the hole cut in the painting. The author does not forget that in the Chamber,
+no one can take the floor <i>between two votes</i>. Enough, therefore!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here follows the female portion of the book: for, to resemble marriage
+perfectly, it ought to be more or less hermaphroditic.
+</p>
+
+<h2>PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE</h2>
+
+<h3>HUSBANDS DURING THE SECOND MONTH.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Two young married women, Caroline and Stephanie, who had been early friends at
+M’lle Machefer’s boarding school, one of the most celebrated educational
+institutions in the Faubourg St. Honoré, met at a ball given by Madame de
+Fischtaminel, and the following conversation took place in a window-seat in the
+boudoir.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was so hot that a man had acted upon the idea of going to breathe the fresh
+night air, some time before the two young women. He had placed himself in the
+angle of the balcony, and, as there were many flowers before the window, the
+two friends thought themselves alone. This man was the author’s best friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the two ladies, standing at the corner of the embrasure, kept watch by
+looking at the boudoir and the parlors. The other had so placed herself as not
+to be in the draft, which was nevertheless tempered by the muslin and silk
+curtains.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The boudoir was empty, the ball was just beginning, the gaming-tables were
+open, offering their green cloths and their packs of cards still compressed in
+the frail case placed upon them by the customs office. The second quadrille was
+in progress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All who go to balls will remember that phase of large parties when the guests
+are not yet all arrived, but when the rooms are already filled —a moment which
+gives the mistress of the house a transitory pang of terror. This moment is,
+other points of comparison apart, like that which decides a victory or the loss
+of a battle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You will understand, therefore, how what was meant to be a secret now obtains
+the honors of publicity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, Caroline?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, Stephanie?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A double sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Have you forgotten our agreement?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why haven’t you been to see me, then?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am never left alone. Even here we shall hardly have time to talk.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! if Adolphe were to get into such habits as that!” exclaimed Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You saw us, Armand and me, when he paid me what is called, I don’t know why,
+his court.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, I admired him, I thought you very happy, you had found your ideal, a
+fine, good-sized man, always well dressed, with yellow gloves, his beard well
+shaven, patent leather boots, a clean shirt, exquisitely neat, and so
+attentive—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, yes, go on.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In short, quite an elegant man: his voice was femininely sweet, and then such
+gentleness! And his promises of happiness and liberty! His sentences were
+veneered with rosewood. He stocked his conversation with shawls and laces. In
+his smallest expression you heard the rumbling of a coach and four. Your
+wedding presents were magnificent. Armand seemed to me like a husband of
+velvet, of a robe of birds’ feathers in which you were to be wrapped.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline, my husband uses tobacco.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So does mine; that is, he smokes.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But mine, dear, uses it as they say Napoleon did: in short, he chews, and I
+hold tobacco in horror. The monster found it out, and went without out it for
+seven months.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All men have their habits. They absolutely must use something.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You have no idea of the tortures I endure. At night I am awakened with a start
+by one of my own sneezes. As I go to sleep my motions bring the grains of snuff
+scattered over the pillow under my nose, I inhale, and explode like a mine. It
+seems that Armand, the wretch, is used to these <i>surprises</i>, and doesn’t
+wake up. I find tobacco everywhere, and I certainly didn’t marry the customs
+office.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, my dear child, what does this trifling inconvenience amount to, if your
+husband is kind and possesses a good disposition?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He is as cold as marble, as particular as an old bachelor, as communicative as
+a sentinel; and he’s one of those men who say yes to everything, but who never
+do anything but what they want to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Deny him, once.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve tried it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What came of it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He threatened to reduce my allowance, and to keep back a sum big enough for
+him to get along without me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poor Stephanie! He’s not a man, he’s a monster.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A calm and methodical monster, who wears a scratch, and who, every night—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, every night—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Wait a minute!—who takes a tumbler every night, and puts seven false teeth in
+it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What a trap your marriage was! At any rate, Armand is rich.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who knows?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Good heavens! Why, you seem to me on the point of becoming very unhappy—or
+very happy.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, dear, how is it with you?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, as for me, I have nothing as yet but a pin that pricks me: but it is
+intolerable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poor creature! You don’t know your own happiness: come, what is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here the young woman whispered in the other’s ear, so that it was impossible to
+catch a single word. The conversation recommenced, or rather finished by a sort
+of inference.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“So, your Adolphe is jealous?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Jealous of whom? We never leave each other, and that, in itself, is an
+annoyance. I can’t stand it. I don’t dare to gape. I am expected to be forever
+enacting the woman in love. It’s fatiguing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What are you going to do?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Resign myself. What are you?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Fight the customs office.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This little trouble tends to prove that in the matter of personal deception,
+the two sexes can well cry quits.
+</p>
+
+<h3>DISAPPOINTED AMBITION.</h3>
+
+<h4>I. CHODOREILLE THE GREAT.</h4>
+
+<p>
+A young man has forsaken his natal city in the depths of one of the
+departments, rather clearly marked by M. Charles Dupin. He felt that glory of
+some sort awaited him: suppose that of a painter, a novelist, a journalist, a
+poet, a great statesman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Young Adolphe de Chodoreille—that we may be perfectly understood —wished to be
+talked about, to become celebrated, to be somebody. This, therefore, is
+addressed to the mass of aspiring individuals brought to Paris by all sorts of
+vehicles, whether moral or material, and who rush upon the city one fine
+morning with the hydrophobic purpose of overturning everybody’s reputation, and
+of building themselves a pedestal with the ruins they are to make,—until
+disenchantment follows. As our intention is to specify this peculiarity so
+characteristic of our epoch, let us take from among the various personages the
+one whom the author has elsewhere called <i>A Distinguished Provencal</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe has discovered that the most admirable trade is that which consists in
+buying a bottle of ink, a bunch of quills, and a ream of paper, at a
+stationer’s for twelve francs and a half, and in selling the two thousand
+sheets in the ream over again, for something like fifty thousand francs, after
+having, of course, written upon each leaf fifty lines replete with style and
+imagination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This problem,—twelve francs and a half metamorphosed into fifty thousand
+francs, at the rate of five sous a line—urges numerous families who might
+advantageously employ their members in the retirement of the provinces, to
+thrust them into the vortex of Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young man who is the object of this exportation, invariably passes in his
+natal town for a man of as much imagination as the most famous author. He has
+always studied well, he writes very nice poetry, he is considered a fellow of
+parts: he is besides often guilty of a charming tale published in the local
+paper, which obtains the admiration of the department.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His poor parents will never know what their son has come to Paris to learn at
+great cost, namely: That it is difficult to be a writer and to understand the
+French language short of a dozen years of heculean labor: That a man must have
+explored every sphere of social life, to become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as
+the novel is the private history of nations: That the great story-tellers,
+Aesop, Lucian, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage,
+Sterne, Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the <i>Thousand and One
+Nights</i>, were all men of genius as well as giants of erudition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Their Adolphe serves his literary apprenticeship in two or three coffee-houses,
+becomes a member of the Society of Men of Letters, attacks, with or without
+reason, men of talent who don’t read his articles, assumes a milder tone on
+seeing the powerlessness of his criticisms, offers novelettes to the papers
+which toss them from one to the other as if they were shuttlecocks: and, after
+five or six years of exercises more or less fatiguing, of dreadful privations
+which seriously tax his parents, he attains a certain position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This position may be described as follows: Thanks to a sort of reciprocal
+support extended to each other, and which an ingenious writer has called
+“Mutual Admiration,” Adolphe often sees his name cited among the names of
+celebrities, either in the prospectuses of the book-trade, or in the lists of
+newspapers about to appear. Publishers print the title of one of his works
+under the deceitful heading “IN PRESS,” which might be called the typographical
+menagerie of bears.[*] Chodoreille is sometimes mentioned among the promising
+young men of the literary world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+[*] A bear (<i>ours</i>) is a play which has been refused by a multitude of
+theatres, but which is finally represented at a time when some manager or other
+feels the need of one. The word has necessarily passed from the language of the
+stage into the jargon of journalism, and is applied to novels which wander the
+streets in search of a publisher.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For eleven years Adolphe Chodoreille remains in the ranks of the promising
+young men: he finally obtains a free entrance to the theatres, thanks to some
+dirty work or certain articles of dramatic criticism: he tries to pass for a
+good fellow; and as he loses his illusions respecting glory and the world of
+Paris, he gets into debt and his years begin to tell upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A paper which finds itself in a tight place asks him for one of his bears
+revised by his friends. This has been retouched and revamped every five years,
+so that it smells of the pomatum of each prevailing and then forgotten fashion.
+To Adolphe it becomes what the famous cap, which he was constantly staking, was
+to Corporal Trim, for during five years “Anything for a Woman” (the title
+decided upon) “will be one of the most entertaining productions of our epoch.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After eleven years, Chodoreille is regarded as having written some respectable
+things, five or six tales published in the dismal magazines, in ladies’
+newspapers, or in works intended for children of tender age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he is a bachelor, and possesses a coat and a pair of black cassimere
+trousers, and when he pleases may thus assume the appearance of an elegant
+diplomat, and as he is not without a certain intelligent air, he is admitted to
+several more or less literary salons: he bows to the five or six academicians
+who possess genius, influence or talent, he visits two or three of our great
+poets, he allows himself, in coffee-rooms, to call the two or three justly
+celebrated women of our epoch by their Christian names; he is on the best of
+terms with the blue stockings of the second grade,—who ought to be called
+<i>socks</i>,—and he shakes hands and takes glasses of absinthe with the stars
+of the smaller newspapers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such is the history of every species of ordinary men—men who have been denied
+what they call good luck. This good luck is nothing less than unyielding will,
+incessant labor, contempt for an easily won celebrity, immense learning, and
+that patience which, according to Buffon, is the whole of genius, but which
+certainly is the half of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+You do not yet see any indication of a petty trouble for Caroline. You imagine
+that this history of five hundred young men engaged at this moment in wearing
+smooth the paving stones of Paris, was written as a sort of warning to the
+families of the eighty-six departments of France: but read these two letters
+which lately passed between two girls differently married, and you will see
+that it was as necessary as the narrative by which every true melodrama was
+until lately expected to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the
+Parisian peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native village, and
+polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, the rays of his glory, which, like
+those of the sun, are only warm and brilliant at a distance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From Madame Claire de la Roulandiere, nee Jugault, to Madame Adolphe de
+Chodoreille, nee Heurtaut.
+</p>
+
+<h5>“VIVIERS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+“You have not yet written to me, and it’s real unkind in you. Don’t you
+remember that the happier was to write first and to console her who remained in
+the country?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Since your departure for Paris, I have married Monsieur de la Roulandiere, the
+president of the tribunal. You know him, and you can judge whether I am happy
+or not, with my heart <i>saturated</i>, as it is, with our ideas. I was not
+ignorant what my lot would be: I live with the ex-president, my husband’s
+uncle, and with my mother-in-law, who has preserved nothing of the ancient
+parliamentary society of Aix but its pride and its severity of manners. I am
+seldom alone, I never go out unless accompanied by my mother-in-law or my
+husband. We receive the heavy people of the city in the evening. They play
+whist at two sous a point, and I listen to conversations of this nature:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Monsieur Vitremont is dead, and leaves two hundred and eighty thousand
+francs,’ says the associate judge, a young man of forty-seven, who is as
+entertaining as a northwest wind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Are you quite sure of that?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The <i>that</i> refers to the two hundred and eighty thousand francs. A little
+judge then holds forth, he runs over the investments, the others discuss their
+value, and it is definitely settled that if he has not left two hundred and
+eighty thousand, he left something near it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then comes a universal concert of eulogy heaped upon the dead man’s body, for
+having kept his bread under lock and key, for having shrewdly invested his
+little savings accumulated sou by sou, in order, probably, that the whole city
+and those who expect legacies may applaud and exclaim in admiration, ‘He leaves
+two hundred and eighty thousand francs!’ Now everybody has rich relations of
+whom they say ‘Will he leave anything like it?’ and thus they discuss the quick
+as they have discussed the dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“They talk of nothing but the prospects of fortune, the prospects of a vacancy
+in office, the prospects of the harvest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When we were children, and used to look at those pretty little white mice, in
+the cobbler’s window in the rue St. Maclou, that turned and turned the circular
+cage in which they were imprisoned, how far I was from thinking that they would
+one day be a faithful image of my life!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Think of it, my being in this condition!—I who fluttered my wings so much more
+than you, I whose imagination was so vagabond! My sins have been greater than
+yours, and I am the more severely punished. I have bidden farewell to my
+dreams: I am <i>Madame la Presidente</i> in all my glory, and I resign myself
+to giving my arm for forty years to my big awkward Roulandiere, to living
+meanly in every way, and to having forever before me two heavy brows and two
+wall-eyes pierced in a yellow face, which is destined never to know what it is
+to smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But you, Caroline dear, you who, between ourselves, were admitted among the
+big girls while I still gamboled among the little ones, you whose only sin was
+pride, you,—at the age of twenty-seven, and with a dowry of two hundred
+thousand francs,—capture and captivate a truly great man, one of the wittiest
+men in Paris, one of the two talented men that our village has produced.—What
+luck!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You now circulate in the most brilliant society of Paris. Thanks to the
+sublime privileges of genius. You may appear in all the salons of the Faubourg
+St. Germain, and be cordially received. You have the exquisite enjoyment of the
+company of the two or three celebrated women of our age, where so many good
+things are said, where the happy speeches which arrive out here like Congreve
+rockets, are first fired off. You go to the Baron Schinner’s of whom Adolphe so
+often spoke to us, whom all the great artists and foreigners of celebrity
+visit. In short, before long, you will be one of the queens of Paris, if you
+wish. You can receive, too, and have at your house the lions of literature,
+fashion and finance, whether male or female, for Adolphe spoke in such terms
+about his illustrious friendships and his intimacy with the favorites of the
+hour, that I imagine you giving and receiving honors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With your ten thousand francs a year, and the legacy from your Aunt Carabas,
+added to the twenty thousand francs that your husband earns, you must keep a
+carriage; and since you go to all the theatres without paying, since
+journalists are the heroes of all the inaugurations so ruinous for those who
+keep up with the movement of Paris, and since they are constantly invited to
+dinner, you live as if you had an income of sixty thousand francs a year! Happy
+Caroline! I don’t wonder you forget me!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can understand how it is that you have not a moment to yourself. Your bliss
+is the cause of your silence, so I pardon you. Still, if, fatigued with so many
+pleasures, you one day, upon the summit of your grandeur, think of your poor
+Claire, write to me, tell me what a marriage with a great man is, describe
+those great Parisian ladies, especially those who write. Oh! I should <i>so</i>
+much like to know what they are made of! Finally don’t forget anything, unless
+you forget that you are loved, as ever, by your poor
+</p>
+
+<h5>“CLAIRE JUGAULT.”</h5>
+
+<p>
+From Madame Adolphe de Chodoreille to Madame la Presidente de la Roulandiere,
+at Viviers.
+</p>
+
+<h5>“PARIS.</h5>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! my poor Claire, could you have known how many wretched little griefs your
+innocent letter would awaken, you never would have written it. Certainly no
+friend, and not even an enemy, on seeing a woman with a thousand mosquito-bites
+and a plaster over them, would amuse herself by tearing it off and counting the
+stings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will begin by telling you that for a woman of twenty-seven, with a face
+still passable, but with a form a little too much like that of the Emperor
+Nicholas for the humble part I play, I am happy! Let me tell you why: Adolphe,
+rejoicing in the deceptions which have fallen upon me like a hail-storm,
+smoothes over the wounds in my self-love by so much affection, so many
+attentions, and such charming things, that, in good truth, women—so far as they
+are simply women—would be glad to find in the man they marry defects so
+advantageous. But all men of letters (Adolphe, alas! is barely a man of
+letters), who are beings not a bit less irritable, nervous, fickle and
+eccentric than women, are far from possessing such solid qualities as those of
+Adolphe, and I hope they have not all been as unfortunate as he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! Claire, we love each other well enough for me to tell you the simple
+truth. I have saved my husband, dear, from profound but skillfully concealed
+poverty. Far from receiving twenty thousand francs a year, he has not earned
+that sum in the entire fifteen years that he has been at Paris. We occupy a
+third story in the rue Joubert, and pay twelve hundred francs for it; we have
+some eighty-five hundred francs left, with which I endeavor to keep house
+honorably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have brought Adolphe luck; for since our marriage, he has obtained the
+control of a feuilleton which is worth four hundred francs a month to him,
+though it takes but a small portion of his time. He owes this situation to an
+investment. We employed the seventy thousand francs left me by my Aunt Carabas
+in giving security for a newspaper; on this we get nine per cent, and we have
+stock besides. Since this transaction, which was concluded some ten months ago,
+our income has doubled, and we now possess a competence, I can complain of my
+marriage in a pecuniary point of view no more than as regards my affections. My
+vanity alone has suffered, and my ambition has been swamped. You will
+understand the various petty troubles which have assailed me, by a single
+specimen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe, you remember, appeared to us on intimate terms with the famous
+Baroness Schinner, so renowned for her wit, her influence, her wealth and her
+connection with celebrated men. I supposed that he was welcomed at her house as
+a friend: my husband presented me, and I was coldly received. I saw that her
+rooms were furnished with extravagant luxury; and instead of Madame Schinner’s
+returning my call, I received a card, twenty days afterward, and at an
+insolently improper hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“On arriving at Paris, I went to walk upon the boulevard, proud of my anonymous
+great man. He nudged me with his elbow, and said, pointing out a fat little
+ill-dressed man, ‘There’s so and so!’ He mentioned one of the seven or eight
+illustrious men in France. I got ready my look of admiration, and I saw Adolphe
+rapturously doffing his hat to the truly great man, who replied by the curt
+little nod that you vouchsafe a person with whom you have doubtless exchanged
+hardly four words in ten years. Adolphe had begged a look for my sake. ‘Doesn’t
+he know you?’ I said to my husband. ‘Oh, yes, but he probably took me for
+somebody else,’ replied he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And so of poets, so of celebrated musicians, so of statesmen. But, as a
+compensation, we stop and talk for ten minutes in front of some arcade or
+other, with Messieurs Armand du Cantal, George Beaunoir, Felix Verdoret, of
+whom you have never heard. Mesdames Constantine Ramachard, Anais Crottat, and
+Lucienne Vouillon threaten me with their <i>blue</i> friendship. We dine
+editors totally unknown in our province. Finally I have had the painful
+happiness of seeing Adolphe decline an invitation to an evening party to which
+I was not bidden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! Claire dear, talent is still the rare flower of spontaneous growth, that
+no greenhouse culture can produce. I do not deceive myself: Adolphe is an
+ordinary man, known, estimated as such: he has no other chance, as he himself
+says, than to take his place among the <i>utilities</i> of literature. He was
+not without wit at Viviers: but to be a man of wit at Paris, you must possess
+every kind of wit in formidable doses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I esteem Adolphe: for, after some few fibs, he frankly confessed his position,
+and, without humiliating himself too deeply, he promised that I should be
+happy. He hopes, like numerous other ordinary men, to obtain some place, that
+of an assistant librarian, for instance, or the pecuniary management of a
+newspaper. Who knows but we may get him elected deputy for Viviers, in the
+course of time?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We live in obscurity; we have five or six friends of either sex whom we like,
+and such is the brilliant style of life which your letter gilded with all the
+social splendors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“From time to time I am caught in a squall, or am the butt of some malicious
+tongue. Thus, yesterday, at the opera, I heard one of our most ill-natured
+wits, Leon de Lora, say to one of our most famous critics, ‘It takes
+Chodoreille to discover the Caroline poplar on the banks of the Rhone!’ They
+had heard my husband call me by my Christian name. At Viviers I was considered
+handsome. I am tall, well made, and fat enough to satisfy Adolphe! In this way
+I learn that the beauty of women from the country is, at Paris, precisely like
+the wit of country gentleman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In short, I am absolutely nobody, if that is what you wish to know: but if you
+desire to learn how far my philosophy goes, understand that I am really happy
+in having found an ordinary man in my pretended great one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Farewell, dear Claire! It is still I, you see, who, in spite of my delusions
+and the petty troubles of my life, am the most favorably situated: for Adolphe
+is young, and a charming fellow.
+</p>
+
+<h5>“CAROLINE HEURTAUT.”</h5>
+
+<p>
+Claire’s reply contained, among other passages, the following: “I hope that the
+indescribable happiness which you enjoy, will continue, thanks to your
+philosophy.” Claire, as any intimate female friend would have done, consoled
+herself for her president by insinuations respecting Adolphe’s prospects and
+future conduct.
+</p>
+
+<h4>II. ANOTHER GLANCE AT CHODOREILLE.</h4>
+
+<p>
+(Letter discovered one day in a casket, while she was making me wait a long
+time and trying to get rid of a hanger-on who could not be made to understand
+hidden meanings. I caught cold—but I got hold of this letter.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This fatuous note was found on a paper which the notary’s clerks had thought of
+no importance in the inventory of the estate of M. Ferdinand de Bourgarel, who
+was mourned of late by politics, arts and amours, and in whom is ended the
+great Provencal house of Borgarelli; for as is generally known the name
+Bourgarel is a corruption of Borgarelli just as the French Girardin is the
+Florentine Gherardini.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An intelligent reader will find little difficulty in placing this letter in its
+proper epoch in the lives of Adolphe and Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear Friend:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I thought myself lucky indeed to marry an artist as superior in his talent as
+in his personal attributes, equally great in soul and mind, worldly-wise, and
+likely to rise by following the public road without being obliged to wander
+along crooked, doubtful by-paths. However, you knew Adolphe; you appreciated
+his worth. I am loved, he is a father, I idolize our children. Adolphe is
+kindness itself to me; I admire and love him. But, my dear, in this complete
+happiness lurks a thorn. The roses upon which I recline have more than one
+fold. In the heart of a woman, folds speedily turn to wounds. These wounds soon
+bleed, the evil spreads, we suffer, the suffering awakens thoughts, the
+thoughts swell and change the course of sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, my dear, you shall know all about it, though it is a cruel thing to
+say—but we live as much by vanity as by love. To live by love alone, one must
+dwell somewhere else than in Paris. What difference would it make to us whether
+we had only one white percale gown, if the man we love did not see other women
+dressed differently, more elegantly than we—women who inspire ideas by their
+ways, by a multitude of little things which really go to make up great
+passions? Vanity, my dear, is cousin-german to jealousy, to that beautiful and
+noble jealousy which consists in not allowing one’s empire to be invaded, in
+reigning undisturbed in a soul, and passing one’s life happily in a heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, well, my woman’s vanity is on the rack. Though some troubles may seem
+petty indeed, I have learned, unfortunately, that in the home there are no
+petty troubles. For everything there is magnified by incessant contact with
+sensations, with desires, with ideas. Such then is the secret of that sadness
+which you have surprised in me and which I did not care to explain. It is one
+of those things in which words go too far, and where writing holds at least the
+thought within bounds by establishing it. The effects of a moral perspective
+differ so radically between what is said and what is written! All is so solemn,
+so serious on paper! One cannot commit any more imprudences. Is it not this
+fact which makes a treasure out of a letter where one gives one’s self over to
+one’s thoughts?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You doubtless thought me wretched, but I am only wounded. You discovered me
+sitting alone by the fire, and no Adolphe. I had just finished putting the
+children to bed; they were asleep. Adolphe for the tenth time had been invited
+out to a house where I do not go, where they want Adolphe without his wife.
+There are drawing-rooms where he goes without me, just at there are many
+pleasures in which he alone is the guest. If he were M. de Navarreins and I a
+d’Espard, society would never think of separating us; it would want us always
+together. His habits are formed; he does not suspect the humiliation which
+weighs upon my heart. Indeed, if he had the slightest inkling of this small
+sorrow which I am ashamed to own, he would drop society, he would become more
+of a prig than the people who come between us. But he would hamper his
+progress, he would make enemies, he would raise up obstacles by imposing me
+upon the salons where I would be subject to a thousand slights. That is why I
+prefer my sufferings to what would happen were they discovered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe will succeed! He carries my revenge in his beautiful head, does this
+man of genius. One day the world shall pay for all these slights. But when?
+Perhaps I shall be forty-five. My beautiful youth will have passed in my
+chimney-corner, and with this thought: Adolphe smiles, he is enjoying the
+society of fair women, he is playing the devoted to them, while none of these
+attentions come my way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It may be that these will finally take him from me!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No one undergoes slight without feeling it, and I feel that I am slighted,
+though young, beautiful and virtuous. Now, can I keep from thinking this way?
+Can I control my anger at the thought that Adolphe is dining in the city
+without me? I take no part in his triumphs; I do not hear the witty or profound
+remarks made to others! I could no longer be content with bourgeois receptions
+whence he rescued me, upon finding me <i>distinguee</i>, wealthy, young,
+beautiful and witty. There lies the evil, and it is irremediable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In a word, for some cause, it is only since I cannot go to a certain salon
+that I want to go there. Nothing is more natural of the ways of a human heart.
+The ancients were wise in having their <i>gyneceums</i>. The collisions between
+the pride of the women, caused by these gatherings, though it dates back only
+four centuries, has cost our own day much disaffection and numerous bitter
+debates.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Be that as it may, my dear, Adolphe is always warmly welcomed when he comes
+back home. Still, no nature is strong enough to await always with the same
+ardor. What a morrow that will be, following the evening when his welcome is
+less warm!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now do you see the depth of the fold which I mentioned? A fold in the heart is
+an abyss, like a crevasse in the Alps—a profundity whose depth and extent we
+have never been able to calculate. Thus it is between two beings, no matter how
+near they may be drawn to each other. One never realizes the weight of
+suffering which oppresses his friend. This seems such a little thing, yet one’s
+life is affected by it in all its length, in all its breadth. I have thus
+argued with myself; but the more I have argued, the more thoroughly have I
+realized the extent of this hidden sorrow. And I can only let the current carry
+me whither it will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Two voices struggle for supremacy when—by a rarely fortunate chance —I am
+alone in my armchair waiting for Adolphe. One, I would wager, comes from Eugene
+Delacroix’s <i>Faust</i> which I have on my table. Mephistopheles speaks, that
+terrible aide who guides the swords so dexterously. He leaves the engraving,
+and places himself diabolically before me, grinning through the hole which the
+great artist has placed under his nose, and gazing at me with that eye whence
+fall rubies, diamonds, carriages, jewels, laces, silks, and a thousand luxuries
+to feed the burning desire within me.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Are you not fit for society?’ he asks. ‘You are the equal of the fairest
+duchesses. Your voice is like a siren’s, your hands command respect and love.
+Ah! that arm!—place bracelets upon it, and how pleasingly it would rest upon
+the velvet of a robe! Your locks are chains which would fetter all men. And you
+could lay all your triumphs at Adolphe’s feet, show him your power and never
+use it. Then he would fear, where now he lives in insolent certainty. Come! To
+action! Inhale a few mouthfuls of disdain and you will exhale clouds of
+incense. Dare to reign! Are you not next to nothing here in your
+chimney-corner? Sooner or later the pretty spouse, the beloved wife will die,
+if you continue like this, in a dressing-gown. Come, and you shall perpetuate
+your sway through the arts of coquetry! Show yourself in salons, and your
+pretty foot shall trample down the love of your rivals.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The other voice comes from my white marble mantel, which rustles like a
+garment. I think I see a veritable goddess crowned with white roses, and
+bearing a palm-branch in her hand. Two blue eyes smile down on me. This simple
+image of virtue says to me:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Be content! Remain good always, and make this man happy. That is the whole of
+your mission. The sweetness of angels triumphs over all pain. Faith in
+themselves has enabled the martyrs to obtain solace even on the brasiers of
+their tormentors. Suffer a moment; you shall be happy in the end.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sometimes Adolphe enters at that moment and I am content. But, my dear, I have
+less patience than love. I almost wish to tear in pieces the woman who can go
+everywhere, and whose society is sought out by men and women alike. What
+profound thought lies in the line of Moliere:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘The world, dear Agnes, is a curious thing!’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You know nothing of this petty trouble, you fortunate Mathilde! You are well
+born. You can do a great deal for me. Just think! I can write you things that I
+dared not speak about. Your visits mean so much; come often to see your poor
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Caroline.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” said I to the notary’s clerk, “do you know what was the nature of this
+letter to the late Bourgarel?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A note of exchange.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Neither clerk nor notary understood my meaning. Do you?
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE PANGS OF INNOCENCE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, dear, in the married state, many things will happen to you which you are
+far from expecting: but then others will happen which you expect still less.
+For instance—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author (may we say the ingenious author?) <i>qui castigat ridendo
+mores</i>, and who has undertaken the <i>Petty Troubles of Married Life</i>,
+hardly needs to remark, that, for prudence’ sake, he here allows a lady of high
+distinction to speak, and that he does not assume the responsibility of her
+language, though he professes the most sincere admiration for the charming
+person to whom he owes his acquaintance with this petty trouble.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For instance—” she says.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nevertheless thinks proper to avow that this person is neither Madame
+Foullepointe, nor Madame de Fischtaminel, nor Madame Deschars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Deschars is too prudish, Madame Foullepointe too absolute in her
+household, and she knows it; indeed, what doesn’t she know? She is
+good-natured, she sees good society, she wishes to have the best: people
+overlook the vivacity of her witticisms, as, under louis XIV, they overlooked
+the remarks of Madame Cornuel. They overlook a good many things in her; there
+are some women who are the spoiled children of public opinion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As to Madame de Fischtaminel, who is, in fact, connected with the affair, as
+you shall see, she, being unable to recriminate, abstains from words and
+recriminates in acts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We give permission to all to think that the speaker is Caroline herself, not
+the silly little Caroline of tender years. But Caroline when she has become a
+woman of thirty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For instance,” she remarks to a young woman whom she is edifying, “you will
+have children, God willing.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame,” I say, “don’t let us mix the deity up in this, unless it is an
+allusion—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You are impertinent,” she replies, “you shouldn’t interrupt a woman—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“When she is busy with children, I know: but, madame, you ought not to trifle
+with the innocence of young ladies. Mademoiselle is going to be married, and if
+she were led to count upon the intervention of the Supreme Being in this
+affair, she would fall into serious errors. We should not deceive the young.
+Mademoiselle is beyond the age when girls are informed that their little
+brother was found under a cabbage.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You evidently want to get me confused,” she replies, smiling and showing the
+loveliest teeth in the world. “I am not strong enough to argue with you, so I
+beg you to let me go on with Josephine. What was I saying?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“That if I get married, I shall have children,” returns the young lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well. I will not represent things to you worse than they are, but it is
+extremely probable that each child will cost you a tooth. With every baby I
+have lost a tooth.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Happily,” I remark at this, “this trouble was with you less than petty, it was
+positively nothing.”—They were side teeth.—“But take notice, miss, that this
+vexation has no absolute, unvarying character as such. The annoyance depends
+upon the condition of the tooth. If the baby causes the loss of a decayed
+tooth, you are fortunate to have a baby the more and a bad tooth the less.
+Don’t let us confound blessings with bothers. Ah! if you were to lose one of
+your magnificent front teeth, that would be another thing! And yet there is
+many a woman that would give the best tooth in her head for a fine, healthy
+boy!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” resumes Caroline, with animation, “at the risk of destroying your
+illusions, poor child, I’ll just show you a petty trouble that counts! Ah, it’s
+atrocious! And I won’t leave the subject of dress which this gentleman
+considers the only subject we women are equal to.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I protest by a gesture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I had been married about two years,” continues Caroline, “and I loved my
+husband. I have got over it since and acted differently for his happiness and
+mine. I can boast of having one of the happiest homes in Paris. In short, my
+dear, I loved the monster, and, even when out in society, saw no one but him.
+My husband had already said to me several times, ‘My dear, young women never
+dress well; your mother liked to have you look like a stick,—she had her
+reasons for it. If you care for my advice, take Madame de Fischtaminel for a
+model: she is a lady of taste.’ I, unsuspecting creature that I was, saw no
+perfidy in the recommendation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“One evening as we returned from a party, he said, ‘Did you notice how Madame
+de Fischtaminel was dressed!’ ‘Yes, very neatly.’ And I said to myself, ‘He’s
+always talking about Madame de Fischtaminel; I must really dress just like
+her.’ I had noticed the stuff and the make of the dress, and the style of the
+trimmings. I was as happy as could be, as I went trotting about town, doing
+everything I could to obtain the same articles. I sent for the very same
+dressmaker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘You work for Madame de Fischtaminel,’ I said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Yes, madame.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Well, I will employ you as my dressmaker, but on one condition: you see I
+have procured the stuff of which her gown is made, and I want you to make me
+one exactly like it.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I confess that I did not at first pay any attention to a rather shrewd smile
+of the dressmaker, though I saw it and afterwards accounted for it. ‘So like
+it,’ I added, ‘that you can’t tell them apart.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh,” says Caroline, interrupting herself and looking at me, “you men teach us
+to live like spiders in the depths of their webs, to see everything without
+seeming to look at it, to investigate the meaning and spirit of words,
+movements, looks. You say, ‘How cunning women are!’ But you should say, ‘How
+deceitful men are!’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I can’t tell you how much care, how many days, how many manoeuvres, it cost me
+to become Madame de Fischtaminel’s duplicate! But these are our battles,
+child,” she adds, returning to Josephine. “I could not find a certain little
+embroidered neckerchief, a very marvel! I finally learned that it was made to
+order. I unearthed the embroideress, and ordered a kerchief like Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s. The price was a mere trifle, one hundred and fifty francs! It
+had been ordered by a gentleman who had made a present of it to Madame de
+Fischtaminel. All my savings were absorbed by it. Now we women of Paris are all
+of us very much restricted in the article of dress. There is not a man worth a
+hundred thousand francs a year, that loses ten thousand a winter at whist, who
+does not consider his wife extravagant, and is not alarmed at her bills for
+what he calls ‘rags’! ‘Let my savings go,’ I said. And they went. I had the
+modest pride of a woman in love: I would not speak a word to Adolphe of my
+dress; I wanted it to be a surprise, goose that I was! Oh, how brutally you men
+take away our blessed ignorance!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This remark is meant for me, for me who had taken nothing from the lady,
+neither tooth, nor anything whatever of the things with a name and without a
+name that may be taken from a woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I must tell you that my husband took me to Madame de Fischtaminel’s, where I
+dined quite often. I heard her say to him, ‘Why, your wife looks very well!’
+She had a patronizing way with me that I put up with: Adolphe wished that I
+could have her wit and preponderance in society. In short, this phoenix of
+women was my model. I studied and copied her, I took immense pains not to be
+myself—oh!—it was a poem that no one but us women can understand! Finally, the
+day of my triumph dawned. My heart beat for joy, as if I were a child, as if I
+were what we all are at twenty-two. My husband was going to call for me for a
+walk in the Tuileries: he came in, I looked at him radiant with joy, but he
+took no notice. Well, I can confess it now, it was one of those frightful
+disasters—but I will say nothing about it —this gentleman here would make fun
+of me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I protest by another movement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was,” she goes on, for a woman never stops till she has told the whole of a
+thing, “as if I had seen an edifice built by a fairy crumble into ruins.
+Adolphe manifested not the slightest surprise. We got into the carriage.
+Adolphe noticed my sadness, and asked me what the matter was: I replied as we
+always do when our hearts are wrung by these petty vexations, ‘Oh, nothing!’
+Then he took his eye-glass, and stared at the promenaders on the Champs
+Elysees, for we were to go the rounds of the Champs Elysees, before taking our
+walk at the Tuileries. Finally, a fit of impatience seized me. I felt a slight
+attack of fever, and when I got home, I composed myself to smile. ‘You haven’t
+said a word about my dress!’ I muttered. ‘Ah, yes, your gown is somewhat like
+Madame de Fischtaminel’s.’ He turned on his heel and went away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The next day I pouted a little, as you may readily imagine. Just as we were
+finishing breakfast by the fire in my room—I shall never forget it—the
+embroideress called to get her money for the neckerchief. I paid her. She bowed
+to my husband as if she knew him. I ran after her on pretext of getting her to
+receipt the bill, and said: ‘You didn’t ask <i>him</i> so much for Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s kerchief!’ ‘I assure you, madame, it’s the same price, the
+gentleman did not beat me down a mite.’ I returned to my room where I found my
+husband looking as foolish as—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hesitates and then resumes: “As a miller just made a bishop. ‘I understand,
+love, now, that I shall never be anything more than <i>somewhat like</i> Madame
+de Fischtaminel.’ ‘You refer to her neckerchief, I suppose: well, I <i>did</i>
+give it to her,—it was for her birthday. You see, we were formerly—’ ‘Ah, you
+were formerly more intimate than you are now!’ Without replying to this, he
+added, ‘<i>But it’s altogether moral.</i>’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He took his hat and went out, leaving me with this fine declaration of the
+Rights of Man. He did not return and came home late at night. I remained in my
+chamber and wept like a Magdalen, in the chimney-corner. You may laugh at me,
+if you will,” she adds, looking at me, “but I shed tears over my youthful
+illusions, and I wept, too, for spite, at having been taken for a dupe. I
+remembered the dressmaker’s smile! Ah, that smile reminded me of the smiles of
+a number of women, who laughed at seeing me so innocent and unsuspecting at
+Madame de Fischtaminel’s! I wept sincerely. Until now I had a right to give my
+husband credit for many things which he did not possess, but in the existence
+of which young married women pertinaciously believe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How many great troubles are included in this petty one! You men are a vulgar
+set. There is not a woman who does not carry her delicacy so far as to
+embroider her past life with the most delightful fibs, while you—but I have had
+my revenge.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame,” I say, “you are giving this young lady too much information.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“True,” she returns, “I will tell you the sequel some other time.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Thus, you see, mademoiselle,” I say, “you imagine you are buying a neckerchief
+and you find a <i>petty trouble</i> round your neck: if you get it given to
+you—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s a <i>great</i> trouble,” retorts the woman of distinction. “Let us stop
+here.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moral of this fable is that you must wear your neckerchief without thinking
+too much about it. The ancient prophets called this world, even in their time,
+a valley of woe. Now, at that period, the Orientals had, with the permission of
+the constituted authorities, a swarm of comely slaves, besides their wives!
+What shall we call the valley of the Seine between Calvary and Charenton, where
+the law allows but one lawful wife.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE UNIVERSAL AMADIS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+You will understand at once that I began to gnaw the head of my cane, to
+consult the ceiling, to gaze at the fire, to examine Caroline’s foot, and I
+thus held out till the marriageable young lady was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You must excuse me,” I said, “if I have remained behind, perhaps in spite of
+you: but your vengeance would lose by being recounted by and by, and if it
+constituted a petty trouble for your husband, I have the greatest interest in
+hearing it, and you shall know why.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah,” she returned, “that expression, ‘<i>it’s altogether moral,</i>’ which he
+gave as an excuse, shocked me to the last degree. It was a great consolation,
+truly, to me, to know that I held the place, in his household, of a piece of
+furniture, a block; that my kingdom lay among the kitchen utensils, the
+accessories of my toilet, and the physicians’ prescriptions; that our conjugal
+love had been assimilated to dinner pills, to veal soup and white mustard; that
+Madame de Fischtaminel possessed my husband’s soul, his admiration, and that
+she charmed and satisfied his intellect, while I was a kind of purely physical
+necessity! What do you think of a woman’s being degraded to the situation of a
+soup or a plate of boiled beef, and without parsley, at that! Oh, I composed a
+catilinic, that evening—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Philippic is better.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, either. I’ll say anything you like, for I was perfectly furious, and I
+don’t remember what I screamed in the desert of my bedroom. Do you suppose that
+this opinion that husbands have of their wives, the parts they give them, is
+not a singular vexation for us? Our petty troubles are always pregnant with
+greater ones. My Adolphe needed a lesson. You know the Vicomte de Lustrac, a
+desperate amateur of women and music, an epicure, one of those ex-beaux of the
+Empire, who live upon their earlier successes, and who cultivate themselves
+with excessive care, in order to secure a second crop?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes,” I said, “one of those laced, braced, corseted old fellows of sixty, who
+work such wonders by the grace of their forms, and who might give a lesson to
+the youngest dandies among us.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Monsieur de Lustrac is as selfish as a king, but gallant and pretentious,
+spite of his jet black wig.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As to his whiskers, he dyes them.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He goes to ten parties in an evening: he’s a butterfly.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He gives capital dinners and concerts, and patronizes inexperienced
+songstresses.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He takes bustle for pleasure.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, but he makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune occurs.
+Are you in mourning, he avoids you. Are you confined, he awaits your churching
+before he visits you. He possesses a mundane frankness and a social intrepidity
+which challenge admiration.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But does it not require courage to appear to be what one really is?” I asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well,” she resumed, after we had exchanged our observations on this point,
+“this young old man, this universal Amadis, whom we call among ourselves
+Chevalier <i>Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore</i>, became the object of my
+admiration. I made him a few of those advances which never compromise a woman;
+I spoke of the good taste exhibited in his latest waistcoats and in his canes,
+and he thought me a lady of extreme amiability. I thought him a chevalier of
+extreme youth; he called upon me; I put on a number of little airs, and
+pretended to be unhappy at home, and to have deep sorrows. You know what a
+woman means when she talks of her sorrows, and complains that she is not
+understood. The old ape replied much better than a young man would, and I had
+the greatest difficulty in keeping a straight face while I listened to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Ah, that’s the way with husbands, they pursue the very worst polity, they
+respect their wives, and, sooner or later, every woman is enraged at finding
+herself respected, and divines the secret education to which she is entitled.
+Once married, you ought not to live like a little school-girl, etc.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“As he spoke, he leaned over me, he squirmed, he was horrible to see. He looked
+like a wooden Nuremberg doll, he stuck out his chin, he stuck out his chair, he
+stuck out his hand—in short, after a variety of marches and countermarches, of
+declarations that were perfectly angelic—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes. <i>Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore</i> had abandoned the classicism of his
+youth for the romanticism now in fashion: he spoke of the soul, of angels, of
+adoration, of submission, he became ethereal, and of the darkest blue. He took
+me to the opera, and handed me to my carriage. This old young man went when I
+went, his waistcoats multiplied, he compressed his waist, he excited his horse
+to a gallop in order to catch and accompany my carriage to the promenade: he
+compromised me with the grace of a young collegian, and was considered madly in
+love with me. I was steadfastly cruel, but accepted his arm and his bouquets.
+We were talked about. I was delighted, and managed before long to be surprised
+by my husband, with the viscount on the sofa in my boudoir, holding my hands in
+his, while I listened in a sort of external ecstasy. It is incredible how much
+a desire for vengeance will induce us to put up with! I appeared vexed at the
+entrance of my husband, who made a scene on the viscount’s departure: ‘I assure
+you, sir,’ said I, after having listened to his reproaches, ‘that <i>it’s
+altogether moral</i>.’ My husband saw the point and went no more to Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s. I received Monsieur de Lustrac no more, either.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But,” I interrupted, “this Lustrac that you, like many others, take for a
+bachelor, is a widower, and childless.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Really!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No man ever buried his wife deeper than he buried his: she will hardly be
+found at the day of judgment. He married before the Revolution, and your
+<i>altogether moral</i> reminds me of a speech of his that I shall have to
+repeat for your benefit. Napoleon appointed Lustrac to an important office, in
+a conquered province. Madame de Lustrac, abandoned for governmental duties,
+took a private secretary for her private affairs, though it was altogether
+moral: but she was wrong in selecting him without informing her husband.
+Lustrac met this secretary in a state of some excitement, in consequence of a
+lively discussion in his wife’s chamber, and at an exceedingly early hour in
+the morning. The city desired nothing better than to laugh at its governor, and
+this adventure made such a sensation that Lustrac himself begged the Emperor to
+recall him. Napoleon desired his representatives to be men of morality, and he
+held that such disasters as this must inevitably take from a man’s
+consideration. You know that among the Emperor’s unhappy passions, was that of
+reforming his court and his government. Lustrac’s request was granted,
+therefore, but without compensation. When he returned to Paris, he reappeared
+at his mansion, with his wife; he took her into society—a step which is
+certainly conformable to the most refined habits of the aristocracy —but then
+there are always people who want to find out about it. They inquired the reason
+of this chivalrous championship. ‘So you are reconciled, you and Madame de
+Lustrac,’ some one said to him in the lobby of the Emperor’s theatre, ‘you have
+pardoned her, have you? So much the better.’ ‘Oh,’ replied he, with a satisfied
+air, ‘I became convinced—’ ‘Ah, that she was innocent, very good.’ ‘No, I
+became convinced that it was altogether physical.’”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The opinion of your admirer reduced this weighty trouble to what is, in this
+case as in yours, a very petty one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“A petty trouble!” she exclaimed, “and pray for what do you take the fatigue of
+coquetting with a de Lustrac, of whom I have made an enemy! Ah, women often pay
+dearly enough for the bouquets they receive and the attentions they accept.
+Monsieur de Lustrac said of me to Monsieur de Bourgarel, ‘I would not advise
+you to pay court to that woman; she is too dear.’”
+</p>
+
+<h3>WITHOUT AN OCCUPATION.</h3>
+
+<h4>“PARIS, 183-</h4>
+
+<p>
+“You ask me, dear mother, whether I am happy with my husband. Certainly
+Monsieur de Fischtaminel was not the ideal of my dreams. I submitted to your
+will, as you know. His fortune, that supreme consideration, spoke, indeed,
+sufficiently loud. With these arguments, —a marriage, without stooping, with
+the Count de Fischtaminel, his having thirty thousand a year, and a home at
+Paris—you were strongly armed against your poor daughter. Besides, Monsieur de
+Fischtaminel is good looking for a man of thirty-six years; he received the
+cross of the Legion of Honor from Napoleon upon the field of battle, he is an
+ex-colonel, and had it not been for the Restoration, which put him upon
+half-pay, he would be a general. These are certainly extenuating circumstances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Many women consider that I have made a good match, and I am bound to confess
+that there is every appearance of happiness,—for the public, that is. But you
+will acknowledge that if you had known of the return of my Uncle Cyrus and of
+his intention to leave me his money, you would have given me the privilege of
+choosing for myself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have nothing to say against Monsieur de Fischtaminel: he does not gamble, he
+is indifferent to women, he doesn’t like wine, and he has no expensive fancies:
+he possesses, as you said, all the negative qualities which make husbands
+passable. Then, what is the matter with him? Well, mother, he has nothing to
+do. We are together the whole blessed day! Would you believe that it is during
+the night, when we are the most closely united, that I am the most alone? His
+sleep is my asylum, my liberty begins when he slumbers. This state of siege
+will yet make me sick: I am never alone. If Monsieur de Fischtaminel were
+jealous, I should have a resource. There would then be a struggle, a comedy:
+but how could the aconite of jealousy have taken root in his soul? He has never
+left me since our marriage. He feels no shame in stretching himself out upon a
+sofa and remaining there for hours together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Two felons pinioned to the same chain do not find time hang heavy: for they
+have their escape to think of. But we have no subject of conversation; we have
+long since talked ourselves out. A little while ago he was so far reduced as to
+talk politics. But even politics are exhausted, Napoleon, unfortunately for me,
+having died at St. Helena, as is well known.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Monsieur de Fischtaminel abhors reading. If he sees me with a book, he comes
+and says a dozen times an hour—‘Nina, dear, haven’t you finished yet?’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I endeavored to persuade this innocent persecutor to ride out every day on
+horseback, and I alleged a consideration usually conclusive with men of forty
+years,—his health! But he said that after having been twelve years on
+horseback, he felt the need of repose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My husband, dear mother, is a man who absorbs you, he uses up the vital fluid
+of his neighbor, his ennui is gluttonous: he likes to be amused by those who
+call upon us, and, after five years of wedlock, no one ever comes: none visit
+us but those whose intentions are evidently dishonorable for him, and who
+endeavor, unsuccessfully, to amuse him, in order to earn the right to weary his
+wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Monsieur de Fischtaminel, mother, opens the door of my chamber, or of the room
+to which I have flown for refuge, five or six times an hour, and comes up to me
+in an excited way, and says, ‘Well, what are you doing, my belle?’ (the
+expression in fashion during the Empire) without perceiving that he is
+constantly repeating the same phrase, which is to me like the one pint too much
+that the executioner formerly poured into the torture by water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then there’s another bore! We can’t go to walk any more. A promenade without
+conversation, without interest, is impossible. My husband walks with me for the
+walk, as if he were alone. I have the fatigue without the pleasure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The interval between getting up and breakfast is employed in my toilet, in my
+household duties; and I manage to get through with this part of the day. But
+between breakfast and dinner, there is a whole desert to plough, a waste to
+traverse. My husband’s want of occupation does not leave me a moment of repose,
+he overpowers me by his uselessness; his idle life positively wears me out. His
+two eyes always open and gazing at mine compel me to keep them lowered. Then
+his monotonous remarks:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘What o’clock is it, love? What are you doing now? What are you thinking of?
+What do you mean to do? Where shall we go this evening? Anything new? What
+weather! I don’t feel well, etc., etc.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“All these variations upon the same theme—the interrogation point —which
+compose Fischtaminel’s repertory, will drive me mad. Add to these leaden arrows
+everlastingly shot off at me, one last trait which will complete the
+description of my happiness, and you will understand my life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Monsieur de Fischtaminel, who went away in 1809, with the rank of
+sub-lieutenant, at the age of eighteen, has had no other education than that
+due to discipline, to the natural sense of honor of a noble and a soldier: but
+though he possesses tact, the sentiment of probity, and a proper subordination,
+his ignorance is gross, he knows absolutely nothing, and he has a horror of
+learning anything. Oh, dear mother, what an accomplished door-keeper this
+colonel would have made, had he been born in indigence! I don’t think a bit the
+better of him for his bravery, for he did not fight against the Russians, the
+Austrians, or the Prussians: he fought against ennui. When he rushed upon the
+enemy, Captain Fischtaminel’s purpose was to get away from himself. He married
+because he had nothing else to do.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We have another slight difficulty to content with: my husband harasses the
+servants to such a degree that we change them every six months.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I so ardently desire, dear mother, to remain a virtuous woman, that I am going
+to try the effect of traveling for half the year. During the winter, I shall go
+every evening to the Italian or the French opera, or to parties: but I don’t
+know whether our fortune will permit such an expenditure. Uncle Cyrus ought to
+come to Paris—I would take care of him as I would of an inheritance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you discover a cure for my woes, let your daughter know of it —your
+daughter who loves you as much as she deplores her misfortunes, and who would
+have been glad to call herself by some other name than that of
+</p>
+
+<h5>“NINA FISCHTAMINEL.”</h5>
+
+<p>
+Besides the necessity of describing this petty trouble, which could only be
+described by the pen of a woman,—and what a woman she was! —it was necessary to
+make you acquainted with a character whom you saw only in profile in the first
+half of this book, the queen of the particular set in which Caroline lived,—a
+woman both envied and adroit, who succeeded in conciliating, at an early date,
+what she owed to the world with the requirements of the heart. This letter is
+her absolution.
+</p>
+
+<h3>INDISCRETIONS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Women are either chaste—or vain—or simply proud. They are therefore all subject
+to the following petty trouble:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a woman to
+themselves,—a possession exclusively due to the legal ceremony,—that they dread
+the public’s making a mistake, and they hasten to brand their consort, as
+lumber-dealers brand their logs while floating down stream, or as the Berry
+stock-raisers brand their sheep. They bestow names of endearment, right before
+people, upon their wives: names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella),
+from the animal kingdom, as: my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or, choosing
+from the vegetable kingdom, they call them: my cabbage, my fig (this only in
+Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia). Never: —My flower! Pray note this
+discretion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:—Bobonne,
+—mother,—daughter,—good woman,—old lady: this last when she is very young.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as: Mon bichon, ma niniche,
+Tronquette!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for his
+ugliness, call his wife, <i>Moumoutte</i>!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I would rather he would strike me,” said this unfortunate to her neighbor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Poor little woman, she is really unhappy,” resumed the neighbor, looking at me
+when Moumoutte had gone: “when she is in company with her husband she is upon
+pins and needles, and keeps out of his way. One evening, he actually seized her
+by the neck and said: ‘Come fatty, let’s go home!’”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning with
+arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions like these
+that the wife had to bear in society. This husband used to give the woman he
+had won at the point of the Code, public little taps on her shoulder, he would
+startle her by a resounding kiss, he dishonored her by a conspicuous
+tenderness, seasoned by those impertinent attentions the secret of which
+belongs to the French savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and
+whose manners are very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in
+fiction. It was, it is said, this shocking situation,—one perfectly appreciated
+by a discerning jury,—which won the prisoner a verdict softened by the
+extenuating circumstances.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The jurymen said to themselves:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For a wife to murder her husband for these conjugal offences, is certainly
+going rather far; but then a woman is very excusable, when she is so harassed!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We deeply regret, in the interest of elegant manners, that these arguments are
+not more generally known. Heaven grant, therefore, that our book may have an
+immense success, as women will obtain this advantage from it, that they will be
+treated as they deserve, that is, as queens.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this respect, love is much superior to marriage, it is proud of indiscreet
+sayings and doings. There are some women that seek them, fish for them, and woe
+to the man who does not now and then commit one!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What passion lies in an accidental <i>thou</i>!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out in the country I heard a husband call his wife: “Ma berline!” She was
+delighted with it, and saw nothing ridiculous in it: she called her husband,
+“Mon fiston!” This delicious couple were ignorant of the existence of such
+things as petty troubles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in observing this happy pair that the author discovered this axiom:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom:—In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of genius
+married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a chance which is not
+as common as might be supposed, you must both of you be exceedingly stupid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The too celebrated history of the cure of a wounded self-love by arsenic,
+proves that, properly speaking, there are no petty troubles for women in
+married life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Woman exists by sentiment where man exists by action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, sentiment can at any moment render a petty trouble either a great
+misfortune, or a wasted life, or an eternal misery. Should Caroline begin, in
+her ignorance of life and the world, by inflicting upon her husband the
+vexations of her stupidity (re-read REVELATIONS), Adolphe, like any other man,
+may find a compensation in social excitement: he goes out, comes back, goes
+here and there, has business. But for Caroline, the question everywhere is, To
+love or not to love, to be or not to be loved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indiscretions are in harmony with the character of the individuals, with times
+and places. Two examples will suffice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is the first. A man is by nature dirty and ugly: he is ill-made and
+repulsive. There are men, and often rich ones, too, who, by a sort of
+unobserved constitution, soil a new suit of clothes in twenty-four hours. They
+were born disgusting. It is so disgraceful for a women to be anything more than
+just simply a wife to this sort of Adolphe, that a certain Caroline had long
+ago insisted upon the suppression of the modern <i>thee</i> and <i>thou</i> and
+all other insignia of the wifely dignity. Society had been for five or six
+years accustomed to this sort of thing, and supposed Madame and Monsieur
+completely separated, and all the more so as it had noticed the accession of a
+Ferdinand II.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One evening, in the presence of a dozen persons, this man said to his wife:
+“Caroline, hand me the tongs, there’s a love.” It is nothing, and yet
+everything. It was a domestic revelation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monsieur de Lustrac, the Universal Amadis, hurried to Madame de Fischtaminel’s,
+narrated this little scene with all the spirit at his command, and Madame de
+Fischtaminel put on an air something like Celimene’s and said: “Poor creature,
+what an extremity she must be in!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+I say nothing of Caroline’s confusion,—you have already divined it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here is the second. Think of the frightful situation in which a lady of great
+refinement was lately placed: she was conversing agreeably at her country seat
+near Paris, when her husband’s servant came and whispered in her ear, “Monsieur
+has come, madame.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, Benoit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everybody had heard the rumblings of the vehicle. It was known that the husband
+had been at Paris since Monday, and this took place on Saturday, at four in the
+afternoon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He’s got something important to say to you, madame.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Though this dialogue was held in a whisper, it was perfectly understood, and
+all the more so from the fact that the lady of the house turned from the pale
+hue of the Bengal rose to the brilliant crimson of the wheatfield poppy. She
+nodded and went on with the conversation, and managed to leave her company on
+the pretext of learning whether her husband had succeeded in an important
+undertaking or not: but she seemed plainly vexed at Adolphe’s want of
+consideration for the company who were visiting her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During their youth, women want to be treated as divinities, they love the
+ideal; they cannot bear the idea of being what nature intended them to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some husbands, on retiring to the country, after a week in town, are worse than
+this: they bow to the company, put their arm round their wife’s waist, take a
+little walk with her, appear to be talking confidentially, disappear in a clump
+of trees, get lost, and reappear half an hour afterward.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This, ladies, is a genuine petty trouble for a young woman, but for a woman
+beyond forty, this sort of indiscretion is so delightful, that the greatest
+prudes are flattered by it, for, be it known:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That women of a certain age, women on the shady side, want to be treated as
+mortals, they love the actual; they cannot bear the idea of no longer being
+what nature intended them to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Modesty is a relative virtue; there is the modesty of the woman of
+twenty, the woman of thirty, the woman of forty-five.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the author said to a lady who told him to guess at her age: “Madame, yours
+is the age of indiscretion.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This charming woman of thirty-nine was making a Ferdinand much too conspicuous,
+while her daughter was trying to conceal her Ferdinand I.
+</p>
+
+<h3>BRUTAL DISCLOSURES.</h3>
+
+<p>
+FIRST STYLE. Caroline adores Adolphe, she thinks him handsome, she thinks him
+superb, especially in his National Guard uniform. She starts when a sentinel
+presents arms to him, she considers him moulded like a model, she regards him
+as a man of wit, everything he does is right, nobody has better taste than he,
+in short, she is crazy about Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It’s the old story of Cupid’s bandage. This is washed every ten years, and
+newly embroidered by the altered manners of the period, but it has been the
+same old bandage since the days of Greece.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is at a ball with one of her young friends. A man well known for his
+bluntness, whose acquaintance she is to make later in life, but whom she now
+sees for the first time, Monsieur Foullepointe, has commenced a conversation
+with Caroline’s friend. According to the custom of society, Caroline listens to
+this conversation without mingling in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pray tell me, madame,” says Monsieur Foullepointe, “who is that queer man who
+has been talking about the Court of Assizes before a gentleman whose acquittal
+lately created such a sensation: he is all the while blundering, like an ox in
+a bog, against everybody’s sore spot. A lady burst into tears at hearing him
+tell of the death of a child, as she lost her own two months ago.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who do you mean?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, that fat man, dressed like a waiter in a cafe, frizzled like a barber’s
+apprentice, there, he’s trying now to make himself agreeable to Madame de
+Fischtaminel.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hush,” whispers the lady quite alarmed, “it’s the husband of the little woman
+next to me!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, it’s your husband?” says Monsieur Foullepointe. “I am delighted, madame,
+he’s a charming man, so vivacious, gay and witty. I am going to make his
+acquaintance immediately.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Foullepointe executes his retreat, leaving a bitter suspicion in Caroline’s
+soul, as to the question whether her husband is really as handsome as she
+thinks him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+SECOND STYLE. Caroline, annoyed by the reputation of Madame Schinner, who is
+credited with the possession of epistolary talents, and styled the “Sevigne of
+the note”, tired of hearing about Madame de Fischtaminel, who has ventured to
+write a little 32mo book on the education of the young, in which she has boldly
+reprinted Fenelon, without the style:—Caroline has been working for six months
+upon a tale tenfold poorer than those of Berquin, nauseatingly moral, and
+flamboyant in style.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After numerous intrigues such as women are skillful in managing in the interest
+of their vanity, and the tenacity and perfection of which would lead you to
+believe that they have a third sex in their head, this tale, entitled “The
+Lotus,” appears in three installments in a leading daily paper. It is signed
+Samuel Crux.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Adolphe takes up the paper at breakfast, Caroline’s heart beats up in her
+very throat: she blushes, turns pale, looks away and stares at the ceiling.
+When Adolphe’s eyes settle upon the feuilleton, she can bear it no longer: she
+gets up, goes out, comes back, having replenished her stock of audacity, no one
+knows where.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Is there a feuilleton this morning?” she asks with an air that she thinks
+indifferent, but which would disturb a husband still jealous of his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, one by a beginner, Samuel Crux. The name is a disguise, clearly: the tale
+is insignificant enough to drive an insect to despair, if he could read: and
+vulgar, too: the style is muddy, but then it’s—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline breathes again. “It’s—” she suggests.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s incomprehensible,” resumes Adolphe. “Somebody must have paid Chodoreille
+five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it’s the production of a
+blue-stocking in high society who has promised to invite Madame Chodoreille to
+her house; or perhaps it’s the work of a woman in whom the editor is personally
+interested. Such a piece of stupidity cannot be explained any other way.
+Imagine, Caroline, that it’s all about a little flower picked on the edge of a
+wood in a sentimental walk, which a gentleman of the Werther school has sworn
+to keep, which he has had framed, and which the lady claims again eleven years
+after (the poor man has had time to change his lodgings three times). It’s
+quite new, about as old as Sterne or Gessner. What makes me think it’s a woman,
+is that the first literary idea of the whole sex is to take vengeance on some
+one.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe might go on pulling “The Lotus” to pieces; Caroline’s ears are full of
+the tinkling of bells. She is like the woman who threw herself over the Pont
+des Arts, and tried to find her way ten feet below the level of the Seine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ANOTHER STYLE. Caroline, in her paroxysms of jealousy, has discovered a hiding
+place used by Adolphe, who, as he can’t trust his wife, and as he knows she
+opens his letters and rummages in his drawers, has endeavored to save his
+correspondence with Hector from the hooked fingers of the conjugal police.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hector is an old schoolmate, who has married in the Loire Inferieure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe lifts up the cloth of his writing desk, a cloth the border of which has
+been embroidered by Caroline, the ground being blue, black or red velvet,—the
+color, as you see, is perfectly immaterial,—and he slips his unfinished letters
+to Madame de Fischtaminel, to his friend Hector, between the table and the
+cloth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thickness of a sheet of paper is almost nothing, velvet is a downy,
+discreet material, but, no matter, these precautions are in vain. The male
+devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet will furnish them of all
+genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her side, the demon who causes tables
+to spurt forth fire, and who, with his ironic finger points out the hiding
+place of keys—the secret of secrets.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline has noticed the thickness of a letter sheet between this velvet and
+this table: she hits upon a letter to Hector instead of hitting upon one to
+Madame de Fischtaminel, who has gone to Plombieres Springs, and reads the
+following:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear Hector:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I pity you, but you have acted wisely in entrusting me with a knowledge of the
+difficulties in which you have voluntarily involved yourself. You never would
+see the difference between the country woman and the woman of Paris. In the
+country, my dear boy, you are always face to face with your wife, and, owing to
+the ennui which impels you, you rush headforemost into the enjoyment of your
+bliss. This is a great error: happiness is an abyss, and when you have once
+reached the bottom, you never get back again, in wedlock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will show you why. Let me take, for your wife’s sake, the shortest path—the
+parable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I remember having made a journey from Paris to Ville-Parisis, in that vehicle
+called a ’bus: distance, twenty miles: ’bus, lumbering: horse, lame. Nothing
+amuses me more than to draw from people, by the aid of that gimlet called the
+interrogation, and to obtain, by means of an attentive air, the sum of
+information, anecdotes and learning that everybody is anxious to part with: and
+all men have such a sum, the peasant as well as the banker, the corporal as
+well as the marshal of France.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I have often noticed how ready these casks, overflowing with wit, are to open
+their sluices while being transported by diligence or ’bus, or by any vehicle
+drawn by horses, for nobody talks in a railway car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“At the rate of our exit from Paris, the journey would take full seven hours:
+so I got an old corporal to talk, for my diversion. He could neither read nor
+write: he was entirely illiterate. Yet the journey seemed short. The corporal
+had been through all the campaigns, he told me of things perfectly unheard of,
+that historians never trouble themselves about.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! Hector, how superior is practice to theory! Among other things, and in
+reply to a question relative to the infantry, whose courage is much more tried
+by marching than by fighting, he said this, which I give you free from
+circumlocution:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“‘Sir, when Parisians were brought to our 45th, which Napoleon called The
+Terrible (I am speaking of the early days of the Empire, when the infantry had
+legs of steel, and when they needed them), I had a way of telling beforehand
+which of them would remain in the 45th. They marched without hurrying, they did
+their little six leagues a day, neither more nor less, and they pitched camp in
+condition to begin again on the morrow. The plucky fellows who did ten leagues
+and wanted to run to the victory, stopped half way at the hospital.’
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The worthy corporal was talking of marriage while he thought he was talking of
+war, and you have stopped half way, Hector, at the hospital.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Remember the sympathetic condolence of Madame de Sevigne counting out three
+hundred thousand francs to Monsieur de Grignan, to induce him to marry one of
+the prettiest girls in France! ‘Why,’ said she to herself, ‘he will have to
+marry her every day, as long as she lives! Decidedly, I don’t think three
+hundred francs too much.’ Is it not enough to make the bravest tremble?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear fellow, conjugal happiness is founded, like that of nations, upon
+ignorance. It is a felicity full of negative conditions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If I am happy with my little Caroline, it is due to the strictest observance
+of that salutary principle so strongly insisted upon in the <i>Physiology of
+Marriage</i>. I have resolved to lead my wife through paths beaten in the snow,
+until the happy day when infidelity will be difficult.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In the situation in which you have placed yourself, and which resembles that
+of Duprez, who, on his first appearance at Paris, went to singing with all the
+voice his lungs would yield, instead of imitating Nourrit, who gave the
+audience just enough to enchant them, the following, I think, is your proper
+course to—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The letter broke off here: Caroline returned it to its place, at the same time
+wondering how she would make her dear Adolphe expiate his obedience to the
+execrable precepts of the <i>Physiology of Marriage</i>.
+</p>
+
+<h3>A TRUCE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+This trouble doubtless occurs sufficiently often and in different ways enough
+in the existence of married women, for this personal incident to become the
+type of the genus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Caroline in question here is very pious, she loves her husband very much,
+her husband asserts that she loves him too much, even: but this is a piece of
+marital conceit, if, indeed, it is not a provocation, as he only complains to
+his wife’s young lady friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a person’s conscience is involved, the least thing becomes exceedingly
+serious. Madame de ——- has told her young friend, Madame de Fischtaminel, that
+she had been compelled to make an extraordinary confession to her spiritual
+director, and to perform penance, the director having decided that she was in a
+state of mortal sin. This lady, who goes to mass every morning, is a woman of
+thirty-six years, thin and slightly pimpled. She has large soft black eyes, her
+upper lip is strongly shaded: still her voice is sweet, her manners gentle, her
+gait noble—she is a woman of quality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame de Fischtaminel, whom Madame de ——- has made her friend (nearly all
+pious women patronize a woman who is considered worldly, on the pretext of
+converting her),—Madame de Fischtaminel asserts that these qualities, in this
+Caroline of the Pious Sort, are a victory of religion over a rather violent
+natural temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These details are necessary to describe the trouble in all its horror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This lady’s Adolphe had been compelled to leave his wife for two months, in
+April, immediately after the forty days’ fast that Caroline scrupulously
+observes. Early in June, therefore, madame expected her husband, she expected
+him day by day. From one hope to another,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Conceived every morn and deferred every eve.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She got along as far as Sunday, the day when her presentiments, which had now
+reached a state of paroxysm, told her that the longed-for husband would arrive
+at an early hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a pious woman expects her husband, and that husband has been absent from
+home nearly four months, she takes much more pains with her toilet than a young
+girl does, though waiting for her first betrothed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This virtuous Caroline was so completely absorbed in exclusively personal
+preparations, that she forgot to go to eight o’clock mass. She proposed to hear
+a low mass, but she was afraid of losing the delight of her dear Adolphe’s
+first glance, in case he arrived at early dawn. Her chambermaid—who
+respectfully left her mistress alone in the dressing-room where pious and
+pimpled ladies let no one enter, not even their husbands, especially if they
+are thin—her chambermaid heard her exclaim several times, “If it’s your master,
+let me know!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The rumbling of a vehicle having made the furniture rattle, Caroline assumed a
+mild tone to conceal the violence of her legitimate emotions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh! ’tis he! Run, Justine: tell him I am waiting for him here.” Caroline
+trembled so that she dropped into an arm-chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vehicle was a butcher’s wagon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was in anxieties like this that the eight o’clock mass slipped by, like an
+eel in his slime. Madame’s toilet operations were resumed, for she was engaged
+in dressing. The chambermaid’s nose had already been the recipient of a superb
+muslin chemise, with a simple hem, which Caroline had thrown at her from the
+dressing-room, though she had given her the same kind for the last three
+months.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What are you thinking of, Justine? I told you to choose from the chemises that
+are not numbered.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unnumbered chemises were only seven or eight, in the most magnificent
+trousseau. They are chemises gotten up and embroidered with the greatest care:
+a woman must be a queen, a young queen, to have a dozen. Each one of Caroline’s
+was trimmed with valenciennes round the bottom, and still more coquettishly
+garnished about the neck. This feature of our manners will perhaps serve to
+suggest a suspicion, in the masculine world, of the domestic drama revealed by
+this exceptional chemise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline had put on a pair of Scotch thread stockings, little prunella buskins,
+and her most deceptive corsets. She had her hair dressed in the fashion that
+most became her, and embellished it with a cap of the most elegant form. It is
+unnecessary to speak of her morning gown. A pious lady who lives at Paris and
+who loves her husband, knows as well as a coquette how to choose those pretty
+little striped patterns, have them cut with an open waist, and fastened by
+loops to buttons in a way which compels her to refasten them two or three times
+in an hour, with little airs more or less charming, as the case may be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The nine o’clock mass, the ten o’clock mass, every mass, went by in these
+preparations, which, for women in love, are one of their twelve labors of
+Hercules.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pious women rarely go to church in a carriage, and they are right. Except in
+the case of a pouring shower, or intolerably bad weather, a person ought not to
+appear haughty in the place where it is becoming to be humble. Caroline was
+afraid to compromise the freshness of her dress and the purity of her thread
+stockings. Alas! these pretexts concealed a reason.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If I am at church when Adolphe comes, I shall lose the pleasure of his first
+glance: and he will think I prefer high mass to him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made this sacrifice to her husband in a desire to please him—a fearfully
+worldly consideration. Prefer the creature to the Creator! A husband to heaven!
+Go and hear a sermon and you will learn what such an offence will cost you.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“After all,” says Caroline, quoting her confessor, “society is founded upon
+marriage, which the Church has included among its sacraments.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this is the way in which religious instruction may be put aside in favor of
+a blind though legitimate love. Madame refused breakfast, and ordered the meal
+to be kept hot, just as she kept herself ready, at a moment’s notice, to
+welcome the precious absentee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now these little things may easily excite a laugh: but in the first place they
+are continually occurring with couples who love each other, or where one of
+them loves the other: besides, in a woman so strait-laced, so reserved, so
+worthy, as this lady, these acknowledgments of affection went beyond the limits
+imposed upon her feelings by the lofty self-respect which true piety induces.
+When Madame de Fischtaminel narrated this little scene in a devotee’s life,
+dressing it up with choice by-play, acted out as ladies of the world know how
+to act out their anecdotes, I took the liberty of saying that it was the
+Canticle of canticles in action.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If her husband doesn’t come,” said Justine to the cook, “what will become of
+us? She has already thrown her chemise in my face.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last, Caroline heard the crack of a postilion’s whip, the well-known
+rumbling of a traveling carriage, the racket made by the hoofs of post-horses,
+and the jingling of their bells! Oh, she could doubt no longer, the bells made
+her burst forth, as thus:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The door! Open the door! ’Tis he, my husband! Will you never go to the door!”
+And the pious woman stamped her foot and broke the bell-rope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, madame,” said Justine, with the vivacity of a servant doing her duty,
+“it’s some people going away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Upon my word,” replied Caroline, half ashamed, to herself, “I will never let
+Adolphe go traveling again without me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A Marseilles poet—it is not known whether it was Mery or Barthelemy
+—acknowledged that if his best fried did not arrive punctually at the dinner
+hour, he waited patiently five minutes: at the tenth minute, he felt a desire
+to throw the napkin in his face: at the twelfth he hoped some great calamity
+would befall him: at the fifteenth, he would not be able to restrain himself
+from stabbing him several times with a dirk.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All women, when expecting somebody, are Marseilles poets, if, indeed, we may
+compare the vulgar throes of hunger to the sublime Canticle of canticles of a
+pious wife, who is hoping for the joys of a husband’s first glance after a
+three months’ absence. Let all those who love and who have met again after an
+absence ten thousand times accursed, be good enough to recall their first
+glance: it says so many things that the lovers, if in the presence of a third
+party, are fain to lower their eyes! This poem, in which every man is as great
+as Homer, in which he seems a god to the woman who loves him, is, for a pious,
+thin and pimpled lady, all the more immense, from the fact that she has not,
+like Madame de Fischtaminel, the resource of having several copies of it. In
+her case, her husband is all she’s got!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So you will not be surprised to learn that Caroline missed every mass and had
+no breakfast. This hunger and thirst for Adolphe gave her a violent cramp in
+the stomach. She did not think of religion once during the hours of mass, nor
+during those of vespers. She was not comfortable when she sat, and she was very
+uncomfortable when she stood: Justine advised her to go to bed. Caroline, quite
+overcome, retired at about half past five in the evening, after having taken a
+light soup: but she ordered a dainty supper at ten.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I shall doubtless sup with my husband,” she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally fulminated.
+She had reached the Marseilles poet’s several stabs with a dirk. So she spoke
+in a tone that was really terrible. At three in the morning Caroline was in a
+profound sleep: Adolphe arrived without her hearing either carriage, or horse,
+or bell, or opening door!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the spare
+room. When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two tears issued from
+her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the slightest preparatory
+toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the threshold, informed her that her
+husband, having traveled two hundred leagues and been two nights without sleep,
+requested that he might not be awakened: he was exceedingly tired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline—pious woman that she was—opened the door violently without being able
+to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and then hastened to church
+to listen to a thanksgiving mass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in reply to
+an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid’s finesse:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, madame, your husband’s got back!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He has only got back to Paris,” returned the pious Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<h3>USELESS CARE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes her
+husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite pains, and
+spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and follow the fashions,
+who does her best to keep house sumptuously and yet economically—a house, too,
+not easy to manage—who, from morality and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one
+but her husband, who has no other study but the happiness of this precious
+husband, who, to express all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment <i>to
+the sentiment of her duties</i>. This underlined circumlocution is the
+paraphrase of the word love in the language of prudes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband by chance
+remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel’s, that he was very fond of
+mushrooms <i>a l’Italienne</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good, great, and
+grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there is no greater
+pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing his favorite viands.
+This springs from the fundamental idea upon which the affection of women is
+based: that of being the source of all his pleasures, big and little. Love
+animates everything in life, and conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend
+to the most trivial details.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how the
+Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells her that at
+Biffi’s, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn how the Italians
+dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain some Milanese mushrooms.
+Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini, and resolves to send him a
+breviary in acknowledgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline’s cook goes to Biffi’s, comes back from Biffi’s, and exhibits to the
+countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman’s ears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very good,” she says, “did he explain to you how to cook them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, for us cooks, them’s a mere nothing,” replies the cook.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except how a cook
+may feather his nest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At evening, during the second course, all Caroline’s fibres quiver with
+pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain suggestive
+dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had waited for her
+husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure, there is,
+to the souls of the elect—and everybody will include a woman who adores her
+husband among the elect—there is, between these two worlds of expectation, the
+difference that exists between a fine night and a fine day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges his spoon
+in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline’s extreme emotion, to several
+of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers who visit Milan do not for a
+long time recognize; they take them for some kind of shell-fish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, Adolphe?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, dear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you recognize them?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Recognize what?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Your mushrooms <i>a l’Italienne</i>?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“These mushrooms! I thought they were—well, yes, they <i>are</i> mushrooms!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, and <i>a l’Italienne</i>, too.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, <i>a la milanaise</i>. I abominate
+them!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What kind is it you like, then?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“<i>Fungi trifolati</i>.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us observe—to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels everything,
+which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this moment classifying
+one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects, giving them all the
+termination <i>us</i>, so that a <i>Silbermanus</i> is the same individual in
+all countries for the learned men who dissect a butterfly’s legs with
+pincers—that we still want a nomenclature for the chemistry of the kitchen, to
+enable all the cooks in the world to produce precisely similar dishes. It would
+be diplomatically agreed that French should be the language of the kitchen, as
+Latin has been adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it
+were desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen Latin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear,” resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face of his
+chaste Caroline, “in France the dish in question is called Mushrooms <i>a
+l’Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise</i>. The mushrooms are minced,
+fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names I have forgotten. You add a
+taste of garlic, I believe—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a woman’s
+heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of eight. <i>Ab uno
+disce omnes</i>: which means, “There’s one of them: find the rest in your
+memory.” For we have taken this culinary description as a prototype of the
+vexations which afflict loving but indifferently loved women.
+</p>
+
+<h3>SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer’s fancy. This feminine
+personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman’s confidence glows
+perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and disappears in a trice like
+a shooting star.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from any marshy
+country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for the superabundant
+powers of their imaginations and their nerves.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who is really
+loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do her the justice to
+say that her first idea is to enjoy it. All who possess treasures are in dread
+of thieves, but they do not, like women, lend wings and feet to their golden
+stores.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the
+heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to abandon it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—A woman is never deserted without a reason.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman. Hence the rage of
+a woman deserted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love: we live in a calculating
+epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may: for, of all wives or
+women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least expensive. Now, every woman who is
+loved, has gone through the petty annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion,
+whether just or unjust, engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is
+the biggest of all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves her rather
+too often upon a matter of business, that eternal Chaumontel’s affair, which
+never comes to an end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Every household has its Chaumontel’s affair. (See TROUBLE WITHIN
+TROUBLE.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business than
+publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and authors. The moment
+a beloved creature absents himself, though she has rendered him even too happy,
+every woman straightway imagines that he has hurried away to some easy
+conquest. In this respect, women endow men with superhuman faculties. Fear
+magnifies everything, it dilates the eyes and the heart: it makes a woman mad.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left me? Why
+did he not take me with him?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of suspicion,
+and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these frightful tempests which
+ravage a woman’s heart springs an ignoble, unworthy resolution, one which every
+woman, the duchess as well as the shopkeeper’s wife, the baroness as well as
+the stockbroker’s lady, the angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well
+as the passionate, at once puts into execution. They imitate the government,
+every one of them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the
+public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in the
+interest of their love. This fatal woman’s curiosity reduces them to the
+necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in this situation,
+has not lost her self-respect,—a situation in which her jealousy will not
+permit her to respect anything: neither your little boxes, nor your clothes,
+nor the drawers of your treasury, of your desk, of your table, of your bureau,
+nor your pocketbook with private compartments, nor your papers, nor your
+traveling dressing-case, nor your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this
+way that her husband dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your
+india-rubber girdles—her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman trusts, is
+her maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and approves her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman makes no
+calculations, takes no observations. She simply wishes to know the whole truth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Justine is delighted: she sees her mistress compromising herself with her,
+and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her suspicions, with
+terrible friendship. Justine and Caroline hold councils and have secret
+interviews. All espionage involves such relationships. In this pass, a maid
+becomes the arbitress of the fate of the married couple. Example: Lord Byron.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame,” Justine one day observes, “monsieur really <i>does</i> go out to see
+a woman.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline turns pale.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But don’t be alarmed, madame, it’s an old woman.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, Justine, to some men no women are old: men are inexplicable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, madame, it isn’t a lady, it’s a woman, quite a common woman.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, Justine, Lord Byron loved a fish-wife at Venice, Madame de Fischtaminel
+told me so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Caroline bursts into tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’ve been pumping Benoit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What is Benoit’s opinion?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Benoit thinks that the woman is a go-between, for monsieur keeps his secret
+from everybody, even from Benoit.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a week Caroline lives the life of the damned; all her savings go to pay
+spies and to purchase reports.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Finally, Justine goes to see the woman, whose name is Madame Mahuchet; she
+bribes her and learns at last that her master has preserved a witness of his
+youthful follies, a nice little boy that looks very much like him, and that
+this woman is his nurse, the second-hand mother who has charge of little
+Frederick, who pays his quarterly school-bills, and through whose hands pass
+the twelve hundred or two thousand francs which Adolphe is supposed annually to
+lose at cards.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What of the mother?” exclaims Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To end the matter, Justine, Caroline’s good genius, proves to her that M’lle
+Suzanne Beauminet, formerly a grisette and somewhat later Madame
+Sainte-Suzanne, died at the hospital, or else that she has made her fortune, or
+else, again, that her place in society is so low there is no danger of madame’s
+ever meeting her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline breathes again: the dirk has been drawn from her heart, she is quite
+happy; but she had no children but daughters, and would like a boy. This little
+drama of unjust suspicions, this comedy of the conjectures to which Mother
+Mahuchet gives rise, these phases of a causeless jealousy, are laid down here
+as the type of a situation, the varieties of which are as innumerable as
+characters, grades and sorts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This source of petty troubles is pointed out here, in order that women seated
+upon the river’s bank may contemplate in it the course of their own married
+life, following its ascent or descent, recalling their own adventures to mind,
+their untold disasters, the foibles which caused their errors, and the peculiar
+fatalities to which were due an instant of frenzy, a moment of unnecessary
+despair, or sufferings which they might have spared themselves, happy in their
+self-delusions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This vexation has a corollary in the following, one which is much more serious
+and often without remedy, especially when its root lies among vices of another
+kind, and which do not concern us, for, in this work, women are invariably
+esteemed honest—until the end.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE DOMESTIC TYRANT.</h3>
+
+<p>
+“My dear Caroline,” says Adolphe one day to his wife, “are you satisfied with
+Justine?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, dear, quite so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t you think she speaks to you rather impertinently?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Do you suppose I would notice a maid? But it seems <i>you</i> notice her!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you say?” asks Adolphe in an indignant way that is always delightful
+to women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine is a genuine maid for an actress, a woman of thirty stamped by the
+small-pox with innumerable dimples, in which the loves are far from sporting:
+she is as brown as opium, has a good deal of leg and not much body, gummy eyes,
+and a tournure to match. She would like to have Benoit marry her, but at this
+unexpected suggestion, Benoit asked for his discharge. Such is the portrait of
+the domestic tyrant enthroned by Caroline’s jealousy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine takes her coffee in the morning, in bed, and manages to have it as good
+as, not to say better than, that of her mistress. Justine sometimes goes out
+without asking leave, dressed like the wife of a second-class banker. She
+sports a pink hat, one of her mistress’ old gowns made over, an elegant shawl,
+shoes of bronze kid, and jewelry of doubtful character.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine is sometimes in a bad humor, and makes her mistress feel that she too
+is a woman like herself, though she is not married. She has her whims, her fits
+of melancholy, her caprices. She even dares to have her nerves! She replies
+curtly, she makes herself insupportable to the other servants, and, to
+conclude, her wages have been considerably increased.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear, this girl is getting more intolerable every day,” says Adolphe one
+morning to his wife, on noticing Justine listening at the key-hole, “and if you
+don’t send her away, I will!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, greatly alarmed, is obliged to give Justine a talking to, while her
+husband is out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Justine, you take advantage of my kindness to you: you have high wages, here,
+you have perquisites, presents: try to keep your place, for my husband wants to
+send you away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The maid humbles herself to the earth, she sheds tears: she is so attached to
+madame! Ah! she would rush into the fire for her: she would let herself be
+chopped into mince-meat: she is ready for anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If you had anything to conceal, madame, I would take it on myself and say it
+was me!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Very well, Justine, very good, my girl,” says Caroline, terrified: “but that’s
+not the point: just try to keep in your place.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, ha!” says Justine to herself, “monsieur wants to send me away, does he?
+Wait and see the deuce of a life I’ll lead you, you old curmudgeon!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A week after, Justine, who is dressing her mistress’ hair, looks in the glass
+to make sure that Caroline can see all the grimaces of her countenance: and
+Caroline very soon inquires, “Why, what’s the matter, Justine?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I would tell you, readily, madame, but then, madame, you are so weak with
+monsieur!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, go on, what is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I know now, madame, why master wanted to show me the door: he has confidence
+in nobody but Benoit, and Benoit is playing the mum with me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, what does that prove? Has anything been discovered?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I’m sure that between the two they are plotting something against you madame,”
+returns the maid with authority.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, whom Justine watches in the glass, turns pale: all the tortures of
+the previous petty trouble return, and Justine sees that she has become as
+indispensable to her mistress as spies are to the government when a conspiracy
+is discovered. Still, Caroline’s friends do not understand why she keeps so
+disagreeable a servant girl, one who wears a hat, whose manners are
+impertinent, and who gives herself the airs of a lady.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This stupid domination is talked of at Madame Deschars’, at Madame de
+Fischtaminel’s, and the company consider it funny. A few ladies think they can
+see certain monstrous reasons for it, reasons which compromise Caroline’s
+honor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—In society, people can put cloaks on every kind of truth, even the
+prettiest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short the <i>aria della calumnia</i> is executed precisely as if Bartholo
+were singing it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is averred that Caroline cannot discharge her maid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Society devotes itself desperately to discovering the secret of this enigma.
+Madame de Fischtaminel makes fun of Adolphe who goes home in a rage, has a
+scene with Caroline and discharges Justine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This produces such an effect upon Justine, that she falls sick, and takes to
+her bed. Caroline observes to her husband, that it would be awkward to turn a
+girl in Justine’s condition into the street, a girl who is so much attached to
+them, too, and who has been with them sine their marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let her go then as soon as she is well!” says Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, reassured in regard to Adolphe, and indecently swindled by Justine,
+at last comes to desire to get rid of her: she applies a violent remedy to the
+disease, and makes up her mind to go under the Caudine Forks of another petty
+trouble, as follows:
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE AVOWAL.</h3>
+
+<p>
+One morning, Adolphe is petted in a very unusual manner. The too happy husband
+wonders what may be the cause of this development of affection, and he hears
+Caroline, in her most winning tones, utter the word: “Adolphe?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well?” he replies, in alarm at the internal agitation betrayed by Caroline’s
+voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Promise not to be angry.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Not to be vexed with me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Never. Go on.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“To forgive me and never say anything about it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But tell me what it is!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Besides, you are the one that’s in the wrong—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Speak, or I’ll go away.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s no one but you that can get me out of the scrape—and it was you that
+got me into it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, come.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s about—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“About Justine!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t speak of her, she’s discharged. I won’t see her again, her style of
+conduct exposes your reputation—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What can people say—what have they said?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scene changes, the result of which is a secondary explanation which makes
+Caroline blush, as she sees the bearing of the suppositions of her best
+friends.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, now, Adolphe, it’s to you I owe all this. Why didn’t you tell me about
+Frederick?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Frederick the Great? The King of Prussia?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What creatures men are! Hypocrite, do you want to make me believe that you
+have forgotten your son so soon, M’lle Suzanne Beauminet’s son?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Then you know—?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The whole thing! And old other Mahuchet, and your absences from home to give
+him a good dinner on holidays.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How like moles you pious women can be if you try!” exclaims Adolphe, in his
+terror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It was Justine that found it out.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah! Now I understand the reason of her insolence.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, your Caroline has been very wretched, dear, and this spying system, which
+was produced by my love for you, for I do love you, and madly too,—if you
+deceived me, I would fly to the extremity of creation,—well, as I was going to
+say, this unfounded jealousy has put me in Justine’s power, so, my precious,
+get me out of it the best way you can!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Let this teach you, my angel, never to make use of your servants, if you want
+them to be of use to you. It is the lowest of tyrannies, this being at the
+mercy of one’s people.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe takes advantage of this circumstance to alarm Caroline, he thinks of
+future Chaumontel’s affairs, and would be glad to have no more espionage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine is sent for, Adolphe peremptorily dismisses her without waiting to hear
+her explanation. Caroline imagines her vexations at an end. She gets another
+maid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Justine, whose twelve or fifteen thousand francs have attracted the notice of a
+water carrier, becomes Madame Chavagnac, and goes into the apple business. Ten
+months after, in Adolphe’s absence, Caroline receives a letter written upon
+school-boy paper, in strides which would require orthopedic treatment for three
+months, and thus conceived:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madam!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yu ar shaimphoolly diseeved bi yure huzban fur mame Deux fischtaminelle, hee
+goze their evry eavning, yu ar az blynde az a Batt. Your gott wott yu dizzurv,
+and I am Glad ovit, and I have thee honur ov prezenting yu the assurunz ov Mi
+moaste ds Sting guischt respecks.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline starts like a lion who has been stung by a bumble-bee; she places
+herself once more, and of her own accord, upon the griddle of suspicion, and
+begins her struggle with the unknown all over again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she has discovered the injustice of her suspicions, there comes another
+letter with an offer to furnish her with details relative to a Chaumontel’s
+affair which Justine has unearthed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The petty trouble of avowals, ladies, is often more serious than this, as you
+perhaps have occasion to remember.
+</p>
+
+<h3>HUMILIATIONS.</h3>
+
+<p>
+To the glory of women, let it be said, they care for their husbands even when
+their husbands care no more for them, not only because there are more ties,
+socially speaking, between a married woman and a man, than between the man and
+the wife; but also because woman has more delicacy and honor than man, the
+chief conjugal question apart, as a matter of course.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there is a man, a
+father, a mother and a woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A married woman has sensibility enough for four, or for five even, if you look
+closely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, it is not improper to observe in this place, that, in a woman’s eyes, love
+is a general absolution: the man who is a good lover may commit crimes, if he
+will, he is always as pure as snow in the eyes of her who loves him, if he
+truly loves her. As to a married woman, loved or not, she feels so deeply that
+the honor and consideration of her husband are the fortune of her children,
+that she acts like the woman in love,—so active is the sense of community of
+interest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This profound sentiment engenders, for certain Carolines, petty troubles which,
+unfortunately for this book, have their dismal side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe is compromised. We will not enumerate all the methods of compromising
+oneself, for we might become personal. Let us take, as an example, the social
+error which our epoch excuses, permits, understands and commits the most of
+any—the case of an honest robbery, of skillfully concealed corruption in
+office, or of some misrepresentation that becomes excusable when it has
+succeeded, as, for instance, having an understanding with parties in power, for
+the sale of property at the highest possible price to a city, or a country.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, in a bankruptcy, Adolphe, in order to protect himself (this means to
+recover his claims), has become mixed up in certain unlawful doings which may
+bring a man to the necessity of testifying before the Court of Assizes. In
+fact, it is not known that the daring creditor will not be considered a party.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Take notice that in all cases of bankruptcy, protecting oneself is regarded as
+the most sacred of duties, even by the most respectable houses: the thing is to
+keep the bad side of the protection out of sight, as they do in prudish
+England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe does not know what to do, as his counsel has told him not to appear in
+the matter: so he has recourse to Caroline. He gives her a lesson, he coaches
+her, he teaches her the Code, he examines her dress, he equips her as a brig
+sent on a voyage, and despatches her to the office of some judge, or some
+syndic. The judge is apparently a man of severe morality, but in reality a
+libertine: he retains his serious expression on seeing a pretty woman enter,
+and makes sundry very uncomplimentary remarks about Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I pity you, madame, you belong to a man who may involve you in numerous
+unpleasant affairs: a few more matters like this, and he will be quite
+disgraced. Have you any children? Excuse my asking; you are so young, it is
+perfectly natural.” And the judge comes as near to Caroline as possible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yes, sir.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, great heavens! what a prospect is yours! My first thought was for the
+woman, but now I pity you doubly, I think of the mother. Ah, how you must have
+suffered in coming here! Poor, poor woman!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, sir, you take an interest in me, do you not?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Alas, what can I do?” says the judge, darting a glance sidewise at Caroline.
+“What you ask of me is a dereliction of duty, and I am a magistrate before I am
+a man.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh, sir, only be a man—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Are you aware of the full bearing of that request, fair creature?” At this
+point the magistrate tremblingly takes Caroline’s hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, who remembers that the honor of her husband and children is at stake,
+says to herself that this is not the time to play the prude. She abandons her
+hand, making just resistance enough for the old man (happily he is an old man)
+to consider it a favor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, come, my beauty,” resumes the judge, “I should be loath to cause so
+lovely a woman to shed tears; we’ll see about it. You shall come to-morrow
+evening and tell me the whole affair. We must look at the papers, we will
+examine them together—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“It’s indispensable.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, sir—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t be alarmed, my dear, a judge is likely to know how to grant what is due
+to justice and—” he puts on a shrewd look here—“to beauty.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, sir—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Be quite at your ease,” he adds, holding her hand closely in his, “and we’ll
+try to reduce this great crime down to a peccadillo.” And he goes to the door
+with Caroline, who is frightened to death at an appointment thus proposed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The syndic is a lively young man, and he receives Madame Adolphe with a smile.
+He smiles at everything, and he smiles as he takes her round the waist with an
+agility which leaves Caroline no time to resist, especially as she says to
+herself, “Adolphe particularly recommended me not to vex the syndic.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless Caroline escapes, in the interest of the syndic himself, and again
+pronounces the “Sir!” which she had said three times to the judge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Don’t be angry with me, you are irresistible, you are an angel, and your
+husband is a monster: for what does he mean by sending a siren to a young man
+whom he knows to be inflammable!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir, my husband could not come himself; he is in bed, very sick, and you
+threatened him so terribly that the urgency of the matter—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Hasn’t he got a lawyer, an attorney?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is terrified by this remark which reveals Adolphe’s profound
+rascality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He supposed, sir, that you would have pity upon the mother of a family, upon
+her children—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ta, ta, ta,” returns the syndic. “You have come to influence my independence,
+my conscience, you want me to give the creditors up to you: well, I’ll do more,
+I give you up my heart, my fortune! Your husband wants to save <i>his</i>
+honor, <i>my</i> honor is at your disposal!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sir,” cries Caroline, as she tries to raise the syndic who has thrown himself
+at her feet. “You alarm me!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She plays the terrified female and thus reaches the door, getting out of a
+delicate situation as women know how to do it, that is, without compromising
+anything or anybody.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I will come again,” she says smiling, “when you behave better.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You leave me thus! Take care! Your husband may yet find himself seated at the
+bar of the Court of Assizes: he is accessory to a fraudulent bankruptcy, and we
+know several things about him that are not by any means honorable. It is not
+his first departure from rectitude; he has done a good many dirty things, he
+has been mixed up in disgraceful intrigues, and you are singularly careful of
+the honor of a man who cares as little for his own honor as he does for yours.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, alarmed by these words, lets go the door, shuts it and comes back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What do you mean, sir?” she exclaims, furious at this outrageous broadside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, this affair—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Chaumontel’s affair?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“No, his speculations in houses that he had built by people that were
+insolvent.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline remembers the enterprise undertaken by Adolphe to double his income:
+(See <i>The Jesuitism of Women</i>) she trembles. Her curiosity is in the
+syndic’s favor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Sit down here. There, at this distance, I will behave well, but I can look at
+you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he narrates, at length, the conception due to du Tillet the banker,
+interrupting himself to say: “Oh, what a pretty, cunning, little foot; no one
+but you could have such a foot as that—<i>Du Tillet, therefore,
+compromised.</i> What an ear, too! You have been doubtless told that you had a
+delicious ear—<i>And du Tillet was right, for judgment had already been
+given</i>—I love small ears, but let me have a model of yours, and I will do
+anything you like—<i>du Tillet profited by this to throw the whole loss on your
+idiotic husband</i>: oh, what a charming silk, you are divinely dressed!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where were we, sir?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“How can I remember while admiring your Raphaelistic head?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the twenty-seventh compliment, Caroline considers the syndic a man of wit:
+she makes him a polite speech, and goes away without learning much more of the
+enterprise which, not long before had swallowed up three hundred thousand
+francs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There are many huge variations of this petty trouble.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+EXAMPLE. Adolphe is brave and susceptible: he is walking on the Champs Elysees,
+where there is a crowd of people; in this crowd are several ill-mannered young
+men who indulge in jokes of doubtful propriety: Caroline puts up with them and
+pretends not to hear them, in order to keep her husband out of a duel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ANOTHER EXAMPLE. A child belonging to the genus Terrible, exclaims in the
+presence of everybody:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Mamma, would you let Justine hit me?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Certainly not.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why do you ask, my little man?” inquires Madame Foullepointe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Because she just gave father a big slap, and he’s ever so much stronger than
+me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Foullepointe laughs, and Adolphe, who intended to pay court to her, is
+cruelly joked by her, after having had a first last quarrel with Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE LAST QUARREL.</h3>
+
+<p>
+In every household, husbands and wives must one day hear the striking of a
+fatal hour. It is a knell, the death and end of jealousy, a great, noble and
+charming passion, the only true symptom of love, if it is not even its double.
+When a woman is no longer jealous of her husband, all is over, she loves him no
+more. So, conjugal love expires in the last quarrel that a woman gives herself
+the trouble to raise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—When a woman ceases to quarrel with her husband, the Minotaur has seated
+himself in a corner arm-chair, tapping his boots with his cane.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every woman must remember her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble which
+often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some occasion of a brutal
+fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell to faith, to the childishness
+of love, to virtue even, is in a degree as capricious as life itself. Like life
+it varies in every house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here, the author ought perhaps to search out all the varieties of quarrels, if
+he desires to be precise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, Caroline may have discovered that the judicial robe of the syndic in
+Chaumontel’s affair, hides a robe of infinitely softer stuff, of an agreeable,
+silky color: that Chaumontel’s hair, in short, is fair, and that his eyes are
+blue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or else Caroline, who arose before Adolphe, may have seen his greatcoat thrown
+wrong side out across a chair; the edge of a little perfumed paper, just
+peeping out of the side-pocket, may have attracted her by its whiteness, like a
+ray of the sun entering a dark room through a crack in the window: or else,
+while taking Adolphe in her arms and feeling his pocket, she may have caused
+the note to crackle: or else she may have been informed of the state of things
+by a foreign odor that she has long noticed upon him, and may have read these
+lines:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ungraitfull wun, wot du yu supoz I no About Hipolite. Kum, and yu shal se
+whether I Love yu.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or this:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Yesterday, love, you made me wait for you: what will it be to-morrow?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or this:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“The women who love you, my dear sir, are very unhappy in hating you so, when
+you are not with them: take care, for the hatred which exists during your
+absence, may possibly encroach upon the hours you spend in their company.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or this:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You traitorous Chodoreille, what were you doing yesterday on the boulevard
+with a woman hanging on your arm? If it was your wife, accept my compliments of
+condolence upon her absent charms: she has doubtless deposited them at the
+pawnbroker’s, and the ticket to redeem them with is lost.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Four notes emanating from the grisette, the lady, the pretentious woman in
+middle life, and the actress, among whom Adolphe has chosen his <i>belle</i>
+(according to the Fischtaminellian vocabulary).
