THE ART OF
TAKING A WIFE

THE ART OF
TAKING A WIFE

BY PAOLO MANTEGAZZA

New Edition

GAY AND BIRD
LONDON MDCCCXCVI

All rights reserved

TO THE IMPATIENT,
WHO WISH TO MARRY TOO SOON;
TO THE LIBERTINES,
WHO TAKE A WIFE TOO LATE;
TO THE TIMID
WHO, WAVERING BETWEEN YES AND NO,
END BY NOT TAKING ONE AT ALL,
This Book is Dedicated
BY A MAN
WHO HAS ALWAYS BLESSED HIS FIRST MARRIAGE,
AND HOPES TO BLESS THE SECOND;
BELIEVING THIS SEXUAL CONTRACT TO BE
THE LEAST EVIL ONE
OF THE TIES WHICH BIND THE
MAN TO THE WOMAN,
IN SPITE
OF ITS MANY DEFECTS AND DANGERS.

CONTENTS.

PROLOGUE.

BETWEEN SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS.—TO TAKE, OR NOT TO TAKE A WIFE?

For the majority of men, and for at least thirty years of their lives, love is the strongest necessity, and governs them like a tyrant with no other curb than the wretched brake of written codes, which they do not read, and of social conventionalities, which they can easily silence by employing hypocrisy’s mask; an hypocrisy, let it be well understood, well dressed, well curled, and well educated.

How can one satisfy this greatest of all human needs?

By buying love, at so much an hour, so much a month, or so much a year.

By gaining it by seduction or violence.

By taking a wife.

It would seem as if these three ways of loving were totally distinct, one from the other; in fact, that any one would exclude the others, and that they would stand in direct opposition to each other. But when hypocrisy is at the helm of the vessel which bears us over the great sea of life, it contrives so ably and so cleverly, as to enable us to enjoy all three methods at one moment, and, while we are sailing between rocks free of danger or shipwreck, it affords us, as it were, all the delights of a voyage in a beautiful archipelago, where islands and islets seem to meet and touch each other; and where land, mountains, and scenery all form a bright, picturesque, and beautiful picture.

We row upon the tranquil waters of matrimony, and yet glide so near to the shores of venal love that we can grasp the flowers and gather the shells and precious pearls which lie there. We sail with the wind over the more tempestuous sea of seduction, but all the while we coast the island of poetic, faithful, and constant love; thus, vice, adultery, and domestic peace, debauchery and eternal vows, angels and beasts, find themselves guests at the same table, without false modesty, and without remorse.

Civilisation has opened three ways of loving to men of the present day, and one would have thought that since they are free to choose one, they would have been satisfied with that. Not at all. Civilised man is by nature insatiable, for the hammer of the excelsior beats ever at his heart, the thirst for something better wears him away, and the hunger for something more consumes him; hence he has set himself to destroy the boundaries and walls which separate the three roads, so that he can easily take short cuts from one to the other without risk; and so matrimony, prostitution, and adultery walk hand in hand; and if in public they appear very cool to each other, that is only a blind, for in the secrecy of their houses they wink at each other, sup and sleep together. If all this is indeed so, a Turk would say it is so because it must be. If all this can indeed be, an epicurean optimist would say, let us, too, try and sail in this sea, now so calm, and now so tempestuous, and let us set that sanctified hypocrisy at the helm.

However, I am neither Turk nor cynic, and I still believe in moral progress, and in the efficacy of books and the spoken word; and even though I be left alone in the belief that there is no happiness save in the good, nor cheerfulness save in sincerity, and in being the same inwardly as outwardly, I would still die in this conviction.

I like a mixture of things at table, but I have no heart for it in the field of morality. I wish to see the family on one side, and the brothel on the other; and when two natures living together have become an intolerable torment to each other, I should wish the law to apply the instrument of divorce to their chains and to set them free.

The three ways of loving should be separate one from the other, and should never be united. So far from breaking down the walls that divide them, I wish to have them so high as to become impregnable fortresses.

⁂

Only one of these three ways, however, is that which the honest and happy ought to take. That of seduction and violence, only thieves, assassins, and villains can enter. The third, unfortunately, the way of venal love, nearly all enter, though still desiring and invoking some distant ideal, where this way shall be closed, and no path left free save that of matrimony, though its dignity must be always guaranteed by the law of divorce.

But is marriage always possible and always easy?

No; it is often impossible, and always difficult.

And the honest man stops and meditates upon it as upon the gravest, the most intricate, and most obscure problem of life. The misfortune is this, that just these timid and thoughtful men are the best, and the fear is sometimes so great, and the meditation lasts so long, that old age comes upon them before they have resolved the problem or made themselves a family nest. Instead of this, the improvident, the thoughtless, and villains precipitate themselves headforemost along the road of matrimony; and if for a few moments they struggle in the tortures of doubt, they quickly silence apprehension and remorse by saying to themselves:

“If it should turn out badly, if I find nettles and thorns on this road, I will clear another cross-road with one good stroke of my spade, and will buy love like so many others, and will, like them, seek it either in the house of my friend or neighbor. Immorality on this point is so lax, the indulgence of the public is so merciful, that I may enjoy this violation of home without falling under the penalty of the law. Mahomet also, generally so severe on all transgressions of the written law, when he speaks of the sins of love, even of the greatest, always adds: ‘But God is good and merciful.’ And all think with Mahomet, though they have not written the Koran, that to the sins of love ‘God is good and merciful.’”

I, however, the warmest advocate of marriage for myself and others, desire with all my soul that the honest and wise man should marry, to increase the capital of honesty and wisdom in future generations. And so I preach and shall preach to my last breath:

Marry! Marriage is still and always will be the most honest, healthy, and ideal mode of loving.

But I add immediately:

Marry well; combine all the powers of your thought and feeling to solve this most important problem of your life; add to them all that is best in yourself; all that you find of the best among your counsellors who are your friends.

And then follow the advice given us by that embodiment of good sense, Benjamin Franklin: Take a sheet of paper, and after having folded it in two, so as to have two distinct columns, write on one side all the advantages the proposed marriage would bring you, and on the other all the evils and dangers into which it might lead you. When you have finished this piece of analysis work, try to measure the opposing elements, cancelling alternately those that seem to balance each other, as in algebra + 3 and - 3 is equal to zero, and you will see what is left upon the page—that is, whether the good predominates, or whether the evil has the upper hand.

I know well all the mistakes you may make. I know, too, that if you love you will write in rose-coloured ink in the column of good, and in that of evil you will use the blackest. But in any case this work of analysis, this labour of detailed examination will, without your being aware of it, oblige you to consider many elements which otherwise you would have passed over, just as if you had had recourse to a microscope of great power instead of to your eyes.

Matrimony must be studied with the eyes first; with the microscope after; yes, even with the telescope. The eyes will enable us to see the principal part of the problem; the microscope will show all the ins and outs of our love; it will reveal all its cells and all its fibres; and lastly, the telescope will give us the power of seeing, prophetically, as it were, what will befall our passion and desire in the evolution of time.

