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.