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or else Caroline, taken veiled by Ferdinand to Ranelagh Garden, sees with her
+own eyes Adolphe abandoning himself furiously to the polka, holding one of the
+ladies of honor to Queen Pomare in his arms; or else, again, Adolphe has for
+the seventh time, made a mistake in the name, and called his wife Juliette,
+Charlotte or Lisa: or, a grocer or restaurateur sends to the house, during
+Adolphe’s absence, certain damning bills which fall into Caroline’s hands.
+</p>
+
+<h4>PAPERS RELATING TO CHAUMONTEL’S AFFAIR.</h4>
+
+<p>
+(Private Tables Served.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Adolphe to Perrault,
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To 1 Pate de Foie Gras delivered at Madame Schontz’s, the 6th of January,      
+          fr.    22.50<br/>
+Six bottle of assorted wines,                              70.00<br/>
+To one special breakfast delivered at Congress<br/>
+Hotel, the 11th of February, at No. 21——<br/>
+Stipulated price,                                    100.00<br/>
+______
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Total,                                Francs,   192.50
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline examines the dates and remembers them as appointments made for
+business connected with Chaumontel’s affair. Adolphe had designated the sixth
+of January as the day fixed for a meeting at which the creditors in
+Chaumontel’s affair were to receive the sums due them. On the eleventh of
+February he had an appointment with the notary, in order to sign a receipt
+relative to Chaumontel’s affair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Or else—but an attempt to mention all the chances of discovery would be the
+undertaking of a madman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Every woman will remember to herself how the bandage with which her eyes were
+bound fell off: how, after many doubts, and agonies of heart, she made up her
+mind to have a final quarrel for the simple purpose of finishing the romance,
+putting the seal to the book, stipulating for her independence, or beginning
+life over again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some women are fortunate enough to have anticipated their husbands, and they
+then have the quarrel as a sort of justification.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nervous women give way to a burst of passion and commit acts of violence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women of mild temper assume a decided tone which appalls the most intrepid
+husbands. Those who have no vengeance ready shed a great many tears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those who love you forgive you. Ah, they conceive so readily, like the woman
+called “Ma berline,” that their Adolphe must be loved by the women of France,
+that they are rejoiced to possess, legally, a man about whom everybody goes
+crazy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Certain women with lips tight shut like a vise, with a muddy complexion and
+thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of promenading their
+Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and contradiction: they question him
+(see <i>Troubles within Troubles</i>), like a magistrate examining a criminal,
+reserving the spiteful enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a
+decisive moment. Generally, in this supreme scene of conjugal life, the fair
+sex is the executioner, while, in the contrary case, man is the assassin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the way of it: This last quarrel (you shall know why the author has
+called it the <i>last</i>), is always terminated by a solemn, sacred promise,
+made by scrupulous, noble, or simply intelligent women (that is to say, by all
+women), and which we give here in its grandest form.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Enough, Adolphe! We love each other no more; you have deceived me, and I shall
+never forget it. I may forgive it, but I can never forget it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women represent themselves as implacable only to render their forgiveness
+charming: they have anticipated God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We have now to live in common like two friends,” continues Caroline. “Well,
+let us live like two comrades, two brothers, I do not wish to make your life
+intolerable, and I never again will speak to you of what has happened—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe gives Caroline his hand: she takes it, and shakes it in the English
+style. Adolphe thanks Caroline, and catches a glimpse of bliss: he has
+converted his wife into a sister, and hopes to be a bachelor again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day Caroline indulges in a very witty allusion (Adolphe cannot help
+laughing at it) to Chaumontel’s affair. In society she makes general remarks
+which, to Adolphe, are very particular remarks, about their last quarrel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the end of a fortnight a day never passes without Caroline’s recalling their
+last quarrel by saying: “It was the day when I found Chaumontel’s bill in your
+pocket:” or “it happened since our last quarrel:” or, “it was the day when, for
+the first time, I had a clear idea of life,” etc. She assassinates Adolphe, she
+martyrizes him! In society she gives utterance to terrible things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“We are happy, my dear [to a lady], when we love each other no longer: it’s
+then that we learn how to make ourselves beloved,” and she looks at Ferdinand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, the last quarrel never comes to an end, and from this fact flows the
+following axiom:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Putting yourself in the wrong with your lawful wife, is solving the
+problem of Perpetual Motion.
+</p>
+
+<h3>A SIGNAL FAILURE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+Women, and especially married women, stick ideas into their brain-pan precisely
+as they stick pins into a pincushion, and the devil himself, —do you
+mind?—could not get them out: they reserve to themselves the exclusive right of
+sticking them in, pulling them out, and sticking them in again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline is riding home one evening from Madame Foullepointe’s in a violent
+state of jealousy and ambition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame Foullepointe, the lioness—but this word requires an explanation. It is a
+fashionable neologism, and gives expression to certain rather meagre ideas
+relative to our present society: you must use it, if you want to describe a
+woman who is all the rage. This lioness rides on horseback every day, and
+Caroline has taken it into her head to learn to ride also.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Observe that in this conjugal phase, Adolphe and Caroline are in the season
+which we have denominated <i>A Household Revolution</i>, and that they have had
+two or three <i>Last Quarrels</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe,” she says, “do you want to do me a favor?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Of course.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Won’t you refuse?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“If your request is reasonable, I am willing—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Ah, already—that’s a true husband’s word—if—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Come, what is it?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I want to learn to ride on horseback.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Now, is it a possible thing, Caroline?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline looks out of the window, and tries to wipe away a dry tear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Listen,” resumes Adolphe; “I cannot let you go alone to the riding-school; and
+I cannot go with you while business gives me the annoyance it does now. What’s
+the matter? I think I have given you unanswerable reasons.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe foresees the hiring of a stable, the purchase of a pony, the
+introduction of a groom and of a servant’s horse into the establishment—in
+short, all the nuisance of female lionization.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When a man gives a woman reasons instead of giving her what she wants —well,
+few men have ventured to descend into that small abyss called the heart, to
+test the power of the tempest that suddenly bursts forth there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Reasons! If you want reasons, here they are!” exclaims Caroline. “I am your
+wife: you don’t seem to care to please me any more. And as to the expenses, you
+greatly overrate them, my dear.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women have as many inflections of voice to pronounce these words, <i>My
+dear</i>, as the Italians have to say <i>Amico</i>. I have counted twenty-nine
+which express only various degrees of hatred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, you’ll see,” resumes Caroline, “I shall be sick, and you will pay the
+apothecary and the doctor as much as the price of a horse. I shall be walled up
+here at home, and that’s all you want. I asked the favor of you, though I was
+sure of a refusal: I only wanted to know how you would go to work to give it.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, Caroline—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Leave me alone at the riding-school!” she continues without listening. “Is
+that a reason? Can’t I go with Madame de Fischtaminel? Madame de Fischtaminel
+is learning to ride on horseback, and I don’t imagine that Monsieur de
+Fischtaminel goes with her.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But, Caroline—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“I am delighted with your solicitude. You think a great deal of me, really.
+Monsieur de Fischtaminel has more confidence in his wife, than you have in
+yours. He does not go with her, not he! Perhaps it’s on account of this
+confidence that you don’t want me at the school, where I might see your goings
+on with the fair Fischtaminel.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe tries to hide his vexation at this torrent of words, which begins when
+they are still half way from home, and has no sea to empty into. When Caroline
+is in her room, she goes on in the same way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You see that if reasons could restore my health or prevent me from desiring a
+kind of exercise pointed out by nature herself, I should not be in want of
+reasons, and that I know all the reasons that there are, and that I went over
+with the reasons before I spoke to you.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This, ladies, may with the more truth be called the prologue to the conjugal
+drama, from the fact that it is vigorously delivered, embellished with a
+commentary of gestures, ornamented with glances and all the other vignettes
+with which you usually illustrate such masterpieces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, when she has once planted in Adolphe’s heart the apprehension of a
+scene of constantly reiterated demands, feels her hatred for his control
+largely increase. Madame pouts, and she pouts so fiercely, that Adolphe is
+forced to notice it, on pain of very disagreeable consequences, for all is
+over, be sure of that, between two beings married by the mayor, or even at
+Gretna Green, when one of them no longer notices the sulkings of the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—A sulk that has struck in is a deadly poison.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was to prevent this suicide of love that our ingenious France invented
+boudoirs. Women could not well have Virgil’s willows in the economy of our
+modern dwellings. On the downfall of oratories, these little cubbies become
+boudoirs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This conjugal drama has three acts. The act of the prologue is already played.
+Then comes the act of false coquetry: one of those in which French women have
+the most success.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe is walking about the room, divesting himself of his apparel, and the
+man thus engaged, divests himself of his strength as well as of his clothing.
+To every man of forty, this axiom will appear profoundly just:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—The ideas of a man who has taken his boots and his suspenders off, are
+no longer those of a man who is still sporting these two tyrants of the mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Take notice that this is only an axiom in wedded life. In morals, it is what we
+call a relative theorem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline watches, like a jockey on the race course, the moment when she can
+distance her adversary. She makes her preparations to be irresistibly
+fascinating to Adolphe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women possess a power of mimicking pudicity, a knowledge of secrets which might
+be those of a frightened dove, a particular register for singing, like
+Isabella, in the fourth act of <i>Robert le Diable: “Grace pour toi! Grace pour
+moi!”</i> which leave jockeys and horse trainers whole miles behind. As usual,
+the <i>Diable</i> succumbs. It is the eternal history, the grand Christian
+mystery of the bruised serpent, of the delivered woman becoming the great
+social force, as the Fourierists say. It is especially in this that the
+difference between the Oriental slave and the Occidental wife appears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Upon the conjugal pillow, the second act ends by a number of onomatopes, all of
+them favorable to peace. Adolphe, precisely like children in the presence of a
+slice of bread and molasses, promises everything that Caroline wants.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THIRD ACT. As the curtain rises, the stage represents a chamber in a state of
+extreme disorder. Adolphe, in his dressing gown, tries to go out furtively and
+without waking Caroline, who is sleeping profoundly, and finally does go out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, exceedingly happy, gets up, consults her mirror, and makes inquiries
+about breakfast. An hour afterward, when she is ready she learns that breakfast
+is served.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Tell monsieur.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame, he is in the little parlor.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What a nice man he is,” she says, going up to Adolphe, and talking the
+babyish, caressing language of the honey-moon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What for, pray?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Why, to let his little Liline ride the horsey.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+OBSERVATION. During the honey-moon, some few married couples,—very young
+ones,—make use of languages, which, in ancient days, Aristotle classified and
+defined. (See his Pedagogy.) Thus they are perpetually using such terminations
+as <i>lala</i>, <i>nana</i>, <i>coachy-poachy</i>, just as mothers and nurses
+use them to babies. This is one of the secret reasons, discussed and recognized
+in big quartos by the Germans, which determined the Cabires, the creators of
+the Greek mythology, to represent Love as a child. There are other reasons very
+well known to women, the principal of which is, that, in their opinion, love in
+men is always <i>small</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where did you get that idea, my sweet? You must have dreamed it!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“What!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already
+considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says not a
+word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of their gaze,
+Adolphe turns half way round toward the dining-room; but he asks himself
+whether it would not be well to let Caroline take one lesson, and to tip the
+wink to the riding-master, to disgust her with equestrianism by the harshness
+of his style of instruction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is nothing so terrible as an actress who reckons upon a success, and who
+<i>fait four</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the language of the stage, to <i>faire four</i> is to play to a wretchedly
+thin house, or to obtain not the slightest applause. It is taking great pains
+for nothing, in short a <i>signal failure</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This petty trouble—it is very petty—is reproduced in a thousand ways in married
+life, when the honey-moon is over, and when the wife has no personal fortune.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In spite of the author’s repugnance to inserting anecdotes in an exclusively
+aphoristic work, the tissue of which will bear nothing but the most delicate
+and subtle observations,—from the nature of the subject at least,—it seems to
+him necessary to illustrate this page by an incident narrated by one of our
+first physicians. This repetition of the subject involves a rule of conduct
+very much in use with the doctors of Paris.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A certain husband was in our Adolphe’s situation. His Caroline, having once
+made a signal failure, was determined to conquer, for Caroline often does
+conquer! (See <i>The Physiology of Marriage</i>, Meditation XXVI, Paragraph
+<i>Nerves</i>.) She had been lying about on the sofas for two months, getting
+up at noon, taking no part in the amusements of the city. She would not go to
+the theatre,—oh, the disgusting atmosphere!—the lights, above all, the lights!
+Then the bustle, coming out, going in, the music,—it might be fatal, it’s so
+terribly exciting!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would not go on excursions to the country, oh, certainly it was her desire
+to do so!—but she would like (desiderata) a carriage of her own, horses of her
+own—her husband would not give her an equipage. And as to going in hacks, in
+hired conveyances, the bare thought gave her a rising at the stomach!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She would not have any cooking—the smell of the meats produced a sudden nausea.
+She drank innumerable drugs that her maid never saw her take.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In short, she expended large amounts of time and money in attitudes,
+privations, effects, pearl-white to give her the pallor of a corpse, machinery,
+and the like, precisely as when the manager of a theatre spreads rumors about a
+piece gotten up in a style of Oriental magnificence, without regard to expense!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This couple had got so far as to believe that even a journey to the springs, to
+Ems, to Hombourg, to Carlsbad, would hardly cure the invalid: but madame would
+not budge, unless she could go in her own carriage. Always that carriage!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe held out, and would not yield.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline, who was a woman of great sagacity, admitted that her husband was
+right.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Adolphe is right,” she said to her friends, “it is I who am unreasonable: he
+can not, he ought not, have a carriage yet: men know better than we do the
+situation of their business.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At times Adolphe was perfectly furious! Women have ways about them that demand
+the justice of Tophet itself. Finally, during the third month, he met one of
+his school friends, a lieutenant in the corps of physicians, modest as all
+young doctors are: he had had his epaulettes one day only, and could give the
+order to fire!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“For a young woman, a young doctor,” said our Adolphe to himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he proposed to the future Bianchon to visit his wife and tell him the truth
+about her condition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My dear, it is time that you should have a physician,” said Adolphe that
+evening to his wife, “and here is the best for a pretty woman.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The novice makes a conscientious examination, questions madame, feels her pulse
+discreetly, inquires into the slightest symptoms, and, at the end, while
+conversing, allows a smile, an expression, which, if not ironical, are
+extremely incredulous, to play involuntarily upon his lips, and his lips are
+quite in sympathy with his eyes. He prescribes some insignificant remedy, and
+insists upon its importance, promising to call again to observe its effect. In
+the ante-chamber, thinking himself alone with his school-mate, he indulges in
+an inexpressible shrug of the shoulders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“There’s nothing the matter with your wife, my boy,” he says: “she is trifling
+with both you and me.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Well, I thought so.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But if she continues the joke, she will make herself sick in earnest: I am too
+sincerely your friend to enter into such a speculation, for I am determined
+that there shall be an honest man beneath the physician, in me—”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My wife wants a carriage.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As in the <i>Solo on the Hearse</i>, this Caroline listened at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even at the present day, the young doctor is obliged to clear his path of the
+calumnies which this charming woman is continually throwing into it: and for
+the sake of a quiet life, he has been obliged to confess his little error—a
+young man’s error—and to mention his enemy by name, in order to close her lips.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE CHESTNUTS IN THE FIRE.</h3>
+
+<p>
+No one can tell how many shades and gradations there are in misfortune, for
+everything depends upon the character of the individual, upon the force of the
+imagination, upon the strength of the nerves. If it is impossible to catch
+these so variable shades, we may at least point out the most striking colors,
+and the principal attendant incidents. The author has therefore reserved this
+petty trouble for the last, for it is the only one that is at once comic and
+disastrous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The author flatters himself that he has mentioned the principal examples. Thus,
+women who have arrived safely at the haven, the happy age of forty, the period
+when they are delivered from scandal, calumny, suspicion, when their liberty
+begins: these women will certainly do him the justice to state that all the
+critical situations of a family are pointed out or represented in this book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline has her Chaumontel’s affair. She has learned how to induce Adolphe to
+go out unexpectedly, and has an understanding with Madame de Fischtaminel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In every household, within a given time, ladies like Madame de Fischtaminel
+become Caroline’s main resource.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline pets Madame de Fischtaminel with all the tenderness that the African
+army is now bestowing upon Abd-el-Kader: she is as solicitous in her behalf as
+a physician is anxious to avoid curing a rich hypochondriac. Between the two,
+Caroline and Madame de Fischtaminel invent occupations for dear Adolphe, when
+neither of them desire the presence of that demigod among their penates. Madame
+de Fischtaminel and Caroline, who have become, through the efforts of Madame
+Foullepointe, the best friends in the world, have even gone so far as to learn
+and employ that feminine free-masonry, the rites of which cannot be made
+familiar by any possible initiation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Caroline writes the following little note to Madame de Fischtaminel:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Dearest Angel:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“You will probably see Adolphe to-morrow, but do not keep him too long, for I
+want to go to ride with him at five: but if you are desirous of taking him to
+ride yourself, do so and I will take him up. You ought to teach me your secret
+for entertaining used-up people as you do.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Madame de Fischtaminel says to herself: “Gracious! So I shall have that fellow
+on my hands to-morrow from twelve o’clock to five.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Axiom.—Men do not always know a woman’s positive request when they see it; but
+another woman never mistakes it: she does the contrary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those sweet little beings called women, and especially Parisian women, are the
+prettiest jewels that social industry has invented. Those who do not adore
+them, those who do not feel a constant jubilation at seeing them laying their
+plots while braiding their hair, creating special idioms for themselves and
+constructing with their slender fingers machines strong enough to destroy the
+most powerful fortunes, must be wanting in a positive sense.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On one occasion Caroline takes the most minute precautions. She writes the day
+before to Madame Foullepointe to go to St. Maur with Adolphe, to look at a
+piece of property for sale there. Adolphe would go to breakfast with her. She
+aids Adolphe in dressing. She twits him with the care he bestows upon his
+toilet, and asks absurd questions about Madame Foullepointe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“She’s real nice, and I think she is quite tired of Charles: you’ll inscribe
+her yet upon your catalogue, you old Don Juan: but you won’t have any further
+need of Chaumontel’s affair; I’m no longer jealous, you’ve got a passport. Do
+you like that better than being adored? Monster, observe how considerate I am.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So soon as her husband has gone, Caroline, who had not omitted, the previous
+evening, to write to Ferdinand to come to breakfast with her, equips herself in
+a costume which, in that charming eighteenth century so calumniated by
+republicans, humanitarians and idiots, women of quality called their
+fighting-dress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline has taken care of everything. Love is the first house servant in the
+world, so the table is set with positively diabolic coquetry. There is the
+white damask cloth, the little blue service, the silver gilt urn, the chiseled
+milk pitcher, and flowers all round!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If it is winter, she has got some grapes, and has rummaged the cellar for the
+very best old wine. The rolls are from the most famous baker’s. The succulent
+dishes, the <i>pate de foie gras</i>, the whole of this elegant entertainment,
+would have made the author of the Glutton’s Almanac neigh with impatience: it
+would make a note-shaver smile, and tell a professor of the old University what
+the matter in hand is.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Everything is prepared. Caroline has been ready since the night before: she
+contemplates her work. Justine sighs and arranges the furniture. Caroline picks
+off the yellow leaves of the plants in the windows. A woman, in these cases,
+disguises what we may call the prancings of the heart, by those meaningless
+occupations in which the fingers have all the grip of pincers, when the pink
+nails burn, and when this unspoken exclamation rasps the throat: “He hasn’t
+come yet!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What a blow is this announcement by Justine: “Madame, here’s a letter!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A letter in place of Ferdinand! How does she ever open it? What ages of life
+slip by as she unfolds it! Women know this by experience! As to men, when they
+are in such maddening passes, they murder their shirt-frills.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Justine, Monsieur Ferdinand is ill!” exclaims Caroline. “Send for a carriage.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Justine goes down stairs, Adolphe comes up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“My poor mistress!” observes Justine. “I guess she won’t want the carriage
+now.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Oh my! Where have you come from?” cries Caroline, on seeing Adolphe standing
+in ecstasy before her voluptuous breakfast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe, whose wife long since gave up treating <i>him</i> to such charming
+banquets, does not answer. But he guesses what it all means, as he sees the
+cloth inscribed with the delightful ideas which Madame de Fischtaminel or the
+syndic of Chaumontel’s affair have often inscribed for him upon tables quite as
+elegant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Whom are you expecting?” he asks in his turn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Who could it be, except Ferdinand?” replies Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“And is he keeping you waiting?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He is sick, poor fellow.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A quizzical idea enters Adolphe’s head, and he replies, winking with one eye
+only: “I have just seen him.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Where?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“In front of the Cafe de Paris, with some friends.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“But why have you come back?” says Caroline, trying to conceal her murderous
+fury.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“Madame Foullepointe, who was tired of Charles, you said, has been with him at
+Ville d’Avray since yesterday.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe sits down, saying: “This has happened very appropriately, for I’m as
+hungry as two bears.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline sits down, too, and looks at Adolphe stealthily: she weeps internally:
+but she very soon asks, in a tone of voice that she manages to render
+indifferent, “Who was Ferdinand with?”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“With some fellows who lead him into bad company. The young man is getting
+spoiled: he goes to Madame Schontz’s. You ought to write to your uncle. It was
+probably some breakfast or other, the result of a bet made at M’lle Malaga’s.”
+He looks slyly at Caroline, who drops her eyes to conceal her tears. “How
+beautiful you have made yourself this morning,” Adolphe resumes. “Ah, you are a
+fair match for your breakfast. I don’t think Ferdinand will make as good a meal
+as I shall,” etc., etc.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe manages the joke so cleverly that he inspires his wife with the idea of
+punishing Ferdinand. Adolphe, who claims to be as hungry as two bears, causes
+Caroline to forget that a carriage waits for her at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The female that tends the gate at the house Ferdinand lives in, arrives at
+about two o’clock, while Adolphe is asleep on a sofa. That Iris of bachelors
+comes to say to Caroline that Monsieur Ferdinand is very much in need of some
+one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He’s drunk, I suppose,” says Caroline in a rage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+“He fought a duel this morning, madame.”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline swoons, gets up and rushes to Ferdinand, wishing Adolphe at the bottom
+of the sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When women are the victims of these little inventions, which are quite as
+adroit as their own, they are sure to exclaim, “What abominable monsters men
+are!”
+</p>
+
+<h3>ULTIMA RATIO.</h3>
+
+<p>
+We have come to our last observation. Doubtless this work is beginning to tire
+you quite as much as its subject does, if you are married.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This work, which, according to the author, is to the <i>Physiology of
+Marriage</i> what Fact is to Theory, or History to Philosophy, has its logic,
+as life, viewed as a whole, has its logic, also.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This logic—fatal, terrible—is as follows. At the close of the first part of the
+book—a book filled with serious pleasantry—Adolphe has reached, as you must
+have noticed, a point of complete indifference in matrimonial matters.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He has read novels in which the writers advise troublesome husbands to embark
+for the other world, or to live in peace with the fathers of their children, to
+pet and adore them: for if literature is the reflection of manners, we must
+admit that our manners recognize the defects pointed out by the <i>Physiology
+of Marriage</i> in this fundamental institution. More than one great genius has
+dealt this social basis terrible blows, without shaking it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Adolphe has especially read his wife too closely, and disguises his
+indifference by this profound word: indulgence. He is indulgent with Caroline,
+he sees in her nothing but the mother of his children, a good companion, a sure
+friend, a brother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the petty troubles of the wife cease, Caroline, who is more clever than
+her husband, has come to profit by this advantageous indulgence: but she does
+not give her dear Adolphe up. It is woman’s nature never to yield any of her
+rights. DIEU ET MON DROIT—CONJUGAL! is, as is well known, the motto of England,
+and is especially so to-day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Women have such a love of domination that we will relate an anecdote, not ten
+years old, in point. It is a very young anecdote.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One of the grand dignitaries of the Chamber of Peers had a Caroline, as lax as
+Carolines usually are. The name is an auspicious one for women. This dignitary,
+extremely old at the time, was on one side of the fireplace, and Caroline on
+the other. Caroline was hard upon the lustrum when women no longer tell their
+age. A friend came in to inform them of the marriage of a general who had
+lately been intimate in their house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline at once had a fit of despair, with genuine tears; she screamed and
+made the grand dignitary’s head ache to such a degree, that he tried to console
+her. In the midst of his condolences, the count forgot himself so far as to
+say—“What can you expect, my dear, he really could not marry you!”
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And this was one of the highest functionaries of the state, but a friend of
+Louis XVIII, and necessarily a little bit Pompadour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole difference, then, between the situation of Adolphe and that of
+Caroline, consists in this: though he no longer cares about her, she retains
+the right to care about him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, let us listen to “What <i>they</i> say,” the theme of the concluding
+chapter of this work.
+</p>
+
+<h3>COMMENTARY.</h3>
+
+<h5>IN WHICH IS EXPLAINED LA FELICITA OF FINALES.</h5>
+
+<p>
+Who has not heard an Italian opera in the course of his life? You must then
+have noticed the musical abuse of the word <i>felicita</i>, so lavishly used by
+the librettist and the chorus at the moment when everybody is deserting his box
+or leaving the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Frightful image of life. We quit it just when we hear <i>la felicita</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Have you reflected upon the profound truth conveyed by this finale, at the
+instant when the composer delivers his last note and the author his last line,
+when the orchestra gives the last pull at the fiddle-bow and the last puff at
+the bassoon, when the principal singers say “Let’s go to supper!” and the
+chorus people exclaim “How lucky, it doesn’t rain!” Well, in every condition in
+life, as in an Italian opera, there comes a time when the joke is over, when
+the trick is done, when people must make up their minds to one thing or the
+other, when everybody is singing his own <i>felicita</i> for himself. After
+having gone through with all the duos, the solos, the stretti, the codas, the
+concerted pieces, the duettos, the nocturnes, the phases which these few
+scenes, chosen from the ocean of married life, exhibit you, and which are
+themes whose variations have doubtless been divined by persons with brains as
+well as by the shallow—for so far as suffering is concerned, we are all
+equal—the greater part of Parisian households reach, without a given time, the
+following final chorus:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE WIFE, <i>to a young woman in the conjugal Indian Summer</i>. My dear, I am
+the happiest woman in the world. Adolphe is the model of husbands, kind,
+obliging, not a bit of a tease. Isn’t he, Ferdinand?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Caroline addresses Adolphe’s cousin, a young man with a nice cravat, glistening
+hair and patent leather boots: his coat is cut in the most elegant fashion: he
+has a crush hat, kid gloves, something very choice in the way of a waistcoat,
+the very best style of moustaches, whiskers, and a goatee a la Mazarin; he is
+also endowed with a profound, mute, attentive admiration of Caroline.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FERDINAND. Adolphe is happy to have a wife like you! What does he want?
+Nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE WIFE. In the beginning, we were always vexing each other: but now we get
+along marvelously. Adolphe no longer does anything but what he likes, he never
+puts himself out: I never ask him where he is going nor what he has seen.
+Indulgence, my dear, is the great secret of happiness. You, doubtless, are
+still in the period of petty troubles, causeless jealousies, cross-purposes,
+and all sorts of little botherations. What is the good of all this? We women
+have but a short life, at the best. How much? Ten good years! Why should we
+fill them with vexation? I was like you. But, one fine morning, I made the
+acquaintance of Madame de Fischtaminel, a charming woman, who taught me how to
+make a husband happy. Since then, Adolphe has changed radically; he has become
+perfectly delightful. He is the first to say to me, with anxiety, with alarm,
+even, when I am going to the theatre, and he and I are still alone at seven
+o’clock: “Ferdinand is coming for you, isn’t he?” Doesn’t he, Ferdinand?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+FERDINAND. We are the best cousins in the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE INDIAN SUMMER WIFE, <i>very much affected</i>. Shall I ever come to that?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE HUSBAND, <i>on the Italian Boulevard</i>. My dear boy [he has button-holed
+Monsieur de Fischtaminel], you still believe that marriage is based upon
+passion. Let me tell you that the best way, in conjugal life, is to have a
+plenary indulgence, one for the other, on condition that appearances be
+preserved. I am the happiest husband in the world. Caroline is a devoted
+friend, she would sacrifice everything for me, even my cousin Ferdinand, if it
+were necessary: oh, you may laugh, but she is ready to do anything. You
+entangle yourself in your laughable ideas of dignity, honor, virtue, social
+order. We can’t have our life over again, so we must cram it full of pleasure.
+Not the smallest bitter word has been exchanged between Caroline and me for two
+years past. I have, in Caroline, a friend to whom I can tell everything, and
+who would be amply able to console me in a great emergency. There is not the
+slightest deceit between us, and we know perfectly well what the state of
+things is. We have thus changed our duties into pleasures. We are often
+happier, thus, than in that insipid season called the honey-moon. She says to
+me, sometimes, “I’m out of humor, go away.” The storm then falls upon my
+cousin. Caroline never puts on her airs of a victim, now, but speaks in the
+kindest manner of me to the whole world. In short, she is happy in my
+pleasures. And as she is a scrupulously honest woman, she is conscientious to
+the last degree in her use of our fortune. My house is well kept. My wife
+leaves me the right to dispose of my reserve without the slightest control on
+her part. That’s the way of it. We have oiled our wheels and cogs, while you,
+my dear Fischtaminel, have put gravel in yours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+CHORUS, <i>in a parlor during a ball</i>. Madame Caroline is a charming woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A WOMAN IN A TURBAN. Yes, she is very proper, very dignified.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A WOMAN WHO HAS SEVEN CHILDREN. Ah! she learned early how to manage her
+husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ONE OF FERDINAND’S FRIENDS. But she loves her husband exceedingly. Besides,
+Adolphe is a man of great distinction and experience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+ONE OF MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL’S FRIENDS. He adores his wife. There’s no fuss at
+their house, everybody is at home there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+MONSIEUR FOULLEPOINTE. Yes, it’s a very agreeable house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A WOMAN ABOUT WHOM THERE IS A GOOD DEAL OF SCANDAL. Caroline is kind and
+obliging, and never talks scandal of anybody.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A YOUNG LADY, <i>returning to her place after a dance</i>. Don’t you remember
+how tiresome she was when she visited the Deschars?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL. Oh! She and her husband were two bundles of
+briars—continually quarreling. [She goes away.]
+</p>
+
+<p>
+AN ARTIST. I hear that the individual known as Deschars is getting dissipated:
+he goes round town—
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A WOMAN, <i>alarmed at the turn the conversation is taking, as her daughter can
+hear</i>. Madame de Fischtaminel is charming, this evening.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A WOMAN OF FORTY, <i>without employment</i>. Monsieur Adolphe appears to be as
+happy as his wife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A YOUNG LADY. Oh! what a sweet man Monsieur Ferdinand is! [Her mother reproves
+her by a sharp nudge with her foot.] What’s the matter, mamma?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+HER MOTHER, <i>looking at her fixedly</i>. A young woman should not speak so,
+my dear, of any one but her betrothed, and Monsieur Ferdinand is not a marrying
+man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A LADY DRESSED RATHER LOW IN THE NECK, <i>to another lady dressed equally low,
+in a whisper</i>. The fact is, my dear, the moral of all this is that there are
+no happy couples but couples of four.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A FRIEND, <i>whom the author was so imprudent as to consult</i>. Those last
+words are false.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE AUTHOR. Do you think so?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE FRIEND, <i>who has just been married</i>. You all of you use your ink in
+depreciating social life, on the pretext of enlightening us! Why, there are
+couples a hundred, a thousand times happier than your boasted couples of four.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE AUTHOR. Well, shall I deceive the marrying class of the population, and
+scratch the passage out?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE FRIEND. No, it will be taken merely as the point of a song in a vaudeville.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE AUTHOR. Yes, a method of passing truths off upon society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE FRIEND, <i>who sticks to his opinion</i>. Such truths as are destined to be
+passed off upon it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE AUTHOR, <i>who wants to have the last word</i>. Who and what is there that
+does not pass off, or become passe? When your wife is twenty years older, we
+will resume this conversation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+THE FRIEND. You revenge yourself cruelly for your inability to write the
+history of happy homes.
+</p>
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANALYTICAL STUDIES ***</div>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #16206 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16206)
diff --git a/old/16206.txt b/old/16206.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Analytical Studies, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere 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
+
+
+Title: Analytical Studies
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: July 4, 2005 [EBook #16206]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANALYTICAL STUDIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers
+
+
+
+
+
+                         ANALYTICAL STUDIES
+
+                                  BY
+
+                           HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+
+                              DEDICATION
+
+  Notice the words: _The man of distinction to whom this book is
+  dedicated_. Need I say: "You are that man."--THE AUTHOR.
+
+  The woman who may be induced by the title of this book to open it,
+  can save herself the trouble; she has already read the work
+  without knowing it. A man, however malicious he may possibly be,
+  can never say about a woman as much good or as much evil as they
+  themselves think. If, in spite of this notice, a woman will
+  persist in reading the volume, she ought to be prevented by
+  delicacy from despising the author, from the very moment that he,
+  forfeiting the praise which most artists welcome, has in a certain
+  way engraved on the title page of his book the prudent inscription
+  written on the portal of certain establishments: _Ladies must not
+  enter_.
+
+
+
+
+
+                              CONTENTS
+
+INTRODUCTION
+THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE
+PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+
+
+
+
+                            INTRODUCTION
+
+The two Analytical Studies, _Physiology of Marriage_ and _Petty
+Troubles of Married Life_, belong quite apart from the action of the
+_Comedie Humaine_, and can only be included therein by virtue of a
+special dispensation on the part of their author, who made for them an
+eighth division therein, thus giving them a local habitation and a
+name. Although they come far down in the list of titles, their
+creation belongs almost to the formative era. Balzac had just shaken
+his skirts clear of the immature dust of the _Oeuvres de Jeunesse_,
+and by the publication, in 1829, of _The Chouans_, had made his first
+real bow to his larger public. In December of that same year appeared
+the _Physiology of Marriage_, followed eleven months later by a few
+papers belonging to _Petty Troubles of Married Life_. Meanwhile,
+between these two Analytical Studies, came a remarkable novelette, _At
+the Sign of the Cat and Racket_, followed soon after by one of the
+most famous stories of the entire _Comedie_, _The Magic Skin_.
+
+We are thus particular to place the two Analytical Studies in time and
+in environment, that the wonderful versatility of the author may
+become apparent--and more: that Balzac may be vindicated from the
+charge of dullness and inaccuracy at this period. Such traits might
+have been charged against him had he left only the Analytical Studies.
+But when they are preceded by the faithful though heavy scene of
+military life, and succeeded by the searching and vivid philosophical
+study, their faults and failures may be considered for the sake of
+their company.
+
+It is hard to determine Balzac's full purpose in including the
+Analytical Studies in the _Comedie_. They are not novels. The few,
+lightly-sketched characters are not connected with those of the
+_Comedie_, save in one or two remote instances. They must have been
+included in order to make one more room in the gigantic mansion which
+the author had planned. His seventh sense of subdivision saw here
+fresh material to classify. And so these grim, almost sardonic essays
+were placed where they now appear.
+
+In all kindness, the Balzac novitiate is warned against beginning an
+acquaintance with the author through the medium of the Analytical
+Studies. He would be almost certain to misjudge Balzac's attitude, and
+might even be tempted to forsake his further cultivation. The mistake
+would be serious for the reader and unjust to the author. These
+studies are chiefly valuable as outlining a peculiar--and, shall we
+say, forced?--mood that sought expression in an isolated channel. All
+his life long, Balzac found time for miscellaneous writings
+--critiques, letters, reviews, essays, political diatribes and
+sketches. In early life they were his "pot-boilers," and he never
+ceased writing them, probably urged partly by continued need of money,
+partly through fondness for this sort of thing. His _Physiology_ is
+fairly representative of the material, being analysis in satirical
+vein of sundry foibles of society. This class of composition was very
+popular in the time of Louis Philippe.
+
+The _Physiology of Marriage_ is couched in a spirit of
+pseudo-seriousness that leaves one in doubt as to Balzac's faith with
+the reader. At times he seems honestly to be trying to analyze a
+particular phase of his subject; at other times he appears to be
+ridiculing the whole institution of marriage. If this be not the case,
+then he would seem unfitted for his task--through the ignorance of a
+bachelor--and adds to error the element of slander. He is at fault
+through lack of intimate experience. And yet the flashes of keen
+penetration preclude such a charge as this. A few bold touches of his
+pen, and a picture is drawn which glows with convincing reality. While
+here and there occur paragraphs of powerful description or searching
+philosophy which proclaim Balzac the mature, Balzac the observant.
+
+On the publication of _Petty Troubles of Married Life_ in _La Presse_,
+the publishers of that periodical had this to say: "M. de Balzac has
+already produced, as you know, the _Physiology of Marriage_, a book
+full of diabolical ingenuity and an analysis of society that would
+drive to despair Leuwenhoech and Swammerdam, who beheld the entire
+universe in a drop of water. This inexhaustible subject has again
+inspired an entertaining book full of Gallic malice and English humor,
+where Rabelais and Sterne meet and greet him at the same moment."
+
+In _Petty Troubles_ we have the sardonic vein fully developed. The
+whole edifice of romance seems but a card house, and all virtue merely
+a question of utility. We must not err, however, in taking sentiments
+at their apparent value, for the real Balzac lies deeper; and here and
+there a glimpse of his true spirit and greater power becomes apparent.
+The bitter satire yields place to a vein of feeling true and fine, and
+gleaming like rich gold amid baser metal. Note "Another Glimpse of
+Adolphus" with its splendid vein of reverie and quiet inspiration to
+higher living. It is touches like this which save the book and reveal
+the author.
+
+_Petty Troubles of Married Life_ is a pendant or sequel to _Physiology
+of Marriage_. It is, as Balzac says, to the _Physiology_ "what Fact is
+to Theory, or History to Philosophy, and has its logic, as life,
+viewed as a whole, has its logic also." We must then say with the
+author, that "if literature is the reflection of manners, we must
+admit that our manners recognize the defects pointed out by the
+_Physiology of Marriage_ in this fundamental institution;" and we must
+concede for _Petty Troubles_ one of those "terrible blows dealt this
+social basis."
+
+The _Physiologie du Mariage, ou Meditations de philosophie eclectique
+sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal_ is dated at Paris, 1824-29. It
+first appeared anonymously, December, 1829, dated 1830, from the press
+of Charles Gosselin and Urbain Canel, in two octavo volumes with its
+present introduction and a note of correction now omitted. Its next
+appearance was signed, in 1834, in a two-volume edition of Ollivier.
+In 1846 it was entered, with its dedication to the reader, in the
+first edition of _Etudes Analytiques_--the first edition also of the
+_Comedie Humaine_--as Volume XVI. All the subsequent editions have
+retained the original small division heads, called Meditations.
+
+_Petites Miseres de la Vie Conjugale_ is not dated. Its composition
+was achieved piecemeal, beginning shortly after its predecessor
+appeared. But it was not till long after--in 1845-46--that its present
+two-part form was published in a single octavo volume by Chlendowski.
+A break had ensued between the first and second parts, the latter
+having appeared practically in full in _La Presse_ of December, 1845.
+The sub-headings have remained unchanged since the original printing.
+
+                                               J. WALKER MCSPADDEN.
+
+
+
+
+
+                     THE PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE;
+                                 OR,
+     THE MUSINGS OF AN ECLECTIC PHILOSOPHER ON THE HAPPINESS AND
+                     UNHAPPINESS OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                             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 them over and over again you will
+admit them, in order to be delivered from the discussion. Thus the
+power of the rattle will prove to you:
+
+That you are very fortunate to have such an excellent wife;
+
+That she has done you too much honor in marrying you;
+
+That women often see clearer than men;
+
+That you ought to take the advice of your wife in everything, and
+almost always ought to follow it;
+
+That you ought to respect the mother of your children, to honor her
+and have confidence in her;
+
+That the best way to escape being deceived, is to rely upon a wife's
+refinement, for according to certain old ideas which we have had the
+weakness to give credit, it is impossible for a man to prevent his
+wife from minotaurizing him;
+
+That a lawful wife is a man's best friend;
+
+That a woman is mistress in her own house and queen in her
+drawing-room, etc.
+
+Those who wish to oppose a firm resistance to a woman's conquest,
+effected by means of her dignity over man's power, fall into the
+category of the predestined.
+
+At first, quarrels arise which in the eye of wives give an air of
+tyranny to husbands. The tyranny of a husband is always a terrible
+excuse for inconsistency in a wife. Then, in their frivolous
+discussions they are enabled to prove to their families and to ours,
+to everybody and to ourselves, that we are in the wrong. If, for the
+sake of peace, or from love, you acknowledge the pretended rights of
+women, you yield an advantage to your wife by which she will profit
+eternally. A husband, like a government, ought never to acknowledge a
+mistake. In case you do so, your power will be outflanked by the
+subtle artifices of feminine dignity; then all will be lost; from that
+moment she will advance from concession to concession until she has
+driven you from her bed.
+
+The woman being shrewd, intelligent, sarcastic and having leisure to
+meditate over an ironical phrase, can easily turn you into ridicule
+during a momentary clash of opinions. The day on which she turns you
+into ridicule, sees the end of your happiness. Your power has expired.
+A woman who has laughed at her husband cannot henceforth love him. A
+man should be, to the woman who is in love with him, a being full of
+power, of greatness, and always imposing. A family cannot exist
+without despotism. Think of that, ye nations!
+
+Now the difficult course which a man has to steer in presence of such
+serious incidents as these, is what we may call the _haute politique_
+of marriage, and is the subject of the second and third parts of our
+book. That breviary of marital Machiavelism will teach you the manner
+in which you may grow to greatness within that frivolous mind, within
+that soul of lacework, to use Napoleon's phrase. You may learn how a
+man may exhibit a soul of steel, may enter upon this little domestic
+war without ever yielding the empire of his will, and may do so
+without compromising his happiness. For if you exhibit any tendency to
+abdication, your wife will despise you, for the sole reason that she
+has discovered you to be destitute of mental vigor; you are no longer
+a _man_ to her.
+
+But we have not yet reached the point at which are to be developed
+those theories and principles, by means of which a man may unite
+elegance of manners with severity of measures; let it suffice us, for
+the moment, to point out the importance of impending events and let us
+pursue our theme.
+
+At this fatal epoch, you will see that she is adroitly setting up a
+right to go out alone.
+
+You were at one time her god, her idol. She has now reached that
+height of devotion at which it is permitted to see holes in the
+garments of the saints.
+
+"Oh, mon Dieu! My dear," said Madame de la Valliere to her husband,
+"how badly you wear your sword! M. de Richelieu has a way of making it
+hang straight at his side, which you ought to try to imitate; it is in
+much better taste."
+
+"My dear, you could not tell me in a more tactful manner that we have
+been married five months!" replied the Duke, whose repartee made his
+fortune in the reign of Louis XV.
+
+She will study your character in order to find weapons against you.
+Such a study, which love would hold in horror, reveals itself in the
+thousand little traps which she lays purposely to make you scold her;
+when a woman has no excuse for minotaurizing her husband she sets to
+work to make one.
+
+She will perhaps begin dinner without waiting for you.
+
+If you drive through the middle of the town, she will point out
+certain objects which escaped your notice; she will sing before you
+without feeling afraid; she will interrupt you, sometimes vouchsafe no
+reply to you, and will prove to you, in a thousand different ways,
+that she is enjoying at your side the use of all her faculties and
+exercising her private judgment.
+
+She will try to abolish entirely your influence in the management of
+the house and to become sole mistress of your fortune. At first this
+struggle will serve as a distraction for her soul, whether it be empty
+or in too violent commotion; next, she will find in your opposition a
+new motive for ridicule. Slang expressions will not fail her, and in
+France we are so quickly vanquished by the ironical smile of another!
+
+At other times headaches and nervous attacks make their appearance;
+but these symptoms furnish matter for a whole future Meditation. In
+the world she will speak of you without blushing, and will gaze at you
+with assurance. She will begin to blame your least actions because
+they are at variance with her ideas, or her secret intentions. She
+will take no care of what pertains to you, she will not even know
+whether you have all you need. You are no longer her paragon.
+
+In imitation of Louis XIV, who carried to his mistresses the bouquets
+of orange blossoms which the head gardener of Versailles put on his
+table every morning, M. de Vivonne used almost every day to give his
+wife choice flowers during the early period of his marriage. One
+morning he found the bouquet lying on the side table without having
+been placed, as usual, in a vase of water.
+
+"Oh! Oh!" said he, "if I am not a cuckold, I shall very soon be one."
+
+You go on a journey for eight days and you receive no letters, or you
+receive one, three pages of which are blank.--Symptom.
+
+You come home mounted on a valuable horse which you like very much,
+and between her kisses your wife shows her uneasiness about the horse
+and his fodder.--Symptom.
+
+To these features of the case, you will be able to add others. We
+shall endeavor in the present volume always to paint things in bold
+fresco style and leave the miniatures to you. According to the
+characters concerned, the indications which we are describing, veiled
+under the incidents of ordinary life, are of infinite variety. One man
+may discover a symptom in the way a shawl is put on, while another
+needs to receive a fillip to his intellect, in order to notice the
+indifference of his mate.
+
+Some fine spring morning, the day after a ball, or the eve of a
+country party, this situation reaches its last phase; your wife is
+listless and the happiness within her reach has no more attractions
+for her. Her mind, her imagination, perhaps her natural caprices call
+for a lover. Nevertheless, she dare not yet embark upon an intrigue
+whose consequences and details fill her with dread. You are still
+there for some purpose or other; you are a weight in the balance,
+although a very light one. On the other hand, the lover presents
+himself arrayed in all the graces of novelty and all the charms of
+mystery. The conflict which has arisen in the heart of your wife
+becomes, in presence of the enemy, more real and more full of peril
+than before. Very soon the more dangers and risks there are to be run,
+the more she burns to plunge into that delicious gulf of fear,
+enjoyment, anguish and delight. Her imagination kindles and sparkles,
+her future life rises before her eyes, colored with romantic and
+mysterious hues. Her soul discovers that existence has already taken
+its tone from this struggle which to a woman has so much solemnity in
+it. All is agitation, all is fire, all is commotion within her. She
+lives with three times as much intensity as before, and judges the
+future by the present. The little pleasure which you have lavished
+upon her bears witness against you; for she is not excited as much by
+the pleasures which she has received, as by those which she is yet to
+enjoy; does not imagination show her that her happiness will be keener
+with this lover, whom the laws deny her, than with you? And then, she
+finds enjoyment even in her terror and terror in her enjoyment. Then
+she falls in love with this imminent danger, this sword of Damocles
+hung over her head by you yourself, thus preferring the delirious
+agonies of such a passion, to that conjugal inanity which is worse to
+her than death, to that indifference which is less a sentiment than
+the absence of all sentiment.
+
+You, who must go to pay your respects to the Minister of Finance, to
+write memorandums at the bank, to make your reports at the Bourse, or
+to speak in the Chamber; you, young men, who have repeated with many
+others in our first Meditation the oath that you will defend your
+happiness in defending your wife, what can you oppose to these desires
+of hers which are so natural? For, with these creatures of fire, to
+live is to feel; the moment they cease to experience emotion they are
+dead. The law in virtue of which you take your position produces in
+her this involuntary act of minotaurism. "There is one sequel," said
+D'Alembert, "to the laws of movement." Well, then, where are your
+means of defence?-- Where, indeed?
+
+Alas! if your wife has not yet kissed the apple of the Serpent, the
+Serpent stands before her; you sleep, we are awake, and our book
+begins.
+
+Without inquiring how many husbands, among the five hundred thousand
+which this book concerns, will be left with the predestined; how many
+have contracted unfortunate marriages; how many have made a bad
+beginning with their wives; and without wishing to ask if there be
+many or few of this numerous band who can satisfy the conditions
+required for struggling against the danger which is impending, we
+intend to expound in the second and third part of this work the
+methods of fighting the Minotaur and keeping intact the virtue of
+wives. But if fate, the devil, the celibate, opportunity, desire your
+ruin, in recognizing the progress of all intrigues, in joining in the
+battles which are fought by every home, you will possibly be able to
+find some consolation. Many people have such a happy disposition, that
+on showing to them the condition of things and explaining to them the
+why and the wherefore, they scratch their foreheads, rub their hands,
+stamp on the ground, and are satisfied.
+
+
+
+                            MEDITATION IX.
+
+                              EPILOGUE.
+
+Faithful to our promise, this first part has indicated the general
+causes which bring all marriages to the crises which we are about to
+describe; and, in tracing the steps of this conjugal preamble, we have
+also pointed out the way in which the catastrophe is to be avoided,
+for we have pointed out the errors by which it is brought about.
+
+But these first considerations would be incomplete if, after
+endeavoring to throw some light upon the inconsistency of our ideas,
+of our manners and of our laws, with regard to a question which
+concerns the life of almost all living beings, we did not endeavor to
+make plain, in a short peroration, the political causes of the
+infirmity which pervades all modern society. After having exposed the
+secret vices of marriage, would it not be an inquiry worthy of
+philosophers to search out the causes which have rendered it so
+vicious?
+
+The system of law and of manners which so far directs women and
+controls marriage in France, is the outcome of ancient beliefs and
+traditions which are no longer in accordance with the eternal
+principles of reason and of justice, brought to light by the great
+Revolution of 1789.
+
+Three great disturbances have agitated France; the conquest of the
+country by the Romans, the establishment of Christianity and the
+invasion of the Franks. Each of these events has left a deep impress
+upon the soil, upon the laws, upon the manners and upon the intellect
+of the nation.
+
+Greece having one foot on Europe and the other on Asia, was influenced
+by her voluptuous climate in the choice of her marriage institutions;
+she received them from the East, where her philosophers, her
+legislators and her poets went to study the abstruse antiquities of
+Egypt and Chaldea. The absolute seclusion of women which was
+necessitated under the burning sun of Asia prevailed under the laws of
+Greece and Ionia. The women remained in confinement within the marbles
+of the gyneceum. The country was reduced to the condition of a city,
+to a narrow territory, and the courtesans who were connected with art
+and religion by so many ties, were sufficient to satisfy the first
+passions of the young men, who were few in number, since their
+strength was elsewhere taken up in the violent exercises of that
+training which was demanded of them by the military system of those
+heroic times.
+
+At the beginning of her royal career Rome, having sent to Greece to
+seek such principles of legislation as might suit the sky of Italy,
+stamped upon the forehead of the married woman the brand of complete
+servitude. The senate understood the importance of virtue in a
+republic, hence the severity of manners in the excessive development
+of the marital and paternal power. The dependence of the woman on her
+husband is found inscribed on every code. The seclusion prescribed by
+the East becomes a duty, a moral obligation, a virtue. On these
+principles were raised temples to modesty and temples consecrated to
+the sanctity of marriage; hence, sprang the institution of censors,
+the law of dowries, the sumptuary laws, the respect for matrons and
+all the characteristics of the Roman law. Moreover, three acts of
+feminine violation either accomplished or attempted, produced three
+revolutions! And was it not a grand event, sanctioned by the decrees
+of the country, that these illustrious women should make their
+appearances on the political arena! Those noble Roman women, who were
+obliged to be either brides or mothers, passed their life in
+retirement engaged in educating the masters of the world. Rome had no
+courtesans because the youth of the city were engaged in eternal war.
+If, later on, dissoluteness appeared, it merely resulted from the
+despotism of emperors; and still the prejudices founded upon ancient
+manners were so influential that Rome never saw a woman on a stage.
+These facts are not put forth idly in scanning the history of marriage
+in France.
+
+After the conquest of Gaul, the Romans imposed their laws upon the
+conquered; but they were incapable of destroying both the profound
+respect which our ancestors entertained for women and the ancient
+superstitions which made women the immediate oracles of God. The Roman
+laws ended by prevailing, to the exclusion of all others, in this
+country once known as the "land of written law," or _Gallia togata_,
+and their ideas of marriage penetrated more or less into the "land of
+customs."
+
+But, during the conflict of laws with manners, the Franks invaded the
+Gauls and gave to the country the dear name of France. These warriors
+came from the North and brought the system of gallantry which had
+originated in their western regions, where the mingling of the sexes
+did not require in those icy climates the jealous precautions of the
+East. The women of that time elevated the privations of that kind of
+life by the exaltation of their sentiments. The drowsy minds of the
+day made necessary those varied forms of delicate solicitation, that
+versatility of address, the fancied repulse of coquetry, which belong
+to the system whose principles have been unfolded in our First Part,
+as admirably suited to the temperate clime of France.
+
+To the East, then, belong the passion and the delirium of passion, the
+long brown hair, the harem, the amorous divinities, the splendor, the
+poetry of love and the monuments of love.-- To the West, the liberty
+of wives, the sovereignty of their blond locks, gallantry, the fairy
+life of love, the secrecy of passion, the profound ecstasy of the
+soul, the sweet feelings of melancholy and the constancy of love.
+
+These two systems, starting from opposite points of the globe, have
+come into collision in France; in France, where one part of the
+country, Languedoc, was attracted by Oriental traditions, while the
+other, Languedoil, was the native land of a creed which attributes to
+woman a magical power. In the Languedoil, love necessitates mystery,
+in the Languedoc, to see is to love.
+
+At the height of this struggle came the triumphant entry of
+Christianity into France, and there it was preached by women, and
+there it consecrated the divinity of a woman who in the forests of
+Brittany, of Vendee and of Ardennes took, under the name of
+Notre-Dame, the place of more than one idol in the hollow of old
+Druidic oaks.
+
+If the religion of Christ, which is above all things a code of
+morality and politics, gave a soul to all living beings, proclaimed
+that equality of all in the sight of God, and by such principles as
+these fortified the chivalric sentiments of the North, this advantage
+was counterbalanced by the fact, that the sovereign pontiff resided at
+Rome, of which seat he considered himself the lawful heir, through the
+universality of the Latin tongue, which became that of Europe during
+the Middle Ages, and through the keen interest taken by monks, writers
+and lawyers in establishing the ascendency of certain codes,
+discovered by a soldier in the sack of Amalfi.
+
+These two principles of the servitude and the sovereignty of women
+retain possession of the ground, each of them defended by fresh
+arguments.
+
+The Salic law, which was a legal error, was a triumph for the
+principle of political and civil servitude for women, but it did not
+diminish the power which French manners accorded them, for the
+enthusiasm of chivalry which prevailed in Europe supplanted the party
+of manners against the party of law.
+
+And in this way was created that strange phenomenon which since that
+time has characterized both our national despotism and our
+legislation; for ever since those epochs which seemed to presage the
+Revolution, when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the
+history of the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions.
+Feudalism, the Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the
+monarchy and the aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so
+closely held the country within their clutches, that woman still
+remains the subject of strange counter-opinions, each springing from
+one of the three great movements to which we have referred. Was it
+possible that the woman question should be discussed and woman's
+political education and marriage should be ventilated when feudalism
+threatened the throne, when reform menaced both king and barons, and
+the people, between the hierarchy and the empire, were forgotten?
+According to a saying of Madame Necker, women, amid these great
+movements, were like the cotton wool put into a case of porcelain.
+They were counted for nothing, but without them everything would have
+been broken.
+
+A married woman, then, in France presents the spectacle of a queen out
+at service, of a slave, at once free and a prisoner; a collision
+between these two principles which frequently occurred, produced odd
+situations by the thousand. And then, woman was physically little
+understood, and what was actually sickness in her, was considered a
+prodigy, witchcraft or monstrous turpitude. In those days these
+creatures, treated by the law as reckless children, and put under
+guardianship, were by the manners of the time deified and adored. Like
+the freedmen of emperors, they disposed of crowns, they decided
+battles, they awarded fortunes, they inspired crimes and revolutions,
+wonderful acts of virtue, by the mere flash of their glances, and yet
+they possessed nothing and were not even possessors of themselves.
+They were equally fortunate and unfortunate. Armed with their weakness
+and strong in instinct, they launched out far beyond the sphere which
+the law allotted them, showing themselves omnipotent for evil, but
+impotent for good; without merit in the virtues that were imposed upon
+them, without excuse in their vices; accused of ignorance and yet
+denied an education; neither altogether mothers nor altogether wives.
+Having all the time to conceal their passions, while they fostered
+them, they submitted to the coquetry of the Franks, while they were
+obliged like Roman women, to stay within the ramparts of their castles
+and bring up those who were to be warriors. While no system was
+definitely decided upon by legislation as to the position of women,
+their minds were left to follow their inclinations, and there are
+found among them as many who resemble Marion Delorme as those who
+resemble Cornelia; there are vices among them, but there are as many
+virtues. These were creatures as incomplete as the laws which governed
+them; they were considered by some as a being midway between man and
+the lower animals, as a malignant beast which the laws could not too
+closely fetter, and which nature had destined, with so many other
+things, to serve the pleasure of men; while others held woman to be an
+angel in exile, a source of happiness and love, the only creature who
+responded to the highest feelings of man, while her miseries were to
+be recompensed by the idolatry of every heart. How could the
+consistency, which was wanting in a political system, be expected in
+the general manners of the nation?
+
+And so woman became what circumstances and men made her, instead of
+being what the climate and native institutions should have made her;
+sold, married against her taste, in accordance with the _Patria
+potestas_ of the Romans, at the same time that she fell under the
+marital despotism which desired her seclusion, she found herself
+tempted to take the only reprisals which were within her power. Then
+she became a dissolute creature, as soon as men ceased to be intently
+occupied in intestine war, for the same reason that she was a virtuous
+woman in the midst of civil disturbances. Every educated man can fill
+in this outline, for we seek from movements like these the lessons and
+not the poetic suggestion which they yield.
+
+The Revolution was too entirely occupied in breaking down and building
+up, had too many enemies, or followed perhaps too closely on the
+deplorable times witnessed under the regency and under Louis XV, to
+pay any attention to the position which women should occupy in the
+social order.
+
+The remarkable men who raised the immortal monument which our codes
+present were almost all old-fashioned students of law deeply imbued
+with a spirit of Roman jurisprudence; and moreover they were not the
+founders of any political institutions. Sons of the Revolution, they
+believed, in accordance with that movement, that the law of divorce
+wisely restricted and the bond of dutiful submission were sufficient
+ameliorations of the previous marriage law. When that former order of
+things was remembered, the change made by the new legislation seemed
+immense.
+
+At the present day the question as to which of these two principles
+shall triumph rests entirely in the hands of our wise legislators. The
+past has teaching which should bear fruit in the future. Have we lost
+all sense of the eloquence of fact?
+
+The principles of the East resulted in the existence of eunuchs and
+seraglios; the spurious social standing of France has brought in the
+plague of courtesans and the more deadly plague of our marriage
+system; and thus, to use the language of a contemporary, the East
+sacrifices to paternity men and the principle of justice; France,
+women and modesty. Neither the East nor France has attained the goal
+which their institutions point to; for that is happiness. The man is
+not more loved by the women of a harem than the husband is sure of
+being in France, as the father of his children; and marrying is not
+worth what it costs. It is time to offer no more sacrifice to this
+institution, and to amass a larger sum of happiness in the social
+state by making our manners and our institution conformable to our
+climate.
+
+Constitutional government, a happy mixture of two extreme political
+systems, despotism and democracy, suggests by the necessity of
+blending also the two principles of marriage, which so far clash
+together in France. The liberty which we boldly claim for young people
+is the only remedy for the host of evils whose source we have pointed
+out, by exposing the inconsistencies resulting from the bondage in
+which girls are kept. Let us give back to youth the indulgence of
+those passions, those coquetries, love and its terrors, love and its
+delights, and that fascinating company which followed the coming of
+the Franks. At this vernal season of life no fault is irreparable, and
+Hymen will come forth from the bosom of experiences, armed with
+confidence, stripped of hatred, and love in marriage will be
+justified, because it will have had the privilege of comparison.
+
+In this change of manners the disgraceful plague of public
+prostitution will perish of itself. It is especially at the time when
+the man possesses the frankness and timidity of adolescence, that in
+his pursuit of happiness he is competent to meet and struggle with
+great and genuine passions of the heart. The soul is happy in making
+great efforts of whatever kind; provided that it can act, that it can
+stir and move, it makes little difference, even though it exercise its
+power against itself. In this observation, the truth of which
+everybody can see, there may be found one secret of successful
+legislation, of tranquillity and happiness. And then, the pursuit of
+learning has now become so highly developed that the most tempestuous
+of our coming Mirabeaus can consume his energy either in the
+indulgence of a passion or the study of a science. How many young
+people have been saved from debauchery by self-chosen labors or the
+persistent obstacles put in the way of a first love, a love that was
+pure! And what young girl does not desire to prolong the delightful
+childhood of sentiment, is not proud to have her nature known, and has
+not felt the secret tremblings of timidity, the modesty of her secret
+communings with herself, and wished to oppose them to the young
+desires of a lover inexperienced as herself! The gallantry of the
+Franks and the pleasures which attend it should then be the portion of
+youth, and then would naturally result a union of soul, of mind, of
+character, of habits, of temperament and of fortune, such as would
+produce the happy equilibrium necessary for the felicity of the
+married couple. This system would rest upon foundations wider and
+freer, if girls were subjected to a carefully calculated system of
+disinheritance; or if, in order to force men to choose only those who
+promised happiness by their virtues, their character or their talents,
+they married as in the United States without dowry.
+
+In that case, the system adopted by the Romans could advantageously be
+applied to the married women who when they were girls used their
+liberty. Being exclusively engaged in the early education of their
+children, which is the most important of all maternal obligations,
+occupied in creating and maintaining the happiness of the household,
+so admirably described in the fourth book of _Julie_, they would be in
+their houses like the women of ancient Rome, living images of
+Providence, which reigns over all, and yet is nowhere visible. In this
+case, the laws covering the infidelity of the wife should be extremely
+severe. They should make the penalty disgrace, rather than inflict
+painful or coercive sentences. France has witnessed the spectacle of
+women riding asses for the pretended crime of magic, and many an
+innocent woman has died of shame. In this may be found the secret of
+future marriage legislation. The young girls of Miletus delivered
+themselves from marriage by voluntary death; the senate condemned the
+suicides to be dragged naked on a hurdle, and the other virgins
+condemned themselves for life.
+
+Women and marriage will never be respected until we have that radical
+change in manners which we are now begging for. This profound thought
+is the ruling principle in the two finest productions of an immortal
+genius. _Emile_ and _La Nouvelle Heloise_ are nothing more than two
+eloquent pleas for the system. The voice there raised will resound
+through the ages, because it points to the real motives of true
+legislation, and the manners which will prevail in the future. By
+placing children at the breast of their mothers, Jean-Jacques rendered
+an immense service to the cause of virtue; but his age was too deeply
+gangrened with abuses to understand the lofty lessons unfolded in
+those two poems; it is right to add also that the philosopher was in
+these works overmastered by the poet, and in leaving in the heart of
+_Julie_ after her marriage some vestiges of her first love, he was led
+astray by the attractiveness of a poetic situation, more touching
+indeed, but less useful than the truth which he wished to display.
+
+Nevertheless, if marriage in France is an unlimited contract to which
+men agree with a silent understanding that they may thus give more
+relish to passion, more curiosity, more mystery to love, more
+fascination to women; if a woman is rather an ornament to the
+drawing-room, a fashion-plate, a portmanteau, than a being whose
+functions in the order politic are an essential part of the country's
+prosperity and the nation's glory, a creature whose endeavors in life
+vie in utility with those of men--I admit that all the above theory,
+all these long considerations sink into nothingness at the prospect of
+such an important destiny!----
+
+But after having squeezed a pound of actualities in order to obtain
+one drop of philosophy, having paid sufficient homage to that passion
+for the historic, which is so dominant in our time, let us turn our
+glance upon the manners of the present period. Let us take the cap and
+bells and the coxcomb of which Rabelais once made a sceptre, and let
+us pursue the course of this inquiry without giving to one joke more
+seriousness than comports with it, and without giving to serious
+things the jesting tone which ill befits them.
+
+
+
+
+
+                             SECOND PART
+
+
+
+               MEANS OF DEFENCE, INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR.
+
+                       "To be or not to be,
+                        That is the question."
+                                --Shakspeare, _Hamlet_.
+
+
+
+                            MEDITATION X.
+
+                    A TREATISE ON MARITAL POLICY.
+
+When a man reaches the position in which the first part of this book
+sets him, we suppose that the idea of his wife being possessed by
+another makes his heart beat, and rekindles his passion, either by an
+appeal to his _amour propre_, his egotism, or his self-interest, for
+unless he is still on his wife's side, he must be one of the lowest of
+men and deserves his fate.
+
+In this trying moment it is very difficult for a husband to avoid
+making mistakes; for, with regard to most men, the art of ruling a
+wife is even less known than that of judiciously choosing one.
+However, marital policy consists chiefly in the practical application
+of three principles which should be the soul of your conduct. The
+first is never to believe what a woman says; the second, always to
+look for the spirit without dwelling too much upon the letter of her
+actions; and the third, not to forget that a woman is never so
+garrulous as when she holds her tongue, and is never working with more
+energy than when she keeps quiet.
+
+From the moment that your suspicions are aroused, you ought to be like
+a man mounted on a tricky horse, who always watches the ears of the
+beast, in fear of being thrown from the saddle.
+
+But art consists not so much in the knowledge of principles, as in the
+manner of applying them; to reveal them to ignorant people is to put a
+razor in the hand of a monkey. Moreover, the first and most vital of
+your duties consists in perpetual dissimulation, an accomplishment in
+which most husbands are sadly lacking. In detecting the symptoms of
+minotaurism a little too plainly marked in the conduct of their wives,
+most men at once indulge in the most insulting suspicions. Their minds
+contract a tinge of bitterness which manifests itself in their
+conversation, and in their manners; and the alarm which fills their
+heart, like the gas flame in a glass globe, lights up their
+countenances so plainly, that it accounts for their conduct.
+
+Now a woman, who has twelve hours more than you have each day to
+reflect and to study you, reads the suspicion written upon your face
+at the very moment that it arises. She will never forget this
+gratuitous insult. Nothing can ever remedy that. All is now said and
+done, and the very next day, if she has opportunity, she will join the
+ranks of inconsistent women.
+
+You ought then to begin under these circumstances to affect towards
+your wife the same boundless confidence that you have hitherto had in
+her. If you begin to lull her anxieties by honeyed words, you are
+lost, she will not believe you; for she has her policy as you have
+yours. Now there is as much need for tact as for kindliness in your
+behavior, in order to inculcate in her, without her knowing it, a
+feeling of security, which will lead her to lay back her ears, and
+prevent you from using rein or spur at the wrong moment.
+
+But how can we compare a horse, the frankest of all animals, to a
+being, the flashes of whose thought, and the movements of whose
+impulses render her at moments more prudent than the Servite
+Fra-Paolo, the most terrible adviser that the Ten at Venice ever had;
+more deceitful than a king; more adroit than Louis XI; more profound
+than Machiavelli; as sophistical as Hobbes; as acute as Voltaire; as
+pliant as the fiancee of Mamolin; and distrustful of no one in the
+whole wide world but you?
+
+Moreover, to this dissimulation, by means of which the springs that
+move your conduct ought to be made as invisible as those that move the
+world, must be added absolute self-control. That diplomatic
+imperturbability, so boasted of by Talleyrand, must be the least of
+your qualities; his exquisite politeness and the grace of his manners
+must distinguish your conversation. The professor here expressly
+forbids you to use your whip, if you would obtain complete control
+over your gentle Andalusian steed.
+
+
+                                 LXI.
+ If a man strike his mistress it is a self-inflicted wound; but if he
+                    strike his wife it is suicide!
+
+
+How can we think of a government without police, an action without
+force, a power without weapons?--Now this is exactly the problem which
+we shall try to solve in our future meditations. But first we must
+submit two preliminary observations. They will furnish us with two
+other theories concerning the application of all the mechanical means
+which we propose you should employ. An instance from life will refresh
+these arid and dry dissertations: the hearing of such a story will be
+like laying down a book, to work in the field.
+
+In the year 1822, on a fine morning in the month of February, I was
+traversing the boulevards of Paris, from the quiet circles of the
+Marais to the fashionable quarters of the Chaussee-d'Antin, and I
+observed for the first time, not without a certain philosophic joy,
+the diversity of physiognomy and the varieties of costume which, from
+the Rue du Pas-de-la-Mule even to the Madeleine, made each portion of
+the boulevard a world of itself, and this whole zone of Paris, a grand
+panorama of manners. Having at that time no idea of what the world
+was, and little thinking that one day I should have the audacity to
+set myself up as a legislator on marriage, I was going to take lunch
+at the house of a college friend, who was perhaps too early in life
+afflicted with a wife and two children. My former professor of
+mathematics lived at a short distance from the house of my college
+friend, and I promised myself the pleasure of a visit to this worthy
+mathematician before indulging my appetite for the dainties of
+friendship. I accordingly made my way to the heart of a study, where
+everything was covered with a dust which bore witness to the lofty
+abstraction of the scholar. But a surprise was in store for me there.
+I perceived a pretty woman seated on the arm of an easy chair, as if
+mounted on an English horse; her face took on the look of conventional
+surprise worn by mistresses of the house towards those they do not
+know, but she did not disguise the expression of annoyance which, at
+my appearance, clouded her countenance with the thought that I was
+aware how ill-timed was my presence. My master, doubtless absorbed in
+an equation, had not yet raised his head; I therefore waved my right
+hand towards the young lady, like a fish moving his fin, and on tiptoe
+I retired with a mysterious smile which might be translated "I will
+not be the one to prevent him committing an act of infidelity to
+Urania." She nodded her head with one of those sudden gestures whose
+graceful vivacity is not to be translated into words.
+
+"My good friend, don't go away," cried the geometrician. "This is my
+wife!"
+
+I bowed for the second time!--Oh, Coulon! Why wert thou not present to
+applaud the only one of thy pupils who understood from that moment the
+expression, "anacreontic," as applied to a bow?--The effect must have
+been very overwhelming; for Madame the Professoress, as the Germans
+say, rose hurriedly as if to go, making me a slight bow which seemed
+to say: "Adorable!----" Her husband stopped her, saying:
+
+"Don't go, my child, this is one of my pupils."
+
+The young woman bent her head towards the scholar as a bird perched on
+a bough stretches its neck to pick up a seed.
+
+"It is not possible," said the husband, heaving a sigh, "and I am
+going to prove it to you by A plus B."
+
+"Let us drop that, sir, I beg you," she answered, pointing with a wink
+to me.
+
+If it had been a problem in algebra, my master would have understood
+this look, but it was Chinese to him, and so he went on.
+
+"Look here, child, I constitute you judge in the matter; our income is
+ten thousand francs."
+
+At these words I retired to the door, as if I were seized with a wild
+desire to examine the framed drawings which had attracted my
+attention. My discretion was rewarded by an eloquent glance. Alas! she
+did not know that in Fortunio I could have played the part of
+Sharp-Ears, who heard the truffles growing.
+
+"In accordance with the principles of general economy," said my
+master, "no one ought to spend in rent and servant's wages more than
+two-tenths of his income; now our apartment and our attendance cost
+altogether a hundred louis. I give you twelve hundred francs to dress
+with" [in saying this he emphasized every syllable]. "Your food," he
+went on, takes up four thousand francs, our children demand at lest
+twenty-five louis; I take for myself only eight hundred francs;
+washing, fuel and light mount up to about a thousand francs; so that
+there does not remain, as you see, more than six hundred francs for
+unforeseen expenses. In order to buy the cross of diamonds, we must
+draw a thousand crowns from our capital, and if once we take that
+course, my little darling, there is no reason why we should not leave
+Paris which you love so much, and at once take up our residence in the
+country, in order to retrench. Children and household expenses will
+increase fast enough! Come, try to be reasonable!"
+
+"I suppose I must," she said, "but you will be the only husband in
+Paris who has not given a New Year's gift to his wife."
+
+And she stole away like a school-boy who goes to finish an imposed
+duty. My master made a gesture of relief. When he saw the door close
+he rubbed his hands, he talked of the war in Spain; and I went my way
+to the Rue de Provence, little knowing that I had received the first
+installment of a great lesson in marriage, any more than I dreamt of
+the conquest of Constantinople by General Diebitsch. I arrived at my
+host's house at the very moment they were sitting down to luncheon,
+after having waited for me the half hour demanded by usage. It was, I
+believe, as she opened a _pate de foie gras_ that my pretty hostess
+said to her husband, with a determined air:
+
+"Alexander, if you were really nice you would give me that pair of
+ear-rings that we saw at Fossin's."
+
+"You shall have them," cheerfully replied my friend, drawing from his
+pocketbook three notes of a thousand francs, the sight of which made
+his wife's eyes sparkle. "I can no more resist the pleasure of
+offering them to you," he added, "than you can that of accepting them.
+This is the anniversary of the day I first saw you, and the diamonds
+will perhaps make you remember it!----"
+
+"You bad man!" said she, with a winning smile.
+
+She poked two fingers into her bodice, and pulling out a bouquet of
+violets she threw them with childlike contempt into the face of my
+friend. Alexander gave her the price of the jewels, crying out:
+
+"I had seen the flowers!"
+
+I shall never forget the lively gesture and the eager joy with which,
+like a cat which lays its spotted paw upon a mouse, the little woman
+seized the three bank notes; she rolled them up blushing with
+pleasure, and put them in the place of the violets which before had
+perfumed her bosom. I could not help thinking about my old
+mathematical master. I did not then see any difference between him and
+his pupil, than that which exists between a frugal man and a prodigal,
+little thinking that he of the two who seemed to calculate the better,
+actually calculated the worse. The luncheon went off merrily. Very
+soon, seated in a little drawing-room newly decorated, before a
+cheerful fire which gave warmth and made our hearts expand as in
+spring
+time, I felt compelled to make this loving couple a guest's
+compliments on the furnishing of their little bower.
+
+"It is a pity that all this costs so dear," said my friend, "but it is
+right that the nest be worthy of the bird; but why the devil do you
+compliment me upon curtains which are not paid for?--You make me
+remember, just at the time I am digesting lunch, that I still owe two
+thousand francs to a Turk of an upholsterer."
+
+At these words the mistress of the house made a mental inventory of
+the pretty room with her eyes, and the radiancy of her face changed to
+thoughtfulness. Alexander took me by the hand and led me to the recess
+of a bay window.
+
+"Do you happen," he said in a low voice, "to have a thousand crowns to
+lend me? I have only twelve thousand francs income, and this year--"
+
+"Alexander," cried the dear creature, interrupting her husband, while,
+rushing up, she offered him the three banknotes, "I see now that it is
+a piece of folly--"
+
+"What do you mean?" answered he, "keep your money."
+
+"But, my love, I am ruining you! I ought to know that you love me so
+much, that I ought not to tell you all that I wish for."
+
+"Keep it, my darling, it is your lawful property--nonsense, I shall
+gamble this winter and get all that back again!"
+
+"Gamble!" cried she, with an expression of horror. "Alexander, take
+back these notes! Come, sir, I wish you to do so."
+
+"No, no," replied my friend, repulsing the white and delicious little
+hand. "Are you not going on Thursday to a ball of Madame de B-----?"
+
+"I will think about what you asked of me," said I to my comrade.
+
+I went away bowing to his wife, but I saw plainly after that scene
+that my anacreontic salutation did not produce much effect upon her.
+
+"He must be mad," thought I as I went away, "to talk of a thousand
+crowns to a law student."
+
+Five days later I found myself at the house of Madame de B-----, whose
+balls were becoming fashionable. In the midst of the quadrilles I saw
+the wife of my friend and that of the mathematician. Madame Alexander
+wore a charming dress; some flowers and white muslin were all that
+composed it. She wore a little cross _a la Jeannette_, hanging by a
+black velvet ribbon which set off the whiteness of her scented skin;
+long pears of gold decorated her ears. On the neck of Madame the
+Professoress sparkled a superb cross of diamonds.
+
+"How funny that is," said I to a personage who had not yet studied the
+world's ledger, nor deciphered the heart of a single woman.
+
+That personage was myself. If I had then the desire to dance with
+those fair women, it was simply because I knew a secret which
+emboldened my timidity.
+
+"So after all, madame, you have your cross?" I said to her first.
+
+"Well, I fairly won it!" she replied, with a smile hard to describe.
+
+"How is this! no ear-rings?" I remarked to the wife of my friend.
+
+"Ah!" she replied, "I have enjoyed possession of them during a whole
+luncheon time, but you see that I have ended by converting Alexander."
+
+"He allowed himself to be easily convinced?"
+
+She answered with a look of triumph.
+
+Eight years afterwards, this scene suddenly rose to my memory, though
+I had long since forgotten it, and in the light of the candles I
+distinctly discerned the moral of it. Yes, a woman has a horror of
+being convinced of anything; when you try to persuade her she
+immediately submits to being led astray and continues to play the role
+which nature gave her. In her view, to allow herself to be won over is
+to grant a favor, but exact arguments irritate and confound her; in
+order to guide her you must employ the power which she herself so
+frequently employs and which lies in an appeal to sensibility. It is
+therefore in his wife, and not in himself, that a husband can find the
+instruments of his despotism; as diamond cuts diamond so must the
+woman be made to tyrannize over herself. To know how to offer the
+ear-rings in such a way that they will be returned, is a secret whose
+application embraces the slightest details of life. And now let us
+pass to the second observation.
+
+"He who can manage property of one toman, can manage one of an hundred
+thousand," says an Indian proverb; and I, for my part, will enlarge
+upon this Asiatic adage and declare, that he who can govern one woman
+can govern a nation, and indeed there is very much similarity between
+these two governments. Must not the policy of husbands be very nearly
+the same as the policy of kings? Do not we see kings trying to amuse
+the people in order to deprive them of their liberty; throwing food at
+their heads for one day, in order to make them forget the misery of a
+whole year; preaching to them not to steal and at the same time
+stripping them of everything; and saying to them: "It seems to me that
+if I were the people I should be virtuous"? It is from England that we
+obtain the precedent which husbands should adopt in their houses.
+Those who have eyes ought to see that when the government is running
+smoothly the Whigs are rarely in power. A long Tory ministry has
+always succeeded an ephemeral Liberal cabinet. The orators of a
+national party resemble the rats which wear their teeth away in
+gnawing the rotten panel; they close up the hole as soon as they smell
+the nuts and the lard locked up in the royal cupboard. The woman is
+the Whig of our government. Occupying the situation in which we have
+left her she might naturally aspire to the conquest of more than one
+privilege. Shut your eyes to the intrigues, allow her to waste her
+strength in mounting half the steps of your throne; and when she is on
+the point of touching your sceptre, fling her back to the ground,
+quite gently and with infinite grace, saying to her: "Bravo!" and
+leaving her to expect success in the hereafter. The craftiness of this
+manoeuvre will prove a fine support to you in the employment of any
+means which it may please you to choose from your arsenal, for the
+object of subduing your wife.
+
+Such are the general principles which a husband should put into
+practice, if he wishes to escape mistakes in ruling his little
+kingdom. Nevertheless, in spite of what was decided by the minority at
+the council of Macon (Montesquieu, who had perhaps foreseen the coming
+of constitutional government has remarked, I forget in what part of
+his writings, that good sense in public assemblies is always found on
+the side of the minority), we discern in a woman a soul and a body,
+and we commence by investigating the means to gain control of her
+moral nature. The exercise of thought, whatever people may say, is
+more noble than the exercise of bodily organs, and we give precedence
+to science over cookery and to intellectual training over hygiene.
+
+
+
+                            MEDITATION XI.
+
+                       INSTRUCTION IN THE HOME.
+
+Whether wives should or should not be put under instruction--such is
+the question before us. Of all those which we have discussed this is
+the only one which has two extremes and admits of no compromise.
+Knowledge and ignorance, such are the two irreconcilable terms of this
+problem. Between these two abysses we seem to see Louis XVIII
+reckoning up the felicities of the eighteenth century, and the
+unhappiness of the nineteenth. Seated in the centre of the seesaw,
+which he knew so well how to balance by his own weight, he
+contemplates at one end of it the fanatic ignorance of a lay brother,
+the apathy of a serf, the shining armor on the horses of a banneret;
+he thinks he hears the cry, "France and Montjoie-Saint-Denis!" But he
+turns round, he smiles as he sees the haughty look of a manufacturer,
+who is captain in the national guard; the elegant carriage of a stock
+broker; the simple costume of a peer of France turned journalist and
+sending his son to the Polytechnique; then he notices the costly
+stuffs, the newspapers, the steam engines; and he drinks his coffee
+from a cup of Sevres, at the bottom of which still glitters the "N"
+surmounted by a crown.
+
+"Away with civilization! Away with thought!"--That is your cry. You
+ought to hold in horror the education of women for the reason so well
+realized in Spain, that it is easier to govern a nation of idiots than
+a nation of scholars. A nation degraded is happy: if she has not the
+sentiment of liberty, neither has she the storms and disturbances
+which it begets; she lives as polyps live; she can be cut up into two
+or three pieces and each piece is still a nation, complete and living,
+and ready to be governed by the first blind man who arms himself with
+the pastoral staff.
+
+What is it that produces this wonderful characteristic of humanity?
+Ignorance; ignorance is the sole support of despotism, which lives on
+darkness and silence. Now happiness in the domestic establishment as
+in a political state is a negative happiness. The affection of a
+people for a king, in an absolute monarchy, is perhaps less contrary
+to nature than the fidelity of a wife towards her husband, when love
+between them no longer exists. Now we know that, in your house, love
+at this moment has one foot on the window-sill. It is necessary for
+you, therefore, to put into practice that salutary rigor by which M.
+de Metternich prolongs his _statu quo_; but we would advise you to do
+so with more tact and with still more tenderness; for your wife is
+more crafty than all the Germans put together, and as voluptuous as
+the Italians.
+
+You should, therefore, try to put off as long as possible the fatal
+moment when your wife asks you for a book. This will be easy. You will
+first of all pronounce in a tone of disdain the phrase "Blue
+stocking;" and, on her request being repeated, you will tell her what
+ridicule attaches, among the neighbors, to pedantic women.
+
+You will then repeat to her, very frequently, that the most lovable
+and the wittiest women in the world are found at Paris, where women
+never read;
+
+That women are like people of quality who, according to Mascarillo,
+know everything without having learned anything; that a woman while
+she is dancing, or while she is playing cards, without even having the
+appearance of listening, ought to know how to pick up from the
+conversation of talented men the ready-made phrases out of which fools
+manufacture their wit at Paris;
+
+That in this country decisive judgments on men and affairs are passed
+round from hand to hand; and that the little cutting phrase with which
+a woman criticises an author, demolishes a work, or heaps contempt on
+a picture, has more power in the world than a court decision;
+
+That women are beautiful mirrors, which naturally reflect the most
+brilliant ideas;
+
+That natural wit is everything, and the best education is gained
+rather from what we learn in the world than by what we read in books;
+
+That, above all, reading ends in making the eyes dull, etc.
+
+To think of leaving a woman at liberty to read the books which her
+character of mind may prompt her to choose! This is to drop a spark in
+a powder magazine; it is worse than that, it is to teach your wife to
+separate herself from you; to live in an imaginary world, in a
+Paradise. For what do women read? Works of passion, the _Confessions_
+of Rousseau, romances, and all those compositions which work most
+powerfully on their sensibility. They like neither argument nor the
+ripe fruits of knowledge. Now have you ever considered the results
+which follow these poetical readings?
+
+Romances, and indeed all works of imagination, paint sentiments and
+events with colors of a very different brilliancy from those presented
+by nature. The fascination of such works springs less from the desire
+which each author feels to show his skill in putting forth choice and
+delicate ideas than from the mysterious working of the human
+intellect. It is characteristic of man to purify and refine everything
+that he lays up in the treasury of his thoughts. What human faces,
+what monuments of the dead are not made more beautiful than actual
+nature in the artistic representation? The soul of the reader assists
+in this conspiracy against the truth, either by means of the profound
+silence which it enjoys in reading or by the fire of mental conception
+with which it is agitated or by the clearness with which imagery is
+reflected in the mirror of the understanding. Who has not seen on
+reading the _Confessions_ of Jean-Jacques, that Madame de Warens is
+described as much prettier than she ever was in actual life? It might
+almost be said that our souls dwell with delight upon the figures
+which they had met in a former existence, under fairer skies; that
+they accept the creations of another soul only as wings on which they
+may soar into space; features the most delicate they bring to
+perfection by making them their own; and the most poetic expression
+which appears in the imagery of an author brings forth still more
+ethereal imagery in the mind of a reader. To read is to join with the
+writer in a creative act. The mystery of the transubstantiation of
+ideas, originates perhaps in the instinctive consciousness that we
+have of a vocation loftier than our present destiny. Or, is it based
+on the lost tradition of a former life? What must that life have been,
+if this slight residuum of memory offers us such volumes of delight?
+
+Moreover, in reading plays and romances, woman, a creature much more
+susceptible than we are to excitement, experiences the most violent
+transport. She creates for herself an ideal existence beside which all
+reality grows pale; she at once attempts to realize this voluptuous
+life, to take to herself the magic which she sees in it. And, without
+knowing it, she passes from spirit to letter and from soul to sense.
+
+And would you be simple enough to believe that the manners, the
+sentiments of a man like you, who usually dress and undress before
+your wife, can counterbalance the influence of these books and
+outshine the glory of their fictitious lovers, in whose garments the
+fair reader sees neither hole nor stain?--Poor fool! too late, alas!
+for her happiness and for yours, your wife will find out that the
+_heroes_ of poetry are as rare in real life as the _Apollos_ of
+sculpture!
+
+Very many husbands will find themselves embarrassed in trying to
+prevent their wives from reading, yet there are certain people who
+allege that reading has this advantage, that men know what their wives
+are about when they have a book in hand. In the first place you will
+see, in the next Meditation, what a tendency the sedentary life has to
+make a woman quarrelsome; but have you never met those beings without
+poetry, who succeed in petrifying their unhappy companions by reducing
+life to its most mechanical elements? Study great men in their
+conversation and learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they
+condemn poetry and the pleasures of imagination.
+
+But if, after all your efforts, your wife persists in wishing to read,
+put at her disposal at once all possible books from the A B C of her
+little boy to _Rene_, a book more dangerous to you when in her hands
+than _Therese Philosophe_. You might create in her an utter disgust
+for reading by giving her tedious books; and plunge her into utter
+idiocy with _Marie Alacoque_, _The Brosse de Penitence_, or with the
+chansons which were so fashionable in the time of Louis XV; but later
+on you will find, in the present volume, the means of so thoroughly
+employing your wife's time, that any kind of reading will be quite out
+of the question.
+
+And first of all, consider the immense resources which the education
+of women has prepared for you in your efforts to turn your wife from
+her fleeting taste for science. Just see with what admirable stupidity
+girls lend themselves to reap the benefit of the education which is
+imposed upon them in France; we give them in charge to nursery maids,
+to companions, to governesses who teach them twenty tricks of coquetry
+and false modesty, for every single noble and true idea which they
+impart to them. Girls are brought up as slaves, and are accustomed to
+the idea that they are sent into the world to imitate their
+grandmothers, to breed canary birds, to make herbals, to water little
+Bengal rose-bushes, to fill in worsted work, or to put on collars.
+Moreover, if a little girl in her tenth year has more refinement than
+a boy of twenty, she is timid and awkward. She is frightened at a
+spider, chatters nonsense, thinks of dress, talks about the fashions
+and has not the courage to be either a watchful mother or a chaste
+wife.
+
+Notice what progress she had made; she has been shown how to paint
+roses, and to embroider ties in such a way as to earn eight sous a
+day. She has learned the history of France in _Ragois_ and chronology
+in the _Tables du Citoyen Chantreau_, and her young imagination has
+been set free in the realm of geography; all without any aim,
+excepting that of keeping away all that might be dangerous to her
+heart; but at the same time her mother and her teachers repeat with
+unwearied voice the lesson, that the whole science of a woman lies in
+knowing how to arrange the fig leaf which our Mother Eve wore. "She
+does not hear for fifteen years," says Diderot, "anything else but 'my
+daughter, your fig leaf is on badly; my daughter, your fig leaf is on
+well; my daughter, would it not look better so?'"
+
+Keep your wife then within this fine and noble circle of knowledge. If
+by chance your wife wishes to have a library, buy for her Florian,
+Malte-Brun, _The Cabinet des Fees_, _The Arabian Nights_, Redoute's
+_Roses_, _The Customs of China_, _The Pigeons_, by Madame Knip, the
+great work on Egypt, etc. Carry out, in short, the clever suggestion
+of that princess who, when she was told of a riot occasioned by the
+dearness of bread, said, "Why don't they eat cake?"
+
+Perhaps, one evening, your wife will reproach you for being sullen and
+not speaking to her; perhaps she will say that you are ridiculous,
+when you have just made a pun; but this is one of the slight
+annoyances incident to our system; and, moreover, what does it matter
+to you that the education of women in France is the most pleasant of
+absurdities, and that your marital obscurantism has brought a doll to
+your arms? As you have not sufficient courage to undertake a fairer
+task, would it not be better to lead your wife along the beaten track
+of married life in safety, than to run the risk of making her scale
+the steep precipices of love? She is likely to be a mother: you must
+not exactly expect to have Gracchi for sons, but to be really _pater
+quem nuptiae demonstrant_; now, in order to aid you in reaching this
+consummation, we must make this book an arsenal from which each one,
+in accordance with his wife's character and his own, may choose
+weapons fit to employ against the terrible genius of evil, which is
+always ready to rise up in the soul of a wife; and since it may fairly
+be considered that the ignorant are the most cruel opponents of
+feminine education, this Meditation will serve as a breviary for the
+majority of husbands.
+
+If a woman has received a man's education, she possesses in very truth
+the most brilliant and most fertile sources of happiness both to
+herself and to her husband; but this kind of woman is as rare as
+happiness itself; and if you do not possess her for your wife, your
+best course is to confine the one you do possess, for the sake of your
+common felicity, to the region of ideas she was born in, for you must
+not forget that one moment of pride in her might destroy you, by
+setting on the throne a slave who would immediately be tempted to
+abuse her power.
+
+After all, by following the system prescribed in this Meditation, a
+man of superiority will be relieved from the necessity of putting his
+thoughts into small change, when he wishes to be understood by his
+wife, if indeed this man of superiority has been guilty of the folly
+of marrying one of those poor creatures who cannot understand him,
+instead of choosing for his wife a young girl whose mind and heart he
+has tested and studied for a considerable time.
+
+Our aim in this last matrimonial observation has not been to advise
+all men of superiority to seek for women of superiority and we do not
+wish each one to expound our principles after the manner of Madame de
+Stael, who attempted in the most indelicate manner to effect a union
+between herself and Napoleon. These two beings would have been very
+unhappy in their domestic life; and Josephine was a wife accomplished
+in a very different sense from this virago of the nineteenth century.
+
+And, indeed, when we praise those undiscoverable girls so happily
+educated by chance, so well endowed by nature, whose delicate souls
+endure so well the rude contact of the great soul of him we call _a
+man_, we mean to speak of those rare and noble creatures of whom
+Goethe has given us a model in his Claire of _Egmont_; we are thinking
+of those women who seek no other glory than that of playing their part
+well; who adapt themselves with amazing pliancy to the will and
+pleasure of those whom nature has given them for masters; soaring at
+one time into the boundless sphere of their thought and in turn
+stooping to the simple task of amusing them as if they were children;
+understanding well the inconsistencies of masculine and violent souls,
+understanding also their slightest word, their most puzzling looks;
+happy in silence, happy also in the midst of loquacity; and well aware
+that the pleasures, the ideas and the moral instincts of a Lord Byron
+cannot be those of a bonnet-maker. But we must stop; this fair picture
+has led us too far from our subject; we are treating of marriage and
+not of love.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XII.
+
+                       THE HYGIENE OF MARRIAGE.
+
+The aim of this Meditation is to call to your attention a new method
+of defence, by which you may reduce the will of your new wife to a
+condition of utter and abject submission. This is brought about by the
+reaction upon her moral nature of physical changes, and the wise
+lowering of her physical condition by a diet skillfully controlled.
+
+This great and philosophical question of conjugal medicine will
+doubtless be regarded favorably by all who are gouty, are impotent, or
+suffer from catarrh; and by that legion of old men whose dullness we
+have quickened by our article on the predestined. But it principally
+concerns those husbands who have courage enough to enter into those
+paths of machiavelism, such as would not have been unworthy of that
+great king of France who endeavored to secure the happiness of the
+nation at the expense of certain noble heads. Here, the subject is the
+same. The amputation or the weakening of certain members is always to
+the advantage of the whole body.
+
+Do you think seriously that a celibate who has been subject to a diet
+consisting of the herb hanea, of cucumbers, of purslane and the
+applications of leeches to his ears, as recommended by Sterne, would
+be able to carry by storm the honor of your wife? Suppose that a
+diplomat had been clever enough to affix a permanent linen plaster to
+the head of Napoleon, or to purge him every morning: Do you think that
+Napoleon, Napoleon the Great, would ever have conquered Italy? Was
+Napoleon, during his campaign in Russia, a prey to the most horrible
+pangs of dysuria, or was he not? That is one of the questions which
+has weighed upon the minds of the whole world. Is it not certain that
+cooling applications, douches, baths, etc., produce great changes in
+more or less acute affections of the brain? In the middle of the heat
+of July when each one of your pores slowly filters out and returns to
+the devouring atmosphere the glasses of iced lemonade which you have
+drunk at a single draught, have you ever felt the flame of courage,
+the vigor of thought, the complete energy which rendered existence
+light and sweet to you some months before?
+
+No, no; the iron most closely cemented into the hardest stone will
+raise and throw apart the most durable monument, by reason of the
+secret influence exercised by the slow and invisible variations of
+heat and cold, which vex the atmosphere. In the first place, let us be
+sure that if atmospheric mediums have an influence over man, there is
+still a stronger reason for believing that man, in turn, influences
+the imagination of his kind, by the more or less vigor with which he
+projects his will and thus produces a veritable atmosphere around him.
+
+It is in this fact that the power of the actor's talent lies, as well
+as that of poetry and of fanaticism; for the former is the eloquence
+of words, as the latter is the eloquence of actions; and in this lies
+the foundation of a science, so far in its infancy.
+
+This will, so potent in one man against another, this nervous and
+fluid force, eminently mobile and transmittable, is itself subject to
+the changing condition of our organization, and there are many
+circumstances which make this frail organism of ours to vary. At this
+point, our metaphysical observation shall stop and we will enter into
+an analysis of the circumstances which develop the will of man and
+impart to it a grater degree of strength or weakness.
+
+Do not believe, however, that it is our aim to induce you to put
+cataplasms on the honor of your wife, to lock her up in a sweating
+house, or to seal her up like a letter; no. We will not even attempt
+to teach you the magnetic theory which would give you the power to
+make your will triumph in the soul of your wife; there is not a single
+husband who would accept the happiness of an eternal love at the price
+of this perpetual strain laid upon his animal forces. But we shall
+attempt to expound a powerful system of hygiene, which will enable you
+to put out the flame when your chimney takes fire. The elegant women
+of Paris and the provinces (and these elegant women form a very
+distinguished class among the honest women) have plenty of means of
+attaining the object which we propose, without rummaging in the
+arsenal of medicine for the four cold specifics, the water-lily and
+the thousand inventions worthy only of witches. We will leave to
+Aelian his herb hanea and to Sterne the purslane and cucumber which
+indicate too plainly his antiphlogistic purpose.
+
+You should let your wife recline all day long on soft armchairs, in
+which she sinks into a veritable bath of eiderdown or feathers; you
+should encourage in every way that does no violence to your
+conscience, the inclination which women have to breathe no other air
+but the scented atmosphere of a chamber seldom opened, where daylight
+can scarcely enter through the soft, transparent curtains.
+
+You will obtain marvelous results from this system, after having
+previously experienced the shock of her excitement; but if you are
+strong enough to support this momentary transport of your wife you
+will soon see her artificial energy die away. In general, women love
+to live fast, but, after their tempest of passion, return to that
+condition of tranquillity which insures the happiness of a husband.
+
+Jean-Jacques, through the instrumentality of his enchanting Julie,
+must have proved to your wife that it was infinitely becoming to
+refrain from affronting her delicate stomach and her refined palate by
+making chyle out of coarse lumps of beef, and enormous collops of
+mutton. Is there anything purer in the world than those interesting
+vegetables, always fresh and scentless, those tinted fruits, that
+coffee, that fragrant chocolate, those oranges, the golden apples of
+Atalanta, the dates of Arabia and the biscuits of Brussels, a
+wholesome and elegant food which produces satisfactory results, at the
+same time that it imparts to a woman an air of mysterious originality?
+By the regimen which she chooses she becomes quite celebrated in her
+immediate circle, just as she would be by a singular toilet, a
+benevolent action or a _bon mot_. Pythagoras must needs have cast his
+spell over her, and become as much petted by her as a poodle or an
+ape.
+
+Never commit the imprudence of certain men who, for the sake of
+putting on the appearance of wit, controvert the feminine dictum,
+_that the figure is preserved by meagre diet_. Women on such a diet
+never grow fat, that is clear and positive; do you stick to that.
+
+Praise the skill with which some women, renowned for their beauty,
+have been able to preserve it by bathing themselves in milk, several
+times a day, or in water compounded of substances likely to render the
+skin softer and to lower the nervous tension.
+
+Advise her above all things to refrain from washing herself in cold
+water; because water warm or tepid is the proper thing for all kinds
+of ablutions.
+
+Let Broussais be your idol. At the least indisposition of your wife,
+and on the slightest pretext, order the application of leeches; do not
+even shrink from applying from time to time a few dozen on yourself,
+in order to establish the system of that celebrated doctor in your
+household. You will constantly be called upon from your position as
+husband to discover that your wife is too ruddy; try even sometimes to
+bring the blood to her head, in order to have the right to introduce
+into the house at certain intervals a squad of leeches.
+
+Your wife ought to drink water, lightly tinged with a Burgundy wine
+agreeable to her taste, but destitute of any tonic properties; every
+other kind of wine would be bad for her. Never allow her to drink
+water alone; if you do, you are lost.
+
+"Impetuous fluid! As soon as you press against the floodgates of the
+brain, how quickly do they yield to your power! Then Curiosity comes
+swimming by, making signs to her companions to follow; they plunge
+into the current. Imagination sits dreaming on the bank. She follows
+the torrent with her eyes and transforms the fragments of straw and
+reed into masts and bowsprit. And scarcely has the transformation
+taken place, before Desire, holding in one hand her skirt drawn up
+even to her knees, appears, sees the vessel and takes possession of
+it. O ye drinkers of water, it is by means of that magic spring that
+you have so often turned and turned again the world at your will,
+throwing beneath your feet the weak, trampling on his neck, and
+sometimes changing even the form and aspect of nature!"