Then, if, after using eyes, microscope, and telescope, you also read my book, you will find there the sincere and dispassionate words of a man who became a physician that he might study mankind better; who began by studying himself, as being the subject ever at hand; who to this daily incessant study has devoted forty-six large volumes not yet printed.

Listen to the voice of a man who has made woman his principal study, judging her to be the better part of humanity, and has loved her more than all the creatures upon earth, believing her to be the first and greatest source of happiness. I know perfectly that, even after having applied Franklin’s method to the study of the problem of matrimony, even after having used eyes, microscope, and telescope, and read my book, you may yet make a mistake; but your conscience will always be free from any remorse, in knowing that, as far as you were able, you did all that was possible to secure happiness.

Vessels are sometimes wrecked under the command of able and brave captains, and under the guidance of a sure compass. But for one of these you find a hundred wrecks, to which there was no compass, or an ignorant or drunken captain.

And all those who marry without reflecting deeply and long on the abstruse problem are drunk and ignorant captains, who launch, without a compass, upon the most tempestuous sea.

THE ART OF TAKING A WIFE.

CHAPTER I.

MARRIAGE IN MODERN SOCIETY.

Of all paradoxes man is the cleverest and most untiring. He says he is a worm of the earth, but believes himself to be a son of God; his own person he clothes modestly, but revels in discovering the nakedness of the greatest possible number of his sisters in Christ. The more he humiliates himself, the prouder he is; the more he vaunts his generosity, so much the more is he egotistical; an adorer of liberty in theory, but in practice a daily contriver of tyrannies.

For the present I will confine myself to this last form of his madness. If one only listens to him, he places liberty above all the good things of the world. If Adam has lost the earthly paradise, it is because he did not know how to tolerate the yoke of a divine prohibition; if man has spattered his planet with blood, it is because he preferred the hard bread of the free citizen to the golden chains of despotism; if he has raised monuments to Spartacus, Bahilla, Garibaldi, and Washington, it is because his first glory is to be free; but the monuments forgotten, the tyrants killed, he raises new ones on his own account; perhaps for the pleasure of destroying them hereafter. If he does not seek some innocent and pleasant occupation, what can he do after having slept and loved and eaten?

Numbers must take the first place among the early tyrants of our own making.

When God made the world, he entirely forgot to make numbers, and we have corrected this fault of creation by making them ourselves. God had not numbered the stars in heaven, or the drops of water in the sea, the leaves on the trees or the ants on the ground. Infinity above, infinity below, the ineffable and immeasurable everywhere.

Instead, we have repaired this great forgetfulness of the Creator, by placing numbers above everything else, and making them our masters in the world of living things and dead; we allow them to tyrannize over us in every act of our humble daily life, as well as in the pages of history and in dogmas of philosophy. If there have been sanguinary revolutions in order to obtain the liberty of the press, why as yet has no one rebelled against the tyranny of numbers?

Quien sabe?

Whoever would think of buying eleven or thirteen eggs?

No one, for 10 and 12 are our small tyrants.

Who would make a present of nine or ninety-nine francs to his own son?

No one, for 10 is a great tyrant, and 100 greater than 10.

Who has never felt the yoke of numbers one thousand and one hundred thousand? who is never in subjection to the tyranny of the million, both in language and mode of life?

And centuries, too, which are only so many figures, what a number of theories they have evoked from the depths of history; how many false names have they not written in the anagraphs of time; how many revolutions have they not postponed; how many others have they aroused, merely on account of the tyranny of a number?

For some years we have had before our eyes one of the most deplorably humiliating examples of our view of this arithmetical incubus, the decline of the nineteenth century to make room for the twentieth.

Six years are still wanting till this numerical cataclysm. Who knows how many books will be written on the century dying out, how many prophecies on the century following it; what torrents of philosophy and ink to discuss the passing of the number 19 to that of 20?

Yet centuries only exist on paper, and after having made them ourselves, we adore and freely elect them to be our tyrants; only to deride the poor savages who, like us, make their own gods of wood and stone, fall on their knees before them and fear them.

And we fear numbers—only another idol of thought, made for our use and necessity, and in the similitude of our wretchedness and intellectual weakness.

For my part I only see around me an infinite continuity of things and of time, nor do I allow myself to be overawed by the cabal of numbers, with which we ought to amuse ourselves as with a pack of cards, esteeming them for what they are worth; a poor example of a thing yet poorer!

The dying century, fin de siècle, and all such sensational phrases, which are intended to express a great deal, because they mean nothing—these exclamations, the eloquence of the non-eloquent, move me little, if at all. I look back and see a yesterday; I look around and see a to-day; forward and I see a to-morrow; the three tenses of the to become, which have no numbers, nor will ever have. For they succeed each other unceasingly, following the mighty strides of our journey, not with the figures of a century, but with a regret that becomes a hope, and will be a faith; to be succeeded again and forever by regret, hope, and faith—unceasingly.

I wished to write this in the first pages of my book to let you know that if I attempt to delineate marriage in modern society I renounce the dying century, the fin de siècle, and all such effective phrases, which would give me, based on numbers, so many resources of rhetoric and sentimentality. I have hated and always shall hate all forms of tyranny, including that of numbers. I look around and say, this is the way men marry to-day. They do so because they are sons of a yesterday, which is the father of to-day; then I look forward and hope that to-morrow will be better than yesterday or to-day, and I endeavour to promote the good as quickly as possible and with a minimum of pain, by my pen, my experience, and my studies, cito tute et jucunde, as Celsus has it.

⁂

In our civilized society, marriage is the least evil of all the different modes of union between man and woman for the preservation of the race. It is the result of many historic evolutions, many sensual, moral, religious, and legislative elements, which have come into conflict with each other in the course of time.

Remote atavism of the ravishment of the female, holy words of inspired prophets, imperiousness of feudatories, avarice of usurers, transports of love and heroism of hearts, have all left something of their own upon the altar of matrimony. But before the sacrament was finished and the priest sent up the fumes of his incense, animal man came leering and saying:

“This is my affair. I am the sole and true priest of this rite. I am the only minister of this religion.” And mixing the divine and human vows on the altar with his hairy hands—perhaps, too, with his tail—he formed a chaos of things most opposite, from the highest to the lowest, from the most sublime to the most ignoble. And this, then, is marriage.

To curse this love sanctified by vows is useless, to suppress it is impossible, to substitute something better is absurd (at least for the present), and nothing remains but to accept it as the least evil of sexual unions, and to ameliorate it gradually, prudently, and wisely.

By free choice on both sides, enlightened by reason.

By the guarantee of divorce.

