Physiology of Marriage

PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE 

OR

MEDITATIONS OF ECLECTIC PHILOSOPHY 

ON HAPPINESS AND UNJURY

---

DEDICATION

Pay attention to these words (page 367): "The superior man to whom this book is dedicated" does not it say to you: - "  It's up to you  ? "

THE AUTHOR.

---

The woman who, on the title of this book, would be tempted to open it, can dispense with it, she has already read it without knowing it. A man, no matter how malicious he may be, will never tell women as much good or as bad as they think themselves. If, in spite of this opinion, a woman persisted in reading the work, delicacy would have to impose on her the law not to reproach the author, the moment when, depriving herself of the approvals which flatter the artists the most, he has in some so engraved on the frontispiece of his book the prudent inscription put on the door of some establishments: The ladies do not enter here .

---

INTRODUCTION

"Marriage does not derive from nature. - The eastern family differs entirely from the western family. Man is the minister of nature, and society comes to dwell on it. Laws are made for morals, and manners vary. "

Marriage can thus undergo the gradual improvement to which all human things appear subject.

These words, pronounced before the Council of State by Napoleon during the discussion of the Civil Code, strongly struck the author of this book; and, perhaps, without his knowledge, they put in him the seed of the work which he offers today to the public. Indeed, at the time when, much younger, he studied French law, the word ADULTÈRE caused him singular impressions. Immense in the code, this word never appeared to his imagination without dragging after him a lugubrious cortege. Tears, shame, hatred, terror, secret crimes, bloody wars, families without leaders, misfortune were personified in front of him and suddenly stood up when he read the sacramental word: ADULTÈRE! Later, by approaching the best-cultivated beaches of society, the author realized that the severity of the conjugal laws was fairly generally tempered by adultery. He found the sum of the bad households much higher than that of happy marriages. At last he thought he remarked, the first, that of all human knowledge, that of marriage was the least advanced. But it was a young man's observation; and at home, as in so many others, like a stone thrown into a lake, she lost herself in the gulf of her tumultuous thoughts. However, the author observed in spite of himself; then he slowly formed himself in his imagination, like a swarm of more or less just ideas about the nature of conjugal things. The works are perhaps formed in souls as mysteriously as the truffles grow in the middle of the perfumed plains of Périgord. From the primitive and holy fear which the Adulteress caused him, and from the observation which he had made without a doubt, was born a morning a minute thought in which his ideas were formulated. It was a mockery of marriage: two spouses loved each other for the first time after twenty-seven years of housekeeping.

He amused himself with this little conjugal pamphlet, and deliciously spent a whole week gathering around this innocent epigram the multitude of ideas he had acquired without his knowledge, and which he was astonished to find in him. This banter fell before a masterful observation. Docile to the opinions, the author was rejected in the carelessness of his lazy habits. Nevertheless, this slight principle of science and jest was perfected by itself in the fields of thought: every sentence of the doomed work took root there, and strengthened itself there, remaining like a small branch of tree which, abandoned on the sand on a winter evening, is coveredthe next day, those white and bizarre crystallizations which the capricious frosts of the night draw. Thus the sketch lived and became the point of departure for a multitude of moral ramifications. It was like a polyp that engendered itself. The sensations of his youth, the observations which an importunate power made him make, found points of support in the slightest events. Moreover, this mass of ideas harmonized, became animated, almost personified, and marched through the fantastic countries where the soul loves to let its wild offspring roam. Through the preoccupations of the world and of life, there was always in the author a voice which made him the most mocking revelations at the very moment when he examined with the most pleasure a woman dancing, smiling or talking. As Mephistopheles points to Faust in the terrible assembly of the Broken with sinister figures, so the author felt a demon who, in a ball, came to strike him familiarly on the shoulder and say: Do you see, that enchanting smile? it's a hateful smile. Sometimes the demon strutted like a captain of Hardy's old comedies. He shook the purple of an embroidered coat and tried to refurbish the old tinsels and tinsel of glory. Sometimes he uttered, in the manner of Rabelais, a broad and frank laugh, and traced on the wall of a street a word which could serve as a counterpart to that of: "Trinque! only oracle obtained from the dive bottle. Often this literary Trilby allowed himself to be seated on heaps of books; and, with his crooked fingers, he maliciously pointed out two yellow volumes, whose title was blazing in the face. Then, when he saw the author attentive, he spouted in a voice as annoying as the sounds of a harmonica: - PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE! But almost always, he appeared in the evening at the time of dreams. Caressing like a fairy, he tried to tame by sweet words the soul he had submitted. As mocking as seductive, as flexible as a woman, as cruel as a tiger, her friendship was more formidable than her hatred; for he did not know how to caress without scratching. One night among others, he tried the power of all his spells and crowned them with a last effort. He came and sat on the edge of the bed, like a young girl full of love, who at first is silent, but whose eyes shine, and to which his secret ends up escaping. - This, he says, is the prospectus of a diving suit by means of which one can walk on the Seineon foot dry. This other volume is the report of the Institute on a garment clean to make us cross the flames without burning us. Will you not propose anything that can preserve the marriage of the misfortunes of cold and heat? But, listen? Here is THE ART OF PRESERVING FOODSTUFFS, THE ART OF PREVENTING CHIMNEYS FROM SMOKING, THE ART OF MAKING GOOD MORTARS, THE ART OF TALKING, THE ART OF CUTTING MEAT.

