It has not yet been decided whether a wife is forced into infidelity by
the impossibility of obtaining any change, or by the liberty which is
allowed her in this connection.
Moreover, as in this work we pitch upon a man at the moment that he
is newly married, we declare that if he has found a wife of sanguine
temperament, of vivid imagination, of a nervous constitution or of an
indolent character, his situation cannot fail to be extremely serious.
A man would find himself in a position of danger even more critical if
his wife drank nothing but water [see the Meditation entitled _Conjugal
Hygiene_]; but if she had some talent for singing, or if she were
disposed to take cold easily, he should tremble all the time; for it
must be remembered that women who sing are at least as passionate as
women whose mucous membrane shows extreme delicacy.
Again, this danger would be aggravated still more if your wife were less
than seventeen; or if, on the other hand, her general complexion were
pale and dull, for this sort of woman is almost always artificial.
But we do not wish to anticipate here any description of the terrors
which threaten husbands from the symptoms of unhappiness which they read
in the character of their wives. This digression has already taken
us too far from the subject of boarding schools, in which so many
catastrophes are hatched, and from which issue so many young girls
incapable of appreciating the painful sacrifices by which the honest man
who does them the honor of marrying them, has obtained opulence; young
girls eager for the enjoyments of luxury, ignorant of our laws, ignorant
of our manners, claim with avidity the empire which their beauty yields
them, and show themselves quite ready to turn away from the genuine
utterances of the heart, while they readily listen to the buzzing of
flattery.
This Meditation should plant in the memory of all who read it, even
those who merely open the book for the sake of glancing at it or
distracting their mind, an intense repugnance for young women educated
in a boarding school, and if it succeeds in doing so, its services to
the public will have already proved considerable.