⁂

Neither the prince nor the proletariate needs this book of mine. The first marries worse than any citizen in his kingdom, for dynastic reasons, without love or sympathy. With him it is first the throne, then the family; first the alliance of his colours, and then if there is room, the kisses of love. It is true he may console himself with the vulgar and easily won embraces of a pandering Venus; he may also take advantage of one of the most ridiculous remnants of the Middle Ages, the morganatic marriage. In all cases the ministers, deputies, nay, even journalists provide him with a wife. The art of taking a wife is for him, therefore, nonsense.

The proletariate, more fortunate than the prince, may choose the woman it loves, and in its choice may take advantage of the counsels of those who have loved and sinned much. But it does not read books, for they cost too much; and when by law its individuality is cancelled from the statistics of the illiterate, it has no time to read, for the tyranny of bread oppresses it.

Therefore I write for neither prince nor proletariate, but for all that human multitude who live and move between the extreme poles of modern society and who constitute the true nerve of the nation.

In what way do all these millions of males and females combine?

In different ways, but amongst them marriage is the only legal foundation of the family permitted by morality and approved by religion. All others are contraband, moving on cross-roads either alone or in company, but all, in one way or the other, defrauding nature, with an eternal envy for those who have honestly paid custom dues on entering the city.

Without fear of going far wrong, one may say that in whatever society there are the greatest number of married people, there one will find more morality and decorum, and consequently the number of those who love and nourish their love by seduction, whether it be with the armed hand on the public road, or clandestinely under the form of domestic robbery, will be less.

Besides this, our modern society is suffering from gold fever; a disease which is as old as man himself and has taken the form and course of a real epidemic; this contributes more than any other element to corrupt the roots of marriage.

Diffused instruction and the many social exigencies have increased our needs beyond measure; more especially those which are more costly, that is, those of the intellect and the higher æsthetic emotions, without in any way enlarging the sources of production.

From birth to death, the balance of home life oppresses us, torments us; its arithmetic pierces through the skin with the acute points of its figures, reaches our very viscera and, alas, our hearts also; poisoning every pleasure, spoiling all the holy and happy poetry of life. Invited as all are to the genial table of modern civilization which offers us so many new delights, we are like the poor government official, who, for appearance’s sake, allows himself to be carried off to a ball, and between the bars of music and the full glasses, feels his pocket anxiously, wondering how and when he will be able to pay the score.

With what difficulty some of the money is drawn from the poor purse of a middle-class man! How many pangs has it not caused before it sees the light of day, accompanied by the last caress of the convulsive fingers! How unequal the comparison between those who live on an income of one thousand and three thousand francs! And, from the ever increasing fever of desires, the gnawing of all vanities, and the vanity of the classes, how these figures increase daily until they reach to ten, twenty, or thirty thousand francs!

And this is the reason that whilst love alone should prompt to marriage, it is nearly always the last party in the contract, in which money judges and directs according to the need of it, with all the imperiousness of one who knows himself to be unconquerable.

Money, money, always money! It is the first and supreme arbiter of the greater number of marriages.

To take a wife means to become poor, if the wife does not help to build the new family nest; it means to walk with open eyes into a bottomless and dark abyss; it signifies condemning one’s self to the daily torture of poverty, and to dedicate the children yet unborn to the same struggle.

Our dignity would demand that the wife’s dowry should not enter into our choice at all. The true ideal would be the ability to offer to our companion riches, or, at least, a competency with our heart and hand, so that we could say:

“See, beloved; all that is mine is thine. However much I give you, I shall always be your debtor, for you have given me your love.” All this is noble and grand, and every man who is conscious of the power of his own moral and physical manhood would wish to say so. But how many really can?

Exceedingly few; hardly any.

And then the young man who would seek to love in the way of the Lord is discouraged and renounces marriage, in which he only sees the door to misery or cowardice. He renounces it frankly and forever. Are celibates more honest, and how far does their honesty extend?

With the most honest, virtue extends to an unwillingness to betray the purity of the maiden, or the faithfulness of other men’s wives; extends or rather descends, to making the service of love a question of periodical hygiene regulated by the rubric of the calendar and by that most imperative one of the lunar month. Poor love, poor translation of the most epic poem of life! It is as though one were to translate Homer into some Australian dialect!

These bachelor hygienists are however a small minority. Others pretend to something more and better, and make love in the houses of others, and live by abject and cowardly seduction, and perhaps usury.

This is the most sordid and cancerous sore in our modern marriage; this is the gangrene of our society, which spreads an asphyxiating fetor of domestic treachery, of moral infection, which contaminates and infests everything. Woe to us if in every family the newly born could proclaim aloud the name of their father! How many false, living bills of exchange would be protested, what long faces amongst biologists who ingeniously study the law of heredity; what a terrible picture of treachery and dissembling! human and civilized society would appear all at once like a band of false coiners, and the woman’s womb nothing but a mint of false money.

But the newly born can only weep—the first salutation to life—and the wombs of women are silent, and continue their business of false coinage.

And yet I do not blame the woman more than the man, in this galley of treachery, this wide-spread and clandestine manufactory of bastards. If man assails the woman, and plots against her virtue, he avails himself of the rights of life. If society does not permit him to take a wife, why should he not share the bread of him who has too much to eat? Do not the workmen of Europe declare daily, that one of the first rights is that of work? And is not the right of loving perhaps more sacred; the work of works; that for which nature sacrifices the individual, and to which it consecrates the best of its energies? Husbands defend these rights, we attack them. If they are conquered—tant pis pour eux!

And the poor wives, why should they not brighten the ennui of the nuptial bed with some little love affair? Were they not bound forever to a man they had never loved, whom they had perhaps seen only once? Were they not sold by their parents, guardians, and matrons, like merchandise? Was not their dowry rated at the weight of a coat of arms? and have not they also the right to love? And all the others who have had the good fortune to love the man who has given them his name, and have thrown themselves into his arms, giving him their whole hearts, happy to be able to transform themselves in him and for him; who dreamt of making marriage a synonym of love, and who instead found the husband in a few months in the arms of an old love; have not all these women the right of vengeance? This is matrimony as it is daily represented in the many small theaters which we call men’s houses.

In these theaters, however (one must be just and not exaggerate), there are more farces played than comedies, more comedies than dramas. Tragedies are rare. For this high form of dramatic art heroes are required, and they are very scarce in modern society. We have made our houses, statues, pictures, and gardens smaller, and have been compelled to reduce our feelings also.

The pistol and dagger, too, figure in the chronicles of matrimony, but as phenomena. In the home-theater, on the contrary, the punishment of retaliation, the little basenesses, the stirring of conscience, under all forms and at all sorts of prices, are in common use. The ménages à trois (aye, even four) are pretty pictures in kind; and the hypocrisy of husbands who will not see, because they detest scenes, figure every day in the running account of modern matrimony.

Live and let live—to apply the noble modern institution of co-operative societies to the family; and raise aloft the banner of the association of forces. One for all, and all for one!

