Can a man ever learn woman and know how to decipher this wondrous strain of music, by remaining through life like a seminarian in his cell?  Is it possible that a man who makes it his business to think for others, to judge others, to rule others, to steal money from others, to feed, to heal, to wound others—­that, in fact, any of our predestined, can spare time to study a woman?  They sell their time for money, how can they give it away for happiness?  Money is their god.  No one can serve two masters at the same time.  Is not the world, moreover, full of young women who drag along pale and weak, sickly and suffering?  Some of them are the prey of feverish inflammations more or less serious, others lie under the cruel tyranny of nervous attacks more or less violent.  All the husbands of these women belong to the class of the ignorant and the predestined.  They have caused their own misfortune and expended as much pains in producing it as the husband artist would have bestowed in bringing to flower the late and delightful blooms of pleasure.  The time which an ignorant man passes to consummate his own ruin is precisely that which a man of knowledge employs in the education of his happiness.

XXVI. 
Do not begin marriage by a violation of law.

In the preceding meditations we have indicated the extent of the evil with the reckless audacity of those surgeons, who boldly induce the formation of false tissues under which a shameful wound is concealed.  Public virtue, transferred to the table of our amphitheatre, has lost even its carcass under the strokes of the scalpel.  Lover or husband, have you smiled, or have you trembled at this evil?  Well, it is with malicious delight that we lay this huge social burden on the conscience of the predestined.  Harlequin, when he tried to find out whether his horse could be accustomed to go without food, was not more ridiculous than the men who wish to find happiness in their home and yet refuse to cultivate it with all the pains which it demands.  The errors of women are so many indictments of egotism, neglect and worthlessness in husbands.

Yet it is yours, reader, it pertains to you, who have often condemned in another the crime which you yourself commit, it is yours to hold the balance.  One of the scales is quite loaded, take care what you are going to put in the other.  Reckon up the number of predestined ones who may be found among the total number of married people, weigh them, and you will then know where the evil is seated.

Let us try to penetrate more deeply into the causes of this conjugal sickliness.

The word love, when applied to the reproduction of the species, is the most hateful blasphemy which modern manners have taught us to utter.  Nature, in raising us above the beasts by the divine gift of thought, had rendered us very sensitive to bodily sensations, emotional sentiment, cravings of appetite and passions.  This double nature of ours makes of man both an animal and a lover.  This distinction gives the key to the social problem which we are considering.