“Let your husband be your best friend and your only confidant.

“Do not hope that your union will procure you perfect peace:  the best marriages are those where with softness and patience they bear by turns with each other; there are none without some contradiction and disagreement.

“Do not expect the same degree of friendship that you feel:  men are in general less tender than women; and you will be unhappy if you are too delicate in friendship.

“Beg of God to guard your heart from jealousy:  do not hope to bring back a husband by complaints, ill humor, and reproaches.  The only means which promise success, are patience and softness:  impatience sours and alienates hearts; softness leads them back to their duty.

“In sacrificing your own will, pretend to no right over that of a husband:  men are more attached to theirs than women, because educated with less constraint.

“They are naturally tyrannical; they will have pleasures and liberty, yet insist that women renounce both:  do not examine whether their rights are well founded; let it suffice to you, that they are established; they are masters, we have only to suffer and obey with a good grace.”

Thus far Madame De Maintenon, who must be allowed to have known the heart of man, since, after having been above twenty years a widow, she enflamed, even to the degree of bringing him to marry her, that of a great monarch, younger than herself, surrounded by beauties, habituated to flattery, in the plenitude of power, and covered with glory; and retained him in her chains to the last moment of his life.

Do not, however, my dear, be alarmed at the picture she has drawn of marriage; nor fancy with her, that women are only born to suffer and to obey.

That we are generally tyrannical, I am obliged to own; but such of us as know how to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master, for the more tender and endearing one of friend; men of sense abhor those customs which treat your sex as if created meerly for the happiness of the other; a supposition injurious to the Deity, though flattering to our tyranny and self-love; and wish only to bind you in the soft chains of affection.

Equality is the soul of friendship:  marriage, to give delight, must join two minds, not devote a slave to the will of an imperious lord; whatever conveys the idea of subjection necessarily destroys that of love, of which I am so convinced, that I have always wished the word obey expunged from the marriage ceremony.

If you will permit me to add my sentiments to those of a lady so learned in the art of pleasing; I would wish you to study the taste of your husband, and endeavor to acquire a relish for those pleasures which appear most to affect him; let him find amusement at home, but never be peevish at his going abroad; he will return to you with the higher gust for your conversation:  have separate apartments, since your fortune makes