+
+If by this system of inaction, in combination with our system of diet,
+you fail to obtain satisfactory results, throw yourself with might and
+main into another system, which we will explain to you.
+
+Man has a certain degree of energy given to him. Such and such a man
+or woman stands to another as ten is to thirty, as one to five; and
+there is a certain degree of energy which no one of us ever exceeds.
+The quantity of energy, or willpower, which each of us possesses
+diffuses itself like sound; it is sometimes weak, sometimes strong; it
+modifies itself according to the octaves to which it mounts. This
+force is unique, and although it may be dissipated in desire, in
+passion, in toils of intellect or in bodily exertion, it turns towards
+the object to which man directs it. A boxer expends it in blows of the
+fist, the baker in kneading his bread, the poet in the enthusiasm
+which consumes and demands an enormous quantity of it; it passes to
+the feet of the dancer; in fact, every one diffuses it at will, and
+may I see the Minotaur tranquilly seated this very evening upon my
+bed, if you do not know as well as I do how he expends it. Almost all
+men spend in necessary toils, or in the anguish of direful passions,
+this fine sum of energy and of will, with which nature has endowed
+them; but our honest women are all the prey to the caprices and the
+struggles of this power which knows not what to do with itself. If, in
+the case of your wife, this energy has not been subdued by the
+prescribed dietary regimen, subject her to some form of activity which
+will constantly increase in violence. Find some means by which her sum
+of force which inconveniences you may be carried off, by some
+occupation which shall entirely absorb her strength. Without setting
+your wife to work the crank of a machine, there are a thousand ways of
+tiring her out under the load of constant work.
+
+In leaving it to you to find means for carrying out our design--and
+these means vary with circumstances--we would point out that dancing
+is one of the very best abysses in which love may bury itself. This
+point having been very well treated by a contemporary, we will give
+him here an opportunity of speaking his mind:
+
+
+ "The poor victim who is the admiration of an enchanted audience
+  pays dear for her success. What result can possibly follow on
+  exertions so ill-proportioned to the resources of the delicate
+  sex? The muscles of the body, disproportionately wearied, are
+  forced to their full power of exertion. The nervous forces,
+  intended to feed the fire of passions, and the labor of the brain,
+  are diverted from their course. The failure of desire, the wish
+  for rest, the exclusive craving for substantial food, all point to
+  a nature impoverished, more anxious to recruit than to enjoy.
+  Moreover, a denizen of the side scenes said to me one day,
+  'Whoever has lived with dancers has lived with sheep; for in their
+  exhaustion they can think of nothing but strong food.' Believe me,
+  then, the love which a ballet girl inspires is very delusive; in
+  her we find, under an appearance of an artificial springtime, a
+  soil which is cold as well as greedy, and senses which are utterly
+  dulled. The Calabrian doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for
+  the hysteric affections which are common among the women of their
+  country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the
+  highbred mares, whose too lively temperament hinders their
+  fecundity. 'Dull as a dancer' is a familiar proverb at the
+  theatre. In fact, the best brains of Europe are convinced that
+  dancing brings with it a result eminently cooling.
+
+ "In support of this it may be necessary to add other observations.
+  The life of shepherds gives birth to irregular loves. The morals
+  of weavers were horribly decried in Greece. The Italians have
+  given birth to a proverb concerning the lubricity of lame women.
+  The Spanish, in whose veins are found many mixtures of African
+  incontinence, have expressed their sentiments in a maxim which is
+  familiar with them: _Muger y gallina pierna quebrantada_ [it is
+  good that a woman and a hen have one broken leg]. The profound
+  sagacity of the Orientals in the art of pleasure is altogether
+  expressed by this ordinance of the caliph Hakim, founder of the
+  Druses, who forbade, under pain of death, the making in his
+  kingdom of any shoes for women. It seems that over the whole
+  globe the tempests of the heart wait only to break out after the
+  limbs are at rest!"
+
+
+What an admirable manoeuvre it would be to make a wife dance, and to
+feed her on vegetables!
+
+Do not believe that these observations, which are as true as they are
+wittily stated, contradict in any way the system which we have
+previously prescribed; by the latter, as by the former, we succeed in
+producing in a woman that needed listlessness, which is the pledge of
+repose and tranquility. By the latter you leave a door open, that the
+enemy may flee; by the former, you slay him.
+
+Now at this point it seems to us that we hear timorous people and
+those of narrow views rising up against our idea of hygiene in the
+name of morality and sentiment.
+
+"Is not woman endowed with a soul? Has she not feelings as we have?
+What right has any one, without regard to her pain, her ideas, or her
+requirements, to hammer her out, as a cheap metal, out of which a
+workman fashions a candlestick or an extinguisher? Is it because the
+poor creatures are already so feeble and miserable that a brute claims
+the power to torture them, merely at the dictate of his own fancies,
+which may be more or less just? And, if by this weakening or heating
+system of yours, which draws out, softens, hardens the fibres, you
+cause frightful and cruel sickness, if you bring to the tomb a woman
+who is dear to you; if, if,--"
+
+This is our answer:
+
+Have you never noticed into how many different shapes harlequin and
+columbine change their little white hats? They turn and twist them so
+well that they become, one after another, a spinning-top, a boat, a
+wine-glass, a half-moon, a cap, a basket, a fish, a whip, a dagger, a
+baby, and a man's head.
+
+This is an exact image of the despotism with which you ought to shape
+and reshape your wife.
+
+The wife is a piece of property, acquired by contract; she is part of
+your furniture, for possession is nine-tenths of the law; in fact, the
+woman is not, to speak correctly, anything but an adjunct to the man;
+therefore abridge, cut, file this article as you choose; she is in
+every sense yours. Take no notice at all of her murmurs, of her cries,
+of her sufferings; nature has ordained her for your use, that she may
+bear everything--children, griefs, blows and pains from man.
+
+Don't accuse yourself of harshness. In the codes of all the nations
+which are called civilized, man has written the laws which govern the
+destiny of women in these cruel terms: _Vae victis!_ Woe to the
+conquered!
+
+Finally, think upon this last observation, the most weighty, perhaps,
+of all that we have made up to this time: if you, her husband, do not
+break under the scourge of your will this weak and charming reed,
+there will be a celibate, capricious and despotic, ready to bring her
+under a yoke more cruel still; and she will have to endure two
+tyrannies instead of one. Under all considerations, therefore,
+humanity demands that you should follow the system of our hygiene.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XIII.
+
+                        OF PERSONAL MEASURES.
+
+Perhaps the preceding Meditations will prove more likely to develop
+general principles of conduct, than to repel force by force. They
+furnish, however, the pharmacopoeia of medicine and not the practice
+of medicine. Now consider the personal means which nature has put into
+your hands for self-defence; for Providence has forgotten no one; if
+to the sepia (that fish of the Adriatic) has been given the black dye
+by which he produces a cloud in which he disappears from his enemy,
+you should believe that a husband has not been left without a weapon;
+and now the time has come for you to draw yours.
+
+You ought to have stipulated before you married that your wife should
+nurse her own children; in this case, as long as she is occupied in
+bearing children or in nursing them you will avoid the danger from one
+or two quarters. The wife who is engaged in bringing into the world
+and nursing a baby has not really the time to bother with a lover, not
+to speak of the fact that before and after her confinement she cannot
+show herself in the world. In short, how can the most bold of the
+distinguished women who are the subject of this work show herself
+under these circumstances in public? O Lord Byron, thou didst not wish
+to see women even eat!
+
+Six months after her confinement, and when the child is on the eve of
+being weaned, a woman just begins to feel that she can enjoy her
+restoration and her liberty.
+
+If your wife has not nursed her first child, you have too much sense
+not to notice this circumstance, and not to make her desire to nurse
+her next one. You will read to her the _Emile_ of Jean-Jacques; you
+will fill her imagination with a sense of motherly duties; you will
+excite her moral feelings, etc.: in a word, you are either a fool or a
+man of sense; and in the first case, even after reading this book, you
+will always be minotaurized; while in the second, you will understand
+how to take a hint.
+
+This first expedient is in reality your own personal business. It will
+give you a great advantage in carrying out all the other methods.
+
+Since Alcibiades cut the ears and the tail of his dog, in order to do
+a service to Pericles, who had on his hands a sort of Spanish war, as
+well as an Ouvrard contract affair, such as was then attracting the
+notice of the Athenians, there is not a single minister who has not
+endeavored to cut the ears of some dog or other.
+
+So in medicine, when inflammation takes place at some vital point of
+the system, counter-irritation is brought about at some other point,
+by means of blisters, scarifications and cupping.
+
+Another method consists in blistering your wife, or giving her, with a
+mental needle, a prod whose violence is such as to make a diversion in
+your favor.
+
+A man of considerable mental resources had made his honeymoon last for
+about four years; the moon began to wane, and he saw appearing the
+fatal hollow in its circle. His wife was exactly in that state of mind
+which we attributed at the close of our first part to every honest
+woman; she had taken a fancy to a worthless fellow who was both
+insignificant in appearance and ugly; the only thing in his favor was,
+he was not her own husband. At this juncture, her husband meditated
+the cutting of some dog's tail, in order to renew, if possible, his
+lease of happiness. His wife had conducted herself with such tact,
+that it would have been very embarrassing to forbid her lover the
+house, for she had discovered some slight tie of relationship between
+them. The danger became, day by day, more imminent. The scent of the
+Minotaur was all around. One evening the husband felt himself plunged
+into a mood of deep vexation so acute as to be apparent to his wife.
+His wife had begun to show him more kindness than she had ever
+exhibited, even during the honeymoon; and hence question after
+question racked his mind. On her part a dead silence reigned. The
+anxious questionings of his mind were redoubled; his suspicions burst
+forth, and he was seized with forebodings of future calamity! Now, on
+this occasion, he deftly applied a Japanese blister, which burned as
+fiercely as an _auto-da-fe_ of the year 1600. At first his wife
+employed a thousand stratagems to discover whether the annoyance of
+her husband was caused by the presence of her lover; it was her first
+intrigue and she displayed a thousand artifices in it. Her imagination
+was aroused; it was no longer taken up with her lover; had she not
+better, first of all, probe her husband's secret?
+
+One evening the husband, moved by the desire to confide in his loving
+helpmeet all his troubles, informed her that their whole fortune was
+lost. They would have to give up their carriage, their box at the
+theatre, balls, parties, even Paris itself; perhaps, by living on
+their estate in the country a year or two, they might retrieve all!
+Appealing to the imagination of his wife, he told her how he pitied
+her for her attachment to a man who was indeed deeply in love with
+her, but was now without fortune; he tore his hair, and his wife was
+compelled in honor to be deeply moved; then in this first excitement
+of their conjugal disturbance he took her off to his estate. Then
+followed scarifications, mustard plaster upon mustard plaster, and the
+tails of fresh dogs were cut: he caused a Gothic wing to be built to
+the chateau; madame altered the park ten time over in order to have
+fountains and lakes and variations in the grounds; finally, the
+husband in the midst of her labors did not forget his own, which
+consisted in providing her with interesting reading, and launching
+upon her delicate attentions, etc. Notice, he never informed his wife
+of the trick he had played on her; and if his fortune was recuperated,
+it was directly after the building of the wing, and the expenditure of
+enormous sums in making water-courses; but he assured her that the
+lake provided a water-power by which mills might be run, etc.
+
+Now, there was a conjugal blister well conceived, for this husband
+neither neglected to rear his family nor to invite to his house
+neighbors who were tiresome, stupid or old; and if he spent the winter
+in Paris, he flung his wife into the vortex of balls and races, so
+that she had not a minute to give to lovers, who are usually the fruit
+of a vacant life.
+
+Journeys to Italy, Switzerland or Greece, sudden complaints which
+require a visit to the waters, and the most distant waters, are pretty
+good blisters. In fact, a man of sense should know how to manufacture
+a thousand of them.
+
+Let us continue our examination of such personal methods.
+
+And here we would have you observe that we are reasoning upon a
+hypothesis, without which this book will be unintelligible to you;
+namely, we suppose that your honeymoon has lasted for a respectable
+time and that the lady that you married was not a widow, but a maid;
+on the opposite supposition, it is at least in accordance with French
+manners to think that your wife married you merely for the purpose of
+becoming inconsistent.
+
+From the moment when the struggle between virtue and inconsistency
+begins in your home, the whole question rests upon the constant and
+involuntary comparison which your wife is instituting between you and
+her lover.
+
+And here you may find still another mode of defence, entirely
+personal, seldom employed by husbands, but the men of superiority will
+not fear to attempt it. It is to belittle the lover without letting
+your wife suspect your intention. You ought to be able to bring it
+about so that she will say to herself some evening while she is
+putting her hair in curl-papers, "My husband is superior to him."
+
+In order to succeed, and you ought to be able to succeed, since you
+have the immense advantage over the lover in knowing the character of
+your wife, and how she is most easily wounded, you should, with all
+the tact of a diplomat, lead this lover to do silly things and cause
+him to annoy her, without his being aware of it.
+
+In the first place, this lover, as usual, will seek your friendship,
+or you will have friends in common; then, either through the
+instrumentality of these friends or by insinuations adroitly but
+treacherously made, you will lead him astray on essential points; and,
+with a little cleverness, you will succeed in finding your wife ready
+to deny herself to her lover when he calls, without either she or he
+being able to tell the reason. Thus you will have created in the bosom
+of your home a comedy in five acts, in which you play, to your profit,
+the brilliant role of Figaro or Almaviva; and for some months you will
+amuse yourself so much the more, because your _amour-propre_, your
+vanity, your all, were at stake.
+
+I had the good fortune in my youth to win the confidence of an old
+_emigre_ who gave me those rudiments of education which are generally
+obtained by young people from women. This friend, whose memory will
+always be dear to me, taught me by his example to put into practice
+those diplomatic stratagems which require tact as well as grace.
+
+The Comte de Noce had returned from Coblenz at a time when it was
+dangerous for the nobility to be found in France. No one had such
+courage and such kindness, such craft and such recklessness as this
+aristocrat. Although he was sixty years old he had married a woman of
+twenty-five, being compelled to this act of folly by soft-heartedness;
+for he thus delivered this poor child from the despotism of a
+capricious mother. "Would you like to be my widow?" this amiable old
+gentleman had said to Mademoiselle de Pontivy, but his heart was too
+affectionate not to become more attached to his wife than a sensible
+man ought to be. As in his youth he had been under the influence of
+several among the cleverest women in the court of Louis XV, he thought
+he would have no difficulty in keeping his wife from any entanglement.
+What man excepting him have I ever seen, who could put into successful
+practice the teachings which I am endeavoring to give to husbands!
+What charm could he impart to life by his delightful manners and
+fascinating conversation!--His wife never knew until after his death
+what she then learned from me, namely, that he had the gout. He had
+wisely retired to a home in the hollow of a valley, close to a forest.
+God only knows what rambles he used to take with his wife!--His good
+star decreed that Mademoiselle de Pontivy should possess an excellent
+heart and should manifest in a high degree that exquisite refinement,
+that sensitive modesty which renders beautiful the plainest girl in
+the world. All of a sudden, one of his nephews, a good-looking
+military man, who had escaped from the disasters of Moscow, returned
+to his uncle's house, as much for the sake of learning how far he had
+to fear his cousins, as heirs, as in the hope of laying siege to his
+aunt. His black hair, his moustache, the easy small-talk of the staff
+officer, a certain freedom which was elegant as well as trifling, his
+bright eyes, contrasted favorably with the faded graces of his uncle.
+I arrived at the precise moment when the young countess was teaching
+her newly found relation to play backgammon. The proverb says that
+"women never learn this game excepting from their lovers, and vice
+versa." Now, during a certain game, M. de Noce had surprised his wife
+and the viscount in the act of exchanging one of those looks which are
+full of mingled innocence, fear, and desire. In the evening he
+proposed to us a hunting-party, and we agreed. I never saw him so gay
+and so eager as he appeared on the following morning, in spite of the
+twinges of gout which heralded an approaching attack. The devil
+himself could not have been better able to keep up a conversation on
+trifling subjects than he was. He had formerly been a musketeer in the
+Grays and had known Sophie Arnoud. This explains all. The conversation
+after a time became so exceedingly free among us three, that I hope
+God may forgive me for it!
+
+"I would never have believed that my uncle was such a dashing blade?"
+said the nephew.
+
+We made a halt, and while we were sitting on the edge of a green
+forest clearing, the count led us on to discourse about women just as
+Brantome and Aloysia might have done.
+
+"You fellows are very happy under the present government!--the women
+of the time are well mannered" (in order to appreciate the exclamation
+of the old gentleman, the reader should have heard the atrocious
+stories which the captain had been relating). "And this," he went on,
+"is one of the advantages resulting from the Revolution. The present
+system gives very much more charm and mystery to passion. In former
+times women were easy; ah! indeed, you would not believe what skill it
+required, what daring, to wake up those worn-out hearts; we were
+always on the _qui vive_. But yet in those days a man became
+celebrated for a broad joke, well put, or for a lucky piece of
+insolence. That is what women love, and it will always be the best
+method of succeeding with them!"
+
+These last words were uttered in a tone of profound contempt; he
+stopped, and began to play with the hammer of his gun as if to
+disguise his deep feeling.
+
+"But nonsense," he went on, "my day is over! A man ought to have the
+body as well as the imagination young. Why did I marry? What is most
+treacherous in girls educated by mothers who lived in that brilliant
+era of gallantry, is that they put on an air of frankness, of reserve;
+they look as if butter would not melt in their mouths, and those who
+know them well feel that they would swallow anything!"
+
+He rose, lifted his gun with a gesture of rage, and dashing it to the
+ground thrust it far up the butt in the moist sod.
+
+"It would seem as if my dear aunt were fond of a little fun," said the
+officer to me in a low voice.
+
+"Or of denouements that do not come off!" I added.
+
+The nephew tightened his cravat, adjusted his collar and gave a jump
+like a Calabrian goat. We returned to the chateau at about two in the
+afternoon. The count kept me with him until dinner-time, under the
+pretext of looking for some medals, of which he had spoken during our
+return home. The dinner was dull. The countess treated her nephew with
+stiff and cold politeness. When we entered the drawing-room the count
+said to his wife:
+
+"Are you going to play backgammon?--We will leave you."
+
+The young countess made no reply. She gazed at the fire, as if she had
+not heard. Her husband took some steps towards the door, inviting me
+by the wave of his hand to follow him. At the sound of his footsteps,
+his wife quickly turned her head.
+
+"Why do you leave us?" said she, "you will have all tomorrow to show
+your friend the reverse of the medals."
+
+The count remained. Without paying any attention to the awkwardness
+which had succeeded the former military aplomb of his nephew, the
+count exercised during the whole evening his full powers as a charming
+conversationalist. I had never before seen him so brilliant or so
+gracious. We spoke a great deal about women. The witticisms of our
+host were marked by the most exquisite refinement. He made me forget
+that his hair was white, for he showed the brilliancy which belonged
+to a youthful heart, a gaiety which effaces the wrinkles from the
+cheek and melts the snow of wintry age.
+
+The next day the nephew went away. Even after the death of M. de Noce,
+I tried to profit by the intimacy of those familiar conversations in
+which women are sometimes caught off their guard to sound her, but I
+could never learn what impertinence the viscount had exhibited towards
+his aunt. His insolence must have been excessive, for since that time
+Madame de Noce has refused to see her nephew, and up to the present
+moment never hears him named without a slight movement of her
+eyebrows. I did not at once guess the end at which the Comte de Noce
+aimed, in inviting us to go shooting; but I discovered later that he
+had played a pretty bold game.
+
+Nevertheless, if you happen at last, like M. de Noce, to carry off a
+decisive victory, do not forget to put into practice at once the
+system of blisters; and do not for a moment imagine that such _tours
+de force_ are to be repeated with safety. If that is the way you use
+your talents, you will end by losing caste in your wife's estimation;
+for she will demand of you, reasonably enough, double what you would
+give her, and the time will come when you declare bankruptcy. The
+human soul in its desires follows a sort of arithmetical progression,
+the end and origin of which are equally unknown. Just as the
+opium-eater must constantly increase his doses in order to obtain the
+same result, so our mind, imperious as it is weak, desires that
+feeling, ideas and objects should go on ever increasing in size and in
+intensity. Hence the necessity of cleverly distributing the interest
+in a dramatic work, and of graduating doses in medicine. Thus you see,
+if you always resort to the employment of means like these, that you
+must accommodate such daring measures to many circumstances, and
+success will always depend upon the motives to which you appeal.
+
+And finally, have you influence, powerful friends, an important post?
+The last means I shall suggest cuts to the root of the evil. Would you
+have the power to send your wife's lover off by securing his
+promotion, or his change of residence by an exchange, if he is a
+military man? You cut off by this means all communication between
+them; later on we will show you how to do it; for _sublata causa
+tollitur effectus_,--Latin words which may be freely translated "there
+is no effect without a cause."
+
+Nevertheless, you feel that your wife may easily choose another lover;
+but in addition to these preliminary expedients, you will always have
+a blister ready, in order to gain time, and calculate how you may
+bring the affair to an end by fresh devices.
+
+Study how to combine the system of blisters with the mimic wiles of
+Carlin, the immortal Carlin of the _Comedie-Italienne_ who always held
+and amused an audience for whole hours, by uttering the same words,
+varied only by the art of pantomime and pronounced with a thousand
+inflections of different tone,--"The queen said to the king!" Imitate
+Carlin, discover some method of always keeping your wife in check, so
+as not to be checkmated yourself. Take a degree among constitutional
+ministers, a degree in the art of making promises. Habituate yourself
+to show at seasonable times the punchinello which makes children run
+after you without knowing the distance they run. We are all children,
+and women are all inclined through their curiosity to spend their time
+in pursuit of a will-o'-the-wisp. The flame is brilliant and quickly
+vanishes, but is not the imagination at hand to act as your ally?
+Finally, study the happy art of being near her and yet not being near
+her; of seizing the opportunity which will yield you pre-eminence in
+her mind without ever crushing her with a sense of your superiority,
+or even of her own happiness. If the ignorance in which you have kept
+her does not altogether destroy her intellect, you must remain in such
+relations with her that each of you will still desire the company of
+the other.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XIV.
+
+                            OF APARTMENTS.
+
+The preceding methods and systems are in a way purely moral; they
+share the nobility of the soul, there is nothing repulsive in them;
+but now we must proceed to consider precautions _a la Bartholo_. Do
+not give way to timidity. There is a marital courage, as there is a
+civil and military courage, as there is the courage of the National
+Guard.
+
+What is the first course of a young girl after having purchased a
+parrot? Is it not to fasten it up in a pretty cage, from which it
+cannot get out without permission?
+
+You may learn your duty from this child.
+
+Everything that pertains to the arrangement of your house and of your
+apartments should be planned so as not to give your wife any
+advantage, in case she has decided to deliver you to the Minotaur;
+half of all actual mischances are brought about by the deplorable
+facilities which the apartments furnish.
+
+Before everything else determine to have for your porter a _single
+man_ entirely devoted to your person. This is a treasure easily to be
+found. What husband is there throughout the world who has not either a
+foster-father or some old servant, upon whose knees he has been
+dandled! There ought to exist by means of your management, a hatred
+like that of Artreus and Thyestes between your wife and this Nestor
+--guardian of your gate. This gate is the Alpha and Omega of an
+intrigue. May not all intrigues in love be confined in these words
+--entering and leaving?
+
+Your house will be of no use to you if it does not stand between a
+court and a garden, and so constructed as to be detached from all
+other buildings. You must abolish all recesses in your apartments. A
+cupboard, if it contain but six pots of preserves, should be walled
+in. You are preparing yourself for war, and the first thought of a
+general is to cut his enemy off from supplies. Moreover, all the walls
+must be smooth, in order to present to the eye lines which may be
+taken in at a glance, and permit the immediate recognition of the
+least strange object. If you consult the remains of antique monuments
+you will see that the beauty of Greek and Roman apartments sprang
+principally from the purity of their lines, the clear sweep of their
+walls and scantiness of furniture. The Greeks would have smiled in
+pity, if they had seen the gaps which our closets make in our
+drawing-rooms.
+
+This magnificent system of defence should above all be put in active
+operation in the apartment of your wife; never let her curtain her bed
+in such a way that one can walk round it amid a maze of hangings; be
+inexorable in the matter of connecting passages, and let her chamber
+be at the bottom of your reception-rooms, so as to show at a glance
+those who come and go.
+
+_The Marriage of Figaro_ will no doubt have taught you to put your
+wife's chamber at a great height from the ground. All celibates are
+Cherubins.
+
+Your means, doubtless, will permit your wife to have a dressing-room,
+a bath-room, and a room for her chambermaid. Think then on Susanne,
+and never commit the fault of arranging this little room below that of
+madame's, but place it always above, and do not shrink from
+disfiguring your mansion by hideous divisions in the windows.
+
+If, by ill luck, you see that this dangerous apartment communicates
+with that of your wife by a back staircase, earnestly consult your
+architect; let his genius exhaust itself in rendering this dangerous
+staircase as innocent as the primitive garret ladder; we conjure you
+let not this staircase have appended to it any treacherous
+lurking-place; its stiff and angular steps must not be arranged with
+that tempting curve which Faublas and Justine found so useful when
+they waited for the exit of the Marquis de B-----. Architects nowadays
+make such staircases as are absolutely preferable to ottomans. Restore
+rather the virtuous garret steps of our ancestors.
+
+Concerning the chimneys in the apartment of madame, you must take care
+to place in the flue, five feet from the ground, an iron grill, even
+though it be necessary to put up a fresh one every time the chimney is
+swept. If your wife laughs at this precaution, suggest to her the
+number of murders that have been committed by means of chimneys.
+Almost all women are afraid of robbers. The bed is one of those
+important pieces of furniture whose structure will demand long
+consideration. Everything concerning it is of vital importance. The
+following is the result of long experience in the construction of
+beds. Give to this piece of furniture a form so original that it may
+be looked upon without disgust, in the midst of changes of fashion
+which succeed so rapidly in rendering antiquated the creations of
+former decorators, for it is essential that your wife be unable to
+change, at pleasure, this theatre of married happiness. The base
+should be plain and massive and admit of no treacherous interval
+between it and the floor; and bear in mind always that the Donna Julia
+of Byron hid Don Juan under her pillow. But it would be ridiculous to
+treat lightly so delicate a subject.
+
+
+                                LXII.
+                  The bed is the whole of marriage.
+
+
+Moreover, we must not delay to direct your attention to this wonderful
+creation of human genius, an invention which claims our recognition
+much more than ships, firearms, matches, wheeled carriages, steam
+engines of all kinds, more than even barrels and bottles. In the first
+place, a little thought will convince us that this is all true of the
+bed; but when we begin to think that it is our second father, that the
+most tranquil and most agitated half of our existence is spent under
+its protecting canopy, words fail in eulogizing it. (See Meditation
+XVII, entitled "Theory of the Bed.")
+
+When the war, of which we shall speak in our third part, breaks out
+between you and madame, you will always have plenty of ingenious
+excuses for rummaging in the drawers and escritoires; for if your wife
+is trying to hide from you some statue of her adoration, it is your
+interest to know where she has hidden it. A gyneceum, constructed on
+the method described, will enable you to calculate at a glance,
+whether there is present in it two pounds of silk more than usual.
+Should a single closet be constructed there, you are a lost man! Above
+all, accustom your wife, during the honeymoon, to bestow especial
+pains in the neatness of her apartment; let nothing put off that. If
+you do not habituate her to be minutely particular in this respect, if
+the same objects are not always found in the same places, she will
+allow things to become so untidy, that you will not be able to see
+that there are two pounds of silk more or less in her room.
+
+The curtains of your apartments ought to be of a stuff which is quite
+transparent, and you ought to contract the habit in the evenings of
+walking outside so that madame may see you come right up to the window
+just out of absent-mindedness. In a word, with regard to windows, let
+the sills be so narrow that even a sack of flour cannot be set up on
+them.
+
+If the apartment of your wife can be arranged on these principles, you
+will be in perfect safety, even if there are niches enough there to
+contain all the saints of Paradise. You will be able, every evening,
+with the assistance of your porter, to strike the balance between the
+entrances and exits of visitors; and, in order to obtain accurate
+results, there is nothing to prevent your teaching him to keep a book
+of visitors, in double entry.
+
+If you have a garden, cultivate a taste for dogs, and always keep at
+large one of these incorruptible guardians under your windows; you
+will thus gain the respect of the Minotaur, especially if you accustom
+your four-footed friend to take nothing substantial excepting from the
+hand of your porter, so that hard-hearted celibates may not succeed in
+poisoning him.
+
+But all these precautions must be taken as a natural thing so that
+they may not arouse suspicions. If husbands are so imprudent as to
+neglect precautions from the moment they are married, they ought at
+once to sell their house and buy another one, or, under the pretext of
+repairs, alter their present house in the way prescribed.
+
+You will without scruple banish from your apartment all sofas,
+ottomans, lounges, sedan chairs and the like. In the first place, this
+is the kind of furniture that adorns the homes of grocers, where they
+are universally found, as they are in those of barbers; but they are
+essentially the furniture of perdition; I can never see them without
+alarm. It has always seemed to me that there the devil himself is
+lurking with his horns and cloven foot.
+
+After all, nothing is so dangerous as a chair, and it is extremely
+unfortunate that women cannot be shut up within the four walls of a
+bare room! What husband is there, who on sitting down on a rickety
+chair is not always forced to believe that this chair has received
+some of the lessons taught by the _Sofa_ of Crebillion junior? But
+happily we have arranged your apartment on such a system of prevention
+that nothing so fatal can happen, or, at any rate, not without your
+contributory negligence.
+
+One fault which you must contract, and which you must never correct,
+will consist in a sort of heedless curiosity, which will make you
+examine unceasingly all the boxes, and turn upside down the contents
+of all dressing-cases and work-baskets. You must proceed to this
+domiciliary visit in a humorous mood, and gracefully, so that each
+time you will obtain pardon by exciting the amusement of your wife.
+
+You must always manifest a most profound astonishment on noticing any
+piece of furniture freshly upholstered in her well-appointed
+apartment. You must immediately make her explain to you the advantages
+of the change; and then you must ransack your mind to discover whether
+there be not some underhand motive in the transaction.
+
+This is by no means all. You have too much sense to forget that your
+pretty parrot will remain in her cage only so long as that cage is
+beautiful. The least accessory of her apartment ought, therefore, to
+breathe elegance and taste. The general appearance should always
+present a simple, at the same time a charming picture. You must
+constantly renew the hangings and muslin curtains. The freshness of
+the decorations is too essential to permit of economy on this point.
+It is the fresh chickweed each morning carefully put into the cage of
+their birds, that makes their pets believe it is the verdure of the
+meadows. An apartment of this character is then the _ultima ratio_ of
+husbands; a wife has nothing to say when everything is lavished on
+her.
+
+Husbands who are condemned to live in rented apartments find
+themselves in the most terrible situation possible. What happy or what
+fatal influence cannot the porter exercise upon their lot?
+
+Is not their home flanked on either side by other houses? It is true
+that by placing the apartment of their wives on one side of the house
+the danger is lessened by one-half; but are they not obliged to learn
+by heart and to ponder the age, the condition, the fortune, the
+character, the habits of the tenants of the next house and even to
+know their friends and relations?
+
+A husband will never take lodgings on the ground floor.
+
+Every man, however, can apply in his apartments the precautionary
+methods which we have suggested to the owner of a house, and thus the
+tenant will have this advantage over the owner, that the apartment,
+which is less spacious than the house, is more easily guarded.
+
+
+
+                            MEDITATION XV.
+
+                         OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE.
+
+"But no, madame, no--"
+
+"Yes, for there is such inconvenience in the arrangement."
+
+"Do you think, madame, that we wish, as at the frontier, to watch the
+visits of persons who cross the threshold of your apartments, or
+furtively leave them, in order to see whether they bring to you
+articles of contraband? That would not be proper; and there is nothing
+odious in our proceeding, any more than there is anything of a fiscal
+character; do not be alarmed."
+
+The Custom House of the marriage state is, of all the expedients
+prescribed in this second part, that which perhaps demands the most
+tact and the most skill as well as the most knowledge acquired _a
+priori_, that is to say before marriage. In order to carry it out, a
+husband ought to have made a profound study of Lavater's book, and to
+be imbued with all his principles; to have accustomed his eye to judge
+and to apprehend with the most astonishing promptitude, the slightest
+physical expressions by which a man reveals his thoughts.
+
+Lavater's _Physiognomy_ originated a veritable science, which has won
+a place in human investigation. If at first some doubts, some jokes
+greeted the appearance of this book, since then the celebrated Doctor
+Gall is come with his noble theory of the skull and has completed the
+system of the Swiss savant, and given stability to his fine and
+luminous observations. People of talent, diplomats, women, all those
+who are numbered among the choice and fervent disciples of these two
+celebrated men, have often had occasion to recognize many other
+evident signs, by which the course of human thought is indicated. The
+habits of the body, the handwriting, the sound of the voice, have
+often betrayed the woman who is in love, the diplomat who is
+attempting to deceive, the clever administrator, or the sovereign who
+is compelled to distinguish at a glance love, treason or merit
+hitherto unknown. The man whose soul operates with energy is like a
+poor glowworm, which without knowing it irradiates light from every
+pore. He moves in a brilliant sphere where each effort makes a burning
+light and outlines his actions with long streamers of fire.
+
+These, then, are all the elements of knowledge which you should
+possess, for the conjugal custom house insists simply in being able by
+a rapid but searching examination to know the moral and physical
+condition of all who enter or leave your house--all, that is, who have
+seen or intend to see your wife. A husband is, like a spider, set at
+the centre of an invisible net, and receives a shock from the least
+fool of a fly who touches it, and from a distance, hears, judges and
+sees what is either his prey or his enemy.
+
+Thus you must obtain means to examine the celibate who rings at your
+door under two circumstances which are quite distinct, namely, when he
+is about to enter and when he is inside.
+
+At the moment of entering how many things does he utter without even
+opening his mouth!
+
+It may be by a slight wave of his hand, or by his plunging his fingers
+many times into his hair, he sticks up or smoothes down his
+characteristic bang.
+
+Or he hums a French or an Italian air, merry or sad, in a voice which
+may be either tenor, contralto, soprano or baritone.
+
+Perhaps he takes care to see that the ends of his necktie are properly
+adjusted.
+
+Or he smoothes down the ruffles or front of his shirt or
+evening-dress.
+
+Or he tries to find out by a questioning and furtive glance whether
+his wig, blonde or brown, curled or plain, is in its natural position.
+
+Perhaps he looks at his nails to see whether they are clean and duly
+cut.
+
+Perhaps with a hand which is either white or untidy, well-gloved or
+otherwise, he twirls his moustache, or his whiskers, or picks his
+teeth with a little tortoise-shell toothpick.
+
+Or by slow and repeated movements he tries to place his chin exactly
+over the centre of his necktie.
+
+Or perhaps he crosses one foot over the other, putting his hands in
+his pockets.
+
+Or perhaps he gives a twist to his shoe, and looks at it as if he
+thought, "Now, there's a foot that is not badly formed."
+
+Or according as he has come on foot or in a carriage, he rubs off or
+he does not rub off the slight patches of mud which soil his shoes.
+
+Or perhaps he remains as motionless as a Dutchman smoking his pipe.
+
+Or perhaps he fixes his eyes on the door and looks like a soul escaped
+from Purgatory and waiting for Saint Peter with the keys.
+
+Perhaps he hesitates to pull the bell; perhaps he seizes it
+negligently, precipitately, familiarly, or like a man who is quite
+sure of himself.
+
+Perhaps he pulls it timidly, producing a faint tinkle which is lost in
+the silence of the apartments, as the first bell of matins in
+winter-time, in a convent of Minims; or perhaps after having rung with
+energy, he rings again impatient that the footman has not heard him.
+
+Perhaps he exhales a delicate scent, as he chews a pastille.
+
+Perhaps with a solemn air he takes a pinch of snuff, brushing off with
+care the grains that might mar the whiteness of his linen.
+
+Perhaps he looks around like a man estimating the value of the
+staircase lamp, the balustrade, the carpet, as if he were a furniture
+dealer or a contractor.
+
+Perhaps this celibate seems a young or an old man, is cold or hot,
+arrives slowly, with an expression of sadness or merriment, etc.
+
+You see that here, at the very foot of your staircase, you are met by
+an astonishing mass of things to observe.
+
+The light pencil-strokes, with which we have tried to outline this
+figure, will suggest to you what is in reality a moral kaleidoscope
+with millions of variations. And yet we have not even attempted to
+bring any woman on to the threshold which reveals so much; for in that
+case our remarks, already considerable in number, would have been
+countless and light as the grains of sand on the seashore.
+
+For as a matter of fact, when he stands before the shut door, a man
+believes that he is quite alone; and he would have no hesitation in
+beginning a silent monologue, a dreamy soliloquy, in which he revealed
+his desires, his intentions, his personal qualities, his faults, his
+virtues, etc.; for undoubtedly a man on a stoop is exactly like a
+young girl of fifteen at confession, the evening before her first
+communion.
+
+Do you want any proof of this? Notice the sudden change of face and
+manner in this celibate from the very moment he steps within the
+house. No machinist in the Opera, no change in the temperature in the
+clouds or in the sun can more suddenly transform the appearance of a
+theatre, the effect of the atmosphere, or the scenery of the heavens.
+
+On reaching the first plank of your antechamber, instead of betraying
+with so much innocence the myriad thoughts which were suggested to you
+on the steps, the celibate has not a single glance to which you could
+attach any significance. The mask of social convention wraps with its
+thick veil his whole bearing; but a clever husband must already have
+divined at a single look the object of his visit, and he reads the
+soul of the new arrival as if it were a printed book.
+
+The manner in which he approaches your wife, in which he addresses
+her, looks at her, greets her and retires--there are volumes of
+observations, more or less trifling, to be made on these subjects.
+
+The tone of his voice, his bearing, his awkwardness, it may be his
+smile, even his gloom, his avoidance of your eye,--all are
+significant, all ought to be studied, but without apparent attention.
+You ought to conceal the most disagreeable discovery you may make by
+an easy manner and remarks such as are ready at hand to a man of
+society. As we are unable to detail the minutiae of this subject we
+leave them entirely to the sagacity of the reader, who must by this
+time have perceived the drift of our investigation, as well as the
+extent of this science which begins at the analysis of glances and
+ends in the direction of such movements as contempt may inspire in a
+great toe hidden under the satin of a lady's slipper or the leather of
+a man's boot.
+
+But the exit!--for we must allow for occasions where you have omitted
+your rigid scrutiny at the threshold of the doorway, and in that case
+the exit becomes of vital importance, and all the more so because this
+fresh study of the celibate ought to be made on the same lines, but
+from an opposite point of view, from that which we have already
+outlined.
+
+In the exit the situation assumes a special gravity; for then is the
+moment in which the enemy has crossed all the intrenchments within
+which he was subject to our examination and has escaped into the
+street! At this point a man of understanding when he sees a visitor
+passing under the _porte-cochere_ should be able to divine the import
+of the whole visit. The indications are indeed fewer in number, but
+how distinct is their character! The denouement has arrived and the
+man instantly betrays the importance of it by the frankest expression
+of happiness, pain or joy.
+
+These revelations are therefore easy to apprehend; they appear in the
+glance cast either at the building or at the windows of the apartment;
+in a slow or loitering gait, in the rubbing of hands, on the part of a
+fool, in the bounding gait of a coxcomb, or the involuntary arrest of
+his footsteps, which marks the man who is deeply moved; in a word, you
+see upon the stoop certain questions as clearly proposed to you as if
+a provincial academy had offered a hundred crowns for an essay; but in
+the exit you behold the solution of these questions clearly and
+precisely given to you. Our task would be far above the power of human
+intelligence if it consisted in enumerating the different ways by
+which men betray their feelings, the discernment of such things is
+purely a matter of tact and sentiment.
+
+If strangers are the subject of these principles of observation, you
+have a still stronger reason for submitting your wife to the formal
+safeguards which we have outlined.
+
+A married man should make a profound study of his wife's countenance.
+Such a study is easy, it is even involuntary and continuous. For him
+the pretty face of his wife must needs contain no mysteries, he knows
+how her feelings are depicted there and with what expression she shuns
+the fire of his glance.
+
+The slightest movement of the lips, the faintest contraction of the
+nostrils, scarcely perceptible changes in the expression of the eye,
+an altered voice, and those indescribable shades of feeling which pass
+over her features, or the light which sometimes bursts forth from
+them, are intelligible language to you.
+
+The whole woman nature stands before you; all look at her, but none
+can interpret her thoughts. But for you, the eye is more or less
+dimmed, wide-opened or closed; the lid twitches, the eyebrow moves; a
+wrinkle, which vanishes as quickly as a ripple on the ocean, furrows
+her brow for one moment; the lip tightens, it is slightly curved or it
+is wreathed with animation--for you the woman has spoken.
+
+If in those puzzling moments in which a woman tries dissimulation in
+presence of her husband, you have the spirit of a sphinx in seeing
+through her, you will plainly observe that your custom-house
+restrictions are mere child's play to her.
+
+When she comes home or goes out, when in a word she believes she is
+alone, your wife will exhibit all the imprudence of a jackdaw and will
+tell her secret aloud to herself; moreover, by her sudden change of
+expression the moment she notices you (and despite the rapidity of
+this change, you will not fail to have observed the expression she
+wore behind your back) you may read her soul as if you were reading a
+book of Plain Song. Moreover, your wife will often find herself just
+on the point of indulging in soliloquies, and on such occasions her
+husband may recognize the secret feelings of his wife.
+
+Is there a man as heedless of love's mysteries as not to have admired,
+over and over again, the light, mincing, even bewitching gait of a
+woman who flies on her way to keep an assignation? She glides through
+the crowd, like a snake through the grass. The costumes and stuffs of
+the latest fashion spread out their dazzling attractions in the shop
+windows without claiming her attention; on, on she goes like the
+faithful animal who follows the invisible tracks of his master; she is
+deaf to all compliments, blind to all glances, insensible even to the
+light touch of the crowd, which is inevitable amid the circulation of
+Parisian humanity. Oh, how deeply she feels the value of a minute! Her
+gait, her toilet, the expression of her face, involve her in a
+thousand indiscretions, but oh, what a ravishing picture she presents
+to the idler, and what an ominous page for the eye of a husband to
+read, is the face of this woman when she returns from the secret place
+of rendezvous in which her heart ever dwells! Her happiness is
+impressed even on the unmistakable disarray of her hair, the mass of
+whose wavy tresses has not received from the broken comb of the
+celibate that radiant lustre, that elegant and well-proportioned
+adjustment which only the practiced hand of her maid can give. And
+what charming ease appears in her gait! How is it possible to describe
+the emotion which adds such rich tints to her complexion!--which robs
+her eyes of all their assurance and gives to them an expression of
+mingled melancholy and delight, of shame which is yet blended with
+pride!
+
+These observations, stolen from our Meditation, _Of the Last
+Symptoms_, and which are really suggested by the situation of a woman
+who tries to conceal everything, may enable you to divine by analogy
+the rich crop of observation which is left for you to harvest when
+your wife arrives home, or when, without having committed the great
+crime she innocently lets out the secrets of her thoughts. For our own
+part we never see a landing without wishing to set up there a
+mariner's card and a weather-cock.
+
+As the means to be employed for constructing a sort of domestic
+observatory depend altogether on places and circumstances, we must
+leave to the address of a jealous husband the execution of the methods
+suggested in this Meditation.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XVI.
+
+                       THE CHARTER OF MARRIAGE.
+
+I acknowledge that I really know of but one house in Paris which is
+managed in accordance with the system unfolded in the two preceding
+Meditations. But I ought to add, also, that I have built up my system
+on the example of that house. The admirable fortress I allude to
+belonged to a young councillor of state, who was mad with love and
+jealousy.
+
+As soon as he learned that there existed a man who was exclusively
+occupied in bringing to perfection the institution of marriage in
+France, he had the generosity to open the doors of his mansion to me
+and to show me his gyneceum. I admired the profound genius which so
+cleverly disguised the precautions of almost oriental jealousy under
+the elegance of furniture, beauty of carpets and brightness of painted
+decorations. I agreed with him that it was impossible for his wife to
+render his home a scene of treachery.
+
+"Sir," said I, to this Othello of the council of state who did not
+seem to me peculiarly strong in the _haute politique_ of marriage, "I
+have no doubt that the viscountess is delighted to live in this little
+Paradise; she ought indeed to take prodigious pleasure in it,
+especially if you are here often. But the time will come when she will
+have had enough of it; for, my dear sir, we grow tired of everything,
+even of the sublime. What will you do then, when madame, failing to
+find in all your inventions their primitive charm, shall open her
+mouth in a yawn, and perhaps make a request with a view to the
+exercise of two rights, both of which are indispensable to her
+happiness: individual liberty, that is, the privilege of going and
+coming according to the caprice of her will; and the liberty of the
+press, that is, the privilege of writing and receiving letters without
+fear of your censure?"
+
+Scarcely had I said these words when the Vicomte de V----- grasped my
+arm tightly and cried:
+
+"Yes, such is the ingratitude of woman! If there is any thing more
+ungrateful than a king, it is a nation; but, sir, woman is more
+ungrateful than either of them. A married woman treats us as the
+citizens of a constitutional monarchy treat their king; every measure
+has been taken to give these citizens a life of prosperity in a
+prosperous country; the government has taken all the pains in the
+world with its gendarmes, its churches, its ministry and all the
+paraphernalia of its military forces, to prevent the people from dying
+of hunger, to light the cities by gas at the expense of the citizens,
+to give warmth to every one by means of the sun which shines at the
+forty-fifth degree of latitude, and to forbid every one, excepting the
+tax-gatherers, to ask for money; it has labored hard to give to all
+the main roads a more or less substantial pavement--but none of these
+advantages of our fair Utopia is appreciated! The citizens want
+something else. They are not ashamed to demand the right of traveling
+over the roads at their own will, and of being informed where that
+money given to the tax-gatherers goes. And, finally, the monarch will
+soon be obliged, if we pay any attention to the chatter of certain
+scribblers, to give to every individual a share in the throne or to
+adopt certain revolutionary ideas, which are mere Punch and Judy shows
+for the public, manipulated by a band of self-styled patriots,
+riff-raff, always ready to sell their conscience for a million francs,
+for an honest woman, or for a ducal coronet."
+
+"But, monsieur," I said, interrupting him, "while I perfectly agree
+with you on this last point, the question remains, how will you escape
+giving an answer to the just demands of your wife?"
+
+"Sir" he replied, "I shall do--I shall answer as the government
+answers, that is, those governments which are not so stupid as the
+opposition would make out to their constituents. I shall begin by
+solemnly interdicting any arrangement, by virtue of which my wife will
+be declared entirely free. I fully recognize her right to go wherever
+it seems good to her, to write to whom she chooses, and to receive
+letters, the contents of which I do not know. My wife shall have all
+the rights that belong to an English Parliament; I shall let her talk
+as much as she likes, discuss and propose strong and energetic
+measures, but without the power to put them into execution, and then
+after that--well, we shall see!"
+
+"By St. Joseph!" said I to myself, "Here is a man who understands the
+science of marriage as well as I myself do. And then, you will see,
+sir," I answered aloud, in order to obtain from him the fullest
+revelation of his experience; "you will see, some fine morning, that
+you are as big a fool as the next man."
+
+"Sir," he gravely replied, "allow me to finish what I was saying. Here
+is what the great politicians call a theory, but in practice they can
+make that theory vanish in smoke; and ministers possess in a greater
+degree than even the lawyers of Normandy, the art of making fact yield
+to fancy. M. de Metternich and M. de Pilat, men of the highest
+authority, have been for a long time asking each other whether Europe
+is in its right senses, whether it is dreaming, whether it knows
+whither it is going, whether it has ever exercised its reason, a thing
+impossible on the part of the masses, of nations and of women. M. de
+Metternich and M. de Pilat are terrified to see this age carried away
+by a passion for constitutions, as the preceding age was by the
+passion for philosophy, as that of Luther was for a reform of abuses
+in the Roman religion; for it truly seems as if different generations
+of men were like those conspirators whose actions are directed to the
+same end, as soon as the watchword has been given them. But their
+alarm is a mistake, and it is on this point alone that I condemn them,
+for they are right in their wish to enjoy power without permitting the
+middle class to come on a fixed day from the depth of each of their
+six kingdoms, to torment them. How could men of such remarkable talent
+fail to divine that the constitutional comedy has in it a moral of
+profound meaning, and to see that it is the very best policy to give
+the age a bone to exercise its teeth upon! I think exactly as they do
+on the subject of sovereignty. A power is a moral being as much
+interested as a man is in self-preservation. This sentiment of
+self-preservation is under the control of an essential principle which
+may be expressed in three words--_to lose nothing_. But in order to
+lose nothing, a power must grow or remain indefinite, for a power
+which
+remains stationary is nullified. If it retrogrades, it is under the
+control of something else, and loses its independent existence. I am
+quite as well aware, as are those gentlemen, in what a false position
+an unlimited power puts itself by making concessions; it allows to
+another power whose essence is to expand a place within its own sphere
+of activity. One of them will necessarily nullify the other, for every
+existing thing aims at the greatest possible development of its own
+forces. A power, therefore, never makes concessions which it does not
+afterwards seek to retract. This struggle between two powers is the
+basis on which stands the balance of government, whose elasticity so
+mistakenly alarmed the patriarch of Austrian diplomacy, for comparing
+comedy with comedy the least perilous and the most advantageous
+administration is found in the seesaw system of the English and of the
+French politics. These two countries have said to the people, 'You are
+free;' and the people have been satisfied; they enter the government
+like the zeros which give value to the unit. But if the people wish to
+take an active part in the government, immediately they are treated,
+like Sancho Panza, on that occasion when the squire, having become
+sovereign over an island on terra firma, made an attempt at dinner to
+eat the viands set before him.
+
+"Now we ought to parody this admirable scene in the management of our
+homes. Thus, my wife has a perfect right to go out, provided she tell
+me where she is going, how she is going, what is the business she is
+engaged in when she is out and at what hour she will return. Instead
+of demanding this information with the brutality of the police, who
+will doubtless some day become perfect, I take pains to speak to her
+in the most gracious terms. On my lips, in my eyes, in my whole
+countenance, an expression plays, which indicates both curiosity and
+indifference, seriousness and pleasantry, harshness and tenderness.
+These little conjugal scenes are so full of vivacity, of tact and
+address that it is a pleasure to take part in them. The very day on
+which I took from the head of my wife the wreath of orange blossoms
+which she wore, I understood that we were playing at a royal
+coronation--the first scene in a comic pantomime!--I have my
+gendarmes!--I have my guard royal!--I have my attorney general--that I
+do!" he continued enthusiastically. "Do you think that I would allow
+madame to go anywhere on foot unaccompanied by a lackey in livery? Is
+not that the best style? Not to count the pleasure she takes in saying
+to everybody, 'I have my people here.' It has always been a
+conservative principle of mine that my times of exercise should
+coincide with those of my wife, and for two years I have proved to her
+that I take an ever fresh pleasure in giving her my arm. If the
+weather is not suitable for walking, I try to teach her how to drive
+with success a frisky horse; but I swear to you that I undertake this
+in such a manner that she does not learn very quickly!--If either by
+chance, or prompted by a deliberate wish, she takes measures to escape
+without a passport, that is to say, alone in the carriage, have I not
+a driver, a footman, a groom? My wife, therefore, go where she will,
+takes with her a complete _Santa Hermandad_, and I am perfectly easy
+in mind--But, my dear sir, there is abundance of means by which to
+annul the charter of marriage by our manner of fulfilling it! I have
+remarked that the manners of high society induce a habit of idleness
+which absorbs half of the life of a woman without permitting her to
+feel that she is alive. For my part, I have formed the project of
+dexterously leading my wife along, up to her fortieth year, without
+letting her think of adultery, just as poor Musson used to amuse
+himself in leading some simple fellow from the Rue Saint-Denis to
+Pierrefitte without letting him think that he had left the shadows of
+St. Lew's tower."
+
+"How is it," I said, interrupting him, "that you have hit upon those
+admirable methods of deception which I was intending to describe in a
+Meditation entitled _The Act of Putting Death into Life!_ Alas! I
+thought I was the first man to discover that science. The epigrammatic
+title was suggested to me by an account which a young doctor gave me
+of an excellent composition of Crabbe, as yet unpublished. In this
+work, the English poet has introduced a fantastic being called _Life
+in Death_. This personage crosses the oceans of the world in pursuit
+of a living skeleton called _Death in Life_--I recollect at the time
+very few people, among the guests of a certain elegant translator of
+English poetry, understood the mystic meaning of a fable as true as it
+was fanciful. Myself alone, perhaps, as I sat buried in silence,
+thought of the whole generations which as they were hurried along by
+life, passed on their way without living. Before my eyes rose faces of
+women by the million, by the myriad, all dead, all disappointed and
+shedding tears of despair, as they looked back upon the lost moments
+of their ignorant youth. In the distance I saw a playful Meditation
+rise to birth, I heard the satanic laughter which ran through it, and
+now you doubtless are about to kill it.--But come, tell me in
+confidence what means you have discovered by which to assist a woman
+to squander the swift moments during which her beauty is at its full
+flower and her desires at their full strength.--Perhaps you have some
+stratagems, some clever devices, to describe to me--"
+
+The viscount began to laugh at this literary disappointment of mine,
+and he said to me, with a self-satisfied air:
+
+"My wife, like all the young people of our happy century, has been
+accustomed, for three or four consecutive years, to press her fingers
+on the keys of a piano, a long-suffering instrument. She has hammered
+out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the
+exercises of Crammer. I had already taken pains to convince her of the
+excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, I have
+listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in the world,
+and I have at last consented to give her a box at the Bouffons. I have
+thus gained three quiet evenings out of the seven which God has
+created in the week. I am the mainstay of the music shops. At Paris
+there are drawing-rooms which exactly resemble the musical snuff-boxes
+of Germany. They are a sort of continuous orchestra to which I
+regularly go in search of that surfeit of harmony which my wife calls
+a concert. But most part of the time my wife keeps herself buried in
+her music-books--"
+
+"But, my dear sir, do you not recognize the danger that lies in
+cultivating in a woman a taste for singing, and allowing her to yield
+to all the excitements of a sedentary life? It is only less dangerous
+to make her feed on mutton and drink cold water."
+
+"My wife never eats anything but the white meat of poultry, and I
+always take care that a ball shall come after a concert and a
+reception after an Opera! I have also succeeded in making her lie down
+between one and two in the day. Ah! my dear sir, the benefits of this
+nap are incalculable! In the first place each necessary pleasure is
+accorded as a favor, and I am considered to be constantly carrying out
+my wife's wishes. And then I lead her to imagine, without saying a
+single word, that she is being constantly amused every day from six
+o'clock in the evening, the time of our dinner and of her toilet,
+until eleven o'clock in the morning, the time when we get up."
+
+"Ah! sir, how grateful you ought to be for a life which is so
+completely filled up!"
+
+"I have scarcely more than three dangerous hours a day to pass; but
+she has, of course, sonatas to practice and airs to go over, and there
+are always rides in the Bois de Boulogne, carriages to try, visits to
+pay, etc. But this is not all. The fairest ornament of a woman is the
+most exquisite cleanliness. A woman cannot be too particular in this
+respect, and no pains she takes can be laughed at. Now her toilet has
+also suggested to me a method of thus consuming the best hours of the
+day in bathing."
+
+"How lucky I am in finding a listener like you!" I cried; "truly, sir,
+you could waste for her four hours a day, if only you were willing to
+teach her an art quite unknown to the most fastidious of our modern
+fine ladies. Why don't you enumerate to the viscountess the
+astonishing precautions manifest in the Oriental luxury of the Roman
+dames? Give her the names of the slaves merely employed for the bath
+in Poppea's palace: the _unctores_, the _fricatores_, the
+_alipilarili_, the _dropacistae_, the _paratiltriae_, the
+_picatrices_, the _tracatrices_, the swan whiteners, and all the rest.
+--Talk to her about this multitude of slaves whose names are given by
+Mirabeau in his _Erotika Biblion_. If she tries to secure the services
+of all these people you will have the fine times of quietness, not to
+speak of the personal satisfaction which will redound to you yourself
+from the introduction into your house of the system invented by these
+illustrious Romans, whose hair, artistically arranged, was deluged
+with perfumes, whose smallest vein seemed to have acquired fresh blood
+from the myrrh, the lint, the perfume, the douches, the flowers of the
+bath, all of which were enjoyed to the strains of voluptuous music."
+
+"Ah! sir," continued the husband, who was warming to his subject, "can
+I not find also admirable pretexts in my solicitude for her heath? Her
+health, so dear and precious to me, forces me to forbid her going out
+in bad weather, and thus I gain a quarter of the year. And I have also
+introduced the charming custom of kissing when either of us goes out,
+this parting kiss being accompanied with the words, 'My sweet angel, I
+am going out.' Finally, I have taken measures for the future to make
+my wife as truly a prisoner in the house as the conscript in his
+sentry box! For I have inspired her with an incredible enthusiasm for
+the sacred duties of maternity."
+
+"You do it by opposing her?" I asked.
+
+"You have guessed it," he answered, laughing. "I have maintained to
+her that it is impossible for a woman of the world to discharge her
+duties towards society, to manage her household, to devote herself to
+fashion, as well as to the wishes of her husband, whom she loves, and,
+at the same time, to rear children. She then avers that, after the
+example of Cato, who wished to see how the nurse changed the swaddling
+bands of the infant Pompey, she would never leave to others the least
+of the services required in shaping the susceptible minds and tender
+bodies of these little creatures whose education begins in the cradle.
+You understand, sir, that my conjugal diplomacy would not be of much
+service to me unless, after having put my wife in solitary
+confinement, I did not also employ a certain harmless machiavelism,
+which consists in begging her to do whatever she likes, and asking her
+advice in every circumstance and on every contingency. As this
+delusive liberty has entirely deceived a creature so high-minded as
+she is, I have taken pains to stop at no sacrifice which would
+convince Madame de V----- that she is the freest woman in Paris; and,
+in order to attain this end, I take care not to commit those gross
+political blunders into which our ministers so often fall."
+
+"I can see you," said I, "when you wish to cheat your wife out of some
+right granted her by the charter, I can see you putting on a mild and
+deliberate air, hiding your dagger under a bouquet of roses, and as
+you plunge it cautiously into her heart, saying to her with a friendly
+voice, 'My darling, does it hurt?' and she, like those on whose toes
+you tread in a crowd, will probably reply, 'Not in the least.'"
+
+He could not restrain a laugh and said:
+
+"Won't my wife be astonished at the Last Judgment?"
+
+"I scarcely know," I replied, "whether you or she will be most
+astonished."
+
+The jealous man frowned, but his face resumed its calmness as I added:
+
+"I am truly grateful, sir, to the chance which has given me the
+pleasure of your acquaintance. Without the assistance of your remarks
+I should have been less successful than you have been in developing
+certain ideas which we possess in common. I beg of you that you will
+give me leave to publish this conversation. Statements which you and I
+find pregnant with high political conceptions, others perhaps will
+think characterized by more or less cutting irony, and I shall pass
+for a clever fellow in the eyes of both parties."
+
+While I thus tried to express my thanks to the viscount (the first
+husband after my heart that I had met with), he took me once more
+through his apartments, where everything seemed to be beyond
+criticism.
+
+I was about to take leave of him, when opening the door of a little
+boudoir he showed me a room with an air which seemed to say, "Is there
+any way by which the least irregularity should occur without my seeing
+it?"
+
+I replied to this silent interrogation by an inclination of the head,
+such as guests make to their Amphytrion when they taste some
+exceptionally choice dish.
+
+"My whole system," he said to me in a whisper, "was suggested to me by
+three words which my father heard Napoleon pronounce at a crowded
+council of state, when divorce was the subject of conversation.
+'Adultery,' he exclaimed, 'is merely a matter of opportunity!' See,
+then, I have changed these accessories of crime, so that they become
+spies," added the councillor, pointing out to me a divan covered with
+tea-colored cashmere, the cushions of which were slightly pressed.
+"Notice that impression,--I learn from it that my wife has had a
+headache, and has been reclining there."
+
+We stepped toward the divan, and saw the word FOOL lightly traced upon
+the fatal cushion, by four
+
+
+  Things that I know not, plucked by lover's hand
+  From Cypris' orchard, where the fairy band
+  Are dancing, once by nobles thought to be
+  Worthy an order of new chivalry,
+  A brotherhood, wherein, with script of gold,
+  More mortal men than gods should be enrolled.
+
+
+"Nobody in my house has black hair!" said the husband, growing pale.
+
+I hurried away, for I was seized with an irresistible fit of laughter,
+which I could not easily overcome.
+
+"That man has met his judgment day!" I said to myself; "all the
+barriers by which he has surrounded her have only been instrumental in
+adding to the intensity of her pleasures!"
+
+This idea saddened me. The adventure destroyed from summit to
+foundation three of my most important Meditations, and the catholic
+infallibility of my book was assailed in its most essential point. I
+would gladly have paid to establish the fidelity of the Viscountess
+V----- a sum as great as very many people would have offered to secure
+her surrender. But alas! my money will now be kept by me.
+
+Three days afterwards I met the councillor in the foyer of the
+Italiens. As soon as he saw me he rushed up. Impelled by a sort of
+modesty I tried to avoid him, but grasping my arm: "Ah! I have just
+passed three cruel days," he whispered in my ear. "Fortunately my wife
+is as innocent as perhaps a new-born babe--"
+
+"You have already told me that the viscountess was extremely
+ingenious," I said, with unfeeling gaiety.
+
+"Oh!" he said, "I gladly take a joke this evening; for this morning I
+had irrefragable proofs of my wife's fidelity. I had risen very early
+to finish a piece of work for which I had been rushed, and in looking
+absently in my garden, I suddenly saw the _valet de chambre_ of a
+general, whose house is next to mine, climbing over the wall. My
+wife's maid, poking her head from the vestibule, was stroking my dog
+and covering the retreat of the gallant. I took my opera glass and
+examined the intruder--his hair was jet black!--Ah! never have I seen
+a Christian face that gave me more delight! And you may well believe
+that during the day all my perplexities vanished. So, my dear sir," he
+continued, "if you marry, let your dog loose and put broken bottles
+over the top of your walls."
+
+"And did the viscountess perceive your distress during these three
+days?
+
+"Do you take me for a child?" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "I
+have never been so merry in all my life as I have been since we met."
+
+"You are a great man unrecognized," I cried, "and you are not--"
+
+He did not permit me to conclude; for he had disappeared on seeing one
+of his friends who approached as if to greet the viscountess.
+
+Now what can we add that would not be a tedious paraphrase of the
+lessons suggested by this conversation? All is included in it, either
+as seed or fruit. Nevertheless, you see, O husband! that your
+happiness hangs on a hair.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XVII.
+
+                        THE THEORY OF THE BED.
+
+It was about seven o'clock in the evening. They were seated upon the
+academic armchairs, which made a semi-circle round a huge hearth, on
+which a coal fire was burning fitfully--symbol of the burning subject
+of their important deliberations. It was easy to guess, on seeing the
+grave but earnest faces of all the members of this assembly, that they
+were called upon to pronounce sentence upon the life, the fortunes and
+the happiness of people like themselves. They had no commission
+excepting that of their conscience, and they gathered there as the
+assessors of an ancient and mysterious tribunal; but they represented
+interests much more important than those of kings or of peoples; they
+spoke in the name of the passions and on behalf of the happiness of
+the numberless generations which should succeed them.
+
+The grandson of the celebrated Boulle was seated before a round table
+on which were placed the criminal exhibits which had been collected
+with remarkable intelligence. I, the insignificant secretary of the
+meeting, occupied a place at this desk, where it was my office to take
+down a report of the meeting.
+
+"Gentlemen," said an old man, "the first question upon which we have
+to deliberate is found clearly stated in the following passage of a
+letter. The letter was written to the Princess of Wales, Caroline of
+Anspach, by the widow of the Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV,
+mother of the Regent: 'The Queen of Spain has a method of making her
+husband say exactly what she wishes. The king is a religious man; he
+believes that he will be damned if he touched any woman but his wife,
+and still this excellent prince is of a very amorous temperament. Thus
+the queen obtains her every wish. She has placed castors on her
+husband's bed. If he refuses her anything, she pushes the bed away. If
+he grants her request, the beds stand side by side, and she admits him
+into hers. And so the king is highly delighted, since he likes -----'
+I will not go any further, gentlemen, for the virtuous frankness of
+the German princess might in this assembly be charged with
+immorality."
+
+Should wise husbands adopt these beds on castors? This is the problem
+which we have to solve.
+
+The unanimity of the vote left no doubt about the opinion of the
+assembly. I was ordered to inscribe in the records, that if two
+married people slept on two separate beds in the same room the beds
+ought not to be set on castors.
+
+"With this proviso," put in one of the members, "that the present
+decision should have no bearing on any subsequent ruling upon the best
+arrangement of the beds of married people."
+
+The president passed to me a choicely bound volume, in which was
+contained the original edition, published in 1788, of the letters of
+Charlotte Elizabeth de Baviere, widow of the Duke of Orleans, the only
+brother of Louis XIV, and, while I was transcribing the passage
+already quoted, he said:
+
+"But, gentlemen, you must all have received at your houses the
+notification in which the second question is stated."
+
+"I rise to make an observation," exclaimed the youngest of the jealous
+husbands there assembled.
+
+The president took his seat with a gesture of assent.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the young husband, "are we quite prepared to
+deliberate upon so grave a question as that which is presented by the
+universally bad arrangement of the beds? Is there not here a much
+wider question than that of mere cabinet-making to decide? For my own
+part I see in it a question which concerns that of universal human
+intellect. The mysteries of conception, gentlemen, are still enveloped
+in a darkness which modern science has but partially dissipated. We do
+not know how far external circumstances influence the microscopic
+beings whose discovery is due to the unwearied patience of Hill,
+Baker, Joblot, Eichorn, Gleichen, Spallanzani, and especially of
+Muller, and last of all of M. Bory de Saint Vincent. The imperfections
+of the bed opens up a musical question of the highest importance, and
+for my part I declare I shall write to Italy to obtain clear
+information as to the manner in which beds are generally arranged. We
+do not know whether there are in the Italian bed numerous curtain
+rods, screws and castors, or whether the construction of beds is in
+this country more faulty than everywhere else, or whether the dryness
+of timber in Italy, due to the influence of the sun, does not _ab ovo_
+produce the harmony, the sense of which is to so large an extent
+innate in Italians. For these reasons I move that we adjourn."
+
+"What!" cried a gentleman from the West, impatiently rising to his
+feet, "are we here to dilate upon the advancement of music? What we
+have to consider first of all is manners, and the moral question is
+paramount in this discussion."
+
+"Nevertheless," remarked one of the most influential members of the
+council, "the suggestion of the former speaker is not in my opinion to
+be passed by. In the last century, gentlemen, Sterne, one of the
+writers most philosophically delightful and most delightfully
+philosophic, complained of the carelessness with which human beings
+were procreated; 'Shame!' he cried 'that he who copies the divine
+physiognomy of man receives crowns and applause, but he who achieves
+the masterpiece, the prototype of mimic art, feels that like virtue he
+must be his own reward.'
+
+"Ought we not to feel more interest in the improvement of the human
+race than in that of horses? Gentlemen, I passed through a little town
+of Orleanais where the whole population consisted of hunchbacks, of
+glum and gloomy people, veritable children of sorrow, and the remark
+of the former speaker caused me to recollect that all the beds were in
+a very bad condition and the bedchambers presented nothing to the eyes
+of the married couple but what was hideous and revolting. Ah!
+gentlemen, how is it possible that our minds should be in an ideal
+state, when instead of the music of angels flying here and there in
+the bosom of that heaven to which we have attained, our ears are
+assailed by the most detestable, the most angry, the most piercing of
+human cries and lamentations? We are perhaps indebted for the fine
+geniuses who have honored humanity to beds which are solidly
+constructed; and the turbulent population which caused the French
+Revolution were conceived perhaps upon a multitude of tottering
+couches, with twisted and unstable legs; while the Orientals, who are
+such a beautiful race, have a unique method of making their beds. I
+vote for the adjournment."
+
+And the gentleman sat down.
+
+A man belonging to the sect of Methodists arose. "Why should we change
+the subject of debate? We are not dealing here with the improvement of
+the race nor with the perfecting of the work. We must not lose sight
+of the interests of the jealous husband and the principles on which
+moral soundness is based. Don't you know that the noise of which you
+complain seems more terrible to the wife uncertain of her crime, than
+the trumpet of the Last Judgment? Can you forget that a suit for
+infidelity could never be won by a husband excepting through this
+conjugal noise? I will undertake, gentlemen, to refer to the divorces
+of Lord Abergavenny, of Viscount Bolingbroke, of the late Queen
+Caroline, of Eliza Draper, of Madame Harris, in fact, of all those who
+are mentioned in the twenty volumes published by--." (The secretary
+did not distinctly hear the name of the English publisher.)
+
+The motion to adjourn was carried. The youngest member proposed to
+make up a purse for the author producing the best dissertation
+addressed to the society upon a subject which Sterne considered of
+such importance; but at the end of the seance eighteen shillings was
+the total sum found in the hat of the president.
+
+The above debate of the society, which had recently been formed in
+London for the improvement of manners and of marriage and which Lord
+Byron scoffed at, was transmitted to us by the kindness of W. Hawkins,
+Esq., cousin-german of the famous Captain Clutterbuck. The extract may
+serve to solve any difficulties which may occur in the theory of bed
+construction.
+
+But the author of the book considers that the English society has
+given too much importance to this preliminary question. There exists
+in fact quite as many reasons for being a _Rossinist_ as for being a
+_Solidist_ in the matter of beds, and the author acknowledges that it
+is either beneath or above him to solve this difficulty. He thinks
+with Laurence Sterne that it is a disgrace to European civilization
+that there exist so few physiological observations on callipedy, and
+he refuses to state the results of his Meditations on this subject,
+because it would be difficult to formulate them in terms of prudery,
+and they would be but little understood, and misinterpreted. Such
+reserve produces an hiatus in this part of the book; but the author
+has the pleasant satisfaction of leaving a fourth work to be
+accomplished by the next century, to which he bequeaths the legacy of
+all that he has not accomplished, a negative munificence which may
+well be followed by all those who may be troubled by an overplus of
+ideas.
+
+The theory of the bed presents questions much more important than
+those put forth by our neighbors with regard to castors and the
+murmurs of criminal conversation.
+
+We know only three ways in which a bed (in the general sense of this
+term) may be arranged among civilized nations, and particularly among
+the privileged classes to whom this book is addressed. These three
+ways are as follows:
+
+
+  1. TWIN BEDS.
+  2. SEPARATE ROOMS.
+  3. ONE BED FOR BOTH.
+
+
+Before applying ourselves to the examination of these three methods of
+living together, which must necessarily have different influences upon
+the happiness of husbands and wives, we must take a rapid survey of
+the practical object served by the bed and the part it plays in the
+political economy of human existence.
+
+The most incontrovertible principle which can be laid down in this
+matter is, _that the bed was made to sleep upon_.
+
+It would be easy to prove that the practice of sleeping together was
+established between married people but recently, in comparison with
+the antiquity of marriage.
+
+By what reasonings has man arrived at that point in which he brought
+in vogue a practice so fatal to happiness, to health, even to
+_amour-propre_? Here we have a subject which it would be curious to
+investigate.
+
+If you knew one of your rivals who had discovered a method of placing
+you in a position of extreme absurdity before the eyes of those who
+were dearest to you--for instance, while you had your mouth crooked
+like that of a theatrical mask, or while your eloquent lips, like the
+copper faucet of a scanty fountain, dripped pure water--you would
+probably stab him. This rival is sleep. Is there a man in the world
+who knows how he appears to others, and what he does when he is
+asleep?
+
+In sleep we are living corpses, we are the prey of an unknown power
+which seizes us in spite of ourselves, and shows itself in the oddest
+shapes; some have a sleep which is intellectual, while the sleep of
+others is mere stupor.
+
+There are some people who slumber with their mouths open in the
+silliest fashion.
+
+There are others who snore loud enough to make the timbers shake.
+
+Most people look like the impish devils that Michael Angelo
+sculptured, putting out their tongues in silent mockery of the
+passers-by.
+
+The only person I know of in the world who sleeps with a noble air is
+Agamemnon, whom Guerin has represented lying on his bed at the moment
+when Clytemnestra, urged by Egisthus, advances to slay him. Moreover,
+I have always had an ambition to hold myself on my pillow as the king
+of kings Agamemnon holds himself, from the day that I was seized with
+dread of being seen during sleep by any other eyes than those of
+Providence. In the same way, too, from the day I heard my old nurse
+snorting in her sleep "like a whale," to use a slang expression, I
+have added a petition to the special litany which I address to
+Saint-Honore, my patron saint, to the effect that he would save me
+from indulging in this sort of eloquence.
+
+When a man wakes up in the morning, his drowsy face grotesquely
+surmounted by the folds of a silk handkerchief which falls over his
+left temple like a police cap, he is certainly a laughable object, and
+it is difficult to recognize in him the glorious spouse, celebrated in
+the strophes of Rousseau; but, nevertheless, there is a certain gleam
+of life to illume the stupidity of a countenance half dead--and if you
+artists wish to make fine sketches, you should travel on the
+stage-coach and, when the postilion wakes up the postmaster, just
+examine the physiognomies of the departmental clerks! But, were you a
+hundred times as pleasant to look upon as are these bureaucratic
+physiognomies, at least, while you have your mouth shut, your eyes are
+open, and you have some expression in your countenance. Do you know
+how you looked an hour before you awoke, or during the first hour of
+your sleep, when you were neither a man nor an animal, but merely a
+thing, subject to the dominion of those dreams which issue from the
+gate of horn? But this is a secret between your wife and God.
+
+Is it for the purpose of insinuating the imbecility of slumber that
+the Romans decorated the heads of their beds with the head of an ass?
+We leave to the gentlemen who form the academy of inscriptions the
+elucidation of this point.
+
+Assuredly, the first man who took it into his head, at the inspiration
+of the devil, not to leave his wife, even while she was asleep, should
+know how to sleep in the very best style; but do not forget to reckon
+among the sciences necessary to a man on setting up an establishment,
+the art of sleeping with elegance. Moreover, we will place here as a
+corollary to Axiom XXV of our Marriage Catechism the two following
+aphorisms:
+
+
+  A husband should sleep as lightly as a watch-dog, so as never to
+  be caught with his eyes shut.
+
+
+  A man should accustom himself from childhood to go to bed
+  bareheaded.
+
+
+Certain poets discern in modesty, in the alleged mysteries of love,
+some reason why the married couple should share the same bed; but the
+fact must be recognized that if primitive men sought the shade of
+caverns, the mossy couch of deep ravines, the flinty roof of grottoes
+to protect his pleasure, it was because the delight of love left him
+without defence against his enemies. No, it is not more natural to lay
+two heads upon the same pillow, than it is reasonable to tie a strip
+of muslin round the neck. Civilization is come. It has shut up a
+million of men within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled
+them in streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet
+square; after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like
+the tubes of a telescope.
+
+From this cause and from many others, such as thrift, fear, and
+ill-concealed jealousy, has sprung the custom of the sleeping together
+of the married couple; and this custom has given rise to punctuality
+and simultaneity in rising and retiring.
+
+And here you find the most capricious thing in the world, the feeling
+most pre-eminently fickle, the thing which is worthless without its
+own spontaneous inspiration, which takes all its charm from the
+suddenness of its desires, which owes its attractions to the
+genuineness of its outbursts--this thing we call love, subjugated to a
+monastic rule, to that law of geometry which belongs to the Board of
+Longitude!
+
+If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the
+clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and
+wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so.
+It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human
+sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what
+love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!
+
+Only the Author of everything can make the sun rise and set, morn and
+eve, with a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here
+below, if we may be permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste
+Rousseau, can play the role of the sun.
+
+From these preliminary observations, we conclude that it is not
+natural for two to lie under the canopy in the same bed;
+
+That a man is almost always ridiculous when he is asleep;
+
+And that this constant living together threatens the husband with
+inevitable dangers.
+
+We are going to try, therefore, to find out a method which will bring
+our customs in harmony with the laws of nature, and to combine custom
+and nature in a way that will enable a husband to find in the mahogany
+of his bed a useful ally, and an aid in defending himself.
+
+
+                            1. TWIN BEDS.
+
+If the most brilliant, the best-looking, the cleverest of husbands
+wishes to find himself minotaurized just as the first year of his
+married life ends, he will infallibly attain that end if he is unwise
+enough to place two beds side by side, under the voluptuous dome of
+the same alcove.
+
+The argument in support of this may be briefly stated. The following
+are its main lines:
+
+The first husband who invented the twin beds was doubtless an
+obstetrician, who feared that in the involuntary struggles of some
+dream he might kick the child borne by his wife.
+
+But no, he was rather some predestined one who distrusted his power of
+checking a snore.
+
+Perhaps it was some young man who, fearing the excess of his own
+tenderness, found himself always lying at the edge of the bed and in
+danger of tumbling off, or so near to a charming wife that he
+disturbed her slumber.
+
+But may it not have been some Maintenon who received the suggestion
+from her confessor, or, more probably, some ambitious woman who wished
+to rule her husband? Or, more undoubtedly, some pretty little
+Pompadour overcome by that Parisian infirmity so pleasantly described
+by M. de Maurepas in that quatrain which cost him his protracted
+disgrace and certainly contributed to the disasters of Louis XVI's
+reign:
+
+
+ "Iris, we love those features sweet,
+  Your graces all are fresh and free;
+  And flowerets spring beneath your feet,
+  Where naught, alas! but flowers are seen."
+
+
+But why should it not have been a philosopher who dreaded the
+disenchantment which a woman would experience at the sight of a man
+asleep? And such a one would always roll himself up in a coverlet and
+keep his head bare.
+
+Unknown author of this Jesuitical method, whoever thou art, in the
+devil's name, we hail thee as a brother! Thou hast been the cause of
+many disasters. Thy work has the character of all half measures; it is
+satisfactory in no respect, and shares the bad points of the two other
+methods without yielding the advantages of either. How can the man of
+the nineteenth century, how can this creature so supremely
+intelligent, who has displayed a power well-nigh supernatural, who has
+employed the resources of his genius in concealing the machinery of
+his life, in deifying his necessary cravings in order that he might
+not despise them, going so far as to wrest from Chinese leaves, from
+Egyptian beans, from seeds of Mexico, their perfume, their treasure,
+their soul; going so far as to chisel the diamond, chase the silver,
+melt the gold ore, paint the clay and woo every art that may serve to
+decorate and to dignify the bowl from which he feeds!--how can this
+king, after having hidden under folds of muslin covered with diamonds,
+studded with rubies, and buried under linen, under folds of cotton,
+under the rich hues of silk, under the fairy patterns of lace, the
+partner of his wretchedness, how can he induce her to make shipwreck
+in the midst of all this luxury on the decks of two beds. What
+advantage is it that we have made the whole universe subserve our
+existence, our delusions, the poesy of our life? What good is it to
+have instituted law, morals and religion, if the invention of an
+upholsterer [for probably it was an upholsterer who invented the twin
+beds] robs our love of all its illusions, strips it bare of the
+majestic company of its delights and gives it in their stead nothing
+but what is ugliest and most odious? For this is the whole history of
+the two bed system.
+
+
+                                LXIII.
+That it shall appear either sublime or grotesque are the alternatives
+                  to which we have reduced a desire.
+
+
+If it be shared, our love is sublime; but should you sleep in twin
+beds, your love will always be grotesque. The absurdities which this
+half separation occasions may be comprised in either one of two
+situations, which will give us occasion to reveal the causes of very
+many marital misfortunes.
+
+Midnight is approaching as a young woman is putting on her curl papers
+and yawning as she did so. I do not know whether her melancholy
+proceeded from a headache, seated in the right or left lobe of her
+brain, or whether she was passing through one of those seasons of
+weariness during which all things appear black to us; but to see her
+negligently putting up her hair for the night, to see her languidly
+raising her leg to take off her garter, it seemed to me that she would
+prefer to be drowned rather than to be denied the relief of plunging
+her draggled life into the slumber that might restore it. At this
+instant, I know not to what degree from the North Pole she stands,
+whether at Spitzberg or in Greenland. Cold and indifferent she goes to
+bed thinking, as Mistress Walter Shandy might have thought, that the
+morrow would be a day of sickness, that her husband is coming home
+very late, that the beaten eggs which she has just eaten were not
+sufficiently sweetened, that she owes more than five hundred francs to
+her dressmaker; in fine, thinking about everything which you may
+suppose would occupy the mind of a tired woman. In the meanwhile
+arrives her great lout of a husband, who, after some business meeting,
+has drunk punch, with a consequent elation. He takes off his boots,
+leaves his stockings on a lounge, his bootjack lies before the
+fireplace; and wrapping his head up in a red silk handkerchief,
+without giving himself the trouble to tuck in the corners, he fires
+off at his wife certain interjectory phrases, those little marital
+endearments, which form almost the whole conversation at those
+twilight hours, where drowsy reason is no longer shining in this
+mechanism of ours. "What, in bed already! It was devilish cold this
+evening! Why don't you speak, my pet? You've already rolled yourself
+up in bed, then! Ah! you are in the dumps and pretend to be asleep!"
+These exclamations are mingled with yawns; and after numberless little
+incidents which according to the usage of each home vary this preface
+of the night, our friend flings himself into his own bed with a heavy
+thud.
+
+Alas! before a woman who is cold, how mad a man must appear when
+desire renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject,
+biting as an epigram and soothing as a madrigal; when he enacts with
+more or less sprightliness the scene where, in _Venice Preserved_, the
+genius of Orway has represented the senator Antonio, repeating a
+hundred times over at the feet of Aquilina: "Aquilina, Quilina, Lina,
+Aqui, Nacki!" without winning from her aught save the stroke of her
+whip, inasmuch as he has undertaken to fawn upon her like a dog. In
+the eyes of every woman, even of a lawful wife, the more a man shows
+eager passion under these circumstances, the more silly he appears. He
+is odious when he commands, he is minotaurized if he abuses his power.
+On this point I would remind you of certain aphorisms in the marriage
+catechism from which you will see that you are violating its most
+sacred precepts. Whether a woman yields, or does not yield, this
+institution of twin beds gives to marriage such an element of
+roughness and nakedness that the most chaste wife and the most
+intelligent husband are led to immodesty.
+
+This scene, which is enacted in a thousand ways and which may
+originate in a thousand different incidents, has a sequel in that
+other situation which, while it is less pleasant, is far more
+terrible.
+
+One evening when I was talking about these serious matters with the
+late Comte de Noce, of whom I have already had occasion to speak, a
+tall white-haired old man, his intimate friend, whose name I will not
+give, because he is still alive, looked at us with a somewhat
+melancholy air. We guessed that he was about to relate some tale of
+scandal, and we accordingly watched him, somewhat as the stenographer
+of the _Moniteur_ might watch, as he mounted the tribune, a minister
+whose speech had already been written out for the reporter. The
+story-teller on this occasion was an old marquis, whose fortune,
+together with his wife and children, had perished in the disasters of
+the Revolution. The marchioness had been one of the most inconsistent
+women of the past generation; the marquis accordingly was not wanting
+in observations on feminine human nature. Having reached an age in
+which he saw nothing before him but the gulf of the grave, he spoke
+about himself as if the subject of his talk were Mark Antony or
+Cleopatra.
+
+"My young friend"--he did me the honor to address me, for it was I who
+made the last remark in this discussion--"your reflections make me
+think of a certain evening, in the course of which one of my friends
+conducted himself in such a manner as to lose forever the respect of
+his wife. Now, in those days a woman could take vengeance with
+marvelous facility--for it was always a word and a blow. The married
+couple I speak of were particular in sleeping on separate beds, with
+their head under the arch of the same alcove. They came home one night
+from a brilliant ball given by the Comte de Mercy, ambassador of the
+emperor. The husband had lost a considerable sum at play, so he was
+completely absorbed in thought. He had to pay a debt, the next day, of
+six thousand crowns!--and you will recollect, Noce, that a hundred
+crowns couldn't be made up from scraping together the resources of ten
+such musketeers. The young woman, as generally happens under such
+circumstances, was in a gale of high spirits. 'Give to the marquis,'
+she said to a _valet de chambre_, 'all that he requires for his
+toilet.' In those days people dressed for the night. These
+extraordinary words did not rouse the husband from his mood of
+abstraction, and then madame, assisted by her maid, began to indulge
+in a thousand coquetries. 'Was my appearance to your taste this
+evening?' 'You are always to my taste,' answered the marquis,
+continuing to stride up and down the room. 'You are very gloomy! Come
+and talk to me, you frowning lover,' said she, placing herself before
+him in the most seductive negligee. But you can have no idea of the
+enchantments of the marchioness unless you had known her. Ah! you have
+seen her, Noce!" he said with a mocking smile. "Finally, in spite of
+all her allurements and beauty, the marchioness was lost sight of amid
+thoughts of the six thousand crowns which this fool of a husband could
+not get out of his head, and she went to bed all alone. But women
+always have one resource left; so that the moment that the good
+husband made as though he would get into his bed, the marchioness
+cried, 'Oh, how cold I am!' 'So am I,' he replied. 'How is it that the
+servants have not warmed our beds?'--And then I rang."
+
+The Comte de Noce could not help laughing, and the old marquis, quite
+put out of countenance, stopped short.
+
+Not to divine the desire of a wife, to snore while she lies awake, to
+be in Siberia when she is in the tropics, these are the slighter
+disadvantages of twin beds. What risks will not a passionate woman run
+when she becomes aware that her husband is a heavy sleeper?
+
+I am indebted to Beyle for an Italian anecdote, to which his dry and
+sarcastic manner lent an infinite charm, as he told me this tale of
+feminine hardihood.
+
+Ludovico had his palace at one end of the town of Milan; at the other
+was that of the Countess of Pernetti. At midnight, on a certain
+occasion, Ludovico resolved, at the peril of his life, to make a rash
+expedition for the sake of gazing for one second on the face he
+adored, and accordingly appeared as if by magic in the palace of his
+well-beloved. He reached the nuptial chamber. Elisa Pernetti, whose
+heart most probably shared the desire of her lover, heard the sound of
+his footsteps and divined his intention. She saw through the walls of
+her chamber a countenance glowing with love. She rose from her
+marriage bed, light as a shadow she glided to the threshold of her
+door, with a look she embraced him, she seized his hand, she made a
+sign to him, she drew him in.
+
+"But he will kill you!" said he.
+
+"Perhaps so."
+
+But all this amounts to nothing. Let us grant that most husbands sleep
+lightly. Let us grant that they sleep without snoring, and that they
+always discern the degree of latitude at which their wives are to be
+found. Moreover, all the reasons which we have given why twin beds
+should be condemned, let us consider but dust in the balance. But,
+after all, a final consideration would make us also proscribe the use
+of beds ranged within the limits of the same alcove.
+
+To a man placed in the position of a husband, there are circumstances
+which have led us to consider the nuptial couch as an actual means of
+defence. For it is only in bed that a man can tell whether his wife's
+love is increasing or decreasing. It is the conjugal barometer. Now to
+sleep in twin beds is to wish for ignorance. You will understand, when
+we come to treat of _civil war_ (See Part Third) of what extreme
+usefulness a bed is and how many secrets a wife reveals in bed,
+without knowing it.
+
+Do not therefore allow yourself to be led astray by the specious good
+nature of such an institution as that of twin beds.
+
+It is the silliest, the most treacherous, the most dangerous in the
+world. Shame and anathema to him who conceived it!
+
+But in proportion as this method is pernicious in the case of young
+married people, it is salutary and advantageous for those who have
+reached the twentieth year of married life. Husband and wife can then
+most conveniently indulge their duets of snoring. It will, moreover,
+be more convenient for their various maladies, whether rheumatism,
+obstinate gout, or even the taking of a pinch of snuff; and the cough
+or the snore will not in any respect prove a greater hindrance than it
+is found to be in any other arrangement.
+
+We have not thought it necessary to mention the exceptional cases
+which authorize a husband to resort to twin beds. However, the opinion
+of Bonaparte was that when once there had taken place an interchange
+of life and breath (such are his words), nothing, not even sickness,
+should separate married people. This point is so delicate that it is
+not possible here to treat it methodically.
+
+Certain narrow minds will object that there are certain patriarchal
+families whose legislation of love is inflexible in the matter of two
+beds and an alcove, and that, by this arrangement, they have been
+happy from generation to generation. But, the only answer that the
+author vouchsafes to this is that he knows a great many respectable
+people who pass their lives in watching games of billiards.
+
+
+                          2. SEPARATE ROOMS.
+
+There cannot be found in Europe a hundred husbands of each nation
+sufficiently versed in the science of marriage, or if you like, of
+life, to be able to dwell in an apartment separate from that of their
+wives.
+
+The power of putting this system into practice shows the highest
+degree of intellectual and masculine force.
+
+The married couple who dwell in separate apartments have become either
+divorced, or have attained to the discovery of happiness. They either
+abominate or adore each other. We will not undertake to detail here
+the admirable precepts which may be deduced from this theory whose end
+is to make constancy and fidelity easy and delightful. It may be
+sufficient to declare that by this system alone two married people can
+realize the dream of many noble souls. This will be understood by all
+the faithful.
+
+As for the profane, their curious questionings will be sufficiently
+answered by the remark that the object of this institution is to give
+happiness to one woman. Which among them will be willing to deprive
+general society of any share in the talents with which they think
+themselves endowed, to the advantage of one woman? Nevertheless, the
+rendering of his mistress happy gives any one the fairest title to
+glory which can be earned in this valley of Jehosaphat, since,
+according to Genesis, Eve was not satisfied even with a terrestrial
+Paradise. She desired to taste the forbidden fruit, the eternal emblem
+of adultery.
+
+But there is an insurmountable reason why we should refrain from
+developing this brilliant theory. It would cause a digression from the
+main theme of our work. In the situation which we have supposed to be
+that of a married establishment, a man who is sufficiently unwise to
+sleep apart from his wife deserves no pity for the disaster which he
+himself invites.
+
+Let us then resume our subject. Every man is not strong enough to
+undertake to occupy an apartment separate from that of his wife;
+although any man might derive as much good as evil from the
+difficulties which exist in using but one bed.
+
+We now proceed to solve the difficulties which superficial minds may
+detect in this method, for which our predilection is manifest.
+
+But this paragraph, which is in some sort a silent one, inasmuch as we
+leave it to the commentaries which will be made in more than one home,
+may serve as a pedestal for the imposing figure of Lycurgus, that
+ancient legislator, to whom the Greeks are indebted for their
+profoundest thoughts on the subject of marriage. May his system be
+understood by future generations! And if modern manners are too much
+given to softness to adopt his system in its entirety, they may at
+least be imbued with the robust spirit of this admirable code.
+
+
+                         3. ONE BED FOR BOTH.
+
+On a night in December, Frederick the Great looked up at the sky,
+whose stars were twinkling with that clear and living light which
+presages heavy frost, and he exclaimed, "This weather will result in a
+great many soldiers to Prussia."
+
+The king expressed here, by a single phrase, the principal
+disadvantage which results from the constant living together of
+married people. Although it may be permitted to Napoleon and to
+Frederick to estimate the value of a woman more or less according to
+the number of her children, yet a husband of talent ought, according
+to the maxims of the thirteenth Meditation, to consider
+child-begetting merely as a means of defence, and it is for him to
+know to what extent it may take place.
+
+The observation leads into mysteries from which the physiological Muse
+recoils. She has been quite willing to enter the nuptial chambers
+while they are occupied, but she is a virgin and a prude, and there
+are occasions on which she retires. For, since it is at this passage
+in my book that the Muse is inclined to put her white hands before her
+eyes so as to see nothing, like the young girl looking through the
+interstices of her tapering fingers, she will take advantage of this
+attack of modesty, to administer a reprimand to our manners. In
+England the nuptial chamber is a sacred place. The married couple
+alone have the privilege of entering it, and more than one lady, we
+are told, makes her bed herself. Of all the crazes which reign beyond
+the sea, why should the only one which we despise be precisely that,
+whose grace and mystery ought undoubtedly to meet the approval of all
+tender souls on this continent? Refined women condemn the immodesty
+with which strangers are introduced into the sanctuary of marriage. As
+for us, who have energetically anathematized women who walk abroad at
+the time when they expect soon to be confined, our opinion cannot be
+doubted. If we wish the celibate to respect marriage, married people
+ought to have some regard for the inflammability of bachelors.
+
+To sleep every night with one's wife may seem, we confess, an act of
+the most insolent folly.
+
+Many husbands are inclined to ask how a man, who desires to bring
+marriage to perfection, dare prescribe to a husband a rule of conduct
+which would be fatal in a lover.
+
+Nevertheless, such is the decision of a doctor of arts and sciences
+conjugal.
+
+In the first place, without making a resolution never to sleep by
+himself, this is the only course left to a husband, since we have
+demonstrated the dangers of the preceding systems. We must now try to
+prove that this last method yields more advantage and less
+disadvantage than the two preceding methods, that is, so far as
+relates to the critical position in which a conjugal establishment
+stands.
+
+Our observations on the twin beds ought to have taught husbands that
+they should always be strung into the same degree of fervor as that
+which prevails in the harmonious organization of their wives. Now it
+seems to us that this perfect equality in feelings would naturally be
+created under the white Aegis, which spreads over both of them its
+protecting sheet; this at the outset is an immense advantage, and
+really nothing is easier to verify at any moment than the degree of
+love and expansion which a woman reaches when the same pillow receives
+the heads of both spouses.
+
+Man [we speak now of the species] walks about with a memorandum always
+totalized, which shows distinctly and without error the amount of
+passion which he carries within him. This mysterious gynometer is
+traced in the hollow of the hand, for the hand is really that one of
+our members which bears the impress most plainly of our characters.
+Chirology is a fifth work which I bequeath to my successors, for I am
+contented here to make known but the elements of this interesting
+science.
+
+The hand is the essential organ of touch. Touch is the sense which
+very nearly takes the place of all the others, and which alone is
+indispensable. Since the hand alone can carry out all that a man
+desires, it is to an extent action itself. The sum total of our
+vitality passes through it; and men of powerful intellects are usually
+remarkable for their shapely hands, perfection in that respect being a
+distinguishing trait of their high calling.
+
+Jesus Christ performed all His miracles by the imposition of hands.
+The hand is the channel through which life passes. It reveals to the
+physician all the mysteries of our organism. It exhales more than any
+other part of our bodies the nervous fluid, or that unknown substance,
+which for want of another term we style _will_. The eye can discover
+the mood of our soul but the hand betrays at the same time the secrets
+of the body and those of the soul. We can acquire the faculty of
+imposing silence on our eyes, on our lips, on our brows, and on our
+forehead; but the hand never dissembles and nothing in our features
+can be compared to the richness of its expression. The heat and cold
+which it feels in such delicate degrees often escape the notice of
+other senses in thoughtless people; but a man knows how to distinguish
+them, however little time he may have bestowed in studying the anatomy
+of sentiments and the affairs of human life. Thus the hand has a
+thousand ways of becoming dry, moist, hot, cold, soft, rough,
+unctuous. The hand palpitates, becomes supple, grows hard and again is
+softened. In fine it presents a phenomenon which is inexplicable so
+that one is tempted to call it the incarnation of thought. It causes
+the despair of the sculptor and the painter when they wish to express
+the changing labyrinth of its mysterious lineaments. To stretch out
+your hand to a man is to save him, it serves as a ratification of the
+sentiments we express. The sorcerers of every age have tried to read
+our future destines in those lines which have nothing fanciful in
+them, but absolutely correspond with the principles of each one's life
+and character. When she charges a man with want of tact, which is
+merely touch, a woman condemns him without hope. We use the
+expressions, the "Hand of Justice," the "Hand of God;" and a _coup de
+main_ means a bold undertaking.
+
+To understand and recognize the hidden feelings by the atmospheric
+variations of the hand, which a woman almost always yields without
+distrust, is a study less unfruitful and surer than that of
+physiognomy.
+
+In this way you will be able, if you acquire this science, to wield
+vast power, and to find a clue which will guide you through the
+labyrinth of the most impenetrable heart. This will render your living
+together free from very many mistakes, and, at the same time, rich in
+the acquisition of many a treasure.
+
+Buffon and certain physiologists affirm that our members are more
+completely exhausted by desire than by the most keen enjoyments. And
+really, does not desire constitute of itself a sort of intuitive
+possession? Does it not stand in the same relation to visible action,
+as those incidents in our mental life, in which we take part in a
+dream, stand to the incidents of our actual life? This energetic
+apprehension of things, does it not call into being an internal
+emotion more powerful than that of the external action? If our
+gestures are only the accomplishment of things already enacted by our
+thought, you may easily calculate how desire frequently entertained
+must necessarily consume the vital fluids. But the passions which are
+no more than the aggregation of desires, do they not furrow with the
+wrinkle of their lightning the faces of the ambitious, of gamblers,
+for instance, and do they not wear out their bodies with marvelous
+swiftness?
+
+These observations, therefore, necessarily contain the germs of a
+mysterious system equally favored by Plato and by Epicurus; we will
+leave it for you to meditate upon, enveloped as it is in the veil
+which enshrouds Egyptian statues.
+
+But the greatest mistake that a man commits is to believe that love
+can belong only to those fugitive moments which, according to the
+magnificent expression of Bossuet, are like to the nails scattered
+over a wall: to the eye they appear numerous; but when they are
+collected they make but a handful.
+
+Love consists almost always in conversation. There are few things
+inexhaustible in a lover: goodness, gracefulness and delicacy. To feel
+everything, to divine everything, to anticipate everything; to
+reproach without bringing affliction upon a tender heart; to make a
+present without pride; to double the value of a certain action by the
+way in which it is done; to flatter rather by actions than by words;
+to make oneself understood rather than to produce a vivid impression;
+to touch without striking; to make a look and the sound of the voice
+produce the effect of a caress; never to produce embarrassment; to
+amuse without offending good taste; always to touch the heart; to
+speak to the soul--this is all that women ask. They will abandon all
+the delights of all the nights of Messalina, if only they may live
+with a being who will yield them those caresses of the soul, for which
+they are so eager, and which cost nothing to men if only they have a
+little consideration.