He named in a minute such a prodigious number of books, that the author was as dazzled.

- These myriad books have been devoured, he said, and yet everyone does not build and eat, everyone does not have a tie and does not heat up, while everyone gets married a little But ... see you ...

His hand then made a gesture, and seemed to discover in the distance an ocean where all the books of the century were moving as if by waves. The in-ricots; the in-8ths which were thrown made a deep sound, went to the bottom, and ascended only very painfully, prevented by in-12s and in-32s which abounded and were resolved in light foam. The furious blades were laden with journalists, protesters, papermakers, apprentices, clerks of printers, who could only be seen jumping heads with the books. Thousands of voices shouted like schoolchildren in the bath. In their canoes came and went a few men engaged in fishing for the books and bringing them to the shore in front of a tall, disdainful man, dressed in black, dry, and cold: it was the booksellers and the public. With the finger the Demon showed a newly decorated skiff, scathing at full sail and carrying a poster as a flag; then, uttering a sardonic laugh, he read in a piercing voice: - PHYSIOLOGY OF MARRIAGE.

The author fell in love, the devil left him alone, for he would have had to deal with too much if he had returned to a dwelling inhabited by a woman. Some years passed without other torments than those of love, and the author was able to think himself cured of a disability by another. But one evening he found himself in a drawing-room in Paris, where one of the men who were part of the circle described in front of the fireplace by some people spoke and recounted the following anecdote in a sepulchral voice.

- A fact took place in Ghent when I was there. Attacked by a deadly disease, a lady, widowed for ten years, layon his bed. Her last breath was expected by three collateral heirs who did not leave her, lest she make a will for the benefit of the Beguinage of the city. The patient was silent, seemed asleep, and death seemed to be slowly taking hold of her mute and livid face. Do you see in the middle of a winter night the three parents silently sitting in front of the bed? An old nurse is there who nods, and the doctor, seeing anxiously the illness that has arrived in his last period, holds his hat with one hand, and the other makes a gesture to the parents, as if to tell them : "I have no more visits to make to you. A solemn silence made it possible to hear the muffled whistles of a shower of snow whipping on the shutters. Lest the dying woman's eyes be wounded by the light, the youngest of the heirs had adapted a screen-guard to the candle placed near the bed, so that the luminous circle of the torch barely reached the funeral pillow, on which the yellowed figure of the patient stood out like a bad christ golden on a tarnished silver cross. The waving gleams thrown by the blue flames of a sparkling fire lit up only this dark room, where a drama was going to be unraveled. Indeed, a tison suddenly rolled from the hearth on the floor as if to presage an event. At this sound, the patient stands abruptly in her seat, she opens two eyes as clear as those of a cat, and everyone astonished looks at her. She watches the firebrand walk; and before anyone thought of opposing the unexpected movement produced by a sort of delirium, she jumped out of bed, seize the tweezers, and throw the coal back into the chimney. The guard, the doctor, the parents, rush forward, take the dying woman in their arms, she is recouched, she puts her head on the bedside; and a few minutes have just elapsed, when she dies, still keeping, after her death, her gaze fastened on the parchment sheet to which the coat had touched. No sooner had the Countess Van Ostroem expired than the three co-heirs looked at each other with suspicion, and, thinking no longer of their aunt, showed themselves the mysterious floor. As they were Belgians, the calculation was at home as quick as their eyes. It was agreed by three words whispered that none of them would leave the room. A lackey went to fetch a workman. These collateral souls throbbed violently when, gathered around this rich floor,giving the first shot of chisel. The wood is sliced. "My aunt has made a gesture!" Said the youngest of the heirs. "No, it's an effect of the ripples of the light!" Answered the older man, who had both an eye on the treasure and the dead. The afflicted parents found, precisely at the spot where the coat had rolled, a mass artistically wrapped in a layer of plaster. "Go!" Said the old coheir. The chisel of the apprentice then blew a human head, and I do not know what vestige of clothing made them recognize the count that the whole city thought dead in Java and whose loss had been deeply mourned by his wife.

The narrator of this old story was a tall, tawny-eyed, dark-haired man, and the author thought he perceived vague resemblances between him and the demon who had so tormented him; but the stranger did not have a forked foot. Suddenly the word adulterous sounded in the author's ears; and then, this sort of bell awakened, in his imagination, the most gloomy figures of the cortege who had lately paraded past these prestigious syllables.

As of this evening, the phantasmagorical persecutions of a work that did not exist recommenced; and at no time in his life was the author attacked with so many fallacious ideas on the fatal subject of this book. But he bravely resisted the spirit, although the latter connected the slightest events of life to this unknown work, and that, like a customs clerk, he plummeted all of his mockery.

