1.  OF RELIGIONS AND OF CONFESSION; CONSIDERED IN THEIR
CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.

La Bruyere has very wittily said, “It is too much for a husband to have ranged against him both devotion and gallantry; a woman ought to choose but one of them for her ally.”

The author thinks that La Bruyere is mistaken.

2.  OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW.

Up to the age of thirty the face of a woman is a book written in a foreign tongue, which one may still translate in spite of all the feminisms of the idiom; but on passing her fortieth year a woman becomes an insoluble riddle; and if any one can see through an old woman, it is another old woman.

Some diplomats have attempted on more than one occasion the diabolical task of gaining over the dowagers who opposed their machinations; but if they have ever succeeded it was only after making enormous concessions to them; for diplomats are practiced people and we do not think that you can employ their recipe in dealing with your mother-in-law.  She will be the first aid-de-camp of her daughter, for if the mother did not take her daughter’s side, it would be one of those monstrous and unnatural exceptions, which unhappily for husbands are extremely rare.

When a man is so happy as to possess a mother-in-law who is well-preserved, he may easily keep her in check for a certain time, although he may not know any young celibate brave enough to assail her.  But generally husbands who have the slightest conjugal genius will find a way of pitting their own mother against that of their wife, and in that case they will naturally neutralize each other’s power.

To be able to keep a mother-in-law in the country while he lives in Paris, and vice versa, is a piece of good fortune which a husband too rarely meets with.

What of making mischief between the mother and the daughter?—­That may be possible; but in order to accomplish such an enterprise he must have the metallic heart of Richelieu, who made a son and a mother deadly enemies to each other.  However, the jealousy of a husband who forbids his wife to pray to male saints and wishes her to address only female saints, would allow her liberty to see her mother.

Many sons-in-law take an extreme course which settles everything, which consists in living on bad terms with their mothers-in-law.  This unfriendliness would be very adroit policy, if it did not inevitably result in drawing tighter the ties that unite mother and daughter.  These are about all the means which you have for resisting maternal influence in your home.  As for the services which your wife can claim from her mother, they are immense; and the assistance which she may derive from the neutrality of her mother is not less powerful.  But on this point everything passes out of the domain of science, for all is veiled in secrecy.  The reinforcements which a mother brings up in support of a daughter are so varied in nature, they depend so much on circumstances, that it would be folly to attempt even a nomenclature for them.  Yet you may write out among the most valuable precepts of this conjugal gospel, the following maxims.