+
+This outline comprises a great portion of such secrets as belong to
+the nuptial couch. There are perhaps some witty people who may take
+this long definition of politeness for a description of love, while in
+any case it is no more than a recommendation to treat your wife as you
+would treat the minister on whose good-will depends your promotion to
+the post you covet.
+
+I hear numberless voices crying out that this book is a special
+advocate for women and neglects the cause of men;
+
+That the majority of women are unworthy of these delicate attentions
+and would abuse them;
+
+That there are women given to licentiousness who would not lend
+themselves to very much of what they would call mystification;
+
+That women are nothing but vanity and think of nothing but dress;
+
+That they have notions which are truly unreasonable;
+
+That they are very often annoyed by an attention;
+
+That they are fools, they understand nothing, are worth nothing, etc.
+
+In answer to all these clamors we will write here the following
+phrases, which, placed between two spaces, will perhaps have the air
+of a thought, to quote an expression of Beaumarchais.
+
+
+                                LXIV.
+     A wife is to her husband just what her husband has made her.
+
+
+The reasons why the single bed must triumph over the other two methods
+of organizing the nuptial couch are as follows: In the single couch we
+have a faithful interpreter to translate with profound truthfulness
+the sentiments of a woman, to render her a spy over herself, to keep
+her at the height of her amorous temperature, never to leave her, to
+have the power of hearing her breathe in slumber, and thus to avoid
+all the nonsense which is the ruin of so many marriages.
+
+As it is impossible to receive benefits without paying for them, you
+are bound to learn how to sleep gracefully, to preserve your dignity
+under the silk handkerchief that wraps your head, to be polite, to see
+that your slumber is light, not to cough too much, and to imitate
+those modern authors who write more prefaces than books.
+
+
+
+                          MEDITATION XVIII.
+
+                       OF MARITAL REVOLUTIONS.
+
+The time always comes in which nations and women even the most stupid
+perceive that their innocence is being abused. The cleverest policy
+may for a long time proceed in a course of deceit; but it would be
+very happy for men if they could carry on their deceit to an infinite
+period; a vast amount of bloodshed would then be avoided, both in
+nations and in families.
+
+Nevertheless, we hope that the means of defence put forth in the
+preceding Meditations will be sufficient to deliver a certain number
+of husbands from the clutches of the Minotaur! You must agree with the
+doctor that many a love blindly entered upon perishes under the
+treatment of hygiene or dies away, thanks to marital policy. Yes [what
+a consoling mistake!] many a lover will be driven away by personal
+efforts, many a husband will learn how to conceal under an
+impenetrable veil the machinery of his machiavelism, and many a man
+will have better success than the old philosopher who cried: _Nolo
+coronari!_
+
+But we are here compelled to acknowledge a mournful truth. Despotism
+has its moments of secure tranquillity. Her reign seems like the hour
+which precedes the tempest, and whose silence enables the traveler,
+stretched upon the faded grass, to hear at a mile's distance, the song
+of the cicada. Some fine morning an honest woman, who will be imitated
+by a great portion of our own women, discerns with an eagle eye the
+clever manoeuvres which have rendered her the victim of an infernal
+policy. She is at first quite furious at having for so long a time
+preserved her virtue. At what age, in what day, does this terrible
+revolution occur? This question of chronology depends entirely upon
+the genius of each husband; for it is not the vocation of all to put
+in practice with the same talent the precepts of our conjugal gospel.
+
+"A man must have very little love," the mystified wife will exclaim,
+"to enter upon such calculations as these! What! From the first day I
+have been to him perpetually an object of suspicion! It is monstrous,
+even a woman would be incapable of such artful and cruel treachery!"
+
+This is the question. Each husband will be able to understand the
+variations of this complaint which will be made in accordance with the
+character of the young Fury, of whom he has made a companion.
+
+A woman by no means loses her head under these circumstances; she
+holds her tongue and dissembles. Her vengeance will be concealed. Only
+you will have some symptoms of hesitation to contend with on the
+arrival of the crisis, which we presume you to have reached on the
+expiration of the honeymoon; but you will also have to contend against
+a resolution. She has determined to revenge herself. From that day, so
+far as regards you, her mask, like her heart, has turned to bronze.
+Formerly you were an object of indifference to her; you are becoming
+by degrees absolutely insupportable. The Civil War commences only at
+the moment in which, like the drop of water which makes the full glass
+overflow, some incident, whose more or less importance we find
+difficulty in determining, has rendered you odious. The lapse of time
+which intervenes between this last hour, the limit of your good
+understanding, and the day when your wife becomes cognizant of your
+artifices, is nevertheless quite sufficient to permit you to institute
+a series of defensive operations, which we will now explain.
+
+Up to this time you have protected your honor solely by the exertion
+of a power entirely occult. Hereafter the wheels of your conjugal
+machinery must be set going in sight of every one. In this case, if
+you would prevent a crime you must strike a blow. You have begun by
+negotiating, you must end by mounting your horse, sabre in hand, like
+a Parisian gendarme. You must make your horse prance, you must
+brandish your sabre, you must shout strenuously, and you must endeavor
+to calm the revolt without wounding anybody.
+
+Just as the author has found a means of passing from occult methods to
+methods that are patent, so it is necessary for the husband to justify
+the sudden change in his tactics; for in marriage, as in literature,
+art consists entirely in the gracefulness of the transitions. This is
+of the highest importance for you. What a frightful position you will
+occupy if your wife has reason to complain of your conduct at the
+moment, which is, perhaps, the most critical of your whole married
+life!
+
+You must therefore find some means or other to justify the secret
+tyranny of your initial policy; some means which still prepare the
+mind of your wife for the severe measures which you are about to take;
+some means which so far from forfeiting her esteem will conciliate
+her; some means which will gain her pardon, which will restore some
+little of that charm of yours, by which you won her love before your
+marriage.
+
+"But what policy is it that demands this course of action? Is there
+such a policy?"
+
+Certainly there is.
+
+But what address, what tact, what histrionic art must a husband
+possess in order to display the mimic wealth of that treasure which we
+are about to reveal to him! In order to counterfeit the passion whose
+fire is to make you a new man in the presence of your wife, you will
+require all the cunning of Talma.
+
+This passion is JEALOUSY.
+
+"My husband is jealous. He has been so from the beginning of our
+marriage. He has concealed this feeling from me by his usual refined
+delicacy. Does he love me still? I am going to do as I like with him!"
+
+Such are the discoveries which a woman is bound to make, one after
+another, in accordance with the charming scenes of the comedy which
+you are enacting for your amusement; and a man of the world must be an
+actual fool, if he fails in making a woman believe that which flatters
+her.
+
+With what perfection of hypocrisy must you arrange, step by step, your
+hypocritical behavior so as to rouse the curiosity of your wife, to
+engage her in a new study, and to lead her astray among the labyrinths
+of your thought!
+
+Ye sublime actors! Do ye divine the diplomatic reticence, the gestures
+of artifice, the veiled words, the looks of doubtful meaning which
+some evening may induce your wife to attempt the capture of your
+secret thoughts?
+
+Ah! to laugh in your sleeve while you are exhibiting the fierceness of
+a tiger; neither to lie nor to tell the truth; to comprehend the
+capricious mood of a woman, and yet to make her believe that she
+controls you, while you intend to bind her with a collar of iron! O
+comedy that has no audience, which yet is played by one heart before
+another heart and where both of you applaud because both of you think
+that you have obtained success!
+
+She it is who will tell you that you are jealous, who will point out
+to you that she knows you better than you know yourself, who will
+prove to you the uselessness of your artifices and who perhaps will
+defy you. She triumphs in the excited consciousness of the superiority
+which she thinks she possesses over you; you of course are ennobled in
+her eyes; for she finds your conduct quite natural. The only thing she
+feels is that your want of confidence was useless; if she wished to
+betray, who could hinder her?
+
+Then, some evening, you will burst into a passion, and, as some trifle
+affords you a pretext, you will make a scene, in the course of which
+your anger will make you divulge the secret of your distress. And here
+comes in the promulgation of our new code.
+
+Have no fear that a woman is going to trouble herself about this. She
+needs your jealousy, she rather likes your severity. This comes from
+the fact that in the first place she finds there a justification for
+her own conduct; and then she finds immense satisfaction in playing
+before other people the part of a victim. What delightful expressions
+of sympathy will she receive! Afterwards she will use this as a weapon
+against you, in the expectation thereby of leading you into a pitfall.
+
+She sees in your conduct the source of a thousand more pleasures in
+her future treachery, and her imagination smiles at all the barricades
+with which you surround her, for will she not have the delight of
+surmounting them all?
+
+Women understand better than we do the art of analyzing the two human
+feelings, which alternately form their weapons of attack, or the
+weapons of which they are victims. They have the instinct of love,
+because it is their whole life, and of jealousy, because it is almost
+the only means by which they can control us. Within them jealousy is a
+genuine sentiment and springs from the instinct of self-preservation;
+it is vital to their life or death. But with men this feeling is
+absolutely absurd when it does not subserve some further end.
+
+To entertain feelings of jealousy towards the woman you love, is to
+start from a position founded on vicious reasoning. We are loved, or
+we are not loved; if a man entertains jealousy under either of these
+circumstances, it is a feeling absolutely unprofitable to him;
+jealousy may be explained as fear, fear in love. But to doubt one's
+wife is to doubt one's self.
+
+To be jealous is to exhibit, at once, the height of egotism, the error
+of _amour-propre_, the vexation of morbid vanity. Women rather
+encourage this ridiculous feeling, because by means of it they can
+obtain cashmere shawls, silver toilet sets, diamonds, which for them
+mark the high thermometer mark of their power. Moreover, unless you
+appear blinded by jealousy, your wife will not keep on her guard; for
+there is no pitfall which she does not distrust, excepting that which
+she makes for herself.
+
+Thus the wife becomes the easy dupe of a husband who is clever enough
+to give to the inevitable revolution, which comes sooner or later, the
+advantageous results we have indicated.
+
+You must import into your establishment that remarkable phenomenon
+whose existence is demonstrated in the asymptotes of geometry. Your
+wife will always try to minotaurize you without being successful. Like
+those knots which are never so tight as when one tries to loosen them,
+she will struggle to the advantage of your power over her, while she
+believes that she is struggling for her independence.
+
+The highest degree of good play on the part of a prince lies in
+persuading his people that he goes to war for them, while all the time
+he is causing them to be killed for his throne.
+
+But many husbands will find a preliminary difficulty in executing this
+plan of campaign. If your wife is a woman of profound dissimulation,
+the question is, what signs will indicate to her the motives of your
+long mystification?
+
+It will be seen that our Meditation on the Custom House, as well as
+that on the Bed, has already revealed certain means of discerning the
+thought of a woman; but we make no pretence in this book of
+exhaustively stating the resources of human wit, which are
+immeasurable. Now here is a proof of this. On the day of the
+Saturnalia the Romans discovered more features in the character of
+their slaves, in ten minutes, than they would have found out during
+the rest of the year! You ought therefore to ordain Saturnalia in your
+establishment, and to imitate Gessler, who, when he saw William Tell
+shoot the apple off his son's head, was forced to remark, "Here is a
+man whom I must get rid of, for he could not miss his aim if he wished
+to kill me."
+
+You understand, then, that if your wife wishes to drink Roussillon
+wine, to eat mutton chops, to go out at all hours and to read the
+encyclopaedia, you are bound to take her very seriously. In the first
+place, she will begin to distrust you against her own wish, on seeing
+that your behaviour towards her is quite contrary to your previous
+proceedings. She will suppose that you have some ulterior motive in
+this change of policy, and therefore all the liberty that you give her
+will make her so anxious that she cannot enjoy it. As regards the
+misfortunes that this change may bring, the future will provide for
+them. In a revolution the primary principle is to exercise a control
+over the evil which cannot be prevented and to attract the lightning
+by rods which shall lead it to the earth.
+
+And now the last act of the comedy is in preparation.
+
+The lover who, from the day when the feeblest of all first symptoms
+shows itself in your wife until the moment when the marital revolution
+takes place, has jumped upon the stage, either as a material creature
+or as a being of the imagination--the LOVER, summoned by a sign from
+her, now declares: "Here I am!"
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XIX.
+
+                            OF THE LOVER.
+
+We offer the following maxims for your consideration:
+
+We should despair of the human race if these maxims had been made
+before 1830; but they set forth in so clear a manner the agreements
+and difficulties which distinguish you, your wife and a lover; they so
+brilliantly describe what your policy should be, and demonstrate to
+you so accurately the strength of the enemy, that the teacher has put
+his _amour-propre_ aside, and if by chance you find here a single new
+thought, send it to the devil, who suggested this work.
+
+
+                                 LXV.
+                  To speak of love is to make love.
+
+
+                                LXVI.
+   In a lover the coarsest desire always shows itself as a burst of
+                          honest admiration.
+
+
+                                LXVII.
+   A lover has all the good points and all the bad points which are
+                        lacking in a husband.
+
+
+                               LXVIII.
+ A lover not only gives life to everything, he makes one forget life;
+             the husband does not give life to anything.
+
+
+                                LXIX.
+All the affected airs of sensibility which a woman puts on invariably
+deceive a lover; and on occasions when a husband shrugs his shoulders,
+a lover is in ecstasies.
+
+
+                                 LXX.
+A lover betrays by his manner alone the degree of intimacy in which he
+                      stands to a married woman.
+
+
+                                LXXI.
+A woman does not always know why she is in love. It is rarely that a
+man falls in love without some selfish purpose. A husband should
+discover this secret motive of egotism, for it will be to him the
+lever of Archimedes.
+
+
+                                LXXII.
+  A clever husband never betrays his supposition that his wife has a
+                                lover.
+
+
+                               LXXIII.
+The lover submits to all the caprices of a woman; and as a man is
+never vile while he lies in the arms of his mistress, he will take the
+means to please her that a husband would recoil from.
+
+
+                                LXXIV.
+ A lover teaches a wife all that her husband has concealed from her.
+
+
+                                LXXV.
+All the sensations which a woman yields to her lover, she gives in
+exchange; they return to her always intensified; they are as rich in
+what they give as in what they receive. This is the kind of commerce
+in which almost all husbands end by being bankrupt.
+
+
+                                LXXVI.
+A lover speaks of nothing to a woman but that which exalts her; while
+a husband, although he may be a loving one, can never refrain from
+giving advice which always has the appearance of reprimand.
+
+
+                               LXXVII.
+A lover always starts from his mistress to himself; with a husband the
+                        contrary is the case.
+
+
+                               LXXVIII.
+A lover always has a desire to appear amiable. There is in this
+sentiment an element of exaggeration which leads to ridicule; study
+how to take advantage of this.
+
+
+                                LXXIX.
+When a crime has been committed the magistrate who investigates the
+case knows [excepting in the case of a released convict who commits
+murder in jail] that there are not more than five persons to whom he
+can attribute the act. He starts from this premise a series of
+conjectures. The husband should reason like the judge; there are only
+three people in society whom he can suspect when seeking the lover of
+                              his wife.
+
+
+                                LXXX.
+                    A lover is never in the wrong.
+
+
+                                LXXXI.
+The lover of a married woman says to her: "Madame, you have need of
+rest. You have to give an example of virtue to your children. You have
+sworn to make your husband happy, and although he has some faults--he
+has fewer than I have--he is worthy of your esteem. Nevertheless you
+have sacrificed everything for me. Do not let a single murmur escape
+you; for regret is an offence which I think worthy of a severer
+penalty than the law decrees against infidelity. As a reward for these
+sacrifices, I will bring you as much pleasure as pain." And the
+incredible part about it is, that the lover triumphs. The form which
+his speech takes carries it. He says but one phrase: "I love you." A
+lover is a herald who proclaims either the merit, the beauty, or the
+wit of a woman. What does a husband proclaim?
+
+
+To sum up all, the love which a married woman inspires, or that which
+she gives back, is the least creditable sentiment in the world; in her
+it is boundless vanity; in her lover it is selfish egotism. The lover
+of a married woman contracts so many obligations, that scarcely three
+men in a century are met with who are capable of discharging them. He
+ought to dedicate his whole life to his mistress, but he always ends
+by deserting her; both parties are aware of this, and, from the
+beginning of social life, the one has always been sublime in
+self-sacrifice, the other an ingrate. The infatuation of love always
+rouses the pity of the judges who pass sentence on it. But where do
+you find such love genuine and constant? What power must a husband
+possess to struggle successfully against a man who casts over a woman
+a spell strong enough to make her submit to such misfortunes!
+
+
+
+We think, then, as a general rule, a husband, if he knows how to use
+the means of defence which we have outlined, can lead his wife up to
+her twenty-seventh year, not without her having chosen a lover, but
+without her having committed the great crime. Here and there we meet
+with men endowed with deep marital genius, who can keep their wives,
+body and soul to themselves alone up to their thirtieth or
+thirty-fifth year; but these exceptions cause a sort of scandal and
+alarm. The phenomenon scarcely ever is met with excepting in the
+country, where life is transparent and people live in glass houses and
+the husband wields immense power. The miraculous assistance which men
+and things thus give to a husband always vanishes in the midst of a
+city whose population reaches to two hundred and fifty thousand.
+
+It would therefore almost appear to be demonstrated that thirty is the
+age of virtue. At that critical period, a woman becomes so difficult
+to guard, that in order successfully to enchain her within the
+conjugal Paradise, resort must be had to those last means of defence
+which remain to be described, and which we will reveal in the _Essay
+on Police_, the _Art of Returning Home_, and _Catastrophes_.
+
+
+
+                            MEDITATION XX.
+
+                           ESSAY ON POLICE.
+
+The police of marriage consist of all those means which are given you
+by law, manners, force, and stratagem for preventing your wife in her
+attempt to accomplish those three acts which in some sort make up the
+life of love: writing, seeing and speaking.
+
+The police combine in greater or less proportion the means of defence
+put forth in the preceding Meditations. Instinct alone can teach in
+what proportions and on what occasions these compounded elements are
+to be employed. The whole system is elastic; a clever husband will
+easily discern how it must be bent, stretched or retrenched. By the
+aid of the police a man can guide his wife to her fortieth year pure
+from any fault.
+
+We will divide this treatise on Police into five captions:
+
+
+  1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS.
+  2. OF CORRESPONDENCE.
+  3. OF SPIES.
+  4. THE INDEX.
+  5. OF THE BUDGET.
+
+
+                          1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS.
+
+In spite of the grave crisis which the husband has reached, we do not
+suppose that the lover has completely acquired the freedom of the city
+in the marital establishment. Many husbands often suspect that their
+wives have a lover, and yet they do not know upon which of the five or
+six chosen ones of whom we have spoken their suspicions ought to fall.
+This hesitation doubtless springs from some moral infirmity, to whose
+assistance the professor must come.
+
+Fouche had in Paris three or four houses resorted to by people of the
+highest distinction; the mistresses of these dwellings were devoted to
+him. This devotion cost a great deal of money to the state. The
+minister used to call these gatherings, of which nobody at the time
+had any suspicion, his _mouse-traps_. More than one arrest was made at
+the end of the ball at which the most brilliant people of Paris had
+been made accomplices of this oratorian.
+
+The act of offering some fragments of roasted nuts, in order to see
+your wife put her white hand in the trap, is certainly exceedingly
+delicate, for a woman is certain to be on her guard; nevertheless, we
+reckon upon at least three kinds of mouse-traps: _The Irresistible_,
+_The Fallacious_, and that which is _Touch and Go_.
+
+
+                         _The Irresistible._
+
+Suppose two husbands, we will call them A and B, wish to discover who
+are the lovers of their wives. We will put the husband A at the centre
+of a table loaded with the finest pyramids of fruit, of crystals, of
+candies and of liqueurs, and the husband B shall be at whatever point
+of this brilliant circle you may please to suppose. The champagne has
+gone round, every eye is sparkling and every tongue is wagging.
+
+HUSBAND A. (peeling a chestnut)--Well, as for me, I admire literary
+people, but from a distance. I find them intolerable; in conversation
+they are despotic; I do not know what displeases me more, their faults
+or their good qualities. In short (he swallows his chestnut), people
+of genius are like tonics--you like, but you must use them
+temperately.
+
+WIFE B. (who has listened attentively)--But, M. A., you are very
+exacting (with an arch smile); it seems to me that dull people have as
+many faults as people of talent, with this difference perhaps, that
+the former have nothing to atone for them!
+
+HUSBAND A. (irritably)--You will agree at least, madame, that they are
+not very amiable to you.
+
+WIFE B. (with vivacity)--Who told you so?
+
+HUSBAND A. (smiling)--Don't they overwhelm you all the time with their
+superiority? Vanity so dominates their souls that between you and them
+the effort is reciprocal--
+
+THE MISTRESS OF THE HOUSE. (aside to Wife A)--You well deserved it, my
+dear. (Wife A shrugs her shoulders.)
+
+HUSBAND A. (still continuing)--Then the habit they have of combining
+ideas which reveal to them the mechanism of feeling! For them love is
+purely physical and every one knows that they do not shine.
+
+WIFE B. (biting her lips, interrupting him)--It seems to me, sir, that
+we are the sole judges in this matter. I can well understand why men
+of the world do not like men of letters! But it is easier to criticise
+than to imitate them.
+
+HUSBAND A. (disdainfully)--Oh, madame, men of the world can assail the
+authors of the present time without being accused of envy. There is
+many a gentleman of the drawing-room, who if he undertook to write--
+
+WIFE B. (with warmth)--Unfortunately for you, sir, certain friends of
+yours in the Chamber have written romances; have you been able to read
+them?--But really, in these days, in order to attain the least
+originality, you must undertake historic research, you must--
+
+HUSBAND B. (making no answer to the lady next him and speaking aside)
+--Oh! Oh! Can it be that it is M. de L-----, author of the _Dreams of
+a Young Girl_, whom my wife is in love with?--That is singular; I
+thought that it was Doctor M-----. But stay! (Aloud.) Do you know, my
+dear, that you are right in what you say? (All laugh.) Really, I
+should prefer to have always artists and men of letters in my
+drawing-room--(aside) when we begin to receive!--rather than to see
+there other professional men. In any case artists speak of things
+about
+which every one is enthusiastic, for who is there who does not believe
+in good taste? But judges, lawyers, and, above all, doctors--Heavens!
+I confess that to hear them constantly speaking about lawsuits and
+diseases, those two human ills--
+
+WIFE A. (sitting next to Husband B, speaking at the same time)--What
+is that you are saying, my friend? You are quite mistaken. In these
+days nobody wishes to wear a professional manner; doctors, since you
+have mentioned doctors, try to avoid speaking of professional matters.
+They talk politics, discuss the fashions and the theatres, they tell
+anecdotes, they write books better than professional authors do; there
+is a vast difference between the doctors of to-day and those of
+Moliere--
+
+HUSBAND A. (aside)--Whew! Is it possible my wife is in love with Dr.
+M-----? That would be odd. (Aloud.) That is quite possible, my dear,
+but I would not give a sick dog in charge of a physician who writes.
+
+WIFE A. (interrupting her husband)--I know people who have five or six
+offices, yet the government has the greatest confidence in them;
+anyway, it is odd that you should speak in this way, you who were one
+of Dr. M-----'s great cases--
+
+HUSBAND A. (aside)--There can be no doubt of it!
+
+
+                          _The Fallacious._
+
+A HUSBAND. (as he reaches home)--My dear, we are invited by Madame de
+Fischtaminel to a concert which she is giving next Tuesday. I reckoned
+on going there, as I wanted to speak with a young cousin of the
+minister who was among the singers; but he is gone to Frouville to see
+his aunt. What do you propose doing?
+
+HIS WIFE.--These concerts tire me to death!--You have to sit nailed to
+your chair whole hours without saying a word.--Besides, you know quite
+well that we dine with my mother on that day, and it is impossible to
+miss paying her a visit.
+
+HER HUSBAND. (carelessly)--Ah! that is true.
+
+_(Three days afterwards.)_
+
+THE HUSBAND. (as he goes to bed)--What do you think, my darling?
+To-morrow I will leave you at your mother's, for the count has
+returned from Frouville and will be at Madame de Fischtaminel's
+concert.
+
+HIS WIFE. (vivaciously)--But why should you go alone? You know how I
+adore music!
+
+
+                    _The Touch and Go Mouse-Trap._
+
+THE WIFE.--Why did you go away so early this evening?
+
+THE HUSBAND. (mysteriously)--Ah! It is a sad business, and all the
+more so because I don't know how I can settle it.
+
+THE WIFE.--What is it all about, Adolph? You are a wretch if you do
+not tell me what you are going to do!
+
+THE HUSBAND.--My dear, that ass of a Prosper Magnan is fighting a duel
+with M. de Fontanges, on account of an Opera singer.--But what is the
+matter with you?
+
+THE WIFE.--Nothing.--It is very warm in this room and I don't know
+what ails me, for the whole day I have been suffering from sudden
+flushing of the face.
+
+THE HUSBAND. (aside)--She is in love with M. de Fontanges. (Aloud.)
+Celestine! (He shouts out still louder.) Celestine! Come quick, madame
+is ill!
+
+You will understand that a clever husband will discover a thousand
+ways of setting these three kinds of traps.
+
+
+                        2. OF CORRESPONDENCE.
+
+To write a letter, and to have it posted; to get an answer, to read it
+and burn it; there we have correspondence stated in the simplest
+terms.
+
+Yet consider what immense resources are given by civilization, by our
+manners and by our love to the women who wish to conceal these
+material actions from the scrutiny of a husband.
+
+The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives
+its epistolary provender from all hands.
+
+There is also the fatal invention of the General Delivery. A lover
+finds in the world a hundred charitable persons, male and female, who,
+for a slight consideration, will slip the billets-doux into the
+amorous and intelligent hand of his fair mistress.
+
+A correspondence is a variable as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks.
+A young celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a
+letter on the fly-leaf of a new book, which, when the husband asked
+for it of the bookseller, reached the hands of his mistress, who had
+been prepared the evening before for this charming article.
+
+A woman in love, who fears her husband's jealousy, will write and read
+billets-doux during the time consecrated to those mysterious
+occupations during which the most tyrannical husband must leave her
+alone.
+
+Moreover, all lovers have the art of arranging a special code of
+signals, whose arbitrary import it is difficult to understand. At a
+ball, a flower placed in some odd way in the hair; at the theatre, a
+pocket handkerchief unfolded on the front of the box; rubbing the
+nose, wearing a belt of a particular color, putting the hat on one
+side, wearing one dress oftener than another, singing a certain song
+in a concert or touching certain notes on the piano; fixing the eyes
+on a point agreed; everything, in fact, from the hurdy-gurdy which
+passes your windows and goes away if you open the shutter, to the
+newspaper announcement of a horse for sale--all may be reckoned as
+correspondence.
+
+How many times, in short, will a wife craftily ask her husband to do
+such and such commission for her, to go to such and such a shop or
+house, having previously informed her lover that your presence at such
+or such a place means yes or no?
+
+On this point the professor acknowledges with shame that there is no
+possible means of preventing correspondence between lovers. But a
+little machiavelism on the part of the husband will be much more
+likely to remedy the difficulty than any coercive measures.
+
+An agreement, which should be kept sacred between married people, is
+their solemn oath that they will respect each other's sealed letters.
+Clever is the husband who makes this pledge on his wedding-day and is
+able to keep it conscientiously.
+
+In giving your wife unrestrained liberty to write and to receive
+letters, you will be enabled to discern the moment she begins to
+correspond with a lover.
+
+But suppose your wife distrusts you and covers with impenetrable
+clouds the means she takes to conceal from you her correspondence. Is
+it not then time to display that intellectual power with which we
+armed you in our Meditation entitled _Of the Custom House_? The man
+who does not see when his wife writes to her lover, and when she
+receives an answer, is a failure as a husband.
+
+The proposed study which you ought to bestow upon the movements, the
+actions, the gestures, the looks of your wife, will be perhaps
+troublesome and wearying, but it will not last long; the only point is
+to discover when your wife and her lover correspond and in what way.
+
+We cannot believe that a husband, even of moderate intelligence, will
+fail to see through this feminine manoeuvre, when once he suspects its
+existence.
+
+Meanwhile, you can judge from a single incident what means of police
+and of restraint remain to you in the event of such a correspondence.
+
+A young lawyer, whose ardent passion exemplified certain of the
+principles dwelt upon in this important part of our work, had married
+a young person whose love for him was but slight; yet this
+circumstance he looked upon as an exceedingly happy one; but at the
+end of his first year of marriage he perceived that his dear Anna [for
+Anna was her name] had fallen in love with the head clerk of a
+stock-broker.
+
+Adolph was a young man of about twenty-five, handsome in face and as
+fond of amusement as any other celibate. He was frugal, discreet,
+possessed of an excellent heart, rode well, talked well, had fine
+black hair always curled, and dressed with taste. In short, he would
+have done honor and credit to a duchess. The advocate was ugly, short,
+stumpy, square-shouldered, mean-looking, and, moreover, a husband.
+Anna, tall and pretty, had almond eyes, white skin and refined
+features. She was all love; and passion lighted up her glance with a
+bewitching expression. While her family was poor, Maitre Lebrun had an
+income of twelve thousand francs. That explains all.
+
+One evening Lebrun got home looking extremely chop-fallen. He went
+into his study to work; but he soon came back shivering to his wife,
+for he had caught a fever and hurriedly went to bed. There he lay
+groaning and lamenting for his clients and especially for a poor widow
+whose fortune he was to save the very next day by effecting a
+compromise. An appointment had been made with certain business men and
+he was quite incapable of keeping it. After having slept for a quarter
+of an hour, he begged his wife in a feeble voice to write to one of
+his intimate friends, asking him to take his (Lebrun's) place next day
+at the conference. He dictated a long letter and followed with his eye
+the space taken up on the paper by his phrases. When he came to begin
+the second page of the last sheet, the advocate set out to describe to
+his confrere the joy which his client would feel on the signing of the
+compromise, and the fatal page began with these words:
+
+
+ "My good friend, go for Heaven's sake to Madame Vernon's at once;
+  you are expected with impatience there; she lives at No. 7 Rue de
+  Sentier. Pardon my brevity; but I count on your admirable good
+  sense to guess what I am unable to explain.
+
+                                               "Tout a vous,"
+
+
+"Give me the letter," said the lawyer, "that I may see whether it is
+correct before signing it."
+
+The unfortunate wife, who had been taken off her guard by this letter,
+which bristled with the most barbarous terms of legal science, gave up
+the letter. As soon as Lebrun got possession of the wily script he
+began to complain, to twist himself about, as if in pain, and to
+demand one little attention after another of his wife. Madame left the
+room for two minutes during which the advocate leaped from his bed,
+folded a piece of paper in the form of a letter and hid the missive
+written by his wife. When Anna returned, the clever husband seized the
+blank paper, made her address it to the friend of his, to whom the
+letter which he had taken out was written, and the poor creature
+handed the blank letter to his servant. Lebrun seemed to grow
+gradually calmer; he slept or pretended to do so, and the next morning
+he still affected to feel strange pains. Two days afterwards he tore
+off the first leaf of the letter and put an "e" to the word _tout_ in
+the phrase "tout a vous."[*] He folded mysteriously the paper which
+contained the innocent forgery, sealed it, left his bedroom and called
+the maid, saying to her:
+
+[*] Thus giving a feminine ending to the signature, and lending the
+    impression that the note emanated from the wife personally--J.W.M.
+
+"Madame begs that you will take this to the house of M. Adolph; now,
+be quick about it."
+
+He saw the chambermaid leave the house and soon afterwards he, on a
+plea of business, went out, hurried to Rue de Sentier, to the address
+indicated, and awaited the arrival of his rival at the house of a
+friend who was in the secret of his stratagem. The lover, intoxicated
+with happiness, rushed to the place and inquired for Madame de Vernon;
+he was admitted and found himself face to face with Maitre Lebrun, who
+showed a countenance pale but chill, and gazed at him with tranquil
+but implacable glance.
+
+"Sir," he said in a tone of emotion to the young clerk, whose heart
+palpitated with terror, "you are in love with my wife, and you are
+trying to please her; I scarcely know how to treat you in return for
+this, because in your place and at your age I should have done exactly
+the same. But Anna is in despair; you have disturbed her happiness,
+and her heart is filled with the torments of hell. Moreover, she has
+told me all, a quarrel soon followed by a reconciliation forced her to
+write the letter which you have received, and she has sent me here in
+her place. I will not tell you, sir, that by persisting in your plan
+of seduction you will cause the misery of her you love, that you will
+forfeit her my esteem, and eventually your own; that your crime will
+be stamped on the future by causing perhaps sorrow to my children. I
+will not even speak to you of the bitterness you will infuse into my
+life;--unfortunately these are commonplaces! But I declare to you,
+sir, that the first step you take in this direction will be the signal
+for a crime; for I will not trust the risk of a duel in order to stab
+you to the heart!"
+
+And the eyes of the lawyer flashed ominously.
+
+"Now, sir," he went on in a gentler voice, "you are young, you have a
+generous heart. Make a sacrifice for the future happiness of her you
+love; leave her and never see her again. And if you must needs be a
+member of my family, I have a young aunt who is yet unsettled in life;
+she is charming, clever and rich. Make her acquaintance, and leave a
+virtuous woman undisturbed."
+
+This mixture of raillery and intimidation, together with the
+unwavering glance and deep voice of the husband, produced a remarkable
+impression on the lover. He remained for a moment utterly confused,
+like people overcome with passion and deprived of all presence of mind
+by a sudden shock. If Anna has since then had any lovers [which is a
+pure hypothesis] Adolph certainly is not one of them.
+
+This occurrence may help you to understand that correspondence is a
+double-edged weapon which is of as much advantage for the defence of
+the husband as for the inconsistency of the wife. You should therefore
+encourage correspondence for the same reason that the prefect of
+police takes special care that the street lamps of Paris are kept
+lighted.
+
+
+                             3. OF SPIES.
+
+To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to
+fall lower still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is
+perhaps not even a dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of
+folly; for nothing will ever guarantee to you the honesty of a servant
+who betrays her mistress, and you can never feel certain whether she
+is operating in your interest or in that of your wife. This point
+therefore may be looked upon as beyond controversy.
+
+Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of
+a family the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most
+truthful and at the same time the most discreet in the world. They are
+silent and yet they speak, they see everything and appear to see
+nothing.
+
+One day I met a friend of mine on the boulevard. He invited me to
+dinner, and we went to his house. Dinner had been already served, and
+the mistress of the house was helping her two daughters to plates of
+soup.
+
+"I see here my first symptoms," I said to myself.
+
+We sat down. The first word of the husband, who spoke without
+thinking, and for the sake of talking, was the question:
+
+"Has any one been here to-day?"
+
+"Not a soul," replied his wife, without lifting her eyes.
+
+I shall never forget the quickness with which the two daughters looked
+up to their mother. The elder girl, aged eight, had something
+especially peculiar in her glance. There was at the same time
+revelation and mystery, curiosity and silence, astonishment and apathy
+in that look. If there was anything that could be compared to the
+speed with which the light of candor flashed from their eyes, it was
+the prudent reserve with which both of them closed down, like
+shutters, the folds of their white eyelids.
+
+Ye sweet and charming creatures, who from the age of nine even to the
+age of marriage too often are the torment of a mother even when she is
+not a coquette, is it by the privilege of your years or the instinct
+of your nature that your young ears catch the faint sound of a man's
+voice through walls and doors, that your eyes are awake to everything,
+and that your young spirit busies itself in divining all, even the
+meaning of a word spoken in the air, even the meaning of your mother's
+slightest gesture?
+
+There is something of gratitude, something in fact instinctive, in the
+predilection of fathers for their daughters and mothers for their
+sons.
+
+But the act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere
+dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of
+the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed,
+and who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the
+words, "You are not very successful in breaking them."
+
+The Marshal de Saxe did not give much consolation to his Popeliniere
+when they discovered in company that famous revolving chimney,
+invented by the Duc de Richelieu.
+
+"That is the finest piece of horn work that I have ever seen!" cried
+the victor of Fontenoy.
+
+Let us hope that your espionage will not give you so troublesome a
+lesson. Such misfortunes are the fruits of the civil war and we do not
+live in that age.
+
+
+                            4. THE INDEX.
+
+The Pope puts books only on the Index; you will mark with a stigma of
+reprobation men and things.
+
+It is forbidden to madame to go into a bath except in her own house.
+
+It is forbidden to madame to receive into her house him whom you
+suspect of being her lover, and all those who are the accomplices of
+their love.
+
+It is forbidden to madame to take a walk without you.
+
+But the peculiarities which in each household originate from the
+diversity of characters, the numberless incidents of passion, and the
+habits of the married people give to this black book so many
+variations, the lines in it are multiplied or erased with such
+rapidity that a friend of the author has called this Index _The
+History of Changes in the Marital Church_.
+
+There are only two things which can be controlled or prescribed in
+accordance with definite rules; the first is the country, the second
+is the promenade.
+
+A husband ought never to take his wife to the country nor permit her
+to go there. Have a country home if you like, live there, entertain
+there nobody excepting ladies or old men, but never leave your wife
+alone there. But to take her, for even half a day, to the house of
+another man is to show yourself as stupid as an ostrich.
+
+To keep guard over a wife in the country is a task most difficult of
+accomplishment. Do you think that you will be able to be in the
+thickets, to climb the trees, to follow the tracks of a lover over the
+grass trodden down at night, but straightened by the dew in the
+morning and refreshed by the rays of the sun? Can you keep your eye on
+every opening in the fence of the park? Oh! the country and the
+Spring! These are the two right arms of the celibate.
+
+When a woman reaches the crisis at which we suppose her to be, a
+husband ought to remain in town till the declaration of war, or to
+resolve on devoting himself to all the delights of a cruel espionage.
+
+With regard to the promenade: Does madame wish to go to parties, to
+the theatre, to the Bois de Boulogne, to purchase her dresses, to find
+out what is the fashion? Madame shall go, shall see everything in the
+respectable company of her lord and master.
+
+If she take advantage of the moment when a business appointment, which
+you cannot fail to keep, detains you, in order to obtain your tacit
+permission to some meditated expedition; if in order to obtain that
+permission she displays all the witcheries of those cajoleries in
+which women excel and whose powerful influence you ought already to
+have known, well, well, the professor implores you to allow her to win
+you over, while at the same time you sell dear the boon she asks; and
+above all convince this creature, whose soul is at once as changeable
+as water and as firm as steel, that it is impossible for you from the
+importance of your work to leave your study.
+
+But as soon as your wife has set foot upon the street, if she goes on
+foot, don't give her time to make fifty steps; follow and track her in
+such a way that you will not be noticed.
+
+It is possible that there exist certain Werthers whose refined and
+delicate souls recoil from this inquisition. But this is not more
+blamable than that of a landed proprietor who rises at night and looks
+through the windows for the purpose of keeping watch over the peaches
+on his _espaliers_. You will probably by this course of action obtain,
+before the crime is committed, exact information with regard to the
+apartments which so many lovers rent in the city under fictitious
+names. If it happens [which God forbid!] that your wife enters a house
+suspected by you, try to find out if the place has several exits.
+
+Should your wife take a hack, what have you to fear? Is there not a
+prefect of police, to whom all husbands ought to decree a crown of
+solid gold, and has he not set up a little shed or bench where there
+is a register, an incorruptible guardian of public morality? And does
+he not know all the comings and goings of these Parisian gondolas?
+
+One of the vital principles of our police will consist in always
+following your wife to the furnishers of your house, if she is
+accustomed to visit them. You will carefully find out whether there is
+any intimacy between her and her draper, her dressmaker or her
+milliner, etc. In this case you will apply the rules of the conjugal
+Custom House, and draw your own conclusions.
+
+If in your absence your wife, having gone out against your will, tells
+you that she had been to such a place, to such a shop, go there
+yourself the next day and try to find out whether she has spoken the
+truth.
+
+But passion will dictate to you, even better than the Meditation, the
+various resources of conjugal tyranny, and we will here cut short
+these tiresome instructions.
+
+
+                          5. OF THE BUDGET.
+
+In outlining the portrait of a sane and sound husband (See _Meditation
+on the Predestined_), we urgently advise that he should conceal from
+his wife the real amount of his income.
+
+In relying upon this as the foundation stone of our financial system
+we hope to do something towards discounting the opinion, so very
+generally held, that a man ought not to give the handling of his
+income to his wife. This principle is one of the many popular errors
+and is one of the chief causes of misunderstanding in the domestic
+establishment.
+
+But let us, in the first place, deal with the question of heart,
+before we proceed to that of money.
+
+To draw up a little civil list for your wife and for the requirements
+of the house and to pay her money as if it were a contribution, in
+twelve equal portions month by month, has something in it that is a
+little mean and close, and cannot be agreeable to any but sordid and
+mistrustful souls. By acting in this way you prepare for yourself
+innumerable annoyances.
+
+I could wish that during the first year of your mellifluous union,
+scenes more or less delightful, pleasantries uttered in good taste,
+pretty purses and caresses might accompany and might decorate the
+handing over of this monthly gift; but the time will come when the
+self-will of your wife or some unforeseen expenditure will compel her
+to ask a loan of the Chamber; I presume that you will always grant her
+the bill of indemnity, as our unfaithful deputies never fail to do.
+They pay, but they grumble; you must pay and at the same time
+compliment her. I hope it will be so.
+
+But in the crisis which we have reached, the provisions of the annual
+budget can never prove sufficient. There must be an increase of
+fichus, of bonnets, of frocks; there is an expense which cannot be
+calculated beforehand demanded by the meetings, by the diplomatic
+messengers, by the ways and means of love, even while the receipts
+remain the same as usual. Then must commence in your establishment a
+course of education the most odious, and the most dreadful which a
+woman can undergo. I know but few noble and generous souls who value,
+more than millions, purity of heart, frankness of soul, and who would
+a thousand times more readily pardon a passion than a lie, whose
+instinctive delicacy has divined the existence of this plague of the
+soul, the lowest step in human degradation.
+
+Under these circumstances there occur in the domestic establishment
+the most delightful scenes of love. It is then that a woman becomes
+utterly pliant and like to the most brilliant of all the strings of a
+harp, when thrown before the fire; she rolls round you, she clasps
+you, she holds you tight; she defers to all your caprices; never was
+her conversation so full of tenderness; she lavishes her endearments
+upon you, or rather she sells them to you; she at last becomes lower
+than a chorus girl, for she prostitutes herself to her husband. In her
+sweetest kisses there is money; in all her words there is money. In
+playing this part her heart becomes like lead towards you. The most
+polished, the most treacherous usurer never weighs so completely with
+a single glance the future value in bullion of a son of a family who
+may sign a note to him, than your wife appraises one of your desires
+as she leaps from branch to branch like an escaping squirrel, in order
+to increase the sum of money she may demand by increasing the appetite
+which she rouses in you. You must not expect to get scot-free from
+such seductions. Nature has given boundless gifts of coquetry to a
+woman, the usages of society have increased them tenfold by its
+fashions, its dresses, its embroideries and its tippets.
+
+"If I ever marry," one of the most honorable generals of our ancient
+army used to say, "I won't put a sou among the wedding presents--"
+
+"What will you put there then, general?" asked a young girl.
+
+"The key of my safe."
+
+The young girl made a curtsey of approbation. She moved her little
+head with a quiver like that of the magnetic needle; raised her chin
+slightly as if she would have said:
+
+"I would gladly marry the general in spite of his forty-five years."
+
+But with regard to money, what interest can you expect your wife to
+take in a machine in which she is looked upon as a mere bookkeeper?
+
+Now look at the other system.
+
+In surrendering to your wife, with an avowal of absolute confidence in
+her, two-thirds of your fortune and letting her as mistress control
+the conjugal administration, you win from her an esteem which nothing
+can destroy, for confidence and high-mindedness find powerful echoes
+in the heart of a woman. Madame will be loaded with a responsibility
+which will often raise a barrier against extravagances, all the
+stronger because it is she herself who has created it in her heart.
+You yourself have made a portion of the work, and you may be sure that
+from henceforth your wife will never perhaps dishonor herself.
+
+Moreover, by seeking in this way a method of defence, consider what
+admirable aids are offered to you by this plan of finances.
+
+You will have in your house an exact estimate of the morality of your
+wife, just as the quotations of the Bourse give you a just estimate of
+the degree of confidence possessed by the government.
+
+And doubtless, during the first years of your married life, your wife
+will take pride in giving you every luxury and satisfaction which your
+money can afford.
+
+She will keep a good table, she will renew the furniture, and the
+carriages; she will always keep in her drawer a sum of money sacred to
+her well-beloved and ready for his needs. But of course, in the actual
+circumstances of life, the drawer will be very often empty and
+monsieur will spend a great deal too much. The economies ordered by
+the Chamber never weigh heavily upon the clerks whose income is twelve
+hundred francs; and you will be the clerk at twelve hundred francs in
+your own house. You will laugh in your sleeve, because you will have
+saved, capitalized, invested one-third of your income during a long
+time, like Louis XV, who kept for himself a little separate treasury,
+"against a rainy day," he used to say.
+
+Thus, if your wife speaks of economy, her discourse will be equal to
+the varying quotations of the money-market. You will be able to divine
+the whole progress of the lover by these financial fluctuations, and
+you will have avoided all difficulties. _E sempre bene._
+
+If your wife fails to appreciate the excessive confidence, and
+dissipates in one day a large proportion of your fortune, in the first
+place it is not probable that this prodigality will amount to
+one-third of the revenue which you have been saving for ten years;
+moreover you will learn, from the Meditation on _Catastrophes_, that
+in the very crisis produced by the follies of your wife, you will have
+brilliant opportunities of slaying the Minotaur.
+
+But the secret of the treasure which has been amassed by your
+thoughtfulness need never be known till after your death; and if you
+have found it necessary to draw upon it, in order to assist your wife,
+you must always let it be thought that you have won at play, or made a
+loan from a friend.
+
+These are the true principles which should govern the conjugal budget.
+
+
+
+The police of marriage has its martyrology. We will cite but one
+instance which will make plain how necessary it is for husbands who
+resort to severe measures to keep watch over themselves as well as
+over their wives.
+
+An old miser who lived at T-----, a pleasure resort if there ever was
+one, had married a young and pretty woman, and he was so wrapped up in
+her and so jealous that love triumphed over avarice; he actually gave
+up trade in order to guard his wife more closely, but his only real
+change was that his covetousness took another form. I acknowledge that
+I owe the greater portion of the observations contained in this essay,
+which still is doubtless incomplete, to the person who made a study of
+this remarkable marital phenomenon, to portray which, one single
+detail will be amply sufficient. When he used to go to the country,
+this husband never went to bed without secretly raking over the
+pathways of his park, and he had a special rake for the sand of his
+terraces. He had made a close study of the footprints made by the
+different members of his household; and early in the morning he used
+to go and identify the tracks that had been made there.
+
+"All this is old forest land," he used to say to the person I have
+referred to, as he showed him over the park; "for nothing can be seen
+through the brushwood."
+
+His wife fell in love with one of the most charming young men of the
+town. This passion had continued for nine years bright and fresh in
+the hearts of the two lovers, whose sole avowal had been a look
+exchanged in a crowded ball-room; and while they danced together their
+trembling hands revealed through the scented gloves the depth of their
+love. From that day they had both of them taken great delight on those
+trifles which happy lovers never disdain. One day the young man led
+his only confidant, with a mysterious air, into a chamber where he
+kept under glass globes upon his table, with more care than he would
+have bestowed upon the finest jewels in the world, the flowers that,
+in the excitement of the dance, had fallen from the hair of his
+mistress, and the finery which had been caught in the trees which she
+had brushed through in the park. He also preserved there the narrow
+footprint left upon the clay soil by the lady's step.
+
+"I could hear," said this confidant to me afterwards, "the violent and
+repressed palpitations of his heart sounding in the silence which we
+preserved before the treasures of this museum of love. I raised my
+eyes to the ceiling, as if to breathe to heaven the sentiment which I
+dared not utter. 'Poor humanity!' I thought. 'Madame de ----- told me
+that one evening at a ball you had been found nearly fainting in her
+card-room?' I remarked to him.
+
+"'I can well believe it,' said he casting down his flashing glance, 'I
+had kissed her arm!--But,' he added as he pressed my hand and shot at
+me a glance that pierced my heart, 'her husband at that time had the
+gout which threatened to attack his stomach.'"
+
+Some time afterwards, the old man recovered and seemed to take a new
+lease of life; but in the midst of his convalescence he took to his
+bed one morning and died suddenly. There were such evident symptoms of
+poisoning in the condition of the dead man that the officers of
+justice were appealed to, and the two lovers were arrested. Then was
+enacted at the court of assizes the most heartrending scene that ever
+stirred the emotions of the jury. At the preliminary examination, each
+of the two lovers without hesitation confessed to the crime, and with
+one thought each of them was solely bent on saving, the one her lover,
+the other his mistress. There were two found guilty, where justice was
+looking for but a single culprit. The trial was entirely taken up with
+the flat contradictions which each of them, carried away by the fury
+of devoted love, gave to the admissions of the other. There they were
+united for the first time, but on the criminals' bench with a gendarme
+seated between them. They were found guilty by the unanimous verdict
+of a weeping jury. No one among those who had the barbarous courage to
+witness their conveyance to the scaffold can mention them to-day
+without a shudder. Religion had won for them a repentance for their
+crime, but could not induce them to abjure their love. The scaffold
+was their nuptial bed, and there they slept together in the long night
+of death.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XXI.
+
+                      THE ART OF RETURNING HOME.
+
+Finding himself incapable of controlling the boiling transports of his
+anxiety, many a husband makes the mistake of coming home and rushing
+into the presence of his wife, with the object of triumphing over her
+weakness, like those bulls of Spain, which, stung by the red
+_banderillo_, disembowel with furious horns horses, matadors,
+picadors, toreadors and their attendants.
+
+But oh! to enter with a tender gentle mien, like Mascarillo, who
+expects a beating and becomes merry as a lark when he finds his master
+in a good humor! Well--that is the mark of a wise man!--
+
+"Yes, my darling, I know that in my absence you could have behaved
+badly! Another in your place would have turned the house topsy-turvy,
+but you have only broken a pane of glass! God bless you for your
+considerateness. Go on in the same way and you will earn my eternal
+gratitude."
+
+Such are the ideas which ought to be expressed by your face and
+bearing, but perhaps all the while you say to yourself:
+
+"Probably he has been here!"
+
+Always to bring home a pleasant face, is a rule which admits of no
+exception.
+
+But the art of never leaving your house without returning when the
+police have revealed to you a conspiracy--to know how to return at the
+right time--this is the lesson which is hard to learn. In this matter
+everything depends upon tact and penetration. The actual events of
+life always transcend anything that is imaginable.
+
+The manner of coming home is to be regulated in accordance with a
+number of circumstances. For example:
+
+Lord Catesby was a man of remarkable strength. It happened one day
+that he was returning from a fox hunt, to which he had doubtless
+promised to go, with some ulterior view, for he rode towards the fence
+of his park at a point where, he said, he saw an extremely fine horse.
+As he had a passion for horses, he drew near to examine this one close
+at hand, There he caught sight of Lady Catesby, to whose rescue it was
+certainly time to go, if he were in the slightest degree jealous for
+his own honor. He rushed upon the gentleman he saw there, and seizing
+him by the belt he hurled him over the fence on to the road side.
+
+"Remember, sir," he said calmly, "it rests with me to decide whether
+it well be necessary to address you hereafter and ask for satisfaction
+on this spot."
+
+"Very well, my lord; but would you have the goodness to throw over my
+horse also?"
+
+But the phlegmatic nobleman had already taken the arm of his wife as
+he gravely said:
+
+"I blame you very much, my dear creature, for not having told me that
+I was to love you for two. Hereafter every other day I shall love you
+for the gentleman yonder, and all other days for myself."
+
+This adventure is regarded in England as one of the best returns home
+that were ever known. It is true it consisted in uniting, with
+singular felicity, eloquence of deed to that of word.
+
+But the art of re-entering your home, principles of which are nothing
+else but natural deductions from the system of politeness and
+dissimulation which have been commended in preceding Meditations, is
+after all merely to be studied in preparation for the conjugal
+catastrophes which we will now consider.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XXII.
+
+                           OF CATASTROPHES.
+
+The word _Catastrophe_ is a term of literature which signifies the
+final climax of a play.
+
+To bring about a catastrophe in the drama which you are playing is a
+method of defence which is as easy to undertake as it is certain to
+succeed. In advising to employ it, we would not conceal from you its
+perils.
+
+The conjugal catastrophe may be compared to one of those high fevers
+which either carry off a predisposed subject or completely restore his
+health. Thus, when the catastrophe succeeds, it keeps a woman for
+years in the prudent realms of virtue.
+
+Moreover, this method is the last of all those which science has been
+able to discover up to this present moment.
+
+The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Sicilian Vespers, the death of
+Lucretia, the two embarkations of Napoleon at Frejus are examples of
+political catastrophe. It will not be in your power to act on such a
+large scale; nevertheless, within their own area, your dramatic
+climaxes in conjugal life will not be less effective than these.
+
+But since the art of creating a situation and of transforming it, by
+the introduction of natural incidents, constitutes genius; since the
+return to virtue of a woman, whose foot has already left some tracks
+upon the sweet and gilded sand which mark the pathway of vice, is the
+most difficult to bring about of all denouements, and since genius
+neither knows it nor teaches it, the practitioner in conjugal laws
+feels compelled to confess at the outset that he is incapable of
+reducing to definite principles a science which is as changeable as
+circumstances, as delusive as opportunity, and as indefinable as
+instinct.
+
+If we may use an expression which neither Diderot, d'Alembert nor
+Voltaire, in spite of every effort, have been able to engraft on our
+language, a conjugal catastrophe _se subodore_ is scented from afar;
+so that our only course will be to sketch out imperfectly certain
+conjugal situations of an analogous kind, thus imitating the
+philosopher of ancient time who, seeking in vain to explain motion,
+walked forward in his attempt to comprehend laws which were
+incomprehensible.
+
+A husband, in accordance with the principles comprised in our
+Meditation on _Police_, will expressly forbid his wife to receive the
+visits of a celibate whom he suspects of being her lover, and whom she
+has promised never again to see. Some minor scenes of the domestic
+interior we leave for matrimonial imaginations to conjure up; a
+husband can delineate them much better than we can; he will betake
+himself in thought back to those days when delightful longings invited
+sincere confidences and when the workings of his policy put into
+motion certain adroitly handled machinery.
+
+Let us suppose, in order to make more interesting the natural scene to
+which I refer, that you who read are a husband, whose carefully
+organized police has made the discovery that your wife, profiting by
+the hours devoted by you to a ministerial banquet, to which she
+probably procured you an invitation, received at your house M. A----z.
+
+Here we find all the conditions necessary to bring about the finest
+possible of conjugal catastrophes.
+
+You return home just in time to find your arrival has coincided with
+that of M. A----z, for we would not advise you to have the interval
+between acts too long. But in what mood should you enter? Certainly
+not in accordance with the rules of the previous Meditation. In a rage
+then? Still less should you do that. You should come in with
+good-natured carelessness, like an absent-minded man who has forgotten
+his purse, the statement which he has drawn up for the minister, his
+pocket-handkerchief or his snuff-box.
+
+In that case you will either catch two lovers together, or your wife,
+forewarned by the maid, will have hidden the celibate.
+
+Now let us consider these two unique situations.
+
+But first of all we will observe that husbands ought always to be in a
+position to strike terror in their homes and ought long before to make
+preparations for the matrimonial second of September.
+
+Thus a husband, from the moment that his wife has caused him to
+perceive certain _first symptoms_, should never fail to give, time
+after time, his personal opinion on the course of conduct to be
+pursued by a husband in a great matrimonial crisis.
+
+"As for me," you should say, "I should have no hesitation in killing
+the man I caught at my wife's feet."
+
+With regard to the discussion that you will thus give rise to, you
+will be led on to aver that the law ought to have given to the
+husband, as it did in ancient Rome, the right of life and death over
+his children, so that he could slay those who were spurious.
+
+These ferocious opinions, which really do not bind you to anything,
+will impress your wife with salutary terror; you will enumerate them
+lightly, even laughingly--and say to her, "Certainly, my dear, I would
+kill you right gladly. Would you like to be murdered by me?"
+
+A woman cannot help fearing that this pleasantry may some day become a
+very serious matter, for in these crimes of impulse there is a certain
+proof of love; and then women who know better than any one else how to
+say true things laughingly at times suspect their husbands of this
+feminine trick.
+
+When a husband surprises his wife engaged in even innocent
+conversation with her lover, his face still calm, should produce the
+effect mythologically attributed to the celebrated Gorgon.
+
+In order to produce a favorable catastrophe at this juncture, you must
+act in accordance with the character of your wife, either play a
+pathetic scene a la Diderot, or resort to irony like Cicero, or rush
+to your pistols loaded with a blank charge, or even fire them off, if
+you think that a serious row is indispensable.
+
+A skillful husband may often gain a great advantage from a scene of
+unexaggerated sentimentality. He enters, he sees the lover and
+transfixes him with a glance. As soon as the celibate retires, he
+falls at the feet of his wife, he declaims a long speech, in which
+among other phrases there occurs this:
+
+"Why, my dear Caroline, I have never been able to love you as I
+should!"
+
+He weeps, and she weeps, and this tearful catastrophe leaves nothing
+to be desired.
+
+We would explain, apropos of the second method by which the
+catastrophe may be brought about, what should be the motives which
+lead a husband to vary this scene, in accordance with the greater or
+less degree of strength which his wife's character possesses.
+
+Let us pursue this subject.
+
+If by good luck it happens that your wife has put her lover in a place
+of concealment, the catastrophe will be very much more successful.
+
+Even if the apartment is not arranged according to the principles
+prescribed in the Meditation, you will easily discern the place into
+which the celibate has vanished, although he be not, like Lord Byron's
+Don Juan, bundled up under the cushion of a divan. If by chance your
+apartment is in disorder, you ought to have sufficient discernment to
+know that there is only one place in which a man could bestow himself.
+Finally, if by some devilish inspiration he has made himself so small
+that he has squeezed into some unimaginable lurking-place (for we may
+expect anything from a celibate), well, either your wife cannot help
+casting a glance towards this mysterious spot, or she will pretend to
+look in an exactly opposite direction, and then nothing is easier for
+a husband than to set a mouse-trap for his wife.
+
+The hiding-place being discovered, you must walk straight up to the
+lover. You must meet him face to face!
+
+And now you must endeavor to produce a fine effect. With your face
+turned three-quarters towards him, you must raise your head with an
+air of superiority. This attitude will enhance immensely the effect
+which you aim at producing.
+
+The most essential thing to do at this moment, is to overwhelm the
+celibate by some crushing phrase which you have been manufacturing all
+the time; when you have thus floored him, you will coldly show him the
+door. You will be very polite, but as relentless as the executioner's
+axe, and as impassive as the law. This freezing contempt will already
+probably have produced a revolution in the mind of your wife. There
+must be no shouts, no gesticulations, no excitement. "Men of high
+social rank," says a young English author, "never behave like their
+inferiors, who cannot lose a fork without sounding the alarm
+throughout the whole neighborhood."
+
+When the celibate has gone, you will find yourself alone with your
+wife, and then is the time when you must subjugate her forever.
+
+You should therefore stand before her, putting on an air whose
+affected calmness betrays the profoundest emotion; then you must
+choose from among the following topics, which we have rhetorically
+amplified, and which are most congenial to your feelings: "Madame,"
+you must say, "I will speak to you neither of your vows, nor of my
+love; for you have too much sense and I have too much pride to make it
+possible that I should overwhelm you with those execrations, which all
+husbands have a right to utter under these circumstances; for the
+least of the mistakes that I should make, if I did so, is that I would
+be fully justified. I will not now, even if I could, indulge either in
+wrath or resentment. It is not I who have been outraged; for I have
+too much heart to be frightened by that public opinion which almost
+always treats with ridicule and condemnation a husband whose wife has
+misbehaved. When I examine my life, I see nothing there that makes
+this treachery deserved by me, as it is deserved by many others. I
+still love you. I have never been false, I will not say to my duty,
+for I have found nothing onerous in adoring you, but not even to those
+welcome obligations which sincere feeling imposes upon us both. You
+have had all my confidence and you have also had the administration of
+my fortune. I have refused you nothing. And now this is the first time
+that I have turned to you a face, I will not say stern, but which is
+yet reproachful. But let us drop this subject, for it is of no use for
+me to defend myself at a moment when you have proved to me with such
+energy that there is something lacking in me, and that I am not
+intended by nature to accomplish the difficult task of rendering you
+happy. But I would ask you, as a friend speaking to a friend, how
+could you have the heart to imperil at the same time the lives of
+three human creatures: that of the mother of my children, who will
+always be sacred to me; that of the head of the family; and finally of
+him--who loves--[she perhaps at these words will throw herself at your
+feet; you must not permit her to do so; she is unworthy of kneeling
+there]. For you no longer love me, Eliza. Well, my poor child [you
+must not call her _my poor child_ excepting when the crime has not
+been committed]--why deceive ourselves? Why do you not answer me? If
+love is extinguished between a married couple, cannot friendship and
+confidence still survive? Are we not two companions united in making
+the same journey? Can it be said that during the journey the one must
+never hold out his hand to the other to raise up a comrade or to
+prevent a comrade's fall? But I have perhaps said too much and I am
+wounding your pride--Eliza! Eliza!"
+
+Now what the deuce would you expect a woman to answer? Why a
+catastrophe naturally follows, without a single word.
+
+In a hundred women there may be found at least a good half dozen of
+feeble creatures who under this violent shock return to their husbands
+never perhaps again to leave them, like scorched cats that dread the
+fire. But this scene is a veritable alexipharmaca, the doses of which
+should be measured out by prudent hands.
+
+For certain women of delicate nerves, whose souls are soft and timid,
+it would be sufficient to point out the lurking-place where the lover
+lies, and say: "M. A----z is there!" [at this point shrug your
+shoulders]. "How can you thus run the risk of causing the death of two
+worthy people? I am going out; let him escape and do not let this
+happen again."
+
+But there are women whose hearts, too violently strained in these
+terrible catastrophes, fail them and they die; others whose blood
+undergoes a change, and they fall a prey to serious maladies; others
+actually go out of their minds. These are examples of women who take
+poison or die suddenly--and we do not suppose that you wish the death
+of the sinner.
+
+Nevertheless, the most beautiful and impressionable of all the queens
+of France, the charming and unfortunate Mary Stuart, after having seen
+Rizzio murdered almost in her arms, fell in love, nevertheless, with
+the Earl of Bothwell; but she was a queen and queens are abnormal in
+disposition.
+
+We will suppose, then, that the woman whose portrait adorns our first
+Meditation is a little Mary Stuart, and we will hasten to raise the
+curtain for the fifth act in this grand drama entitled _Marriage_.
+
+A conjugal catastrophe may burst out anywhere, and a thousand
+incidents which we cannot describe may give it birth. Sometimes it is
+a handkerchief, as in _Othello_; or a pair of slippers, as in _Don
+Juan_; sometimes it is the mistake of your wife, who cries out--"Dear
+Alphonse!" instead of "Dear Adolph!" Sometimes a husband, finding out
+that his wife is in debt, will go and call on her chief creditor, and
+will take her some morning to his house, as if by chance, in order to
+bring about a catastrophe. "Monsieur Josse, you are a jeweler and you
+sell your jewels with a readiness which is not equaled by the
+readiness of your debtors to pay for them. The countess owes you
+thirty thousand francs. If you wish to be paid to-morrow [tradesmen
+should always be visited at the end of the month] come to her at noon;
+her husband will be in the chamber. Do not attend to any sign which
+she may make to impose silence upon you--speak out boldly. I will pay
+all."
+
+So that the catastrophe in the science of marriage is what figures are
+in arithmetic.
+
+
+
+All the principles of higher conjugal philosophy, on which are based
+the means of defence outlined in this second part of our book, are
+derived from the nature of human sentiments, and we have found them in
+different places in the great book of the world. Just as persons of
+intellect instinctively apply the laws of taste whose principles they
+would find difficulty in formulating, so we have seen numberless
+people of deep feeling employing with singular felicity the precepts
+which we are about to unfold, yet none of them consciously acted on a
+definite system. The sentiments which this situation inspired only
+revealed to them incomplete fragments of a vast system; just as the
+scientific men of the sixteenth century found that their imperfect
+microscopes did not enable them to see all the living organisms, whose
+existence had yet been proved to them by the logic of their patient
+genius.
+
+We hope that the observations already made in this book, and in those
+which follow, will be of a nature to destroy the opinion which
+frivolous men maintain, namely that marriage is a sinecure. According
+to our view, a husband who gives way to ennui is a heretic, and more
+than that, he is a man who lives quite out of sympathy with the
+marriage state, of whose importance he has no conception. In this
+connection, these Meditations perhaps will reveal to very many
+ignorant men the mysteries of a world before which they stand with
+open eyes, yet without seeing it.
+
+We hope, moreover, that these principles when well applied will
+produce many conversions, and that among the pages that separate this
+second part from that entitled _Civil War_ many tears will be shed and
+many vows of repentance breathed.
+
+Yes, among the four hundred thousand honest women whom we have so
+carefully sifted out from all the European nations, we indulge the
+belief that there are a certain number, say three hundred thousand,
+who will be sufficiently self-willed, charming, adorable, and
+bellicose to raise the standard of _Civil War_.
+
+To arms then, to arms!
+
+
+
+
+
+                              THIRD PART
+
+
+
+                        RELATING TO CIVIL WAR.
+
+                "Lovely as the seraphs of Klopstock,
+                 Terrible as the devils of Milton."
+                                               --DIDEROT.
+
+
+
+                          MEDITATION XXIII.
+
+                           OF MANIFESTOES.
+
+The Preliminary precepts, by which science has been enabled at this
+point to put weapons into the hand of a husband, are few in number; it
+is not of so much importance to know whether he will be vanquished, as
+to examine whether he can offer any resistance in the conflict.
+
+Meanwhile, we will set up here certain beacons to light up the arena
+where a husband is soon to find himself, in alliance with religion and
+law, engaged single-handed in a contest with his wife, who is
+supported by her native craft and the whole usages of society as her
+allies.
+
+
+                               LXXXII.
+ Anything may be expected and anything may be supposed of a woman who
+                             is in love.
+
+
+                               LXXXIII.
+ The actions of a woman who intends to deceive her husband are almost
+      always the result of study, but never dictated by reason.
+
+
+                               LXXXIV.
+The greater number of women advance like the fleas, by erratic leaps
+and bounds, They owe their escape to the height or depth of their
+first ideas, and any interruption of their plans rather favors their
+execution. But they operate only within a narrow area which it is easy
+for the husband to make still narrower; and if he keeps cool he will
+end by extinguishing this piece of living saltpetre.
+
+
+                                LXXXV.
+ A husband should never allow himself to address a single disparaging
+          remark to his wife, in presence of a third party.
+
+
+                               LXXXVI.
+The moment a wife decides to break her marriage vow she reckons her
+husband as everything or nothing. All defensive operations must start
+from this proposition.
+
+
+                               LXXXVII.
+The life of a woman is either of the head, of the heart, or of
+passion. When a woman reaches the age to form an estimate of life, her
+husband ought to find out whether the primary cause of her intended
+infidelity proceeds from vanity, from sentiment or from temperament.
+Temperament may be remedied like disease; sentiment is something in
+which the husband may find great opportunities of success; but vanity
+is incurable. A woman whose life is of the head may be a terrible
+scourge. She combines the faults of a passionate woman with those of
+the tender-hearted woman, without having their palliations. She is
+destitute alike of pity, love, virtue or sex.
+
+
+                              LXXXVIII.
+A woman whose life is of the head will strive to inspire her husband
+with indifference; the woman whose life is of the heart, with hatred;
+the passionate woman, with disgust.
+
+
+                               LXXXIX.
+A husband never loses anything by appearing to believe in the fidelity
+of his wife, by preserving an air of patience and by keeping silence.
+Silence especially troubles a woman amazingly.
+
+
+                                 XC.
+To show himself aware of the passion of his wife is the mark of a
+fool; but to affect ignorance of all proves that a man has sense, and
+this is in fact the only attitude to take. We are taught, moreover,
+that everybody in France is sensible.
+
+
+                                 XCI.
+The rock most to be avoided is ridicule.--"At least, let us be
+affectionate in public," ought to be the maxim of a married
+establishment. For both the married couple to lose honor, esteem,
+consideration, respect and all that is worth living for in society, is
+                        to become a nonentity.
+
+
+These axioms relate to the contest alone. As for the catastrophe,
+others will be needed for that.
+
+
+
+We have called this crisis _Civil War_ for two reasons; never was a
+war more really intestine and at the same time so polite as this war.
+But in what point and in what manner does this fatal war break out?
+You do not believe that your wife will call out regiments and sound
+the trumpet, do you? She will, perhaps, have a commanding officer, but
+that is all. And this feeble army corps will be sufficient to destroy
+the peace of your establishment.
+
+"You forbid me to see the people that I like!" is an exordium which
+has served for a manifesto in most homes. This phrase, with all the
+ideas that are concomitant, is oftenest employed by vain and
+artificial women.
+
+The most usual manifesto is that which is proclaimed in the conjugal
+bed, the principal theatre of war. This subject will be treated in
+detail in the Meditation entitled: _Of Various Weapons_, in the
+paragraph, _Of Modesty in its Connection with Marriage_.
+
+Certain women of a lymphatic temperament will pretend to have the
+spleen and will even feign death, if they can only gain thereby the
+benefit of a secret divorce.
+
+But most of them owe their independence to the execution of a plan,
+whose effect upon the majority of husbands is unfailing and whose
+perfidies we will now reveal.
+
+One of the greatest of human errors springs from the belief that our
+honor and our reputation are founded upon our actions, or result from
+the approbation which the general conscience bestows upon on conduct.
+A man who lives in the world is born to be a slave to public opinion.
+Now a private man in France has less opportunity of influencing the
+world than his wife, although he has ample occasion for ridiculing it.
+Women possess to a marvelous degree the art of giving color by
+specious arguments to the recriminations in which they indulge. They
+never set up any defence, excepting when they are in the wrong, and in
+this proceeding they are pre-eminent, knowing how to oppose arguments
+by precedents, proofs by assertions, and thus they very often obtain
+victory in minor matters of detail. They see and know with admirable
+penetration, when one of them presents to another a weapon which she
+herself is forbidden to whet. It is thus that they sometimes lose a
+husband without intending it. They apply the match and long afterwards
+are terror-stricken at the conflagration.
+
+As a general thing, all women league themselves against a married man
+who is accused of tyranny; for a secret tie unites them all, as it
+unites all priests of the same religion. They hate each other, yet
+shield each other. You can never gain over more than one of them; and
+yet this act of seduction would be a triumph for your wife.
+
+You are, therefore, outlawed from the feminine kingdom. You see
+ironical smiles on every lip, you meet an epigram in every answer.
+These clever creatures force their daggers and amuse themselves by
+sculpturing the handle before dealing you a graceful blow.
+
+The treacherous art of reservation, the tricks of silence, the malice
+of suppositions, the pretended good nature of an inquiry, all these
+arts are employed against you. A man who undertakes to subjugate his
+wife is an example too dangerous to escape destruction from them, for
+will not his conduct call up against them the satire of every husband?
+Moreover, all of them will attack you, either by bitter witticisms, or
+by serious arguments, or by the hackneyed maxims of gallantry. A swarm
+of celibates will support all their sallies and you will be assailed
+and persecuted as an original, a tyrant, a bad bed-fellow, an
+eccentric man, a man not to be trusted.
+
+Your wife will defend you like the bear in the fable of La Fontaine;
+she will throw paving stones at your head to drive away the flies that
+alight on it. She will tell you in the evening all the things that
+have been said about you, and will ask an explanation of acts which
+you never committed, and of words which you never said. She professes
+to have justified you for faults of which you are innocent; she has
+boasted of a liberty which she does not possess, in order to clear you
+of the wrong which you have done in denying that liberty. The
+deafening rattle which your wife shakes will follow you everywhere
+with its obtrusive din. Your darling will stun you, will torture you,
+meanwhile arming herself by making you feel only the thorns of married
+life. She will greet you with a radiant smile in public, and will be
+sullen at home. She will be dull when you are merry, and will make you
+detest her merriment when you are moody. Your two faces will present a
+perpetual contrast.
+
+Very few men have sufficient force of mind not to succumb to this
+preliminary comedy, which is always cleverly played, and resembles the
+_hourra_ raised by the Cossacks, as they advance to battle. Many
+husbands become irritated and fall into irreparable mistakes. Others
+abandon their wives. And, indeed, even those of superior intelligence
+do not know how to get hold of the enchanted ring, by which to dispel
+this feminine phantasmagoria.
+
+Two-thirds of such women are enabled to win their independence by this
+single manoeuvre, which is no more than a review of their forces. In
+this case the war is soon ended.
+
+But a strong man who courageously keeps cool throughout this first
+assault will find much amusement in laying bare to his wife, in a
+light and bantering way, the secret feelings which make her thus
+behave, in following her step by step through the labyrinth which she
+treads, and telling her in answer to her every remark, that she is
+false to herself, while he preserves throughout a tone of pleasantry
+and never becomes excited.
+
+Meanwhile war is declared, and if her husband has not been dazzled by
+these first fireworks, a woman has yet many other resources for
+securing her triumph; and these it is the purpose of the following
+Meditations to discover.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XXIV.
+
+                       PRINCIPLES OF STRATEGY.
+
+The Archduke Charles published a very fine treatise on military under
+the title _Principles of Strategy in Relation to the Campaigns of
+1796_. These principles seem somewhat to resemble poetic canons
+prepared for poems already published. In these days we are become very
+much more energetic, we invent rules to suit works and works to suit
+rules. But of what use were ancient principles of military art in
+presence of the impetuous genius of Napoleon? If, to-day, however, we
+reduce to a system the lessons taught by this great captain whose new
+tactics have destroyed the ancient ones, what future guarantee do we
+possess that another Napoleon will not yet be born? Books on military
+art meet, with few exceptions, the fate of ancient works on Chemistry
+and Physics. Everything is subject to change, either constant or
+periodic.
+
+This, in a few words, is the history of our work.
+
+So long as we have been dealing with a woman who is inert or lapped in
+slumber, nothing has been easier than to weave the meshes with which
+we have bound her; but the moment she wakes up and begins to struggle,
+all is confusion and complication. If a husband would make an effort
+to recall the principles of the system which we have just described in
+order to involve his wife in the nets which our second part has set
+for her, he would resemble Wurmser, Mack and Beaulieu arranging their
+halts and their marches while Napoleon nimbly turns their flank, and
+makes use of their own tactics to destroy them.
+
+This is just what your wife will do.
+
+How is it possible to get at the truth when each of you conceals it
+under the same lie, each setting the same trap for the other? And
+whose will be the victory when each of you is caught in a similar
+snare?
+
+"My dear, I have to go out; I have to pay a visit to Madame So and So.
+I have ordered the carriage. Would you like to come with me? Come, be
+good, and go with your wife."
+
+You say to yourself:
+
+"She would be nicely caught if I consented! She asks me only to be
+refused."
+
+Then you reply to her:
+
+"Just at the moment I have some business with Monsieur Blank, for he
+has to give a report in a business matter which deeply concerns us
+both, and I must absolutely see him. Then I must go to the Minister of
+Finance. So your arrangement will suit us both."
+
+"Very well, dearest, go and dress yourself, while Celine finishes
+dressing me; but don't keep me waiting."
+
+"I am ready now, love," you cry out, at the end of ten minutes, as you
+stand shaved and dressed.
+
+But all is changed. A letter has arrived; madame is not well; her
+dress fits badly; the dressmaker has come; if it is not the dressmaker
+it is your mother. Ninety-nine out of a hundred husbands will leave
+the house satisfied, believing that their wives are well guarded,
+when, as a matter of fact, the wives have gotten rid of them.
+
+A lawful wife who from her husband cannot escape, who is not
+distressed by pecuniary anxiety, and who in order to give employment
+to a vacant mind, examines night and day the changing tableaux of each
+day's experience, soon discovers the mistake she has made in falling
+into a trap or allowing herself to be surprised by a catastrophe; she
+will then endeavor to turn all these weapons against you.
+
+There is a man in society, the sight of whom is strangely annoying to
+your wife; she can tolerate neither his tone, his manners nor his way
+of regarding things. Everything connected with him is revolting to
+her; she is persecuted by him, he is odious to her; she hopes that no
+one will tell him this. It seems almost as if she were attempting to
+oppose you; for this man is one for whom you have the highest esteem.
+You like his disposition because he flatters you; and thus your wife
+presumes that your esteem for him results from flattered vanity. When
+you give a ball, an evening party or a concert, there is almost a
+discussion on this subject, and madame picks a quarrel with you,
+because you are compelling her to see people who are not agreeable to
+her.
+
+"At least, sir, I shall never have to reproach myself with omitting to
+warn you. That man will yet cause you trouble. You should put some
+confidence in women when they pass sentence on the character of a man.
+And permit me to tell you that this baron, for whom you have such a
+predilection, is a very dangerous person, and you are doing very wrong
+to bring him to your house. And this is the way you behave; you
+absolutely force me to see one whom I cannot tolerate, and if I ask
+you to invite Monsieur A-----, you refuse to do so, because you think
+that I like to have him with me! I admit that he talks well, that he
+is kind and amiable; but you are more to me than he can ever be."
+
+These rude outlines of feminine tactics, which are emphasized by
+insincere gestures, by looks of feigned ingenuousness, by artful
+intonations of the voice and even by the snare of cunning silence, are
+characteristic to some degree of their whole conduct.
+
+There are few husbands who in such circumstances as these do not form
+the idea of setting a mouse-trap; they welcome as their guests both
+Monsieur A----- and the imaginary baron who represents the person whom
+their wives abhor, and they do so in the hope of discovering a lover
+in the celibate who is apparently beloved.
+
+Oh yes, I have often met in the world young men who were absolutely
+starlings in love and complete dupes of a friendship which women
+pretended to show them, women who felt themselves obliged to make a
+diversion and to apply a blister to their husbands as their husbands
+had previously done to them! These poor innocents pass their time in
+running errands, in engaging boxes at the theatre, in riding in the
+Bois de Boulogne by the carriages of their pretended mistresses; they
+are publicly credited with possessing women whose hands they have not
+even kissed. Vanity prevents them from contradicting these flattering
+rumors, and like the young priests who celebrate masses without a
+Host, they enjoy a mere show passion, and are veritable
+supernumeraries of love.
+
+Under these circumstances sometimes a husband on returning home asks
+the porter: "Has no one been here?"--"M. le Baron came past at two
+o'clock to see monsieur; but as he found no one was in but madame he
+went away; but Monsieur A----- is with her now."
+
+You reach the drawing-room, you see there a young celibate, sprightly,
+scented, wearing a fine necktie, in short a perfect dandy. He is a man
+who holds you in high esteem; when he comes to your house your wife
+listens furtively for his footsteps; at a ball she always dances with
+him. If you forbid her to see him, she makes a great outcry and it is
+not till many years afterwards [see Meditation on _Las Symptoms_] that
+you see the innocence of Monsieur A----- and the culpability of the
+baron.
+
+We have observed and noted as one of the cleverest manoeuvres, that of
+a young woman who, carried away by an irresistible passion, exhibited
+a bitter hatred to the man she did not love, but lavished upon her
+lover secret intimations of her love. The moment that her husband was
+persuaded that she loved the _Cicisbeo_ and hated the _Patito_, she
+arranged that she and the _Patito_ should be found in a situation
+whose compromising character she had calculated in advance, and her
+husband and the execrated celibate were thus induced to believe that
+her love and her aversion were equally insincere. When she had brought
+her husband into the condition of perplexity, she managed that a
+passionate letter should fall into his hands. One evening in the midst
+of the admirable catastrophe which she had thus brought to a climax,
+madame threw herself at her husband's feet, wet them with her tears,
+and thus concluded the climax to her own satisfaction.
+
+"I esteem and honor you profoundly," she cried, "for keeping your own
+counsel as you have done. I am in love! Is this a sentiment which is
+easy for me to repress? But what I can do is to confess the fact to
+you; to implore you to protect me from myself, to save me from my own
+folly. Be my master and be a stern master to me; take me away from
+this place, remove me from what has caused all this trouble, console
+me; I will forget him, I desire to do so. I do not wish to betray you.
+I humbly ask your pardon for the treachery love has suggested to me.
+Yes, I confess to you that the love which I pretended to have for my
+cousin was a snare set to deceive you. I love him with the love of
+friendship and no more.--Oh! forgive me! I can love no one but"--her
+voice was choked in passionate sobs--"Oh! let us go away, let us leave
+Paris!"
+
+She began to weep; her hair was disheveled, her dress in disarray; it
+was midnight, and her husband forgave her. From henceforth, the cousin
+made his appearance without risk, and the Minotaur devoured one victim
+more.
+
+What instructions can we give for contending with such adversaries as
+these? Their heads contain all the diplomacy of the congress of
+Vienna; they have as much power when they are caught as when they
+escape. What man has a mind supple enough to lay aside brute force and
+strength and follow his wife through such mazes as these?
+
+To make a false plea every moment, in order to elicit the truth, a
+true plea in order to unmask falsehood; to charge the battery when
+least expected, and to spike your gun at the very moment of firing it;
+to scale the mountain with the enemy, in order to descend to the plain
+again five minutes later; to accompany the foe in windings as rapid,
+as obscure as those of a plover on the breezes; to obey when obedience
+is necessary, and to oppose when resistance is inertial; to traverse
+the whole scale of hypotheses as a young artist with one stroke runs
+from the lowest to the highest note of his piano; to divine at last
+the secret purpose on which a woman is bent; to fear her caresses and
+to seek rather to find out what are the thoughts that suggested them
+and the pleasure which she derived from them--this is mere child's pay
+for the man of intellect and for those lucid and searching
+imaginations which possess the gift of doing and thinking at the same
+time. But there are a vast number of husbands who are terrified at the
+mere idea of putting in practice these principles in their dealings
+with a woman.
+
+Such men as these prefer passing their lives in making huge efforts to
+become second-class chess-players, or to pocket adroitly a ball in
+billiards.
+
+Some of them will tell you that they are incapable of keeping their
+minds on such a constant strain and breaking up the habits of their
+life. In that case the woman triumphs. She recognizes that in mind and
+energy she is her husband's superior, although the superiority may be
+but temporary; and yet there rises in her a feeling of contempt for
+the head of the house.
+
+If many man fail to be masters in their own house this is not from
+lack of willingness, but of talent. As for those who are ready to
+undergo the toils of this terrible duel, it is quite true that they
+must needs possess great moral force.
+
+And really, as soon as it is necessary to display all the resources of
+this secret strategy, it is often useless to attempt setting any traps
+for these satanic creatures. Once women arrive at a point when they
+willfully deceive, their countenances become as inscrutable as
+vacancy. Here is an example which came within my own experience.
+
+A very young, very pretty, and very clever coquette of Paris had not
+yet risen. Seated by her bed was one of her dearest friends. A letter
+arrived from another, a very impetuous fellow, to whom she had allowed
+the right of speaking to her like a master. The letter was in pencil
+and ran as follows:
+
+"I understand that Monsieur C----- is with you at this moment. I am
+waiting for him to blow his brains out."
+
+Madame D----- calmly continued the conversation with Monsieur C-----.
+She asked him to hand her a little writing desk of red leather which
+stood on the table, and he brought it to her.
+
+"Thanks, my dear," she said to him; "go on talking, I am listening to
+you."
+
+C----- talked away and she replied, all the while writing the
+following note:
+
+"As soon as you become jealous of C----- you two can blow out each
+other's brains at your pleasure. As for you, you may die; but brains
+--you haven't any brains to blow out."
+
+"My dear friend," she said to C-----, "I beg you will light this
+candle. Good, you are charming. And now be kind enough to leave me and
+let me get up, and give this letter to Monsieur d'H-----, who is
+waiting at the door."
+
+All this was said with admirable coolness. The tones and intonations
+of her voice, the expression of her face showed no emotion. Her
+audacity was crowned with complete success. On receiving the answer
+from the hand of Monsieur C-----, Monsieur d'H----- felt his wrath
+subside. He was troubled with only one thing and that was how to
+disguise his inclination to laugh.
+
+The more torch-light one flings into the immense cavern which we are
+now trying to illuminate, the more profound it appears. It is a
+bottomless abyss. It appears to us that our task will be accomplished
+more agreeably and more instructively if we show the principles of
+strategy put into practice in the case of a woman, when she has
+reached a high degree of vicious accomplishment. An example suggests
+more maxims and reveals the existence of more methods than all
+possible theories.
+
+One day at the end of a dinner given to certain intimate friends by
+Prince Lebrun, the guests, heated by champagne, were discussing the
+inexhaustible subject of feminine artifice. The recent adventure which
+was credited to the Countess R. D. S. J. D. A-----, apropos of a
+necklace, was the subject first broached. A highly esteemed artist, a
+gifted friend of the emperor, was vigorously maintaining the opinion,
+which seemed somewhat unmanly, that it was forbidden to a man to
+resist successfully the webs woven by a woman.
+
+"It is my happy experience," he said, "that to them nothing is
+sacred."
+
+The ladies protested.
+
+"But I can cite an instance in point."
+
+"It is an exception!"
+
+"Let us hear the story," said a young lady.
+
+"Yes, tell it to us," cried all the guests.
+
+The prudent old gentleman cast his eyes around, and, after having
+formed his conclusions as to the age of the ladies, smiled and said:
+
+"Since we are all experienced in life, I consent to relate the
+adventure."
+
+Dead silence followed, and the narrator read the following from a
+little book which he had taken from his pocket:
+
+
+I was head over ears in love with the Comtesse de -----. I was twenty
+and I was ingenuous. She deceived me. I was angry; she threw me over.
+I was ingenuous, I repeat, and I was grieved to lose her. I was
+twenty; she forgave me. And as I was twenty, as I was always
+ingenuous, always deceived, but never again thrown over by her, I
+believed myself to have been the best beloved of lovers, consequently
+the happiest of men. The countess had a friend, Madame de T-----, who
+seemed to have some designs on me, but without compromising her
+dignity; for she was scrupulous and respected the proprieties. One day
+while I was waiting for the countess in her Opera box, I heard my name
+called from a contiguous box. It was Madame de T-----.
+
+"What," she said, "already here? Is this fidelity or merely a want of
+something to do? Won't you come to me?"
+
+Her voice and her manner had a meaning in them, but I was far from
+inclined at that moment to indulge in a romance.
+
+"Have you any plans for this evening?" she said to me. "Don't make
+any! If I cheer your tedious solitude you ought to be devoted to me.
+Don't ask any questions, but obey. Call my servants."
+
+I answered with a bow and on being requested to leave the Opera box, I
+obeyed.
+
+"Go to this gentleman's house," she said to the lackey. "Say he will
+not be home till to-morrow."
+
+She made a sign to him, he went to her, she whispered in his ear, and
+he left us. The Opera began. I tried to venture on a few words, but
+she silenced me; some one might be listening. The first act ended, the
+lackey brought back a note, and told her that everything was ready.
+Then she smiled, asked for my hand, took me off, put me in her
+carriage, and I started on my journey quite ignorant of my
+destination. Every inquiry I made was answered by a peal of laughter.
+If I had not been aware that this was a woman of great passion, that
+she had long loved the Marquis de V-----, that she must have known I
+was aware of it, I should have believed myself in good luck; but she
+knew the condition of my heart, and the Comtesse de -----. I therefore
+rejected all presumptuous ideas and bided my time. At the first stop,
+a change of horses was supplied with the swiftness of lightning and we
+started afresh. The matter was becoming serious. I asked with some
+insistency, where this joke was to end.
+
+"Where?" she said, laughing. "In the pleasantest place in the world,
+but can't you guess? I'll give you a thousand chances. Give it up, for
+you will never guess. We are going to my husband's house. Do you know
+him?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"So much the better, I thought you didn't. But I hope you will like
+him. We have lately become reconciled. Negotiations went on for six
+months; and we have been writing to one another for a month. I think
+it is very kind of me to go and look him up."
+
+"It certainly is, but what am I going to do there? What good will I be
+in this reconciliation?"
+
+"Ah, that is my business. You are young, amiable, unconventional; you
+suit me and will save me from the tediousness of a tete-a-tete."
+
+"But it seems odd to me, to choose the day or the night of a
+reconciliation to make us acquainted; the awkwardness of the first
+interview, the figure all three of us will cut,--I don't see anything
+particularly pleasant in that."
+
+"I have taken possession of you for my own amusement!" she said with
+an imperious air, "so please don't preach."
+
+I saw she was decided, so surrendered myself to circumstances. I began
+to laugh at my predicament and we became exceedingly merry. We again
+changed horses. The mysterious torch of night lit up a sky of extreme
+clearness and shed around a delightful twilight. We were approaching
+the spot where our tete-a-tete must end. She pointed out to me at
+intervals the beauty of the landscape, the tranquillity of the night,
+the all-pervading silence of nature. In order to admire these things
+in company as it was natural we should, we turned to the same window
+and our faces touched for a moment. In a sudden shock she seized my
+hand, and by a chance which seemed to me extraordinary, for the stone
+over which our carriage had bounded could not have been very large, I
+found Madame de T----- in my arms. I do not know what we were trying
+to see; what I am sure of is that the objects before our eyes began in
+spite of the full moon to grow misty, when suddenly I was released
+from her weight, and she sank into the back cushions of the carriage.
+
+"Your object," she said, rousing herself from a deep reverie, "is
+possibly to convince me of the imprudence of this proceeding. Judge,
+therefore, of my embarrassment!"
+
+"My object!" I replied, "what object can I have with regard to you?
+What a delusion! You look very far ahead; but of course the sudden
+surprise or turn of chance may excuse anything."
+
+"You have counted, then, upon that chance, it seems to me?"
+
+We had reached our destination, and before we were aware of it, we had
+entered the court of the chateau. The whole place was brightly lit up.
+Everything wore a festal air, excepting the face of its master, who at
+the sight of me seemed anything but delighted. He came forward and
+expressed in somewhat hesitating terms the tenderness proper to the
+occasion of a reconciliation. I understood later on that this
+reconciliation was absolutely necessary from family reasons. I was
+presented to him and was coldly greeted. He extended his hand to his
+wife, and I followed the two, thinking of my part in the past, in the
+present and in the future. I passed through apartments decorated with
+exquisite taste. The master in this respect had gone beyond all the
+ordinary refinement of luxury, in the hope of reanimating, by the
+influence of voluptuous imagery, a physical nature that was dead. Not
+knowing what to say, I took refuge in expressions of admiration. The
+goddess of the temple, who was quite ready to do the honors, accepted
+my compliments.
+
+"You have not seen anything," she said. "I must take you to the
+apartments of my husband."
+
+"Madame, five years ago I caused them to be pulled down."
+
+"Oh! Indeed!" said she.
+
+At the dinner, what must she do but offer the master some fish, on
+which he said to her:
+
+"Madame, I have been living on milk for the last three years."
+
+"Oh! Indeed!" she said again.
+
+Can any one imagine three human beings as astonished as we were to
+find ourselves gathered together? The husband looked at me with a
+supercilious air, and I paid him back with a look of audacity.
+
+Madame de T----- smiled at me and was charming to me; Monsieur de
+T----- accepted me as a necessary evil. Never in all my life have I
+taken part in a dinner which was so odd as that. The dinner ended, I
+thought that we would go to bed early--that is, I thought that
+Monsieur de T----- would. As we entered the drawing-room:
+
+"I appreciate, madame," said he, "your precaution in bringing this
+gentleman with you. You judged rightly that I should be but poor
+company for the evening, and you have done well, for I am going to
+retire."
+
+Then turning to me, he added in a tone of profound sarcasm:
+
+"You will please to pardon me, and obtain also pardon from madame."
+
+He left us. My reflections? Well, the reflections of a twelvemonth
+were then comprised in those of a minute. When we were left alone,
+Madame de T----- and I, we looked at each other so curiously that, in
+order to break through the awkwardness, she proposed that we should
+take a turn on the terrace while we waited, as she said, until the
+servants had supped.
+
+It was a superb night. It was scarcely possible to discern surrounding
+objects, they seemed to be covered with a veil, that imagination might
+be permitted to take a loftier flight. The gardens, terraced on the
+side of a mountain, sloped down, platform after platform, to the banks
+of the Seine, and the eye took in the many windings of the stream
+covered with islets green and picturesque. These variations in the
+landscape made up a thousand pictures which gave to the spot,
+naturally charming, a thousand novel features. We walked along the
+most extensive of these terraces, which was covered with a thick
+umbrage of trees. She had recovered from the effects of her husband's
+persiflage, and as we walked along she gave me her confidence.
+Confidence begets confidence, and as I told her mine, all she said to
+me became more intimate and more interesting. Madame de T----- at
+first gave me her arm; but soon this arm became interlaced in mine, I
+know not how, but in some way almost lifted her up and prevented her
+from touching the ground. The position was agreeable, but became at
+last fatiguing. We had been walking for a long time and we still had
+much to say to each other. A bank of turf appeared and she sat down
+without withdrawing her arm. And in this position we began to sound
+the praises of mutual confidence, its charms and its delights.
+
+"Ah!" she said to me, "who can enjoy it more than we and with less
+cause of fear? I know well the tie that binds you to another, and
+therefore have nothing to fear."
+
+Perhaps she wished to be contradicted. But I answered not a word. We
+were then mutually persuaded that it was possible for us to be friends
+without fear of going further.
+
+"But I was afraid, however," I said, "that that sudden jolt in the
+carriage and the surprising consequences may have frightened you."
+
+"Oh, I am not so easily alarmed!"
+
+"I fear it has left a little cloud on your mind?"
+
+"What must I do to reassure you?"
+
+"Give me the kiss here which chance--"
+
+"I will gladly do so; for if I do not, your vanity will lead you to
+think that I fear you."
+
+I took the kiss.
+
+It is with kisses as with confidences, the first leads to another.
+They are multiplied, they interrupt conversation, they take its place;
+they scarce leave time for a sigh to escape. Silence followed. We
+could hear it, for silence may be heard. We rose without a word and
+began to walk again.
+
+"We must go in," said she, "for the air of the river is icy, and it is
+not worth while--"
+
+"I think to go in would be more dangerous," I answered.
+
+"Perhaps so! Never mind, we will go in."
+
+"Why, is this out of consideration for me? You wish doubtless to save
+me from the impressions which I may receive from such a walk as this
+--the consequences which may result. Is it for me--for me only--?"
+
+"You are modest," she said smiling, "and you credit me with singular
+consideration."
+
+"Do you think so? Well, since you take it in this way, we will go in;
+I demand it."
+
+A stupid proposition, when made by two people who are forcing
+themselves to say something utterly different from what they think.
+
+Then she compelled me to take the path that led back to the chateau. I
+do not know, at least I did not then know, whether this course was one
+which she forced upon herself, whether it was the result of a vigorous
+resolution, or whether she shared my disappointment in seeing an
+incident which had begun so well thus suddenly brought to a close but
+by a mutual instinct our steps slackened and we pursued our way
+gloomily dissatisfied the one with the other and with ourselves. We
+knew not the why and the wherefore of what we were doing. Neither of
+us had the right to demand or even to ask anything. We had neither of
+us any ground for uttering a reproach. O that we had got up a quarrel!
+But how could I pick one with her? Meanwhile we drew nearer and
+nearer, thinking how we might evade the duty which we had so awkwardly
+imposed upon ourselves. We reached the door, when Madame de T-----
+said to me:
+
+"I am angry with you! After the confidences I have given you, not to
+give me a single one! You have not said a word about the countess. And
+yet it is so delightful to speak of the one we love! I should have
+listened with such interest! It was the very best I could do after I
+had taken you away from her!"
+
+"Cannot I reproach you with the same thing?" I said, interrupting her,
+"and if instead of making me a witness to this singular reconciliation
+in which I play so odd a part, you had spoken to me of the marquis--"
+
+"Stop," she said, "little as you know of women, you are aware that
+their confidences must be waited for, not asked. But to return to
+yourself. Are you very happy with my friend? Ah! I fear the
+contrary--"
+
+"Why, madame, should everything that the public amuses itself by
+saying claim our belief?"
+
+"You need not dissemble. The countess makes less a mystery of things
+than you do. Women of her stamp do not keep the secrets of their loves
+and of their lovers, especially when you are prompted by discretion to
+conceal her triumph. I am far from accusing her of coquetry; but a
+prude has as much vanity as a coquette.--Come, tell me frankly, have
+you not cause of complaint against her?"
+
+"But, madame, the air is really too icy for us to stay here. Would you
+like to go in?" said I with a smile.
+
+"Do you find it so?--That is singular. The air is quite warm."
+
+She had taken my arm again, and we continued to walk, although I did
+not know the direction which we took. All that she had hinted at
+concerning the lover of the countess, concerning my mistress, together
+with this journey, the incident which took place in the carriage, our
+conversation on the grassy bank, the time of night, the moonlight--all
+made me feel anxious. I was at the same time carried along by vanity,
+by desire, and so distracted by thought, that I was too excited
+perhaps to take notice of all that I was experiencing. And, while I
+was overwhelmed with these mingled feelings, she continued talking to
+me of the countess, and my silence confirmed the truth of all that she
+chose to say about her. Nevertheless, certain passages in her talk
+recalled me to myself.
+
+"What an exquisite creature she is!" she was saying. "How graceful! On
+her lips the utterances of treachery sound like witticism; an act of
+infidelity seems the prompting of reason, a sacrifice to propriety;
+while she is never reckless, she is always lovable; she is seldom
+tender and never sincere; amorous by nature, prudish on principle;
+sprightly, prudent, dexterous though utterly thoughtless, varied as
+Proteus in her moods, but charming as the Graces in her manner; she
+attracts but she eludes. What a number of parts I have seen her play!
+_Entre nous_, what a number of dupes hang round her! What fun she has
+made of the baron, what a life she has led the marquis! When she took
+you, it was merely for the purpose of throwing the two rivals off the
+scent; they were on the point of a rupture; for she had played with
+them too long, and they had had time to see through her. But she
+brought you on the scene. Their attention was called to you, she led
+them to redouble their pursuit, she was in despair over you, she
+pitied you, she consoled you-- Ah! how happy is a clever woman when in
+such a game as this she professes to stake nothing of her own! But
+yet, is this true happiness?"