⁂

Infidelity and treachery are not the only moths which corrode marriage. We have all the domestic discords which spring from the inequality of the needs of intelligence, heart, and habits of thought; we have the partisans of the wife and those of the husband, who quarrel amongst themselves, complicating the problem, poisoning the wounds, opening with every touch the cicatrices which time and love were so pitifully healing.

If war is an exception in matrimony, peace is still more rare; and one may safely say that in the greater number of cases it is an armed peace, an atmosphere which relaxes the strength, dries up the purest sources of tenderness, and destroys its happiness. In a word, as our society is constituted in the present day, hell is not common in the family circle, paradise exceedingly rare, but purgatory is almost universal.

And yet marriage is still the least evil amongst the unions of the man and woman; it can and ought to grow continually better and increase human happiness; which is for me the highest and truest end of progress.

What is the use of being able to run through space at the velocity of seventy kilometres an hour, or to go round the world in seventy days; what the use of being able to talk through the telephone or see the clouds in the sky of Mars; what the use of so great a fecundity of books, of such a deluge of journals, if one is unable to increase the patrimony of human happiness by even a farthing?

At the present day marriage may be happy, just as one may become rich by playing in the lottery, but whilst one door opens to the possibility of good, two open to that of evil. He who utters the fatal yes before the Syndic girded with the three national colors, lets a grain fall in the scale that holds our happiness and two in the scale that holds our misfortunes. It is his duty to do the opposite; it is the duty of society to defend matrimony from the perils which threaten it, by wise laws not inspired by the arcadian tendency of the heart, nor by theocratical mysticism, but by a profound knowledge of man.

⁂

About twenty years ago I broke a lance in favour of divorce in my “Fisiologia dell’ amore,” and hoped at that time to have seen it by now included in the laws of my country.

Twenty years ago I wrote:

“Divorce ought to be included among our laws as soon as possible: happy couples solicit it to secure their dignity, wounded by a tyrannical tie; the unhappy implore it on their bended knees, those who by misfortune or fault are condemned to the most supreme of human tortures: that of a slavery without redemption, of a yoke without rest, of a scourge without balm, of a grief without hope.”[1] Even to-day divorce is not made a law among us, but public opinion demands and will have it. No one in the present day dare defend it with the broken arms of the Church; but many defend it still in the name of the children and of the sanctity of the family.

[1] “Fisiologia dell’ amore,” Milano, 1873, p. 338.

There are too many innocent victims of matrimony for their voices not to be heard; and when the law-giver knows how to surround divorce with all the most delicate guarantees, he will increase the sanctity of the family and free the children from the cruelly abject spectacle of their two parents living under the same roof hating each other, with homicide in their thoughts, bearing the chains of convicts, without the courage or the strength to break them.

⁂

Legislators must do this, the rest of the duty lies with those directors of the mind who are called writers, masters, and educators. They ought to teach the woman to know what love is, and what matrimony is, so that she should not give herself, bound hand and foot, to a contract which she knows by hearsay only, nor enter the dim future guided by paternal, maternal, or religious authority alone.

The possibilities of misfortune are a hundred times greater for the woman than for the man, for she is always more ignorant of things genital than we are, and goes to the altar or municipality ignorant of all, dragged like a lamb to the slaughter-house.

At the present day, under the customs to which our society conforms, the only profession of woman is that of wife and mother; and to this calling she is instructed from infancy, not to be an exemplary wife or perfect mother, but, if possible, to find a husband, and that an ideal one, one who is handsome, young, and above all rich. She is secretly and cleverly instructed in the art of hunting that rare game, a good husband; not in order to make him or herself happy, but to increase her income and to rise a step or two in the social scale. If in comfortable circumstances, she must become rich; if rich, a millionaire; if civilian, a countess; if countess, marchioness or princess. This is what she is to aim at; all her education has been directed to this end. Now, marriage should rise from its lower position of a business transaction to the higher one of a union of hearts and thoughts, and neither of the two companions ought to be able to look at each other with anger and think:

You bought me.

I sold myself.

Nothing can cleanse us from this original sin, which contaminates matrimony. In vain do the comforts of riches, the pride of a high position, the excitements of domestic sensuality, throw flowers over the wound to hide it. At the least quibble, the least cloud that covers the heaven of the double life, one hears the fatal words:

You bought me,

I sold myself,

arising from the depths of the troubled conscience like a voice evoked by some evil spirit.

And when neither riches, sensuality, nor vanity have a rag wherewith to cover the cancerous sore, the naked and dreadful spectre of an unsuccessful speculation, of unsuccessful business—then bitterness is added to bitterness, and the domestic warfare which has become permanent, angry, and poisonous, developes into a chronic despair, the most heart-rending form of human pain. Even this is not all; as in an attack of neuralgia the deep-seated and continual pains become sharper and more intolerable at certain moments, taking on a piercing and stab-like character, so it is with the deep-seated and dumb despair of those two unfortunate beings. Every now and then the inexorable cry sounds, and thus it goes on until the last breath.

Let divorce come then, and quickly, to set all these slaves free; let there be a wiser and more liberal education, to teach girls what they do not know or know indifferently; so that they, like ourselves, can freely say their yes before the altar or the magistrate with perfect knowledge and understanding.

CHAPTER II.

SEXUAL CHOICE IN MARRIAGE.—THE ART OF CHOOSING WELL.

There are two principal ways by which we may arrive at the fatal yes, that terrible monosyllable which must decide our happiness or misfortune; that yes which may make for us a paradise on earth, or a hell of twenty-four hours for every day in the 365.

Either love first and marriage after, or marriage first and love after. Which of these two ways is the better, and the most certain to lead us to the paradise of two?

Theoretically, the answer cannot be doubted; one ought to love first and marry after.

In practice, however, it is not always so. Many marriages inspired by love end badly, while others, planned by reason more than the heart, turn out well.

And why? If the theory is true, it ought to accord with the practice, and if it contradicts the practice the theory must be mistaken.

The apparent contradiction can be explained at once if we reflect that love is every day spoken of as the desire for the possession of the woman, and this alone is certainly not sufficient to make two people happy. Give love and lust their real names and every difficulty immediately disappears, and we then see the happy dogma, Love first and marriage after, shine out in all its splendour. If by legal means alone a man can possess the woman he loves and if the passion be violent, the greatest libertine, and even the enemy of matrimony, bow their heads under the Furcæ Caudinæ of female virtue and the civil code, and marry. It is a stony road and full of pitfalls, but one which, nevertheless, may sometimes lead to the happiness of the two. Gradually there becomes associated with the desire of the senses, that more valuable sense of the affinity of hearts, and when the desire is satisfied there remains still the enjoyment of the more delicate dainties of the understanding and affection. To transform lust into love is a difficult work, but worthy of woman’s holy virtue, and the woman can succeed in doing so, even when possession has cooled desire and age dimmed her beauty; but she must be a sublime being and possess lasting gifts of sentiment and thought; if her companion be also an elect soul, who knows how to value this lasting and solid virtue, and who understands ideality of spirit as well as grace of form, so much the better.