A few days later, the author found himself in the company of two ladies. The first had been one of the most humane and witty women of Napoleon's court. Having arrived at a high social position, the restoration surprised him, and overthrew him; she had become a hermit. The second, young and beautiful, played at that moment, in Paris, the part of a fashionable woman. They were friends, because one being forty years old and the other twenty-two, their pretensions seldom put their vanity on the same ground. The author being of no consequence to one of the ladies, and the other having divined it, they continued in her presence a frank conversation which they had begun with their work as a woman.

"Have you noticed, my dear, that women in general only like fools? "What are you saying here, duchess? andhow will you grant this remark with the aversion they have for their husbands? "(But it's a tyranny," said the author, "now is the devil in a cornet?) No, my dear, I'm not joking! "said the Duchess," and there is something to be thrilled for yourself, since I have coldly contemplated the persons I once knew. The spirit always has a brilliance that hurts us, the man who has many frightens us perhaps, and if he is proud, he will not be jealous, so he can not please us. At last we may like to raise a man up to ourselves rather than to go up to him. Talent has many successes to share with us, but the fool gives pleasure; and we always prefer to hear, "Here is a handsome man! To see our lover chosen to be of the Institute. - That's enough, Duchess! you terrified me.

And the young coquette, starting to make the portraits of the lovers, whom all the women of her acquaintance loved, did not find a single man of wit. - But, by my virtue, she says, their husbands are better ..

- These people are their husbands! replied the Duchess gravely.

"But," asked the author, "is the misfortune threatened by the husband in France inevitable?

- Yes ! replied the duchess, laughing. And the perseverance of certain women against those who have the happy misfortune of having a passion proves how much chastity is their responsibility. Without the fear of the devil, one would be Laïs; the other owes its virtue to the dryness of his heart; that one in the foolish way in which his first lover behaved; this one…

The author stopped the torrent of these revelations by informing the two ladies of the project of work by which he was persecuted, they smiled, and promised much advice. The youngest cheerfully provides one of the firm's earliest assets, saying that it was mathematically proving that fully virtuous women were rational beings.

Back home, the author then said to his demon: - Arrive? I'm ready. Let's sign the pact! The demon did not return.

If the author here writes the biography of his book, it is by no inspiration of fatuity. He recounts facts which may serve the history of human thought, and which will no doubt explain the work itself. It may not be indifferent to some anatomistsfrom the thought of knowing that the soul is woman. Thus, as long as the author refrained from thinking of the book he was to make, the book was written everywhere. He found one page on the bed of a patient, another on the sofa of a boudoir. The looks of the women, when they whirled in a waltz, threw thoughts at him; a gesture, a word, fertilized his disdainful brain. The day he says to himself: "This work, which obsesses me, will be done! Everything has fled; and, like the three Belgians, he raised a skeleton where he bent over to seize a treasure.

A sweet and pale figure succeeded the tempting demon, she had engaging manners and good nature, her representations were disarmed from the sharp points of criticism. She lavished more words than ideas, and seemed to be afraid of noise. Perhaps it was the familiar genius of the hon. Members sitting in the center of the House.

"Is not it better," she said, "to leave things as they are? Are they so bad? We must believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul; and you certainly do not make a book to boast of marital happiness. Besides, you will probably conclude from a thousand Parisian households that are only exceptions. You may find husbands willing to abandon their wives to you; but no son will abandon you his mother ... Some people hurt by the opinions you profess will suspect your morals, will slander your intentions. Finally, to touch social scruples, one must be king, or at least first consul. "

Although it appeared in the form which might please the author the most, Reason was not listened to; for in the distance madness agitated Panurge's fancy, and he wished to seize it; but when he tried to take it, it turned out that it was as heavy as the club of Hercules, moreover, the priest of Meudon had garnished it so that a young man who stung himself less to make a book well that being well gloved could not really touch it.

- Is our work finished? asked the youngest of the two female accomplices of the author. - Alas! madame, will you reward me with all the hatreds he may raise against me? She made a gesture, and then the author responded to his indecision with an expression of carelessness. - What! would you hesitate? publish,do not be afraid. Today we take a book much more for the way than for the stuff.

Although the author gives himself here only for the humble secretary of two ladies, he has, while coordinating their observations, accomplished more than one task. Perhaps only one had remained in marriage, that of collecting the things that everyone thinks and no one expresses; but also to make such a study with the mind of everybody, is it not to expose oneself to the fact that nobody likes it? However, the eclecticism of this study may save her. While mocking, the author tried to popularize some consoling ideas. He almost always tried to awaken unknown springs in the human soul. While taking the defense of the most material interests, judging them or condemning them, he will perhaps have seen more than one intellectual enjoyment. But the author does not have the silly pretense of having always managed to make jokes of good taste; only he counted on the diversity of minds, to receive as much blame as approval. The matter was so serious that he constantly tried toanecdotal , since today the anecdotes are the passport-bearer of all morals and the anti-narcotic of all books. In this one, where everything is analysis and observation, the fatigue in the reader and the MOI in the author were inevitable. This is one of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to a book, and the author has not concealed it. He thus arranged the basics of this long STUDY so as to provide stops for the reader. This system was consecrated by a writer who worked on TASTE, a work quite similar to that which he was busy with on MARRIAGE, and to which he will borrow some words to express a thought which is common to them. It will be a kind of tribute to his predecessor whose death has so closely followed the success.