+
+This last phrase, accompanied by a significant sigh, was a
+master-stroke. I felt as if a bandage had fallen from my eyes, without
+seeing who had put it there. My mistress appeared to me the falsest of
+women, and I believed that I held now the only sensible creature in
+the
+world. Then I sighed without knowing why. She seemed grieved at having
+given me pain and at having in her excitement drawn a picture, the
+truth of which might be open to suspicion, since it was the work of a
+woman. I do not know how I answered; for without realizing the drift
+of all I heard, I set out with her on the high road of sentiment, and
+we mounted to such lofty heights of feeling that it was impossible to
+guess what would be the end of our journey. It was fortunate that we
+also took the path towards a pavilion which she pointed out to me at
+the end of the terrace, a pavilion, the witness of many sweet moments.
+She described to me the furnishing of it. What a pity that she had not
+the key! As she spoke we reached the pavilion and found that it was
+open. The clearness of the moonlight outside did not penetrate, but
+darkness has many charms. We trembled as we went in. It was a
+sanctuary. Might it not be the sanctuary of love? We drew near a sofa
+and sat down, and there we remained a moment listening to our
+heart-beats. The last ray of the moon carried away the last scruple.
+The hand which repelled me felt my heart beat. She struggled to get
+away, but fell back overcome with tenderness. We talked together
+through that silence in the language of thought. Nothing is more
+rapturous than these mute conversations. Madame de T----- took refuge
+in my arms, hid her head in my bosom, sighed and then grew calm under
+my caresses. She grew melancholy, she was consoled, and she asked of
+love all that love had robbed her of. The sound of the river broke the
+silence of night with a gentle murmur, which seemed in harmony with
+the beating of our hearts. Such was the darkness of the place it was
+scarcely possible to discern objects; but through the transparent
+crepe of a fair summer's night, the queen of that lovely place seemed
+to me adorable.
+
+"Oh!" she said to me with an angelic voice, "let us leave this
+dangerous spot. Resistance here is beyond our strength."
+
+She drew me away and we left the pavilion with regret.
+
+"Ah! how happy is she!" cried Madame de T-----.
+
+"Whom do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"Did I speak?" said she with a look of alarm.
+
+And then we reached the grassy bank, and stopped there involuntarily.
+"What a distance there is," she said to me, "between this place and
+the pavilion!"
+
+"Yes indeed," said I. "But must this bank be always ominous? Is there
+a regret? Is there--?"
+
+I do not know by what magic it took place; but at this point the
+conversation changed and became less serious. She ventured even to
+speak playfully of the pleasures of love, to eliminate from them all
+moral considerations, to reduce them to their simplest elements, and
+to prove that the favors of lovers were mere pleasure, that there were
+no pledges--philosophically speaking--excepting those which were given
+to the world, when we allowed it to penetrate our secrets and joined
+it in the acts of indiscretion.
+
+"How mild is the night," she said, "which we have by chance picked
+out! Well, if there are reasons, as I suppose there are, which compel
+us to part to-morrow, our happiness, ignored as it is by all nature,
+will not leave us any ties to dissolve. There will, perhaps, be some
+regrets, the pleasant memory of which will give us reparation; and
+then there will be a mutual understanding, without all the delays, the
+fuss and the tyranny of legal proceedings. We are such machines--and I
+blush to avow it--that in place of all the shrinkings that tormented
+me before this scene took place, I was half inclined to embrace the
+boldness of these principles, and I felt already disposed to indulge
+in the love of liberty.
+
+"This beautiful night," she continued, "this lovely scenery at this
+moment have taken on fresh charms. O let us never forget this
+pavilion! The chateau," she added smilingly, "contains a still more
+charming place, but I dare not show you anything; you are like a
+child, who wishes to touch everything and breaks everything that he
+touches."
+
+Moved by a sentiment of curiosity I protested that I was a very good
+child. She changed the subject.
+
+"This night," she said, "would be for me without a regret if I were
+not vexed with myself for what I said to you about the countess. Not
+that I wish to find fault with you. Novelty attracts me. You have
+found me amiable, I should like to believe in your good faith. But the
+dominion of habit takes a long time to break through and I have not
+learned the secret of doing this--By the bye, what do you think of my
+husband?"
+
+"Well, he is rather cross, but I suppose he could not be otherwise to
+me."
+
+"Oh, that is true, but his way of life isn't pleasant, and he could
+not see you here with indifference. He might be suspicious even of our
+friendship."
+
+"Oh! he is so already."
+
+"Confess that he has cause. Therefore you must not prolong this visit;
+he might take it amiss. As soon as any one arrives--" and she added
+with a smile, "some one is going to arrive--you must go. You have to
+keep up appearance, you know. Remember his manner when he left us
+to-night."
+
+I was tempted to interpret this adventure as a trap, but as she
+noticed the impression made by her words, she added:
+
+"Oh, he was very much gayer when he was superintending the arrangement
+of the cabinet I told you about. That was before my marriage. This
+passage leads to my apartment. Alas! it testifies to the cunning
+artifices to which Monsieur de T----- has resorted in protecting his
+love for me."
+
+"How pleasant it would be," I said to her, keenly excited by the
+curiosity she had roused in me, "to take vengeance in this spot for
+the insults which your charms have suffered, and to seek to make
+restitution for the pleasures of which you have been robbed."
+
+She doubtless thought this remark in good taste, but she said: "You
+promised to be good!"
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+I threw a veil over the follies which every age will pardon to youth,
+on the ground of so many balked desires and bitter memories. In the
+morning, scarcely raising her liquid eyes, Madame de T-----, fairer
+than ever, said to me:
+
+"Now will you ever love the countess as much as you do me?"
+
+I was about to answer when her maid, her confidante, appeared saying:
+
+"You must go. It is broad daylight, eleven o'clock, and the chateau is
+already awake."
+
+All had vanished like a dream! I found myself wandering through the
+corridors before I had recovered my senses. How could I regain my
+apartment, not knowing where it was? Any mistake might bring about an
+exposure. I resolved on a morning walk. The coolness of the fresh air
+gradually tranquilized my imagination and brought me back to the world
+of reality; and now instead of a world of enchantment I saw myself in
+my soul, and my thoughts were no longer disturbed but followed each
+other in connected order; in fact, I breathed once more. I was, above
+all things, anxious to learn what I was to her so lately left--I who
+knew that she had been desperately in love with the Marquis de V-----.
+Could she have broken with him? Had she taken me to be his successor,
+or only to punish him? What a night! What an adventure! Yes, and what
+a delightful woman! While I floated on the waves of these thoughts, I
+heard a sound near at hand. I raised my eyes, I rubbed them, I could
+not believe my senses. Can you guess who it was? The Marquis de
+V-----!
+
+"You did not expect to see me so early, did you?" he said. "How has it
+all gone off?"
+
+"Did you know that I was here?" I asked in utter amazement.
+
+"Oh, yes, I received word just as you left Paris. Have you played your
+part well? Did not the husband think your visit ridiculous? Was he put
+out? When are you going to take leave? You had better go, I have made
+every provision for you. I have brought you a good carriage. It is at
+your service. This is the way I requite you, my dear friend. You may
+rely on me in the future, for a man is grateful for such services as
+yours."
+
+These last words gave me the key to the whole mystery, and I saw how I
+stood.
+
+"But why should you have come so soon?" I asked him; "it would have
+been more prudent to have waited a few days."
+
+"I foresaw that; and it is only chance that has brought me here. I am
+supposed to be on my way back from a neighboring country house. But
+has not Madame de T----- taken you into her secret? I am surprised at
+her want of confidence, after all you have done for us."
+
+"My dear friend," I replied, "she doubtless had her reasons. Perhaps I
+did not play my part very well."
+
+"Has everything been very pleasant? Tell me the particulars; come,
+tell me."
+
+"Now wait a moment. I did not know that this was to be a comedy; and
+although Madame de T----- gave me a part in the play--"
+
+"It wasn't a very nice one."
+
+"Do not worry yourself; there are no bad parts for good actors."
+
+"I understand, you acquitted yourself well."
+
+"Admirably."
+
+"And Madame de T-----?"
+
+"Is adorable."
+
+"To think of being able to win such a woman!" said he, stopping short
+in our walk, and looking triumphantly at me. "Oh, what pains I have
+taken with her! And I have at last brought her to a point where she is
+perhaps the only woman in Paris on whose fidelity a man may infallibly
+count!"
+
+"You have succeeded--?"
+
+"Yes; in that lies my special talent. Her inconstancy was mere
+frivolity, unrestrained imagination. It was necessary to change that
+disposition of hers, but you have no idea of her attachment to me. But
+really, is she not charming?"
+
+"I quite agree with you."
+
+"And yet _entre nous_ I recognize one fault in her. Nature in giving
+her everything, has denied her that flame divine which puts the crown
+on all other endowments; while she rouses in others the ardor of
+passion, she feels none herself, she is a thing of marble."
+
+"I am compelled to believe you, for I have had no opportunity of
+judging, but do you think that you know that woman as well as if you
+were her husband? It is possible to be deceived. If I had not dined
+yesterday with the veritable--I should take you--"
+
+"By the way, has he been good?"
+
+"Oh, I was received like a dog!"
+
+"I understand. Let us go in, let us look for Madame de T-----. She
+must be up by this time."
+
+"But should we not out of decency begin with the husband?" I said to
+him.
+
+"You are right. Let us go to your room, I wish to put on a little
+powder. But tell me, did he really take you for her lover?"
+
+"You may judge by the way he receives me; but let us go at once to his
+apartment."
+
+I wished to avoid having to lead him to an apartment whose whereabouts
+I did not know; but by chance we found it. The door was open and there
+I saw my _valet de chambre_ asleep on an armchair. A candle was going
+out on a table beside him. He drowsily offered a night robe to the
+marquis. I was on pins and needles; but the marquis was in a mood to
+be easily deceived, took the man for a mere sleepy-head, and made a
+joke of the matter. We passed on to the apartment of Monsieur de
+T-----. There was no misunderstanding the reception which he accorded
+me, and the welcome, the compliments which he addressed to the
+marquis, whom he almost forced to stay. He wished to take him to
+madame in order that she might insist on his staying. As for me, I
+received no such invitation. I was reminded that my health was
+delicate, the country was damp, fever was in the air, and I seemed so
+depressed that the chateau would prove too gloomy for me. The marquis
+offered me his chaise and I accepted it. The husband seemed delighted
+and we were all satisfied. But I could not refuse myself the pleasure
+of seeing Madame de T----- once more. My impatience was wonderful. My
+friend conceived no suspicions from the late sleep of his mistress.
+
+"Isn't this fine?" he said to me as we followed Monsieur de T-----.
+"He couldn't have spoken more kindly if she had dictated his words. He
+is a fine fellow. I am not in the least annoyed by this
+reconciliation; they will make a good home together, and you will
+agree with me, that he could not have chosen a wife better able to do
+the honors."
+
+"Certainly," I replied.
+
+"However pleasant the adventure has been," he went on with an air of
+mystery, "you must be off! I will let Madame de T----- understand that
+her secret will be well kept."
+
+"On that point, my friend, she perhaps counts more on me than on you;
+for you see her sleep is not disturbed by the matter."
+
+"Oh! I quite agree that there is no one like you for putting a woman
+to sleep."
+
+"Yes, and a husband too, and if necessary a lover, my dear friend."
+
+At last Monsieur de T----- was admitted to his wife's apartment, and
+there we were all summoned.
+
+"I trembled," said Madame de T----- to me, "for fear you would go
+before I awoke, and I thank you for saving me the annoyance which that
+would have caused me."
+
+"Madame," I said, and she must have perceived the feeling that was in
+my tones--"I come to say good-bye."
+
+She looked at me and at the marquis with an air of disquietude; but
+the self-satisfied, knowing look of her lover reassured her. She
+laughed in her sleeve with me as if she would console me as well as
+she could, without lowering herself in my eyes.
+
+"He has played his part well," the marquis said to her in a low voice,
+pointing to me, "and my gratitude--"
+
+"Let us drop the subject," interrupted Madame de T-----; "you may be
+sure that I am well aware of all I owe him."
+
+At last Monsieur de T-----, with a sarcastic remark, dismissed me; my
+friend threw the dust in his eyes by making fun of me; and I paid back
+both of them by expressing my admiration for Madame de T-----, who
+made fools of us all without forfeiting her dignity. I took myself
+off; but Madame de T----- followed me, pretending to have a commission
+to give me.
+
+"Adieu, monsieur!" she said, "I am indebted to you for the very great
+pleasure you have given me; but I have paid you back with a beautiful
+dream," and she looked at me with an expression of subtle meaning.
+"But adieu, and forever! You have plucked a solitary flower,
+blossoming in its loveliness, which no man--"
+
+She stopped and her thought evaporated in a sigh; but she checked the
+rising flood of sensibility and smiled significantly.
+
+"The countess loves you," she said. "If I have robbed her of some
+transports, I give you back to her less ignorant than before. Adieu!
+Do not make mischief between my friend and me."
+
+She wrung my hand and left me.
+
+
+
+More than once the ladies who had mislaid their fans blushed as they
+listened to the old gentleman, whose brilliant elocution won their
+indulgence for certain details which we have suppressed, as too erotic
+for the present age; nevertheless, we may believe that each lady
+complimented him in private; for some time afterwards he gave to each
+of them, as also to the masculine guests, a copy of this charming
+story, twenty-five copies of which were printed by Pierre Didot. It is
+from copy No. 24 that the author has transcribed this tale, hitherto
+unpublished, and, strange to say, attributed to Dorat. It has the
+merit of yielding important lessons for husbands, while at the same
+time it gives the celibates a delightful picture of morals in the last
+century.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XXV.
+
+                              OF ALLIES.
+
+Of all the miseries that civil war can bring upon a country the
+greatest lies in the appeal which one of the contestants always ends
+by making to some foreign government.
+
+Unhappily we are compelled to confess that all women make this great
+mistake, for the lover is only the first of their soldiers. It may be
+a member of their family or at least a distant cousin. This
+Meditation, then, is intended to answer the inquiry, what assistance
+can each of the different powers which influence human life give to
+your wife? or better than that, what artifices will she resort to to
+arm them against you?
+
+Two beings united by marriage are subject to the laws of religion and
+society; to those of private life, and, from considerations of health,
+to those of medicine. We will therefore divide this important
+Meditation into six paragraphs:
+
+
+  1. OF RELIGIONS AND OF CONFESSION; CONSIDERED IN THEIR CONNECTION
+     WITH MARRIAGE.
+  2. OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW.
+  3. OF BOARDING SCHOOL FRIENDS AND INTIMATE FRIENDS.
+  4. OF THE LOVER'S ALLIES.
+  5. OF THE MAID.
+  6. OF THE DOCTOR.
+
+
+        1. OF RELIGIONS AND OF CONFESSION; CONSIDERED IN THEIR
+                      CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.
+
+La Bruyere has very wittily said, "It is too much for a husband to
+have ranged against him both devotion and gallantry; a woman ought to
+choose but one of them for her ally."
+
+The author thinks that La Bruyere is mistaken.
+
+
+                       2. OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW.
+
+Up to the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a
+foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the
+_feminisms_ of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman
+becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old
+woman, it is another old woman.
+
+Some diplomats have attempted on more than one occasion the diabolical
+task of gaining over the dowagers who opposed their machinations; but
+if they have ever succeeded it was only after making enormous
+concessions to them; for diplomats are practiced people and we do not
+think that you can employ their recipe in dealing with your
+mother-in-law. She will be the first aid-de-camp of her daughter, for
+if the mother did not take her daughter's side, it would be one of
+those monstrous and unnatural exceptions, which unhappily for husbands
+are extremely rare.
+
+When a man is so happy as to possess a mother-in-law who is
+well-preserved, he may easily keep her in check for a certain time,
+although he may not know any young celibate brave enough to assail
+her. But generally husbands who have the slightest conjugal genius
+will find a way of pitting their own mother against that of their
+wife, and in that case they will naturally neutralize each other's
+power.
+
+To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in
+Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too
+rarely meets with.
+
+What of making mischief between the mother and the daughter?--That may
+be possible; but in order to accomplish such an enterprise he must
+have the metallic heart of Richelieu, who made a son and a mother
+deadly enemies to each other. However, the jealousy of a husband who
+forbids his wife to pray to male saints and wishes her to address only
+female saints, would allow her liberty to see her mother.
+
+Many sons-in-law take an extreme course which settles everything,
+which consists in living on bad terms with their mothers-in-law. This
+unfriendliness would be very adroit policy, if it did not inevitably
+result in drawing tighter the ties that unite mother and daughter.
+These are about all the means which you have for resisting maternal
+influence in your home. As for the services which your wife can claim
+from her mother, they are immense; and the assistance which she may
+derive from the neutrality of her mother is not less powerful. But on
+this point everything passes out of the domain of science, for all is
+veiled in secrecy. The reinforcements which a mother brings up in
+support of a daughter are so varied in nature, they depend so much on
+circumstances, that it would be folly to attempt even a nomenclature
+for them. Yet you may write out among the most valuable precepts of
+this conjugal gospel, the following maxims.
+
+A husband should never let his wife visit her mother unattended.
+
+A husband ought to study all the reasons why all the celibates under
+forty who form her habitual society are so closely united by ties of
+friendship to his mother-in-law; for, if a daughter rarely falls in
+love with the lover of her mother, her mother has always a weak spot
+for her daughter's lover.
+
+
+         3. OF BOARDING SCHOOL FRIENDS AND INTIMATE FRIENDS.
+
+Louise de L-----, daughter of an officer killed at Wagram, had been
+the object of Napoleon's special protection. She left Ecouen to marry
+a commissary general, the Baron de V-----, who is very rich.
+
+Louise was eighteen and the baron forty. She was ordinary in face and
+her complexion could not be called white, but she had a charming
+figure, good eyes, a small foot, a pretty hand, good taste and
+abundant intelligence. The baron, worn out by the fatigues of war and
+still more by the excesses of a stormy youth, had one of those faces
+upon which the Republic, the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire
+seemed to have set their impress.
+
+He became so deeply in love with his wife, that he asked and obtained
+from the Emperor a post at Paris, in order that he might be enabled to
+watch over his treasure. He was as jealous as Count Almaviva, still
+more from vanity than from love. The young orphan had married her
+husband from necessity, and, flattered by the ascendancy she wielded
+over a man much older than herself, waited upon his wishes and his
+needs; but her delicacy was offended from the first days of their
+marriage by the habits and ideas of a man whose manners were tinged
+with republican license. He was a predestined.
+
+I do not know exactly how long the baron made his honeymoon last, nor
+when war was declared in his household; but I believe it happened in
+1816, at a very brilliant ball given by Monsieur D-----, a
+commissariat officer, that the commissary general, who had been
+promoted head of the department, admired the beautiful Madame B-----,
+the wife of a banker, and looked at her much more amorously than a
+married man should have allowed himself to do.
+
+At two o'clock in the morning it happened that the banker, tired of
+waiting any longer, went home leaving his wife at the ball.
+
+"We are going to take you home to your house," said the baroness to
+Madame B-----. "Monsieur de V-----, offer your arm to Emilie!"
+
+And now the baron is seated in his carriage next to a woman who,
+during the whole evening, had been offered and had refused a thousand
+attentions, and from whom he had hoped in vain to win a single look.
+There she was, in all the lustre of her youth and beauty, displaying
+the whitest shoulders and the most ravishing lines of beauty. Her
+face, which still reflected the pleasures of the evening, seemed to
+vie with the brilliancy of her satin gown; her eyes to rival the blaze
+of her diamonds; and her skin to cope with the soft whiteness of the
+marabouts which tied in her hair, set off the ebon tresses and the
+ringlets dangling from her headdress. Her tender voice would stir the
+chords of the most insensible hearts; in a word, so powerfully did she
+wake up love in the human breast that Robert d'Abrissel himself would
+perhaps have yielded to her.
+
+The baron glanced at his wife, who, overcome with fatigue, had sunk to
+sleep in a corner of the carriage. He compared, in spite of himself,
+the toilette of Louise and that of Emilie. Now on occasions of this
+kind the presence of a wife is singularly calculated to sharpen the
+unquenchable desires of a forbidden love. Moreover, the glances of the
+baron, directed alternately to his wife and to her friend, were easy
+to interpret, and Madame B----- interpreted them.
+
+"Poor Louise," she said, "she is overtired. Going out does not suit
+her, her tastes are so simple. At Ecouen she was always reading--"
+
+"And you, what used you to do?"
+
+"I, sir? Oh, I thought about nothing but acting comely. It was my
+passion!"
+
+"But why do you so rarely visit Madame de V-----? We have a country
+house at Saint-Prix, where we could have a comedy acted, in a little
+theatre which I have built there."
+
+"If I have not visited Madame de V-----, whose fault is it?" she
+replied. "You are so jealous that you will not allow her either to
+visit her friends or to receive them."
+
+"I jealous!" cried Monsieur de V-----, "after four years of marriage,
+and after having had three children!"
+
+"Hush," said Emilie, striking the fingers of the baron with her fan,
+"Louise is not asleep!"
+
+The carriage stopped, and the baron offered his hand to his wife's
+fair friend and helped her to get out.
+
+"I hope," said Madame B-----, "that you will not prevent Louise from
+coming to the ball which I am giving this week."
+
+The baron made her a respectful bow.
+
+This ball was a triumph of Madame B-----'s and the ruin of the husband
+of Louise; for he became desperately enamored of Emilie, to whom he
+would have sacrificed a hundred lawful wives.
+
+Some months after that evening on which the baron gained some hopes of
+succeeding with his wife's friend, he found himself one morning at the
+house of Madame B-----, when the maid came to announce the Baroness de
+V-----.
+
+"Ah!" cried Emilie, "if Louise were to see you with me at such an hour
+as this, she would be capable of compromising me. Go into that closet
+and don't make the least noise."
+
+The husband, caught like a mouse in a trap, concealed himself in the
+closet.
+
+"Good-day, my dear!" said the two women, kissing each other.
+
+"Why are you come so early?" asked Emilie.
+
+"Oh! my dear, cannot you guess? I came to have an understanding with
+you!"
+
+"What, a duel?"
+
+"Precisely, my dear. I am not like you, not I! I love my husband and
+am jealous of him. You! you are beautiful, charming, you have the
+right to be a coquette, you can very well make fun of B-----, to whom
+your virtue seems to be of little importance. But as you have plenty
+of lovers in society, I beg you that you will leave me my husband. He
+is always at your house, and he certainly would not come unless you
+were the attraction."
+
+"What a very pretty jacket you have on."
+
+"Do you think so? My maid made it."
+
+"Then I shall get Anastasia to take a lesson from Flore--"
+
+"So, then, my dear, I count on your friendship to refrain from
+bringing trouble in my house."
+
+"But, my child, I do not know how you can conceive that I should fall
+in love with your husband; he is coarse and fat as a deputy of the
+centre. He is short and ugly--Ah! I will allow that he is generous,
+but that is all you can say for him, and this is a quality which is
+all in all only to opera girls; so that you can understand, my dear,
+that if I were choosing a lover, as you seem to suppose I am, I
+wouldn't choose an old man like your baron. If I have given him any
+hopes, if I have received him, it was certainly for the purpose of
+amusing myself, and of giving you liberty; for I believed you had a
+weakness for young Rostanges."
+
+"I?" exclaimed Louise, "God preserve me from it, my dear; he is the
+most intolerable coxcomb in the world. No, I assure you, I love my
+husband! You may laugh as you choose; it is true. I know it may seem
+ridiculous, but consider, he has made my fortune, he is no miser, and
+he is everything to me, for it has been my unhappy lot to be left an
+orphan. Now even if I did not love him, I ought to try to preserve his
+esteem. Have I a family who will some day give me shelter?"
+
+"Come, my darling, let us speak no more about it," said Emilie,
+interrupting her friend, "for it tires me to death."
+
+After a few trifling remarks the baroness left.
+
+"How is this, monsieur?" cried Madame B-----, opening the door of the
+closet where the baron was frozen with cold, for this incident took
+place in winter; "how is this? Aren't you ashamed of yourself for not
+adoring a little wife who is so interesting? Don't speak to me of
+love; you may idolize me, as you say you do, for a certain time, but
+you will never love me as you love Louise. I can see that in your
+heart I shall never outweigh the interest inspired by a virtuous wife,
+children, and a family circle. I should one day be deserted and become
+the object of your bitter reflections. You would coldly say of me 'I
+have had that woman!' That phrase I have heard pronounced by men with
+the most insulting indifference. You see, monsieur, that I reason in
+cold blood, and that I do not love you, because you never would be
+able to love me."
+
+"What must I do then to convince you of my love?" cried the baron,
+fixing his gaze on the young woman.
+
+She had never appeared to him so ravishingly beautiful as at that
+moment, when her soft voice poured forth a torrent of words whose
+sternness was belied by the grace of her gestures, by the pose of her
+head and by her coquettish attitude.
+
+"Oh, when I see Louise in possession of a lover," she replied, "when I
+know that I am taking nothing away from her, and that she has nothing
+to regret in losing your affection; when I am quite sure that you love
+her no longer, and have obtained certain proof of your indifference
+towards her--Oh, then I may listen to you!--These words must seem
+odious to you," she continued in an earnest voice; "and so indeed they
+are, but do not think that they have been pronounced by me. I am the
+rigorous mathematician who makes his deductions from a preliminary
+proposition. You are married, and do you deliberately set about making
+love to some one else? I should be mad to give any encouragement to a
+man who cannot be mine eternally."
+
+"Demon!" exclaimed the husband. "Yes, you are a demon, and not a
+woman!"
+
+"Come now, you are really amusing!" said the young woman as she seized
+the bell-rope.
+
+"Oh! no, Emilie," continued the lover of forty, in a calmer voice. "Do
+not ring; stop, forgive me! I will sacrifice everything for you."
+
+"But I do not promise you anything!" she answered quickly with a
+laugh.
+
+"My God! How you make me suffer!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Well, and have not you in your life caused the unhappiness of more
+than one person?" she asked. "Remember all the tears which have been
+shed through you and for you! Oh, your passion does not inspire me
+with the least pity. If you do not wish to make me laugh, make me
+share your feelings."
+
+"Adieu, madame, there is a certain clemency in your sternness. I
+appreciate the lesson you have taught me. Yes, I have many faults to
+expiate."
+
+"Well then, go and repent of them," she said with a mocking smile; "in
+making Louise happy you will perform the rudest penance in your
+power."
+
+They parted. But the love of the baron was too violent to allow of
+Madame B-----'s harshness failing to accomplish her end, namely, the
+separation of the married couple.
+
+At the end of some months the Baron de V----- and his wife lived
+apart, though they lived in the same mansion. The baroness was the
+object of universal pity, for in public she always did justice to her
+husband and her resignation seemed wonderful. The most prudish women
+of society found nothing to blame in the friendship which united
+Louise to the young Rostanges. And all was laid to the charge of
+Monsieur de V-----'s folly.
+
+When this last had made all the sacrifices that a man could make for
+Madame B-----, his perfidious mistress started for the waters of Mount
+Dore, for Switzerland and for Italy, on the pretext of seeking the
+restoration of her health.
+
+The baron died of inflammation of the liver, being attended during his
+sickness by the most touching ministrations which his wife could
+lavish upon him; and judging from the grief which he manifested at
+having deserted her, he seemed never to have suspected her
+participation in the plan which had been his ruin.
+
+This anecdote, which we have chosen from a thousand others,
+exemplifies the services which two women can render each other.
+
+From the words--"Let me have the pleasure of bringing my husband" up
+to the conception of the drama, whose denouement was inflammation of
+the liver, every female perfidy was assembled to work out the end.
+Certain incidents will, of course, be met with which diversify more or
+less the typical example which we have given, but the march of the
+drama is almost always the same. Moreover a husband ought always to
+distrust the woman friends of his wife. The subtle artifices of these
+lying creatures rarely fail of their effect, for they are seconded by
+two enemies, who always keep close to a man--and these are vanity and
+desire.
+
+
+                      4. OF THE LOVER'S ALLIES.
+
+The man who hastens to tell another man that he has dropped a thousand
+franc bill from his pocket-book, or even that the handkerchief is
+coming out of his pocket, would think it a mean thing to warn him that
+some one was carrying off his wife. There is certainly something
+extremely odd in this moral inconsistency, but after all it admits of
+explanation. Since the law cannot exercise any interference with
+matrimonial rights, the citizens have even less right to constitute
+themselves a conjugal police; and when one restores a thousand franc
+bill to him who has lost it, he acts under a certain kind of
+obligation, founded on the principle which says, "Do unto others as ye
+would they should do unto you!"
+
+But by what reasoning can justification be found for the help which
+one celibate never asks in vain, but always receives from another
+celibate in deceiving a husband, and how shall we qualify the
+rendering of such help? A man who is incapable of assisting a gendarme
+in discovering an assassin, has no scruple in taking a husband to a
+theatre, to a concert or even to a questionable house, in order to
+help a comrade, whom he would not hesitate to kill in a duel
+to-morrow, in keeping an assignation, the result of which is to
+introduce into a family a spurious child, and to rob two brothers of a
+portion of their fortune by giving them a co-heir whom they never
+perhaps would otherwise have had; or to effect the misery of three
+human beings. We must confess that integrity is a very rare virtue,
+and, very often, the man that thinks he has most actually has least.
+Families have been divided by feuds, and brothers have been murdered,
+which events would never have taken place if some friend had refused
+to perform what passes to the world as a harmless trick.
+
+It is impossible for a man to be without some hobby or other, and all
+of us are devoted either to hunting, fishing, gambling, music, money,
+or good eating. Well, your ruling passion will always be an accomplice
+in the snare which a lover sets for you, the invisible hand of this
+passion will direct your friends, or his, whether they consent or not,
+to play a part in the little drama when they want to take you away
+from home, or to induce you to leave your wife to the mercy of
+another. A lover will spend two whole months, if necessary, in
+planning the construction of the mouse-trap.
+
+I have seen the most cunning men on earth thus taken in.
+
+There was a certain retired lawyer of Normandy. He lived in the little
+town of B-----, where a regiment of the chasseurs of Cantal were
+garrisoned. A fascinating officer of this regiment had fallen in love
+with the wife of this pettifogger, and the regiment was leaving before
+the two lovers had been able to enjoy the least privacy. It was the
+fourth military man over whom the lawyer had triumphed. As he left the
+dinner-table one evening, about six o'clock, the husband took a walk
+on the terrace of his garden from which he could see the whole country
+side. The officers arrived at this moment to take leave of him.
+Suddenly the flame of a conflagration burst forth on the horizon.
+"Heavens! La Daudiniere is on fire!" exclaimed the major. He was an
+old simple-minded soldier, who had dined at home. Every one mounted
+horse. The young wife smiled as she found herself alone, for her
+lover, hidden in the coppice, had said to her, "It is a straw stack on
+fire!" The flank of the husband was turned with all the more facility
+in that a fine courser was provided for him by the captain, and with a
+delicacy very rare in the cavalry, the lover actually sacrificed a few
+moments of his happiness in order to catch up with the cavalcade, and
+return in company with the husband.
+
+Marriage is a veritable duel, in which persistent watchfulness is
+required in order to triumph over an adversary; for, if you are
+unlucky enough to turn your head, the sword of the celibate will
+pierce you through and through.
+
+
+                           5. OF THE MAID.
+
+The prettiest waiting-maid I have ever seen is that of Madame V----y,
+a lady who to-day plays at Paris a brilliant part among the most
+fashionable women, and passes for a wife who keeps on excellent terms
+with her husband. Mademoiselle Celestine is a person whose points of
+beauty are so numerous that, in order to describe her, it would be
+necessary to translate the thirty verses which we are told form an
+inscription in the seraglio of the Grand Turk and contain each of them
+an excellent description of one of the thirty beauties of women.
+
+"You show a great deal of vanity in keeping near you such an
+accomplished creature," said a lady to the mistress of the house.
+
+"Ah! my dear, some day perhaps you will find yourself jealous of me in
+possessing Celestine."
+
+"She must be endowed with very rare qualities, I suppose? She perhaps
+dresses you well?"
+
+"Oh, no, very badly!"
+
+"She sews well?"
+
+"She never touches her needle."
+
+"She is faithful?"
+
+"She is one of those whose fidelity costs more than the most cunning
+dishonesty."
+
+"You astonish me, my dear; she is then your foster-sister?"
+
+"Not at all; she is positively good for nothing, but she is more
+useful to me than any other member of my household. If she remains
+with me ten years, I have promised her twenty thousand francs. It will
+be money well earned, and I shall not forget to give it!" said the
+young woman, nodding her head with a meaning gesture.
+
+At last the questioner of Madame V----y understood.
+
+When a woman has no friend of her own sex intimate enough to assist
+her in proving false to marital love, her maid is a last resource
+which seldom fails in bringing about the desired result.
+
+Oh! after ten years of marriage to find under his roof, and to see all
+the time, a young girl of from sixteen to eighteen, fresh, dressed
+with taste, the treasures of whose beauty seem to breathe defiance,
+whose frank bearing is irresistibly attractive, whose downcast eyes
+seem to fear you, whose timid glance tempts you, and for whom the
+conjugal bed has no secrets, for she is at once a virgin and an
+experienced woman! How can a man remain cold, like St. Anthony, before
+such powerful sorcery, and have the courage to remain faithful to the
+good principles represented by a scornful wife, whose face is always
+stern, whose manners are always snappish, and who frequently refuses
+to be caressed? What husband is stoical enough to resist such fires,
+such frosts? There, where you see a new harvest of pleasure, the young
+innocent sees an income, and your wife her liberty. It is a little
+family compact, which is signed in the interest of good will.
+
+In this case, your wife acts with regard to marriage as young
+fashionables do with regard to their country. If they are drawn for
+the army, they buy a man to carry the musket, to die in their place
+and to spare them the hardships of military life.
+
+In compromises of this sort there is not a single woman who does not
+know how to put her husband in the wrong. I have noticed that, by a
+supreme stroke of diplomacy, the majority of wives do not admit their
+maids into the secret of the part which they give them to play. They
+trust to nature, and assume an affected superiority over the lover and
+his mistress.
+
+These secret perfidies of women explain to a great degree the odd
+features of married life which are to be observed in the world; and I
+have heard women discuss, with profound sagacity, the dangers which
+are inherent in this terrible method of attack, and it is necessary to
+know thoroughly both the husband and the creature to whom he is to be
+abandoned, in order to make successful use of her. Many a woman, in
+this connection, has been the victim of her own calculations.
+
+Moreover, the more impetuous and passionate a husband shows himself,
+the less will a woman dare to employ this expedient; but a husband
+caught in this snare will never have anything to say to his stern
+better-half, when the maid, giving evidence of the fault she has
+committed, is sent into the country with an infant and a dowry.
+
+
+                          6. OF THE DOCTOR.
+
+The doctor is one of the most potent auxiliaries of an honest woman,
+when she wishes to acquire a friendly divorce from her husband. The
+services that the doctor renders, most of the time without knowing it,
+to a woman, are of such importance that there does not exist a single
+house in France where the doctor is chosen by any one but the wife.
+
+All doctors know what great influence women have on their reputation;
+thus we meet with few doctors who do not study to please the ladies.
+When a man of talent has become celebrated it is true that he does not
+lend himself to the crafty conspiracies which women hatch; but without
+knowing it he becomes involved in them.
+
+I suppose that a husband taught by the adventures of his own youth
+makes up his mind to pick out a doctor for his wife, from the first
+days of his marriage. So long as his feminine adversary fails to
+conceive the assistance that she may derive from this ally, she will
+submit in silence; but later on, if all her allurements fail to win
+over the man chosen by her husband, she will take a more favorable
+opportunity to give her husband her confidence, in the following
+remarkable manner.
+
+"I don't like the way in which the doctor feels my pulse!"
+
+And of course the doctor is dropped.
+
+Thus it happens that either a woman chooses her doctor, wins over the
+man who has been imposed upon her, or procures his dismissal. But this
+contest is very rare; the majority of young men who marry are
+acquainted with none but beardless doctors whom they have no anxiety
+to procure for their wives, and almost always the Esculapius of the
+household is chosen by the feminine power. Thus it happens that some
+fine morning the doctor, when he leaves the chamber of madame, who has
+been in bed for a fortnight, is induced by her to say to you:
+
+"I do not say that the condition of madame presents any serious
+symptoms; but this constant drowsiness, this general listlessness, and
+her natural tendency to a spinal affection demand great care. Her
+lymph is inspissated. She wants a change of air. She ought to be sent
+either to the waters of Bareges or to the waters of Plombieres."
+
+"All right, doctor."
+
+You allow your wife to go to Plombieres; but she goes there because
+Captain Charles is quartered in the Vosges. She returns in capital
+health and the waters of Plombieres have done wonders for her. She has
+written to you every day, she has lavished upon you from a distance
+every possible caress. The danger of a spinal affection has utterly
+disappeared.
+
+There is extant a little pamphlet, whose publication was prompted
+doubtless by hate. It was published in Holland, and it contains some
+very curious details of the manner in which Madame de Maintenon
+entered into an understanding with Fagon, for the purposes of
+controlling Louis XIV. Well, some morning your doctor will threaten
+you, as Fagon threatened his master, with a fit of apoplexy, if you do
+not diet yourself. This witty work of satire, doubtless the production
+of some courtier, entitled "Madame de Saint Tron," has been
+interpreted by the modern author who has become proverbial as "the
+young doctor." But his delightful sketch is very much superior to the
+work whose title I cite for the benefit of the book-lovers, and we
+have great pleasure in acknowledging that the work of our clever
+contemporary has prevented us, out of regard for the glory of the
+seventeenth century, from publishing the fragment of the old pamphlet.
+
+Very frequently a doctor becomes duped by the judicious manoeuvres of
+a young and delicate wife, and comes to you with the announcement:
+
+"Sir, I would not wish to alarm madame with regard to her condition;
+but I will advise you, if you value her health, to keep her in perfect
+tranquillity. The irritation at this moment seems to threaten the
+chest, and we must gain control of it; there is need of rest for her,
+perfect rest; the least agitation might change the seat of the malady.
+At this crisis, the prospect of bearing a child would be fatal to
+her."
+
+"But, doctor--"
+
+"Ah, yes! I know that!"
+
+He laughs and leaves the house.
+
+Like the rod of Moses, the doctor's mandate makes and unmakes
+generations. The doctor will restore you to your marriage bed with the
+same arguments that he used in debarring you. He treats your wife for
+complaints which she has not, in order to cure her of those which she
+has, and all the while you have no idea of it; for the scientific
+jargon of doctors can only be compared to the layers in which they
+envelop their pills.
+
+An honest woman in her chamber with the doctor is like a minister sure
+of a majority; she has it in her power to make a horse, or a carriage,
+according to her good pleasure and her taste; she will send you away
+or receive you, as she likes. Sometimes she will pretend to be ill in
+order to have a chamber separate from yours; sometimes she will
+surround herself with all the paraphernalia of an invalid; she will
+have an old woman for a nurse, regiments of vials and of bottles, and,
+environed by these ramparts, will defy you by her invalid airs. She
+will talk to you in such a depressing way of the electuaries and of
+the soothing draughts which she has taken, of the agues which she has
+had, of her plasters and cataplasms, that she will fill you with
+disgust at these sickly details, if all the time these sham sufferings
+are not intended to serve as engines by means of which, eventually, a
+successful attack may be made on that singular abstraction known as
+_your honor_.
+
+In this way your wife will be able to fortify herself at every point
+of contact which you possess with the world, with society and with
+life. Thus everything will take arms against you, and you will be
+alone among all these enemies. But suppose that it is your
+unprecedented privilege to possess a wife who is without religious
+connections, without parents or intimate friends; that you have
+penetration enough to see through all the tricks by which your wife's
+lover tries to entrap you; that you still have sufficient love for
+your fair enemy to resist all the Martons of the earth; that, in fact,
+you have for your doctor a man who is so celebrated that he has no
+time to listen to the maunderings of your wife; or that if your
+Esculapius is madame's vassal, you demand a consultation, and an
+incorruptible doctor intervenes every time the favorite doctor
+prescribes a remedy that disquiets you; even in that case, your
+prospects will scarcely be more brilliant. In fact, even if you do not
+succumb to this invasion of allies, you must not forget that, so far,
+your adversary has not, so to speak, struck the decisive blow. If you
+hold out still longer, your wife, having flung round you thread upon
+thread, as a spider spins his web, an invisible net, will resort to
+the arms which nature has given her, which civilization has perfected,
+and which will be treated of in the next Meditation.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XXVI.
+
+                        OF DIFFERENT WEAPONS.
+
+A weapon is anything which is used for the purpose of wounding. From
+this point of view, some sentiments prove to be the most cruel weapons
+which man can employ against his fellow man. The genius of Schiller,
+lucid as it was comprehensive, seems to have revealed all the
+phenomena which certain ideas bring to light in the human organization
+by their keen and penetrating action. A man may be put to death by a
+thought. Such is the moral of those heartrending scenes, when in _The
+Brigands_ the poet shows a young man, with the aid of certain ideas,
+making such powerful assaults on the heart of an old man, that he ends
+by causing the latter's death. The time is not far distant when
+science will be able to observe the complicated mechanism of our
+thoughts and to apprehend the transmission of our feelings. Some
+developer of the occult sciences will prove that our intellectual
+organization constitutes nothing more than a kind of interior man, who
+projects himself with less violence than the exterior man, and that
+the struggle which may take place between two such powers as these,
+although invisible to our feeble eyes, is not a less mortal struggle
+than that in which our external man compels us to engage.
+
+But these considerations belong to a different department of study
+from that in which we are now engaged; these subjects we intend to
+deal with in a future publication; some of our friends are already
+acquainted with one of the most important,--that, namely, entitled
+"THE PATHOLOGY OF SOCIAL LIFE, _or Meditations mathematical, physical,
+chemical and transcendental on the manifestations of thought, taken
+under all the forms which are produced by the state of society,
+whether by living, marriage, conduct, veterinary medicine, or by
+speech and action, etc._," in which all these great questions are
+fully discussed. The aim of this brief metaphysical observation is
+only to remind you that the higher classes of society reason too well
+to admit of their being attacked by any other than intellectual arms.
+
+Although it is true that tender and delicate souls are found enveloped
+in a body of metallic hardness, at the same time there are souls of
+bronze enveloped in bodies so supple and capricious that their grace
+attracts the friendship of others, and their beauty calls for a
+caress. But if you flatter the exterior man with your hand, the _Homo
+duplex_, the interior man, to use an expression of Buffon, immediately
+rouses himself and rends you with his keen points of contact.
+
+This description of a special class of human creatures, which we hope
+you will not run up against during your earthly journey, presents a
+picture of what your wife may be to you. Every one of the sentiments
+which nature has endowed your heart with, in their gentlest form, will
+become a dagger in the hand of your wife. You will be stabbed every
+moment, and you will necessarily succumb; for your love will flow like
+blood from every wound.
+
+This is the last struggle, but for her it also means victory.
+
+In order to carry out the distinction which we think we have
+established among three sorts of feminine temperament, we will divide
+this Meditation into three parts, under the following titles:
+
+
+  1. OF HEADACHES.
+  2. OF NERVOUS AFFECTATIONS.
+  3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.
+
+
+                           1. OF HEADACHES.
+
+Women are constantly the dupes or the victims of excessive
+sensibility; but we have already demonstrated that with the greater
+number of them this delicacy of soul must needs, almost without their
+knowing it, receive many rude blows, from the very fact of their
+marriage. (See Meditations entitled _The Predestined_ and _Of the
+Honeymoon_.) Most of the means of defence instinctively employed by
+husbands are nothing but traps set for the liveliness of feminine
+affections.
+
+Now the moment comes when the wife, during the Civil War, traces by a
+single act of thought the history of her moral life, and is irritated
+on perceiving the prodigious way in which you have taken advantage of
+her sensibility. It is very rarely that women, moved either by an
+innate feeling for revenge, which they themselves can never explain,
+or by their instinct of domination, fail to discover that this quality
+in their natural machinery, when brought into play against the man, is
+inferior to no other instrument for obtaining ascendancy over him.
+
+With admirable cleverness, they proceed to find out what chords in the
+hearts of their husbands are most easily touched; and when once they
+discover this secret, they eagerly proceed to put it into practice;
+then, like a child with a mechanical toy, whose spring excites their
+curiosity, they go on employing it, carelessly calling into play the
+movements of the instrument, and satisfied simply with their success
+in doing so. If they kill you, they will mourn over you with the best
+grace in the world, as the most virtuous, the most excellent, the most
+sensible of men.
+
+In this way your wife will first arm herself with that generous
+sentiment which leads us to respect those who are in pain. The man
+most disposed to quarrel with a woman full of life and health becomes
+helpless before a woman who is weak and feeble. If your wife has not
+attained the end of her secret designs, by means of those various
+methods already described, she will quickly seize this all-powerful
+weapon. In virtue of this new strategic method, you will see the young
+girl, so strong in life and beauty, whom you had wedded in her flower,
+metamorphosing herself into a pale and sickly woman.
+
+Now headache is an affection which affords infinite resources to a
+woman. This malady, which is the easiest of all to feign, for it is
+destitute of any apparent symptom, merely obliges her to say: "I have
+a headache." A woman trifles with you and there is no one in the world
+who can contradict her skull, whose impenetrable bones defy touch or
+ocular test. Moreover, headache is, in our opinion, the queen of
+maladies, the pleasantest and the most terrible weapon employed by
+wives against their husbands. There are some coarse and violent men
+who have been taught the tricks of women by their mistresses, in the
+happy hours of their celibacy, and so flatter themselves that they are
+never to be caught by this vulgar trap. But all their efforts, all
+their arguments end by being vanquished before the magic of these
+words: "I have a headache." If a husband complains, or ventures on a
+reproach, if he tries to resist the power of this _Il buondo cani_ of
+marriage, he is lost.
+
+Imagine a young woman, voluptuously lying on a divan, her head softly
+supported by a cushion, one hand hanging down; on a small table close
+at hand is her glass of lime-water. Now place by her side a burly
+husband. He has made five or six turns round the room; but each time
+he has turned on his heels to begin his walk all over again, the
+little invalid has made a slight movement of her eyebrows in a vain
+attempt to remind him that the slightest noise fatigues her. At last
+he musters all his courage and utters a protest against her pretended
+malady, in the bold phrase:
+
+"And have you really a headache?"
+
+At these words the young woman slightly raises her languid head, lifts
+an arm, which feebly falls back again upon her divan, raises her eyes
+to the ceiling, raises all that she has power to raise; then darting
+at you a leaden glance, she says in a voice of remarkable feebleness:
+
+"Oh! What can be the matter with me? I suffer the agonies of death!
+And this is all the comfort you give me! Ah! you men, it is plainly
+seen that nature has not given you the task of bringing children into
+the world. What egoists and tyrants you are! You take us in all the
+beauty of our youth, fresh, rosy, with tapering waist, and then all is
+well! When your pleasures have ruined the blooming gifts which we
+received from nature, you never forgive us for having forfeited them
+to you! That was all understood. You will allow us to have neither the
+virtues nor the sufferings of our condition. You must needs have
+children, and we pass many nights in taking care of them. But
+child-bearing has ruined our health, and left behind the germs of
+serious maladies.--Oh, what pain I suffer! There are few women who are
+not subject to headaches; but your wife must be an exception. You even
+laugh at our sufferings; that is generosity!--please don't walk about
+--I should not have expected this of you!--Stop the clock; the click
+of the pendulum rings in my head. Thanks! Oh, what an unfortunate
+creature I am! Have you a scent-bottle with you? Yes, oh! for pity's
+sake, allow me to suffer in peace, and go away; for this scent splits
+my head!"
+
+What can you say in reply? Do you not hear within you a voice which
+cries, "And what if she is actually suffering?" Moreover, almost all
+husbands evacuate the field of battle very quietly, while their wives
+watch them from the corner of their eyes, marching off on tip-toe and
+closing the door quietly on the chamber henceforth to be considered
+sacred by them.
+
+Such is the headache, true or false, which is patronized at your home.
+Then the headache begins to play a regular role in the bosom of your
+family. It is a theme on which a woman can play many admirable
+variations. She sets it forth in every key. With the aid of the
+headache alone a wife can make a husband desperate. A headache seizes
+madame when she chooses, where she chooses, and as much as she
+chooses. There are headaches of five days, of ten minutes, periodic or
+intermittent headaches.
+
+You sometimes find your wife in bed, in pain, helpless, and the blinds
+of her room are closed. The headache has imposed silence on every one,
+from the regions of the porter's lodge, where he is cutting wood, even
+to the garret of your groom, from which he is throwing down innocent
+bundles of straw. Believing in this headache, you leave the house, but
+on your return you find that madame has decamped! Soon madame returns,
+fresh and ruddy:
+
+"The doctor came," she says, "and advised me to take exercise, and I
+find myself much better!"
+
+Another day you wish to enter madame's room.
+
+"Oh, sir," says the maid, showing the most profound astonishment,
+"madame has her usual headache, and I have never seen her in such
+pain! The doctor has been sent for."
+
+"You are a happy man," said Marshal Augereau to General R-----, "to
+have such a pretty wife!"
+
+"To have!" replied the other. "If I have my wife ten days in the year,
+that is about all. These confounded women have always either the
+headache or some other thing!"
+
+The headache in France takes the place of the sandals, which, in
+Spain, the Confessor leaves at the door of the chamber in which he is
+with his penitent.
+
+If your wife, foreseeing some hostile intentions on your part, wishes
+to make herself as inviolable as the charter, she immediately gets up
+a little headache performance. She goes to bed in a most deliberate
+fashion, she utters shrieks which rend the heart of the hearer. She
+goes gracefully through a series of gesticulations so cleverly
+executed that you might think her a professional contortionist. Now
+what man is there so inconsiderate as to dare to speak to a suffering
+woman about desires which, in him, prove the most perfect health?
+Politeness alone demands of him perfect silence. A woman knows under
+these circumstances that by means of this all-powerful headache, she
+can at her will paste on her bed the placard which sends back home the
+amateurs who have been allured by the announcement of the Comedie
+Francaise, when they read the words: "Closed through the sudden
+indisposition of Mademoiselle Mars."
+
+O headache, protectress of love, tariff of married life, buckler
+against which all married desires expire! O mighty headache! Can it be
+possible that lovers have never sung thy praises, personified thee, or
+raised thee to the skies? O magic headache, O delusive headache, blest
+be the brain that first invented thee! Shame on the doctor who shall
+find out thy preventive! Yes, thou art the only ill that women bless,
+doubtless through gratitude for the good things thou dispensest to
+them, O deceitful headache! O magic headache!
+
+
+                     2. OF NERVOUS AFFECTATIONS.
+
+There is, however, a power which is superior even to that of the
+headache; and we must avow to the glory of France, that this power is
+one of the most recent which has been won by Parisian genius. As in
+the case with all the most useful discoveries of art and science, no
+one knows to whose intellect it is due. Only, it is certain that it
+was towards the middle of the last century that "Vapors" made their
+first appearance in France. Thus while Papin was applying the force of
+vaporized water in mechanical problems, a French woman, whose name
+unhappily is unknown, had the glory of endowing her sex with the
+faculty of vaporizing their fluids. Very soon the prodigious influence
+obtained by vapors was extended to the nerves; it was thus in passing
+from fibre to fibre that the science of neurology was born. This
+admirable science has since then led such men as Philips and other
+clever physiologists to the discovery of the nervous fluid in its
+circulation; they are now perhaps on the eve of identifying its
+organs, and the secret of its origin and of its evaporation. And thus,
+thanks to certain quackeries of this kind, we may be enabled some day
+to penetrate the mysteries of that unknown power which we have already
+called more than once in the present book, the _Will_. But do not let
+us trespass on the territory of medical philosophy. Let us consider
+the nerves and the vapors solely in their connection with marriage.
+
+Victims of Neurosis (a pathological term under which are comprised all
+affections of the nervous system) suffer in two ways, as far as
+married women are concerned; for our physiology has the loftiest
+disdain for medical classifications. Thus we recognize only:
+
+
+  1. CLASSIC NEUROSIS.
+  2. ROMANTIC NEUROSIS.
+
+
+The classic affection has something bellicose and excitable on it.
+Those who thus suffer are as violent in their antics as pythonesses,
+as frantic as _monads_, as excited as _bacchantes_; it is a revival of
+antiquity, pure and simple.
+
+The romantic sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid
+the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their
+bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they
+breathe all the melancholy of the North.
+
+That woman with black hair, with piercing eye, with high color, with
+dry lips and a powerful hand, will become excited and convulsive; she
+represents the genius of classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman,
+with white skin, is the genius of romantic neurosis; to one belongs
+the empire gained by nerves, to the other the empire gained by vapors.
+
+Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in
+tears.
+
+"What is the matter, my darling?"
+
+"It is nothing."
+
+"But you are in tears!"
+
+"I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the
+clouds, and those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some
+disaster--I think I must be going to die."
+
+Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead
+uncle, of her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all
+these mournful shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses,
+she is attacked with all the pains they felt, she feels her heart
+palpitate with excessive violence, she feels her spleen swelling. You
+say to yourself, with a self-satisfied air:
+
+"I know exactly what this is all about!"
+
+And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns
+like an open box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew,
+who implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful
+memories. She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own
+funeral, is buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping
+willow, and at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful
+epithalamium, you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish
+to console her melts away in the cloud of Ixion.
+
+There are women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from
+their feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their
+debts, or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors
+are employed as decisive weapons in Civil War.
+
+On the plea of her spinal affection or of her weak chest, a woman
+takes pains to seek out some distraction or other; you see her
+dressing herself in soft fabrics like an invalid with all the symptoms
+of spleen; she never goes out because an intimate friend, her mother
+or her sister, has tried to tear her away from that divan which
+monopolizes her and on which she spends her life in improvising
+elegies. Madame is going to spend a fortnight in the country because
+the doctor orders it. In short, she goes where she likes and does what
+she likes. Is it possible that there can be a husband so brutal as to
+oppose such desires, by hindering a wife from going to seek a cure for
+her cruel sufferings? For it has been established after many long
+discussions that in the nerves originate the most fearful torture.
+
+But it is especially in bed that vapors play their part. There when a
+woman has not a headache she has her vapors; and when she has neither
+vapors nor headache, she is under the protection of the girdle of
+Venus, which, as you know, is a myth.
+
+Among the women who fight with you the battle of vapors, are some more
+blonde, more delicate, more full of feeling than others, and who
+possess the gift of tears. How admirably do they know how to weep!
+They weep when they like, as they like and as much as they like. They
+organize a system of offensive warfare which consists of manifesting
+sublime resignation, and they gain victories which are all the more
+brilliant, inasmuch as they remain all the time in excellent health.
+
+Does a husband, irritated beyond all measure, at last express his
+wishes to them? They regard him with an air of submission, bow their
+heads and keep silence. This pantomime almost always puts a husband to
+rout. In conjugal struggles of this kind, a man prefers a woman should
+speak and defend herself, for then he may show elation or annoyance;
+but as for these women, not a word. Their silence distresses you and
+you experience a sort of remorse, like the murderer who, when he finds
+his victim offers no resistance, trembles with redoubled fear. He
+would prefer to slay him in self-defence. You return to the subject.
+As you draw near, your wife wipes away her tears and hides her
+handkerchief, so as to let you see that she has been weeping. You are
+melted, you implore your little Caroline to speak, your sensibility
+has been touched and you forget everything; then she sobs while she
+speaks, and speaks while she sobs. This is a sort of machine
+eloquence; she deafens you with her tears, with her words which come
+jerked out in confusion; it is the clapper and torrent of a mill.
+
+French women and especially Parisians possess in a marvelous degree
+the secret by which such scenes are enacted, and to these scenes their
+voices, their sex, their toilet, their manner give a wonderful charm.
+How often do the tears upon the cheeks of these adorable actresses
+give way to a piquant smile, when they see their husbands hasten to
+break the silk lace, the weak fastening of their corsets, or to
+restore the comb which holds together the tresses of their hair and
+the bunch of golden ringlets always on the point of falling down?
+
+But how all these tricks of modernity pale before the genius of
+antiquity, before nervous attacks which are violent, before the
+Pyrrhic dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are
+there in the vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of
+those glances, in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in
+contortion! It is then that a woman is carried away like an impetuous
+wind, darts forth like the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a
+movement like a billow which glides over the white pebbles. She is
+overcome with excess of love, she sees the future, she is the seer who
+prophesies, but above all, she sees the present moment and tramples on
+her husband, and impresses him with a sort of terror.
+
+The sight of his wife flinging off vigorous men as if they were so
+many feathers, is often enough to deter a man from ever striving to
+wrong her. He will be like the child who, having pulled the trigger of
+some terrific engine, has ever afterwards an incredible respect for
+the smallest spring. I have known a man, gentle and amiable in his
+ways, whose eyes were fixed upon those of his wife, exactly as if he
+had been put into a lion's cage, and some one had said to him that he
+must not irritate the beast, if he would escape with his life.
+
+Nervous attacks of this kind are very fatiguing and become every day
+more rare. Romanticism, however, has maintained its ground.
+
+Sometimes, we meet with phlegmatic husbands, those men whose love is
+long enduring, because they store up their emotions, whose genius gets
+the upper hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these
+sublime creatures are rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St.
+Thomas, who wished to put his finger into the wound, they are endowed
+with an incredulity worthy of an atheist. Imperturbable in the midst
+of all these fraudulent headaches and all these traps set by neurosis,
+they concentrate their attention on the comedy which is being played
+before them, they examine the actress, they search for one of the
+springs that sets her going; and when they have discovered the
+mechanism of this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight
+impulse to the puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either
+of the reality of the disease or the artifices of these conjugal
+mummeries.
+
+But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband
+escapes all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to
+women, he will beyond doubt be overcome by the employment of a
+terrible weapon, the last which a woman would resort to, for she never
+destroys with her own hands her empire over her husband without some
+sort of repugnance. But this is a poisoned weapon as powerful as the
+fatal knife of the executioner. This reflection brings us to the last
+paragraph of the present Meditation.
+
+
+           3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.
+
+Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary
+to inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman
+but well understood coquetry? Is it anything but a sentiment that
+claims the right, on a woman's part, to dispose of her own body as she
+chooses, as one may well believe, when we consider that half the women
+in the world go almost naked? Is it anything but a social chimera, as
+Diderot supposed, reminding us that this sentiment always gives way
+before sickness and before misery?
+
+Justice may be done to all these questions.
+
+An ingenious author has recently put forth the view that men are much
+more modest than women. He supports this contention by a great mass of
+surgical experiences; but, in order that his conclusions merit our
+attention, it would be necessary that for a certain time men were
+subjected to treatment by women surgeons.
+
+The opinion of Diderot is of still less weight.
+
+To deny the existence of modesty, because it disappears during those
+crises in which almost all human sentiments are annihilated, is as
+unreasonable as to deny that life exists because death sooner or later
+comes.
+
+Let us grant, then, that one sex has as much modesty as the other, and
+let us inquire in what modesty consists.
+
+Rousseau makes modesty the outcome of all those coquetries which
+females display before males. This opinion appears to us equally
+mistaken.
+
+The writers of the eighteenth century have doubtless rendered immense
+services to society; but their philosophy, based as it is upon
+sensualism, has never penetrated any deeper than the human epidermis.
+They have only considered the exterior universe; and so they have
+retarded, for some time, the moral development of man and the progress
+of science which will always draw its first principles from the
+Gospel, principles hereafter to be best understood by the fervent
+disciples of the Son of Man.
+
+The study of thought's mysteries, the discovery of those organs which
+belong to the human soul, the geometry of its forces, the phenomena of
+its active power, the appreciation of the faculty by which we seem to
+have an independent power of bodily movement, so as to transport
+ourselves whither we will and to see without the aid of bodily organs,
+--in a word the laws of thought's dynamic and those of its physical
+influence,--these things will fall to the lot of the next century, as
+their portion in the treasury of human sciences. And perhaps we, of
+the present time, are merely occupied in quarrying the enormous blocks
+which later on some mighty genius will employ in the building of a
+glorious edifice.
+
+Thus the error of Rousseau is simply the error of his age. He explains
+modesty by the relations of different human beings to each other
+instead of explaining it by the moral relations of each one with
+himself. Modesty is no more susceptible of analysis than conscience;
+and this perhaps is another way of saying that modesty is the
+conscience of the body; for while conscience directs our sentiments
+and the least movement of our thoughts towards the good, modesty
+presides over external movements. The actions which clash with our
+interests and thus disobey the laws of conscience wound us more than
+any other; and if they are repeated call forth our hatred. It is the
+same with acts which violate modesty in their relations to love, which
+is nothing but the expression of our whole sensibility. If extreme
+modesty is one of the conditions on which the reality of marriage is
+based, as we have tried to prove [See _Conjugal Catechism, Meditation
+IV._], it is evident that immodesty will destroy it. But this
+position, which would require long deductions for the acceptance of
+the physiologist, women generally apply, as it were, mechanically; for
+society, which exaggerates everything for the benefit of the exterior
+man, develops this sentiment of women from childhood, and around it
+are grouped almost every other sentiment. Moreover, the moment that
+this boundless veil, which takes away the natural brutality from the
+least gesture, is dragged down, woman disappears. Heart, mind, love,
+grace, all are in ruins. In a situation where the virginal innocence
+of a daughter of Tahiti is most brilliant, the European becomes
+detestable. In this lies the last weapon which a wife seizes, in order
+to escape from the sentiment which her husband still fosters towards
+her. She is powerful because she had made herself loathsome; and this
+woman, who would count it as the greatest misfortune that her lover
+should be permitted to see the slightest mystery of her toilette,
+is delighted to exhibit herself to her husband in the most
+disadvantageous situation that can possibly be imagined.
+
+It is by means of this rigorous system that she will try to banish you
+from the conjugal bed. Mrs. Shandy may be taken to mean us harm in
+bidding the father of Tristram wind up the clock; so long as your wife
+is not blamed for the pleasure she takes in interrupting you by the
+most imperative questions. Where there formerly was movement and life
+is now lethargy and death. An act of love becomes a transaction long
+discussed and almost, as it were, settled by notarial seal. But we
+have in another place shown that we never refuse to seize upon the
+comic element in a matrimonial crisis, although here we may be
+permitted to disdain the diversion which the muse of Verville and of
+Marshall have found in the treachery of feminine manoeuvres, the
+insulting audacity of their talk, amid the cold-blooded cynicism which
+they exhibit in certain situations. It is too sad to laugh at, and too
+funny to mourn over. When a woman resorts to such extreme measures,
+worlds at once separate her from her husband. Nevertheless, there are
+some women to whom Heaven has given the gift of being charming under
+all circumstances, who know how to put a certain witty and comic grace
+into these performances, and who have such smooth tongues, to use the
+expression of Sully, that they obtain forgiveness for their caprices
+and their mockeries, and never estrange the hearts of their husbands.
+
+What soul is so robust, what man so violently in love as to persist in
+his passion, after ten years of marriage, in presence of a wife who
+loves him no longer, who gives him proofs of this every moment, who
+repulses him, who deliberately shows herself bitter, caustic, sickly
+and capricious, and who will abjure her vows of elegance and
+cleanliness, rather than not see her husband turn away from her; in
+presence of a wife who will stake the success of her schemes upon the
+horror caused by her indecency?
+
+All this, my dear sir, is so much more horrible because--
+
+
+                                XCII.
+                        LOVERS IGNORE MODESTY.
+
+
+We have now arrived at the last infernal circle in the Divine Comedy
+of Marriage. We are at the very bottom of Hell. There is something
+inexpressibly terrible in the situation of a married woman at the
+moment when unlawful love turns her away from her duties as mother and
+wife. As Diderot has very well put it, "infidelity in a woman is like
+unbelief in a priest, the last extreme of human failure; for her it is
+the greatest of social crimes, since it implies in her every other
+crime besides, and indeed either a wife profanes her lawless love by
+continuing to belong to her husband, or she breaks all the ties which
+attach her to her family, by giving herself over altogether to her
+lover. She ought to choose between the two courses, for her sole
+possible excuse lies in the intensity of her love."
+
+She lives then between the claims of two obligations. It is a dilemma;
+she will work either the unhappiness of her lover, if he is sincere in
+his passion, or that of her husband, if she is still beloved by him.
+
+It is to this frightful dilemma of feminine life that all the strange
+inconsistencies of women's conduct is to be attributed. In this lies
+the origin of all their lies, all their perfidies; here is the secret
+of all their mysteries. It is something to make one shudder. Moreover,
+even as simply based upon cold-blooded calculations, the conduct of a
+woman who accepts the unhappiness which attends virtue and scorns the
+bliss which is bought by crime, is a hundred times more reasonable.
+Nevertheless, almost all women will risk suffering in the future and
+ages of anguish for the ecstasy of one half hour. If the human feeling
+of self-preservation, if the fear of death does not check them, how
+fruitless must be the laws which send them for two years to the
+Madelonnettes? O sublime infamy! And when one comes to think that he
+for whom these sacrifices are to be made is one of our brethren, a
+gentleman to whom we would not trust our fortune, if we had one, a man
+who buttons his coat just as all of us do, it is enough to make one
+burst into a roar of laughter so loud, that starting from the
+Luxembourg it would pass over the whole of Paris and startle an ass
+browsing in the pasture at Montmartre.
+
+It will perhaps appear extraordinary that in speaking of marriage we
+have touched upon so many subjects; but marriage is not only the whole
+of human life, it is the whole of two human lives. Now just as the
+addition of a figure to the drawing of a lottery multiplies the
+chances a hundredfold, so one single life united to another life
+multiplies by a startling progression the risks of human life, which
+are in any case so manifold.
+
+
+
+                          MEDITATION XXVII.
+
+                        OF THE LAST SYMPTOMS.
+
+The author of this book has met in the world so many people possessed
+by a fanatic passion for a knowledge of the mean time, for watches
+with a second hand, and for exactness in the details of their
+existence, that he has considered this Meditation too necessary for
+the tranquillity of a great number of husbands, to be omitted. It
+would have been cruel to leave men, who are possessed with the passion
+for learning the hour of the day, without a compass whereby to
+estimate the last variations in the matrimonial zodiac, and to
+calculate the precise moment when the sign of the Minotaur appears on
+the horizon. The knowledge of conjugal time would require a whole book
+for its exposition, so fine and delicate are the observations required
+by the task. The master admits that his extreme youth has not
+permitted him as yet to note and verify more than a few symptoms; but
+he feels a just pride, on his arrival at the end of his difficult
+enterprise, from the consciousness that he is leaving to his
+successors a new field of research; and that in a matter apparently so
+trite, not only was there much to be said, but also very many points
+are found remaining which may yet be brought into the clear light of
+observation. He therefore presents here without order or connection
+the rough outlines which he has so far been able to execute, in the
+hope that later he may have leisure to co-ordinate them and to arrange
+them in a complete system. If he has been so far kept back in the
+accomplishment of a task of supreme national importance, he believes,
+he may say, without incurring the charge of vanity, that he has here
+indicated the natural division of those symptoms. They are necessarily
+of two kinds: the unicorns and the bicorns. The unicorn Minotaur is
+the least mischievous. The two culprits confine themselves to a
+platonic love, in which their passion, at least, leaves no visible
+traces among posterity; while the bicorn Minotaur is unhappiness with
+all its fruits.
+
+We have marked with an asterisk the symptoms which seem to concern the
+latter kind.
+
+
+                       MINOTAURIC OBSERVATIONS.
+
+
+                                  I.
+
+*When, after remaining a long time aloof from her husband, a woman
+makes overtures of a very marked character in order to attract his
+love, she acts in accordance with the axiom of maritime law, which
+says: _The flag protects the cargo_.
+
+
+                                 II.
+
+A woman is at a ball, one of her friends comes up to her and says:
+
+"Your husband has much wit."
+
+"You find it so?"
+
+
+                                 III.
+
+Your wife discovers that it is time to send your boy to a boarding
+school, with whom, a little time ago, she was never going to part.
+
+
+                                 IV.
+
+*In Lord Abergavenny's suit for divorce, the _valet de chambre_
+deposed that "the countess had such a detestation of all that belonged
+to my lord that he had very often seen her burning the scraps of paper
+which he had touched in her room."
+
+
+                                  V.
+
+If an indolent woman becomes energetic, if a woman who formerly hated
+study learns a foreign language; in short, every appearance of a
+complete change in character is a decisive symptom.
+
+
+                                 VI.
+
+The woman who is happy in her affections does not go much into the
+world.
+
+
+                                 VII.
+
+The woman who has a lover becomes very indulgent in judging others.
+
+
+                                VIII.
+
+*A husband gives to his wife a hundred crowns a month for dress; and,
+taking everything into account, she spends at least five hundred
+francs without being a sou in debt; the husband is robbed every night
+with a high hand by escalade, but without burglarious breaking in.
+
+
+                                 IX.
+
+*A married couple slept in the same bed; madame was always sick. Now
+they sleep apart, she has no more headache, and her health becomes
+more brilliant than ever; an alarming symptom!
+
+
+                                  X.
+
+A woman who was a sloven suddenly develops extreme nicety in her
+attire. There is a Minotaur at hand!
+
+
+                                 XI.
+
+"Ah! my dear, I know no greater torment than not to be understood."
+
+"Yes, my dear, but when one is--"
+
+"Oh, that scarcely ever happens."
+
+"I agree with you that it very seldom does. Ah! it is great happiness,
+but there are not two people in the world who are able to understand
+you."
+
+
+                                 XII.
+
+*The day when a wife behaves nicely to her husband--all is over.
+
+
+                                XIII.
+
+I asked her: "Where have you been, Jeanne?"
+
+"I have been to your friend's to get your plate that you left there."
+
+"Ah, indeed! everything is still mine," I said. The following year I
+repeated the question under similar circumstances.
+
+"I have been to bring back our plate."
+
+"Well, well, part of the things are still mine," I said. But after
+that, when I questioned her, she spoke very differently.
+
+"You wish to know everything, like great people, and you have only
+three shirts. I went to get my plate from my friend's house, where I
+had stopped."
+
+"I see," I said, "nothing is left me."
+
+
+                                 XIV.
+
+Do not trust a woman who talks of her virtue.
+
+
+                                 XV.
+
+Some one said to the Duchess of Chaulnes, whose life was despaired of:
+
+"The Duke of Chaulnes would like to see you once more."
+
+"Is he there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Let him wait; he shall come in with the sacraments." This minotauric
+anecdote has been published by Chamfort, but we quote it here as
+typical.
+
+
+                                 XVI.
+
+*Some women try to persuade their husbands that they have duties to
+perform towards certain persons.
+
+"I am sure that you ought to pay a visit to such and such a man. . . .
+We cannot avoid asking such and such a man to dinner."
+
+
+                                XVII.
+
+"Come, my son, hold yourself straight: try to acquire good manners!
+Watch such and such a man! See how he walks! Notice the way in which
+he dresses."
+
+
+                                XVIII.
+
+When a woman utters the name of a man but twice a day, there is
+perhaps some uncertainty about her feelings toward him--but if thrice?
+--Oh! oh!
+
+
+                                 XIX.
+
+When a woman goes home with a man who is neither a lawyer nor a
+minister, to the door of his apartment, she is very imprudent.
+
+
+                                 XX.
+
+It is a terrible day when a husband fails to explain to himself the
+motive of some action of his wife.
+
+
+                                 XXI.
+
+*The woman who allows herself to be found out deserves her fate.
+
+
+
+What should be the conduct of a husband, when he recognizes a last
+symptom which leaves no doubt as to the infidelity of his wife? There
+are only two courses open; that of resignation or that of vengeance;
+there is no third course. If vengeance is decided upon, it should be
+complete.
+
+The husband who does not separate himself forever from his wife is a
+veritable simpleton. If a wife and husband think themselves fit for
+that union of friendship which exists between men, it is odious in the
+husband to make his wife feel his superiority over her.
+
+Here are some anecdotes, most of them as yet unpublished, which
+indicate pretty plainly, in my opinion, the different shades of
+conduct to be observed by a husband in like case.
+
+M. de Roquemont slept once a month in the chamber of his wife, and he
+used to say, as he went away:
+
+"I wash my hands of anything that may happen."
+
+There is something disgusting in that remark, and perhaps something
+profound in its suggestion of conjugal policy.
+
+A diplomat, when he saw his wife's lover enter, left his study and,
+going to his wife's chamber, said to the two:
+
+"I hope you will at least refrain from fighting."
+
+This was good humor.
+
+M. de Boufflers was asked what he would do if on returning after a
+long absence he found his wife with child?
+
+"I would order my night dress and slippers to be taken to her room."
+
+This was magnanimity.
+
+"Madame, if this man ill treats you when you are alone, it is your own
+fault; but I will not permit him to behave ill towards you in my
+presence, for this is to fail in politeness in me."
+
+This was nobility.
+
+The sublime is reached in this connection when the square cap of the
+judge is placed by the magistrate at the foot of the bed wherein the
+two culprits are asleep.
+
+There are some fine ways of taking vengeance. Mirabeau has admirably
+described in one of the books he wrote to make a living the mournful
+resignation of that Italian lady who was condemned by her husband to
+perish with him in the Maremma.
+
+
+                             LAST AXIOMS.
+
+
+                                XCIII.
+It is no act of vengeance to surprise a wife and her lover and to kill
+ them locked in each other's arms; it is a great favor to them both.
+
+
+                                XCIV.
+         A husband will be best avenged by his wife's lover.
+
+
+
+                          MEDITATION XXVIII.
+
+                          OF COMPENSATIONS.
+
+The marital catastrophe which a certain number of husbands cannot
+avoid, almost always forms the closing scene of the drama. At that
+point all around you is tranquil. Your resignation, if you are
+resigned, has the power of awakening keen remorse in the soul of your
+wife and of her lover; for their happiness teaches them the depth of
+the wound they have inflicted upon you. You are, you may be sure, a
+third element in all their pleasures. The principle of kindliness and
+goodness which lies at the foundation of the human soul, is not so
+easily repressed as people think; moreover the two people who are
+causing you tortures are precisely those for whom you wish the most
+good.
+
+In the conversations so sweetly familiar which link together the
+pleasures of love, and form in some way to lovers the caresses of
+thought, your wife often says to your rival:
+
+"Well, I assure you, Auguste, that in any case I should like to see my
+poor husband happy; for at bottom he is good; if he were not my
+husband, but were only my brother, there are so many things I would do
+to please him! He loves me, and--his friendship is irksome to me."
+
+"Yes, he is a fine fellow!"
+
+Then you become an object of respect to the celibate, who would yield
+to you all the indemnity possible for the wrong he has done you; but
+he is repelled by the disdainful pride which gives a tone to your
+whole conversation, and is stamped upon your face.
+
+So that actually, during the first moments of the Minotaur's arrival,
+a man is like an actor who feels awkward in a theatre where he is not
+accustomed to appear. It is very difficult to bear the affront with
+dignity; but though generosity is rare, a model husband is sometimes
+found to possess it.
+
+Eventually you are little by little won over by the charming way in
+which your wife makes herself agreeable to you. Madame assumes a tone
+of friendship which she never henceforth abandons. The pleasant
+atmosphere of your home is one of the chief compensations which
+renders the Minotaur less odious to a husband. But as it is natural to
+man to habituate himself to the hardest conditions, in spite of the
+sentiment of outraged nobility which nothing can change, you are
+gradually induced by a fascination whose power is constantly around
+you, to accept the little amenities of your position.
+
+Suppose that conjugal misfortune has fallen upon an epicure. He
+naturally demands the consolations which suit his taste. His sense of
+pleasure takes refuge in other gratifications, and forms other habits.
+You shape your life in accordance with the enjoyment of other
+sensations.
+
+One day, returning from your government office, after lingering for a
+long time before the rich and tasteful book shop of Chevet, hovering
+in suspense between the hundred francs of expense, and the joys of a
+Strasbourg _pate de fois gras_, you are struck dumb on finding this
+_pate_ proudly installed on the sideboard of your dining-room. Is this
+the vision offered by some gastronomic mirage? In this doubting mood
+you approach with firm step, for a _pate_ is a living creature, and
+seem to neigh as you scent afar off the truffles whose perfumes escape
+through the gilded enclosure. You stoop over it two distinct times;
+all the nerve centres of your palate have a soul; you taste the
+delights of a genuine feast, etc.; and during this ecstasy a feeling
+of remorse seizes upon you, and you go to your wife's room.
+
+"Really, my dear girl, we have not means which warrant our buying
+_pates_."
+
+"But it costs us nothing!"
+
+"Oh! ho!"
+
+"Yes, it is M. Achille's brother who sent it to him."
+
+You catch sight of M. Achille in a corner. The celibate greets you, he
+is radiant on seeing that you have accepted the _pate_. You look at
+your wife, who blushes; you stroke your beard a few times; and, as you
+express no thanks, the two lovers divine your acceptance of the
+compensation.
+
+A sudden change in the ministry takes place. A husband, who is
+Councillor of State, trembles for fear of being wiped from the roll,
+when the night before he had been made director-general; all the
+ministers are opposed to him and he has turned Constitutionalist.
+Foreseeing his disgrace he has betaken himself to Auteuil, in search
+of consolation from an old friend who quotes Horace and Tibullus to
+him. On returning home he sees the table laid as if to receive the
+most influential men of the assembly.
+
+"In truth, madame," he says with acrimony as he enters his wife's
+room, where she is finishing her toilette, "you seem to have lost your
+habitual tact. This is a nice time to be giving dinner parties! Twenty
+persons will soon learn--"
+
+"That you are director-general!" she cries, showing him a royal
+despatch.
+
+He is thunderstruck. He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now
+another; he opens it. He sits down and spreads it out.
+
+"I well know," he says, "that justice would be rendered me under
+whatever ministers I served."
+
+"Yes, my dear! But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life,
+and his eminence the Cardinal de ----- of whom he is the--"
+
+"M. de Villeplaine?"
+
+This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the
+smile of a director-general:
+
+"Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!"
+
+"Ah! don't thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to
+you."
+
+On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring
+rain, or tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the
+cafe, or in the world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried
+away by an impulse to follow his wife to the conjugal chamber. There
+he sank into an arm-chair and like any sultan awaited his coffee, as
+if he would say:
+
+"Well, after all, she is my wife!"
+
+The fair siren herself prepares the favorite draught; she strains it
+with special care, sweetens it, tastes it, and hands it to him; then,
+with a smile, she ventures like a submissive odalisque to make a joke,
+with a view to smoothing the wrinkles on the brow of her lord and
+master. Up to that moment he had thought his wife stupid; but on
+hearing a sally as witty as that which even you would cajole with,
+madame, he raises his head in the way peculiar to dogs who are hunting
+the hare.
+
+"Where the devil did she get that--but it's a random shot!" he says to
+himself.
+
+From the pinnacle of his own greatness he makes a piquant repartee.
+Madame retorts, the conversation becomes as lively as it is
+interesting, and this husband, a very superior man, is quite
+astonished to discover the wit of his wife, in other respects, an
+accomplished woman; the right word occurs to her with wonderful
+readiness; her tact and keenness enable her to meet an innuendo with
+charming originality. She is no longer the same woman. She notices the
+effect she produces upon her husband, and both to avenge herself for
+his neglect and to win his admiration for the lover from whom she has
+received, so to speak, the treasures of her intellect, she exerts
+herself, and becomes actually dazzling. The husband, better able than
+any one else to appreciate a species of compensation which may have
+some influence on his future, is led to think that the passions of
+women are really necessary to their mental culture.
+
+But how shall we treat those compensations which are most pleasing to
+husbands?
+
+Between the moment when the last symptoms appear, and the epoch of
+conjugal peace, which we will not stop to discuss, almost a dozen
+years have elapsed. During this interval and before the married couple
+sign the treaty which, by means of a sincere reconciliation of the
+feminine subject with her lawful lord, consecrates their little
+matrimonial restoration, in order to close in, as Louis XVIII said,
+the gulf of revolutions, it is seldom that the honest woman has but
+one lover. Anarchy has its inevitable phases. The stormy domination of
+tribunes is supplanted by that of the sword and the pen, for few loves
+are met with whose constancy outlives ten years. Therefore, since our
+calculations prove that an honest woman has merely paid strictly her
+physiological or diabolical dues by rendering but three men happy, it
+is probable that she has set foot in more than one region of love.
+Sometimes it may happen that in an interregnum of love too long
+protracted, the wife, whether from whim, temptation or the desire of
+novelty, undertakes to seduce her own husband.
+
+Imagine charming Mme. de T-----, the heroine of our Meditation of
+_Strategy_, saying with a fascinating smile:
+
+"I never before found you so agreeable!"
+
+By flattery after flattery, she tempts, she rouses curiosity, she
+soothes, she rouses in you the faintest spark of desire, she carries
+you away with her, and makes you proud of yourself. Then the right of
+indemnifications for her husband comes. On this occasion the wife
+confounds the imagination of her husband. Like cosmopolitan travelers
+she tells tales of all the countries which she had traversed. She
+intersperses her conversation with words borrowed from several
+languages. The passionate imagery of the Orient, the unique emphasis
+of Spanish phraseology, all meet and jostle one another. She opens out
+the treasures of her notebook with all the mysteries of coquetry, she
+is delightful, you never saw her thus before! With that remarkable art
+which women alone possess of making their own everything that has been
+told them, she blends all shades and variations of character so as to
+create a manner peculiarly her own. You received from the hands of
+Hymen only one woman, awkward and innocent; the celibate returns you a
+dozen of them. A joyful and rapturous husband sees his bed invaded by
+the giddy and wanton courtesans, of whom we spoke in the Meditation on
+_The First Symptoms_. These goddesses come in groups, they smile and
+sport under the graceful muslin curtains of the nuptial bed. The
+Phoenician girl flings to you her garlands, gently sways herself to
+and fro; the Chalcidian woman overcomes you by the witchery of her
+fine and snowy feet; the Unelmane comes and speaking the dialect of
+fair Ionia reveals the treasures of happiness unknown before, and in
+the study of which she makes you experience but a single sensation.
+
+Filled with regret at having disdained so many charms, and frequently
+tired of finding too often as much perfidiousness in priestesses of
+Venus as in honest women, the husband sometimes hurries on by his
+gallantry the hour of reconciliation desired of worthy people. The
+aftermath of bliss is gathered even with greater pleasure, perhaps,
+than the first crop. The Minotaur took your gold, he makes restoration
+in diamonds. And really now seems the time to state a fact of the
+utmost importance. A man may have a wife without possessing her. Like
+most husbands you had hitherto received nothing from yours, and the
+powerful intervention of the celibate was needed to make your union
+complete. How shall we give a name to this miracle, perhaps the only
+one wrought upon a patient during his absence? Alas, my brothers, we
+did not make Nature!
+
+But how many other compensations, not less precious, are there, by
+which the noble and generous soul of the young celibate may many a
+time purchase his pardon! I recollect witnessing one of the most
+magnificent acts of reparation which a lover should perform toward the
+husband he is minotaurizing.
+
+One warm evening in the summer of 1817, I saw entering one of the
+rooms of Tortoni one of the two hundred young men whom we confidently
+style our friends; he was in the full bloom of his modesty. A lovely
+woman, dressed in perfect taste, and who had consented to enter one of
+the cool parlors devoted to people of fashion, had stepped from an
+elegant carriage which had stopped on the boulevard, and was
+approaching on foot along the sidewalk. My young friend, the celibate,
+then appeared and offered his arm to his queen, while the husband
+followed holding by the hand two little boys, beautiful as cupids. The
+two lovers, more nimble than the father of the family, reached in
+advance of him one of the small rooms pointed out by the attendant. In
+crossing the vestibule the husband knocked up against some dandy, who
+claimed that he had been jostled. Then arose a quarrel, whose
+seriousness was betrayed by the sharp tones of the altercation. The
+moment the dandy was about to make a gesture unworthy of a
+self-respecting man, the celibate intervened, seized the dandy by the
+arm, caught him off his guard, overcame and threw him to the ground;
+it
+was magnificent. He had done the very thing the aggressor was
+meditating, as he exclaimed:
+
+"Monsieur!"
+
+This "Monsieur" was one of the finest things I have ever heard. It was
+as if the young celibate had said: "This father of a family belongs to
+me; as I have carried off his honor, it is mine to defend him. I know
+my duty, I am his substitute and will fight for him." The young woman
+behaved superbly! Pale, and bewildered, she took the arm of her
+husband, who continued his objurgations; without a word she led him
+away to the carriage, together with her children. She was one of those
+women of the aristocracy, who also know how to retain their dignity
+and self-control in the midst of violent emotions.
+
+"O Monsieur Adolphe!" cried the young lady as she saw her friend with
+an air of gayety take his seat in the carriage.
+
+"It is nothing, madame, he is one of my friends; we have shaken
+hands."
+
+Nevertheless, the next morning, the courageous celibate received a
+sword thrust which nearly proved fatal, and confined him six months to
+his bed. The attentions of the married couple were lavished upon him.
+What numerous compensations do we see here! Some years afterwards, an
+old uncle of the husband, whose opinions did not fit in with those of
+the young friend of the house, and who nursed a grudge against him on
+account of some political discussion, undertook to have him driven
+from the house. The old fellow went so far as to tell his nephew to
+choose between being his heir and sending away the presumptuous
+celibate. It was then that the worthy stockbroker said to his uncle:
+
+"Ah, you must never think, uncle, that you will succeed in making me
+ungrateful! But if I tell him to do so this young man will let himself
+be killed for you. He has saved my credit, he would go through fire
+and water for me, he has relieved me of my wife, he has brought me
+clients, he has procured for me almost all the business in the Villele
+loans--I owe my life to him, he is the father of my children; I can
+never forget all this."
+
+In this case the compensations may be looked upon as complete; but
+unfortunately there are compensations of all kinds. There are those
+which must be considered negative, deluding, and those which are both
+in one.
+
+I knew a husband of advanced years who was possessed by the demon of
+gambling. Almost every evening his wife's lover came and played with
+him. The celibate gave him a liberal share of the pleasures which come
+from games of hazard, and knew how to lose to him a certain number of
+francs every month; but madame used to give them to him, and the
+compensation was a deluding one.
+
+You are a peer of France, and you have no offspring but daughters.
+Your wife is brought to bed of a boy! The compensation is negative.
+
+The child who is to save your name from oblivion is like his mother.
+The duchess persuades you that the child is yours. The negative
+compensation becomes deluding.
+
+Here is one of the most charming compensations known. One morning the
+Prince de Ligne meets his wife's lover and rushes up to him, laughing
+wildly:
+
+"My friend," he says to him, "I cuckolded you, last night!"
+
+If some husbands attain to conjugal peace by quiet methods, and carry
+so gracefully the imaginary ensigns of matrimonial pre-eminence, their
+philosophy is doubtless based on the _comfortabilisme_ of accepting
+certain compensations, a _comfortabilisme_ which indifferent men
+cannot imagine. As years roll by the married couple reach the last
+stage in that artificial existence to which their union has condemned
+them.
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XXIX.
+
+                          OF CONJUGAL PEACE.
+
+My imagination has followed marriage through all the phases of its
+fantastic life in so fraternal a spirit, that I seem to have grown old
+with the house I made my home so early in life at the commencement of
+this work.
+
+After experiencing in thought the ardor of man's first passion; and
+outlining, in however imperfect a way, the principal incidents of
+married life; after struggling against so many wives that did not
+belong to me, exhausting myself in conflict with so many personages
+called up from nothingness, and joining so many battles, I feel an
+intellectual lassitude, which makes me see everything in life hang, as
+it were, in mournful crape. I seem to have a catarrh, to look at
+everything through green spectacles, I feel as if my hands trembled,
+as if I must needs employ the second half of my existence and of my
+book in apologizing for the follies of the first half.
+
+I see myself surrounded by tall children of whom I am not the father,
+and seated beside a wife I never married. I think I can feel wrinkles
+furrowing my brow. The fire before which I am placed crackles, as if
+in derision, the room is ancient in its furniture; I shudder with
+sudden fright as I lay my hand upon my heart, and ask myself: "Is
+that, too, withered?"
+
+I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever. I never
+accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic
+maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.
+No face can delude me. I am melancholy and overcast with gloom. I know
+the world and it has no more illusions for me. My closest friends have
+proved traitors. My wife and myself exchange glances of profound
+meaning and the slightest word either of us utters is a dagger which
+pierces the heart of the other through and through. I stagnate in a
+dreary calm. This then is the tranquillity of old age! The old man
+possesses in himself the cemetery which shall soon possess him. He is
+growing accustomed to the chill of the tomb. Man, according to
+philosophers, dies in detail; at the same time he may be said even to
+cheat death; for that which his withered hand has laid hold upon, can
+it be called life?
+
+Oh, to die young and throbbing with life! 'Tis a destiny enviable
+indeed! For is not this, as a delightful poet has said, "to take away
+with one all one's illusions, to be buried like an Eastern king, with
+all one's jewels and treasures, with all that makes the fortune of
+humanity!"
+
+How many thank-offerings ought we to make to the kind and beneficent
+spirit that breathes in all things here below! Indeed, the care which
+nature takes to strip us piece by piece of our raiment, to unclothe
+the soul by enfeebling gradually our hearing, sight, and sense of
+touch, in making slower the circulation of our blood, and congealing
+our humors so as to make us as insensible to the approach of death as
+we were to the beginnings of life, this maternal care which she
+lavishes on our frail tabernacle of clay, she also exhibits in regard
+to the emotions of man, and to the double existence which is created
+by conjugal love. She first sends us Confidence, which with extended
+hand and open heart says to us: "Behold, I am thine forever!"
+Lukewarmness follows, walking with languid tread, turning aside her
+blonde face with a yawn, like a young widow obliged to listen to the
+minister of state who is ready to sign for her a pension warrant. Then
+Indifference comes; she stretches herself on the divan, taking no care
+to draw down the skirts of her robe which Desire but now lifted so
+chastely and so eagerly. She casts a glance upon the nuptial bed, with
+modesty and without shamelessness; and, if she longs for anything, it
+is for the green fruit that calls up again to life the dulled papillae
+with which her blase palate is bestrewn. Finally the philosophical
+Experience of Life presents herself, with careworn and disdainful
+brow, pointing with her finger to the results, and not the causes of
+life's incidents; to the tranquil victory, not to the tempestuous
+combat. She reckons up the arrearages, with farmers, and calculates
+the dowry of a child. She materializes everything. By a touch of her
+wand, life becomes solid and springless; of yore, all was fluid, now
+it is crystallized into rock. Delight no longer exists for our hearts,
+it has received its sentence, 'twas but mere sensation, a passing
+paroxysm. What the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and
+happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity,
+in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other,
+and the sluggish organs perform their functions.
+
+"This is horrible!" I cried; "I am young and full of life! Perish all
+the books in the world rather than my illusions should perish!"
+
+I left my laboratory and plunged into the whirl of Paris. As I saw the
+fairest faces glide by before me, I felt that I was not old. The first
+young woman who appeared before me, lovely in face and form and
+dressed to perfection, with one glance of fire made all the sorcery
+whose spells I had voluntarily submitted to vanish into thin air.
+Scarcely had I walked three steps in the Tuileries gardens, the place
+which I had chosen as my destination, before I saw the prototype of
+the matrimonial situation which has last been described in this book.
+Had I desired to characterize, to idealize, to personify marriage, as
+I conceived it to be, it would have been impossible for the Creator
+himself to have produced so complete a symbol of it as I then saw
+before me.
+
+Imagine a woman of fifty, dressed in a jacket of reddish brown merino,
+holding in her left hand a green cord, which was tied to the collar of
+an English terrier, and with her right arm linked with that of a man
+in knee-breeches and silk stockings, whose hat had its brim
+whimsically turned up, while snow-white tufts of hair like pigeon
+plumes rose at its sides. A slender queue, thin as a quill, tossed
+about on the back of his sallow neck, which was thick, as far as it
+could be seen above the turned down collar of a threadbare coat. This
+couple assumed the stately tread of an ambassador; and the husband,
+who was at least seventy, stopped complaisantly every time the terrier
+began to gambol. I hastened to pass this living impersonation of my
+Meditation, and was surprised to the last degree to recognize the
+Marquis de T-----, friend of the Comte de Noce, who had owed me for a
+long time the end of the interrupted story which I related in the
+_Theory of the Bed_. [See Meditation XVII.]
+
+"I have the honor to present to you the Marquise de T-----," he said
+to me.
+
+I made a low bow to a lady whose face was pale and wrinkled; her
+forehead was surmounted by a toupee, whose flattened ringlets, ranged
+around it, deceived no one, but only emphasized, instead of
+concealing, the wrinkles by which it was deeply furrowed. The lady was
+slightly roughed, and had the appearance of an old country actress.
+
+"I do not see, sir, what you can say against a marriage such as ours,"
+said the old man to me.
+
+"The laws of Rome forefend!" I cried, laughing.
+
+The marchioness gave me a look filled with inquietude as well as
+disapprobation, which seemed to say, "Is it possible that at my age I
+have become but a concubine?"
+
+We sat down upon a bench, in the gloomy clump of trees planted at the
+corner of the high terrace which commands La Place Louis XV, on the
+side of the Garde-Meuble. Autumn had already begun to strip the trees
+of their foliage, and was scattering before our eyes the yellow leaves
+of his garland; but the sun nevertheless filled the air with grateful
+warmth.
+
+"Well, is your work finished?" asked the old man, in the unctuous
+tones peculiar to men of the ancient aristocracy.
+
+And with these words he gave a sardonic smile, as if for commentary.
+
+"Very nearly, sir," I replied. "I have come to the philosophic
+situation, which you appear to have reached, but I confess that I--"
+
+"You are searching for ideas?" he added--finishing for me a sentence,
+which I confess I did not know how to end.
+
+"Well," he continued, "you may boldly assume, that on arriving at the
+winter of his life, a man--a man who thinks, I mean--ends by denying
+that love has any existence, in the wild form with which our illusions
+invested it!"
+
+"What! would you deny the existence of love on the day after that of
+marriage?"
+
+"In the first place, the day after would be the very reason; but my
+marriage was a commercial speculation," replied he, stooping to speak
+into my ear. "I have thereby purchased the care, the attention, the
+services which I need; and I am certain to obtain all the
+consideration my age demands; for I have willed all my property to my
+nephew, and as my wife will be rich only during my life, you can
+imagine how--"
+
+I turned on the old marquis a look so piercing that he wrung my hand
+and said: "You seem to have a good heart, for nothing is certain in
+this life--"
+
+"Well, you may be sure that I have arranged a pleasant surprise for
+her in my will," he replied, gayly.
+
+"Come here, Joseph," cried the marchioness, approaching a servant who
+carried an overcoat lined with silk. "The marquis is probably feeling
+the cold."
+
+The old marquis put on his overcoat, buttoned it up, and taking my
+arm, led me to the sunny side of the terrace.
+
+"In your work," he continued, "you have doubtless spoken of the love
+of a young man. Well, if you wish to act up to the scope which you
+give to your work--in the word ec--elec--"
+
+"Eclectic," I said, smiling, seeing he could not remember this
+philosophic term.
+
+"I know the word well!" he replied. "If then you wish to keep your vow
+of eclecticism, you should be willing to express certain virile ideas
+on the subject of love which I will communicate to you, and I will not
+grudge you the benefit of them, if benefit there be; I wish to
+bequeath my property to you, but this will be all that you will get of
+it."
+
+"There is no money fortune which is worth as much as a fortune of
+ideas if they be valuable ideas! I shall, therefore, listen to you
+with a grateful mind."
+
+"There is no such thing as love," pursued the old man, fixing his gaze
+upon me. "It is not even a sentiment, it is an unhappy necessity,
+which is midway between the needs of the body and those of the soul.
+But siding for a moment with your youthful thoughts, let us try to
+reason upon this social malady. I suppose that you can only conceive
+of love as either a need or a sentiment."
+
+I made a sign of assent.
+
+"Considered as a need," said the old man, "love makes itself felt last
+of all our needs, and is the first to cease. We are inclined to love
+in our twentieth year, to speak in round numbers, and we cease to do
+so at fifty. During these thirty years, how often would the need be
+felt, if it were not for the provocation of city manners, and the
+modern custom of living in the presence of not one woman, but of women
+in general? What is our debt to the perpetuation of the race? It
+probably consists in producing as many children as we have breasts--so
+that if one dies the other may live. If these two children were always
+faithfully produced, what would become of nations? Thirty millions of
+people would constitute a population too great for France, for the
+soil is not sufficient to guarantee more than ten millions against
+misery and hunger. Remember that China is reduced to the expedient of
+throwing its children into the water, according to the accounts of
+travelers. Now this production of two children is really the whole of
+marriage. The superfluous pleasures of marriage are not only
+profligate, but involve an immense loss to the man, as I will now
+demonstrate. Compare then with this poverty of result, and shortness
+of duration, the daily and perpetual urgency of other needs of our
+existence. Nature reminds us every hour of our real needs; and, on the
+other hand, refuses absolutely to grant the excess which our
+imagination sometimes craves in love. It is, therefore, the last of
+our needs, and the only one which may be forgotten without causing any
+disturbance in the economy of the body. Love is a social luxury like
+lace and diamonds. But if we analyze it as a sentiment, we find two
+distinct elements in it; namely, pleasure and passion. Now analyze
+pleasure. Human affections rest upon two foundations, attraction and
+repulsion. Attraction is a universal feeling for those things which
+flatter our instinct of self-preservation; repulsion is the exercise
+of the same instinct when it tells us that something is near which
+threatens it with injury. Everything which profoundly moves our
+organization gives us a deeper sense of our existence; such a thing is
+pleasure. It is contracted of desire, of effort, and the joy of
+possessing something or other. Pleasure is a unique element in life,
+and our passions are nothing but modifications, more or less keen, of
+pleasure; moreover, familiarity with one pleasure almost always
+precludes the enjoyment of all others. Now, love is the least keen and
+the least durable of our pleasures. In what would you say the pleasure
+of love consists? Does it lie in the beauty of the beloved? In one
+evening you may obtain for money the loveliest odalisques; but at the
+end of a month you will in this way have burnt out all your sentiment
+for all time. Would you love a women because she is well dressed,
+elegant, rich, keeps a carriage, has commercial credit? Do not call
+this love, for it is vanity, avarice, egotism. Do you love her because
+she is intellectual? You are in that case merely obeying the dictates
+of literary sentiment."