Sublime beings and elect souls are always exceptional, and if, in the innumerable crowd of husbands and wives, they have reached the yes by the way of desire of the flesh, they soon find that the game was not worth the candle, and that the muddy swamp of weariness and animal familiarity of sex follows upon the first outburst of voluptuousness. The woman sometimes succeeds in fanning and reviving it with inexhaustible coquetry, but one gets scorched, and the distaste may become even more obstinate the more ingenious are the remedies used to oppose it. A marriage inspired only by the desires of the flesh, maintained only by the bread of lust, is a very poor and abject thing, that can very rarely give peace to the mind, and much less happiness. Even in the most vulgar and sensual natures, there is something that rebels against the permanent animal, and raises its voice in demand for a more human form of food. Man, like the swine, wallows in the mud, but with this difference: he likes to wash himself, and to look up to the heavens from the trough. It must be added that in marriage the dignities of father and mother only increase the responsibility of the two consorts to animate and enlarge the human nut at the expense of the animal pulp. The spirituality of the family impresses itself upon the coarsest nature and the most obtuse nerves, by warming the atmosphere and revealing a streak of blue in the heaven above.

Woe to the man who, in solitary and sad contemplation of his wife, says to himself: My companion is only a female!

Much worse is it, and woe to that woman who, in the night watches, looking at her husband as he snores, says in a low, fretful voice: My husband is only a male!

⁂

There is hardly a man who would confess to his friends, or even to himself, that he married a woman to possess her. Even if it were true, modesty and pride fight against the confession, and with one of those clever self-deceptions with which we know how to embellish and deceive our own consciences, we exclaim in a decided and convinced tone, I love her!

If it be so difficult a thing to distinguish between gold and its alloy, true and false diamonds, eastern and Roman pearls, imagine whether it is easy to distinguish between the desire of the flesh and true love. Yet this is just one of those most dangerous and hidden pitfalls which bring death to happiness in the battle waged in our minds between the to be or not to be, when we have to decide whether or no we ought to give the holy name of wife to the woman we desire. In other books of mine I have ventured to give some advice to those aspiring to matrimony to enable them to distinguish between true love and carnal excitement, which only affects one organ.

As I believe, however, that we have here before our eyes one of the gravest and most vital questions in the art of taking a wife, I may be allowed to enter more minutely into particulars.

Always doubt a sudden impression, so called a coup de foudre, if it has seized you after long abstinence from woman’s society.

⁂

For love also, and perhaps more for love than for the brain, it is prudent to remember the fasting Philip.

⁂

If you fear being enamoured of a young girl and are not disposed toward marriage, go and see all the married and young ladies most famed for beauty, grace, and elegance, and make your comparisons. If they be unfavourable to her, doubt directly the seriousness and depth of your passion.

This has to do only with what we call physical love, but I speak of it at some length as it is the first door opened when a man and woman see each other for the first time. But I do not mean that it is the only one which leads you to the fatal yes. It ought only to give you an entrance into the ante-chamber where you must wait patiently until heart and mind open the doors of the inner rooms, where you will have to live all your life.

If there has been no coup de foudre, but the sympathy came gradually, developed and grew until it became a real passion, then all my counsels of examination and experiment will be perfectly useless. At each visit you unconsciously, and without thinking of it at all, correct or confirm the first impression—now trimming, now increasing the warmth of the original sympathy. How many wooings, how many marriages have miscarried in our fancy without our knowing a word of it, or even having spoken an affectionate word to the person who awakened so sudden and strong an impression in us! A being suddenly appeared on the horizon, perhaps in an hour in which we felt the weight of solitude, the tortures of abstinence, and we said to ourselves directly: What a charming and sweet creature! Why do I not take her for mine ... and forever?

The apparition passed from our gaze, but we carried it home with us carved, or rather written, on our minds in fire. We saw her between the lines of the book we read, in our dreams, everywhere.

A few days later we see her in the street, or in society, and we vainly endeavor to reconcile the reality with the figure we saw in our imagination. The discord is complete. The woman is not the same, and smiling to ourselves over the love which we had dreamt of in the silence of our minds, we exclaim, “How could I ever have admired this vulgar, ugly, faded creature and wished to have her for my own!”

It is well, indeed, when the sketch can be corrected so soon; unfortunately it sometimes occurs after several visits, when we may have compromised our heart and perhaps our word.

Prudence, then, adelante Pedro con juicio!

⁂

Science teaches that no force in the world is lost, no energy consumed, but that force and energy transform themselves one into the other without loss at all. Then I ask myself—but all the desires that men and women breathe out in the streets, in society, in theatres, or wherever they meet, where do they end? All those glances of the eyes which carry fire enough in their rays to burn and consume the whole planetary system; all those heart beatings which make the face burn and attract two beings, two organisms, two lives to each other; when (as in most cases) they pass like meteors without fructifying the earth, where do they go? Those terrible energies, the fruit of the most intricate and sublime mechanism of our brains and nerves; into what do they transport themselves when they produce neither words, tears, lust, crime, matrimony, nor sin?

And yet these desires are many; they meet day and night in the crowded streets, in the whirl of railway carriages, in the dense crowd, in the solitary mountain paths; they plough through space, and if we were able to see them we should see the air lighted up by them as by the convulsive lightning of a tropical tempest.

But where do they go? Where is so much light consumed? Who warms himself with all this mighty heat? And where are the ashes of such a fire?

I know not; perhaps biologists and physicists of the future will tell us.

⁂

Another elementary, but most important aid toward the wise choice of a wife, is to see a large number of women before choosing her to whom you wish to give name, heart, and life.

If you have chosen your companion in the narrow circle of a village without leaving it, you may be proud to have gained the prettiest girl among a dozen companions. But woe to you, should you suddenly go to other villages, or still worse to some large city; you may find the comparison odious, most odious, and yet irremediable.

This is why men who have seen and travelled a great deal generally make the best husbands; for making their choice on a larger basis, there is great probability of their choosing well, and perhaps also for another reason, women more easily pardon some former gallantry in their fiancés than a too ingenuous virtue. Don Giovanni has always seemed more pleasing to them than the chaste Joseph.

A woman who knows that she is preferred and chosen as a companion, by one who has seen and known a hundred or a thousand other women, is proud of it, and with reason.

I do not know if all women will share my opinion, but those who know most of the science of love will most certainly think with me. Were I a woman, my ideal of a husband would be a man who had travelled in all the six parts of the world, and had seen and admired all the women there.

And continuing my Utopia, but bringing it down to the level of earth; were I a woman and had I doubts about the sincerity of the passion awakened in my fiancé, I should wish him to make a journey through all Europe which should last a year, and if on his return he still found me worthy of him, I would give him my hand with the certainty of having a loving and faithful husband.