"When I write and speak of myself in the singular, it supposes a confabulation with the reader; he can examine, discuss, doubt, and even laugh; but when I arm myself with the dreadful WE, I profess, we must submit. (Brillat-Savarin, preface to the PHYSIOLOGIE DU GOUT.)

PART ONE

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS

We will speak against foolish laws until they are reformed, and in the meantime we will submit to them blindly.

(DIDEROT, Supplement to the Bougainville Travel .)

MEDITATION I

THE SUBJECT

Physiology, what do you want?

Is it your purpose to show us that marriage unites, for the whole of life, two beings who do not know each other?

That life is in passion, and that no passion resists marriage?

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

That the divorce, this admirable palliative to the evils of the marriage, will be unanimously redemanded?

That, despite all its disadvantages, marriage is the primary source of property?

That it offers incalculable guarantees of security to the governments?

That there is something touching in the association of two beings to bear the sorrows of life?

That there is something ridiculous about wanting one thought to lead two wills?

That the woman is treated as a slave?

That there are no fully happy marriages?

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

That fidelity is impossible, at least to man?

That an expertise, if it could be established, would prove more troubles than security in the inheritance transmission of properties?

That adultery causes more evils than marriage brings goods?

That the infidelity of women goes back to the earliest times of society, and that marriage resists this perpetuity of frauds?

That the laws of love so strongly bind two beings, that no human law could separate them?

That if there are marriages written on the registers of officiality, there are those formed by the vows of nature, by a sweet conformity or by an entire dissimilarity in thought, and by bodily conformations; that so heaven and earth are constantly upset?

That there are rich husbands of superior size and spirit, whose wives have ugly, small or stupid lovers?

All these questions would furnish books if necessary; but these books are made, and the questions are perpetually solved.

Physiology, what do you want?

Do you reveal new principles? Do you claim that women must be put in common? Lycurgus and some Greek tribes, Tartars and Savages, have tried it.

Would it be necessary to enclose women? the Ottomans have done it and today they release them.

Would it be necessary to marry daughters without dowry and to exclude them from the right to succeed? ... English writers and moralists have proved that it was, with divorce, the surest way to make marriages happy.

Would it take a little Agar in each household? There is no need for law for that. The article of the Code which pronounces penalties against the adulterous woman, wherever the crime is committed, and whoever punishes a husband only as long as his concubine lives under the conjugal roof, implicitly admit mistresses in town.

Sanchez has spoken on all the penitentiary cases of marriage; he even argued on the legitimacy, on the opportunity of each pleasure; he has traced all the moral, religious, corporal duties of the spouses; in short, his work would form twelve volumes in-8º if one reprinted this large folio entitled Matrimonio .

Swarms of jurisconsults have launched swarms of treatises on the legal difficulties arising from marriage. There is even some literature on the judicial congress.

Legions of doctors have published legions of books on marriage in its dealings with surgery and medicine.

In the nineteenth century, therefore, the Physiology of Marriage is an insignificant compilation or the work of a fool written for other fools: old priests took their golden scales and weighed the least scruples; old jurisconsults have put on their spectacles and distinguished all species; old doctors took the scalpel and wandered it over all the wounds; old judges have risen upon their siege, and judged all the fatal cases; whole generations have passed by throwing their cry of joy or pain; every century has cast its vote in the ballot box; the Holy Spirit, the poets, the writers, have recorded everything from Eve to the Trojan war, from Helene to Madame de Maintenon, from the wife of Louis XIV to the Contemporaine.

Physiology, what do you want from me?

Would you like to present to us some pictures more or less well designed to convince us that a man is getting married:

By Ambition ... this is well known;

By goodness, to snatch a girl from the tyranny of her mother;

By anger, to disinherit collaterals;

By Dedain of an unfaithful mistress;

By Boredom of the delightful boy's life;

By madness, it is always one;

By wager, it is the case of Lord Byron;

By Honor, like Georges Dandin?

By interest, but it is almost always so;

By Jeunesse, at the end of the college, stunned;

By Ugliness, fearing to miss a woman one day;

By Machiavellianism, to inherit promptly from an old woman;

By necessity, to give a state to our son;

By Obligation, the young lady having been weak;

By Passion, to heal more surely;

By Querelle, to finish a trial;

By gratitude, it is to give more than we have received;

By wisdom, this still happens to the doctrinaires;

By Testament, when a dead uncle strikes you his inheritance of a girl to marry;

By old age, to make an end;

By Usage, in imitation of his ancestors.

(The X is missing, and perhaps it is because of its lack of use as a hint of a word that it was taken as a sign of the unknown .)

By Yatidi , who is the hour to go to bed and means all the needs among the Turks;

By Zeal, like the Duke of Saint-Aignan who did not want to commit sins.

But these accidents have furnished the subjects of thirty thousand comedies and a hundred thousand novels.

Physiology, for the third and last time, what do you want?

Here everything is banal like the cobblestones of a street, vulgar like a crossroads. Marriage is better known than Barrabas of the Passion; all the old ideas that he awakens have been rolling in the literatures since the world is world, and there is no useful opinion and whimsical project that did not go to find an author, a printer, a bookseller and a reader .

