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.