Time is a valuable element to add weight to our choice; it is one of the best gauges of comparison by which to distinguish true love from carnal excitement. It is an old axiom, confirmed by universal experience, that time cools and extinguishes the small attacks of love, but strengthens and invigorates the more serious ones. The fatal brevity of our lives, the natural impatience of all those in love, conspire together to hasten marriage, but as far as I know and am able, I recommend men and women to acquire the sainted virtue of patience. I pray women again and again in their love affairs (in which as people say they are more men than we are), to follow the tactics of Fabius the temporizer: wait, wait, and still wait. Love is centred in a most serious moment, one most pregnant with consequences to our whole lives, and a month or two more will only increase the dignity of the choice, and be a guarantee for the future. The honeymoon will shine all the longer above our horizon, the more we wait for it, with the poetry of desire and the ideality of hope.

CHAPTER III.

AGE AND HEALTH.

If a man were only a generating animal, the problem of age in marriage would be very simple, and reducible to this formula: That as long as men or women can relight the flame of life they are marriageable.

That means that a man may marry from sixteen to sixty, and in exceptional cases up to seventy and eighty; and that he may marry a woman of from fifteen to forty-five.

Man, however, is not solely a generating animal, but a thinking, reasoning, sentient, cavilling, wrangling being; a political, commercial, and religious creature; he manufactures brakes to curb the exhilaration of the gallop downhill, creates sophisms to spoil truth, and crutches to make athletes rickety; he tells many lies for amusement; in short he is the most clever and ingenious artificer in things of which he knows very little, in the whole planetary universe. Notwithstanding all these precious virtues, man finds the problem of age most complicated, when he wishes to take one of the daughters of Eve and say to her: “Will you give me your hand, so that we may form a little future for ourselves?”

All other elements being favourable, the ideal perfection in age as regards marriage would be as follows:

The man to be from twenty-five to thirty-five.

The woman from eighteen to twenty-five.

The man should always be a few years older than the woman, that is from five to ten years older, and this for many reasons. Man grows older more slowly than woman, and keeps his power of reproduction longer.

Before twenty-five or thirty years of age a man, unless he be a born libertine, knows comparatively little of the world of woman, and that only the worst, and in his choice of a wife may make a terrible mistake.

Then, also, the products of a too early union are weak and inferior; the statistics of all countries show that there are more deaths among children of young parents than of older, or if they live, they are more weakly.

In the most simple problems of marriage, as in the most complex and metaphysical, it is always better to remember the fundamental doctrine, that harmony and happiness are founded on the agreement of two very different instruments, which ought always to accord with each other. We should pay attention, then, to false notes! If in an orchestra two instruments do not strike the right notes, or if one goes too fast and the other too slow, it is a very small matter, and ends in a grimace upon the brow of the few who understand music.

But in marriage the slight discord is a wound in the heart of two beings, who had joined hands for a happy life; and there is always a cicatrix left, which, like the wounds of veterans, acts as a barometer to the least change of temperature, of moisture, or of an atmosphere charged with electricity. The restless hand seeks to stop the sharp irritation, and lacerates the cicatrix, changing it to a chronic sore, which is always painful, but never healed.

Oh, men! oh, women, study counterpoint, the harmony and melody of the heart, body, and soul, day and night, if you wish to gather the blessed and perfumed rose of married happiness, in the garden of life.

⁂

Beyond the ideal perfection of number represented by the beautiful figure of two flowering and fragrant young lives, you may have all these possible combinations, which, with a crescendo of perils and accidents, render the accordance of hearts and bodies always more difficult:

Two beings equally mature in age.

Two old people.

A mature or old man and a young woman.

A young man and a middle-aged or old woman.

We see all these combinations pass daily beyond our eyes, paired according to one or the other of these arithmetical formulæ—formulæ in which numbers weigh and govern human happiness with so tremendous an influence.

Let us study them one by one.

⁂

Man adult—woman adult:

This is one of the most favorable combinations, the freest from danger and painful discovery. If it be true that for this combination there is rarer access to the Olympus of ardent love, it is also true that shipwreck and cataclysm are rarer also. The navigation is nearly always on a tranquil lake, in a safe boat, under the guidance of that best of helmsmen, good sense.

The majority of such cases consists of old attachments interrupted by unsurmountable obstacles, favoured again by some fortunate circumstance. The two who had loved and hoped for each other in their youth, find themselves free and their own masters, and all at once, at a single glance, have called up from the depths a bright panorama of fond visions, which for some time seemed to have disappeared in that abyss which buries and consumes all.

Do you remember, dear?

Yes, indeed I do! I seem to see you still at your window on that Sunday, when, after looking at me so long, you threw me a kiss across the street, when I believed I was hidden by the convolvulus on my balcony.

Ah, yes, yes; that kiss was the beginning of a long idyl which I seem to see rising from the mists of the past as though by enchantment————

And from remembrance to remembrance a living and speaking world appears before those two once more, but more beautiful and more rose-coloured in semblance than it was in reality; enlarged by fancy, the first of artists, gilded by distant reminiscence, which is ever optimist.

The old couple have some wrinkles on their faces and some threads of silver in their hair, but they see each other as they were twenty years ago; and if desires are indolent, and the clasp of the hands does not set the heart beating; if at night ardent dreams no longer disturb the peace of the passions, an odour of loving friendship surrounds them and binds them closer to each other day by day, and grows hourly more like love and less like friendship. They have so many remembrances in common. They have twenty years of life to recount to each other, and relating the sad and joyful events they alternately recount their recollections as though they had in reality lived together all the while, so that mine becomes thine and then ours, and without declaration or trepidation the happy day arrives when, without any necessity of finishing the phrase or dotting the i, the two right hands find themselves clasped together, the lips join between a sigh that questions and one that answers:

Really you wish————?

And why not?

And the why not becomes because I do on the morrow, and the man and woman become husband and wife; and almost without agitation, without accident, they reach in safety the port of sure and tranquil happiness.

I recall two such marriages with emotion, those of Stuart Mill and Hillebrandt.

To these serene and tranquil unions children are not necessary, but if they come they brighten and bless the house, bringing with them a nosegay of flowers and an odour of spring which makes those two happy mortals young once more.

⁂

Two old people.

Add some ten years to the arithmetical combination just studied and you will have a lower temperature, but still less danger to the happiness of the two beings who, defying ridicule and prejudice, wish to consecrate an old friendship upon the altar of matrimony.

I do not say altar as a matter of phraseology, nor to do homage to the religious ceremony of marriage, but because I am deeply convinced that if there be nothing beyond the union of bodies or association of capital marriage is a sacrilege. The troth of two should always be plighted on an altar, whether it be that of Christ or of some ideal, of Moses or Mahomet, of poetry or religion.

