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.