Let me tell you how Rabelais, our master at all: - "Good people, God saves you and keeps you! Where are you ? I can not see you. Wait until I put on my glasses. Ah! ah! I see you. You, your women, your children, are you in desired health? I like it. "

But it's not for you that I write. Since you have big kids, everything is said.

"Ah! it is you, very illustrious drinkers, you, very precious gouty, and you, crusts-tireless tireless peppers, who pantagruelizez all the day, who have private spears very guallantes, and go to third, to sext, to nones, and likewise to vespers, to compline, who would go on forever. "

It is not for you that the Physiology of Marriage is addressed, since you are not married. So be it always!

"You, bunch of serrabaites, cagots, snails, hypocrites, caphartz, frapartz, botineurs, romipetes and others like people who have disguised themselves as masks, to deceive the world! ... back masters, out of the quarry! out of here, brains with bead! ... By the devil, are you still there? ... "

I only have, perhaps, good souls who like to laugh. Not those whines who want to drown themselves in verse and prose, who make the sick into odes, sonnets, meditations; No, none of these dreamers of any kind, but some of those ancient pantagruelists who do not look so closely at them.when it is a question of banqueting and mocking, who find something good in the book of peas with bacon, cum commento , de Rabelais, in that of the dignity of the Braguettes , and who estimate these beautiful books of haulte gresse, legiers au porchas , bold to meet.

The government can scarcely be laughed at since my friends have found a way to raise fifteen hundred millions of taxes. The popes, the evangelists, the monks and the monks are not yet rich enough to drink at home; but Saint Michael arrives, who drives the devil from heaven, and we may see the good weather return! Therefore, we are left at this moment only the marriage in France which is subject to laughter. Disciples of Panurge, of you alone I want for readers. You know how to take and leave a book about, to do the easiest, to understand half a word and to draw nourishment from a medullary bone.

These people with a microscope, who only see one point, the censors finally, did they say everything, all reviewed? Did they finally say that a book on marriage is as impossible to execute as a broken jug to make new?

- Yes, master-crazy. Press the marriage, it will never leave nothing but fun for boys and boredom for husbands. It's the eternal morality. One million printed pages will have no other substance.

However, here is my first proposition: Marriage is an excessive battle before which both husbands ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most reckless enterprise; the fight soon begins, and victory, that is to say, liberty, remains at the most skilful.

Okay. Where do you see a new design?

Hey! Well, I speak to the married of yesterday and today, to those who, on leaving the church or the municipality, conceive the hope of keeping their wives to themselves; to those to whom I know not what selfishness or what an indefinable sentiment makes one say to the aspect of the misfortunes of others: "It will not happen to me!

I speak to those sailors who, after seeing ships sinking, go to sea; to those boys who, having caused the sinking of more than one conjugal virtue, dare to marry. And here is the subject, he is eternally new, eternally old!

A young man, an old man perhaps, in love or not, has just acquired by a contract well and duly registered at the Town Hall, in the Sky and on the controls of the Domain, a girl with long hair, with black eyes and wet, with tiny feet, with slender, slender fingers, with a rosy mouth, with ivory teeth, well made, quivering, appetizing and spruce, white as a lily, filled with the most desirable treasures of beauty: her lashes lowered resembling the darts of the iron crown, its skin, as fresh as the corolla of a white camellia, is nuanced by the purple of the red camellias; on her virginal complexion, the eye thinks she sees the flower of a young fruit and the imperceptible down of a diaperous peach; the azure of the veins distils a rich heat through this clear network; she asks and gives life; she is all joy and all love, all kindness and all naivety. She loves her husband, or at least she thinks he loves her ...

The lover husband said in the bottom of his heart: "These eyes will only see me, this mouth will shudder with love only for me, this sweet hand will pour the ticklish treasures of pleasure on me, this breast does not it will throb at my voice, that sleeping soul will awake only at my will; I alone will plunge my fingers into these brilliant braids; alone I will walk dreamy caresses on that shivering head. I will make Death watch my bedside to defend the access of the nuptial bed to the foreign kidnapper; this throne of love will swim in the blood of the imprudent or in mine. Rest, honor, happiness, paternal bonds, fortune of my children, everything is there; I want to defend everything like a lioness her little ones. Woe to whoever will set foot in my lair! "

- Hey! Well, brave athlete, we applaud your design. So far no geometer has dared to draw lines of longitude and latitude on the sea. The old husbands were shamed to point out the sandbanks, the reefs, the reefs, the breakers, the monsoons, the coasts and the currents that destroyed their boats, so much they were ashamed of their shipwrecks. A guide was missing, a compass for married pilgrims ... this work is destined to serve them.

Not to mention the grocers and draperies, there are so many people who are too busy to waste time looking for the secret reasons that make women act, that it is a charitable work to classify them by titles and by chapters all situations. secret of marriage; a good table of contents will enable them to put their finger on the movements of their wives' hearts, as the table of logarithms teaches them the product of a multiplication.