Old people only marry once, either to win legitimacy for an old contraband love, or to give a legal status to the children. They are marriages of reparation, corrections of proof-sheets set aside for many years and forgotten. They merit our approbation and belong to those good actions of which Christ speaks, which, if done at the last hour, make death less hard and allow us to die at peace and at rest with the faith, which illuminates our souls and prepares us to start in the train that bears us to eternal silence, or to the golden gates of the Christian paradise.

In the marriage of two old people who love each other, love is no intoxicating flower, but a friendship slightly gilded by sexual sympathy, which endures longer than the reproductive function even as it precedes it.

⁂

A middle-aged man and a young woman: If theory, hygiene, logical concords, and compacts proclaim the truth—which has all the force of a dogma—that an old man ought not to marry a young woman, daily practice shows us that all these combinations are possible:

40 ♀ + 20 ♂
50 ♀ + 18 ♂
60 ♀ + 30 ♂
60 ♀ + 15 ♂
70 ♀ + 30 ♂
70 ♀ + 20 ♂
80 ♀ + 40 ♂
80 ♀ + 30 ♂
80 ♀ + 15 or 18 ♂

All formulæ, cold and precise as the numbers that make them up, but full of a terrible crescendo of precipices and cataclysms! They arouse before us the phantom of a perfect pandemonium, and show us the horrors of a hell more dreadful than that of Dante.

How many tears, how much blood, bathe the path which divides those figures! What deep and hidden hatred, how much revenge premeditated during the night and put into practice in the clear light of day; how many deceptions planned with the cruelty of art; what repentance, crimes, intrigues, bitterness of soul; how many tortures and struggles are written between those silent and lifeless figures? Yet, still, you will find the rarest, most complete, and perfect happiness lying close to this hell, like an oasis in the midst of a desert.

For example, there are marriages of which the formula is 60 + 30, and even 50 + 18, that are real Edens of delight, where neither the most lovely and fragrant flowers of spring-time, nor the sweet tendernesses of voluptuousness, illimitable prospects, painless sighs, conversation without words, nor all indescribable delights, are wanting; and where you have also the charm that belongs to difficulty, and all the fascination which surrounds things sacred.

But why among these mute and dead numbers do we find the extremes of human misery and blessedness? Why do we see the most noble sacrifices and meannesses, the most ignoble baseness and the highest ideality, bound together, with a cruel irony, by a malignant fate; why do we see angels and demons dancing together as though enchanted by some fantastic waltz?

For a very simple reason.

Because the happiness of marriage between an old man and a young woman is nothing but an unstable and difficult balance granted to few. But to those who are capable of feeling it, it brings the sublime giddiness of the great heights. Everyone walks, but few take the leap to death. All climb the hills; exceedingly few have stood on the top of Mont Blanc. But those who do not break their necks, nor fall into the crevasses, experience, as they mount the highest and most difficult summit of the Alps, strong and fascinating emotions which make them proud and glad. All problems of life, whether great or small or indifferent, always have this dilemma hidden within them:

To dare or not to dare.

The Rubicon is either an historical fact, a myth, or a romance.

I leave it to historians to decide; but every practical problem of happiness has its rubicon, at which the whole world pauses.

Some turn back.

Some leap over it.

The most of them remain still on the bank all their lives, looking at the other side and scratching their heads. After forty years of age bachelors or widows stand before the rubicon of marriage and say:

Shall I go over or not?

The larger number wait so long to decide that the forty years become fifty and then sixty. The limbs become weaker and the river grows wider by the inundations and floods of so many autumns, and thus the problem is resolved by want of resolution.

Others instead, after a short and earnest meditation, exclaim:

No, I will not leap it.

And both do well, because although the calculation of probabilities is rarely applicable to moral problems, yet it proves that the combination of an old man and a young woman is a very frail one; at the least shock it is separated, as with fulminant mercury, chloride of azote, and all the infinite array of explosives; then comes a detonation, a disaster, more often a putrid and fetid dissolution.

Some do not scratch their heads, but decide resolutely on the great step and leap.

A difficult and perilous leap in which but few reach the other side unscathed. The majority of these intrepid individuals fall into the middle of the stream, which carries them away in its turbid and rough waters; others plunge directly into the mud up to the body and are fixed there, without being able to get out, a ridicule to others, a desperation to themselves.

⁂

In that garden of Gethsemane, where all men drink of the cup of doubt, in that garden of perplexity which we ought to leave with a yes or no and turn to the right or left, knowing that one path leads to happiness, the other to desperation, without knowing, however, which of the two ways leads whither; in that garden, I say, my little book ought to serve as a guide to resolve one of the most difficult problems of marriage.

And I, who have arrogated to myself this right of counsel, will tell with a loud voice those who do care for my advice, my fundamental and organic precept on which all the other minor points must rest.

Marriage between an old man and a young woman may lead to happiness, if inspired on both sides by love.

Less surely will it lead to the same end if the love that leads them to the altar is all on one side.

It nearly always leads to unhappiness and ruin if the man is induced by sensuality, or the woman by the desire of riches or by ambition.

And as this third case is the most common, I will explain at once why those terrible arithmetical combinations are so fruitful in domestic misery, adultery, and let us say crime, including those which the code does not regard.

⁂

At this point I see a malicious reader smiling, and hear him say that I ought to be classed among those madmen and deceivers who think they have solved the problem of squaring the circle or of perpetual motion.

You tell me a marriage between an old man and a young woman may be happy, provided there be love on both sides. But this is an impudent joke. You may assure me with equal seriousness that I can catch a sparrow if I put salt upon its tail. How, when, and where can a young woman, fragrant of spring, who seeks with eyes, mouth, nostrils, with all senses, the pollen which will fructify her and make her a mother; how can she desire or love a man who is already on the decline of life and can offer his companion nothing but lasciviousness framed by rheumatism, catarrh, dyspepsia, and cough?

No, malicious reader, I do not joke; neither have I endeavoured to solve insoluble problems. I sincerely believe a young woman can love an old man, but he must still be a man and handsome; for robust, flourishing, and cheerful old age has a beauty of its own, and if much is wanting it has the greatest resources and a certain delicate virtue, too, which a young man does not possess.

Love, too, has so many and such different forms, and is composed of so many different elements, that it can vibrate and burn even in the gray-headed.

The last love of Goethe speaks of all these; and the many warm and enduring passions awakened in young women by men eminent in politics, arts, letters, and science join in the chorus.

If in these loves the ardour of the senses fails—and it must fail—we find much veneration, tenderness, and often a sweet compassion, a sentiment that always predominates in the female breast.

Young men are often bad husbands because they assume too much; they pretend that love should be laid at their feet, as a tribute due to their beauty and transcendent vigour. They claim that they have the right to be loved for themselves, even when they on their side fulfil none of their duties.

