Honore de Balzac - The Physiology of Marriage, Complete

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"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.

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