In outlining the portrait of a sane and sound husband (See _Meditation
on the Predestined_), we urgently advise that he should conceal from his
wife the real amount of his income.
In relying upon this as the foundation stone of our financial system we
hope to do something towards discounting the opinion, so very generally
held, that a man ought not to give the handling of his income to his
wife. This principle is one of the many popular errors and is one of the
chief causes of misunderstanding in the domestic establishment.
But let us, in the first place, deal with the question of heart, before
we proceed to that of money.
To draw up a little civil list for your wife and for the requirements of
the house and to pay her money as if it were a contribution, in twelve
equal portions month by month, has something in it that is a little mean
and close, and cannot be agreeable to any but sordid and mistrustful
souls. By acting in this way you prepare for yourself innumerable
annoyances.
I could wish that during the first year of your mellifluous union,
scenes more or less delightful, pleasantries uttered in good taste,
pretty purses and caresses might accompany and might decorate the
handing over of this monthly gift; but the time will come when the
self-will of your wife or some unforeseen expenditure will compel her to
ask a loan of the Chamber; I presume that you will always grant her the
bill of indemnity, as our unfaithful deputies never fail to do. They
pay, but they grumble; you must pay and at the same time compliment her.
I hope it will be so.
But in the crisis which we have reached, the provisions of the annual
budget can never prove sufficient. There must be an increase of fichus,
of bonnets, of frocks; there is an expense which cannot be calculated
beforehand demanded by the meetings, by the diplomatic messengers, by
the ways and means of love, even while the receipts remain the same as
usual. Then must commence in your establishment a course of education
the most odious, and the most dreadful which a woman can undergo. I know
but few noble and generous souls who value, more than millions, purity
of heart, frankness of soul, and who would a thousand times more readily
pardon a passion than a lie, whose instinctive delicacy has divined
the existence of this plague of the soul, the lowest step in human
degradation.
Under these circumstances there occur in the domestic establishment the
most delightful scenes of love. It is then that a woman becomes utterly
pliant and like to the most brilliant of all the strings of a harp, when
thrown before the fire; she rolls round you, she clasps you, she holds
you tight; she defers to all your caprices; never was her conversation
so full of tenderness; she lavishes her endearments upon you, or rather
she sells them to you; she at last becomes lower than a chorus girl, for
she prostitutes herself to her husband. In her sweetest kisses there is
money; in all her words there is money. In playing this part her heart
becomes like lead towards you. The most polished, the most treacherous
usurer never weighs so completely with a single glance the future value
in bullion of a son of a family who may sign a note to him, than your
wife appraises one of your desires as she leaps from branch to branch
like an escaping squirrel, in order to increase the sum of money she may
demand by increasing the appetite which she rouses in you. You must not
expect to get scot-free from such seductions. Nature has given boundless
gifts of coquetry to a woman, the usages of society have increased them
tenfold by its fashions, its dresses, its embroideries and its tippets.
“If I ever marry,” one of the most honorable generals of our ancient
army used to say, “I won’t put a sou among the wedding presents--”
“What will you put there then, general?” asked a young girl.
“The key of my safe.”
The young girl made a curtsey of approbation. She moved her little head
with a quiver like that of the magnetic needle; raised her chin slightly
as if she would have said:
“I would gladly marry the general in spite of his forty-five years.”
But with regard to money, what interest can you expect your wife to take
in a machine in which she is looked upon as a mere bookkeeper?
Now look at the other system.
In surrendering to your wife, with an avowal of absolute confidence in
her, two-thirds of your fortune and letting her as mistress control the
conjugal administration, you win from her an esteem which nothing can
destroy, for confidence and high-mindedness find powerful echoes in the
heart of a woman. Madame will be loaded with a responsibility which will
often raise a barrier against extravagances, all the stronger because it
is she herself who has created it in her heart. You yourself have made a
portion of the work, and you may be sure that from henceforth your wife
will never perhaps dishonor herself.
Moreover, by seeking in this way a method of defence, consider what
admirable aids are offered to you by this plan of finances.
You will have in your house an exact estimate of the morality of your
wife, just as the quotations of the Bourse give you a just estimate of
the degree of confidence possessed by the government.
And doubtless, during the first years of your married life, your wife
will take pride in giving you every luxury and satisfaction which your
money can afford.
She will keep a good table, she will renew the furniture, and the
carriages; she will always keep in her drawer a sum of money sacred to
her well-beloved and ready for his needs. But of course, in the actual
circumstances of life, the drawer will be very often empty and monsieur
will spend a great deal too much. The economies ordered by the Chamber
never weigh heavily upon the clerks whose income is twelve hundred
francs; and you will be the clerk at twelve hundred francs in your
own house. You will laugh in your sleeve, because you will have saved,
capitalized, invested one-third of your income during a long time, like
Louis XV, who kept for himself a little separate treasury, “against a
rainy day,” he used to say.