Hey! Well, what do you think? Is it not a new enterprise to which any philosopher has renounced to show how one can prevent a woman from deceiving her husband? Is it not the comedy of comedies? Is it not another speculum vitæ humanæ  ? It is no longer a question of these idle questions of which we have done justice in this Meditation. Today, in morals, as in the exact sciences, the century requires facts, observations. We bring some.

Let us begin by examining the true state of affairs, by analyzing the strengths of each party. Before arming our imaginary champion, let's calculate the number of his enemies, count the Cossacks who want to invade his little homeland.

Embark with us who will, laugh who can. Raise the anchor, hoist the sails! You know what a little round point you are leaving. This is a great advantage we have on many books.

As for our fantasy of laughing, crying and crying, laughing, as the divine Rabelais drank while eating and eating while drinking; as for our mania to put Heraclitus and Democritus in the same page, to have neither style, nor premeditation of sentence ... if someone of the crew in whispers! ... Out of the deck, the old brains with bead, the classics in swimsuit, the romantics in shroud, and wander the galley!

All these people will reproach us perhaps for resembling those who say with a merry air: "I will tell you a story that will make you laugh! ..." It's all about joking when we talk about marriage! Do you not guess that we consider it a slight disease to which we are all subjects and that this book is its monograph?

"But you, your galley or your work, look like those postillions who, starting from a relay, crack their whip because they lead Englishmen. You will not have run at a gallop for half a league as you descend to give a line or let your horses breathe. Why ring the trumpet before the victory?

- Hey ! dear Pantagruelists, it is enough today to have pretensions to a success to obtain it; and as, after all, the great works are perhaps only small, long-developed ideas, I do not see why I would not try to pick laurels, if only to crown these salty hams which will help us to smell the paw. - One moment, pilot? Do not leave without making a small definition ...

Readers, if you meet from time to time, as in the world, the words of virtue or virtuous women in this work, let us agree that virtue will be that painful facility with which a wife reserves her heart to a husband; unless the word is used in a general sense, a distinction which is abandoned to the natural sagacity of each.

MEDITATION II

STATISTICAL CONJUGAL

The Administration has been busy for twenty years to find out how much the soil of France contains hectares of woods, meadows, vineyards, fallows. She did not stop there, she wanted to know the number and the nature of the animals. Scholars have gone farther: they have counted the steres of wood, the kilograms of beef, the liters of wine, the apples and the eggs eaten in Paris. But no one has yet advised, either in the name of marital honor, or in the interest of people to marry, or for the benefit of morality and the perfectibility of human institutions, to examine the number of honest women . What! the French ministry questioned may answer that it has so many men under arms, so many spies, so many employees, so many schoolboys; and as for virtuous women ... nothing? If he took from a king of France the fancy of seeking his august companion among his subjects, the Administration could not even point out to him the bulk of white sheep in which he would have to choose; she would be obliged to come to some institution of rosière, which would prepare to laugh.

Would the ancients be our masters in political institutions as well as in morals? History tells us that Ahasuerus,wishing to take a wife among the daughters of Persia, chooses Esther, the most virtuous and the most beautiful. His ministers had therefore necessarily found some way of skimming the population. Unfortunately, the Bible, so clear on all matrimonial matters, has failed to give us this law of conjugal election.

Let us try to make up for this silence of the Administration by establishing the count of the female sex in France. Here we demand the attention of all the friends of public morality, and we make them judges of our way of proceeding. We shall endeavor to be generous enough in our evaluations, exact enough in our reasoning, to admit to everybody the result of this analysis.

There are generally thirty million inhabitants in France.

Some naturalists think that the number of women surpasses that of men; but as many statisticians are of the opposite opinion, we will take the most probable calculation by admitting fifteen million women.

We will begin by deducting from this total sum about nine million creatures who, at first sight, seem to have enough resemblance to the woman, but a thorough examination forced us to reject.

Let us explain.

Naturalists consider in man only a unique genus of this order of Bimanes, established by Dumeril, in his analytic Zoology, page 16, and to which Bory-Saint-Vincent thought it his duty to add the genus Orang, under the pretext of the complete.

If these zoologists see in us only a mammal, with thirty-two vertebrae, having a hyoid bone, possessing more folds than any other animal in the hemispheres of the brain; if for them there are no other differences in this order than those introduced by the influence of climates, which have furnished the nomenclature of fifteen species, of which it is useless to cite scientific names, the physiologist must also have the right to establish one's genera and sub-genera, according to certain degrees of intelligence and certain conditions of moral and pecuniary existence.

Now, the nine millions of beings of which we are dealing here offer, at the first aspect, all the characters attributed to the human species: they have the hyoid bone, the coracoid beak, the acromion, and the zygomatic arcade; these gentlemen of the Jardin des Plantes of the classify as Bimane; but that we see women there! This is what our Physiology will never admit.

For us and for those for whom this book is intended, a woman is a rare variety in the human race, and here are the principal physiological characters.