+
+"But," I said, "love only reveals its pleasures to those who mingle in
+one their thoughts, their fortunes, their sentiments, their souls,
+their lives--"
+
+"Oh dear, dear!" cried the old man, in a jeering tone. "Can you show
+me five men in any nation who have sacrificed anything for a woman? I
+do not say their life, for that is a slight thing,--the price of a
+human life under Napoleon was never more than twenty thousand francs;
+and there are in France to-day two hundred and fifty thousand brave
+men who would give theirs for two inches of red ribbon; while seven
+men have sacrificed for a woman ten millions on which they might have
+slept in solitude for a whole night. Dubreuil and Phmeja are still
+rarer than is the love of Dupris and Bolingbroke. These sentiments
+proceed from an unknown cause. But you have brought me thus to
+consider love as a passion. Yes, indeed, it is the last of them all
+and the most contemptible. It promises everything, and fulfils
+nothing. It comes, like love, as a need, the last, and dies away the
+first. Ah, talk to me of revenge, hatred, avarice, of gaming, of
+ambition, of fanaticism. These passions have something virile in them;
+these sentiments are imperishable; they make sacrifices every day,
+such as love only makes by fits and starts. But," he went on, "suppose
+you abjure love. At first there will be no disquietudes, no anxieties,
+no worry, none of those little vexations that waste human life. A man
+lives happy and tranquil; in his social relations he becomes
+infinitely more powerful and influential. This divorce from the thing
+called love is the primary secret of power in all men who control
+large bodies of men; but this is a mere trifle. Ah! if you knew with
+what magic influence a man is endowed, what wealth of intellectual
+force, what longevity in physical strength he enjoys, when detaching
+himself from every species of human passion he spends all his energy
+to the profit of his soul! If you could enjoy for two minutes the
+riches which God dispenses to the enlightened men who consider love as
+merely a passing need which it is sufficient to satisfy for six months
+in their twentieth year; to the men who, scorning the luxurious and
+surfeiting beefsteaks of Normandy, feed on the roots which God has
+given in abundance, and take their repose on a bed of withered leaves,
+like the recluses of the Thebaid!--ah! you would not keep on three
+seconds the wool of fifteen merinos which covers you; you would fling
+away your childish switch, and go to live in the heaven of heavens!
+There you would find the love you sought in vain amid the swine of
+earth; there you would hear a concert of somewhat different melody
+from that of M. Rossini, voices more faultless than that of Malibran.
+But I am speaking as a blind man might, and repeating hearsays. If I
+had not visited Germany about the year 1791, I should know nothing of
+all this. Yes!--man has a vocation for the infinite. There dwells
+within him an instinct that calls him to God. God is all, gives all,
+brings oblivion on all, and thought is the thread which he has given
+us as a clue to communication with himself!"
+
+He suddenly stopped, and fixed his eyes upon the heavens.
+
+"The poor fellow has lost his wits!" I thought to myself.
+
+"Sir," I said to him, "it would be pushing my devotion to eclectic
+philosophy too far to insert your ideas in my book; they would destroy
+it. Everything in it is based on love, platonic and sensual. God
+forbid that I should end my book by such social blasphemies! I would
+rather try to return by some pantagruelian subtlety to my herd of
+celibates and honest women, with many an attempt to discover some
+social utility in their passions and follies. Oh! if conjugal peace
+leads us to arguments so disillusionizing and so gloomy as these, I
+know a great many husbands who would prefer war to peace."
+
+"At any rate, young man," the old marquis cried, "I shall never have
+to reproach myself with refusing to give true directions to a traveler
+who had lost his way."
+
+"Adieu, thou old carcase!" I said to myself; "adieu, thou walking
+marriage! Adieu, thou stick of a burnt-out fire-work! Adieu, thou
+machine! Although I have given thee from time to time some glimpses of
+people dear to me, old family portraits,--back with you to the picture
+dealer's shop, to Madame de T-----, and all the rest of them; take
+your place round the bier with undertaker's mutes, for all I care!"
+
+
+
+                           MEDITATION XXX.
+
+                             CONCLUSION.
+
+A recluse, who was credited with the gift of second sight, having
+commanded the children of Israel to follow him to a mountain top in
+order to hear the revelation of certain mysteries, saw that he was
+accompanied by a crowd which took up so much room on the road that,
+prophet as he was, his _amour-propre_ was vastly tickled.
+
+But as the mountain was a considerable distance off, it happened that
+at the first halt, an artisan remembered that he had to deliver a new
+pair of slippers to a duke and peer, a publican fell to thinking how
+he had some specie to negotiate, and off they went.
+
+A little further on two lovers lingered under the olive trees and
+forgot the discourse of the prophet; for they thought that the
+promised land was the spot where they stood, and the divine word was
+heard when they talked to one another.
+
+The fat people, loaded with punches a la Sancho, had been wiping their
+foreheads with their handkerchiefs, for the last quarter of an hour,
+and began to grow thirsty, and therefore halted beside a clear spring.
+
+Certain retired soldiers complained of the corns which tortured them,
+and spoke of Austerlitz, and of their tight boots.
+
+At the second halt, certain men of the world whispered together:
+
+"But this prophet is a fool."
+
+"Have you ever heard him?"
+
+"I? I came from sheer curiosity."
+
+"And I because I saw the fellow had a large following." (The last man
+who spoke was a fashionable.)
+
+"He is a mere charlatan."
+
+The prophet kept marching on. But when he reached the plateau, from
+which a wide horizon spread before him, he turned back, and saw no one
+but a poor Israelite, to whom he might have said as the Prince de
+Ligne to the wretched little bandy-legged drummer boy, whom he found
+on the spot where he expected to see a whole garrison awaiting him:
+"Well, my readers, it seems that you have dwindled down to one."
+
+Thou man of God who has followed me so far--I hope that a short
+recapitulation will not terrify thee, and I have traveled on under the
+impression that thou, like me, hast kept saying to thyself, "Where the
+deuce are we going?"
+
+Well, well, this is the place and the time to ask you, respected
+reader, what your opinion is with regard to the renewal of the tobacco
+monopoly, and what you think of the exorbitant taxes on wines, on the
+right to carry firearms, on gaming, on lotteries, on playing cards, on
+brandy, on soap, cotton, silks, etc.
+
+"I think that since all these duties make up one-third of the public
+revenues, we should be seriously embarrassed if--"
+
+So that, my excellent model husband, if no one got drunk, or gambled,
+or smoked, or hunted, in a word if we had neither vices, passions, nor
+maladies in France, the State would be within an ace of bankruptcy;
+for it seems that the capital of our national income consists of
+popular corruptions, as our commerce is kept alive by national luxury.
+If you cared to look a little closer into the matter you would see
+that all taxes are based upon some moral malady. As a matter of fact,
+if we continue this philosophical scrutiny it will appear that the
+gendarmes would want horses and leather breeches, if every one kept
+the peace, and if there were neither foes nor idle people in the
+world. Therefore impose virtue on mankind! Well, I consider that there
+are more parallels than people think between my honest woman and the
+budget, and I will undertake to prove this by a short essay on
+statistics, if you will permit me to finish my book on the same lines
+as those on which I have begun it. Will you grant that a lover must
+put on more clean shirts than are worn by either a husband, or a
+celibate unattached? This to me seems beyond doubt. The difference
+between a husband and a lover is seen even in the appearance of their
+toilette. The one is careless, he is unshaved, and the other never
+appears excepting in full dress. Sterne has pleasantly remarked that
+the account book of the laundress was the most authentic record he
+knew, as to the life of Tristram Shandy; and that it was easy to guess
+from the number of shirts he wore what passages of his book had cost
+him most. Well, with regard to lovers the account book of their
+laundresses is the most faithful historic record as well as the most
+impartial account of their various amours. And really a prodigious
+quantity of tippets, cravats, dresses, which are absolutely necessary
+to coquetry, is consumed in the course of an amour. A wonderful
+prestige is gained by white stockings, the lustre of a collar, or a
+shirt-waist, the artistically arranged folds of a man's shirt, or the
+taste of his necktie or his collar. This will explain the passages in
+which I said of the honest woman [Meditation II], "She spends her life
+in having her dresses starched." I have sought information on this
+point from a lady in order to learn accurately at what sum was to be
+estimated the tax thus imposed by love, and after fixing it at one
+hundred francs per annum for a woman, I recollect what she said with
+great good humor: "It depends on the character of the man, for some
+are so much more particular than others." Nevertheless, after a very
+profound discussion, in which I settled upon the sum for the
+celibates, and she for her sex, it was agreed that, one thing with
+another, since the two lovers belong to the social sphere which this
+work concerns, they ought to spend between them, in the matter
+referred to, one hundred and fifty francs more than in time of peace.
+
+By a like treaty, friendly in character and long discussed, we
+arranged that there should be a collective difference of four hundred
+francs between the expenditure for all parts of the dress on a war
+footing, and for that on a peace footing. This provision was
+considered very paltry by all the powers, masculine or feminine, whom
+we consulted. The light thrown upon these delicate matters by the
+contributions of certain persons suggested to us the idea of gathering
+together certain savants at a dinner party, and taking their wise
+counsels for our guidance in these important investigations. The
+gathering took place. It was with glass in hand and after listening to
+many brilliant speeches that I received for the following chapters on
+the budget of love, a sort of legislative sanction. The sum of one
+hundred francs was allowed for porters and carriages. Fifty crowns
+seemed very reasonable for the little patties that people eat on a
+walk, for bouquets of violets and theatre tickets. The sum of two
+hundred francs was considered necessary for the extra expense of
+dainties and dinners at restaurants. It was during this discussion
+that a young cavalryman, who had been made almost tipsy by the
+champagne, was called to order for comparing lovers to distilling
+machines. But the chapter that gave occasion for the most violent
+discussion, and the consideration of which was adjourned for several
+weeks, when a report was made, was that concerning presents. At the
+last session, the refined Madame de D----- was the first speaker; and
+in a graceful address, which testified to the nobility of her
+sentiments, she set out to demonstrate that most of the time the gifts
+of love had no intrinsic value. The author replied that all lovers had
+their portraits taken. A lady objected that a portrait was invested
+capital, and care should always be taken to recover it for a second
+investment. But suddenly a gentleman of Provence rose to deliver a
+philippic against women. He spoke of the greediness which most women
+in love exhibited for furs, satins, silks, jewels and furniture; but a
+lady interrupted him by asking if Madame d'O-----y, his intimate
+friend, had not already paid his debts twice over.
+
+"You are mistaken, madame," said the Provencal, "it was her husband."
+
+"The speaker is called to order," cried the president, "and condemned
+to dine the whole party, for having used the word _husband_."
+
+The Provencal was completely refuted by a lady who undertook to prove
+that women show much more self-sacrifice in love than men; that lovers
+cost very dear, and that the honest woman may consider herself very
+fortunate if she gets off with spending on them two thousand francs
+for a single year. The discussion was in danger of degenerating into
+an exchange of personalities, when a division was called for. The
+conclusions of the committee were adopted by vote. The conclusions
+were, in substance, that the amount for presents between lovers during
+the year should be reckoned at five hundred francs, but that in this
+computation should be included: (1) the expense of expeditions into
+the country; (2) the pharmaceutical expenses, occasioned by the colds
+caught from walking in the damp pathways of parks, and in leaving the
+theatre, which expenses are veritable presents; (3) the carrying of
+letters, and law expenses; (4) journeys, and expenses whose items are
+forgotten, without counting the follies committed by the spenders;
+inasmuch as, according to the investigations of the committee, it had
+been proved that most of a man's extravagant expenditure profited the
+opera girls, rather than the married women. The conclusion arrived at
+from this pecuniary calculation was that, in one way or another, a
+passion costs nearly fifteen hundred francs a year, which were
+required to meet the expense borne more unequally by lovers, but which
+would not have occurred, but for their attachment. There was also a
+sort of unanimity in the opinion of the council that this was the
+lowest annual figure which would cover the cost of a passion. Now, my
+dear sir, since we have proved, by the statistics of our conjugal
+calculations [See Meditations I, II, and III.] and proved
+irrefragably, that there exists a floating total of at least fifteen
+hundred thousand unlawful passions, it follows:
+
+That the criminal conversations of a third among the French population
+contribute a sum of nearly three thousand millions to that vast
+circulation of money, the true blood of society, of which the budget
+is the heart;
+
+That the honest woman not only gives life to the children of the
+peerage, but also to its financial funds;
+
+That manufacturers owe their prosperity to this _systolic_ movement;
+
+That the honest woman is a being essentially _budgetative_, and active
+as a consumer;
+
+That the least decline in public love would involve incalculable
+miseries to the treasury, and to men of invested fortunes;
+
+That a husband has at least a third of his fortune invested in the
+inconstancy of his wife, etc.
+
+I am well aware that you are going to open your mouth and talk to me
+about manners, politics, good and evil. But, my dear victim of the
+Minotaur, is not happiness the object which all societies should set
+before them? Is it not this axiom that makes these wretched kings give
+themselves so much trouble about their people? Well, the honest woman
+has not, like them, thrones, gendarmes and tribunals; she has only a
+bed to offer; but if our four hundred thousand women can, by this
+ingenious machine, make a million celibates happy, do not they attain
+in a mysterious manner, and without making any fuss, the end aimed at
+by a government, namely, the end of giving the largest possible amount
+of happiness to the mass of mankind?
+
+"Yes, but the annoyances, the children, the troubles--"
+
+Ah, you must permit me to proffer the consolatory thought with which
+one of our wittiest caricaturists closes his satiric observations:
+"Man is not perfect!" It is sufficient, therefore, that our
+institutions have no more disadvantages than advantages in order to be
+reckoned excellent; for the human race is not placed, socially
+speaking, between the good and the bad, but between the bad and the
+worse. Now if the work, which we are at present on the point of
+concluding, has had for its object the diminution of the worse, as it
+is found in matrimonial institutions, in laying bare the errors and
+absurdities due to our manners and our prejudices, we shall certainly
+have won one of the fairest titles that can be put forth by a man to a
+place among the benefactors of humanity. Has not the author made it
+his aim, by advising husbands, to make women more self-restrained and
+consequently to impart more violence to passions, more money to the
+treasury, more life to commerce and agriculture? Thanks to this last
+Meditation he can flatter himself that he has strictly kept the vow of
+eclecticism, which he made in projecting the work, and he hopes he has
+marshaled all details of the case, and yet like an attorney-general
+refrained from expressing his personal opinion. And really what do you
+want with an axiom in the present matter? Do you wish that this book
+should be a mere development of the last opinion held by Tronchet, who
+in his closing days thought that the law of marriage had been drawn up
+less in the interest of husbands than of children? I also wish it very
+much. Would you rather desire that this book should serve as proof to
+the peroration of the Capuchin, who preached before Anne of Austria,
+and when he saw the queen and her ladies overwhelmed by his triumphant
+arguments against their frailty, said as he came down from the pulpit
+of truth, "Now you are all honorable women, and it is we who
+unfortunately are sons of Samaritan women"? I have no objection to
+that either. You may draw what conclusion you please; for I think it
+is very difficult to put forth two contrary opinions, without both of
+them containing some grains of truth. But the book has not been
+written either for or against marriage; all I have thought you needed
+was an exact description of it. If an examination of the machine shall
+lead us to make one wheel of it more perfect; if by scouring away some
+rust we have given more elastic movement to its mechanism; then give
+his wage to the workman. If the author has had the impertinence to
+utter truths too harsh for you, if he has too often spoken of rare and
+exceptional facts as universal, if he has omitted the commonplaces
+which have been employed from time immemorial to offer women the
+incense of flattery, oh, let him be crucified! But do not impute to
+him any motive of hostility to the institution itself; he is concerned
+merely for men and women. He knows that from the moment marriage
+ceases to defeat the purpose of marriage, it is unassailable; and,
+after all, if there do arise serious complaints against this
+institution, it is perhaps because man has no memory excepting for his
+disasters, that he accuses his wife, as he accuses his life, for
+marriage is but a life within a life. Yet people whose habit it is to
+take their opinions from newspapers would perhaps despise a book in
+which they see the mania of eclecticism pushed too far; for then they
+absolutely demand something in the shape of a peroration, it is not
+hard to find one for them. And since the words of Napoleon served to
+start this book, why should it not end as it began? Before the whole
+Council of State the First Consul pronounced the following startling
+phrase, in which he at the same time eulogized and satirized marriage,
+and summed up the contents of this book:
+
+"If a man never grew old, I would never wish him to have a wife!"
+
+
+
+                             POSTSCRIPT.
+
+"And so you are going to be married?" asked the duchess of the author
+who had read his manuscript to her.
+
+She was one of those ladies to whom the author has already paid his
+respects in the introduction of this work.
+
+"Certainly, madame," I replied. "To meet a woman who has courage
+enough to become mine, would satisfy the wildest of my hopes."
+
+"Is this resignation or infatuation?"
+
+"That is my affair."
+
+"Well, sir, as you are doctor of conjugal arts and sciences, allow me
+to tell you a little Oriental fable, that I read in a certain sheet,
+which is published annually in the form of an almanac. At the
+beginning of the Empire ladies used to play at a game in which no one
+accepted a present from his or her partner in the game, without saying
+the word, _Diadeste_. A game lasted, as you may well suppose, during a
+week, and the point was to catch some one receiving some trifle or
+other without pronouncing the sacramental word."
+
+"Even a kiss?"
+
+"Oh, I have won the _Diadeste_ twenty times in that way," she
+laughingly replied.
+
+"It was, I believe, from the playing of this game, whose origin is
+Arabian or Chinese, that my apologue takes its point. But if I tell
+you," she went on, putting her finger to her nose, with a charming air
+of coquetry, "let me contribute it as a finale to your work."
+
+"This would indeed enrich me. You have done me so many favors already,
+that I cannot repay--"
+
+She smiled slyly, and replied as follows:
+
+
+
+A philosopher had compiled a full account of all the tricks that women
+could possibly play, and in order to verify it, he always carried it
+about with him. One day he found himself in the course of his travels
+near an encampment of Arabs. A young woman, who had seated herself
+under the shade of a palm tree, rose on his approach. She kindly asked
+him to rest himself in her tent, and he could not refuse. Her husband
+was then absent. Scarcely had the traveler seated himself on a soft
+rug, when the graceful hostess offered him fresh dates, and a cup of
+milk; he could not help observing the rare beauty of her hands as she
+did so. But, in order to distract his mind from the sensations roused
+in him by the fair young Arabian girl, whose charms were most
+formidable, the sage took his book, and began to read.
+
+The seductive creature piqued by this slight said to him in a
+melodious voice:
+
+"That book must be very interesting since it seems to be the sole
+object worthy of your attention. Would it be taking a liberty to ask
+what science it treats of?"
+
+The philosopher kept his eyes lowered as he replied:
+
+"The subject of this book is beyond the comprehension of ladies."
+
+This rebuff excited more than ever the curiosity of the young Arabian
+woman. She put out the prettiest little foot that had ever left its
+fleeting imprint on the shifting sands of the desert. The philosopher
+was perturbed, and his eyes were too powerfully tempted to resist
+wandering from these feet, which betokened so much, up to the bosom,
+which was still more ravishingly fair; and soon the flame of his
+admiring glance was mingled with the fire that sparkled in the pupils
+of the young Asiatic. She asked again the name of the book in tones so
+sweet that the philosopher yielded to the fascination, and replied:
+
+"I am the author of the book; but the substance of it is not mine: it
+contains an account of all the ruses and stratagems of women."
+
+"What! Absolutely all?" said the daughter of the desert.
+
+"Yes, all! And it has been only by a constant study of womankind that
+I have come to regard them without fear."
+
+"Ah!" said the young Arabian girl, lowering the long lashes of her
+white eyelids.
+
+Then, suddenly darting the keenest of her glances at the pretended
+sage, she made him in one instant forget the book and all its
+contents. And now our philosopher was changed to the most passionate
+of men. Thinking he saw in the bearing of the young woman a faint
+trace of coquetry, the stranger was emboldened to make an avowal. How
+could he resist doing so? The sky was blue, the sand blazed in the
+distance like a scimitar of gold, the wind of the desert breathed
+love, and the woman of Arabia seemed to reflect all the fire with
+which she was surrounded; her piercing eyes were suffused with a mist;
+and by a slight nod of the head she seemed to make the luminous
+atmosphere undulate, as she consented to listen to the stranger's
+words of love. The sage was intoxicated with delirious hopes, when the
+young woman, hearing in the distance the gallop of a horse which
+seemed to fly, exclaimed:
+
+"We are lost! My husband is sure to catch us. He is jealous as a
+tiger, and more pitiless than one. In the name of the prophet, if you
+love your life, conceal yourself in this chest!"
+
+The author, frightened out of his wits, seeing no other way of getting
+out of a terrible fix, jumped into the box, and crouched down there.
+The woman closed down the lid, locked it, and took the key. She ran to
+meet her husband, and after some caresses which put him into a good
+humor, she said:
+
+"I must relate to you a very singular adventure I have just had."
+
+"I am listening, my gazelle," replied the Arab, who sat down on a rug
+and crossed his feet after the Oriental manner.
+
+"There arrived here to-day a kind of philosopher," she began, "he
+professes to have compiled a book which describes all the wiles of
+which my sex is capable; and then this sham sage made love to me."
+
+"Well, go on!" cried the Arab.
+
+"I listened to his avowal. He was young, ardent--and you came just in
+time to save my tottering virtue."
+
+The Arab leaped to his feet like a lion, and drew his scimitar with a
+shout of fury. The philosopher heard all from the depths of the chest
+and consigned to Hades his book, and all the men and women of Arabia
+Petraea.
+
+"Fatima!" cried the husband, "if you would save your life, answer me
+--Where is the traitor?"
+
+Terrified at the tempest which she had roused, Fatima threw herself at
+her husband's feet, and trembling beneath the point of his sword, she
+pointed out the chest with a prompt though timid glance of her eye.
+Then she rose to her feet, as if in shame, and taking the key from her
+girdle presented it to the jealous Arab; but, just as he was about to
+open the chest, the sly creature burst into a peal of laughter. Faroun
+stopped with a puzzled expression, and looked at his wife in
+amazement.
+
+"So I shall have my fine chain of gold, after all!" she cried, dancing
+for joy. "You have lost the _Diadeste_. Be more mindful next time."
+
+The husband, thunderstruck, let fall the key, and offered her the
+longed-for chain on bended knee, and promised to bring to his darling
+Fatima all the jewels brought by the caravan in a year, if she would
+refrain from winning the _Diadeste_ by such cruel stratagems. Then, as
+he was an Arab, and did not like forfeiting a chain of gold, although
+his wife had fairly won it, he mounted his horse again, and galloped
+off, to complain at his will, in the desert, for he loved Fatima too
+well to let her see his annoyance. The young woman then drew forth the
+philosopher from the chest, and gravely said to him, "Do not forget,
+Master Doctor, to put this feminine trick into your collection."
+
+
+
+"Madame," said I to the duchess, "I understand! If I marry, I am bound
+to be unexpectedly outwitted by some infernal trick or other; but I
+shall in that case, you may be quite sure, furnish a model household
+for the admiration of my contemporaries."
+
+
+
+PARIS, 1824-29.
+
+
+
+
+
+                    PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+                                 BY
+
+                          HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+                             PART FIRST
+
+
+
+                               PREFACE
+
+    IN WHICH EVERY ONE WILL FIND HIS OWN IMPRESSIONS OF MARRIAGE.
+
+  A friend, in speaking to you of a young woman, says: "Good family,
+  well bred, pretty, and three hundred thousand in her own right."
+  You have expressed a desire to meet this charming creature.
+
+  Usually, chance interviews are premeditated. And you speak with
+  this object, who has now become very timid.
+
+  YOU.--"A delightful evening!"
+
+  SHE.--"Oh! yes, sir."
+
+  You are allowed to become the suitor of this young person.
+
+  THE MOTHER-IN-LAW (to the intended groom).--"You can't imagine how
+  susceptible the dear girl is of attachment."
+
+  Meanwhile there is a delicate pecuniary question to be discussed
+  by the two families.
+
+  YOUR FATHER (to the mother-in-law).--"My property is valued at
+  five hundred thousand francs, my dear madame!"
+
+  YOUR FUTURE MOTHER-IN-LAW.--"And our house, my dear sir, is on a
+  corner lot."
+
+  A contract follows, drawn up by two hideous notaries, a small one,
+  and a big one.
+
+  Then the two families judge it necessary to convoy you to the
+  civil magistrate's and to the church, before conducting the bride
+  to her chamber.
+
+  Then what? . . . . . Why, then come a crowd of petty unforeseen
+  troubles, like the following:
+
+
+
+
+
+                    PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+
+
+                      THE UNKINDEST CUT OF ALL.
+
+Is it a petty or a profound trouble? I knew not; it is profound for
+your sons-in-law or daughters-in-law, but exceedingly petty for you.
+
+"Petty! You must be joking; why, a child costs terribly dear!"
+exclaims a ten-times-too-happy husband, at the baptism of his
+eleventh, called the little last newcomer,--a phrase with which women
+beguile their families.
+
+"What trouble is this?" you ask me. Well! this is, like many petty
+troubles of married life, a blessing for some one.
+
+You have, four months since, married off your daughter, whom we will
+call by the sweet name of CAROLINE, and whom we will make the type of
+all wives. Caroline is, like all other young ladies, very charming,
+and you have found for her a husband who is either a lawyer, a
+captain, an engineer, a judge, or perhaps a young viscount. But he is
+more likely to be what sensible families must seek,--the ideal of
+their desires--the only son of a rich landed proprietor. (See the
+_Preface_.)
+
+This phoenix we will call ADOLPHE, whatever may be his position in the
+world, his age, and the color of his hair.
+
+The lawyer, the captain, the engineer, the judge, in short, the
+son-in-law, Adolphe, and his family, have seen in Miss Caroline:
+
+I.--Miss Caroline;
+
+II.--The only daughter of your wife and you.
+
+Here, as in the Chamber of Deputies, we are compelled to call for a
+division of the house:
+
+1.--As to your wife.
+
+Your wife is to inherit the property of a maternal uncle, a gouty old
+fellow whom she humors, nurses, caresses, and muffles up; to say
+nothing of her father's fortune. Caroline has always adored her uncle,
+--her uncle who trotted her on his knee, her uncle who--her uncle
+whom--her uncle, in short,--whose property is estimated at two hundred
+thousand.
+
+Further, your wife is well preserved, though her age has been the
+subject of mature reflection on the part of your son-in-law's
+grandparents and other ancestors. After many skirmishes between the
+mothers-in-law, they have at last confided to each other the little
+secrets peculiar to women of ripe years.
+
+"How is it with you, my dear madame?"
+
+"I, thank heaven, have passed the period; and you?"
+
+"I really hope I have, too!" says your wife.
+
+"You can marry Caroline," says Adolphe's mother to your future
+son-in-law; "Caroline will be the sole heiress of her mother, of her
+uncle, and her grandfather."
+
+2.--As to yourself.
+
+You are also the heir of your maternal grandfather, a good old man
+whose possessions will surely fall to you, for he has grown imbecile,
+and is therefore incapable of making a will.
+
+You are an amiable man, but you have been very dissipated in your
+youth. Besides, you are fifty-nine years old, and your head is bald,
+resembling a bare knee in the middle of a gray wig.
+
+III.--A dowry of three hundred thousand.
+
+IV.--Caroline's only sister, a little dunce of twelve, a sickly child,
+who bids fair to fill an early grave.
+
+V.--Your own fortune, father-in-law (in certain kinds of society they
+say _papa father-in-law_) yielding an income of twenty thousand, and
+which will soon be increased by an inheritance.
+
+VI.--Your wife's fortune, which will be increased by two inheritances
+--from her uncle and her grandfather. In all, thus:
+
+  Three inheritances and interest,      750,000
+  Your fortune,                         250,000
+  Your wife's fortune,                  250,000
+                                      _________
+
+      Total,                          1,250,000
+
+which surely cannot take wing!
+
+Such is the autopsy of all those brilliant marriages that conduct
+their processions of dancers and eaters, in white gloves, flowering at
+the button-hole, with bouquets of orange flowers, furbelows, veils,
+coaches and coach-drivers, from the magistrate's to the church, from
+the church to the banquet, from the banquet to the dance, from the
+dance to the nuptial chamber, to the music of the orchestra and the
+accompaniment of the immemorial pleasantries uttered by relics of
+dandies, for are there not, here and there in society, relics of
+dandies, as there are relics of English horses? To be sure, and such
+is the osteology of the most amorous intent.
+
+The majority of the relatives have had a word to say about this
+marriage.
+
+Those on the side of the bridegroom:
+
+"Adolphe has made a good thing of it."
+
+Those on the side of the bride:
+
+"Caroline has made a splendid match. Adolphe is an only son, and will
+have an income of sixty thousand, _some day or other_!"
+
+Some time afterwards, the happy judge, the happy engineer, the happy
+captain, the happy lawyer, the happy only son of a rich landed
+proprietor, in short Adolphe, comes to dine with you, accompanied by
+his family.
+
+Your daughter Caroline is exceedingly proud of the somewhat rounded
+form of her waist. All women display an innocent artfulness, the first
+time they find themselves facing motherhood. Like a soldier who makes
+a brilliant toilet for his first battle, they love to play the pale,
+the suffering; they rise in a certain manner, and walk with the
+prettiest affectation. While yet flowers, they bear a fruit; they
+enjoy their maternity by anticipation. All those little ways are
+exceedingly charming--the first time.
+
+Your wife, now the mother-in-law of Adolphe, subjects herself to the
+pressure of tight corsets. When her daughter laughs, she weeps; when
+Caroline wishes her happiness public, she tries to conceal hers. After
+dinner, the discerning eye of the co-mother-in-law divines the work of
+darkness.
+
+Your wife also is an expectant mother! The news spreads like
+lightning, and your oldest college friend says to you laughingly: "Ah!
+so you are trying to increase the population again!"
+
+You have some hope in a consultation that is to take place to-morrow.
+You, kind-hearted man that you are, you turn red, you hope it is
+merely the dropsy; but the doctors confirm the arrival of a _little
+last one_!
+
+In such circumstances some timorous husbands go to the country or make
+a journey to Italy. In short, a strange confusion reigns in your
+household; both you and your wife are in a false position.
+
+"Why, you old rogue, you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" says a
+friend to you on the Boulevard.
+
+"Well! do as much if you can," is your angry retort.
+
+"It's as bad as being robbed on the highway!" says your son-in-law's
+family. "Robbed on the highway" is a flattering expression for the
+mother-in-law.
+
+The family hopes that the child which divides the expected fortune in
+three parts, will be, like all old men's children, scrofulous, feeble,
+an abortion. Will it be likely to live? The family awaits the delivery
+of your wife with an anxiety like that which agitated the house of
+Orleans during the confinement of the Duchess de Berri: a second son
+would secure the throne to the younger branch without the onerous
+conditions of July; Henry V would easily seize the crown. From that
+moment the house of Orleans was obliged to play double or quits: the
+event gave them the game.
+
+The mother and the daughter are put to bed nine days apart.
+
+Caroline's first child is a pale, cadaverous little girl that will not
+live.
+
+Her mother's last child is a splendid boy, weighing twelve pounds,
+with two teeth and luxuriant hair.
+
+For sixteen years you have desired a son. This conjugal annoyance is
+the only one that makes you beside yourself with joy. For your
+rejuvenated wife has attained what must be called the _Indian Summer_
+of women; she nurses, she has a full breast of milk! Her complexion is
+fresh, her color is pure pink and white. In her forty-second year, she
+affects the young woman, buys little baby stockings, walks about
+followed by a nurse, embroiders caps and tries on the cunningest
+headdresses. Alexandrine has resolved to instruct her daughter by her
+example; she is delightful and happy. And yet this is a trouble, a
+petty one for you, a serious one for your son-in-law. This annoyance
+is of the two sexes, it is common to you and your wife. In short, in
+this instance, your paternity renders you all the more proud from the
+fact that it is incontestable, my dear sir!
+
+
+
+                             REVELATIONS.
+
+Generally speaking, a young woman does not exhibit her true character
+till she has been married two or three years. She hides her faults,
+without intending it, in the midst of her first joys, of her first
+parties of pleasure. She goes into society to dance, she visits her
+relatives to show you off, she journeys on with an escort of love's
+first wiles; she is gradually transformed from girlhood to womanhood.
+Then she becomes mother and nurse, and in this situation, full of
+charming pangs, that leaves neither a word nor a moment for
+observation, such are its multiplied cares, it is impossible to judge
+of a woman. You require, then, three or four years of intimate life
+before you discover an exceedingly melancholy fact, one that gives you
+cause for constant terror.
+
+Your wife, the young lady in whom the first pleasures of life and love
+supplied the place of grace and wit, so arch, so animated, so
+vivacious, whose least movements spoke with delicious eloquence, has
+cast off, slowly, one by one, her natural artifices. At last you
+perceive the truth! You try to disbelieve it, you think yourself
+deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she can
+neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are
+frightened. You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling
+through the thorny paths, where you must perforce leave your
+self-esteem in tatters.
+
+You have already been annoyed several times by replies that, in
+society, were politely received: people have held their tongues
+instead of smiling; but you were certain that after your departure the
+women looked at each other and said: "Did you hear Madame Adolphe?"
+
+"Your little woman, she is--"
+
+"A regular cabbage-head."
+
+"How could he, who is certainly a man of sense, choose--?"
+
+"He should educate, teach his wife, or make her hold her tongue."
+
+
+
+                               AXIOMS.
+
+Axiom.--In our system of civilization a man is entirely responsible
+for his wife.
+
+
+Axiom.--The husband does not mould the wife.
+
+
+Caroline has one day obstinately maintained, at the house of Madame de
+Fischtaminel, a very distinguished lady, that her little last one
+resembled neither its father nor its mother, but looked like a certain
+friend of the family. She perhaps enlightens Monsieur de Fischtaminel,
+and overthrows the labors of three years, by tearing down the
+scaffolding of Madame de Fischtaminel's assertions, who, after this
+visit, will treat you will coolness, suspecting, as she does, that you
+have been making indiscreet remarks to your wife.
+
+On another occasion, Caroline, after having conversed with a writer
+about his works, counsels the poet, who is already a prolific author,
+to try to write something likely to live. Sometimes she complains of
+the slow attendance at the tables of people who have but one servant
+and have put themselves to great trouble to receive her. Sometimes she
+speaks ill of widows who marry again, before Madame Deschars who has
+married a third time, and on this occasion, an ex-notary,
+Nicolas-Jean-Jerome-Nepomucene-Ange-Marie-Victor-Joseph Deschars, a
+friend of your father's.
+
+In short, you are no longer yourself when you are in society with your
+wife. Like a man who is riding a skittish horse and glares straight
+between the beast's two ears, you are absorbed by the attention with
+which you listen to your Caroline.
+
+In order to compensate herself for the silence to which young ladies
+are condemned, Caroline talks; or rather babbles. She wants to make a
+sensation, and she does make a sensation; nothing stops her. She
+addresses the most eminent men, the most celebrated women. She
+introduces herself, and puts you on the rack. Going into society is
+going to the stake.
+
+She begins to think you are cross-grained, moody. The fact is, you are
+watching her, that's all! In short, you keep her within a small circle
+of friends, for she has already embroiled you with people on whom your
+interests depended.
+
+How many times have you recoiled from the necessity of a remonstrance,
+in the morning, on awakening, when you had put her in a good humor for
+listening! A woman rarely listens. How many times have you recoiled
+from the burthen of your imperious obligations!
+
+The conclusion of your ministerial communication can be no other than:
+"You have no sense." You foresee the effect of your first lesson.
+Caroline will say to herself: "Ah I have no sense! Haven't I though?"
+
+No woman ever takes this in good part. Both of you must draw the sword
+and throw away the scabbard. Six weeks after, Caroline may prove to
+you that she has quite sense enough to _minotaurize_ you without your
+perceiving it.
+
+Frightened at such a prospect, you make use of all the eloquent
+phrases to gild this pill. In short, you find the means of flattering
+Caroline's various self-loves, for:
+
+
+Axiom.--A married woman has several self-loves.
+
+
+You say that you are her best friend, the only one well situated to
+enlighten her; the more careful you are, the more watchful and puzzled
+she is. At this moment she has plenty of sense.
+
+You ask your dear Caroline, whose waist you clasp, how she, who is so
+brilliant when alone with you, who retorts so charmingly (you remind
+her of sallies that she has never made, which you put in her mouth,
+and, which she smilingly accepts), how she can say this, that, and the
+other, in society. She is, doubtless, like many ladies, timid in
+company.
+
+"I know," you say, "many very distinguished men who are just the
+same."
+
+You cite the case of some who are admirable tea-party oracles, but who
+cannot utter half a dozen sentences in the tribune. Caroline should
+keep watch over herself; you vaunt silence as the surest method of
+being witty. In society, a good listener is highly prized.
+
+You have broken the ice, though you have not even scratched its glossy
+surface: you have placed your hand upon the croup of the most
+ferocious and savage, the most wakeful and clear-sighted, the most
+restless, the swiftest, the most jealous, the most ardent and violent,
+the simplest and most elegant, the most unreasonable, the most
+watchful chimera of the moral world--THE VANITY OF A WOMAN!
+
+Caroline clasps you in her arms with a saintly embrace, thanks you for
+your advice, and loves you the more for it; she wishes to be beholden
+to you for everything, even for her intellect; she may be a dunce,
+but, what is better than saying fine things, she knows how to do them!
+But she desires also to be your pride! It is not a question of taste
+in dress, of elegance and beauty; she wishes to make you proud of her
+intelligence. You are the luckiest of men in having successfully
+managed to escape from this first dangerous pass in conjugal life.
+
+"We are going this evening to Madame Deschars', where they never know
+what to do to amuse themselves; they play all sorts of forfeit games
+on account of a troop of young women and girls there; you shall see!"
+she says.
+
+You are so happy at this turn of affairs, that you hum airs and
+carelessly chew bits of straw and thread, while still in your shirt
+and drawers. You are like a hare frisking on a flowering dew-perfumed
+meadow. You leave off your morning gown till the last extremity, when
+breakfast is on the table. During the day, if you meet a friend and he
+happens to speak of women, you defend them; you consider women
+charming, delicious, there is something divine about them.
+
+How often are our opinions dictated to us by the unknown events of our
+life!
+
+You take your wife to Madame Deschars'. Madame Deschars is a mother
+and is exceedingly devout. You never see any newspapers at her house:
+she keeps watch over her daughters by three different husbands, and
+keeps them all the more closely from the fact that she herself has, it
+is said, some little things to reproach herself with during the career
+of her two former lords. At her house, no one dares risk a jest.
+Everything there is white and pink and perfumed with sanctity, as at
+the houses of widows who are approaching the confines of their third
+youth. It seems as if every day were Sunday there.
+
+You, a young husband, join the juvenile society of young women and
+girls, misses and young people, in the chamber of Madame Deschars. The
+serious people, politicians, whist-players, and tea-drinkers, are in
+the parlor.
+
+In Madame Deschars' room they are playing a game which consists in
+hitting upon words with several meanings, to fit the answers that each
+player is to make to the following questions:
+
+How do you like it?
+
+What do you do with it?
+
+Where do you put it?
+
+Your turn comes to guess the word, you go into the parlor, take part
+in a discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They
+have selected a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical
+replies. Everybody knows that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads,
+the best way is to choose a very ordinary word, and to invent phrases
+that will send the parlor Oedipus a thousand leagues from each of his
+previous thoughts.
+
+This game is a poor substitute for lansquenet or dice, but it is not
+very expensive.
+
+The word MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion.
+Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among
+other acceptations, has that of _mal_ [evil], a substantive that
+signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of _mal_ [pain,
+disease, complaint], a substantive that enters into a thousand
+pathological expressions; then _malle_ [a mail-bag], and finally
+_malle_ [a trunk], that box of various forms, covered with all kinds
+of skin, made of every sort of leather, with handles, that journeys
+rapidly, for it serves to carry travelling effects in, as a man of
+Delille's school would say.
+
+For you, a man of some sharpness, the Sphinx displays his wiles; he
+spreads his wings and folds them up again; he shows you his lion's
+paws, his woman's neck, his horse's loins, and his intellectual head;
+he shakes his sacred fillets, he strikes an attitude and runs away, he
+comes and goes, and sweeps the place with his terrible equine tail; he
+shows his shining claws, and draws them in; he smiles, frisks, and
+murmurs. He puts on the looks of a joyous child and those of a matron;
+he is, above all, there to make fun of you.
+
+You ask the group collectively, "How do you like it?"
+
+"I like it for love's sake," says one.
+
+"I like it regular," says another.
+
+"I like it with a long mane."
+
+"I like it with a spring lock."
+
+"I like it unmasked."
+
+"I like it on horseback."
+
+"I like it as coming from God," says Madame Deschars.
+
+"How do you like it?" you say to your wife.
+
+"I like it legitimate."
+
+This response of your wife is not understood, and sends you a journey
+into the constellated fields of the infinite, where the mind, dazzled
+by the multitude of creations, finds it impossible to make a choice.
+
+"Where do you put it?"
+
+"In a carriage."
+
+"In a garret."
+
+"In a steamboat."
+
+"In the closet."
+
+"On a cart."
+
+"In prison."
+
+"In the ears."
+
+"In a shop."
+
+Your wife says to you last of all: "In bed."
+
+You were on the point of guessing it, but you know no word that fits
+this answer, Madame Deschars not being likely to have allowed anything
+improper.
+
+"What do you do with it?"
+
+"I make it my sole happiness," says your wife, after the answers of
+all the rest, who have sent you spinning through a whole world of
+linguistic suppositions.
+
+This response strikes everybody, and you especially; so you persist in
+seeking the meaning of it. You think of the bottle of hot water that
+your wife has put to her feet when it is cold,--of the warming pan,
+above all! Now of her night-cap,--of her handkerchief,--of her curling
+paper,--of the hem of her chemise,--of her embroidery,--of her flannel
+jacket,--of your bandanna,--of the pillow.
+
+In short, as the greatest pleasure of the respondents is to see their
+Oedipus mystified, as each word guessed by you throws them into fits
+of laughter, superior men, perceiving no word that will fit all the
+explanations, will sooner give it up than make three unsuccessful
+attempts. According to the law of this innocent game you are condemned
+to return to the parlor after leaving a forfeit; but you are so
+exceedingly puzzled by your wife's answers, that you ask what the word
+was.
+
+"Mal," exclaims a young miss.
+
+You comprehend everything but your wife's replies: she has not played
+the game. Neither Madame Deschars, nor any one of the young women
+understand. She has cheated. You revolt, there is an insurrection
+among the girls and young women. They seek and are puzzled. You want
+an explanation, and every one participates in your desire.
+
+"In what sense did you understand the word, my dear?" you say to
+Caroline.
+
+"Why, _male_!" [male.]
+
+Madame Deschars bites her lips and manifests the greatest displeasure;
+the young women blush and drop their eyes; the little girls open
+theirs, nudge each other and prick up their ears. Your feet are glued
+to the carpet, and you have so much salt in your throat that you
+believe in a repetition of the event which delivered Lot from his
+wife.
+
+You see an infernal life before you; society is out of the question.
+
+To remain at home with this triumphant stupidity is equivalent to
+condemnation to the state's prison.
+
+
+Axiom.--Moral tortures exceed physical sufferings by all the
+difference which exists between the soul and the body.
+
+
+
+                      THE ATTENTIONS OF A WIFE.
+
+Among the keenest pleasures of bachelor life, every man reckons the
+independence of his getting up. The fancies of the morning compensate
+for the glooms of evening. A bachelor turns over and over in his bed:
+he is free to gape loud enough to justify apprehensions of murder, and
+to scream at a pitch authorizing the suspicion of joys untold. He can
+forget his oaths of the day before, let the fire burn upon the hearth
+and the candle sink to its socket,--in short, go to sleep again in
+spite of pressing work. He can curse the expectant boots which stand
+holding their black mouths open at him and pricking up their ears. He
+can pretend not to see the steel hooks which glitter in a sunbeam
+which has stolen through the curtains, can disregard the sonorous
+summons of the obstinate clock, can bury himself in a soft place,
+saying: "Yes, I was in a hurry, yesterday, but am so no longer to-day.
+Yesterday was a dotard. To-day is a sage: between them stands the
+night which brings wisdom, the night which gives light. I ought to go,
+I ought to do it, I promised I would--I am weak, I know. But how can I
+resist the downy creases of my bed? My feet feel flaccid, I think I
+must be sick, I am too happy just here. I long to see the ethereal
+horizon of my dreams again, those women without claws, those winged
+beings and their obliging ways. In short, I have found the grain of
+salt to put upon the tail of that bird that was always flying away:
+the coquette's feet are caught in the line. I have her now--"
+
+Your servant, meantime, reads your newspaper, half-opens your letters,
+and leaves you to yourself. And you go to sleep again, lulled by the
+rumbling of the morning wagons. Those terrible, vexatious, quivering
+teams, laden with meat, those trucks with big tin teats bursting with
+milk, though they make a clatter most infernal and even crush the
+paving stones, seem to you to glide over cotton, and vaguely remind
+you of the orchestra of Napoleon Musard. Though your house trembles in
+all its timbers and shakes upon its keel, you think yourself a sailor
+cradled by a zephyr.
+
+You alone have the right to bring these joys to an end by throwing
+away your night-cap as you twist up your napkin after dinner, and by
+sitting up in bed. Then you take yourself to task with such reproaches
+as these: "Ah, mercy on me, I must get up!" "Early to bed and early to
+rise, makes a man healthy--!" "Get up, lazy bones!"
+
+All this time you remain perfectly tranquil. You look round your
+chamber, you collect your wits together. Finally, you emerge from the
+bed, spontaneously! Courageously! of your own accord! You go to the
+fireplace, you consult the most obliging of timepieces, you utter
+hopeful sentences thus couched: "Whatshisname is a lazy creature, I
+guess I shall find him in. I'll run. I'll catch him if he's gone. He's
+sure to wait for me. There is a quarter of an hour's grace in all
+appointments, even between debtor and creditor."
+
+You put on your boots with fury, you dress yourself as if you were
+afraid of being caught half-dressed, you have the delight of being in
+a hurry, you call your buttons into action, you finally go out like a
+conqueror, whistling, brandishing your cane, pricking up your ears and
+breaking into a canter.
+
+After all, you say to yourself, you are responsible to no one, you are
+your own master!
+
+But you, poor married man, you were stupid enough to say to your wife,
+"To-morrow, my dear" (sometimes she knows it two days beforehand), "I
+have got to get up early." Unfortunate Adolphe, you have especially
+proved the importance of this appointment: "It's to--and to--and above
+all to--in short to--"
+
+Two hours before dawn, Caroline wakes you up gently and says to you
+softly: "Adolphy dear, Adolphy love!"
+
+"What's the matter? Fire?"
+
+"No, go to sleep again, I've made a mistake; but the hour hand was on
+it, any way! It's only four, you can sleep two hours more."
+
+Is not telling a man, "You've only got two hours to sleep," the same
+thing, on a small scale, as saying to a criminal, "It's five in the
+morning, the ceremony will be performed at half-past seven"? Such
+sleep is troubled by an idea dressed in grey and furnished with wings,
+which comes and flaps, like a bat, upon the windows of your brain.
+
+A woman in a case like this is as exact as a devil coming to claim a
+soul he has purchased. When the clock strikes five, your wife's voice,
+too well known, alas! resounds in your ear; she accompanies the
+stroke, and says with an atrocious calmness, "Adolphe, it's five
+o'clock, get up, dear."
+
+"Ye-e-e-s, ah-h-h-h!"
+
+"Adolphe, you'll be late for your business, you said so yourself."
+
+"Ah-h-h-h, ye-e-e-e-s." You turn over in despair.
+
+"Come, come, love. I got everything ready last night; now you must, my
+dear; do you want to miss him? There, up, I say; it's broad daylight."
+
+Caroline throws off the blankets and gets up: she wants to show you
+that _she_ can rise without making a fuss. She opens the blinds, she
+lets in the sun, the morning air, the noise of the street, and then
+comes back.
+
+"Why, Adolphe, you _must_ get up! Who ever would have supposed you had
+no energy! But it's just like you men! I am only a poor, weak woman,
+but when I say a thing, I do it."
+
+You get up grumbling, execrating the sacrament of marriage. There is
+not the slightest merit in your heroism; it wasn't you, but your wife,
+that got up. Caroline gets you everything you want with provoking
+promptitude; she foresees everything, she gives you a muffler in
+winter, a blue-striped cambric shirt in summer, she treats you like a
+child; you are still asleep, she dresses you and has all the trouble.
+She finally thrusts you out of doors. Without her nothing would go
+straight! She calls you back to give you a paper, a pocketbook, you
+had forgotten. You don't think of anything, she thinks of everything!
+
+You return five hours afterwards to breakfast, between eleven and
+noon. The chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the
+landing, talking with somebody's valet: she runs in on hearing or
+seeing you. Your servant is laying the cloth in a most leisurely
+style, stopping to look out of the window or to lounge, and coming and
+going like a person who knows he has plenty of time. You ask for your
+wife, supposing that she is up and dressed.
+
+"Madame is still in bed," says the maid.
+
+You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep. She had been awake
+all night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is
+quite hungry now.
+
+You are the cause of all these disarrangements. If breakfast is not
+ready, she says it's because you went out. If she is not dressed, and
+if everything is in disorder, it's all your fault. For everything
+which goes awry she has this answer: "Well, you would get up so
+early!" "He would get up so early!" is the universal reason. She makes
+you go to bed early, because you got up early. She can do nothing all
+day, because you would get up so unusually early.
+
+Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, "Without me, you
+would never get up!" To her friends she says, "My husband get up! If
+it weren't for me, he never _would_ get up!"
+
+To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, "A graceful
+compliment to you, madame!" This slightly indelicate comment puts an
+end to her boasts.
+
+This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone
+in the bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no
+confidant but yourself: and it often seems to you a question whether
+the inconveniences of the married state do not exceed its advantages.
+
+
+
+                           SMALL VEXATIONS.
+
+You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the
+bachelor to the heavy andante of the father of a family.
+
+Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the
+polished shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving
+his glistening croup under the quadruple network of the reins and
+ribbons that you so skillfully manage with what grace and elegance the
+Champs Elysees can bear witness--you drive a good solid Norman horse
+with a steady, family gait.
+
+You have learned what paternal patience is, and you let no opportunity
+slip of proving it. Your countenance, therefore, is serious.
+
+By your side is a domestic, evidently for two purposes like the
+carriage. The vehicle is four-wheeled and hung upon English springs:
+it is corpulent and resembles a Rouen scow: it has glass windows, and
+an infinity of economical arrangements. It is a barouche in fine
+weather, and a brougham when it rains. It is apparently light, but,
+when six persons are in it, it is heavy and tires out your only horse.
+
+On the back seat, spread out like flowers, is your young wife in full
+bloom, with her mother, a big marshmallow with a great many leaves.
+These two flowers of the female species twitteringly talk of you,
+though the noise of the wheels and your attention to the horse, joined
+to your fatherly caution, prevent you from hearing what they say.
+
+On the front seat, there is a nice tidy nurse holding a little girl in
+her lap: by her side is a boy in a red plaited shirt, who is
+continually leaning out of the carriage and climbing upon the
+cushions, and who has a thousand times drawn down upon himself those
+declarations of every mother, which he knows to be threats and nothing
+else: "Be a good boy, Adolphe, or else--" "I declare I'll never bring
+you again, so there!"
+
+His mamma is secretly tired to death of this noisy little boy: he has
+provoked her twenty times, and twenty times the face of the little
+girl asleep has calmed her.
+
+"I am his mother," she says to herself. And so she finally manages to
+keep her little Adolphe quiet.
+
+You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into
+execution. You left your home in the morning, all the opposite
+neighbors having come to their windows, envying you the privilege
+which your means give you of going to the country and coming back
+again without undergoing the miseries of a public conveyance. So you
+have dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to Vincennes,
+from Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from
+Charenton opposite some island or other which struck your wife and
+mother-in-law as being prettier than all the landscapes through which
+you had driven them.
+
+"Let's go to Maison's!" somebody exclaims.
+
+So you go to Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of
+the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The
+horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled,
+and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two
+bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened
+by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and
+which, no less than the dust, has made him gummy, sticky and shaggy.
+The horse looks like a wrathy porcupine: you are afraid he will be
+foundered, and you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way
+that he perfectly understands, for he moves his head about like an
+omnibus horse, tired of his deplorable existence.
+
+You think a good deal of this horse; your consider him an excellent
+one and he cost you twelve hundred francs. When a man has the honor of
+being the father of a family, he thinks as much of twelve hundred
+francs as you think of this horse. You see at once the frightful
+amount of your extra expenses, in case Coco should have to lie by. For
+two days you will have to take hackney coaches to go to your business.
+You wife will pout if she can't go out: but she will go out, and take
+a carriage. The horse will cause the purchase of numerous extras,
+which you will find in your coachman's bill,--your only coachman, a
+model coachman, whom you watch as you do a model anybody.
+
+To these thoughts you give expression in the gentle movement of the
+whip as it falls upon the animal's ribs, up to his knees in the black
+dust which lines the road in front of La Verrerie.
+
+At this moment, little Adolphe, who doesn't know what to do in this
+rolling box, has sadly twisted himself up into a corner, and his
+grandmother anxiously asks him, "What is the matter?"
+
+"I'm hungry," says the child.
+
+"He's hungry," says the mother to her daughter.
+
+"And why shouldn't he be hungry? It is half-past five, we are not at
+the barrier, and we started at two!"
+
+"Your husband might have treated us to dinner in the country."
+
+"He'd rather make his horse go a couple of leagues further, and get
+back to the house."
+
+"The cook might have had the day to herself. But Adolphe is right,
+after all: it's cheaper to dine at home," adds the mother-in-law.
+
+"Adolphe," exclaims your wife, stimulated by the word "cheaper," "we
+go so slow that I shall be seasick, and you keep driving right in this
+nasty dust. What are you thinking of? My gown and hat will be ruined!"
+
+"Would you rather ruin the horse?" you ask, with the air of a man who
+can't be answered.
+
+"Oh, no matter for your horse; just think of your son who is dying of
+hunger: he hasn't tasted a thing for seven hours. Whip up your old
+horse! One would really think you cared more for your nag than for
+your child!"
+
+You dare not give your horse a single crack with the whip, for he
+might still have vigor enough left to break into a gallop and run
+away.
+
+"No, Adolphe tries to vex me, he's going slower," says the young wife
+to her mother. "My dear, go as slow as you like. But I know you'll say
+I am extravagant when you see me buying another hat."
+
+Upon this you utter a series of remarks which are lost in the racket
+made by the wheels.
+
+"What's the use of replying with reasons that haven't got an ounce of
+common-sense?" cries Caroline.
+
+You talk, turning your face to the carriage and then turning back to
+the horse, to avoid an accident.
+
+"That's right, run against somebody and tip us over, do, you'll be rid
+of us. Adolphe, your son is dying of hunger. See how pale he is!"
+
+"But Caroline," puts in the mother-in-law, "he's doing the best he
+can."
+
+Nothing annoys you so much as to have your mother-in-law take your
+part. She is a hypocrite and is delighted to see you quarreling with
+her daughter. Gently and with infinite precaution she throws oil on
+the fire.
+
+When you arrive at the barrier, your wife is mute. She says not a
+word, she sits with her arms crossed, and will not look at you. You
+have neither soul, heart, nor sentiment. No one but you could have
+invented such a party of pleasure. If you are unfortunate enough to
+remind Caroline that it was she who insisted on the excursion, that
+morning, for her children's sake, and in behalf of her milk--she
+nurses the baby--you will be overwhelmed by an avalanche of frigid and
+stinging reproaches.
+
+You bear it all so as "not to turn the milk of a nursing mother, for
+whose sake you must overlook some little things," so your atrocious
+mother-in-law whispers in your ear.
+
+All the furies of Orestes are rankling in your heart.
+
+In reply to the sacramental words pronounced by the officer of the
+customs, "Have you anything to declare?" your wife says, "I declare a
+great deal of ill-humor and dust."
+
+She laughs, the officer laughs, and you feel a desire to tip your
+family into the Seine.
+
+Unluckily for you, you suddenly remember the joyous and perverse young
+woman who wore a pink bonnet and who made merry in your tilbury six
+years before, as you passed this spot on your way to the chop-house on
+the river's bank. What a reminiscence! Was Madame Schontz anxious
+about babies, about her bonnet, the lace of which was torn to pieces
+in the bushes? No, she had no care for anything whatever, not even for
+her dignity, for she shocked the rustic police of Vincennes by the
+somewhat daring freedom of her style of dancing.
+
+You return home, you have frantically hurried your Norman horse, and
+have neither prevented an indisposition of the animal, nor an
+indisposition of your wife.
+
+That evening, Caroline has very little milk. If the baby cries and if
+your head is split in consequence, it is all your fault, as you
+preferred the health of your horse to that of your son who was dying
+of hunger, and of your daughter whose supper has disappeared in a
+discussion in which your wife was right, _as she always is_.
+
+"Well, well," she says, "men are not mothers!"
+
+As you leave the chamber, you hear your mother-in-law consoling her
+daughter by these terrible words: "Come, be calm, Caroline: that's the
+way with them all: they are a selfish lot: your father was just like
+that!"
+
+
+
+                            THE ULTIMATUM.
+
+It is eight o'clock; you make your appearance in the bedroom of your
+wife. There is a brilliant light. The chambermaid and the cook hover
+lightly about. The furniture is covered with dresses and flowers tried
+on and laid aside.
+
+The hair-dresser is there, an artist par excellence, a sovereign
+authority, at once nobody and everything. You hear the other domestics
+going and coming: orders are given and recalled, errands are well or
+ill performed. The disorder is at its height. This chamber is a studio
+from whence to issue a parlor Venus.
+
+Your wife desires to be the fairest at the ball which you are to
+attend. Is it still for your sake, or only for herself, or is it for
+somebody else? Serious questions these.
+
+The idea does not even occur to you.
+
+You are squeezed, hampered, harnessed in your ball accoutrement: you
+count your steps as you walk, you look around, you observe, you
+contemplate talking business on neutral ground with a stock-broker, a
+notary or a banker, to whom you would not like to give an advantage
+over you by calling at their house.
+
+A singular fact which all have probably observed, but the causes of
+which can hardly be determined, is the peculiar repugnance which men
+dressed and ready to go to a party have for discussions or to answer
+questions. At the moment of starting, there are few husbands who are
+not taciturn and profoundly absorbed in reflections which vary with
+their characters. Those who reply give curt and peremptory answers.
+
+But women, at this time, are exceedingly aggravating. They consult
+you, they ask your advice upon the best way of concealing the stem of
+a rose, of giving a graceful fall to a bunch of briar, or a happy turn
+to a scarf. As a neat English expression has it, "they fish for
+compliments," and sometimes for better than compliments.
+
+A boy just out of school would discern the motive concealed behind the
+willows of these pretexts: but your wife is so well known to you, and
+you have so often playfully joked upon her moral and physical
+perfections, that you are harsh enough to give your opinion briefly
+and conscientiously: you thus force Caroline to put that decisive
+question, so cruel to women, even those who have been married twenty
+years:
+
+"So I don't suit you then?"
+
+Drawn upon the true ground by this inquiry, you bestow upon her such
+little compliments as you can spare and which are, as it were, the
+small change, the sous, the liards of your purse.
+
+"The best gown you ever wore!" "I never saw you so well dressed."
+"Blue, pink, yellow, cherry [take your pick], becomes you charmingly."
+"Your head-dress is quite original." "As you go in, every one will
+admire you." "You will not only be the prettiest, but the best
+dressed." "They'll all be mad not to have your taste." "Beauty is a
+natural gift: taste is like intelligence, a thing that we may be proud
+of."
+
+"Do you think so? Are you in earnest, Adolphe?"
+
+Your wife is coquetting with you. She chooses this moment to force
+from you your pretended opinion of one and another of her friends, and
+to insinuate the price of the articles of her dress you so much
+admire. Nothing is too dear to please you. She sends the cook out of
+the room.
+
+"Let's go," you say.
+
+She sends the chambermaid out after having dismissed the hair-dresser,
+and begins to turn round and round before her glass, showing off to
+you her most glorious beauties.
+
+"Let's go," you say.
+
+"You are in a hurry," she returns.
+
+And she goes on exhibiting herself with all her little airs, setting
+herself off like a fine peach magnificently exhibited in a fruiterer's
+window. But since you have dined rather heartily, you kiss her upon
+the forehead merely, not feeling able to countersign your opinions.
+Caroline becomes serious.
+
+The carriage waits. All the household looks at Caroline as she goes
+out: she is the masterpiece to which all have contributed, and
+everybody admires the common work.
+
+Your wife departs highly satisfied with herself, but a good deal
+displeased with you. She proceeds loftily to the ball, just as a
+picture, caressed by the painter and minutely retouched in the studio,
+is sent to the annual exhibition in the vast bazaar of the Louvre.
+Your wife, alas! sees fifty women handsomer than herself: they have
+invented dresses of the most extravagant price, and more or less
+original: and that which happens at the Louvre to the masterpiece,
+happens to the object of feminine labor: your wife's dress seems pale
+by the side of another very much like it, but the livelier color of
+which crushes it. Caroline is nobody, and is hardly noticed. When
+there are sixty handsome women in a room, the sentiment of beauty is
+lost, beauty is no longer appreciated. Your wife becomes a very
+ordinary affair. The petty stratagem of her smile, made perfect by
+practice, has no meaning in the midst of countenances of noble
+expression, of self-possessed women of lofty presence. She is
+completely put down, and no one asks her to dance. She tries to force
+an expression of pretended satisfaction, but, as she is not satisfied,
+she hears people say, "Madame Adolphe is looking very ill to-night."
+Women hypocritically ask her if she is indisposed and "Why don't you
+dance?" They have a whole catalogue of malicious remarks veneered with
+sympathy and electroplated with charity, enough to damn a saint, to
+make a monkey serious, and to give the devil the shudders.
+
+You, who are innocently playing cards or walking backwards and
+forwards, and so have not seen one of the thousand pin-pricks with
+which your wife's self-love has been tattooed, you come and ask her in
+a whisper, "What is the matter?"
+
+"Order _my_ carriage!"
+
+This _my_ is the consummation of marriage. For two years she has said
+"_my husband's_ carriage," "_the_ carriage," "_our_ carriage," and now
+she says "_my_ carriage."
+
+You are in the midst of a game, you say, somebody wants his revenge,
+or you must get your money back.
+
+Here, Adolphe, we allow that you have sufficient strength of mind to
+say yes, to disappear, and _not_ to order the carriage.
+
+You have a friend, you send him to dance with your wife, for you have
+commenced a system of concessions which will ruin you. You already
+dimly perceive the advantage of a friend.
+
+Finally, you order the carriage. You wife gets in with concentrated
+rage, she hurls herself into a corner, covers her face with her hood,
+crosses her arms under her pelisse, and says not a word.
+
+O husbands! Learn this fact; you may, at this fatal moment, repair and
+redeem everything: and never does the impetuosity of lovers who have
+been caressing each other the whole evening with flaming gaze fail to
+do it! Yes, you can bring her home in triumph, she has now nobody but
+you, you have one more chance, that of taking your wife by storm! But
+no, idiot, stupid and indifferent that you are, you ask her, "What is
+the matter?"
+
+
+Axiom.--A husband should always know what is the matter with his wife,
+for she always knows what is not.
+
+
+"I'm cold," she says.
+
+"The ball was splendid."
+
+"Pooh! nobody of distinction! People have the mania, nowadays, to
+invite all Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs:
+their gowns were horribly smashed, and mine is ruined."
+
+"We had a good time."
+
+"Ah, you men, you play and that's the whole of it. Once married, you
+care about as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts."
+
+"How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we
+arrived."
+
+"Oh, you never understand us women. I begged you to go home, and you
+left me there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason. You
+are not without intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I
+don't know what you are thinking about."
+
+Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter. When you give
+your wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman
+of wood: she gives you a "thank you" which puts you in the same rank
+as her servant. You understood your wife no better before than you do
+after the ball: you find it difficult to follow her, for instead of
+going up stairs, she flies up. The rupture is complete.
+
+The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace: she is received with
+blunt No's and Yes's, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows
+with a slanting glance at you. "Monsieur's always doing these things,"
+she mutters.
+
+You alone might have changed Madame's temper. She goes to bed; she has
+her revenge to take: you did not comprehend her. Now she does not
+comprehend you. She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the
+most hostile and offensive posture: she is wrapped up in her chemise,
+in her sack, in her night-cap, like a bale of clocks packed for the
+East Indies. She says neither good-night, nor good-day, nor dear, nor
+Adolphe: you don't exist, you are a bag of wheat.
+
+Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber
+where she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead. Were you
+the Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not
+melt the ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to
+be asleep, and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked.
+Ask her one hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland
+replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.
+
+Nothing is the matter with her: she is tired: she is going to sleep.
+
+The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the
+more she isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise. If you get impatient,
+Caroline begins to dream! You grumble, you are lost.
+
+
+Axiom.--Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their
+strong points, they leave us to guess at their weak ones.
+
+
+Caroline will perhaps also condescend to assure you that she does not
+feel well. But she laughs in her night-cap when you have fallen
+asleep, and hurls imprecations upon your slumbering body.
+
+
+
+                            WOMEN'S LOGIC.
+
+You imagine you have married a creature endowed with reason: you are
+woefully mistaken, my friend.
+
+
+Axiom.--Sensitive beings are not sensible beings.
+
+
+Sentiment is not argument, reason is not pleasure, and pleasure is
+certainly not a reason.
+
+"Oh! sir!" she says.
+
+Reply "Ah! yes! Ah!" You must bring forth this "ah!" from the very
+depths of your thoracic cavern, as you rush in a rage from the house,
+or return, confounded, to your study.
+
+Why? Now? Who has conquered, killed, overthrown you! Your wife's
+logic, which is not the logic of Aristotle, nor that of Ramus, nor
+that of Kant, nor that of Condillac, nor that of Robespierre, nor that
+of Napoleon: but which partakes of the character of all these logics,
+and which we must call the universal logic of women, the logic of
+English women as it is that of Italian women, of the women of Normandy
+and Brittany (ah, these last are unsurpassed!), of the women of Paris,
+in short, that of the women in the moon, if there are women in that
+nocturnal land, with which the women of the earth have an evident
+understanding, angels that they are!
+
+The discussion began after breakfast. Discussions can never take place
+in a household save at this hour. A man could hardly have a discussion
+with his wife in bed, even if he wanted to: she has too many
+advantages over him, and can too easily reduce him to silence. On
+leaving the nuptial chamber with a pretty woman in it, a man is apt to
+be hungry, if he is young. Breakfast is usually a cheerful meal, and
+cheerfulness is not given to argument. In short, you do not open the
+business till you have had your tea or your coffee.
+
+You have taken it into your head, for instance, to send your son to
+school. All fathers are hypocrites and are never willing to confess
+that their own flesh and blood is very troublesome when it walks about
+on two legs, lays its dare-devil hands on everything, and is
+everywhere at once like a frisky pollywog. Your son barks, mews, and
+sings; he breaks, smashes and soils the furniture, and furniture is
+dear; he makes toys of everything, he scatters your papers, and he
+cuts paper dolls out of the morning's newspaper before you have read
+it.
+
+His mother says to him, referring to anything of yours: "Take it!" but
+in reference to anything of hers she says: "Take care!"
+
+She cunningly lets him have your things that she may be left in peace.
+Her bad faith as a good mother seeks shelter behind her child, your
+son is her accomplice. Both are leagued against you like Robert
+Macaire and Bertrand against the subscribers to their joint stock
+company. The boy is an axe with which foraging excursions are
+performed in your domains. He goes either boldly or slyly to maraud in
+your wardrobe: he reappears caparisoned in the drawers you laid aside
+that morning, and brings to the light of day many articles condemned
+to solitary confinement. He brings the elegant Madame Fischtaminel, a
+friend whose good graces you cultivate, your girdle for checking
+corpulency, bits of cosmetic for dyeing your moustache, old waistcoats
+discolored at the arm-holes, stockings slightly soiled at the heels
+and somewhat yellow at the toes. It is quite impossible to remark that
+these stains are caused by the leather!
+
+Your wife looks at your friend and laughs; you dare not be angry, so
+you laugh too, but what a laugh! The unfortunate all know that laugh.
+
+Your son, moreover, gives you a cold sweat, if your razors happen to
+be out of their place. If you are angry, the little rebel laughs and
+shows his two rows of pearls: if you scold him, he cries. His mother
+rushes in! And what a mother she is! A mother who will detest you if
+you don't give him the razor! With women there is no middle ground; a
+man is either a monster or a model.
+
+At certain times you perfectly understand Herod and his famous decrees
+relative to the Massacre of the Innocents, which have only been
+surpassed by those of the good Charles X!
+
+Your wife has returned to her sofa, you walk up and down, and stop,
+and you boldly introduce the subject by this interjectional remark:
+
+"Caroline, we must send Charles to boarding school."
+
+"Charles cannot go to boarding school," she returns in a mild tone.
+
+"Charles is six years old, the age at which a boy's education begins."
+
+"In the first place," she replies, "it begins at seven. The royal
+princes are handed over to their governor by their governess when they
+are seven. That's the law and the prophets. I don't see why you
+shouldn't apply to the children of private people the rule laid down
+for the children of princes. Is your son more forward than theirs? The
+king of Rome--"
+
+"The king of Rome is not a case in point."
+
+"What! Is not the king of Rome the son of the Emperor? [Here she
+changes the subject.] Well, I declare, you accuse the Empress, do you?
+Why, Doctor Dubois himself was present, besides--"
+
+"I said nothing of the kind."
+
+"How you do interrupt, Adolphe."
+
+"I say that the king of Rome [here you begin to raise your voice], the
+king of Rome, who was hardly four years old when he left France, is no
+example for us."
+
+"That doesn't prevent the fact of the Duke de Bordeaux's having been
+placed in the hands of the Duke de Riviere, his tutor, at seven
+years." [Logic.]
+
+"The case of the young Duke of Bordeaux is different."
+
+"Then you confess that a boy can't be sent to school before he is
+seven years old?" she says with emphasis. [More logic.]
+
+"No, my dear, I don't confess that at all. There is a great deal of
+difference between private and public education."
+
+"That's precisely why I don't want to send Charles to school yet. He
+ought to be much stronger than he is, to go there."
+
+"Charles is very strong for his age."
+
+"Charles? That's the way with men! Why, Charles has a very weak
+constitution; he takes after you. [Here she changes from _tu_ to
+_vous_.] But if you are determined to get rid of your son, why put him
+out to board, of course. I have noticed for some time that the dear
+child annoys you."
+
+"Annoys me? The idea! But we are answerable for our children, are we
+not? It is time Charles' education was began: he is getting very bad
+habits here, he obeys no one, he thinks himself perfectly free to do
+as he likes, he hits everybody and nobody dares to hit him back. He
+ought to be placed in the midst of his equals, or he will grow up with
+the most detestable temper."
+
+"Thank you: so I am bringing Charles up badly!"
+
+"I did not say that: but you will always have excellent reasons for
+keeping him at home."
+
+Here the _vous_ becomes reciprocal and the discussion takes a bitter
+turn on both sides. Your wife is very willing to wound you by saying
+_vous_, but she feels cross when it becomes mutual.
+
+"The long and the short of it is that you want to get my child away,
+you find that he is between us, you are jealous of your son, you want
+to tyrannize over me at your ease, and you sacrifice your boy! Oh, I
+am smart enough to see through you!"
+
+"You make me out like Abraham with his knife! One would think there
+were no such things as schools! So the schools are empty; nobody sends
+their children to school!"
+
+"You are trying to make me appear ridiculous," she retorts. "I know
+that there are schools well enough, but people don't send boys of six
+there, and Charles shall not start now."
+
+"Don't get angry, my dear."
+
+"As if I ever get angry! I am a woman and know how to suffer in
+silence."
+
+"Come, let us reason together."
+
+"You have talked nonsense enough."
+
+"It is time that Charles should learn to read and write; later in
+life, he will find difficulties sufficient to disgust him."
+
+Here, you talk for ten minutes without interruption, and you close
+with an appealing "Well?" armed with an intonation which suggests an
+interrogation point of the most crooked kind.
+
+"Well!" she replies, "it is not yet time for Charles to go to school."
+
+You have gained nothing at all.
+
+"But, my dear, Monsieur Deschars certainly sent his little Julius to
+school at six years. Go and examine the schools and you will find lots
+of little boys of six there."
+
+You talk for ten minutes more without the slightest interruption, and
+then you ejaculate another "Well?"
+
+"Little Julius Deschars came home with chilblains," she says.
+
+"But Charles has chilblains here."
+
+"Never," she replies, proudly.
+
+In a quarter of an hour, the main question is blocked by a side
+discussion on this point: "Has Charles had chilblains or not?"
+
+You bandy contradictory allegations; you no longer believe each other;
+you must appeal to a third party.
+
+
+Axiom.--Every household has its Court of Appeals which takes no notice
+of the merits, but judges matters of form only.
+
+
+The nurse is sent for. She comes, and decides in favor of your wife.
+It is fully decided that Charles has never had chilblains.
+
+Caroline glances triumphantly at you and utters these monstrous words:
+"There, you see Charles can't possibly go to school!"
+
+You go out breathless with rage. There is no earthly means of
+convincing your wife that there is not the slightest reason for your
+son's not going to school in the fact that he has never had
+chilblains.
+
+That evening, after dinner, you hear this atrocious creature finishing
+a long conversation with a woman with these words: "He wanted to send
+Charles to school, but I made him see that he would have to wait."
+
+Some husbands, at a conjuncture like this, burst out before everybody;
+their wives take their revenge six weeks later, but the husbands gain
+this by it, that Charles is sent to school the very day he gets into
+any mischief. Other husbands break the crockery, and keep their rage
+to themselves. The knowing ones say nothing and bide their time.
+
+A woman's logic is exhibited in this way upon the slightest occasion,
+about a promenade or the proper place to put a sofa. This logic is
+extremely simple, inasmuch as it consists in never expressing but one
+idea, that which contains the expression of their will. Like
+everything pertaining to female nature, this system may be resolved
+into two algebraic terms--Yes: no. There are also certain little
+movements of the head which mean so much that they may take the place
+of either.
+
+
+
+                       THE JESUITISM OF WOMEN.
+
+The most jesuitical Jesuit of Jesuits is yet a thousand times less
+jesuitical than the least jesuitical woman,--so you may judge what
+Jesuits women are! They are so jesuitical that the cunningest Jesuit
+himself could never guess to what extent of jesuitism a woman may go,
+for there are a thousand ways of being jesuitical, and a woman is such
+an adroit Jesuit, that she has the knack of being a Jesuit without
+having a jesuitical look. You can rarely, though you can sometimes,
+prove to a Jesuit that he is one: but try once to demonstrate to a
+woman that she acts or talks like a Jesuit. She would be cut to pieces
+rather than confess herself one.
+
+She, a Jesuit! The very soul of honor and loyalty! She a Jesuit! What
+do you mean by "Jesuit?" She does not know what a Jesuit is: what is a
+Jesuit? She has never seen or heard of a Jesuit! It's you who are a
+Jesuit! And she proves with jesuitical demonstration that you are a
+subtle Jesuit.
+
+Here is one of the thousand examples of a woman's jesuitism, and this
+example constitutes the most terrible of the petty troubles of married
+life; it is perhaps the most serious.
+
+Induced by a desire the thousandth time expressed by Caroline, who
+complained that she had to go on foot or that she could not buy a new
+hat, a new parasol, a new dress, or any other article of dress, often
+enough:
+
+That she could not dress her baby as a sailor, as a lancer, as an
+artilleryman of the National Guard, as a Highlander with naked legs
+and a cap and feather, in a jacket, in a roundabout, in a velvet sack,
+in boots, in trousers: that she could not buy him toys enough, nor
+mechanical moving mice and Noah's Arks enough:
+
+That she could not return Madame Deschars or Madame de Fischtaminel
+their civilities, a ball, a party, a dinner: nor take a private box at
+the theatre, thus avoiding the necessity of sitting cheek by jowl with
+men who are either too polite or not enough so, and of calling a cab
+at the close of the performance; apropos of which she thus discourses:
+
+"You think it cheaper, but you are mistaken: men are all the same! I
+soil my shoes, I spoil my hat, my shawl gets wet and my silk stockings
+get muddy. You economize twenty francs by not having a carriage,--no
+not twenty, sixteen, for your pay four for the cab--and you lose fifty
+francs' worth of dress, besides being wounded in your pride on seeing
+a faded bonnet on my head: you don't see why it's faded, but it's
+those horrid cabs. I say nothing of the annoyance of being tumbled and
+jostled by a crowd of men, for it seems you don't care for that!"
+
+That she could not buy a piano instead of hiring one, nor keep up with
+the fashions; (there are some women, she says, who have all the new
+styles, but just think what they give in return! She would rather
+throw herself out of the window than imitate them! She loves you too
+much. Here she sheds tears. She does not understand such women). That
+she could not ride in the Champs Elysees, stretched out in her own
+carriage, like Madame de Fischtaminel. (There's a woman who
+understands life: and who has a well-taught, well-disciplined and very
+contented husband: his wife would go through fire and water for him!)
+
+Finally, beaten in a thousand conjugal scenes, beaten by the most
+logical arguments (the late logicians Tripier and Merlin were nothing
+to her, as the preceding chapter has sufficiently shown you), beaten
+by the most tender caresses, by tears, by your own words turned
+against you, for under circumstances like these, a woman lies in wait
+in her house like a jaguar in the jungle; she does not appear to
+listen to you, or to heed you; but if a single word, a wish, a
+gesture, escapes you, she arms herself with it, she whets it to an
+edge, she brings it to bear upon you a hundred times over; beaten by
+such graceful tricks as "If you will do so and so, I will do this and
+that;" for women, in these cases, become greater bargainers than the
+Jews and Greeks (those, I mean, who sell perfumes and little girls),
+than the Arabs (those, I mean, who sell little boys and horses),
+greater higglers than the Swiss and the Genevese, than bankers, and,
+what is worse than all, than the Genoese!
+
+Finally, beaten in a manner which may be called beaten, you determine
+to risk a certain portion of your capital in a business undertaking.
+One evening, at twilight, seated side by side, or some morning on
+awakening, while Caroline, half asleep, a pink bud in her white linen,
+her face smiling in her lace, is beside you, you say to her, "You want
+this, you say, or you want that: you told me this or you told me
+that:" in short, you hastily enumerate the numberless fancies by which
+she has over and over again broken your heart, for there is nothing
+more dreadful than to be unable to satisfy the desires of a beloved
+wife, and you close with these words:
+
+"Well, my dear, an opportunity offers of quintupling a hundred
+thousand francs, and I have decided to make the venture."
+
+She is wide awake now, she sits up in bed, and gives you a kiss, ah!
+this time, a real good one!
+
+"You are a dear boy!" is her first word.
+
+We will not mention her last, for it is an enormous and
+unpronounceable onomatope.
+
+"Now," she says, "tell me all about it."
+
+You try to explain the nature of the affair. But in the first place,
+women do not understand business, and in the next they do not wish to
+seem to understand it. Your dear, delighted Caroline says you were
+wrong to take her desires, her groans, her sighs for new dresses, in
+earnest. She is afraid of your venture, she is frightened at the
+directors, the shares, and above all at the running expenses, and
+doesn't exactly see where the dividend comes in.
+
+
+Axiom.--Women are always afraid of things that have to be divided.
+
+
+In short, Caroline suspects a trap: but she is delighted to know that
+she can have her carriage, her box, the numerous styles of dress for
+her baby, and the rest. While dissuading you from engaging in the
+speculation, she is visibly glad to see you investing your money in
+it.
+
+
+FIRST PERIOD.--"Oh, I am the happiest woman on the face of the earth!
+Adolphe has just gone into the most splendid venture. I am going to
+have a carriage, oh! ever so much handsomer than Madame de
+Fischtaminel's; hers is out of fashion. Mine will have curtains with
+fringes. My horses will be mouse-colored, hers are bay,--they are as
+common as coppers."
+
+"What is this venture, madame?"
+
+"Oh, it's splendid--the stock is going up; he explained it to me
+before he went into it, for Adolphe never does anything without
+consulting me."
+
+"You are very fortunate."
+
+"Marriage would be intolerable without entire confidence, and Adolphe
+tells me everything."
+
+Thus, Adolphe, you are the best husband in Paris, you are adorable,
+you are a man of genius, you are all heart, an angel. You are petted
+to an uncomfortable degree. You bless the marriage tie. Caroline
+extols men, calling them "kings of creation," women were made for
+them, man is naturally generous, and matrimony is a delightful
+institution.
+
+For three, sometimes six, months, Caroline executes the most brilliant
+concertos and solos upon this delicious theme: "I shall be rich! I
+shall have a thousand a month for my dress: I am going to keep my
+carriage!"
+
+If your son is alluded to, it is merely to ask about the school to
+which he shall be sent.
+
+
+SECOND PERIOD.--"Well, dear, how is your business getting on?--What
+has become of it?--How about that speculation which was to give me a
+carriage, and other things?--It is high time that affair should come
+to something.--It is a good while cooking.--When _will_ it begin to
+pay? Is the stock going up?--There's nobody like you for hitting upon
+ventures that never amount to anything."
+
+One day she says to you, "Is there really an affair?"
+
+If you mention it eight or ten months after, she returns:
+
+"Ah! Then there really _is_ an affair!"
+
+This woman, whom you thought dull, begins to show signs of
+extraordinary wit, when her object is to make fun of you. During this
+period, Caroline maintains a compromising silence when people speak of
+you, or else she speaks disparagingly of men in general: "Men are not
+what they seem: to find them out you must try them." "Marriage has its
+good and its bad points." "Men never can finish anything."
+
+
+THIRD PERIOD.--_Catastrophe_.--This magnificent affair which was to
+yield five hundred per cent, in which the most cautious, the best
+informed persons took part--peers, deputies, bankers--all of them
+Knights of the Legion of Honor--this venture has been obliged to
+liquidate! The most sanguine expect to get ten per cent of their
+capital back. You are discouraged.
+
+Caroline has often said to you, "Adolphe, what is the matter? Adolphe,
+there is something wrong."
+
+Finally, you acquaint Caroline with the fatal result: she begins by
+consoling you.
+
+"One hundred thousand francs lost! We shall have to practice the
+strictest economy," you imprudently add.
+
+The jesuitism of woman bursts out at this word "economy." It sets fire
+to the magazine.
+
+"Ah! that's what comes of speculating! How is it that _you, ordinarily
+so prudent_, could go and risk a hundred thousand francs! _You know I
+was against it from the beginning!_ BUT YOU WOULD NOT LISTEN TO ME!"
+
+Upon this, the discussion grows bitter.
+
+You are good for nothing--you have no business capacity; women alone
+take clear views of things. You have risked your children's bread,
+though she tried to dissuade you from it.--You cannot say it was for
+her. Thank God, she has nothing to reproach herself with. A hundred
+times a month she alludes to your disaster: "If my husband had not
+thrown away his money in such and such a scheme, I could have had this
+and that." "The next time you want to go into an affair, perhaps
+you'll consult me!" Adolphe is accused and convicted of having
+foolishly lost one hundred thousand francs, without an object in view,
+like a dolt, and without having consulted his wife. Caroline advises
+her friends not to marry. She complains of the incapacity of men who
+squander the fortunes of their wives. Caroline is vindictive, she
+makes herself generally disagreeable. Pity Adolphe! Lament, ye
+husbands! O bachelors, rejoice and be exceeding glad!
+
+
+
+                        MEMORIES AND REGRETS.
+
+After several years of wedded life, your love has become so placid,
+that Caroline sometimes tries, in the evening, to wake you up by
+various little coquettish phrases. There is about you a certain
+calmness and tranquillity which always exasperates a lawful wife.
+Women see in it a sort of insolence: they look upon the indifference
+of happiness as the fatuity of confidence, for of course they never
+imagine their inestimable equalities can be regarded with disdain:
+their virtue is therefore enraged at being so cordially trusted in.
+
+In this situation, which is what every couple must come to, and which
+both husband and wife must expect, no husband dares confess that the
+constant repetition of the same dish has become wearisome; but his
+appetite certainly requires the condiments of dress, the ideas excited
+by absence, the stimulus of an imaginary rivalry.
+
+In short, at this period, you walk very comfortably with your wife on
+your arm, without pressing hers against your heart with the solicitous
+and watchful cohesion of a miser grasping his treasure. You gaze
+carelessly round upon the curiosities in the street, leading your wife
+in a loose and distracted way, as if you were towing a Norman scow.
+Come now, be frank! If, on passing your wife, an admirer were gently
+to press her, accidentally or purposely, would you have the slightest
+desire to discover his motives? Besides, you say, no woman would seek
+to bring about a quarrel for such a trifle. Confess this, too, that
+the expression "such a trifle" is exceedingly flattering to both of
+you.
+
+You are in this position, but you have as yet proceeded no farther.
+Still, you have a horrible thought which you bury in the depths of
+your heart and conscience: Caroline has not come up to your
+expectations. Caroline has imperfections, which, during the high tides
+of the honey-moon, were concealed under the water, but which the ebb
+of the gall-moon has laid bare. You have several times run against
+these breakers, your hopes have been often shipwrecked upon them, more
+than once your desires--those of a young marrying man--(where, alas,
+is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces
+there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the
+marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression,
+as you talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at
+Caroline, "_She is not what I took her to be!_"
+
+Some evening, at a ball, in society, at a friend's house, no matter
+where, you meet a sublime young woman, beautiful, intellectual and
+kind: with a soul, oh! a soul of celestial purity, and of miraculous
+beauty! Yes, there is that unchangeable oval cut of face, those
+features which time will never impair, that graceful and thoughtful
+brow. The unknown is rich, well-educated, of noble birth: she will
+always be what she should be, she knows when to shine, when to remain
+in the background: she appears in all her glory and power, the being
+you have dreamed of, your wife that should have been, she whom you
+feel you could love forever. She would always have flattered your
+little vanities, she would understand and admirably serve your
+interests. She is tender and gay, too, this young lady who reawakens
+all your better feelings, who rekindles your slumbering desires.
+
+You look at Caroline with gloomy despair, and here are the
+phantom-like thoughts which tap, with wings of a bat, the beak of
+a vulture, the body of a death's-head moth, upon the walls of the
+palace in which, enkindled by desire, glows your brain like a lamp
+of gold:
+
+
+FIRST STANZA. Ah, dear me, why did I get married? Fatal idea! I
+allowed myself to be caught by a small amount of cash. And is it
+really over? Cannot I have another wife? Ah, the Turks manage things
+better! It is plain enough that the author of the Koran lived in the
+desert!
+
+SECOND STANZA. My wife is sick, she sometimes coughs in the morning.
+If it is the design of Providence to remove her from the world, let it
+be speedily done for her sake and for mine. The angel has lived long
+enough.
+
+THIRD STANZA. I am a monster! Caroline is the mother of my children!
+
+
+You go home, that night, in a carriage with your wife: you think her
+perfectly horrible: she speaks to you, but you answer in
+monosyllables. She says, "What is the matter?" and you answer,
+"Nothing." She coughs, you advise her to see the doctor in the
+morning. Medicine has its hazards.
+
+
+FOURTH STANZA. I have been told that a physician, poorly paid by the
+heirs of his deceased patient, imprudently exclaimed, "What! they cut
+down my bill, when they owe me forty thousand a year." _I_ would not
+haggle over fees!
+
+
+"Caroline," you say to her aloud, "you must take care of yourself;
+cross your shawl, be prudent, my darling angel."
+
+Your wife is delighted with you since you seem to take such an
+interest in her. While she is preparing to retire, you lie stretched
+out upon the sofa. You contemplate the divine apparition which opens
+to you the ivory portals of your castles in the air. Delicious
+ecstasy! 'Tis the sublime young woman that you see before you! She is
+as white as the sail of the treasure-laden galleon as it enters the
+harbor of Cadiz. Your wife, happy in your admiration, now understands
+your former taciturnity. You still see, with closed eyes, the sublime
+young woman; she is the burden of your thoughts, and you say aloud:
+
+
+FIFTH AND LAST STANZA. Divine! Adorable! Can there be another woman
+like her? Rose of Night! Column of ivory! Celestial maiden! Morning
+and Evening Star!
+
+
+Everyone says his prayers; you have said four.
+
+The next morning, your wife is delightful, she coughs no more, she has
+no need of a doctor; if she dies, it will be of good health; you
+launched four maledictions upon her, in the name of your sublime young
+woman, and four times she blessed you for it. Caroline does not know
+that in the depths of your heart there wriggles a little red fish like
+a crocodile, concealed beneath conjugal love like the other would be
+hid in a basin.
+
+A few days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal
+terms to Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her,
+and Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you
+and says she never was happier.
+
+You rush out in a rage, you are beside yourself, and are glad to meet
+a friend, that you may work off your bile.
+
+"Don't you ever marry, George; it's better to see your heirs carrying
+away your furniture while the death-rattle is in your throat, better
+to go through an agony of two hours without a drop to cool your
+tongue, better to be assassinated by inquiries about your will by a
+nurse like the one in Henry Monnier's terrible picture of a
+'Bachelor's Last Moments!' Never marry under any pretext!"
+
+Fortunately you see the sublime young woman no more. You are saved
+from the tortures to which a criminal passion was leading you. You
+fall back again into the purgatory of your married bliss; but you
+begin to be attentive to Madame de Fischtaminel, with whom you were
+dreadfully in love, without being able to get near her, while you were
+a bachelor.
+
+
+
+                            OBSERVATIONS.
+
+When you have arrived at this point in the latitude or longitude of
+the matrimonial ocean, there appears a slight chronic, intermittent
+affection, not unlike the toothache. Here, I see, you stop me to ask,
+"How are we to find the longitude in this sea? When can a husband be
+sure he has attained this nautical point? And can the danger be
+avoided?"
+
+You may arrive at this point, look you, as easily after ten months as
+ten years of wedlock; it depends upon the speed of the vessel, its
+style of rigging, upon the trade winds, the force of the currents, and
+especially upon the composition of the crew. You have this advantage
+over the mariner, that he has but one method of calculating his
+position, while husbands have at least a thousand of reckoning theirs.
+
+
+EXAMPLE: Caroline, your late darling, your late treasure, who is now
+merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while
+walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to
+take your arm at all;
+
+Or else she notices men, older or younger as the case may be, dressed
+with more or less taste, whereas she formerly saw no one whatever,
+though the sidewalk was black with hats and traveled by more boots
+than slippers;
+
+Or, when you come home, she says, "It's no one but my husband:"
+instead of saying "Ah! 'tis Adolphe!" as she used to say with a
+gesture, a look, an accent which caused her admirers to think, "Well,
+here's a happy woman at last!" This last exclamation of a woman is
+suitable for two eras,--first, while she is sincere; second, while she
+is hypocritical, with her "Ah! 'tis Adolphe!" When she exclaims, "It's
+only my husband," she no longer deigns to play a part.
+
+Or, if you come home somewhat late--at eleven, or at midnight--you
+find her--snoring! Odious symptom!
+
+Or else she puts on her stockings in your presence. Among English
+couples, this never happens but once in a lady's married life; the
+next day she leaves for the Continent with some captain or other, and
+no longer thinks of putting on her stockings at all.
+
+Or else--but let us stop here.
+
+This is intended for the use of mariners and husbands who are
+weatherwise.
+
+
+
+                       THE MATRIMONIAL GADFLY.
+
+Very well! In this degree of longitude, not far from a tropical sign
+upon the name of which good taste forbids us to make a jest at once
+coarse and unworthy of this thoughtful work, a horrible little
+annoyance appears, ingeniously called the Matrimonial Gadfly, the most
+provoking of all gnats, mosquitoes, blood-suckers, fleas and
+scorpions, for no net was ever yet invented that could keep it off.
+The gadfly does not immediately sting you; it begins by buzzing in
+your ears, and _you do not at first know what it is_.
+
+Thus, apropos of nothing, in the most natural way in the world,
+Caroline says: "Madame Deschars had a lovely dress on, yesterday."
+
+"She is a woman of taste," returns Adolphe, though he is far from
+thinking so.
+
+"Her husband gave it to her," resumes Caroline, with a shrug of her
+shoulders.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Yes, a four hundred franc dress! It's the very finest quality of
+velvet."
+
+"Four hundred francs!" cries Adolphe, striking the attitude of the
+apostle Thomas.
+
+"But then there are two extra breadths and enough for a high waist!"
+
+"Monsieur Deschars does things on a grand scale," replies Adolphe,
+taking refuge in a jest.
+
+"All men don't pay such attentions to their wives," says Caroline,
+curtly.
+
+"What attentions?"
+
+"Why, Adolphe, thinking of extra breadths and of a waist to make the
+dress good again, when it is no longer fit to be worn low in the
+neck."
+
+Adolphe says to himself, "Caroline wants a dress."
+
+Poor man!
+
+Some time afterward, Monsieur Deschars furnishes his wife's chamber
+anew. Then he has his wife's diamonds set in the prevailing fashion.
+Monsieur Deschars never goes out without his wife, and never allows
+his wife to go out without offering her his arm.
+
+If you bring Caroline anything, no matter what, it is never equal to
+what Monsieur Deschars has done. If you allow yourself the slightest
+gesture or expression a little livelier than usual, if you speak a
+little bit loud, you hear the hissing and viper-like remark:
+
+"You wouldn't see Monsieur Deschars behaving like this! Why don't you
+take Monsieur Deschars for a model?"
+
+In short, this idiotic Monsieur Deschars is forever looming up in your
+household on every conceivable occasion.
+
+The expression--"Do you suppose Monsieur Deschars ever allows himself"
+--is a sword of Damocles, or what is worse, a Damocles pin: and your
+self-love is the cushion into which your wife is constantly sticking
+it, pulling it out, and sticking it in again, under a variety of
+unforeseen pretexts, at the same time employing the most winning terms
+of endearment, and with the most agreeable little ways.
+
+Adolphe, stung till he finds himself tattooed, finally does what is
+done by police authorities, by officers of government, by military
+tacticians. He casts his eye on Madame de Fischtaminel, who is still
+young, elegant and a little bit coquettish, and places her (this had
+been the rascal's intention for some time) like a blister upon
+Caroline's extremely ticklish skin.
+
+O you, who often exclaim, "I don't know what is the matter with my
+wife!" you will kiss this page of transcendent philosophy, for you
+will find in it _the key to every woman's character_! But as to
+knowing women as well as I know them, it will not be knowing them
+much; they don't know themselves! In fact, as you well know, God was
+Himself mistaken in the only one that He attempted to manage and to
+whose manufacture He had given personal attention.
+
+Caroline is very willing to sting Adolphe at all hours, but this
+privilege of letting a wasp off now and then upon one's consort (the
+legal term), is exclusively reserved to the wife. Adolphe is a monster
+if he starts off a single fly at Caroline. On her part, it is a
+delicious joke, a new jest to enliven their married life, and one
+dictated by the purest intentions; while on Adolphe's part, it is a
+piece of cruelty worthy a Carib, a disregard of his wife's heart, and
+a deliberate plan to give her pain. But that is nothing.
+
+"So you are really in love with Madame de Fischtaminel?" Caroline
+asks. "What is there so seductive in the mind or the manners of the
+spider?"
+
+"Why, Caroline--"
+
+"Oh, don't undertake to deny your eccentric taste," she returns,
+checking a negation on Adolphe's lips. "I have long seen that you
+prefer that Maypole [Madame de Fischtaminel is thin] to me. Very well!
+go on; you will soon see the difference."
+
+Do you understand? You cannot suspect Caroline of the slightest
+inclination for Monsieur Deschars, a low, fat, red-faced man, formerly
+a notary, while you are in love with Madame de Fischtaminel! Then
+Caroline, the Caroline whose simplicity caused you such agony,
+Caroline who has become familiar with society, Caroline becomes acute
+and witty: you have two gadflies instead of one.
+
+The next day she asks you, with a charming air of interest, "How are
+you coming on with Madame de Fischtaminel?"
+
+When you go out, she says: "Go and drink something calming, my dear."
+For, in their anger with a rival, all women, duchesses even, will use
+invectives, and even venture into the domain of Billingsgate; they
+make an offensive weapon of anything and everything.
+
+To try to convince Caroline that she is mistaken and that you are
+indifferent to Madame de Fischtaminel, would cost you dear. This is a
+blunder that no sensible man commits; he would lose his power and
+spike his own guns.
+
+Oh! Adolphe, you have arrived unfortunately at that season so
+ingeniously called the _Indian Summer of Marriage_.
+
+You must now--pleasing task!--win your wife, your Caroline, over
+again, seize her by the waist again, and become the best of husbands
+by trying to guess at things to please her, so as to act according to
+her whims instead of according to your will. This is the whole
+question henceforth.
+
+
+
+                             HARD LABOR.
+
+Let us admit this, which, in our opinion, is a truism made as good as
+new:
+
+
+Axiom.--Most men have some of the wit required by a difficult
+position, when they have not the whole of it.
+
+
+As for those husbands who are not up to their situation, it is
+impossible to consider their case here: without any struggle whatever
+they simply enter the numerous class of the _Resigned_.
+
+Adolphe says to himself: "Women are children: offer them a lump of
+sugar, and you will easily get them to dance all the dances that
+greedy children dance; but you must always have a sugar plum in hand,
+hold it up pretty high, and--take care that their fancy for sweetmeats
+does not leave them. Parisian women--and Caroline is one--are very
+vain, and as for their voracity--don't speak of it. Now you cannot
+govern men and make friends of them, unless you work upon them through
+their vices, and flatter their passions: my wife is mine!"
+
+Some days afterward, during which Adolphe has been unusually attentive
+to his wife, he discourses to her as follows:
+
+"Caroline, dear, suppose we have a bit of fun: you'll put on your new
+gown--the one like Madame Deschars!--and we'll go to see a farce at
+the Varieties."
+
+This kind of proposition always puts a wife in the best possible
+humor. So away you go! Adolphe has ordered a dainty little dinner for
+two, at Borrel's _Rocher de Cancale_.
+
+"As we are going to the Varieties, suppose we dine at the tavern,"
+exclaims Adolphe, on the boulevard, with the air of a man suddenly
+struck by a generous idea.