The old man, on the contrary, feels his own weakness and implores love as a favour, and responds to it with a warm and inexhaustible gratitude every hour and every minute. He knows that little is due to him, and contents himself with a smile, a kiss, or a caress, which he doubles and centriples with his unfailing gratitude. He guards his love as a treasure, which may be taken from him from one moment to another; he defends it with all his strength, encloses it in a tabernacle, and adores it as a god. His companion, therefore, has always the peaceful surety that she will not be betrayed by other women.

⁂

That these unions may be blessed by happiness, the husband and wife, above all things, must be gentle-people; that is persons of honour, who frankly accept the compact sworn to, without reticence or subterfuge.

Before the old man utters the tremendous yes he ought to present his account, even increasing the credit and diminishing the debit; explain himself clearly and dot every i. Therefore I entreat you when you make your fiancée acquainted with your financial position, be careful that each i has its dot, aye, even two.

⁂

Such marriages as we are studying are far more frequent than we should at first suppose, and the fortunate cases are also less rare than the theory would lead us to believe; because women are far greater idealists in love than we are, and whilst we chiefly seek beauty and carnal gratification, they seek other things of a superior order, which they appease with the heart of the artist, and the phantasy of the poet. The love of a man for an illustrious but ugly woman is a phenomenon rarer than a white fly. The love of a young woman for a great, but gray-headed man is tolerably common, and is sufficient to do honour to the female sex.

But a man of mature age has other things besides to offer a young woman: riches, a high social position, many ambitions he can satisfy; and he has a whole world of high, good, and pleasant things to lay at the foot of the woman, and can say to her: All this for a little love!

I, of course, understand that these are international exchanges, which are far removed from love, and approach more nearly to commerce; but the sacred books have often used the words carnal commerce without blushing, and why can there not be a little commerce in matrimony? Provided the balance does not incline too much to one side, and there is no deceit—in a word provided the one who weighs be a gentleman—such marriages may be happy, too.

⁂

When a man marries a woman very much younger than himself, people smile maliciously and point their fingers as if to ward off the evil eye, and to show the daring individual that the Minotaur awaits him. In this case the populace cuts not one, but a hundred gordian knots with a brutal and bestial sword.

Adultery is a plant that grows in every clime, but more especially where a woman fails in esteem for her companion, and the clever sower and cultivator of these plants is always the husband.

I am so convinced of this truth, that if statistics of adultery were possible, I am certain I should find the greatest number amongst the unions of young people: for they also make contracts of buying and selling, of exchange of titles and dollars, in their marriages.

If you, with your white hairs, have the courage to marry a young woman, study her character most of all. If she be a thorough lady in education she will be less likely to betray you than if you were young; for she is proud of herself and would not willingly commit a sin toward which the world would be so indulgent; for women also like difficult things, heroic undertakings; because they like to say in their own hearts or throw in the face of their seducer the sublime motto: noblesse oblige.

⁂

Then in conclusion:

If, with your white hairs, you have the courage to bind your life to blond or brown tresses fragrant with youthfulness, place yourself naked before the mirror in your chamber and look at yourself for some time. Then for a longer time put yourself before that other mirror of conscience which reflects us so inexorably; and, having balanced the accounts of your physical I and your moral and intellectual me, see if you are still a possible man, a handsome and strong man; and if you find yourself a young woman who is more an angel than a woman, more woman than female, offer her your hand without too many scruples or false reticences, and who knows but that when you die, you may then be able to say: “The last years of my life have been my happiest. In my youth I knew a hundred women, in my old age I have only known one; and she alone was worth the other hundred. Woman is the benediction of life.”

⁂

A young man and old woman:

Amongst the discordances of age between husband and wife, none astonish us so much, or I ought to say disgust us more, than when an old woman marries a young man.

There is the kernel of a great truth at the root of this scorn, which springs from the very heart of nature.

A man may be a man even at eighty years of age; and I cannot resist smiling when I remember a lady who complained of the exactions of her companion, a man over seventy. We all remember Fontenelle and the Duke of Richelieu, in whom virility was only extinguished with life: in the first case the life lasting for a century, in the second for more than eighty years.

A woman, on the contrary, after forty-five, or at the most after fifty years of age, is no longer a woman, and the reproductive faculty is entirely destroyed. Hence the marriage of a young man and old woman is more contrary to the laws of nature than that of an old man and a young woman. The one may be fruitful, the other never. Add to the æsthetic exigencies of the man the rapid decadence of the woman after the change of life, and you will understand that the union we are discussing is one of the most repugnant and repulsive. The motives which bring such a man and such a woman together are nearly always the most abject, and amongst those that offend the moral sense the most. On one side carnal gratification; on the other the thirst for gold; hence, prostitution on the part of the man, the most filthy and disgusting in the commerce of love. The man sells his youth, his virility, in exchange for money; and the woman who no longer has a right to love, buys it as a merchandise, and is satisfied with the voluptuousness given her by one whom she ought to be the first to despise! A market of lasciviousness and vileness, gold gathered from the mud—a mud, however, which cannot be washed off, and which soils hand, conscience, everything it touches.

However, for the honour of humanity, such unions are exceedingly rare: those who buy and sell and are satisfied with a clandestine concubinage, hide the sin in the deep folds of our modern hypocrisy.

Maintained, yes; a husband, no!

A woman, on the contrary, always desires marriage, because she has the pride of proclaiming to all the world, that, notwithstanding her many years and innumerable wrinkles, the wreck of her form which assails her on all sides, she has known how to find a companion at bed and board, who makes her happy.

Man, on the contrary, hides himself on account of the modesty which is never wanting, even in the vilest delinquents; and hiding his shame in the darkness of a clandestine concubinage, hopes to preserve the esteem of men, and the gold he has gained with that reddened face of his. I will persist no longer on this theme because I hope that no young husbands of old women will ever read my book—they would soil it too much with their filthy hands—and because I have a great hope that they are all illiterate.

⁂

However, before leaving this lurid argument, I ought to say, for the love of truth, that ancient and modern history register some exceedingly rare cases of union between old women and young men, in which neither the desires of the flesh nor the thirst for gold entered at all; they treat of intellectual unions in which the concord of souls, the sympathy of hearts and thoughts, the harmony of taste, the affinity of humane propositions, most charmingly unite two persons whom the difference in age would generally divide.

Love is the greatest and most powerful worker of miracles, it is the thaumaturgus of thaumaturgists, and I in the small circle of my experiences know a young man, who has never been able to desire or love a young woman, but adores old women; and if he does not marry any of his venerable friends, it is from fear of ridicule. It is true that in this case we treat of an aberration of sexual instinct to be classed with sodomy and incest; but this pathological nomad is seated in an otherwise normal and perfect brain.

Intellectual unions on the other hand are physiological facts which offend no rights of nature, and ought to be respected and studied, as rare, but most noble phenomena of the human heart.

With regard to the health of those desiring to take a wife, and the health of our companion, I will recommend to them my Elementi d’igiene, and more especially Igiene d’amore, where I have fully treated this vital side of the great problem.