This species is due to the special care that men have given to its culture, thanks to the power of gold and the moral warmth of civilization. It is generally recognized by the whiteness, the smoothness, the softness of the skin. Her penchant brings her to exquisite cleanliness. His fingers hate to meet anything but soft, fluffy, scented objects. Like the ermine, she sometimes dies of pain to see her white tunic soiled. She likes to straighten her hair, make them exhale intoxicating smells, brush her pink nails, cut them into almonds, bathe her delicate limbs often. She enjoys herself at night only on the softest down; during the day, only on horsehair couches; so the horizontal position is she the one she likes most. His voice is penetratingly soft, his movements are graceful. She speaks with wonderful ease. She does not do any hard work; and yet, in spite of her apparent weakness, there are burdens she can carry and stir with a miraculous ease. It flees the brightness of the sun and preserves it by ingenious means. For her, walking is a fatigue; does she eat? it's a mystery ; Does it share the needs of other species? it is a problem. Curious to excess, she is easily caught by the one who knows how to hide the smallest thing for her, because her mind carries her constantly to seek the unknown. To love is her religion: she thinks only of pleasing the one she loves. To be loved is the goal of all his actions, to excite desires that of all his actions. So she only thinks of the means of shining; it moves only within a sphere of grace and elegance; it is for her that the young Indian has spun the supple hair of the goats of Thibet, that Tarare weaves his veils of air, that Brussels runs shuttles laden with the purest and most untied linen, which Visapour disputes with the entrails from the earth sparkling pebbles, and that Sèvres gilds its white clay. She meditates day and night on new ornaments, uses her life to make her dresses starch, to crumple some kerchiefs. She is going to be brilliant and fresh to strangers whose tributes flatter her, let Visapour dispute sparkling pebbles in the bowels of the earth, and let Sevres gild his white clay. She meditates day and night on new ornaments, uses her life to make her dresses starch, to crumple some kerchiefs. She is going to be brilliant and fresh to strangers whose tributes flatter her, let Visapour dispute sparkling pebbles in the bowels of the earth, and let Sevres gild his white clay. She meditates day and night on new ornaments, uses her life to make her dresses starch, to crumple some kerchiefs. She is going to be brilliant and fresh to strangers whose tributes flatter her,whose desires charm her, although they are indifferent to her. The hours stolen from the care of herself and pleasure, she employs them to sing the sweetest tunes: it is for her that France and Italy invent their delicious concerts and that Naples gives the strings a soul harmonious. This species, finally, is the queen of the world and the slave of a desire. She fears marriage because he ends up spoiling the waist, but she indulges in it because he promises happiness. If she has children, it is by pure chance, and when they are grown up, she hides them.

Are these traits, caught in the midst of adventure, found in those creatures whose hands are black like those of the monkeys, and the skin tanned like the old scrolls of an olim?whose face is burned by the sun, and the neck wrinkled like that of turkeys; who are covered with rags, whose voice is hoarse, intelligence nil, the smell unbearable, who think only of the hutch bread, who are incessantly curved towards the ground, who pick, who harrow, who fade, glean, reap, knead bread, dye hemp; who, pell-mell with cattle, children, and men, live in holes scarcely covered with straw; which at last does not matter where the children rain? to produce a great deal of it in order to give much to misery and work is their task; and if their love is not a labor like that of the fields, it is at least a speculation.

Alas! if there are in the world merchants seated all day long between candles and brown sugar, farmers who milk cows, unfortunate ones who are used as beasts of burden in factories, or who wear hoods hoe and stall; if there are unfortunately too many vulgar creatures for whom the life of the soul, the benefits of education, the delicious storms of the heart are an inaccessible paradise, and if nature wanted them to have a coracoid beak, a hyoid bone and thirty-two vertebrae, which they remain for the physiologist in the genus Orang! Here we stipulate only for the idle, for those who have the time and the spirit to love, for the rich who have bought the property of the passions, for the intelligences which have conquered the monopoly of the chimeras. Anathema on everything that does not live in thought! Let'sRaca and even scum of who is not ardent, young, handsome and passionate. It is the public expression of the secret feeling of philanthropists who can read or who can ride as a crew. Inour nine million proscribed, the tax-collector, the magistrate, the legislator, the priest doubtless see souls, administrates, litigants, taxpayers; but the sentimental man, the boudoir philosopher, while eating the griot roll sown and harvested by these creatures, will reject them, as we do, out of the feminine kind. For them, there is no woman but one who can inspire love; there exists only the creature invested with the priesthood of thought by a privileged education, and in whom idleness has developed the power of imagination; lastly, there is only being whose soul dreams of love, as much intellectual enjoyment as physical pleasure.

However, we will observe that these nine millions of female parias produce here and there thousands of peasant women who, by strange circumstances, are pretty as lovers; they arrive in Paris or in the big cities, and end up rising to the rank of women as it should be; but for these two or three thousand privileged creatures, there are another hundred thousand who remain servants or throw themselves into frightful disorders. Nevertheless we will take into account the female population of these village Pompadours.

This first calculation is based on this discovery of statistics, that in France there are eighteen million poor, ten million wealthy people, and two million rich.

There are, therefore, only six millions of women in France, whose men of feeling are engaged in caring for, caring for or caring for each other.

Submit this social elite to a philosophical examination.