+
+Caroline, delighted with this appearance of good fortune, enters a
+little parlor where she finds the cloth laid and that neat little
+service set, which Borrel places at the disposal of those who are rich
+enough to pay for the quarters intended for the great ones of the
+earth, who make themselves small for an hour.
+
+Women eat little at a formal dinner: their concealed harness hampers
+them, they are laced tightly, and they are in the presence of women
+whose eyes and whose tongues are equally to be dreaded. They prefer
+fancy eating to good eating, then: they will suck a lobster's claw,
+swallow a quail or two, punish a woodcock's wing, beginning with a bit
+of fresh fish, flavored by one of those sauces which are the glory of
+French cooking. France is everywhere sovereign in matters of taste: in
+painting, fashions, and the like. Gravy is the triumph of taste, in
+cookery. So that grisettes, shopkeepers' wives and duchesses are
+delighted with a tasty little dinner washed down with the choicest
+wines, of which, however, they drink but little, the whole concluded
+by fruit such as can only be had at Paris; and especially delighted
+when they go to the theatre to digest the little dinner, and listen,
+in a comfortable box, to the nonsense uttered upon the stage, and to
+that whispered in their ears to explain it. But then the bill of the
+restaurant is one hundred francs, the box costs thirty, the carriage,
+dress, gloves, bouquet, as much more. This gallantry amounts to the
+sum of one hundred and sixty francs, which is hard upon four thousand
+francs a month, if you go often to the Comic, the Italian, or the
+Grand, Opera. Four thousand francs a month is the interest of a
+capital of two millions. But then the honor of being a husband is
+fully worth the price!
+
+Caroline tells her friends things which she thinks exceedingly
+flattering, but which cause a sagacious husband to make a wry face.
+
+"Adolphe has been delightful for some time past. I don't know what I
+have done to deserve so much attention, but he overpowers me. He gives
+value to everything by those delicate ways which have such an effect
+upon us women. After taking me Monday to the _Rocher de Cancale_ to
+dine, he declared that Very was as good a cook as Borrel, and he gave
+me the little party of pleasure that I told you of all over again,
+presenting me at dessert with a ticket for the opera. They sang
+'William Tell,' which, you know, is my craze."
+
+"You are lucky indeed," returns Madame Deschars with evident jealousy.
+
+"Still, a wife who discharges all her duties, deserves such luck, it
+seems to me."
+
+When this terrible sentiment falls from the lips of a married woman,
+it is clear that she _does her duty_, after the manner of school-boys,
+for the reward she expects. At school, a prize is the object: in
+marriage, a shawl or a piece of jewelry. No more love, then!
+
+"As for me,"--Madame Deschars is piqued--"I am reasonable. Deschars
+committed such follies once, but I put a stop to it. You see, my dear,
+we have two children, and I confess that one or two hundred francs are
+quite a consideration for me, as the mother of a family."
+
+"Dear me, madame," says Madame de Fischtaminel, "it's better that our
+husbands should have cosy little times with us than with--"
+
+"Deschars!--" suddenly puts in Madame Deschars, as she gets up and
+says good-bye.
+
+The individual known as Deschars (a man nullified by his wife) does
+not hear the end of the sentence, by which he might have learned that
+a man may spend his money with other women.
+
+Caroline, flattered in every one of her vanities, abandons herself to
+the pleasures of pride and high living, two delicious capital sins.
+Adolphe is gaining ground again, but alas! (this reflection is worth a
+whole sermon in Lent) sin, like all pleasure, contains a spur. Vice is
+like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate
+it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries. With Vice a
+man's course must always be crescendo!--and forever.
+
+
+Axiom.--Vice, Courtiers, Misfortune and Love, care only for the
+PRESENT.
+
+
+At the end of a period of time difficult to determine, Caroline looks
+in the glass, at dessert, and notices two or three pimples blooming
+upon her cheeks, and upon the sides, lately so pure, of her nose. She
+is out of humor at the theatre, and you do not know why, you, so
+proudly striking an attitude in your cravat, you, displaying your
+figure to the best advantage, as a complacent man should.
+
+A few days after, the dressmaker arrives. She tries on a gown, she
+exerts all her strength, but cannot make the hooks and eyes meet. The
+waiting maid is called. After a two horse-power pull, a regular
+thirteenth labor of Hercules, a hiatus of two inches manifests itself.
+The inexorable dressmaker cannot conceal from Caroline the fact that
+her form is altered. Caroline, the aerial Caroline, threatens to
+become like Madame Deschars. In vulgar language, she is getting stout.
+The maid leaves her in a state of consternation.
+
+"What! am I to have, like that fat Madame Deschars, cascades of flesh
+a la Rubens! That Adolphe is an awful scoundrel. Oh, I see, he wants
+to make me an old mother Gigogne, and destroy my powers of
+fascination!"
+
+Thenceforward Caroline is willing to go to the opera, she accepts two
+seats in a box, but she considers it very distingue to eat sparingly,
+and declines the dainty dinners of her husband.
+
+"My dear," she says, "a well-bred woman should not go often to these
+places; you may go once for a joke; but as for making a habitual thing
+of it--fie, for shame!"
+
+Borrel and Very, those masters of the art, lose a thousand francs a
+day by not having a private entrance for carriages. If a coach could
+glide under an archway, and go out by another door, after leaving its
+fair occupants on the threshold of an elegant staircase, how many of
+them would bring the landlord fine, rich, solid old fellows for
+customers!
+
+
+Axiom.--Vanity is the death of good living.
+
+
+Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can
+tell the cause of her disgust. Pray excuse Adolphe! A husband is not
+the devil.
+
+Fully one-third of the women of Paris are bored by the theatre. Many
+of them are tired to death of music, and go to the opera for the
+singers merely, or rather to notice the difference between them in
+point of execution. What supports the theatre is this: the women are a
+spectacle before and after the play. Vanity alone will pay the
+exorbitant price of forty francs for three hours of questionable
+pleasure, in a bad atmosphere and at great expense, without counting
+the colds caught in going out. But to exhibit themselves, to see and
+be seen, to be the observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious
+mouthful! as Rabelais would say.
+
+To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must
+be looked at. Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at.
+Caroline is chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women
+who are _not_ with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short.
+Now, as the very slight return she gets from her efforts, her dresses,
+and her attitudes, does not compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue,
+her display and her weariness, it is very soon the same with the
+theatre as it was with the good cheer; high living made her fat, the
+theatre is making her yellow.
+
+Here Adolphe--or any other man in Adolphe's place--resembles a certain
+Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in
+French, corn,--but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don't
+you think so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into
+the sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, "Devil
+take you! Make me suffer again, will you?"
+
+"Upon my word," says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he
+receives from his wife a refusal, "I should like very much to know
+what would please you!"
+
+Caroline looks loftily down upon her husband, and says, after a pause
+worthy of an actress, "I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!"
+
+"'Tis true, I might lay out four thousand francs a month to better
+effect," returns Adolphe.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"With the quarter of that sum, presented to estimable burglars,
+youthful jail-birds and honorable criminals, I might become somebody,
+a Man in the Blue Cloak on a small scale; and then a young woman is
+proud of her husband," Adolphe replies.
+
+This answer is the grave of love, and Caroline takes it in very bad
+part. An explanation follows. This must be classed among the thousand
+pleasantries of the following chapter, the title of which ought to
+make lovers smile as well as husbands. If there are yellow rays of
+light, why should there not be whole days of this extremely
+matrimonial color?
+
+
+
+                            FORCED SMILES.
+
+On your arrival in this latitude, you enjoy numerous little scenes,
+which, in the grand opera of marriage, represent the intermezzos, and
+of which the following is a type:
+
+You are one evening alone after dinner, and you have been so often
+alone already that you feel a desire to say sharp little things to
+each other, like this, for instance:
+
+"Take care, Caroline," says Adolphe, who has not forgotten his many
+vain efforts to please her. "I think your nose has the impertinence to
+redden at home quite well as at the restaurant."
+
+"This is not one of your amiable days!"
+
+
+General Rule.--No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly
+advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
+
+
+"Perhaps it's because you are laced too tight. Women make themselves
+sick that way."
+
+The moment a man utters these words to a woman, no matter whom, that
+woman,--who knows that stays will bend,--seizes her corset by the
+lower end, and bends it out, saying, with Caroline:
+
+"Look, you can get your hand in! I never lace tight."
+
+"Then it must be your stomach."
+
+"What has the stomach got to do with the nose?"
+
+"The stomach is a centre which communicates with all the organs."
+
+"So the nose is an organ, is it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Your organ is doing you a poor service at this moment." She raises
+her eyes and shrugs her shoulders. "Come, Adolphe, what have I done?"
+
+"Nothing. I'm only joking, and I am unfortunate enough not to please
+you," returns Adolphe, smiling.
+
+"My misfortune is being your wife! Oh, why am I not somebody else's!"
+
+"That's what _I_ say!"
+
+"If I were, and if I had the innocence to say to you, like a coquette
+who wishes to know how far she has got with a man, 'the redness of my
+nose really gives me anxiety,' you would look at me in the glass with
+all the affectations of an ape, and would reply, 'O madame, you do
+yourself an injustice; in the first place, nobody sees it: besides, it
+harmonizes with your complexion; then again we are all so after
+dinner!' and from this you would go on to flatter me. Do I ever tell
+you that you are growing fat, that you are getting the color of a
+stone-cutter, and that I prefer thin and pale men?"
+
+They say in London, "Don't touch the axe!" In France we ought to say,
+"Don't touch a woman's nose."
+
+"And all this about a little extra natural vermilion!" exclaims
+Adolphe. "Complain about it to Providence, whose office it is to put a
+little more color in one place than another, not to me, who loves you,
+who desires you to be perfect, and who merely says to you, take care!"
+
+"You love me too much, then, for you've been trying, for some time
+past, to find disagreeable things to say to me. You want to run me
+down under the pretext of making me perfect--people said I _was_
+perfect, five years ago."
+
+"I think you are better than perfect, you are stunning!"
+
+"With too much vermilion?"
+
+Adolphe, who sees the atmosphere of the north pole upon his wife's
+face, sits down upon a chair by her side. Caroline, unable decently to
+go away, gives her gown a sort of flip on one side, as if to produce a
+separation. This motion is performed by some women with a provoking
+impertinence: but it has two significations; it is, as whist players
+would say, either a signal _for trumps_ or a _renounce_. At this time,
+Caroline renounces.
+
+"What is the matter?" says Adolphe.
+
+"Will you have a glass of sugar and water?" asks Caroline, busying
+herself about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain. Perhaps you
+would like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water? The doctor spoke
+of it as an excellent remedy."
+
+"How anxious you are about my stomach!"
+
+"It's a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act
+upon your heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue."
+
+Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects
+upon the acuteness which his wife is acquiring: he sees her daily
+gaining in strength and in acrimony: she is getting to display an art
+in vexation and a military capacity for disputation which reminds him
+of Charles XII and the Russians. Caroline, during this time, is busy
+with an alarming piece of mimicry: she looks as if she were going to
+faint.
+
+"Are you sick?" asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place
+where women always have us.
+
+"It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back
+and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it's just like you:
+you are always in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men
+are more or less cracked."
+
+Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there
+pensive: marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with
+its crop of nettles and mullen stalks.
+
+"What, are you pouting?" asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour's
+observation of her husband's countenance.
+
+"No, I am meditating," replied Adolphe.
+
+"Oh, what an infernal temper you've got!" she returns, with a shrug of
+the shoulders. "Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape
+and your digestion? Don't you see that I was only paying you back for
+your vermilion? You'll make me think that men are as vain as women.
+[Adolphe remains frigid.] It is really quite kind in you to take our
+qualities. [Profound silence.] I made a joke and you got angry [she
+looks at Adolphe], for you are angry. I am not like you: I cannot bear
+the idea of having given you pain! Nevertheless, it's an idea that a
+man never would have had, that of attributing your impertinence to
+something wrong in your digestion. It's not my Dolph, it's his stomach
+that was bold enough to speak. I did not know you were a
+ventriloquist, that's all."
+
+Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles: Adolphe is as stiff as if he
+were glued.
+
+"No, he won't laugh! And, in your jargon, you call this having
+character. Oh, how much better we are!"
+
+She goes and sits down in Adolphe's lap, and Adolphe cannot help
+smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has
+been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon of it.
+
+"Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong," she says. "Why pout?
+Dear me, I like you just as you are: in my eyes you are as slender as
+when I married you, and slenderer perhaps."
+
+"Caroline, when people get to deceive themselves in these little
+matters, where one makes concessions and the other does not get angry,
+do you know what it means?"
+
+"What does it mean?" asks Caroline, alarmed at Adolphe's dramatic
+attitude.
+
+"That they love each other less."
+
+"Oh! you monster, I understand you: you were angry so as to make me
+believe you loved me!"
+
+Alas! let us confess it, Adolphe tells the truth in the only way he
+can--by a laugh.
+
+"Why give me pain?" she says. "If I am wrong in anything, isn't it
+better to tell me of it kindly, than brutally to say [here she raises
+her voice], 'Your nose is getting red!' No, that is not right! To
+please you, I will use an expression of the fair Fischtaminel, 'It's
+not the act of a gentleman!'"
+
+Adolphe laughs and pays the expenses of the reconciliation; but
+instead of discovering therein what will please Caroline and what will
+attach her to him, he finds out what attaches him to her.
+
+
+
+                       NOSOGRAPHY OF THE VILLA.
+
+Is it advantageous for a man not to know what will please his wife
+after their marriage? Some women (this still occurs in the country)
+are innocent enough to tell promptly what they want and what they
+like. But in Paris, nearly every woman feels a kind of enjoyment in
+seeing a man wistfully obedient to her heart, her desires, her
+caprices--three expressions for the same thing!--and anxiously going
+round and round, half crazy and desperate, like a dog that has lost
+his master.
+
+They call this _being loved_, poor things! And a good many of them say
+to themselves, as did Caroline, "How will he manage?"
+
+Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and
+excellent Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the
+couple known as Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife
+inaugurate a delightful country house. It is an opportunity that the
+Deschars have seized upon, the folly of a man of letters, a charming
+villa upon which he lavished one hundred thousand francs and which has
+been sold at auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a new dress to
+air, or a hat with a weeping willow plume--things which a tilbury will
+set off to a charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother. The
+servants have a holiday. The youthful pair start beneath the smile of
+a blue sky, flecked with milk-while clouds merely to heighten the
+effect. They breathe the pure air, through which trots the heavy
+Norman horse, animated by the influence of spring. They soon reach
+Marnes, beyond Ville d'Avray, where the Deschars are spreading
+themselves in a villa copied from one at Florence, and surrounded by
+Swiss meadows, though without all the objectionable features of the
+Alps.
+
+"Dear me! what a delightful thing a country house like this must be!"
+exclaims Caroline, as she walks in the admirable wood that skirts
+Marnes and Ville d'Avray. "It makes your eyes as happy as if they had
+a heart in them."
+
+Caroline, having no one to take but Adolphe, takes Adolphe, who
+becomes her Adolphe again. And then you should see her run about like
+a fawn, and act once more the sweet, pretty, innocent, adorable
+school-girl that she was! Her braids come down! She takes off her
+bonnet, and holds it by the strings! She is young, pink and white
+again. Her eyes smile, her mouth is a pomegranate endowed with
+sensibility, with a sensibility which seems quite fresh.
+
+"So a country house would please you very much, would it, darling?"
+says Adolphe, clasping Caroline round the waist, and noticing that she
+leans upon him as if to show the flexibility of her form.
+
+"What, will you be such a love as to buy me one? But remember, no
+extravagance! Seize an opportunity like the Deschars."
+
+"To please you and to find out what is likely to give you pleasure,
+such is the constant study of your own Dolph."
+
+They are alone, at liberty to call each other their little names of
+endearment, and run over the whole list of their secret caresses.
+
+"Does he really want to please his little girly?" says Caroline,
+resting her head on the shoulder of Adolphe, who kisses her forehead,
+saying to himself, "Gad! I've got her now!"
+
+
+Axiom.--When a husband and a wife have got each other, the devil only
+knows which has got the other.
+
+
+The young couple are captivating, whereupon the stout Madame Deschars
+gives utterance to a remark somewhat equivocal for her, usually so
+stern, prudish and devout.
+
+"Country air has one excellent property: it makes husbands very
+amiable."
+
+M. Deschars points out an opportunity for Adolphe to seize. A house is
+to be sold at Ville d'Avray, for a song, of course. Now, the country
+house is a weakness peculiar to the inhabitant of Paris. This
+weakness, or disease, has its course and its cure. Adolphe is a
+husband, but not a doctor. He buys the house and takes possession with
+Caroline, who has become once more his Caroline, his Carola, his fawn,
+his treasure, his girly girl.
+
+The following alarming symptoms now succeed each other with frightful
+rapidity: a cup of milk, baptized, costs five sous; when it is
+anhydrous, as the chemists say, ten sous. Meat costs more at Sevres
+than at Paris, if you carefully examine the qualities. Fruit cannot be
+had at any price. A fine pear costs more in the country than in the
+(anhydrous!) garden that blooms in Chevet's window.
+
+Before being able to raise fruit for oneself, from a Swiss meadow
+measuring two square yards, surrounded by a few green trees which look
+as if they were borrowed from the scenic illusions of a theatre, the
+most rural authorities, being consulted on the point, declare that you
+must spend a great deal of money, and--wait five years! Vegetables
+dash out of the husbandman's garden to reappear at the city market.
+Madame Deschars, who possesses a gate-keeper that is at the same time
+a gardener, confesses that the vegetables raised on her land, beneath
+her glass frames, by dint of compost and top-soil, cost her twice as
+much as those she used to buy at Paris, of a woman who had rent and
+taxes to pay, and whose husband was an elector. Despite the efforts
+and pledges of the gate-keeper-gardener, early peas and things at
+Paris are a month in advance of those in the country.
+
+From eight in the evening to eleven our couple don't know what to do,
+on account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and
+the questions of self-love which arise out of the merest trifles.
+
+Monsieur Deschars remarks, with that profound knowledge of figures
+which distinguishes the ex-notary, that the cost of going to Paris and
+back, added to the interest of the cost of his villa, to the taxes,
+wages of the gate-keeper and his wife, are equal to a rent of three
+thousand francs a year. He does not see how he, an ex-notary, allowed
+himself to be so caught! For he has often drawn up leases of chateaux
+with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a year.
+
+It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a
+country house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated
+nuisance.
+
+"I don't see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has
+to be watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it," says
+Caroline.
+
+"The way to get along in the country," replies a little retired
+grocer, "is to stay there, to live there, to become country-folks, and
+then everything changes."
+
+On going home, Caroline says to her poor Adolphe, "What an idea that
+was of yours, to buy a country house! The best way to do about the
+country is to go there on visits to other people."
+
+Adolphe remembers an English proverb, which says, "Don't have a
+newspaper or a country seat of your own: there are plenty of idiots
+who will have them for you."
+
+"Bah!" returns Adolph, who was enlightened once for all upon women's
+logic by the Matrimonial Gadfly, "you are right: but then you know the
+baby is in splendid health, here."
+
+Though Adolphe has become prudent, this reply awakens Caroline's
+susceptibilities. A mother is very willing to think exclusively of her
+child, but she does not want him to be preferred to herself. She is
+silent; the next day, she is tired to death of the country. Adolphe
+being absent on business, she waits for him from five o'clock to
+seven, and goes alone with little Charles to the coach office. She
+talks for three-quarters of an hour of her anxieties. She was afraid
+to go from the house to the office. Is it proper for a young woman to
+be left alone, so? She cannot support such an existence.
+
+The country house now creates a very peculiar phase; one which
+deserves a chapter to itself.
+
+
+
+                       TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE.
+
+Axiom.--There are parentheses in worry.
+
+
+EXAMPLE--A great deal of evil has been said of the stitch in the side;
+but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the
+pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving,
+like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant,
+which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife's
+timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once
+devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season has its
+peculiar vexation.
+
+Caroline, after a week spent in taking note of her husband's absences,
+perceives that he passes seven hours a day away from her. At last,
+Adolphe, who comes home as gay as an actor who has been applauded,
+observes a slight coating of hoar frost upon Caroline's visage. After
+making sure that the coldness of her manner has been observed,
+Caroline puts on a counterfeit air of interest,--the well-known
+expression of which possesses the gift of making a man inwardly
+swear,--and says: "You must have had a good deal of business to-day,
+dear?"
+
+"Oh, lots!"
+
+"Did you take many cabs?"
+
+"I took seven francs' worth."
+
+"Did you find everybody in?"
+
+"Yes, those with whom I had appointments."
+
+"When did you make appointments with them? The ink in your inkstand is
+dried up; it's like glue; I wanted to write, and spent a whole hour in
+moistening it, and even then only produced a thick mud fit to mark
+bundles with for the East Indies."
+
+Here any and every husband looks suspiciously at his better half.
+
+"It is probable that I wrote them at Paris--"
+
+"What business was it, Adolphe?"
+
+"Why, I thought you knew. Shall I run over the list? First, there's
+Chaumontel's affair--"
+
+"I thought Monsieur Chaumontel was in Switzerland--"
+
+"Yes, but he has representatives, a lawyer--"
+
+"Didn't you do anything else but business?" asks Caroline,
+interrupting Adolphe.
+
+Here she gives him a direct, piercing look, by which she plunges into
+her husband's eyes when he least expects it: a sword in a heart.
+
+"What could I have done? Made a little counterfeit money, run into
+debt, or embroidered a sampler?"
+
+"Oh, dear, I don't know. And I can't even guess. I am too dull, you've
+told me so a hundred times."
+
+"There you go, and take an expression of endearment in bad part. How
+like a woman that is!"
+
+"Have you concluded anything?" she asks, pretending to take an
+interest in business.
+
+"No, nothing,"
+
+"How many persons have you seen?"
+
+"Eleven, without counting those who were walking in the streets."
+
+"How you answer me!"
+
+"Yes, and how you question me! As if you'd been following the trade of
+an examining judge for the last ten years!"
+
+"Come, tell me all you've done to-day, it will amuse me. You ought to
+try to please me while you are here! I'm dull enough when you leave me
+alone all day long."
+
+"You want me to amuse you by telling you about business?"
+
+"Formerly, you told me everything--"
+
+This friendly little reproach disguises the certitude that Caroline
+wishes to enjoy respecting the serious matters which Adolphe wishes to
+conceal. Adolphe then undertakes to narrate how he has spent the day.
+Caroline affects a sort of distraction sufficiently well played to
+induce the belief that she is not listening.
+
+"But you said just now," she exclaims, at the moment when Adolphe is
+getting into a snarl, "that you had paid seven francs for cabs, and
+you now talk of a hack! You took it by the hour, I suppose? Did you do
+your business in a hack?" she asks, railingly.
+
+"Why should hacks be interdicted?" inquires Adolphe, resuming his
+narrative.
+
+"Haven't you been to Madame de Fischtaminel's?" she asks in the middle
+of an exceedingly involved explanation, insolently taking the words
+out of your mouth.
+
+"Why should I have been there?"
+
+"It would have given me pleasure: I wanted to know whether her parlor
+is done."
+
+"It is."
+
+"Ah! then you _have_ been there?"
+
+"No, her upholsterer told me."
+
+"Do you know her upholsterer?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who is it?"
+
+"Braschon."
+
+"So you met the upholsterer?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You said you only went in carriages."
+
+"Yes, my dear, but to get carriages, you have to go and--"
+
+"Pooh! I dare say Braschon was in the carriage, or the parlor was--one
+or the other is equally probable."
+
+"You won't listen," exclaims Adolphe, who thinks that a long story
+will lull Caroline's suspicions.
+
+"I've listened too much already. You've been lying for the last hour,
+worse than a drummer."
+
+"Well, I'll say nothing more."
+
+"I know enough. I know all I wanted to know. You say you've seen
+lawyers, notaries, bankers: now you haven't seen one of them! Suppose
+I were to go to-morrow to see Madame de Fischtaminel, do you know what
+she would say?"
+
+Here, Caroline watches Adolphe closely: but Adolphe affects a delusive
+calmness, in the middle of which Caroline throws out her line to fish
+up a clue.
+
+"Why, she would say that she had had the pleasure of seeing you! How
+wretched we poor creatures are! We never know what you are doing: here
+we are stuck, chained at home, while you are off at your business!
+Fine business, truly! If I were in your place, I would invent business
+a little bit better put together than yours! Ah, you set us a worthy
+example! They say women are perverse. Who perverted them?"
+
+Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the
+torrent of words. Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up
+by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of
+Rossini's codas:
+
+"Yes, it's a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so
+that you may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause
+of your passion for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in
+the trap! You are right, sir, a villa is very convenient: it serves
+two objects. But the wife can get along with it as well as the
+husband. You may take Paris and its hacks! I'll take the woods and
+their shady groves! Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so let's say
+no more about it."
+
+Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.
+
+"Have you done, dear?" he asks, profiting by an instant in which she
+tosses her head after a pointed interrogation.
+
+Then Caroline concludes thus: "I've had enough of the villa, and I'll
+never set foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you'll keep
+it, probably, and leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least
+amuse myself, while you go with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods.
+What is a _Villa Adolphini_ where you get nauseated if you go six
+times round the lawn? where they've planted chair-legs and
+broom-sticks on the pretext of producing shade? It's like a furnace:
+the walls are six inches thick! and my gentleman is absent seven hours
+a day! That's what a country seat means!"
+
+"Listen to me, Caroline."
+
+"I wouldn't so much mind, if you would only confess what you did
+to-day. You don't know me yet: come, tell me, I won't scold you. I
+pardon you beforehand for all that you've done."
+
+Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make
+one to his wife, replies--"Well, I'll tell you."
+
+"That's a good fellow--I shall love you better."
+
+"I was three hours--"
+
+"I was sure of it--at Madame de Fischtaminel's!"
+
+"No, at our notary's, as he had got me a purchaser; but we could not
+come to terms: he wanted our villa furnished. When I left there, I
+went to Braschon's, to see how much we owed him--"
+
+"You made up this romance while I was talking to you! Look me in the
+face! I'll go to see Braschon to-morrow."
+
+Adolphe cannot restrain a nervous shudder.
+
+"You can't help laughing, you monster!"
+
+"I laugh at your obstinacy."
+
+"I'll go to-morrow to Madame de Fischtaminel's."
+
+"Oh, go wherever you like!"
+
+"What brutality!" says Caroline, rising and going away with her
+handkerchief at her eyes.
+
+The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become
+a diabolical invention of Adolphe's, a trap into which the fawn has
+fallen.
+
+Since Adolphe's discovery that it is impossible to reason with
+Caroline, he lets her say whatever she pleases.
+
+Two months after, he sells the villa which cost him twenty-two
+thousand francs for seven thousand! But he gains this by the
+adventure--he finds out that the country is not the thing that
+Caroline wants.
+
+The question is becoming serious. Nature, with its woods, its forests,
+its valleys, the Switzerland of the environs of Paris, the artificial
+rivers, have amused Caroline for barely six months. Adolphe is tempted
+to abdicate and take Caroline's part himself.
+
+
+
+                       A HOUSEHOLD REVOLUTION.
+
+One morning, Adolphe is seized by the triumphant idea of letting
+Caroline find out for herself what she wants. He gives up to her the
+control of the house, saying, "Do as you like." He substitutes the
+constitutional system for the autocratic system, a responsible
+ministry for an absolute conjugal monarchy. This proof of confidence
+--the object of much secret envy--is, to women, a field-marshal's
+baton. Women are then, so to speak, mistresses at home.
+
+After this, nothing, not even the memory of the honey-moon, can be
+compared to Adolphe's happiness for several days. A woman, under such
+circumstances, is all sugar. She is too sweet: she would invent the
+art of petting and cosseting and of coining tender little names, if
+this matrimonial sugar-plummery had not existed ever since the
+Terrestrial Paradise. At the end of the month, Adolphe's condition is
+like that of children towards the close of New Year's week. So
+Caroline is beginning to say, not in words, but in acts, in manner, in
+mimetic expressions: "It's difficult to tell _what_ to do to please a
+man!"
+
+Giving up the helm of the boat to one's wife, is an exceedingly
+ordinary idea, and would hardly deserve the qualification of
+"triumphant," which we have given it at the commencement of this
+chapter, if it were not accompanied by that of taking it back again.
+Adolphe was seduced by a wish, which invariably seizes persons who are
+the prey of misfortune, to know how far an evil will go!--to try how
+much damage fire will do when left to itself, the individual
+possessing, or thinking he possesses, the power to arrest it. This
+curiosity pursues us from the cradle to the grave. Then, after his
+plethora of conjugal felicity, Adolphe, who is treating himself to a
+farce in his own house, goes through the following phases:
+
+
+FIRST EPOCH. Things go on altogether too well. Caroline buys little
+account books to keep a list of her expenses in, she buys a nice
+little piece of furniture to store her money in, she feeds Adolphe
+superbly, she is happy in his approbation, she discovers that very
+many articles are needed in the house. It is her ambition to be an
+incomparable housekeeper. Adolphe, who arrogates to himself the right
+of censorship, no longer finds the slightest suggestion to make.
+
+When he dresses himself, everything is ready to his hands. Not even in
+Armide's garden was more ingenious tenderness displayed than that of
+Caroline. For her phoenix husband, she renews the wax upon his razor
+strap, she substitutes new suspenders for old ones. None of his
+button-holes are ever widowed. His linen is as well cared for as that
+of the confessor of the devotee, all whose sins are venial. His
+stockings are free from holes. At table, his tastes, his caprices
+even, are studied, consulted: he is getting fat! There is ink in his
+inkstand, and the sponge is always moist. He never has occasion to
+say, like Louis XIV, "I came near having to wait!" In short, he hears
+himself continually called _a love of a man_. He is obliged to
+reproach Caroline for neglecting herself: she does not pay sufficient
+attention to her own needs. Of this gentle reproach Caroline takes
+note.
+
+
+SECOND EPOCH. The scene changes, at table. Everything is exceedingly
+dear. Vegetables are beyond one's means. Wood sells as if it came from
+Campeche. Fruit? Oh! as to fruit, princes, bankers and great lords
+alone can eat it. Dessert is a cause of ruin. Adolphe often hears
+Caroline say to Madame Deschars: "How do you manage?" Conferences are
+held in your presence upon the proper way to keep cooks under the
+thumb.
+
+A cook who entered your service without effects, without clothes, and
+without talent, has come to get her wages in a blue merino gown, set
+off by an embroidered neckerchief, her ears embellished with a pair of
+ear-rings enriched with small pearls, her feet clothed in comfortable
+shoes which give you a glimpse of neat cotton stockings. She has two
+trunks full of property, and keeps an account at the savings bank.
+
+Upon this Caroline complains of the bad morals of the lower classes:
+she complains of the education and the knowledge of figures which
+distinguish domestics. From time to time she utters little axioms like
+the following: There are some mistakes you _must_ make!--It's only
+those who do nothing who do everything well.--She has the anxieties
+that belong to power.--Ah! men are fortunate in not having a house to
+keep.--Women bear the burden of the innumerable details.
+
+
+THIRD EPOCH. Caroline, absorbed in the idea that you should eat merely
+to live, treats Adolphe to the delights of a cenobitic table.
+
+Adolphe's stockings are either full of holes or else rough with the
+lichen of hasty mendings, for the day is not long enough for all that
+his wife has to do. He wears suspenders blackened by use. His linen is
+old and gapes like a door-keeper, or like the door itself. At a time
+when Adolphe is in haste to conclude a matter of business, it takes
+him an hour to dress: he has to pick out his garments one by one,
+opening many an article before finding one fit to wear. But Caroline
+is charmingly dressed. She has pretty bonnets, velvet boots,
+mantillas. She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration
+in virtue of this principle: Charity well understood begins at home.
+When Adolphe complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken
+wardrobe and Caroline's splendor, she says, "Why, you reproached me
+with buying nothing for myself!"
+
+The husband and the wife here begin to bandy jests more or less
+acrimonious. One evening Caroline makes herself very agreeable, in
+order to insinuate an avowal of a rather large deficit, just as the
+ministry begins to eulogize the tax-payers, and boast of the wealth of
+the country, when it is preparing to bring forth a bill for an
+additional appropriation. There is this further similitude that both
+are done in the chamber, whether in administration or in housekeeping.
+From this springs the profound truth that the constitutional system is
+infinitely dearer than the monarchical system. For a nation as for a
+household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity,
+of chicanery.
+
+Adolphe, enlightened by his past annoyances, waits for an opportunity
+to explode, and Caroline slumbers in a delusive security.
+
+What starts the quarrel? Do we ever know what electric current
+precipitates the avalanche or decides a revolution? It may result from
+anything or nothing. But finally, Adolphe, after a period to be
+determined in each case by the circumstances of the couple, utters
+this fatal phrase, in the midst of a discussion: "Ah! when I was a
+bachelor!"
+
+Her husband's bachelor life is to a woman what the phrase, "My dear
+deceased," is to a widow's second husband. These two stings produce
+wounds which are never completely healed.
+
+Then Adolphe goes on like General Bonaparte haranguing the Five
+Hundred: "We are on a volcano!--The house no longer has a head, the
+time to come to an understanding has arrived.--You talk of happiness,
+Caroline, but you have compromised, imperiled it by your exactions,
+you have violated the civil code: you have mixed yourself up in the
+discussions of business, and you have invaded the conjugal authority.
+--We must reform our internal affairs."
+
+Caroline does not shout, like the Five Hundred, "Down with the
+dictator!" For people never shout a man down, when they feel that they
+can put him down.
+
+"When I was a bachelor I had none but new stockings! I had a clean
+napkin every day on my plate. The restaurateur only fleeced me of a
+determinate sum. I have given up to you my beloved liberty! What have
+you done with it?"
+
+"Am I then so very wrong, Adolphe, to have sought to spare you
+numerous cares?" says Caroline, taking an attitude before her husband.
+"Take the key of the money-box back,--but do you know what will
+happen? I am ashamed, but you will compel me to go on to the stage to
+get the merest necessaries of life. Is this what you want? Degrade
+your wife, or bring in conflict two contrary, hostile interests--"
+
+Such, for three quarters of the French people is an exact definition
+of marriage.
+
+"Be perfectly easy, dear," resumes Caroline, seating herself in her
+chair like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, "I will never ask you for
+anything. I am not a beggar! I know what I'll do--you don't know me
+yet."
+
+"Well, what will you do?" asks Adolphe; "it seems impossible to joke
+or have an explanation with you women. What will you do?"
+
+"It doesn't concern you at all."
+
+"Excuse me, madame, quite the contrary. Dignity, honor--"
+
+"Oh, have no fear of that, sir. For your sake more than for my own, I
+will keep it a dead secret."
+
+"Come, Caroline, my own Carola, what do you mean to do?"
+
+Caroline darts a viper-like glance at Adolphe, who recoils and
+proceeds to walk up and down the room.
+
+"There now, tell me, what will you do?" he repeats after much too
+prolonged a silence.
+
+"I shall go to work, sir!"
+
+At this sublime declaration, Adolphe executes a movement in retreat,
+detecting a bitter exasperation, and feeling the sharpness of a north
+wind which had never before blown in the matrimonial chamber.
+
+
+
+                      THE ART OF BEING A VICTIM.
+
+On and after the Revolution, our vanquished Caroline adopts an
+infernal system, the effect of which is to make you regret your
+victory every hour. She becomes the opposition! Should Adolphe have
+one more such triumph, he would appear before the Court of Assizes,
+accused of having smothered his wife between two mattresses, like
+Shakespeare's Othello. Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her
+submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates
+Adolphe with a "Just as you like!" uttered in tones whose sweetness is
+something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who
+utters elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile
+is elegiac, her silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are
+a few examples, wherein every household will find some of its
+impressions recorded:
+
+
+AFTER BREAKFAST. "Caroline, we go to-night to the Deschars' grand ball
+you know."
+
+"Yes, love."
+
+AFTER DINNER. "What, not dressed yet, Caroline?" exclaims Adolphe, who
+has just made his appearance, magnificently equipped.
+
+He finds Caroline arrayed in a gown fit for an elderly lady of strong
+conversational powers, a black moire with an old-fashioned fan-waist.
+Flowers, too badly imitated to deserve the name of artificial, give a
+gloomy aspect to a head of hair which the chambermaid has carelessly
+arranged. Caroline's gloves have already seen wear and tear.
+
+"I am ready, my dear."
+
+"What, in that dress?"
+
+"I have no other. A new dress would have cost three hundred francs."
+
+"Why did you not tell me?"
+
+"I, ask you for anything, after what has happened!"
+
+"I'll go alone," says Adolphe, unwilling to be humiliated in his wife.
+
+"I dare say you are very glad to," returns Caroline, in a captious
+tone, "it's plain enough from the way you are got up."
+
+
+Eleven persons are in the parlor, all invited to dinner by Adolphe.
+Caroline is there, looking as if her husband had invited her too. She
+is waiting for dinner to be served.
+
+"Sir," says the parlor servant in a whisper to his master, "the cook
+doesn't know what on earth to do!"
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"You said nothing to her, sir: and she has only two side-dishes, the
+beef, a chicken, a salad and vegetables."
+
+"Caroline, didn't you give the necessary orders?"
+
+"How did I know that you had company, and besides I can't take it upon
+myself to give orders here! You delivered me from all care on that
+point, and I thank heaven for it every day of my life."
+
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel has called to pay Madame Caroline a visit. She
+finds her coughing feebly and nearly bent double over her embroidery.
+
+"Ah, so you are working those slippers for your dear Adolphe?"
+
+Adolphe is standing before the fire-place as complacently as may be.
+
+"No, madame, it's for a tradesman who pays me for them: like the
+convicts, my labor enables me to treat myself to some little
+comforts."
+
+Adolphe reddens; he can't very well beat his wife, and Madame de
+Fischtaminel looks at him as much as to say, "What does this mean?"
+
+"You cough a good deal, my darling," says Madame de Fischtaminel.
+
+"Oh!" returns Caroline, "what is life to me?"
+
+
+Caroline is seated, conversing with a lady of your acquaintance, whose
+good opinion you are exceedingly anxious to retain. From the depths of
+the embrasure where you are talking with some friends, you gather,
+from the mere motion of her lips, these words: "My husband would have
+it so!" uttered with the air of a young Roman matron going to the
+circus to be devoured. You are profoundly wounded in your several
+vanities, and wish to attend to this conversation while listening to
+your guests: you thus make replies which bring you back such inquiries
+as: "Why, what are you thinking of?" For you have lost the thread of
+the discourse, and you fidget nervously with your feet, thinking to
+yourself, "What is she telling her about me?"
+
+
+Adolphe is dining with the Deschars: twelve persons are at table, and
+Caroline is seated next to a nice young man named Ferdinand, Adolphe's
+cousin. Between the first and second course, conjugal happiness is the
+subject of conversation.
+
+"There is nothing easier than for a woman to be happy," says Caroline
+in reply to a woman who complains of her husband.
+
+"Tell us your secret, madame," says M. de Fischtaminel agreeably.
+
+"A woman has nothing to do but to meddle with nothing to consider
+herself as the first servant in the house or as a slave that the
+master takes care of, to have no will of her own, and never to make an
+observation: thus all goes well."
+
+This, delivered in a bitter tone and with tears in her voice, alarms
+Adolphe, who looks fixedly at his wife.
+
+"You forget, madame, the happiness of telling about one's happiness,"
+he returns, darting at her a glance worthy of the tyrant in a
+melodrama.
+
+Quite satisfied with having shown herself assassinated or on the point
+of being so, Caroline turns her head aside, furtively wipes away a
+tear, and says:
+
+"Happiness cannot be described!"
+
+This incident, as they say at the Chamber, leads to nothing, but
+Ferdinand looks upon his cousin as an angel about to be offered up.
+
+
+Some one alludes to the frightful prevalence of inflammation of the
+stomach, or to the nameless diseases of which young women die.
+
+"Ah, too happy they!" exclaims Caroline, as if she were foretelling
+the manner of her death.
+
+
+Adolphe's mother-in-law comes to see her daughter. Caroline says, "My
+husband's parlor:" "Your master's chamber." Everything in the house
+belongs to "My husband."
+
+"Why, what's the matter, children?" asks the mother-in-law; "you seem
+to be at swords' points."
+
+"Oh, dear me," says Adolphe, "nothing but that Caroline has had the
+management of the house and didn't manage it right, that's all."
+
+"She got into debt, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, dearest mamma."
+
+"Look here, Adolphe," says the mother-in-law, after having waited to
+be left alone with her son, "would you prefer to have my daughter
+magnificently dressed, to have everything go on smoothly, _without its
+costing you anything_?"
+
+Imagine, if you can, the expression of Adolphe's physiognomy, as he
+hears _this declaration of woman's rights_!
+
+
+Caroline abandons her shabby dress and appears in a splendid one. She
+is at the Deschars': every one compliments her upon her taste, upon
+the richness of her materials, upon her lace, her jewels.
+
+"Ah! you have a charming husband!" says Madame Deschars. Adolphe
+tosses his head proudly, and looks at Caroline.
+
+"My husband, madame! I cost that gentleman nothing, thank heaven! All
+I have was given me by my mother."
+
+Adolphe turns suddenly about and goes to talk with Madame de
+Fischtaminel.
+
+
+After a year of absolute monarchy, Caroline says very mildly one
+morning:
+
+"How much have you spent this year, dear?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Examine your accounts."
+
+Adolphe discovers that he has spent a third more than during
+Caroline's worst year.
+
+"And I've cost you nothing for my dress," she adds.
+
+
+Caroline is playing Schubert's melodies. Adolphe takes great pleasure
+in hearing these compositions well-executed: he gets up and
+compliments Caroline. She bursts into tears.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Nothing, I'm nervous."
+
+"I didn't know you were subject to that."
+
+"O Adolphe, you won't see anything! Look, my rings come off my
+fingers: you don't love me any more--I'm a burden to you--"
+
+She weeps, she won't listen, she weeps afresh at every word Adolphe
+utters.
+
+"Suppose you take the management of the house back again?"
+
+"Ah!" she exclaims, rising sharply to her feet, like a spring figure
+in a box, "now that you've had enough of your experience! Thank you!
+Do you suppose it's money that I want? Singular method, yours, of
+pouring balm upon a wounded heart. No, go away."
+
+"Very well, just as you like, Caroline."
+
+This "just as you like" is the first expression of indifference
+towards a wife: and Caroline sees before her an abyss towards which
+she had been walking of her own free will.
+
+
+
+                         THE FRENCH CAMPAIGN.
+
+The disasters of 1814 afflict every species of existence. After
+brilliant days of conquest, after the period during which obstacles
+change to triumphs, and the slightest check becomes a piece of good
+fortune, there comes a time when the happiest ideas turn out blunders,
+when courage leads to destruction, and when your very fortifications
+are a stumbling-block. Conjugal love, which, according to authors, is
+a peculiar phase of love, has, more than anything else, its French
+Campaign, its fatal 1814. The devil especially loves to dangle his
+tail in the affairs of poor desolate women, and to this Caroline has
+come.
+
+Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband
+back. She spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her
+imagination works. She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands
+pensively at the window, looking at the street and seeing nothing, her
+face glued to the panes, and feeling as if in a desert, in the midst
+of her friends, in the bosom of her luxuriously furnished apartments.
+
+Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed
+between a court and a garden, all life is double. At every story, a
+family sees another family in the opposite house. Everybody plunges
+his gaze at will into his neighbor's domains. There is a necessity for
+mutual observation, a common right of search from which none can
+escape. At a given time, in the morning, you get up early, the servant
+opposite is dusting the parlor, she has left the windows open and has
+put the rugs on the railing; you divine a multitude of things, and
+vice-versa. Thus, in a given time, you are acquainted with the habits
+of the pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman
+opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old
+bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair
+front. Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination.
+At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself--too
+late, like the chaste Susanne,--the prey of the delighted lorgnette of
+an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who
+becomes criminal gratis. On the other hand, a handsome young
+gentleman, who, for the present, works without wages, and is only
+nineteen years old, appears before the sight of a pious old lady, in
+the simple apparel of a man engaged in shaving. The watch thus kept up
+is never relaxed, while prudence, on the contrary, has its moments of
+forgetfulness. Curtains are not always let down in time. A woman, just
+before dark, approaches the window to thread her needle, and the
+married man opposite may then admire a head that Raphael might have
+painted, and one that he considers worthy of himself--a National Guard
+truly imposing when under arms. Oh, sacred private life, where art
+thou! Paris is a city ever ready to exhibit itself half naked, a city
+essentially libertine and devoid of modesty. For a person's life to be
+decorous in it, the said person should have a hundred thousand a year.
+Virtues are dearer than vices in Paris.
+
+Caroline, whose gaze sometimes steals between the protecting muslins
+which hide her domestic life from the five stories opposite, at last
+discovers a young couple plunged in the delights of the honey-moon,
+and newly established in the first story directly in view of her
+window. She spends her time in the most exciting observations. The
+blinds are closed early, and opened late. One day, Caroline, who has
+arisen at eight o'clock notices, by accident, of course, the maid
+preparing a bath or a morning dress, a delicious deshabille. Caroline
+sighs. She lies in ambush like a hunter at the cover; she surprises
+the young woman, her face actually illuminated with happiness.
+Finally, by dint of watching the charming couple, she sees the
+gentleman and lady open the window, and lean gently one against the
+other, as, supported by the railing, they breathe the evening air.
+Caroline gives herself a nervous headache, by endeavoring to interpret
+the phantasmagorias, some of them having an explanation and others
+not, made by the shadows of these two young people on the curtains,
+one night when they have forgotten to close the shutters. The young
+woman is often seated, melancholy and pensive, waiting for her absent
+husband; she hears the tread of a horse, or the rumble of a cab at the
+street corner; she starts from the sofa, and from her movements, it is
+easy for Caroline to see that she exclaims: "'Tis he!"
+
+"How they love each other!" says Caroline to herself.
+
+By dint of nervous headache, Caroline conceives an exceedingly
+ingenious plan: this plan consists in using the conjugal bliss of the
+opposite neighbors as a tonic to stimulate Adolphe. The idea is not
+without depravity, but then Caroline's intention sanctifies the means!
+
+"Adolphe," she says, "we have a neighbor opposite, the loveliest
+woman, a brunette--"
+
+"Oh, yes," returns Adolphe, "I know her. She is a friend of Madame de
+Fischtaminel's: Madame Foullepointe, the wife of a broker, a charming
+man and a good fellow, very fond of his wife: he's crazy about her.
+His office and rooms are here, in the court, while those on the street
+are madame's. I know of no happier household. Foullepointe talks about
+his happiness everywhere, even at the Exchange; he's really quite
+tiresome."
+
+"Well, then, be good enough to present Monsieur and Madame
+Foullepointe to me. I should be delighted to learn how she manages to
+make her husband love her so much: have they been married long?"
+
+"Five years, just like us."
+
+"O Adolphe, dear, I am dying to know her: make us intimately
+acquainted. Am I as pretty as she?"
+
+"Well, if I were to meet you at an opera ball, and if you weren't my
+wife, I declare, I shouldn't know which--"
+
+"You are real sweet to-day. Don't forget to invite them to dinner
+Saturday."
+
+"I'll do it to-night. Foullepointe and I often meet on 'Change."
+
+"Now," says Caroline, "this young woman will doubtless tell me what
+her method of action is."
+
+Caroline resumes her post of observation. At about three she looks
+through the flowers which form as it were a bower at the window, and
+exclaims, "Two perfect doves!"
+
+For the Saturday in question, Caroline invites Monsieur and Madame
+Deschars, the worthy Monsieur Fischtaminel, in short, the most
+virtuous couples of her society. She has brought out all her
+resources: she has ordered the most sumptuous dinner, she has taken
+the silver out of the chest: she means to do all honor to the model of
+wives.
+
+"My dear, you will see to-night," she says to Madame Deschars, at the
+moment when all the women are looking at each other in silence, "the
+most admirable young couple in the world, our opposite neighbors: a
+young man of fair complexion, so graceful and with _such_ manners! His
+head is like Lord Byron's, and he's a real Don Juan, only faithful:
+he's discovered the secret of making love eternal: I shall perhaps
+obtain a second crop of it from her example. Adolphe, when he sees
+them, will blush at his conduct, and--"
+
+The servant announces: "Monsieur and Madame Foullepointe."
+
+Madame Foullepointe, a pretty brunette, a genuine Parisian, slight and
+erect in form, the brilliant light of her eye quenched by her long
+lashes, charmingly dressed, sits down upon the sofa. Caroline bows to
+a fat gentleman with thin gray hair, who follows this Paris
+Andalusian, and who exhibits a face and paunch fit for Silenus, a
+butter-colored pate, a deceitful, libertine smile upon his big, heavy
+lips,--in short, a philosopher! Caroline looks upon this individual
+with astonishment.
+
+"Monsieur Foullepointe, my dear," says Adolphe, presenting the worthy
+quinquagenarian.
+
+"I am delighted, madame," says Caroline, good-naturedly, "that you
+have brought your father-in-law [profound sensation], but we shall
+soon see your husband, I trust--"
+
+"Madame--!"
+
+Everybody listens and looks. Adolphe becomes the object of every one's
+attention; he is literally dumb with amazement: if he could, he would
+whisk Caroline off through a trap, as at the theatre.
+
+"This is Monsieur Foullepointe, my husband," says Madame Foullepointe.
+
+Caroline turns scarlet as she sees her ridiculous blunder, and Adolphe
+scathes her with a look of thirty-six candlepower.
+
+"You said he was young and fair," whispers Madame Deschars. Madame
+Foullepointe,--knowing lady that she is,--boldly stares at the
+ceiling.
+
+A month after, Madame Foullepointe and Caroline become intimate.
+Adolphe, who is taken up with Madame de Fischtaminel, pays no
+attention to this dangerous friendship, a friendship which will bear
+its fruits, for--pray learn this--
+
+
+Axiom.--Women have corrupted more women than men have ever loved.
+
+
+
+                        A SOLO ON THE HEARSE.
+
+After a period, the length of which depends on the strength of
+Caroline's principles, she appears to be languishing; and when
+Adolphe, anxious for decorum's sake, as he sees her stretched out upon
+the sofa like a snake in the sun, asks her, "What is the matter, love?
+What do you want?"
+
+"I wish I was dead!" she replies.
+
+"Quite a merry and agreeable wish!"
+
+"It isn't death that frightens me, it's suffering."
+
+"I suppose that means that I don't make you happy! That's the way with
+women!"
+
+Adolphe strides about the room, talking incoherently: but he is
+brought to a dead halt by seeing Caroline dry her tears, which are
+really flowing artistically, in an embroidered handkerchief.
+
+"Do you feel sick?"
+
+"I don't feel well. [Silence.] I only hope that I shall live long
+enough to see my daughter married, for I know the meaning, now, of the
+expression so little understood by the young--_the choice of a
+husband_! Go to your amusements, Adolphe: a woman who thinks of the
+future, a woman who suffers, is not at all diverting: come, go and
+have a good time."
+
+"Where do you feel bad?"
+
+"I don't feel bad, dear: I never was better. I don't feel anything.
+No, really, I am better. There, leave me to myself."
+
+This time, being the first, Adolphe goes away almost sad.
+
+A week passes, during which Caroline orders all the servants to
+conceal from her husband her deplorable situation: she languishes, she
+rings when she feels she is going off, she uses a great deal of ether.
+The domestics finally acquaint their master with madame's conjugal
+heroism, and Adolphe remains at home one evening after dinner, and
+sees his wife passionately kissing her little Marie.
+
+"Poor child! I regret the future only for your sake! What is life, I
+should like to know?"
+
+"Come, my dear," says Adolphe, "don't take on so."
+
+"I'm not taking on. Death doesn't frighten me--I saw a funeral this
+morning, and I thought how happy the body was! How comes it that I
+think of nothing but death? Is it a disease? I have an idea that I
+shall die by my own hand."
+
+The more Adolphe tries to divert Caroline, the more closely she wraps
+herself up in the crape of her hopeless melancholy. This second time,
+Adolphe stays at home and is wearied to death. At the third attack of
+forced tears, he goes out without the slightest compunction. He
+finally gets accustomed to these everlasting murmurs, to these dying
+postures, these crocodile tears. So he says:
+
+"If you are sick, Caroline, you'd better have a doctor."
+
+"Just as you like! It will end quicker, so. But bring a famous one, if
+you bring any."
+
+At the end of a month, Adolphe, worn out by hearing the funereal air
+that Caroline plays him on every possible key, brings home a famous
+doctor. At Paris, doctors are all men of discernment, and are
+admirably versed in conjugal nosography.
+
+"Well, madame," says the great physician, "how happens it that so
+pretty a woman allows herself to be sick?"
+
+"Ah! sir, like the nose of old father Aubry, I aspire to the tomb--"
+
+Caroline, out of consideration for Adolphe, makes a feeble effort to
+smile.
+
+"Tut, tut! But your eyes are clear: they don't seem to need our
+infernal drugs."
+
+"Look again, doctor, I am eaten up with fever, a slow, imperceptible
+fever--"
+
+And she fastens her most roguish glance upon the illustrious doctor,
+who says to himself, "What eyes!"
+
+"Now, let me see your tongue."
+
+Caroline puts out her taper tongue between two rows of teeth as white
+as those of a dog.
+
+"It is a little bit furred at the root: but you have breakfasted--"
+observes the great physician, turning toward Adolphe.
+
+"Oh, a mere nothing," returns Caroline; "two cups of tea--"
+
+Adolphe and the illustrious leech look at each other, for the doctor
+wonders whether it is the husband or the wife that is trifling with
+him.
+
+"What do you feel?" gravely inquires the physician.
+
+"I don't sleep."
+
+"Good!"
+
+"I have no appetite."
+
+"Well!"
+
+"I have a pain, here."
+
+The doctor examines the part indicated.
+
+"Very good, we'll look at that by and by."
+
+"Now and then a shudder passes over me--"
+
+"Very good!"
+
+"I have melancholy fits, I am always thinking of death, I feel
+promptings of suicide--"
+
+"Dear me! Really!"
+
+"I have rushes of heat to the face: look, there's a constant trembling
+in my eyelid."
+
+"Capital! We call that a trismus."
+
+The doctor goes into an explanation, which lasts a quarter of an hour,
+of the trismus, employing the most scientific terms. From this it
+appears that the trismus is the trismus: but he observes with the
+greatest modesty that if science knows that the trismus is the
+trismus, it is entirely ignorant of the cause of this nervous
+affection, which comes and goes, appears and disappears--"and," he
+adds, "we have decided that it is altogether nervous."
+
+"Is it very dangerous?" asks Caroline, anxiously.
+
+"Not at all. How do you lie at night?"
+
+"Doubled up in a heap."
+
+"Good. On which side?"
+
+"The left."
+
+"Very well. How many mattresses are there on your bed?"
+
+"Three."
+
+"Good. Is there a spring bed?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What is the spring bed stuffed with?"
+
+"Horse hair."
+
+"Capital. Let me see you walk. No, no, naturally, and as if we weren't
+looking at you."
+
+Caroline walks like Fanny Elssler, communicating the most Andalusian
+little motions to her tournure.
+
+"Do you feel a sensation of heaviness in your knees?"
+
+"Well, no--" she returns to her place. "Ah, no that I think of it, it
+seems to me that I do."
+
+"Good. Have you been in the house a good deal lately?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir, a great deal too much--and alone."
+
+"Good. I thought so. What do you wear on your head at night?"
+
+"An embroidered night-cap, and sometimes a handkerchief over it."
+
+"Don't you feel a heat there, a slight perspiration?"
+
+"How can I, when I'm asleep?"
+
+"Don't you find your night-cap moist on your forehead, when you wake
+up?"
+
+"Sometimes."
+
+"Capital. Give me your hand."
+
+The doctor takes out his watch.
+
+"Did I tell you that I have a vertigo?" asks Caroline.
+
+"Hush!" says the doctor, counting the pulse. "In the evening?"
+
+"No, in the morning."
+
+"Ah, bless me, a vertigo in the morning," says the doctor, looking at
+Adolphe.
+
+"The Duke of G. has not gone to London," says the great physician,
+while examining Caroline's skin, "and there's a good deal to be said
+about it in the Faubourg St. Germain."
+
+"Have you patients there?" asks Caroline.
+
+"Nearly all my patients are there. Dear me, yes; I've got seven to see
+this morning; some of them are in danger."
+
+"What do you think of me, sir?" says Caroline.
+
+"Madame, you need attention, a great deal of attention, you must take
+quieting liquors, plenty of syrup of gum, a mild diet, white meat, and
+a good deal of exercise."
+
+"There go twenty francs," says Adolphe to himself with a smile.
+
+The great physician takes Adolphe by the arm, and draws him out with
+him, as he takes his leave: Caroline follows them on tiptoe.
+
+"My dear sir," says the great physician, "I have just prescribed very
+insufficiently for your wife. I did not wish to frighten her: this
+affair concerns you more nearly than you imagine. Don't neglect her;
+she has a powerful temperament, and enjoys violent health; all this
+reacts upon her. Nature has its laws, which, when disregarded, compel
+obedience. She may get into a morbid state, which would cause you
+bitterly to repent having neglected her. If you love her, why, love
+her: but if you don't love her, and nevertheless desire to preserve
+the mother of your children, the resolution to come to is a matter of
+hygiene, but it can only proceed from you!"
+
+"How well he understand me!" says Caroline to herself. She opens the
+door and says: "Doctor, you did not write down the doses!"
+
+The great physician smiles, bows and slips the twenty franc piece into
+his pocket; he then leaves Adolphe to his wife, who takes him and
+says:
+
+"What is the fact about my condition? Must I prepare for death?"
+
+"Bah! He says you're too healthy!" cries Adolphe, impatiently.
+
+Caroline retires to her sofa to weep.
+
+"What is it, now?"
+
+"So I am to live a long time--I am in the way--you don't love me any
+more--I won't consult that doctor again--I don't know why Madame
+Foullepointe advised me to see him, he told me nothing but trash--I
+know better than he what I need!"
+
+"What do you need?"
+
+"Can you ask, ungrateful man?" and Caroline leans her head on
+Adolphe's shoulder.
+
+Adolphe, very much alarmed, says to himself: "The doctor's right, she
+may get to be morbidly exacting, and then what will become of me? Here
+I am compelled to choose between Caroline's physical extravagance, or
+some young cousin or other."
+
+Meanwhile Caroline sits down and sings one of Schubert's melodies with
+all the agitation of a hypochondriac.
+
+
+
+
+                             PART SECOND
+
+
+
+                               PREFACE
+
+  If, reader, you have grasped the intent of this book,--and
+  infinite honor is done you by the supposition: the profoundest
+  author does not always comprehend, I may say never comprehends,
+  the different meanings of his book, nor its bearing, nor the good
+  nor the harm it may do--if, then, you have bestowed some attention
+  upon these little scenes of married life, you have perhaps noticed
+  their color--
+
+  "What color?" some grocer will doubtless ask; "books are bound in
+  yellow, blue, green, pearl-gray, white--"
+
+  Alas! books possess another color, they are dyed by the author,
+  and certain writers borrow their dye. Some books let their color
+  come off on to others. More than this. Books are dark or fair,
+  light brown or red. They have a sex, too! I know of male books,
+  and female books, of books which, sad to say, have no sex, which
+  we hope is not the case with this one, supposing that you do this
+  collection of nosographic sketches the honor of calling it a book.
+
+  Thus far, the troubles we have described have been exclusively
+  inflicted by the wife upon the husband. You have therefore seen
+  only the masculine side of the book. And if the author really has
+  the sense of hearing for which we give him credit, he has already
+  caught more than one indignant exclamation or remonstrance:
+
+  "He tells us of nothing but vexations suffered by our husbands, as
+  if we didn't have our petty troubles, too!"
+
+  Oh, women! You have been heard, for if you do not always make
+  yourselves understood, you are always sure to make yourselves
+  heard.
+
+  It would therefore be signally unjust to lay upon you alone the
+  reproaches that every being brought under the yoke (_conjugium_)
+  has the right to heap upon that necessary, sacred, useful,
+  eminently conservative institution,--one, however, that is often
+  somewhat of an encumbrance, and tight about the joints, though
+  sometimes it is also too loose there.
+
+  I will go further! Such partiality would be a piece of idiocy.
+
+  A man,--not a writer, for in a writer there are many men,--an
+  author, rather, should resemble Janus, see behind and before,
+  become a spy, examine an idea in all its phases, delve alternately
+  into the soul of Alceste and into that of Philaenete, know
+  everything though he does not tell it, never be tiresome, and--
+
+  We will not conclude this programme, for we should tell the whole,
+  and that would be frightful for those who reflect upon the present
+  condition of literature.
+
+  Furthermore, an author who speaks for himself in the middle of his
+  book, resembles the old fellow in "The Speaking Picture," when he
+  puts his face in the hole cut in the painting. The author does not
+  forget that in the Chamber, no one can take the floor _between two
+  votes_. Enough, therefore!
+
+  Here follows the female portion of the book: for, to resemble
+  marriage perfectly, it ought to be more or less hermaphroditic.
+
+
+
+
+
+                    PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+
+
+                   HUSBANDS DURING THE SECOND MONTH.
+
+Two young married women, Caroline and Stephanie, who had been early
+friends at M'lle Machefer's boarding school, one of the most
+celebrated educational institutions in the Faubourg St. Honore, met at
+a ball given by Madame de Fischtaminel, and the following conversation
+took place in a window-seat in the boudoir.
+
+It was so hot that a man had acted upon the idea of going to breathe
+the fresh night air, some time before the two young women. He had
+placed himself in the angle of the balcony, and, as there were many
+flowers before the window, the two friends thought themselves alone.
+This man was the author's best friend.
+
+One of the two ladies, standing at the corner of the embrasure, kept
+watch by looking at the boudoir and the parlors. The other had so
+placed herself as not to be in the draft, which was nevertheless
+tempered by the muslin and silk curtains.
+
+The boudoir was empty, the ball was just beginning, the gaming-tables
+were open, offering their green cloths and their packs of cards still
+compressed in the frail case placed upon them by the customs office.
+The second quadrille was in progress.
+
+All who go to balls will remember that phase of large parties when the
+guests are not yet all arrived, but when the rooms are already filled
+--a moment which gives the mistress of the house a transitory pang of
+terror. This moment is, other points of comparison apart, like that
+which decides a victory or the loss of a battle.
+
+You will understand, therefore, how what was meant to be a secret now
+obtains the honors of publicity.
+
+"Well, Caroline?"
+
+"Well, Stephanie?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+A double sigh.
+
+"Have you forgotten our agreement?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Why haven't you been to see me, then?"
+
+"I am never left alone. Even here we shall hardly have time to talk."
+
+"Ah! if Adolphe were to get into such habits as that!" exclaimed
+Caroline.
+
+"You saw us, Armand and me, when he paid me what is called, I don't
+know why, his court."
+
+"Yes, I admired him, I thought you very happy, you had found your
+ideal, a fine, good-sized man, always well dressed, with yellow
+gloves, his beard well shaven, patent leather boots, a clean shirt,
+exquisitely neat, and so attentive--"
+
+"Yes, yes, go on."
+
+"In short, quite an elegant man: his voice was femininely sweet, and
+then such gentleness! And his promises of happiness and liberty! His
+sentences were veneered with rosewood. He stocked his conversation
+with shawls and laces. In his smallest expression you heard the
+rumbling of a coach and four. Your wedding presents were magnificent.
+Armand seemed to me like a husband of velvet, of a robe of birds'
+feathers in which you were to be wrapped."
+
+"Caroline, my husband uses tobacco."
+
+"So does mine; that is, he smokes."
+
+"But mine, dear, uses it as they say Napoleon did: in short, he chews,
+and I hold tobacco in horror. The monster found it out, and went
+without out it for seven months."
+
+"All men have their habits. They absolutely must use something."
+
+"You have no idea of the tortures I endure. At night I am awakened
+with a start by one of my own sneezes. As I go to sleep my motions
+bring the grains of snuff scattered over the pillow under my nose, I
+inhale, and explode like a mine. It seems that Armand, the wretch, is
+used to these _surprises_, and doesn't wake up. I find tobacco
+everywhere, and I certainly didn't marry the customs office."
+
+"But, my dear child, what does this trifling inconvenience amount to,
+if your husband is kind and possesses a good disposition?"
+
+"He is as cold as marble, as particular as an old bachelor, as
+communicative as a sentinel; and he's one of those men who say yes to
+everything, but who never do anything but what they want to."
+
+"Deny him, once."
+
+"I've tried it."
+
+"What came of it?"
+
+"He threatened to reduce my allowance, and to keep back a sum big
+enough for him to get along without me."
+
+"Poor Stephanie! He's not a man, he's a monster."
+
+"A calm and methodical monster, who wears a scratch, and who, every
+night--"
+
+"Well, every night--"
+
+"Wait a minute!--who takes a tumbler every night, and puts seven false
+teeth in it."
+
+"What a trap your marriage was! At any rate, Armand is rich."
+
+"Who knows?"
+
+"Good heavens! Why, you seem to me on the point of becoming very
+unhappy--or very happy."
+
+"Well, dear, how is it with you?"
+
+"Oh, as for me, I have nothing as yet but a pin that pricks me: but it
+is intolerable."
+
+"Poor creature! You don't know your own happiness: come, what is it?"
+
+Here the young woman whispered in the other's ear, so that it was
+impossible to catch a single word. The conversation recommenced, or
+rather finished by a sort of inference.
+
+"So, your Adolphe is jealous?"
+
+"Jealous of whom? We never leave each other, and that, in itself, is
+an annoyance. I can't stand it. I don't dare to gape. I am expected to
+be forever enacting the woman in love. It's fatiguing."
+
+"Caroline?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"Resign myself. What are you?
+
+"Fight the customs office."
+
+This little trouble tends to prove that in the matter of personal
+deception, the two sexes can well cry quits.
+
+
+
+                        DISAPPOINTED AMBITION.
+
+
+                      I. CHODOREILLE THE GREAT.
+
+A young man has forsaken his natal city in the depths of one of the
+departments, rather clearly marked by M. Charles Dupin. He felt that
+glory of some sort awaited him: suppose that of a painter, a novelist,
+a journalist, a poet, a great statesman.
+
+Young Adolphe de Chodoreille--that we may be perfectly understood
+--wished to be talked about, to become celebrated, to be somebody.
+This, therefore, is addressed to the mass of aspiring individuals
+brought to Paris by all sorts of vehicles, whether moral or material,
+and who rush upon the city one fine morning with the hydrophobic
+purpose of overturning everybody's reputation, and of building
+themselves a pedestal with the ruins they are to make,--until
+disenchantment follows. As our intention is to specify this
+peculiarity so characteristic of our epoch, let us take from among
+the various personages the one whom the author has elsewhere called
+_A Distinguished Provencal_.
+
+Adolphe has discovered that the most admirable trade is that which
+consists in buying a bottle of ink, a bunch of quills, and a ream of
+paper, at a stationer's for twelve francs and a half, and in selling
+the two thousand sheets in the ream over again, for something like
+fifty thousand francs, after having, of course, written upon each leaf
+fifty lines replete with style and imagination.
+
+This problem,--twelve francs and a half metamorphosed into fifty
+thousand francs, at the rate of five sous a line--urges numerous
+families who might advantageously employ their members in the
+retirement of the provinces, to thrust them into the vortex of Paris.
+
+The young man who is the object of this exportation, invariably passes
+in his natal town for a man of as much imagination as the most famous
+author. He has always studied well, he writes very nice poetry, he is
+considered a fellow of parts: he is besides often guilty of a charming
+tale published in the local paper, which obtains the admiration of the
+department.
+
+His poor parents will never know what their son has come to Paris to
+learn at great cost, namely: That it is difficult to be a writer and
+to understand the French language short of a dozen years of heculean
+labor: That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to
+become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private
+history of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian,
+Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne,
+Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the _Thousand and One
+Nights_, were all men of genius as well as giants of erudition.
+
+Their Adolphe serves his literary apprenticeship in two or three
+coffee-houses, becomes a member of the Society of Men of Letters,
+attacks, with or without reason, men of talent who don't read his
+articles, assumes a milder tone on seeing the powerlessness of his
+criticisms, offers novelettes to the papers which toss them from one
+to the other as if they were shuttlecocks: and, after five or six
+years of exercises more or less fatiguing, of dreadful privations
+which seriously tax his parents, he attains a certain position.
+
+This position may be described as follows: Thanks to a sort of
+reciprocal support extended to each other, and which an ingenious
+writer has called "Mutual Admiration," Adolphe often sees his name
+cited among the names of celebrities, either in the prospectuses of
+the book-trade, or in the lists of newspapers about to appear.
+Publishers print the title of one of his works under the deceitful
+heading "IN PRESS," which might be called the typographical menagerie
+of bears.[*] Chodoreille is sometimes mentioned among the promising
+young men of the literary world.
+
+[*] A bear (_ours_) is a play which has been refused by a multitude of
+    theatres, but which is finally represented at a time when some
+    manager or other feels the need of one. The word has necessarily
+    passed from the language of the stage into the jargon of
+    journalism, and is applied to novels which wander the streets in
+    search of a publisher.
+
+For eleven years Adolphe Chodoreille remains in the ranks of the
+promising young men: he finally obtains a free entrance to the
+theatres, thanks to some dirty work or certain articles of dramatic
+criticism: he tries to pass for a good fellow; and as he loses his
+illusions respecting glory and the world of Paris, he gets into debt
+and his years begin to tell upon him.
+
+A paper which finds itself in a tight place asks him for one of his
+bears revised by his friends. This has been retouched and revamped
+every five years, so that it smells of the pomatum of each prevailing
+and then forgotten fashion. To Adolphe it becomes what the famous cap,
+which he was constantly staking, was to Corporal Trim, for during five
+years "Anything for a Woman" (the title decided upon) "will be one of
+the most entertaining productions of our epoch."
+
+After eleven years, Chodoreille is regarded as having written some
+respectable things, five or six tales published in the dismal
+magazines, in ladies' newspapers, or in works intended for children of
+tender age.
+
+As he is a bachelor, and possesses a coat and a pair of black
+cassimere trousers, and when he pleases may thus assume the appearance
+of an elegant diplomat, and as he is not without a certain intelligent
+air, he is admitted to several more or less literary salons: he bows
+to the five or six academicians who possess genius, influence or
+talent, he visits two or three of our great poets, he allows himself,
+in coffee-rooms, to call the two or three justly celebrated women of
+our epoch by their Christian names; he is on the best of terms with
+the blue stockings of the second grade,--who ought to be called
+_socks_,--and he shakes hands and takes glasses of absinthe with the
+stars of the smaller newspapers.
+
+Such is the history of every species of ordinary men--men who have
+been denied what they call good luck. This good luck is nothing less
+than unyielding will, incessant labor, contempt for an easily won
+celebrity, immense learning, and that patience which, according to
+Buffon, is the whole of genius, but which certainly is the half of it.
+
+You do not yet see any indication of a petty trouble for Caroline. You
+imagine that this history of five hundred young men engaged at this
+moment in wearing smooth the paving stones of Paris, was written as a
+sort of warning to the families of the eighty-six departments of
+France: but read these two letters which lately passed between two
+girls differently married, and you will see that it was as necessary
+as the narrative by which every true melodrama was until lately
+expected to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the
+Parisian peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native
+village, and polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, the rays of his
+glory, which, like those of the sun, are only warm and brilliant at a
+distance.
+
+
+From Madame Claire de la Roulandiere, nee Jugault, to Madame Adolphe
+de Chodoreille, nee Heurtaut.
+
+"VIVIERS.
+
+"You have not yet written to me, and it's real unkind in you. Don't
+you remember that the happier was to write first and to console her
+who remained in the country?
+
+"Since your departure for Paris, I have married Monsieur de la
+Roulandiere, the president of the tribunal. You know him, and you can
+judge whether I am happy or not, with my heart _saturated_, as it is,
+with our ideas. I was not ignorant what my lot would be: I live with
+the ex-president, my husband's uncle, and with my mother-in-law, who
+has preserved nothing of the ancient parliamentary society of Aix but
+its pride and its severity of manners. I am seldom alone, I never go
+out unless accompanied by my mother-in-law or my husband. We receive
+the heavy people of the city in the evening. They play whist at two
+sous a point, and I listen to conversations of this nature:
+
+"'Monsieur Vitremont is dead, and leaves two hundred and eighty
+thousand francs,' says the associate judge, a young man of
+forty-seven, who is as entertaining as a northwest wind.
+
+"'Are you quite sure of that?'
+
+"The _that_ refers to the two hundred and eighty thousand francs. A
+little judge then holds forth, he runs over the investments, the
+others discuss their value, and it is definitely settled that if he
+has not left two hundred and eighty thousand, he left something near
+it.
+
+"Then comes a universal concert of eulogy heaped upon the dead man's
+body, for having kept his bread under lock and key, for having
+shrewdly invested his little savings accumulated sou by sou, in order,
+probably, that the whole city and those who expect legacies may
+applaud and exclaim in admiration, 'He leaves two hundred and eighty
+thousand francs!' Now everybody has rich relations of whom they say
+'Will he leave anything like it?' and thus they discuss the quick as
+they have discussed the dead.
+
+"They talk of nothing but the prospects of fortune, the prospects of a
+vacancy in office, the prospects of the harvest.
+
+"When we were children, and used to look at those pretty little white
+mice, in the cobbler's window in the rue St. Maclou, that turned and
+turned the circular cage in which they were imprisoned, how far I was
+from thinking that they would one day be a faithful image of my life!
+
+"Think of it, my being in this condition!--I who fluttered my wings so
+much more than you, I whose imagination was so vagabond! My sins have
+been greater than yours, and I am the more severely punished. I have
+bidden farewell to my dreams: I am _Madame la Presidente_ in all my
+glory, and I resign myself to giving my arm for forty years to my big
+awkward Roulandiere, to living meanly in every way, and to having
+forever before me two heavy brows and two wall-eyes pierced in a
+yellow face, which is destined never to know what it is to smile.
+
+"But you, Caroline dear, you who, between ourselves, were admitted
+among the big girls while I still gamboled among the little ones, you
+whose only sin was pride, you,--at the age of twenty-seven, and with a
+dowry of two hundred thousand francs,--capture and captivate a truly
+great man, one of the wittiest men in Paris, one of the two talented
+men that our village has produced.--What luck!
+
+"You now circulate in the most brilliant society of Paris. Thanks to
+the sublime privileges of genius. You may appear in all the salons of
+the Faubourg St. Germain, and be cordially received. You have the
+exquisite enjoyment of the company of the two or three celebrated
+women of our age, where so many good things are said, where the happy
+speeches which arrive out here like Congreve rockets, are first fired
+off. You go to the Baron Schinner's of whom Adolphe so often spoke to
+us, whom all the great artists and foreigners of celebrity visit. In
+short, before long, you will be one of the queens of Paris, if you
+wish. You can receive, too, and have at your house the lions of
+literature, fashion and finance, whether male or female, for Adolphe
+spoke in such terms about his illustrious friendships and his intimacy
+with the favorites of the hour, that I imagine you giving and
+receiving honors.
+
+"With your ten thousand francs a year, and the legacy from your Aunt
+Carabas, added to the twenty thousand francs that your husband earns,
+you must keep a carriage; and since you go to all the theatres without
+paying, since journalists are the heroes of all the inaugurations so
+ruinous for those who keep up with the movement of Paris, and since
+they are constantly invited to dinner, you live as if you had an
+income of sixty thousand francs a year! Happy Caroline! I don't wonder
+you forget me!
+
+"I can understand how it is that you have not a moment to yourself.
+Your bliss is the cause of your silence, so I pardon you. Still, if,
+fatigued with so many pleasures, you one day, upon the summit of your
+grandeur, think of your poor Claire, write to me, tell me what a
+marriage with a great man is, describe those great Parisian ladies,
+especially those who write. Oh! I should _so_ much like to know what
+they are made of! Finally don't forget anything, unless you forget
+that you are loved, as ever, by your poor
+
+"CLAIRE JUGAULT."
+
+
+From Madame Adolphe de Chodoreille to Madame la Presidente de la
+Roulandiere, at Viviers.
+
+"PARIS.
+
+"Ah! my poor Claire, could you have known how many wretched little
+griefs your innocent letter would awaken, you never would have written
+it. Certainly no friend, and not even an enemy, on seeing a woman with
+a thousand mosquito-bites and a plaster over them, would amuse herself
+by tearing it off and counting the stings.
+
+"I will begin by telling you that for a woman of twenty-seven, with a
+face still passable, but with a form a little too much like that of
+the Emperor Nicholas for the humble part I play, I am happy! Let me
+tell you why: Adolphe, rejoicing in the deceptions which have fallen
+upon me like a hail-storm, smoothes over the wounds in my self-love by
+so much affection, so many attentions, and such charming things, that,
+in good truth, women--so far as they are simply women--would be glad
+to find in the man they marry defects so advantageous. But all men of
+letters (Adolphe, alas! is barely a man of letters), who are beings
+not a bit less irritable, nervous, fickle and eccentric than women,
+are far from possessing such solid qualities as those of Adolphe, and
+I hope they have not all been as unfortunate as he.
+
+"Ah! Claire, we love each other well enough for me to tell you the
+simple truth. I have saved my husband, dear, from profound but
+skillfully concealed poverty. Far from receiving twenty thousand
+francs a year, he has not earned that sum in the entire fifteen years
+that he has been at Paris. We occupy a third story in the rue Joubert,
+and pay twelve hundred francs for it; we have some eighty-five hundred
+francs left, with which I endeavor to keep house honorably.
+
+"I have brought Adolphe luck; for since our marriage, he has obtained
+the control of a feuilleton which is worth four hundred francs a month
+to him, though it takes but a small portion of his time. He owes this
+situation to an investment. We employed the seventy thousand francs
+left me by my Aunt Carabas in giving security for a newspaper; on this
+we get nine per cent, and we have stock besides. Since this
+transaction, which was concluded some ten months ago, our income has
+doubled, and we now possess a competence, I can complain of my
+marriage in a pecuniary point of view no more than as regards my
+affections. My vanity alone has suffered, and my ambition has been
+swamped. You will understand the various petty troubles which have
+assailed me, by a single specimen.
+
+"Adolphe, you remember, appeared to us on intimate terms with the
+famous Baroness Schinner, so renowned for her wit, her influence, her
+wealth and her connection with celebrated men. I supposed that he was
+welcomed at her house as a friend: my husband presented me, and I was
+coldly received. I saw that her rooms were furnished with extravagant
+luxury; and instead of Madame Schinner's returning my call, I received
+a card, twenty days afterward, and at an insolently improper hour.
+
+"On arriving at Paris, I went to walk upon the boulevard, proud of my
+anonymous great man. He nudged me with his elbow, and said, pointing
+out a fat little ill-dressed man, 'There's so and so!' He mentioned
+one of the seven or eight illustrious men in France. I got ready my
+look of admiration, and I saw Adolphe rapturously doffing his hat to
+the truly great man, who replied by the curt little nod that you
+vouchsafe a person with whom you have doubtless exchanged hardly four
+words in ten years. Adolphe had begged a look for my sake. 'Doesn't he
+know you?' I said to my husband. 'Oh, yes, but he probably took me for
+somebody else,' replied he.
+
+"And so of poets, so of celebrated musicians, so of statesmen. But, as
+a compensation, we stop and talk for ten minutes in front of some
+arcade or other, with Messieurs Armand du Cantal, George Beaunoir,
+Felix Verdoret, of whom you have never heard. Mesdames Constantine
+Ramachard, Anais Crottat, and Lucienne Vouillon threaten me with their
+_blue_ friendship. We dine editors totally unknown in our province.
+Finally I have had the painful happiness of seeing Adolphe decline an
+invitation to an evening party to which I was not bidden.
+
+"Oh! Claire dear, talent is still the rare flower of spontaneous
+growth, that no greenhouse culture can produce. I do not deceive
+myself: Adolphe is an ordinary man, known, estimated as such: he has
+no other chance, as he himself says, than to take his place among the
+_utilities_ of literature. He was not without wit at Viviers: but to
+be a man of wit at Paris, you must possess every kind of wit in
+formidable doses.
+
+"I esteem Adolphe: for, after some few fibs, he frankly confessed his
+position, and, without humiliating himself too deeply, he promised
+that I should be happy. He hopes, like numerous other ordinary men, to
+obtain some place, that of an assistant librarian, for instance, or
+the pecuniary management of a newspaper. Who knows but we may get him
+elected deputy for Viviers, in the course of time?
+
+"We live in obscurity; we have five or six friends of either sex whom
+we like, and such is the brilliant style of life which your letter
+gilded with all the social splendors.
+
+"From time to time I am caught in a squall, or am the butt of some
+malicious tongue. Thus, yesterday, at the opera, I heard one of our
+most ill-natured wits, Leon de Lora, say to one of our most famous
+critics, 'It takes Chodoreille to discover the Caroline poplar on the
+banks of the Rhone!' They had heard my husband call me by my Christian
+name. At Viviers I was considered handsome. I am tall, well made, and
+fat enough to satisfy Adolphe! In this way I learn that the beauty of
+women from the country is, at Paris, precisely like the wit of country
+gentleman.
+
+"In short, I am absolutely nobody, if that is what you wish to know:
+but if you desire to learn how far my philosophy goes, understand that
+I am really happy in having found an ordinary man in my pretended
+great one.
+
+"Farewell, dear Claire! It is still I, you see, who, in spite of my
+delusions and the petty troubles of my life, am the most favorably
+situated: for Adolphe is young, and a charming fellow.
+
+"CAROLINE HEURTAUT."
+
+
+Claire's reply contained, among other passages, the following: "I hope
+that the indescribable happiness which you enjoy, will continue,
+thanks to your philosophy." Claire, as any intimate female friend
+would have done, consoled herself for her president by insinuations
+respecting Adolphe's prospects and future conduct.
+
+
+                  II. ANOTHER GLANCE AT CHODOREILLE.
+
+(Letter discovered one day in a casket, while she was making me wait a
+long time and trying to get rid of a hanger-on who could not be made
+to understand hidden meanings. I caught cold--but I got hold of this
+letter.)
+
+This fatuous note was found on a paper which the notary's clerks had
+thought of no importance in the inventory of the estate of M.
+Ferdinand de Bourgarel, who was mourned of late by politics, arts and
+amours, and in whom is ended the great Provencal house of Borgarelli;
+for as is generally known the name Bourgarel is a corruption of
+Borgarelli just as the French Girardin is the Florentine Gherardini.
+
+An intelligent reader will find little difficulty in placing this
+letter in its proper epoch in the lives of Adolphe and Caroline.
+
+
+"My dear Friend:
+
+"I thought myself lucky indeed to marry an artist as superior in his
+talent as in his personal attributes, equally great in soul and mind,
+worldly-wise, and likely to rise by following the public road without
+being obliged to wander along crooked, doubtful by-paths. However, you
+knew Adolphe; you appreciated his worth. I am loved, he is a father, I
+idolize our children. Adolphe is kindness itself to me; I admire and
+love him. But, my dear, in this complete happiness lurks a thorn. The
+roses upon which I recline have more than one fold. In the heart of a
+woman, folds speedily turn to wounds. These wounds soon bleed, the
+evil spreads, we suffer, the suffering awakens thoughts, the thoughts
+swell and change the course of sentiment.
+
+"Ah, my dear, you shall know all about it, though it is a cruel thing
+to say--but we live as much by vanity as by love. To live by love
+alone, one must dwell somewhere else than in Paris. What difference
+would it make to us whether we had only one white percale gown, if the
+man we love did not see other women dressed differently, more
+elegantly than we--women who inspire ideas by their ways, by a
+multitude of little things which really go to make up great passions?
+Vanity, my dear, is cousin-german to jealousy, to that beautiful and
+noble jealousy which consists in not allowing one's empire to be
+invaded, in reigning undisturbed in a soul, and passing one's life
+happily in a heart.
+
+"Ah, well, my woman's vanity is on the rack. Though some troubles may
+seem petty indeed, I have learned, unfortunately, that in the home
+there are no petty troubles. For everything there is magnified by
+incessant contact with sensations, with desires, with ideas. Such then
+is the secret of that sadness which you have surprised in me and which
+I did not care to explain. It is one of those things in which words go
+too far, and where writing holds at least the thought within bounds by
+establishing it. The effects of a moral perspective differ so
+radically between what is said and what is written! All is so solemn,
+so serious on paper! One cannot commit any more imprudences. Is it not
+this fact which makes a treasure out of a letter where one gives one's
+self over to one's thoughts?
+
+"You doubtless thought me wretched, but I am only wounded. You
+discovered me sitting alone by the fire, and no Adolphe. I had just
+finished putting the children to bed; they were asleep. Adolphe for
+the tenth time had been invited out to a house where I do not go,
+where they want Adolphe without his wife. There are drawing-rooms
+where he goes without me, just at there are many pleasures in which he
+alone is the guest. If he were M. de Navarreins and I a d'Espard,
+society would never think of separating us; it would want us always
+together. His habits are formed; he does not suspect the humiliation
+which weighs upon my heart. Indeed, if he had the slightest inkling of
+this small sorrow which I am ashamed to own, he would drop society, he
+would become more of a prig than the people who come between us. But
+he would hamper his progress, he would make enemies, he would raise up
+obstacles by imposing me upon the salons where I would be subject to a
+thousand slights. That is why I prefer my sufferings to what would
+happen were they discovered.
+
+"Adolphe will succeed! He carries my revenge in his beautiful head,
+does this man of genius. One day the world shall pay for all these
+slights. But when? Perhaps I shall be forty-five. My beautiful youth
+will have passed in my chimney-corner, and with this thought: Adolphe
+smiles, he is enjoying the society of fair women, he is playing the
+devoted to them, while none of these attentions come my way.
+
+"It may be that these will finally take him from me!
+
+"No one undergoes slight without feeling it, and I feel that I am
+slighted, though young, beautiful and virtuous. Now, can I keep from
+thinking this way? Can I control my anger at the thought that Adolphe
+is dining in the city without me? I take no part in his triumphs; I do
+not hear the witty or profound remarks made to others! I could no
+longer be content with bourgeois receptions whence he rescued me, upon
+finding me _distinguee_, wealthy, young, beautiful and witty. There
+lies the evil, and it is irremediable.
+
+"In a word, for some cause, it is only since I cannot go to a certain
+salon that I want to go there. Nothing is more natural of the ways of
+a human heart. The ancients were wise in having their _gyneceums_. The
+collisions between the pride of the women, caused by these gatherings,
+though it dates back only four centuries, has cost our own day much
+disaffection and numerous bitter debates.
+
+"Be that as it may, my dear, Adolphe is always warmly welcomed when he
+comes back home. Still, no nature is strong enough to await always
+with the same ardor. What a morrow that will be, following the evening
+when his welcome is less warm!
+
+"Now do you see the depth of the fold which I mentioned? A fold in the
+heart is an abyss, like a crevasse in the Alps--a profundity whose
+depth and extent we have never been able to calculate. Thus it is
+between two beings, no matter how near they may be drawn to each
+other. One never realizes the weight of suffering which oppresses his
+friend. This seems such a little thing, yet one's life is affected by
+it in all its length, in all its breadth. I have thus argued with
+myself; but the more I have argued, the more thoroughly have I
+realized the extent of this hidden sorrow. And I can only let the
+current carry me whither it will.
+
+"Two voices struggle for supremacy when--by a rarely fortunate chance
+--I am alone in my armchair waiting for Adolphe. One, I would wager,
+comes from Eugene Delacroix's _Faust_ which I have on my table.
+Mephistopheles speaks, that terrible aide who guides the swords so
+dexterously. He leaves the engraving, and places himself diabolically
+before me, grinning through the hole which the great artist has placed
+under his nose, and gazing at me with that eye whence fall rubies,
+diamonds, carriages, jewels, laces, silks, and a thousand luxuries to
+feed the burning desire within me.
+
+"'Are you not fit for society?' he asks. 'You are the equal of the
+fairest duchesses. Your voice is like a siren's, your hands command
+respect and love. Ah! that arm!--place bracelets upon it, and how
+pleasingly it would rest upon the velvet of a robe! Your locks are
+chains which would fetter all men. And you could lay all your triumphs
+at Adolphe's feet, show him your power and never use it. Then he would
+fear, where now he lives in insolent certainty. Come! To action!
+Inhale a few mouthfuls of disdain and you will exhale clouds of
+incense. Dare to reign! Are you not next to nothing here in your
+chimney-corner? Sooner or later the pretty spouse, the beloved wife
+will die, if you continue like this, in a dressing-gown. Come, and you
+shall perpetuate your sway through the arts of coquetry! Show yourself
+in salons, and your pretty foot shall trample down the love of your
+rivals.'
+
+"The other voice comes from my white marble mantel, which rustles like
+a garment. I think I see a veritable goddess crowned with white roses,
+and bearing a palm-branch in her hand. Two blue eyes smile down on me.
+This simple image of virtue says to me:
+
+"'Be content! Remain good always, and make this man happy. That is the
+whole of your mission. The sweetness of angels triumphs over all pain.
+Faith in themselves has enabled the martyrs to obtain solace even on
+the brasiers of their tormentors. Suffer a moment; you shall be happy
+in the end.'
+
+"Sometimes Adolphe enters at that moment and I am content. But, my
+dear, I have less patience than love. I almost wish to tear in pieces
+the woman who can go everywhere, and whose society is sought out by
+men and women alike. What profound thought lies in the line of
+Moliere:
+
+  "'The world, dear Agnes, is a curious thing!'
+
+"You know nothing of this petty trouble, you fortunate Mathilde! You
+are well born. You can do a great deal for me. Just think! I can write
+you things that I dared not speak about. Your visits mean so much;
+come often to see your poor
+
+        "Caroline."
+
+
+"Well," said I to the notary's clerk, "do you know what was the nature
+of this letter to the late Bourgarel?"
+
+"No."
+
+"A note of exchange."
+
+Neither clerk nor notary understood my meaning. Do you?
+
+
+
+                       THE PANGS OF INNOCENCE.
+
+"Yes, dear, in the married state, many things will happen to you which
+you are far from expecting: but then others will happen which you
+expect still less. For instance--"
+
+The author (may we say the ingenious author?) _qui castigat ridendo
+mores_, and who has undertaken the _Petty Troubles of Married Life_,
+hardly needs to remark, that, for prudence' sake, he here allows a
+lady of high distinction to speak, and that he does not assume the
+responsibility of her language, though he professes the most sincere
+admiration for the charming person to whom he owes his acquaintance
+with this petty trouble.
+
+"For instance--" she says.
+
+He nevertheless thinks proper to avow that this person is neither
+Madame Foullepointe, nor Madame de Fischtaminel, nor Madame Deschars.
+
+Madame Deschars is too prudish, Madame Foullepointe too absolute in
+her household, and she knows it; indeed, what doesn't she know? She is
+good-natured, she sees good society, she wishes to have the best:
+people overlook the vivacity of her witticisms, as, under louis XIV,
+they overlooked the remarks of Madame Cornuel. They overlook a good
+many things in her; there are some women who are the spoiled children
+of public opinion.
+
+As to Madame de Fischtaminel, who is, in fact, connected with the
+affair, as you shall see, she, being unable to recriminate, abstains
+from words and recriminates in acts.
+
+We give permission to all to think that the speaker is Caroline
+herself, not the silly little Caroline of tender years. But Caroline
+when she has become a woman of thirty.
+
+"For instance," she remarks to a young woman whom she is edifying,
+"you will have children, God willing."
+
+"Madame," I say, "don't let us mix the deity up in this, unless it is
+an allusion--"
+
+"You are impertinent," she replies, "you shouldn't interrupt a
+woman--"
+
+"When she is busy with children, I know: but, madame, you ought not to
+trifle with the innocence of young ladies. Mademoiselle is going to be
+married, and if she were led to count upon the intervention of the
+Supreme Being in this affair, she would fall into serious errors. We
+should not deceive the young. Mademoiselle is beyond the age when
+girls are informed that their little brother was found under a
+cabbage."
+
+"You evidently want to get me confused," she replies, smiling and
+showing the loveliest teeth in the world. "I am not strong enough to
+argue with you, so I beg you to let me go on with Josephine. What was
+I saying?"
+
+"That if I get married, I shall have children," returns the young
+lady.
+
+"Very well. I will not represent things to you worse than they are,
+but it is extremely probable that each child will cost you a tooth.
+With every baby I have lost a tooth."
+
+"Happily," I remark at this, "this trouble was with you less than
+petty, it was positively nothing."--They were side teeth.--"But take
+notice, miss, that this vexation has no absolute, unvarying character
+as such. The annoyance depends upon the condition of the tooth. If the
+baby causes the loss of a decayed tooth, you are fortunate to have a
+baby the more and a bad tooth the less. Don't let us confound
+blessings with bothers. Ah! if you were to lose one of your
+magnificent front teeth, that would be another thing! And yet there is
+many a woman that would give the best tooth in her head for a fine,
+healthy boy!"
+
+"Well," resumes Caroline, with animation, "at the risk of destroying
+your illusions, poor child, I'll just show you a petty trouble that
+counts! Ah, it's atrocious! And I won't leave the subject of dress
+which this gentleman considers the only subject we women are equal
+to."
+
+I protest by a gesture.
+
+"I had been married about two years," continues Caroline, "and I loved
+my husband. I have got over it since and acted differently for his
+happiness and mine. I can boast of having one of the happiest homes in
+Paris. In short, my dear, I loved the monster, and, even when out in
+society, saw no one but him. My husband had already said to me several
+times, 'My dear, young women never dress well; your mother liked to
+have you look like a stick,--she had her reasons for it. If you care
+for my advice, take Madame de Fischtaminel for a model: she is a lady
+of taste.' I, unsuspecting creature that I was, saw no perfidy in the
+recommendation.
+
+"One evening as we returned from a party, he said, 'Did you notice how
+Madame de Fischtaminel was dressed!' 'Yes, very neatly.' And I said to
+myself, 'He's always talking about Madame de Fischtaminel; I must
+really dress just like her.' I had noticed the stuff and the make of
+the dress, and the style of the trimmings. I was as happy as could be,
+as I went trotting about town, doing everything I could to obtain the
+same articles. I sent for the very same dressmaker.
+
+"'You work for Madame de Fischtaminel,' I said.
+
+"'Yes, madame.'
+
+"'Well, I will employ you as my dressmaker, but on one condition: you
+see I have procured the stuff of which her gown is made, and I want
+you to make me one exactly like it.'
+
+"I confess that I did not at first pay any attention to a rather
+shrewd smile of the dressmaker, though I saw it and afterwards
+accounted for it. 'So like it,' I added, 'that you can't tell them
+apart.'
+
+"Oh," says Caroline, interrupting herself and looking at me, "you men
+teach us to live like spiders in the depths of their webs, to see
+everything without seeming to look at it, to investigate the meaning
+and spirit of words, movements, looks. You say, 'How cunning women
+are!' But you should say, 'How deceitful men are!'
+
+"I can't tell you how much care, how many days, how many manoeuvres,
+it cost me to become Madame de Fischtaminel's duplicate! But these are
+our battles, child," she adds, returning to Josephine. "I could not
+find a certain little embroidered neckerchief, a very marvel! I
+finally learned that it was made to order. I unearthed the
+embroideress, and ordered a kerchief like Madame de Fischtaminel's.
+The price was a mere trifle, one hundred and fifty francs! It had been
+ordered by a gentleman who had made a present of it to Madame de
+Fischtaminel. All my savings were absorbed by it. Now we women of
+Paris are all of us very much restricted in the article of dress.
+There is not a man worth a hundred thousand francs a year, that loses
+ten thousand a winter at whist, who does not consider his wife
+extravagant, and is not alarmed at her bills for what he calls 'rags'!
+'Let my savings go,' I said. And they went. I had the modest pride of
+a woman in love: I would not speak a word to Adolphe of my dress; I
+wanted it to be a surprise, goose that I was! Oh, how brutally you men
+take away our blessed ignorance!"
+
+This remark is meant for me, for me who had taken nothing from the
+lady, neither tooth, nor anything whatever of the things with a name
+and without a name that may be taken from a woman.
+
+"I must tell you that my husband took me to Madame de Fischtaminel's,
+where I dined quite often. I heard her say to him, 'Why, your wife
+looks very well!' She had a patronizing way with me that I put up
+with: Adolphe wished that I could have her wit and preponderance in
+society. In short, this phoenix of women was my model. I studied and
+copied her, I took immense pains not to be myself--oh!--it was a poem
+that no one but us women can understand! Finally, the day of my
+triumph dawned. My heart beat for joy, as if I were a child, as if I
+were what we all are at twenty-two. My husband was going to call for
+me for a walk in the Tuileries: he came in, I looked at him radiant
+with joy, but he took no notice. Well, I can confess it now, it was
+one of those frightful disasters--but I will say nothing about it
+--this gentleman here would make fun of me."
+
+I protest by another movement.
+
+"It was," she goes on, for a woman never stops till she has told the
+whole of a thing, "as if I had seen an edifice built by a fairy
+crumble into ruins. Adolphe manifested not the slightest surprise. We
+got into the carriage. Adolphe noticed my sadness, and asked me what
+the matter was: I replied as we always do when our hearts are wrung by
+these petty vexations, 'Oh, nothing!' Then he took his eye-glass, and
+stared at the promenaders on the Champs Elysees, for we were to go the
+rounds of the Champs Elysees, before taking our walk at the Tuileries.
+Finally, a fit of impatience seized me. I felt a slight attack of
+fever, and when I got home, I composed myself to smile. 'You haven't
+said a word about my dress!' I muttered. 'Ah, yes, your gown is
+somewhat like Madame de Fischtaminel's.' He turned on his heel and
+went away.
+
+"The next day I pouted a little, as you may readily imagine. Just as
+we were finishing breakfast by the fire in my room--I shall never
+forget it--the embroideress called to get her money for the
+neckerchief. I paid her. She bowed to my husband as if she knew him. I
+ran after her on pretext of getting her to receipt the bill, and said:
+'You didn't ask _him_ so much for Madame de Fischtaminel's kerchief!'