Thus, if your wife speaks of economy, her discourse will be equal to the
varying quotations of the money-market. You will be able to divine the
whole progress of the lover by these financial fluctuations, and you
will have avoided all difficulties. _E sempre bene._
If your wife fails to appreciate the excessive confidence, and
dissipates in one day a large proportion of your fortune, in the first
place it is not probable that this prodigality will amount to one-third
of the revenue which you have been saving for ten years; moreover you
will learn, from the Meditation on _Catastrophes_, that in the very
crisis produced by the follies of your wife, you will have brilliant
opportunities of slaying the Minotaur.
But the secret of the treasure which has been amassed by your
thoughtfulness need never be known till after your death; and if you
have found it necessary to draw upon it, in order to assist your wife,
you must always let it be thought that you have won at play, or made a
loan from a friend.
These are the true principles which should govern the conjugal budget.
The police of marriage has its martyrology. We will cite but one
instance which will make plain how necessary it is for husbands who
resort to severe measures to keep watch over themselves as well as over
their wives.
An old miser who lived at T-----, a pleasure resort if there ever was
one, had married a young and pretty woman, and he was so wrapped up in
her and so jealous that love triumphed over avarice; he actually gave up
trade in order to guard his wife more closely, but his only real change
was that his covetousness took another form. I acknowledge that I owe
the greater portion of the observations contained in this essay, which
still is doubtless incomplete, to the person who made a study of this
remarkable marital phenomenon, to portray which, one single detail will
be amply sufficient. When he used to go to the country, this husband
never went to bed without secretly raking over the pathways of his park,
and he had a special rake for the sand of his terraces. He had made
a close study of the footprints made by the different members of his
household; and early in the morning he used to go and identify the
tracks that had been made there.
“All this is old forest land,” he used to say to the person I have
referred to, as he showed him over the park; “for nothing can be seen
through the brushwood.”
His wife fell in love with one of the most charming young men of the
town. This passion had continued for nine years bright and fresh in the
hearts of the two lovers, whose sole avowal had been a look exchanged
in a crowded ball-room; and while they danced together their trembling
hands revealed through the scented gloves the depth of their love. From
that day they had both of them taken great delight on those trifles
which happy lovers never disdain. One day the young man led his only
confidant, with a mysterious air, into a chamber where he kept under
glass globes upon his table, with more care than he would have bestowed
upon the finest jewels in the world, the flowers that, in the excitement
of the dance, had fallen from the hair of his mistress, and the finery
which had been caught in the trees which she had brushed through in the
park. He also preserved there the narrow footprint left upon the clay
soil by the lady’s step.
“I could hear,” said this confidant to me afterwards, “the violent and
repressed palpitations of his heart sounding in the silence which we
preserved before the treasures of this museum of love. I raised my eyes
to the ceiling, as if to breathe to heaven the sentiment which I dared
not utter. ‘Poor humanity!’ I thought. ‘Madame de ----- told me that one
evening at a ball you had been found nearly fainting in her card-room?’
I remarked to him.
“‘I can well believe it,’ said he casting down his flashing glance, ‘I
had kissed her arm!--But,’ he added as he pressed my hand and shot at me
a glance that pierced my heart, ‘her husband at that time had the gout
which threatened to attack his stomach.’”
Some time afterwards, the old man recovered and seemed to take a new
lease of life; but in the midst of his convalescence he took to his
bed one morning and died suddenly. There were such evident symptoms of
poisoning in the condition of the dead man that the officers of justice
were appealed to, and the two lovers were arrested. Then was enacted at
the court of assizes the most heartrending scene that ever stirred the
emotions of the jury. At the preliminary examination, each of the two
lovers without hesitation confessed to the crime, and with one thought
each of them was solely bent on saving, the one her lover, the other his
mistress. There were two found guilty, where justice was looking for
but a single culprit. The trial was entirely taken up with the flat
contradictions which each of them, carried away by the fury of devoted
love, gave to the admissions of the other. There they were united for
the first time, but on the criminals’ bench with a gendarme seated
between them. They were found guilty by the unanimous verdict of a
weeping jury. No one among those who had the barbarous courage to
witness their conveyance to the scaffold can mention them to-day without
a shudder. Religion had won for them a repentance for their crime,
but could not induce them to abjure their love. The scaffold was their
nuptial bed, and there they slept together in the long night of death.