We think, without fear of being denied, that spouses who have twenty years of housework must sleep peacefully without having to fear the invasion of love and the scandal of a trial in criminal conversation. Of these six million people, it is necessary to divert about two millions of extremely amiable women, because at the age of forty they have seen the world; but as they can not stir the heart of anyone, they are outside the question in question. If they have the misfortune of not being sought for their amiability, boredom wins them; they throw themselves into devotion, into cats, little dogs, and other manias that offend only God.

The calculations made at the Bureau of Longitudes on Population allow us to subtract another two million little girls, pretty to eat; they are at the A, B, C of life, and play innocently with other children, without suspecting that these little malis , which then make them laugh, will make them cry one day.

Now, of the remaining two million women, what is the reasonable man who will not leave us a hundred thousand poor hunchbacked, ugly, quintile, rickety, sick, blind, wounded, poor, though well-bred, but still damsels and nuns? By no means offending, by this means, the holy laws of marriage?

Will we refuse a hundred thousand other girls who are sisters of St. Camille, sisters of charity, nuns, teachers, companions, etc.? ? But we will put in this holy neighborhood the number difficult to evaluate young people too big to play with little boys, and too young to scatter their crowns of orange blossoms.

Finally, out of the fifteen hundred thousand subjects which are at the bottom of our crucible, we will reduce another five hundred thousand other units which we will attribute to the daughters of Baal, who please the less delicate people. We shall even understand, without fear that they will spoil together, the women kept, the milliners, the girls of the shop, the haberdies, the actresses, the singers, the opera girls, the extras, the maids-mistresses, maids, etc. Most of these creatures excite many passions, but they find it indecent to warn a notary, a mayor, a clergyman and a world of laughter of the day and the moment when they give themselves to their lover. Their system, precisely blamed by a curious society, has the advantage of not forcing them to do anything to men, to the Mayor, towards justice. However, not violating any public oath, these women do not belong to a work exclusively devoted to legitimate marriages.

It is very little to ask for this article, it will be said, but it will compensate those whom amateurs might find too swollen. If someone, out of love for a rich dowager, wants to pass it into the remaining million, he will take it on the chapter of the sisters of charity, opera girls or hunchbacks. Finally, we have only called for five hundred thousand heads to form this last category, because it often happens, as we have seen above, that the nine millions of peasant women increase it by a great amount.number of subjects. We have neglected the working class and petty commerce for the same reason: the women of these two social sections are the product of the efforts of the nine million female Bimanes to climb to the high regions of civilization. Without this scrupulous accuracy, many people would view this Meditation of Marriage Statistics as a joke.

We had thought well of organizing a small class of a hundred thousand individuals, to form a fund for the amortization of the species, and to serve as an asylum for women who fall into a common state, like widows, for example; but we preferred to count widely.

It is easy to prove the correctness of our analysis: a single reflection is enough.

The life of the woman is divided into three distinct periods: the first begins in the cradle and ends at the age of nubility; the second embraces the time during which a woman belongs to the marriage; the third opens with the critical age, a rather brutal summons which Nature makes passions to have to cease. These three spheres of existence being, almost equal, in duration, must divide into equal numbers a given quantity of women. Thus, in a mass of six millions, one finds, except the fractions that it is permissible for scholars to look for, about two million girls between one year and eighteen, two million women aged eighteen at least forty or more, and two million old. The caprices of the welfare state have thus distributed the two million women capable of getting married in three main categories of existence, namely: those who remain girls for the reasons we have deduced; those whose virtue is of little importance to husbands, and the millions of legitimate women we have to deal with.

You see, by this rather exact recounting of the female population, that there is scarcely in France a small herd of a million white ewes, a privileged strait where all the wolves want to enter.

Let's go through another stamen this million women already handpicked.

To arrive at a more true appreciation of the degree of confidence a man must have in his wife, let us suppose for a moment that all these wives will deceive their husbands.

In this case, it will be necessary to twentieth of young people who, married the day before, will at least be faithful to their oaths for a while.

Another twentieth will be sick. It gives a very small part to the human pains.

Certain passions which, it is said, destroy the empire of man over the heart of woman, ugliness, sorrows, and pregnancies, still claim a twentieth.

Adultery is not established in the heart of a married woman as one fires a pistol. Even if sympathy would give rise to feelings at first sight, there is always a struggle whose duration forms a certain non-value in the total sum of conjugal infidelities. It is almost insulting modesty in France to represent the time of these combats, in a country so naturally warlike, only by a twentieth of the total number of women; but then we will suppose that some sick women keep their lovers in the midst of soothing potions, and that there are women whose pregnancies make some sneaky bachelor smile smile. We will thus save modesty from those who fight for virtue.

For the same reason, we dare not believe that a woman abandoned by her lover finds another problem; but this non-value being necessarily weaker than the preceding one, we will estimate it at one fortieth.

These entrenchments will reduce our mass to eight hundred thousand women, when it comes to determining the number of those who offend the conjugal faith.

At this moment, who would not want to remain convinced that these women are virtuous? Are not they the flower of the country? Are not they all green, lovely, dizzying with beauty, youth, life and love? To believe in their virtue is a kind of social religion; because they are the ornament of the world and make the glory of France.

It is within this million that we have to look for:

The number of honest women;

The number of virtuous women.

This investigation and these two categories require whole Meditations, which will serve as an appendage to it.