+'I assure you, madame, it's the same price, the gentleman did not beat
+me down a mite.' I returned to my room where I found my husband
+looking as foolish as--"
+
+She hesitates and then resumes: "As a miller just made a bishop. 'I
+understand, love, now, that I shall never be anything more than
+_somewhat like_ Madame de Fischtaminel.' 'You refer to her
+neckerchief, I suppose: well, I _did_ give it to her,--it was for her
+birthday. You see, we were formerly--' 'Ah, you were formerly more
+intimate than you are now!' Without replying to this, he added, '_But
+it's altogether moral._'
+
+"He took his hat and went out, leaving me with this fine declaration
+of the Rights of Man. He did not return and came home late at night. I
+remained in my chamber and wept like a Magdalen, in the
+chimney-corner. You may laugh at me, if you will," she adds, looking
+at me, "but I shed tears over my youthful illusions, and I wept, too,
+for spite, at having been taken for a dupe. I remembered the
+dressmaker's smile! Ah, that smile reminded me of the smiles of a
+number of women, who laughed at seeing me so innocent and unsuspecting
+at Madame de Fischtaminel's! I wept sincerely. Until now I had a right
+to give my husband credit for many things which he did not possess,
+but
+in the existence of which young married women pertinaciously believe.
+
+"How many great troubles are included in this petty one! You men are a
+vulgar set. There is not a woman who does not carry her delicacy so
+far as to embroider her past life with the most delightful fibs, while
+you--but I have had my revenge."
+
+"Madame," I say, "you are giving this young lady too much
+information."
+
+"True," she returns, "I will tell you the sequel some other time."
+
+"Thus, you see, mademoiselle," I say, "you imagine you are buying a
+neckerchief and you find a _petty trouble_ round your neck: if you get
+it given to you--"
+
+"It's a _great_ trouble," retorts the woman of distinction. "Let us
+stop here."
+
+The moral of this fable is that you must wear your neckerchief without
+thinking too much about it. The ancient prophets called this world,
+even in their time, a valley of woe. Now, at that period, the
+Orientals had, with the permission of the constituted authorities, a
+swarm of comely slaves, besides their wives! What shall we call the
+valley of the Seine between Calvary and Charenton, where the law
+allows but one lawful wife.
+
+
+
+                        THE UNIVERSAL AMADIS.
+
+You will understand at once that I began to gnaw the head of my cane,
+to consult the ceiling, to gaze at the fire, to examine Caroline's
+foot, and I thus held out till the marriageable young lady was gone.
+
+"You must excuse me," I said, "if I have remained behind, perhaps in
+spite of you: but your vengeance would lose by being recounted by and
+by, and if it constituted a petty trouble for your husband, I have the
+greatest interest in hearing it, and you shall know why."
+
+"Ah," she returned, "that expression, '_it's altogether moral,_' which
+he gave as an excuse, shocked me to the last degree. It was a great
+consolation, truly, to me, to know that I held the place, in his
+household, of a piece of furniture, a block; that my kingdom lay among
+the kitchen utensils, the accessories of my toilet, and the
+physicians' prescriptions; that our conjugal love had been assimilated
+to dinner pills, to veal soup and white mustard; that Madame de
+Fischtaminel possessed my husband's soul, his admiration, and that she
+charmed and satisfied his intellect, while I was a kind of purely
+physical necessity! What do you think of a woman's being degraded to
+the situation of a soup or a plate of boiled beef, and without
+parsley, at that! Oh, I composed a catilinic, that evening--"
+
+"Philippic is better."
+
+"Well, either. I'll say anything you like, for I was perfectly
+furious, and I don't remember what I screamed in the desert of my
+bedroom. Do you suppose that this opinion that husbands have of their
+wives, the parts they give them, is not a singular vexation for us?
+Our petty troubles are always pregnant with greater ones. My Adolphe
+needed a lesson. You know the Vicomte de Lustrac, a desperate amateur
+of women and music, an epicure, one of those ex-beaux of the Empire,
+who live upon their earlier successes, and who cultivate themselves
+with excessive care, in order to secure a second crop?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "one of those laced, braced, corseted old fellows of
+sixty, who work such wonders by the grace of their forms, and who
+might give a lesson to the youngest dandies among us."
+
+"Monsieur de Lustrac is as selfish as a king, but gallant and
+pretentious, spite of his jet black wig."
+
+"As to his whiskers, he dyes them."
+
+"He goes to ten parties in an evening: he's a butterfly."
+
+"He gives capital dinners and concerts, and patronizes inexperienced
+songstresses."
+
+"He takes bustle for pleasure."
+
+"Yes, but he makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune
+occurs. Are you in mourning, he avoids you. Are you confined, he
+awaits your churching before he visits you. He possesses a mundane
+frankness and a social intrepidity which challenge admiration."
+
+"But does it not require courage to appear to be what one really is?"
+I asked.
+
+"Well," she resumed, after we had exchanged our observations on this
+point, "this young old man, this universal Amadis, whom we call among
+ourselves Chevalier _Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore_, became the object of
+my admiration. I made him a few of those advances which never
+compromise a woman; I spoke of the good taste exhibited in his latest
+waistcoats and in his canes, and he thought me a lady of extreme
+amiability. I thought him a chevalier of extreme youth; he called upon
+me; I put on a number of little airs, and pretended to be unhappy at
+home, and to have deep sorrows. You know what a woman means when she
+talks of her sorrows, and complains that she is not understood. The
+old ape replied much better than a young man would, and I had the
+greatest difficulty in keeping a straight face while I listened to
+him.
+
+"'Ah, that's the way with husbands, they pursue the very worst polity,
+they respect their wives, and, sooner or later, every woman is enraged
+at finding herself respected, and divines the secret education to
+which she is entitled. Once married, you ought not to live like a
+little school-girl, etc.'
+
+"As he spoke, he leaned over me, he squirmed, he was horrible to see.
+He looked like a wooden Nuremberg doll, he stuck out his chin, he
+stuck out his chair, he stuck out his hand--in short, after a variety
+of marches and countermarches, of declarations that were perfectly
+angelic--"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes. _Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore_ had abandoned the classicism of his
+youth for the romanticism now in fashion: he spoke of the soul, of
+angels, of adoration, of submission, he became ethereal, and of the
+darkest blue. He took me to the opera, and handed me to my carriage.
+This old young man went when I went, his waistcoats multiplied, he
+compressed his waist, he excited his horse to a gallop in order to
+catch and accompany my carriage to the promenade: he compromised me
+with the grace of a young collegian, and was considered madly in love
+with me. I was steadfastly cruel, but accepted his arm and his
+bouquets. We were talked about. I was delighted, and managed before
+long to be surprised by my husband, with the viscount on the sofa in
+my boudoir, holding my hands in his, while I listened in a sort of
+external ecstasy. It is incredible how much a desire for vengeance
+will induce us to put up with! I appeared vexed at the entrance of my
+husband, who made a scene on the viscount's departure: 'I assure you,
+sir,' said I, after having listened to his reproaches, 'that _it's
+altogether moral_.' My husband saw the point and went no more to
+Madame de Fischtaminel's. I received Monsieur de Lustrac no more,
+either."
+
+"But," I interrupted, "this Lustrac that you, like many others, take
+for a bachelor, is a widower, and childless."
+
+"Really!"
+
+"No man ever buried his wife deeper than he buried his: she will
+hardly be found at the day of judgment. He married before the
+Revolution, and your _altogether moral_ reminds me of a speech of his
+that I shall have to repeat for your benefit. Napoleon appointed
+Lustrac to an important office, in a conquered province. Madame de
+Lustrac, abandoned for governmental duties, took a private secretary
+for her private affairs, though it was altogether moral: but she was
+wrong in selecting him without informing her husband. Lustrac met this
+secretary in a state of some excitement, in consequence of a lively
+discussion in his wife's chamber, and at an exceedingly early hour in
+the morning. The city desired nothing better than to laugh at its
+governor, and this adventure made such a sensation that Lustrac
+himself begged the Emperor to recall him. Napoleon desired his
+representatives to be men of morality, and he held that such disasters
+as this must inevitably take from a man's consideration. You know that
+among the Emperor's unhappy passions, was that of reforming his court
+and his government. Lustrac's request was granted, therefore, but
+without compensation. When he returned to Paris, he reappeared at his
+mansion, with his wife; he took her into society--a step which is
+certainly conformable to the most refined habits of the aristocracy
+--but then there are always people who want to find out about it.
+They inquired the reason of this chivalrous championship. 'So you are
+reconciled, you and Madame de Lustrac,' some one said to him in the
+lobby of the Emperor's theatre, 'you have pardoned her, have you? So
+much the better.' 'Oh,' replied he, with a satisfied air, 'I became
+convinced--' 'Ah, that she was innocent, very good.' 'No, I became
+convinced that it was altogether physical.'"
+
+Caroline smiled.
+
+"The opinion of your admirer reduced this weighty trouble to what is,
+in this case as in yours, a very petty one."
+
+"A petty trouble!" she exclaimed, "and pray for what do you take the
+fatigue of coquetting with a de Lustrac, of whom I have made an enemy!
+Ah, women often pay dearly enough for the bouquets they receive and
+the attentions they accept. Monsieur de Lustrac said of me to Monsieur
+de Bourgarel, 'I would not advise you to pay court to that woman; she
+is too dear.'"
+
+
+
+                        WITHOUT AN OCCUPATION.
+
+
+"PARIS, 183-
+
+"You ask me, dear mother, whether I am happy with my husband.
+Certainly Monsieur de Fischtaminel was not the ideal of my dreams. I
+submitted to your will, as you know. His fortune, that supreme
+consideration, spoke, indeed, sufficiently loud. With these arguments,
+--a marriage, without stooping, with the Count de Fischtaminel, his
+having thirty thousand a year, and a home at Paris--you were strongly
+armed against your poor daughter. Besides, Monsieur de Fischtaminel is
+good looking for a man of thirty-six years; he received the cross of
+the Legion of Honor from Napoleon upon the field of battle, he is an
+ex-colonel, and had it not been for the Restoration, which put him
+upon half-pay, he would be a general. These are certainly extenuating
+circumstances.
+
+"Many women consider that I have made a good match, and I am bound to
+confess that there is every appearance of happiness,--for the public,
+that is. But you will acknowledge that if you had known of the return
+of my Uncle Cyrus and of his intention to leave me his money, you
+would have given me the privilege of choosing for myself.
+
+"I have nothing to say against Monsieur de Fischtaminel: he does not
+gamble, he is indifferent to women, he doesn't like wine, and he has
+no expensive fancies: he possesses, as you said, all the negative
+qualities which make husbands passable. Then, what is the matter with
+him? Well, mother, he has nothing to do. We are together the whole
+blessed day! Would you believe that it is during the night, when we
+are the most closely united, that I am the most alone? His sleep is my
+asylum, my liberty begins when he slumbers. This state of siege will
+yet make me sick: I am never alone. If Monsieur de Fischtaminel were
+jealous, I should have a resource. There would then be a struggle, a
+comedy: but how could the aconite of jealousy have taken root in his
+soul? He has never left me since our marriage. He feels no shame in
+stretching himself out upon a sofa and remaining there for hours
+together.
+
+"Two felons pinioned to the same chain do not find time hang heavy:
+for they have their escape to think of. But we have no subject of
+conversation; we have long since talked ourselves out. A little while
+ago he was so far reduced as to talk politics. But even politics are
+exhausted, Napoleon, unfortunately for me, having died at St. Helena,
+as is well known.
+
+"Monsieur de Fischtaminel abhors reading. If he sees me with a book,
+he comes and says a dozen times an hour--'Nina, dear, haven't you
+finished yet?'
+
+"I endeavored to persuade this innocent persecutor to ride out every
+day on horseback, and I alleged a consideration usually conclusive
+with men of forty years,--his health! But he said that after having
+been twelve years on horseback, he felt the need of repose.
+
+"My husband, dear mother, is a man who absorbs you, he uses up the
+vital fluid of his neighbor, his ennui is gluttonous: he likes to be
+amused by those who call upon us, and, after five years of wedlock, no
+one ever comes: none visit us but those whose intentions are evidently
+dishonorable for him, and who endeavor, unsuccessfully, to amuse him,
+in order to earn the right to weary his wife.
+
+"Monsieur de Fischtaminel, mother, opens the door of my chamber, or of
+the room to which I have flown for refuge, five or six times an hour,
+and comes up to me in an excited way, and says, 'Well, what are you
+doing, my belle?' (the expression in fashion during the Empire)
+without perceiving that he is constantly repeating the same phrase,
+which is to me like the one pint too much that the executioner
+formerly poured into the torture by water.
+
+"Then there's another bore! We can't go to walk any more. A promenade
+without conversation, without interest, is impossible. My husband
+walks with me for the walk, as if he were alone. I have the fatigue
+without the pleasure.
+
+"The interval between getting up and breakfast is employed in my
+toilet, in my household duties; and I manage to get through with this
+part of the day. But between breakfast and dinner, there is a whole
+desert to plough, a waste to traverse. My husband's want of occupation
+does not leave me a moment of repose, he overpowers me by his
+uselessness; his idle life positively wears me out. His two eyes
+always open and gazing at mine compel me to keep them lowered. Then
+his monotonous remarks:
+
+"'What o'clock is it, love? What are you doing now? What are you
+thinking of? What do you mean to do? Where shall we go this evening?
+Anything new? What weather! I don't feel well, etc., etc.'
+
+"All these variations upon the same theme--the interrogation point
+--which compose Fischtaminel's repertory, will drive me mad. Add to
+these leaden arrows everlastingly shot off at me, one last trait which
+will complete the description of my happiness, and you will understand
+my life.
+
+"Monsieur de Fischtaminel, who went away in 1809, with the rank of
+sub-lieutenant, at the age of eighteen, has had no other education
+than that due to discipline, to the natural sense of honor of a noble
+and a soldier: but though he possesses tact, the sentiment of probity,
+and a proper subordination, his ignorance is gross, he knows
+absolutely nothing, and he has a horror of learning anything. Oh, dear
+mother, what an accomplished door-keeper this colonel would have made,
+had he been born in indigence! I don't think a bit the better of him
+for his bravery, for he did not fight against the Russians, the
+Austrians, or the Prussians: he fought against ennui. When he rushed
+upon the enemy, Captain Fischtaminel's purpose was to get away from
+himself. He married because he had nothing else to do.
+
+"We have another slight difficulty to content with: my husband
+harasses the servants to such a degree that we change them every six
+months.
+
+"I so ardently desire, dear mother, to remain a virtuous woman, that I
+am going to try the effect of traveling for half the year. During the
+winter, I shall go every evening to the Italian or the French opera,
+or to parties: but I don't know whether our fortune will permit such
+an expenditure. Uncle Cyrus ought to come to Paris--I would take care
+of him as I would of an inheritance.
+
+"If you discover a cure for my woes, let your daughter know of it
+--your daughter who loves you as much as she deplores her misfortunes,
+and who would have been glad to call herself by some other name than
+that of
+
+        "NINA FISCHTAMINEL."
+
+
+Besides the necessity of describing this petty trouble, which could
+only be described by the pen of a woman,--and what a woman she was!
+--it was necessary to make you acquainted with a character whom you
+saw only in profile in the first half of this book, the queen of the
+particular set in which Caroline lived,--a woman both envied and
+adroit, who succeeded in conciliating, at an early date, what she owed
+to the world with the requirements of the heart. This letter is her
+absolution.
+
+
+
+                            INDISCRETIONS.
+
+Women are either chaste--or vain--or simply proud. They are therefore
+all subject to the following petty trouble:
+
+Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a
+woman to themselves,--a possession exclusively due to the legal
+ceremony,--that they dread the public's making a mistake, and they
+hasten to brand their consort, as lumber-dealers brand their logs
+while floating down stream, or as the Berry stock-raisers brand their
+sheep. They bestow names of endearment, right before people, upon
+their wives: names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella), from
+the animal kingdom, as: my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or,
+choosing from the vegetable kingdom, they call them: my cabbage, my
+fig (this only in Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia). Never:
+--My flower! Pray note this discretion.
+
+Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:--Bobonne,
+--mother,--daughter,--good woman,--old lady: this last when she is
+very young.
+
+Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as: Mon bichon, ma
+niniche, Tronquette!
+
+We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for
+his ugliness, call his wife, _Moumoutte_!
+
+"I would rather he would strike me," said this unfortunate to her
+neighbor.
+
+"Poor little woman, she is really unhappy," resumed the neighbor,
+looking at me when Moumoutte had gone: "when she is in company with
+her husband she is upon pins and needles, and keeps out of his way.
+One evening, he actually seized her by the neck and said: 'Come fatty,
+let's go home!'"
+
+It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning
+with arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions
+like these that the wife had to bear in society. This husband used to
+give the woman he had won at the point of the Code, public little taps
+on her shoulder, he would startle her by a resounding kiss, he
+dishonored her by a conspicuous tenderness, seasoned by those
+impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French
+savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners
+are very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction.
+It was, it is said, this shocking situation,--one perfectly
+appreciated by a discerning jury,--which won the prisoner a verdict
+softened by the extenuating circumstances.
+
+The jurymen said to themselves:
+
+"For a wife to murder her husband for these conjugal offences, is
+certainly going rather far; but then a woman is very excusable, when
+she is so harassed!"
+
+We deeply regret, in the interest of elegant manners, that these
+arguments are not more generally known. Heaven grant, therefore, that
+our book may have an immense success, as women will obtain this
+advantage from it, that they will be treated as they deserve, that is,
+as queens.
+
+In this respect, love is much superior to marriage, it is proud of
+indiscreet sayings and doings. There are some women that seek them,
+fish for them, and woe to the man who does not now and then commit
+one!
+
+What passion lies in an accidental _thou_!
+
+Out in the country I heard a husband call his wife: "Ma berline!" She
+was delighted with it, and saw nothing ridiculous in it: she called
+her husband, "Mon fiston!" This delicious couple were ignorant of the
+existence of such things as petty troubles.
+
+It was in observing this happy pair that the author discovered this
+axiom:
+
+
+Axiom:--In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of
+genius married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a
+chance which is not as common as might be supposed, you must both of
+you be exceedingly stupid.
+
+
+The too celebrated history of the cure of a wounded self-love by
+arsenic, proves that, properly speaking, there are no petty troubles
+for women in married life.
+
+
+Axiom.--Woman exists by sentiment where man exists by action.
+
+
+Now, sentiment can at any moment render a petty trouble either a great
+misfortune, or a wasted life, or an eternal misery. Should Caroline
+begin, in her ignorance of life and the world, by inflicting upon her
+husband the vexations of her stupidity (re-read REVELATIONS), Adolphe,
+like any other man, may find a compensation in social excitement: he
+goes out, comes back, goes here and there, has business. But for
+Caroline, the question everywhere is, To love or not to love, to be or
+not to be loved.
+
+Indiscretions are in harmony with the character of the individuals,
+with times and places. Two examples will suffice.
+
+
+Here is the first. A man is by nature dirty and ugly: he is ill-made
+and repulsive. There are men, and often rich ones, too, who, by a sort
+of unobserved constitution, soil a new suit of clothes in twenty-four
+hours. They were born disgusting. It is so disgraceful for a women to
+be anything more than just simply a wife to this sort of Adolphe, that
+a certain Caroline had long ago insisted upon the suppression of the
+modern _thee_ and _thou_ and all other insignia of the wifely dignity.
+Society had been for five or six years accustomed to this sort of
+thing, and supposed Madame and Monsieur completely separated, and all
+the more so as it had noticed the accession of a Ferdinand II.
+
+One evening, in the presence of a dozen persons, this man said to his
+wife: "Caroline, hand me the tongs, there's a love." It is nothing,
+and yet everything. It was a domestic revelation.
+
+Monsieur de Lustrac, the Universal Amadis, hurried to Madame de
+Fischtaminel's, narrated this little scene with all the spirit at his
+command, and Madame de Fischtaminel put on an air something like
+Celimene's and said: "Poor creature, what an extremity she must be
+in!"
+
+I say nothing of Caroline's confusion,--you have already divined it.
+
+
+Here is the second. Think of the frightful situation in which a lady
+of great refinement was lately placed: she was conversing agreeably at
+her country seat near Paris, when her husband's servant came and
+whispered in her ear, "Monsieur has come, madame."
+
+"Very well, Benoit."
+
+Everybody had heard the rumblings of the vehicle. It was known that
+the husband had been at Paris since Monday, and this took place on
+Saturday, at four in the afternoon.
+
+"He's got something important to say to you, madame."
+
+Though this dialogue was held in a whisper, it was perfectly
+understood, and all the more so from the fact that the lady of the
+house turned from the pale hue of the Bengal rose to the brilliant
+crimson of the wheatfield poppy. She nodded and went on with the
+conversation, and managed to leave her company on the pretext of
+learning whether her husband had succeeded in an important undertaking
+or not: but she seemed plainly vexed at Adolphe's want of
+consideration for the company who were visiting her.
+
+During their youth, women want to be treated as divinities, they love
+the ideal; they cannot bear the idea of being what nature intended
+them to be.
+
+Some husbands, on retiring to the country, after a week in town, are
+worse than this: they bow to the company, put their arm round their
+wife's waist, take a little walk with her, appear to be talking
+confidentially, disappear in a clump of trees, get lost, and reappear
+half an hour afterward.
+
+This, ladies, is a genuine petty trouble for a young woman, but for a
+woman beyond forty, this sort of indiscretion is so delightful, that
+the greatest prudes are flattered by it, for, be it known:
+
+That women of a certain age, women on the shady side, want to be
+treated as mortals, they love the actual; they cannot bear the idea of
+no longer being what nature intended them to be.
+
+
+Axiom.--Modesty is a relative virtue; there is the modesty of the
+woman of twenty, the woman of thirty, the woman of forty-five.
+
+
+Thus the author said to a lady who told him to guess at her age:
+"Madame, yours is the age of indiscretion."
+
+This charming woman of thirty-nine was making a Ferdinand much too
+conspicuous, while her daughter was trying to conceal her Ferdinand I.
+
+
+
+                         BRUTAL DISCLOSURES.
+
+
+FIRST STYLE. Caroline adores Adolphe, she thinks him handsome, she
+thinks him superb, especially in his National Guard uniform. She
+starts when a sentinel presents arms to him, she considers him moulded
+like a model, she regards him as a man of wit, everything he does is
+right, nobody has better taste than he, in short, she is crazy about
+Adolphe.
+
+It's the old story of Cupid's bandage. This is washed every ten years,
+and newly embroidered by the altered manners of the period, but it has
+been the same old bandage since the days of Greece.
+
+Caroline is at a ball with one of her young friends. A man well known
+for his bluntness, whose acquaintance she is to make later in life,
+but whom she now sees for the first time, Monsieur Foullepointe, has
+commenced a conversation with Caroline's friend. According to the
+custom of society, Caroline listens to this conversation without
+mingling in it.
+
+"Pray tell me, madame," says Monsieur Foullepointe, "who is that queer
+man who has been talking about the Court of Assizes before a gentleman
+whose acquittal lately created such a sensation: he is all the while
+blundering, like an ox in a bog, against everybody's sore spot. A lady
+burst into tears at hearing him tell of the death of a child, as she
+lost her own two months ago."
+
+"Who do you mean?"
+
+"Why, that fat man, dressed like a waiter in a cafe, frizzled like a
+barber's apprentice, there, he's trying now to make himself agreeable
+to Madame de Fischtaminel."
+
+"Hush," whispers the lady quite alarmed, "it's the husband of the
+little woman next to me!"
+
+"Ah, it's your husband?" says Monsieur Foullepointe. "I am delighted,
+madame, he's a charming man, so vivacious, gay and witty. I am going
+to make his acquaintance immediately."
+
+And Foullepointe executes his retreat, leaving a bitter suspicion in
+Caroline's soul, as to the question whether her husband is really as
+handsome as she thinks him.
+
+
+SECOND STYLE. Caroline, annoyed by the reputation of Madame Schinner,
+who is credited with the possession of epistolary talents, and styled
+the "Sevigne of the note", tired of hearing about Madame de
+Fischtaminel, who has ventured to write a little 32mo book on the
+education of the young, in which she has boldly reprinted Fenelon,
+without the style:--Caroline has been working for six months upon a
+tale tenfold poorer than those of Berquin, nauseatingly moral, and
+flamboyant in style.
+
+After numerous intrigues such as women are skillful in managing in the
+interest of their vanity, and the tenacity and perfection of which
+would lead you to believe that they have a third sex in their head,
+this tale, entitled "The Lotus," appears in three installments in a
+leading daily paper. It is signed Samuel Crux.
+
+When Adolphe takes up the paper at breakfast, Caroline's heart beats
+up in her very throat: she blushes, turns pale, looks away and stares
+at the ceiling. When Adolphe's eyes settle upon the feuilleton, she
+can bear it no longer: she gets up, goes out, comes back, having
+replenished her stock of audacity, no one knows where.
+
+"Is there a feuilleton this morning?" she asks with an air that she
+thinks indifferent, but which would disturb a husband still jealous of
+his wife.
+
+"Yes, one by a beginner, Samuel Crux. The name is a disguise, clearly:
+the tale is insignificant enough to drive an insect to despair, if he
+could read: and vulgar, too: the style is muddy, but then it's--"
+
+Caroline breathes again. "It's--" she suggests.
+
+"It's incomprehensible," resumes Adolphe. "Somebody must have paid
+Chodoreille five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it's the
+production of a blue-stocking in high society who has promised to
+invite Madame Chodoreille to her house; or perhaps it's the work of a
+woman in whom the editor is personally interested. Such a piece of
+stupidity cannot be explained any other way. Imagine, Caroline, that
+it's all about a little flower picked on the edge of a wood in a
+sentimental walk, which a gentleman of the Werther school has sworn to
+keep, which he has had framed, and which the lady claims again eleven
+years after (the poor man has had time to change his lodgings three
+times). It's quite new, about as old as Sterne or Gessner. What makes
+me think it's a woman, is that the first literary idea of the whole
+sex is to take vengeance on some one."
+
+Adolphe might go on pulling "The Lotus" to pieces; Caroline's ears are
+full of the tinkling of bells. She is like the woman who threw herself
+over the Pont des Arts, and tried to find her way ten feet below the
+level of the Seine.
+
+
+ANOTHER STYLE. Caroline, in her paroxysms of jealousy, has discovered
+a hiding place used by Adolphe, who, as he can't trust his wife, and
+as he knows she opens his letters and rummages in his drawers, has
+endeavored to save his correspondence with Hector from the hooked
+fingers of the conjugal police.
+
+Hector is an old schoolmate, who has married in the Loire Inferieure.
+
+Adolphe lifts up the cloth of his writing desk, a cloth the border of
+which has been embroidered by Caroline, the ground being blue, black
+or red velvet,--the color, as you see, is perfectly immaterial,--and
+he slips his unfinished letters to Madame de Fischtaminel, to his
+friend Hector, between the table and the cloth.
+
+The thickness of a sheet of paper is almost nothing, velvet is a
+downy, discreet material, but, no matter, these precautions are in
+vain. The male devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet
+will furnish them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her
+side, the demon who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with
+his ironic finger points out the hiding place of keys--the secret of
+secrets.
+
+Caroline has noticed the thickness of a letter sheet between this
+velvet and this table: she hits upon a letter to Hector instead of
+hitting upon one to Madame de Fischtaminel, who has gone to Plombieres
+Springs, and reads the following:
+
+
+"My dear Hector:
+
+"I pity you, but you have acted wisely in entrusting me with a
+knowledge of the difficulties in which you have voluntarily involved
+yourself. You never would see the difference between the country woman
+and the woman of Paris. In the country, my dear boy, you are always
+face to face with your wife, and, owing to the ennui which impels you,
+you rush headforemost into the enjoyment of your bliss. This is a
+great error: happiness is an abyss, and when you have once reached the
+bottom, you never get back again, in wedlock.
+
+"I will show you why. Let me take, for your wife's sake, the shortest
+path--the parable.
+
+"I remember having made a journey from Paris to Ville-Parisis, in that
+vehicle called a 'bus: distance, twenty miles: 'bus, lumbering: horse,
+lame. Nothing amuses me more than to draw from people, by the aid of
+that gimlet called the interrogation, and to obtain, by means of an
+attentive air, the sum of information, anecdotes and learning that
+everybody is anxious to part with: and all men have such a sum, the
+peasant as well as the banker, the corporal as well as the marshal of
+France.
+
+"I have often noticed how ready these casks, overflowing with wit, are
+to open their sluices while being transported by diligence or 'bus, or
+by any vehicle drawn by horses, for nobody talks in a railway car.
+
+"At the rate of our exit from Paris, the journey would take full seven
+hours: so I got an old corporal to talk, for my diversion. He could
+neither read nor write: he was entirely illiterate. Yet the journey
+seemed short. The corporal had been through all the campaigns, he told
+me of things perfectly unheard of, that historians never trouble
+themselves about.
+
+"Ah! Hector, how superior is practice to theory! Among other things,
+and in reply to a question relative to the infantry, whose courage is
+much more tried by marching than by fighting, he said this, which I
+give you free from circumlocution:
+
+"'Sir, when Parisians were brought to our 45th, which Napoleon called
+The Terrible (I am speaking of the early days of the Empire, when the
+infantry had legs of steel, and when they needed them), I had a way of
+telling beforehand which of them would remain in the 45th. They
+marched without hurrying, they did their little six leagues a day,
+neither more nor less, and they pitched camp in condition to begin
+again on the morrow. The plucky fellows who did ten leagues and wanted
+to run to the victory, stopped half way at the hospital.'
+
+"The worthy corporal was talking of marriage while he thought he was
+talking of war, and you have stopped half way, Hector, at the
+hospital.
+
+"Remember the sympathetic condolence of Madame de Sevigne counting out
+three hundred thousand francs to Monsieur de Grignan, to induce him to
+marry one of the prettiest girls in France! 'Why,' said she to
+herself, 'he will have to marry her every day, as long as she lives!
+Decidedly, I don't think three hundred francs too much.' Is it not
+enough to make the bravest tremble?
+
+"My dear fellow, conjugal happiness is founded, like that of nations,
+upon ignorance. It is a felicity full of negative conditions.
+
+"If I am happy with my little Caroline, it is due to the strictest
+observance of that salutary principle so strongly insisted upon in the
+_Physiology of Marriage_. I have resolved to lead my wife through
+paths beaten in the snow, until the happy day when infidelity will be
+difficult.
+
+"In the situation in which you have placed yourself, and which
+resembles that of Duprez, who, on his first appearance at Paris, went
+to singing with all the voice his lungs would yield, instead of
+imitating Nourrit, who gave the audience just enough to enchant them,
+the following, I think, is your proper course to--"
+
+
+The letter broke off here: Caroline returned it to its place, at the
+same time wondering how she would make her dear Adolphe expiate his
+obedience to the execrable precepts of the _Physiology of Marriage_.
+
+
+
+                               A TRUCE.
+
+This trouble doubtless occurs sufficiently often and in different ways
+enough in the existence of married women, for this personal incident
+to become the type of the genus.
+
+The Caroline in question here is very pious, she loves her husband
+very much, her husband asserts that she loves him too much, even: but
+this is a piece of marital conceit, if, indeed, it is not a
+provocation, as he only complains to his wife's young lady friends.
+
+When a person's conscience is involved, the least thing becomes
+exceedingly serious. Madame de ----- has told her young friend, Madame
+de Fischtaminel, that she had been compelled to make an extraordinary
+confession to her spiritual director, and to perform penance, the
+director having decided that she was in a state of mortal sin. This
+lady, who goes to mass every morning, is a woman of thirty-six years,
+thin and slightly pimpled. She has large soft black eyes, her upper
+lip is strongly shaded: still her voice is sweet, her manners gentle,
+her gait noble--she is a woman of quality.
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel, whom Madame de ----- has made her friend
+(nearly all pious women patronize a woman who is considered worldly,
+on the pretext of converting her),--Madame de Fischtaminel asserts
+that these qualities, in this Caroline of the Pious Sort, are a
+victory of religion over a rather violent natural temper.
+
+These details are necessary to describe the trouble in all its horror.
+
+This lady's Adolphe had been compelled to leave his wife for two
+months, in April, immediately after the forty days' fast that Caroline
+scrupulously observes. Early in June, therefore, madame expected her
+husband, she expected him day by day. From one hope to another,
+
+  "Conceived every morn and deferred every eve."
+
+She got along as far as Sunday, the day when her presentiments, which
+had now reached a state of paroxysm, told her that the longed-for
+husband would arrive at an early hour.
+
+When a pious woman expects her husband, and that husband has been
+absent from home nearly four months, she takes much more pains with
+her toilet than a young girl does, though waiting for her first
+betrothed.
+
+This virtuous Caroline was so completely absorbed in exclusively
+personal preparations, that she forgot to go to eight o'clock mass.
+She proposed to hear a low mass, but she was afraid of losing the
+delight of her dear Adolphe's first glance, in case he arrived at
+early dawn. Her chambermaid--who respectfully left her mistress alone
+in the dressing-room where pious and pimpled ladies let no one enter,
+not even their husbands, especially if they are thin--her chambermaid
+heard her exclaim several times, "If it's your master, let me know!"
+
+The rumbling of a vehicle having made the furniture rattle, Caroline
+assumed a mild tone to conceal the violence of her legitimate
+emotions.
+
+"Oh! 'tis he! Run, Justine: tell him I am waiting for him here."
+Caroline trembled so that she dropped into an arm-chair.
+
+The vehicle was a butcher's wagon.
+
+It was in anxieties like this that the eight o'clock mass slipped by,
+like an eel in his slime. Madame's toilet operations were resumed, for
+she was engaged in dressing. The chambermaid's nose had already been
+the recipient of a superb muslin chemise, with a simple hem, which
+Caroline had thrown at her from the dressing-room, though she had
+given her the same kind for the last three months.
+
+"What are you thinking of, Justine? I told you to choose from the
+chemises that are not numbered."
+
+The unnumbered chemises were only seven or eight, in the most
+magnificent trousseau. They are chemises gotten up and embroidered
+with the greatest care: a woman must be a queen, a young queen, to
+have a dozen. Each one of Caroline's was trimmed with valenciennes
+round the bottom, and still more coquettishly garnished about the
+neck. This feature of our manners will perhaps serve to suggest a
+suspicion, in the masculine world, of the domestic drama revealed by
+this exceptional chemise.
+
+Caroline had put on a pair of Scotch thread stockings, little prunella
+buskins, and her most deceptive corsets. She had her hair dressed in
+the fashion that most became her, and embellished it with a cap of the
+most elegant form. It is unnecessary to speak of her morning gown. A
+pious lady who lives at Paris and who loves her husband, knows as well
+as a coquette how to choose those pretty little striped patterns, have
+them cut with an open waist, and fastened by loops to buttons in a way
+which compels her to refasten them two or three times in an hour, with
+little airs more or less charming, as the case may be.
+
+The nine o'clock mass, the ten o'clock mass, every mass, went by in
+these preparations, which, for women in love, are one of their twelve
+labors of Hercules.
+
+Pious women rarely go to church in a carriage, and they are right.
+Except in the case of a pouring shower, or intolerably bad weather, a
+person ought not to appear haughty in the place where it is becoming
+to be humble. Caroline was afraid to compromise the freshness of her
+dress and the purity of her thread stockings. Alas! these pretexts
+concealed a reason.
+
+"If I am at church when Adolphe comes, I shall lose the pleasure of
+his first glance: and he will think I prefer high mass to him."
+
+She made this sacrifice to her husband in a desire to please him--a
+fearfully worldly consideration. Prefer the creature to the Creator! A
+husband to heaven! Go and hear a sermon and you will learn what such
+an offence will cost you.
+
+"After all," says Caroline, quoting her confessor, "society is founded
+upon marriage, which the Church has included among its sacraments."
+
+And this is the way in which religious instruction may be put aside in
+favor of a blind though legitimate love. Madame refused breakfast, and
+ordered the meal to be kept hot, just as she kept herself ready, at a
+moment's notice, to welcome the precious absentee.
+
+Now these little things may easily excite a laugh: but in the first
+place they are continually occurring with couples who love each other,
+or where one of them loves the other: besides, in a woman so
+strait-laced, so reserved, so worthy, as this lady, these
+acknowledgments of affection went beyond the limits imposed upon her
+feelings by the lofty self-respect which true piety induces. When
+Madame de Fischtaminel narrated this little scene in a devotee's life,
+dressing it up with choice by-play, acted out as ladies of the world
+know how to act out their anecdotes, I took the liberty of saying that
+it was the Canticle of canticles in action.
+
+"If her husband doesn't come," said Justine to the cook, "what will
+become of us? She has already thrown her chemise in my face."
+
+At last, Caroline heard the crack of a postilion's whip, the
+well-known rumbling of a traveling carriage, the racket made by the
+hoofs of post-horses, and the jingling of their bells! Oh, she could
+doubt no longer, the bells made her burst forth, as thus:
+
+"The door! Open the door! 'Tis he, my husband! Will you never go to
+the door!" And the pious woman stamped her foot and broke the
+bell-rope.
+
+"Why, madame," said Justine, with the vivacity of a servant doing her
+duty, "it's some people going away."
+
+"Upon my word," replied Caroline, half ashamed, to herself, "I will
+never let Adolphe go traveling again without me."
+
+A Marseilles poet--it is not known whether it was Mery or Barthelemy
+--acknowledged that if his best fried did not arrive punctually at the
+dinner hour, he waited patiently five minutes: at the tenth minute, he
+felt a desire to throw the napkin in his face: at the twelfth he hoped
+some great calamity would befall him: at the fifteenth, he would not
+be able to restrain himself from stabbing him several times with a
+dirk.
+
+All women, when expecting somebody, are Marseilles poets, if, indeed,
+we may compare the vulgar throes of hunger to the sublime Canticle of
+canticles of a pious wife, who is hoping for the joys of a husband's
+first glance after a three months' absence. Let all those who love and
+who have met again after an absence ten thousand times accursed, be
+good enough to recall their first glance: it says so many things that
+the lovers, if in the presence of a third party, are fain to lower
+their eyes! This poem, in which every man is as great as Homer, in
+which he seems a god to the woman who loves him, is, for a pious, thin
+and pimpled lady, all the more immense, from the fact that she has
+not, like Madame de Fischtaminel, the resource of having several
+copies of it. In her case, her husband is all she's got!
+
+So you will not be surprised to learn that Caroline missed every mass
+and had no breakfast. This hunger and thirst for Adolphe gave her a
+violent cramp in the stomach. She did not think of religion once
+during the hours of mass, nor during those of vespers. She was not
+comfortable when she sat, and she was very uncomfortable when she
+stood: Justine advised her to go to bed. Caroline, quite overcome,
+retired at about half past five in the evening, after having taken a
+light soup: but she ordered a dainty supper at ten.
+
+"I shall doubtless sup with my husband," she said.
+
+This speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally
+fulminated. She had reached the Marseilles poet's several stabs with a
+dirk. So she spoke in a tone that was really terrible. At three in the
+morning Caroline was in a profound sleep: Adolphe arrived without her
+hearing either carriage, or horse, or bell, or opening door!
+
+Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the
+spare room. When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two
+tears issued from her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the
+slightest preparatory toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the
+threshold, informed her that her husband, having traveled two hundred
+leagues and been two nights without sleep, requested that he might not
+be awakened: he was exceedingly tired.
+
+Caroline--pious woman that she was--opened the door violently without
+being able to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and
+then hastened to church to listen to a thanksgiving mass.
+
+As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in
+reply to an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid's finesse:
+
+"Why, madame, your husband's got back!"
+
+"He has only got back to Paris," returned the pious Caroline.
+
+
+
+                            USELESS CARE.
+
+Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes
+her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite
+pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and
+follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and
+yet economically--a house, too, not easy to manage--who, from morality
+and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no
+other study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to
+express all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment _to the
+sentiment of her duties_. This underlined circumlocution is the
+paraphrase of the word love in the language of prudes.
+
+Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband
+by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel's, that he
+was very fond of mushrooms _a l'Italienne_.
+
+If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good,
+great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there
+is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing
+his favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upon which
+the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all his
+pleasures, big and little. Love animates everything in life, and
+conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial
+details.
+
+Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how
+the Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells
+her that at Biffi's, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn
+how the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain
+some Milanese mushrooms. Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini,
+and resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.
+
+Caroline's cook goes to Biffi's, comes back from Biffi's, and exhibits
+to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman's ears.
+
+"Very good," she says, "did he explain to you how to cook them?"
+
+"Oh, for us cooks, them's a mere nothing," replies the cook.
+
+As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except
+how a cook may feather his nest.
+
+At evening, during the second course, all Caroline's fibres quiver
+with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain
+suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had
+waited for her husband.
+
+But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure,
+there is, to the souls of the elect--and everybody will include a
+woman who adores her husband among the elect--there is, between these
+two worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine
+night and a fine day.
+
+The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges
+his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline's extreme
+emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers
+who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for
+some kind of shell-fish.
+
+"Well, Adolphe?"
+
+"Well, dear."
+
+"Don't you recognize them?"
+
+"Recognize what?"
+
+"Your mushrooms _a l'Italienne_?"
+
+"These mushrooms! I thought they were--well, yes, they _are_
+mushrooms!"
+
+"Yes, and _a l'Italienne_, too."
+
+"Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, _a la milanaise_. I abominate
+them!"
+
+"What kind is it you like, then?"
+
+"_Fungi trifolati_."
+
+Let us observe--to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels
+everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this
+moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects,
+giving them all the termination _us_, so that a _Silbermanus_ is the
+same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a
+butterfly's legs with pincers--that we still want a nomenclature for
+the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to
+produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed
+that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been
+adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were
+desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen
+Latin.
+
+"My dear," resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face
+of his chaste Caroline, "in France the dish in question is called
+Mushrooms _a l'Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise_. The
+mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names
+I have forgotten. You add a taste of garlic, I believe--"
+
+Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a
+woman's heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of
+eight. _Ab uno disce omnes_: which means, "There's one of them: find
+the rest in your memory." For we have taken this culinary description
+as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently
+loved women.
+
+
+
+                         SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.
+
+A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer's fancy. This
+feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman's
+confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and
+disappears in a trice like a shooting star.
+
+With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from
+any marshy country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for
+the superabundant powers of their imaginations and their nerves.
+
+Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who
+is really loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do
+her the justice to say that her first idea is to enjoy it. All who
+possess treasures are in dread of thieves, but they do not, like
+women, lend wings and feet to their golden stores.
+
+The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the
+heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to
+abandon it.
+
+
+Axiom.--A woman is never deserted without a reason.
+
+
+This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman. Hence the
+rage of a woman deserted.
+
+Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love: we live in a
+calculating epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may:
+for, of all wives or women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least
+expensive. Now, every woman who is loved, has gone through the petty
+annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion, whether just or unjust,
+engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of
+all.
+
+Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves
+her rather too often upon a matter of business, that eternal
+Chaumontel's affair, which never comes to an end.
+
+
+Axiom.--Every household has its Chaumontel's affair. (See TROUBLE
+WITHIN TROUBLE.)
+
+
+In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business
+than publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and
+authors. The moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has
+rendered him even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he
+has hurried away to some easy conquest. In this respect, women endow
+men with superhuman faculties. Fear magnifies everything, it dilates
+the eyes and the heart: it makes a woman mad.
+
+"Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left
+me? Why did he not take me with him?"
+
+These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of
+suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these
+frightful tempests which ravage a woman's heart springs an ignoble,
+unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the
+shopkeeper's wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker's lady, the
+angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate,
+at once puts into execution. They imitate the government, every one of
+them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the
+public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in
+the interest of their love. This fatal woman's curiosity reduces them
+to the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in
+this situation, has not lost her self-respect,--a situation in which
+her jealousy will not permit her to respect anything: neither your
+little boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of
+your desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with
+private compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling
+dressing-case, nor your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way
+that her husband dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your
+india-rubber girdles--her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman
+trusts, is her maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and
+approves her.
+
+In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman
+makes no calculations, takes no observations. She simply wishes to
+know the whole truth.
+
+And Justine is delighted: she sees her mistress compromising herself
+with her, and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her
+suspicions, with terrible friendship. Justine and Caroline hold
+councils and have secret interviews. All espionage involves such
+relationships. In this pass, a maid becomes the arbitress of the fate
+of the married couple. Example: Lord Byron.
+
+"Madame," Justine one day observes, "monsieur really _does_ go out to
+see a woman."
+
+Caroline turns pale.
+
+"But don't be alarmed, madame, it's an old woman."
+
+"Ah, Justine, to some men no women are old: men are inexplicable."
+
+"But, madame, it isn't a lady, it's a woman, quite a common woman."
+
+"Ah, Justine, Lord Byron loved a fish-wife at Venice, Madame de
+Fischtaminel told me so."
+
+And Caroline bursts into tears.
+
+"I've been pumping Benoit."
+
+"What is Benoit's opinion?"
+
+"Benoit thinks that the woman is a go-between, for monsieur keeps his
+secret from everybody, even from Benoit."
+
+For a week Caroline lives the life of the damned; all her savings go
+to pay spies and to purchase reports.
+
+Finally, Justine goes to see the woman, whose name is Madame Mahuchet;
+she bribes her and learns at last that her master has preserved a
+witness of his youthful follies, a nice little boy that looks very
+much like him, and that this woman is his nurse, the second-hand
+mother who has charge of little Frederick, who pays his quarterly
+school-bills, and through whose hands pass the twelve hundred or two
+thousand francs which Adolphe is supposed annually to lose at cards.
+
+"What of the mother?" exclaims Caroline.
+
+To end the matter, Justine, Caroline's good genius, proves to her that
+M'lle Suzanne Beauminet, formerly a grisette and somewhat later Madame
+Sainte-Suzanne, died at the hospital, or else that she has made her
+fortune, or else, again, that her place in society is so low there is
+no danger of madame's ever meeting her.
+
+Caroline breathes again: the dirk has been drawn from her heart, she
+is quite happy; but she had no children but daughters, and would like
+a boy. This little drama of unjust suspicions, this comedy of the
+conjectures to which Mother Mahuchet gives rise, these phases of a
+causeless jealousy, are laid down here as the type of a situation, the
+varieties of which are as innumerable as characters, grades and sorts.
+
+This source of petty troubles is pointed out here, in order that women
+seated upon the river's bank may contemplate in it the course of their
+own married life, following its ascent or descent, recalling their own
+adventures to mind, their untold disasters, the foibles which caused
+their errors, and the peculiar fatalities to which were due an instant
+of frenzy, a moment of unnecessary despair, or sufferings which they
+might have spared themselves, happy in their self-delusions.
+
+This vexation has a corollary in the following, one which is much more
+serious and often without remedy, especially when its root lies among
+vices of another kind, and which do not concern us, for, in this work,
+women are invariably esteemed honest--until the end.
+
+
+
+                         THE DOMESTIC TYRANT.
+
+"My dear Caroline," says Adolphe one day to his wife, "are you
+satisfied with Justine?"
+
+"Yes, dear, quite so."
+
+"Don't you think she speaks to you rather impertinently?"
+
+"Do you suppose I would notice a maid? But it seems _you_ notice her!"
+
+"What do you say?" asks Adolphe in an indignant way that is always
+delightful to women.
+
+Justine is a genuine maid for an actress, a woman of thirty stamped by
+the small-pox with innumerable dimples, in which the loves are far
+from sporting: she is as brown as opium, has a good deal of leg and
+not much body, gummy eyes, and a tournure to match. She would like to
+have Benoit marry her, but at this unexpected suggestion, Benoit asked
+for his discharge. Such is the portrait of the domestic tyrant
+enthroned by Caroline's jealousy.
+
+Justine takes her coffee in the morning, in bed, and manages to have
+it as good as, not to say better than, that of her mistress. Justine
+sometimes goes out without asking leave, dressed like the wife of a
+second-class banker. She sports a pink hat, one of her mistress' old
+gowns made over, an elegant shawl, shoes of bronze kid, and jewelry of
+doubtful character.
+
+Justine is sometimes in a bad humor, and makes her mistress feel that
+she too is a woman like herself, though she is not married. She has
+her whims, her fits of melancholy, her caprices. She even dares to
+have her nerves! She replies curtly, she makes herself insupportable
+to the other servants, and, to conclude, her wages have been
+considerably increased.
+
+"My dear, this girl is getting more intolerable every day," says
+Adolphe one morning to his wife, on noticing Justine listening at the
+key-hole, "and if you don't send her away, I will!"
+
+Caroline, greatly alarmed, is obliged to give Justine a talking to,
+while her husband is out.
+
+"Justine, you take advantage of my kindness to you: you have high
+wages, here, you have perquisites, presents: try to keep your place,
+for my husband wants to send you away."
+
+The maid humbles herself to the earth, she sheds tears: she is so
+attached to madame! Ah! she would rush into the fire for her: she
+would let herself be chopped into mince-meat: she is ready for
+anything.
+
+"If you had anything to conceal, madame, I would take it on myself and
+say it was me!"
+
+"Very well, Justine, very good, my girl," says Caroline, terrified:
+"but that's not the point: just try to keep in your place."
+
+"Ah, ha!" says Justine to herself, "monsieur wants to send me away,
+does he? Wait and see the deuce of a life I'll lead you, you old
+curmudgeon!"
+
+A week after, Justine, who is dressing her mistress' hair, looks in
+the glass to make sure that Caroline can see all the grimaces of her
+countenance: and Caroline very soon inquires, "Why, what's the matter,
+Justine?"
+
+"I would tell you, readily, madame, but then, madame, you are so weak
+with monsieur!"
+
+"Come, go on, what is it?"
+
+"I know now, madame, why master wanted to show me the door: he has
+confidence in nobody but Benoit, and Benoit is playing the mum with
+me."
+
+"Well, what does that prove? Has anything been discovered?"
+
+"I'm sure that between the two they are plotting something against you
+madame," returns the maid with authority.
+
+Caroline, whom Justine watches in the glass, turns pale: all the
+tortures of the previous petty trouble return, and Justine sees that
+she has become as indispensable to her mistress as spies are to the
+government when a conspiracy is discovered. Still, Caroline's friends
+do not understand why she keeps so disagreeable a servant girl, one
+who wears a hat, whose manners are impertinent, and who gives herself
+the airs of a lady.
+
+This stupid domination is talked of at Madame Deschars', at Madame de
+Fischtaminel's, and the company consider it funny. A few ladies think
+they can see certain monstrous reasons for it, reasons which
+compromise Caroline's honor.
+
+
+Axiom.--In society, people can put cloaks on every kind of truth, even
+the prettiest.
+
+
+In short the _aria della calumnia_ is executed precisely as if
+Bartholo were singing it.
+
+It is averred that Caroline cannot discharge her maid.
+
+Society devotes itself desperately to discovering the secret of this
+enigma. Madame de Fischtaminel makes fun of Adolphe who goes home in a
+rage, has a scene with Caroline and discharges Justine.
+
+This produces such an effect upon Justine, that she falls sick, and
+takes to her bed. Caroline observes to her husband, that it would be
+awkward to turn a girl in Justine's condition into the street, a girl
+who is so much attached to them, too, and who has been with them sine
+their marriage.
+
+"Let her go then as soon as she is well!" says Adolphe.
+
+Caroline, reassured in regard to Adolphe, and indecently swindled by
+Justine, at last comes to desire to get rid of her: she applies a
+violent remedy to the disease, and makes up her mind to go under the
+Caudine Forks of another petty trouble, as follows:
+
+
+
+                             THE AVOWAL.
+
+One morning, Adolphe is petted in a very unusual manner. The too happy
+husband wonders what may be the cause of this development of
+affection, and he hears Caroline, in her most winning tones, utter the
+word: "Adolphe?"
+
+"Well?" he replies, in alarm at the internal agitation betrayed by
+Caroline's voice.
+
+"Promise not to be angry."
+
+"Well."
+
+"Not to be vexed with me."
+
+"Never. Go on."
+
+"To forgive me and never say anything about it."
+
+"But tell me what it is!"
+
+"Besides, you are the one that's in the wrong--"
+
+"Speak, or I'll go away."
+
+"There's no one but you that can get me out of the scrape--and it was
+you that got me into it."
+
+"Come, come."
+
+"It's about--"
+
+"About--"
+
+"About Justine!"
+
+"Don't speak of her, she's discharged. I won't see her again, her
+style of conduct exposes your reputation--"
+
+"What can people say--what have they said?"
+
+The scene changes, the result of which is a secondary explanation
+which makes Caroline blush, as she sees the bearing of the
+suppositions of her best friends.
+
+"Well, now, Adolphe, it's to you I owe all this. Why didn't you tell
+me about Frederick?"
+
+"Frederick the Great? The King of Prussia?"
+
+"What creatures men are! Hypocrite, do you want to make me believe
+that you have forgotten your son so soon, M'lle Suzanne Beauminet's
+son?"
+
+"Then you know--?"
+
+"The whole thing! And old other Mahuchet, and your absences from home
+to give him a good dinner on holidays."
+
+"How like moles you pious women can be if you try!" exclaims Adolphe,
+in his terror.
+
+"It was Justine that found it out."
+
+"Ah! Now I understand the reason of her insolence."
+
+"Oh, your Caroline has been very wretched, dear, and this spying
+system, which was produced by my love for you, for I do love you, and
+madly too,--if you deceived me, I would fly to the extremity of
+creation,--well, as I was going to say, this unfounded jealousy has
+put me in Justine's power, so, my precious, get me out of it the best
+way you can!"
+
+"Let this teach you, my angel, never to make use of your servants, if
+you want them to be of use to you. It is the lowest of tyrannies, this
+being at the mercy of one's people."
+
+Adolphe takes advantage of this circumstance to alarm Caroline, he
+thinks of future Chaumontel's affairs, and would be glad to have no
+more espionage.
+
+Justine is sent for, Adolphe peremptorily dismisses her without
+waiting to hear her explanation. Caroline imagines her vexations at an
+end. She gets another maid.
+
+Justine, whose twelve or fifteen thousand francs have attracted the
+notice of a water carrier, becomes Madame Chavagnac, and goes into the
+apple business. Ten months after, in Adolphe's absence, Caroline
+receives a letter written upon school-boy paper, in strides which
+would require orthopedic treatment for three months, and thus
+conceived:
+
+
+"Madam!
+
+"Yu ar shaimphoolly diseeved bi yure huzban fur mame Deux
+fischtaminelle, hee goze their evry eavning, yu ar az blynde az a
+Batt. Your gott wott yu dizzurv, and I am Glad ovit, and I have thee
+honur ov prezenting yu the assurunz ov Mi moaste ds Sting guischt
+respecks."
+
+
+Caroline starts like a lion who has been stung by a bumble-bee; she
+places herself once more, and of her own accord, upon the griddle of
+suspicion, and begins her struggle with the unknown all over again.
+
+When she has discovered the injustice of her suspicions, there comes
+another letter with an offer to furnish her with details relative to a
+Chaumontel's affair which Justine has unearthed.
+
+The petty trouble of avowals, ladies, is often more serious than this,
+as you perhaps have occasion to remember.
+
+
+
+                            HUMILIATIONS.
+
+To the glory of women, let it be said, they care for their husbands
+even when their husbands care no more for them, not only because there
+are more ties, socially speaking, between a married woman and a man,
+than between the man and the wife; but also because woman has more
+delicacy and honor than man, the chief conjugal question apart, as a
+matter of course.
+
+
+Axiom.--In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there
+is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.
+
+
+A married woman has sensibility enough for four, or for five even, if
+you look closely.
+
+Now, it is not improper to observe in this place, that, in a woman's
+eyes, love is a general absolution: the man who is a good lover may
+commit crimes, if he will, he is always as pure as snow in the eyes of
+her who loves him, if he truly loves her. As to a married woman, loved
+or not, she feels so deeply that the honor and consideration of her
+husband are the fortune of her children, that she acts like the woman
+in love,--so active is the sense of community of interest.
+
+This profound sentiment engenders, for certain Carolines, petty
+troubles which, unfortunately for this book, have their dismal side.
+
+Adolphe is compromised. We will not enumerate all the methods of
+compromising oneself, for we might become personal. Let us take, as an
+example, the social error which our epoch excuses, permits,
+understands and commits the most of any--the case of an honest
+robbery, of skillfully concealed corruption in office, or of some
+misrepresentation that becomes excusable when it has succeeded, as,
+for instance, having an understanding with parties in power, for the
+sale of property at the highest possible price to a city, or a
+country.
+
+Thus, in a bankruptcy, Adolphe, in order to protect himself (this
+means to recover his claims), has become mixed up in certain unlawful
+doings which may bring a man to the necessity of testifying before the
+Court of Assizes. In fact, it is not known that the daring creditor
+will not be considered a party.
+
+Take notice that in all cases of bankruptcy, protecting oneself is
+regarded as the most sacred of duties, even by the most respectable
+houses: the thing is to keep the bad side of the protection out of
+sight, as they do in prudish England.
+
+Adolphe does not know what to do, as his counsel has told him not to
+appear in the matter: so he has recourse to Caroline. He gives her a
+lesson, he coaches her, he teaches her the Code, he examines her
+dress, he equips her as a brig sent on a voyage, and despatches her to
+the office of some judge, or some syndic. The judge is apparently a
+man of severe morality, but in reality a libertine: he retains his
+serious expression on seeing a pretty woman enter, and makes sundry
+very uncomplimentary remarks about Adolphe.
+
+"I pity you, madame, you belong to a man who may involve you in
+numerous unpleasant affairs: a few more matters like this, and he will
+be quite disgraced. Have you any children? Excuse my asking; you are
+so young, it is perfectly natural." And the judge comes as near to
+Caroline as possible.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Ah, great heavens! what a prospect is yours! My first thought was for
+the woman, but now I pity you doubly, I think of the mother. Ah, how
+you must have suffered in coming here! Poor, poor woman!"
+
+"Ah, sir, you take an interest in me, do you not?"
+
+"Alas, what can I do?" says the judge, darting a glance sidewise at
+Caroline. "What you ask of me is a dereliction of duty, and I am a
+magistrate before I am a man."
+
+"Oh, sir, only be a man--"
+
+"Are you aware of the full bearing of that request, fair creature?" At
+this point the magistrate tremblingly takes Caroline's hand.
+
+Caroline, who remembers that the honor of her husband and children is
+at stake, says to herself that this is not the time to play the prude.
+She abandons her hand, making just resistance enough for the old man
+(happily he is an old man) to consider it a favor.
+
+"Come, come, my beauty," resumes the judge, "I should be loath to
+cause so lovely a woman to shed tears; we'll see about it. You shall
+come to-morrow evening and tell me the whole affair. We must look at
+the papers, we will examine them together--"
+
+"Sir--"
+
+"It's indispensable."
+
+"But, sir--"
+
+"Don't be alarmed, my dear, a judge is likely to know how to grant
+what is due to justice and--" he puts on a shrewd look here--"to
+beauty."
+
+"But, sir--"
+
+"Be quite at your ease," he adds, holding her hand closely in his,
+"and we'll try to reduce this great crime down to a peccadillo." And
+he goes to the door with Caroline, who is frightened to death at an
+appointment thus proposed.
+
+The syndic is a lively young man, and he receives Madame Adolphe with
+a smile. He smiles at everything, and he smiles as he takes her round
+the waist with an agility which leaves Caroline no time to resist,
+especially as she says to herself, "Adolphe particularly recommended
+me not to vex the syndic."
+
+Nevertheless Caroline escapes, in the interest of the syndic himself,
+and again pronounces the "Sir!" which she had said three times to the
+judge.
+
+"Don't be angry with me, you are irresistible, you are an angel, and
+your husband is a monster: for what does he mean by sending a siren to
+a young man whom he knows to be inflammable!"
+
+"Sir, my husband could not come himself; he is in bed, very sick, and
+you threatened him so terribly that the urgency of the matter--"
+
+"Hasn't he got a lawyer, an attorney?"
+
+Caroline is terrified by this remark which reveals Adolphe's profound
+rascality.
+
+"He supposed, sir, that you would have pity upon the mother of a
+family, upon her children--"
+
+"Ta, ta, ta," returns the syndic. "You have come to influence my
+independence, my conscience, you want me to give the creditors up to
+you: well, I'll do more, I give you up my heart, my fortune! Your
+husband wants to save _his_ honor, _my_ honor is at your disposal!"
+
+"Sir," cries Caroline, as she tries to raise the syndic who has thrown
+himself at her feet. "You alarm me!"
+
+She plays the terrified female and thus reaches the door, getting out
+of a delicate situation as women know how to do it, that is, without
+compromising anything or anybody.
+
+"I will come again," she says smiling, "when you behave better."
+
+"You leave me thus! Take care! Your husband may yet find himself
+seated at the bar of the Court of Assizes: he is accessory to a
+fraudulent bankruptcy, and we know several things about him that are
+not by any means honorable. It is not his first departure from
+rectitude; he has done a good many dirty things, he has been mixed up
+in disgraceful intrigues, and you are singularly careful of the honor
+of a man who cares as little for his own honor as he does for yours."
+
+Caroline, alarmed by these words, lets go the door, shuts it and comes
+back.
+
+"What do you mean, sir?" she exclaims, furious at this outrageous
+broadside.
+
+"Why, this affair--"
+
+"Chaumontel's affair?"
+
+"No, his speculations in houses that he had built by people that were
+insolvent."
+
+Caroline remembers the enterprise undertaken by Adolphe to double his
+income: (See _The Jesuitism of Women_) she trembles. Her curiosity is
+in the syndic's favor.
+
+"Sit down here. There, at this distance, I will behave well, but I can
+look at you."
+
+And he narrates, at length, the conception due to du Tillet the
+banker, interrupting himself to say: "Oh, what a pretty, cunning,
+little foot; no one but you could have such a foot as that--_Du
+Tillet, therefore, compromised._ What an ear, too! You have been
+doubtless told that you had a delicious ear--_And du Tillet was
+right, for judgment had already been given_--I love small ears, but
+let me have a model of yours, and I will do anything you like--_du
+Tillet profited by this to throw the whole loss on your idiotic
+husband_: oh, what a charming silk, you are divinely dressed!"
+
+"Where were we, sir?"
+
+"How can I remember while admiring your Raphaelistic head?"
+
+At the twenty-seventh compliment, Caroline considers the syndic a man
+of wit: she makes him a polite speech, and goes away without learning
+much more of the enterprise which, not long before had swallowed up
+three hundred thousand francs.
+
+There are many huge variations of this petty trouble.
+
+
+EXAMPLE. Adolphe is brave and susceptible: he is walking on the Champs
+Elysees, where there is a crowd of people; in this crowd are several
+ill-mannered young men who indulge in jokes of doubtful propriety:
+Caroline puts up with them and pretends not to hear them, in order to
+keep her husband out of a duel.
+
+
+ANOTHER EXAMPLE. A child belonging to the genus Terrible, exclaims in
+the presence of everybody:
+
+"Mamma, would you let Justine hit me?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Why do you ask, my little man?" inquires Madame Foullepointe.
+
+"Because she just gave father a big slap, and he's ever so much
+stronger than me."
+
+Madame Foullepointe laughs, and Adolphe, who intended to pay court to
+her, is cruelly joked by her, after having had a first last quarrel
+with Caroline.
+
+
+
+                          THE LAST QUARREL.
+
+In every household, husbands and wives must one day hear the striking
+of a fatal hour. It is a knell, the death and end of jealousy, a
+great, noble and charming passion, the only true symptom of love, if
+it is not even its double. When a woman is no longer jealous of her
+husband, all is over, she loves him no more. So, conjugal love expires
+in the last quarrel that a woman gives herself the trouble to raise.
+
+
+Axiom.--When a woman ceases to quarrel with her husband, the Minotaur
+has seated himself in a corner arm-chair, tapping his boots with his
+cane.
+
+
+Every woman must remember her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble
+which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some
+occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell
+to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree
+as capricious as life itself. Like life it varies in every house.
+
+Here, the author ought perhaps to search out all the varieties of
+quarrels, if he desires to be precise.
+
+Thus, Caroline may have discovered that the judicial robe of the
+syndic in Chaumontel's affair, hides a robe of infinitely softer
+stuff, of an agreeable, silky color: that Chaumontel's hair, in short,
+is fair, and that his eyes are blue.
+
+Or else Caroline, who arose before Adolphe, may have seen his
+greatcoat thrown wrong side out across a chair; the edge of a little
+perfumed paper, just peeping out of the side-pocket, may have
+attracted her by its whiteness, like a ray of the sun entering a dark
+room through a crack in the window: or else, while taking Adolphe in
+her arms and feeling his pocket, she may have caused the note to
+crackle: or else she may have been informed of the state of things by
+a foreign odor that she has long noticed upon him, and may have read
+these lines:
+
+
+"Ungraitfull wun, wot du yu supoz I no About Hipolite. Kum, and yu
+shal se whether I Love yu."
+
+
+Or this:
+
+"Yesterday, love, you made me wait for you: what will it be
+to-morrow?"
+
+
+Or this:
+
+"The women who love you, my dear sir, are very unhappy in hating you
+so, when you are not with them: take care, for the hatred which exists
+during your absence, may possibly encroach upon the hours you spend in
+their company."
+
+
+Or this:
+
+"You traitorous Chodoreille, what were you doing yesterday on the
+boulevard with a woman hanging on your arm? If it was your wife,
+accept my compliments of condolence upon her absent charms: she has
+doubtless deposited them at the pawnbroker's, and the ticket to redeem
+them with is lost."
+
+
+Four notes emanating from the grisette, the lady, the pretentious
+woman in middle life, and the actress, among whom Adolphe has chosen
+his _belle_ (according to the Fischtaminellian vocabulary).
+
+Or else Caroline, taken veiled by Ferdinand to Ranelagh Garden, sees
+with her own eyes Adolphe abandoning himself furiously to the polka,
+holding one of the ladies of honor to Queen Pomare in his arms; or
+else, again, Adolphe has for the seventh time, made a mistake in the
+name, and called his wife Juliette, Charlotte or Lisa: or, a grocer or
+restaurateur sends to the house, during Adolphe's absence, certain
+damning bills which fall into Caroline's hands.
+
+
+PAPERS RELATING TO CHAUMONTEL'S AFFAIR.
+
+(Private Tables Served.)
+
+M. Adolphe to Perrault,
+
+To 1 Pate de Foie Gras delivered at Madame
+     Schontz's, the 6th of January,                 fr.    22.50
+Six bottle of assorted wines,                              70.00
+To one special breakfast delivered at Congress
+     Hotel, the 11th of February, at No. 21----
+     Stipulated price,                                    100.00
+                                                          ______
+
+          Total,                                Francs,   192.50
+
+
+Caroline examines the dates and remembers them as appointments made
+for business connected with Chaumontel's affair. Adolphe had
+designated the sixth of January as the day fixed for a meeting at
+which the creditors in Chaumontel's affair were to receive the sums
+due them. On the eleventh of February he had an appointment with the
+notary, in order to sign a receipt relative to Chaumontel's affair.
+
+Or else--but an attempt to mention all the chances of discovery would
+be the undertaking of a madman.
+
+Every woman will remember to herself how the bandage with which her
+eyes were bound fell off: how, after many doubts, and agonies of
+heart, she made up her mind to have a final quarrel for the simple
+purpose of finishing the romance, putting the seal to the book,
+stipulating for her independence, or beginning life over again.
+
+Some women are fortunate enough to have anticipated their husbands,
+and they then have the quarrel as a sort of justification.
+
+Nervous women give way to a burst of passion and commit acts of
+violence.
+
+Women of mild temper assume a decided tone which appalls the most
+intrepid husbands. Those who have no vengeance ready shed a great many
+tears.
+
+Those who love you forgive you. Ah, they conceive so readily, like the
+woman called "Ma berline," that their Adolphe must be loved by the
+women of France, that they are rejoiced to possess, legally, a man
+about whom everybody goes crazy.
+
+Certain women with lips tight shut like a vise, with a muddy
+complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure
+of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and
+contradiction: they question him (see _Troubles within Troubles_),
+like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful
+enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive
+moment. Generally, in this supreme scene of conjugal life, the fair
+sex is the executioner, while, in the contrary case, man is the
+assassin.
+
+This is the way of it: This last quarrel (you shall know why the
+author has called it the _last_), is always terminated by a solemn,
+sacred promise, made by scrupulous, noble, or simply intelligent women
+(that is to say, by all women), and which we give here in its grandest
+form.
+
+"Enough, Adolphe! We love each other no more; you have deceived me,
+and I shall never forget it. I may forgive it, but I can never forget
+it."
+
+Women represent themselves as implacable only to render their
+forgiveness charming: they have anticipated God.
+
+"We have now to live in common like two friends," continues Caroline.
+"Well, let us live like two comrades, two brothers, I do not wish to
+make your life intolerable, and I never again will speak to you of
+what has happened--"
+
+Adolphe gives Caroline his hand: she takes it, and shakes it in the
+English style. Adolphe thanks Caroline, and catches a glimpse of
+bliss: he has converted his wife into a sister, and hopes to be a
+bachelor again.
+
+The next day Caroline indulges in a very witty allusion (Adolphe
+cannot help laughing at it) to Chaumontel's affair. In society she
+makes general remarks which, to Adolphe, are very particular remarks,
+about their last quarrel.
+
+At the end of a fortnight a day never passes without Caroline's
+recalling their last quarrel by saying: "It was the day when I found
+Chaumontel's bill in your pocket:" or "it happened since our last
+quarrel:" or, "it was the day when, for the first time, I had a clear
+idea of life," etc. She assassinates Adolphe, she martyrizes him! In
+society she gives utterance to terrible things.
+
+"We are happy, my dear [to a lady], when we love each other no longer:
+it's then that we learn how to make ourselves beloved," and she looks
+at Ferdinand.
+
+In short, the last quarrel never comes to an end, and from this fact
+flows the following axiom:
+
+
+Axiom.--Putting yourself in the wrong with your lawful wife, is
+solving the problem of Perpetual Motion.
+
+
+
+                          A SIGNAL FAILURE.
+
+Women, and especially married women, stick ideas into their brain-pan
+precisely as they stick pins into a pincushion, and the devil himself,
+--do you mind?--could not get them out: they reserve to themselves the
+exclusive right of sticking them in, pulling them out, and sticking
+them in again.
+
+Caroline is riding home one evening from Madame Foullepointe's in a
+violent state of jealousy and ambition.
+
+Madame Foullepointe, the lioness--but this word requires an
+explanation. It is a fashionable neologism, and gives expression to
+certain rather meagre ideas relative to our present society: you must
+use it, if you want to describe a woman who is all the rage. This
+lioness rides on horseback every day, and Caroline has taken it into
+her head to learn to ride also.
+
+Observe that in this conjugal phase, Adolphe and Caroline are in the
+season which we have denominated _A Household Revolution_, and that
+they have had two or three _Last Quarrels_.
+
+"Adolphe," she says, "do you want to do me a favor?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Won't you refuse?"
+
+"If your request is reasonable, I am willing--"
+
+"Ah, already--that's a true husband's word--if--"
+
+"Come, what is it?"
+
+"I want to learn to ride on horseback."
+
+"Now, is it a possible thing, Caroline?"
+
+Caroline looks out of the window, and tries to wipe away a dry tear.
+
+"Listen," resumes Adolphe; "I cannot let you go alone to the
+riding-school; and I cannot go with you while business gives me the
+annoyance it does now. What's the matter? I think I have given you
+unanswerable reasons."
+
+Adolphe foresees the hiring of a stable, the purchase of a pony, the
+introduction of a groom and of a servant's horse into the
+establishment--in short, all the nuisance of female lionization.
+
+When a man gives a woman reasons instead of giving her what she wants
+--well, few men have ventured to descend into that small abyss called
+the heart, to test the power of the tempest that suddenly bursts forth
+there.
+
+"Reasons! If you want reasons, here they are!" exclaims Caroline. "I
+am your wife: you don't seem to care to please me any more. And as to
+the expenses, you greatly overrate them, my dear."
+
+Women have as many inflections of voice to pronounce these words, _My
+dear_, as the Italians have to say _Amico_. I have counted twenty-nine
+which express only various degrees of hatred.
+
+"Well, you'll see," resumes Caroline, "I shall be sick, and you will
+pay the apothecary and the doctor as much as the price of a horse. I
+shall be walled up here at home, and that's all you want. I asked the
+favor of you, though I was sure of a refusal: I only wanted to know
+how you would go to work to give it."
+
+"But, Caroline--"
+
+"Leave me alone at the riding-school!" she continues without
+listening. "Is that a reason? Can't I go with Madame de Fischtaminel?
+Madame de Fischtaminel is learning to ride on horseback, and I don't
+imagine that Monsieur de Fischtaminel goes with her."
+
+"But, Caroline--"
+
+"I am delighted with your solicitude. You think a great deal of me,
+really. Monsieur de Fischtaminel has more confidence in his wife, than
+you have in yours. He does not go with her, not he! Perhaps it's on
+account of this confidence that you don't want me at the school, where
+I might see your goings on with the fair Fischtaminel."
+
+Adolphe tries to hide his vexation at this torrent of words, which
+begins when they are still half way from home, and has no sea to empty
+into. When Caroline is in her room, she goes on in the same way.
+
+"You see that if reasons could restore my health or prevent me from
+desiring a kind of exercise pointed out by nature herself, I should
+not be in want of reasons, and that I know all the reasons that there
+are, and that I went over with the reasons before I spoke to you."
+
+This, ladies, may with the more truth be called the prologue to the
+conjugal drama, from the fact that it is vigorously delivered,
+embellished with a commentary of gestures, ornamented with glances and
+all the other vignettes with which you usually illustrate such
+masterpieces.
+
+Caroline, when she has once planted in Adolphe's heart the
+apprehension of a scene of constantly reiterated demands, feels her
+hatred for his control largely increase. Madame pouts, and she pouts
+so fiercely, that Adolphe is forced to notice it, on pain of very
+disagreeable consequences, for all is over, be sure of that, between
+two beings married by the mayor, or even at Gretna Green, when one of
+them no longer notices the sulkings of the other.
+
+
+Axiom.--A sulk that has struck in is a deadly poison.
+
+
+It was to prevent this suicide of love that our ingenious France
+invented boudoirs. Women could not well have Virgil's willows in the
+economy of our modern dwellings. On the downfall of oratories, these
+little cubbies become boudoirs.
+
+This conjugal drama has three acts. The act of the prologue is already
+played. Then comes the act of false coquetry: one of those in which
+French women have the most success.
+
+Adolphe is walking about the room, divesting himself of his apparel,
+and the man thus engaged, divests himself of his strength as well as
+of his clothing. To every man of forty, this axiom will appear
+profoundly just:
+
+
+Axiom.--The ideas of a man who has taken his boots and his suspenders
+off, are no longer those of a man who is still sporting these two
+tyrants of the mind.
+
+
+Take notice that this is only an axiom in wedded life. In morals, it
+is what we call a relative theorem.
+
+Caroline watches, like a jockey on the race course, the moment when
+she can distance her adversary. She makes her preparations to be
+irresistibly fascinating to Adolphe.
+
+Women possess a power of mimicking pudicity, a knowledge of secrets
+which might be those of a frightened dove, a particular register for
+singing, like Isabella, in the fourth act of _Robert le Diable: "Grace
+pour toi! Grace pour moi!"_ which leave jockeys and horse trainers
+whole miles behind. As usual, the _Diable_ succumbs. It is the eternal
+history, the grand Christian mystery of the bruised serpent, of the
+delivered woman becoming the great social force, as the Fourierists
+say. It is especially in this that the difference between the Oriental
+slave and the Occidental wife appears.
+
+Upon the conjugal pillow, the second act ends by a number of
+onomatopes, all of them favorable to peace. Adolphe, precisely like
+children in the presence of a slice of bread and molasses, promises
+everything that Caroline wants.
+
+
+THIRD ACT. As the curtain rises, the stage represents a chamber in a
+state of extreme disorder. Adolphe, in his dressing gown, tries to go
+out furtively and without waking Caroline, who is sleeping profoundly,
+and finally does go out.
+
+Caroline, exceedingly happy, gets up, consults her mirror, and makes
+inquiries about breakfast. An hour afterward, when she is ready she
+learns that breakfast is served.
+
+"Tell monsieur."
+
+"Madame, he is in the little parlor."
+
+"What a nice man he is," she says, going up to Adolphe, and talking
+the babyish, caressing language of the honey-moon.
+
+"What for, pray?"
+
+"Why, to let his little Liline ride the horsey."
+
+
+OBSERVATION. During the honey-moon, some few married couples,--very
+young ones,--make use of languages, which, in ancient days, Aristotle
+classified and defined. (See his Pedagogy.) Thus they are perpetually
+using such terminations as _lala_, _nana_, _coachy-poachy_, just as
+mothers and nurses use them to babies. This is one of the secret
+reasons, discussed and recognized in big quartos by the Germans, which
+determined the Cabires, the creators of the Greek mythology, to
+represent Love as a child. There are other reasons very well known to
+women, the principal of which is, that, in their opinion, love in men
+is always _small_.
+
+
+"Where did you get that idea, my sweet? You must have dreamed it!"
+
+"What!"
+
+Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already
+considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says
+not a word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of
+their gaze, Adolphe turns half way round toward the dining-room; but
+he asks himself whether it would not be well to let Caroline take one
+lesson, and to tip the wink to the riding-master, to disgust her with
+equestrianism by the harshness of his style of instruction.
+
+There is nothing so terrible as an actress who reckons upon a success,
+and who _fait four_.
+
+In the language of the stage, to _faire four_ is to play to a
+wretchedly thin house, or to obtain not the slightest applause. It is
+taking great pains for nothing, in short a _signal failure_.
+
+This petty trouble--it is very petty--is reproduced in a thousand ways
+in married life, when the honey-moon is over, and when the wife has no
+personal fortune.
+
+In spite of the author's repugnance to inserting anecdotes in an
+exclusively aphoristic work, the tissue of which will bear nothing but
+the most delicate and subtle observations,--from the nature of the
+subject at least,--it seems to him necessary to illustrate this page
+by an incident narrated by one of our first physicians. This
+repetition of the subject involves a rule of conduct very much in use
+with the doctors of Paris.
+
+A certain husband was in our Adolphe's situation. His Caroline, having
+once made a signal failure, was determined to conquer, for Caroline
+often does conquer! (See _The Physiology of Marriage_, Meditation
+XXVI, Paragraph _Nerves_.) She had been lying about on the sofas for
+two months, getting up at noon, taking no part in the amusements of
+the city. She would not go to the theatre,--oh, the disgusting
+atmosphere!--the lights, above all, the lights! Then the bustle,
+coming out, going in, the music,--it might be fatal, it's so terribly
+exciting!
+
+She would not go on excursions to the country, oh, certainly it was
+her desire to do so!--but she would like (desiderata) a carriage of
+her own, horses of her own--her husband would not give her an
+equipage. And as to going in hacks, in hired conveyances, the bare
+thought gave her a rising at the stomach!
+
+She would not have any cooking--the smell of the meats produced a
+sudden nausea. She drank innumerable drugs that her maid never saw her
+take.
+
+In short, she expended large amounts of time and money in attitudes,
+privations, effects, pearl-white to give her the pallor of a corpse,
+machinery, and the like, precisely as when the manager of a theatre
+spreads rumors about a piece gotten up in a style of Oriental
+magnificence, without regard to expense!
+
+This couple had got so far as to believe that even a journey to the
+springs, to Ems, to Hombourg, to Carlsbad, would hardly cure the
+invalid: but madame would not budge, unless she could go in her own
+carriage. Always that carriage!
+
+Adolphe held out, and would not yield.
+
+Caroline, who was a woman of great sagacity, admitted that her husband
+was right.
+
+"Adolphe is right," she said to her friends, "it is I who am
+unreasonable: he can not, he ought not, have a carriage yet: men know
+better than we do the situation of their business."
+
+At times Adolphe was perfectly furious! Women have ways about them
+that demand the justice of Tophet itself. Finally, during the third
+month, he met one of his school friends, a lieutenant in the corps of
+physicians, modest as all young doctors are: he had had his epaulettes
+one day only, and could give the order to fire!
+
+"For a young woman, a young doctor," said our Adolphe to himself.
+
+And he proposed to the future Bianchon to visit his wife and tell him
+the truth about her condition.
+
+"My dear, it is time that you should have a physician," said Adolphe
+that evening to his wife, "and here is the best for a pretty woman."
+
+The novice makes a conscientious examination, questions madame, feels
+her pulse discreetly, inquires into the slightest symptoms, and, at
+the end, while conversing, allows a smile, an expression, which, if
+not ironical, are extremely incredulous, to play involuntarily upon
+his lips, and his lips are quite in sympathy with his eyes. He
+prescribes some insignificant remedy, and insists upon its importance,
+promising to call again to observe its effect. In the ante-chamber,
+thinking himself alone with his school-mate, he indulges in an
+inexpressible shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"There's nothing the matter with your wife, my boy," he says: "she is
+trifling with both you and me."
+
+"Well, I thought so."
+
+"But if she continues the joke, she will make herself sick in earnest:
+I am too sincerely your friend to enter into such a speculation, for I
+am determined that there shall be an honest man beneath the physician,
+in me--"
+
+"My wife wants a carriage."
+
+As in the _Solo on the Hearse_, this Caroline listened at the door.
+
+Even at the present day, the young doctor is obliged to clear his path
+of the calumnies which this charming woman is continually throwing
+into it: and for the sake of a quiet life, he has been obliged to
+confess his little error--a young man's error--and to mention his
+enemy by name, in order to close her lips.
+
+
+
+                      THE CHESTNUTS IN THE FIRE.
+
+No one can tell how many shades and gradations there are in
+misfortune, for everything depends upon the character of the
+individual, upon the force of the imagination, upon the strength of
+the nerves. If it is impossible to catch these so variable shades, we
+may at least point out the most striking colors, and the principal
+attendant incidents. The author has therefore reserved this petty
+trouble for the last, for it is the only one that is at once comic and
+disastrous.
+
+The author flatters himself that he has mentioned the principal
+examples. Thus, women who have arrived safely at the haven, the happy
+age of forty, the period when they are delivered from scandal,
+calumny, suspicion, when their liberty begins: these women will
+certainly do him the justice to state that all the critical situations
+of a family are pointed out or represented in this book.
+
+Caroline has her Chaumontel's affair. She has learned how to induce
+Adolphe to go out unexpectedly, and has an understanding with Madame
+de Fischtaminel.
+
+In every household, within a given time, ladies like Madame de
+Fischtaminel become Caroline's main resource.
+
+Caroline pets Madame de Fischtaminel with all the tenderness that the
+African army is now bestowing upon Abd-el-Kader: she is as solicitous
+in her behalf as a physician is anxious to avoid curing a rich
+hypochondriac. Between the two, Caroline and Madame de Fischtaminel
+invent occupations for dear Adolphe, when neither of them desire the
+presence of that demigod among their penates. Madame de Fischtaminel
+and Caroline, who have become, through the efforts of Madame
+Foullepointe, the best friends in the world, have even gone so far as
+to learn and employ that feminine free-masonry, the rites of which
+cannot be made familiar by any possible initiation.
+
+If Caroline writes the following little note to Madame de
+Fischtaminel:
+
+
+"Dearest Angel:
+
+"You will probably see Adolphe to-morrow, but do not keep him too
+long, for I want to go to ride with him at five: but if you are
+desirous of taking him to ride yourself, do so and I will take him up.
+You ought to teach me your secret for entertaining used-up people as
+you do."
+
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel says to herself: "Gracious! So I shall have
+that fellow on my hands to-morrow from twelve o'clock to five."
+
+
+Axiom.--Men do not always know a woman's positive request when they
+see it; but another woman never mistakes it: she does the contrary.
+
+
+Those sweet little beings called women, and especially Parisian women,
+are the prettiest jewels that social industry has invented. Those who
+do not adore them, those who do not feel a constant jubilation at
+seeing them laying their plots while braiding their hair, creating
+special idioms for themselves and constructing with their slender
+fingers machines strong enough to destroy the most powerful fortunes,
+must be wanting in a positive sense.
+
+On one occasion Caroline takes the most minute precautions. She writes
+the day before to Madame Foullepointe to go to St. Maur with Adolphe,
+to look at a piece of property for sale there. Adolphe would go to
+breakfast with her. She aids Adolphe in dressing. She twits him with
+the care he bestows upon his toilet, and asks absurd questions about
+Madame Foullepointe.
+
+"She's real nice, and I think she is quite tired of Charles: you'll
+inscribe her yet upon your catalogue, you old Don Juan: but you won't
+have any further need of Chaumontel's affair; I'm no longer jealous,
+you've got a passport. Do you like that better than being adored?
+Monster, observe how considerate I am."
+
+So soon as her husband has gone, Caroline, who had not omitted, the
+previous evening, to write to Ferdinand to come to breakfast with her,
+equips herself in a costume which, in that charming eighteenth century
+so calumniated by republicans, humanitarians and idiots, women of
+quality called their fighting-dress.
+
+Caroline has taken care of everything. Love is the first house servant
+in the world, so the table is set with positively diabolic coquetry.
+There is the white damask cloth, the little blue service, the silver
+gilt urn, the chiseled milk pitcher, and flowers all round!
+
+If it is winter, she has got some grapes, and has rummaged the cellar
+for the very best old wine. The rolls are from the most famous
+baker's. The succulent dishes, the _pate de foie gras_, the whole of
+this elegant entertainment, would have made the author of the
+Glutton's Almanac neigh with impatience: it would make a note-shaver
+smile, and tell a professor of the old University what the matter in
+hand is.
+
+Everything is prepared. Caroline has been ready since the night
+before: she contemplates her work. Justine sighs and arranges the
+furniture. Caroline picks off the yellow leaves of the plants in the
+windows. A woman, in these cases, disguises what we may call the
+prancings of the heart, by those meaningless occupations in which the
+fingers have all the grip of pincers, when the pink nails burn, and
+when this unspoken exclamation rasps the throat: "He hasn't come yet!"
+
+What a blow is this announcement by Justine: "Madame, here's a
+letter!"
+
+A letter in place of Ferdinand! How does she ever open it? What ages
+of life slip by as she unfolds it! Women know this by experience! As
+to men, when they are in such maddening passes, they murder their
+shirt-frills.
+
+"Justine, Monsieur Ferdinand is ill!" exclaims Caroline. "Send for a
+carriage."
+
+As Justine goes down stairs, Adolphe comes up.
+
+"My poor mistress!" observes Justine. "I guess she won't want the
+carriage now."
+
+"Oh my! Where have you come from?" cries Caroline, on seeing Adolphe
+standing in ecstasy before her voluptuous breakfast.
+
+Adolphe, whose wife long since gave up treating _him_ to such charming
+banquets, does not answer. But he guesses what it all means, as he
+sees the cloth inscribed with the delightful ideas which Madame de
+Fischtaminel or the syndic of Chaumontel's affair have often inscribed
+for him upon tables quite as elegant.
+
+"Whom are you expecting?" he asks in his turn.
+
+"Who could it be, except Ferdinand?" replies Caroline.
+
+"And is he keeping you waiting?"
+
+"He is sick, poor fellow."
+
+A quizzical idea enters Adolphe's head, and he replies, winking with
+one eye only: "I have just seen him."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In front of the Cafe de Paris, with some friends."
+
+"But why have you come back?" says Caroline, trying to conceal her
+murderous fury.
+
+"Madame Foullepointe, who was tired of Charles, you said, has been
+with him at Ville d'Avray since yesterday."
+
+Adolphe sits down, saying: "This has happened very appropriately, for
+I'm as hungry as two bears."
+
+Caroline sits down, too, and looks at Adolphe stealthily: she weeps
+internally: but she very soon asks, in a tone of voice that she
+manages to render indifferent, "Who was Ferdinand with?"
+
+"With some fellows who lead him into bad company. The young man is
+getting spoiled: he goes to Madame Schontz's. You ought to write to
+your uncle. It was probably some breakfast or other, the result of a
+bet made at M'lle Malaga's." He looks slyly at Caroline, who drops her
+eyes to conceal her tears. "How beautiful you have made yourself this
+morning," Adolphe resumes. "Ah, you are a fair match for your
+breakfast. I don't think Ferdinand will make as good a meal as I
+shall," etc., etc.
+
+Adolphe manages the joke so cleverly that he inspires his wife with
+the idea of punishing Ferdinand. Adolphe, who claims to be as hungry
+as two bears, causes Caroline to forget that a carriage waits for her
+at the door.
+
+The female that tends the gate at the house Ferdinand lives in,
+arrives at about two o'clock, while Adolphe is asleep on a sofa. That
+Iris of bachelors comes to say to Caroline that Monsieur Ferdinand is
+very much in need of some one.
+
+"He's drunk, I suppose," says Caroline in a rage.
+
+"He fought a duel this morning, madame."
+
+Caroline swoons, gets up and rushes to Ferdinand, wishing Adolphe at
+the bottom of the sea.
+
+When women are the victims of these little inventions, which are quite
+as adroit as their own, they are sure to exclaim, "What abominable
+monsters men are!"
+
+
+
+                            ULTIMA RATIO.
+
+We have come to our last observation. Doubtless this work is beginning
+to tire you quite as much as its subject does, if you are married.
+
+This work, which, according to the author, is to the _Physiology of
+Marriage_ what Fact is to Theory, or History to Philosophy, has its
+logic, as life, viewed as a whole, has its logic, also.
+
+This logic--fatal, terrible--is as follows. At the close of the first
+part of the book--a book filled with serious pleasantry--Adolphe has
+reached, as you must have noticed, a point of complete indifference in
+matrimonial matters.
+
+He has read novels in which the writers advise troublesome husbands to
+embark for the other world, or to live in peace with the fathers of
+their children, to pet and adore them: for if literature is the
+reflection of manners, we must admit that our manners recognize the
+defects pointed out by the _Physiology of Marriage_ in this
+fundamental institution. More than one great genius has dealt this
+social basis terrible blows, without shaking it.
+
+Adolphe has especially read his wife too closely, and disguises his
+indifference by this profound word: indulgence. He is indulgent with
+Caroline, he sees in her nothing but the mother of his children, a
+good companion, a sure friend, a brother.
+
+When the petty troubles of the wife cease, Caroline, who is more
+clever than her husband, has come to profit by this advantageous
+indulgence: but she does not give her dear Adolphe up. It is woman's
+nature never to yield any of her rights. DIEU ET MON DROIT--CONJUGAL!
+is, as is well known, the motto of England, and is especially so
+to-day.
+
+Women have such a love of domination that we will relate an anecdote,
+not ten years old, in point. It is a very young anecdote.
+
+One of the grand dignitaries of the Chamber of Peers had a Caroline,
+as lax as Carolines usually are. The name is an auspicious one for
+women. This dignitary, extremely old at the time, was on one side of
+the fireplace, and Caroline on the other. Caroline was hard upon the
+lustrum when women no longer tell their age. A friend came in to
+inform them of the marriage of a general who had lately been intimate
+in their house.
+
+Caroline at once had a fit of despair, with genuine tears; she
+screamed and made the grand dignitary's head ache to such a degree,
+that he tried to console her. In the midst of his condolences, the
+count forgot himself so far as to say--"What can you expect, my dear,
+he really could not marry you!"
+
+And this was one of the highest functionaries of the state, but a
+friend of Louis XVIII, and necessarily a little bit Pompadour.
+
+The whole difference, then, between the situation of Adolphe and that
+of Caroline, consists in this: though he no longer cares about her,
+she retains the right to care about him.
+
+Now, let us listen to "What _they_ say," the theme of the concluding
+chapter of this work.
+
+
+
+                             COMMENTARY.
+
+            IN WHICH IS EXPLAINED LA FELICITA OF FINALES.
+
+Who has not heard an Italian opera in the course of his life? You must
+then have noticed the musical abuse of the word _felicita_, so
+lavishly used by the librettist and the chorus at the moment when
+everybody is deserting his box or leaving the house.
+
+Frightful image of life. We quit it just when we hear _la felicita_.
+
+Have you reflected upon the profound truth conveyed by this finale, at
+the instant when the composer delivers his last note and the author
+his last line, when the orchestra gives the last pull at the
+fiddle-bow and the last puff at the bassoon, when the principal
+singers
+say "Let's go to supper!" and the chorus people exclaim "How lucky, it
+doesn't rain!" Well, in every condition in life, as in an Italian
+opera, there comes a time when the joke is over, when the trick is
+done, when people must make up their minds to one thing or the other,
+when everybody is singing his own _felicita_ for himself. After having
+gone through with all the duos, the solos, the stretti, the codas, the
+concerted pieces, the duettos, the nocturnes, the phases which these
+few scenes, chosen from the ocean of married life, exhibit you, and
+which are themes whose variations have doubtless been divined by
+persons with brains as well as by the shallow--for so far as suffering
+is concerned, we are all equal--the greater part of Parisian
+households reach, without a given time, the following final chorus:
+
+THE WIFE, _to a young woman in the conjugal Indian Summer_. My dear, I
+am the happiest woman in the world. Adolphe is the model of husbands,
+kind, obliging, not a bit of a tease. Isn't he, Ferdinand?
+
+Caroline addresses Adolphe's cousin, a young man with a nice cravat,
+glistening hair and patent leather boots: his coat is cut in the most
+elegant fashion: he has a crush hat, kid gloves, something very choice
+in the way of a waistcoat, the very best style of moustaches,
+whiskers, and a goatee a la Mazarin; he is also endowed with a
+profound, mute, attentive admiration of Caroline.
+
+FERDINAND. Adolphe is happy to have a wife like you! What does he
+want? Nothing.
+
+THE WIFE. In the beginning, we were always vexing each other: but now
+we get along marvelously. Adolphe no longer does anything but what he
+likes, he never puts himself out: I never ask him where he is going
+nor what he has seen. Indulgence, my dear, is the great secret of
+happiness. You, doubtless, are still in the period of petty troubles,
+causeless jealousies, cross-purposes, and all sorts of little
+botherations. What is the good of all this? We women have but a short
+life, at the best. How much? Ten good years! Why should we fill them
+with vexation? I was like you. But, one fine morning, I made the
+acquaintance of Madame de Fischtaminel, a charming woman, who taught
+me how to make a husband happy. Since then, Adolphe has changed
+radically; he has become perfectly delightful. He is the first to say
+to me, with anxiety, with alarm, even, when I am going to the theatre,
+and he and I are still alone at seven o'clock: "Ferdinand is coming
+for you, isn't he?" Doesn't he, Ferdinand?
+
+FERDINAND. We are the best cousins in the world.
+
+THE INDIAN SUMMER WIFE, _very much affected_. Shall I ever come to
+that?
+
+THE HUSBAND, _on the Italian Boulevard_. My dear boy [he has
+button-holed Monsieur de Fischtaminel], you still believe that
+marriage
+is based upon passion. Let me tell you that the best way, in conjugal
+life, is to have a plenary indulgence, one for the other, on condition
+that appearances be preserved. I am the happiest husband in the world.
+Caroline is a devoted friend, she would sacrifice everything for me,
+even my cousin Ferdinand, if it were necessary: oh, you may laugh, but
+she is ready to do anything. You entangle yourself in your laughable
+ideas of dignity, honor, virtue, social order. We can't have our life
+over again, so we must cram it full of pleasure. Not the smallest
+bitter word has been exchanged between Caroline and me for two years
+past. I have, in Caroline, a friend to whom I can tell everything, and
+who would be amply able to console me in a great emergency. There is
+not the slightest deceit between us, and we know perfectly well what
+the state of things is. We have thus changed our duties into
+pleasures. We are often happier, thus, than in that insipid season
+called the honey-moon. She says to me, sometimes, "I'm out of humor,
+go away." The storm then falls upon my cousin. Caroline never puts on
+her airs of a victim, now, but speaks in the kindest manner of me to
+the whole world. In short, she is happy in my pleasures. And as she is
+a scrupulously honest woman, she is conscientious to the last degree
+in her use of our fortune. My house is well kept. My wife leaves me
+the right to dispose of my reserve without the slightest control on
+her part. That's the way of it. We have oiled our wheels and cogs,
+while you, my dear Fischtaminel, have put gravel in yours.
+
+CHORUS, _in a parlor during a ball_. Madame Caroline is a charming
+woman.
+
+A WOMAN IN A TURBAN. Yes, she is very proper, very dignified.
+
+A WOMAN WHO HAS SEVEN CHILDREN. Ah! she learned early how to manage
+her husband.
+
+ONE OF FERDINAND'S FRIENDS. But she loves her husband exceedingly.
+Besides, Adolphe is a man of great distinction and experience.
+
+ONE OF MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL'S FRIENDS. He adores his wife. There's
+no fuss at their house, everybody is at home there.
+
+MONSIEUR FOULLEPOINTE. Yes, it's a very agreeable house.
+
+A WOMAN ABOUT WHOM THERE IS A GOOD DEAL OF SCANDAL. Caroline is kind
+and obliging, and never talks scandal of anybody.
+
+A YOUNG LADY, _returning to her place after a dance_. Don't you
+remember how tiresome she was when she visited the Deschars?
+
+MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL. Oh! She and her husband were two bundles of
+briars--continually quarreling. [She goes away.]
+
+AN ARTIST. I hear that the individual known as Deschars is getting
+dissipated: he goes round town--
+
+A WOMAN, _alarmed at the turn the conversation is taking, as her
+daughter can hear_. Madame de Fischtaminel is charming, this evening.
+
+A WOMAN OF FORTY, _without employment_. Monsieur Adolphe appears to be
+as happy as his wife.
+
+A YOUNG LADY. Oh! what a sweet man Monsieur Ferdinand is! [Her mother
+reproves her by a sharp nudge with her foot.] What's the matter,
+mamma?
+
+HER MOTHER, _looking at her fixedly_. A young woman should not speak
+so, my dear, of any one but her betrothed, and Monsieur Ferdinand is
+not a marrying man.
+
+A LADY DRESSED RATHER LOW IN THE NECK, _to another lady dressed
+equally low, in a whisper_. The fact is, my dear, the moral of all
+this is that there are no happy couples but couples of four.
+
+A FRIEND, _whom the author was so imprudent as to consult_. Those last
+words are false.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Do you think so?
+
+THE FRIEND, _who has just been married_. You all of you use your ink
+in depreciating social life, on the pretext of enlightening us! Why,
+there are couples a hundred, a thousand times happier than your
+boasted couples of four.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Well, shall I deceive the marrying class of the
+population, and scratch the passage out?
+
+THE FRIEND. No, it will be taken merely as the point of a song in a
+vaudeville.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Yes, a method of passing truths off upon society.
+
+THE FRIEND, _who sticks to his opinion_. Such truths as are destined
+to be passed off upon it.
+
+THE AUTHOR, _who wants to have the last word_. Who and what is there
+that does not pass off, or become passe? When your wife is twenty
+years older, we will resume this conversation.
+
+THE FRIEND. You revenge yourself cruelly for your inability to write
+the history of happy homes.
+
+
+
+                              THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Analytical Studies, by Honore de Balzac
+
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