The Physiology of Marriage, part 2 | Page 7

sculpture!
Very many husbands will find themselves embarrassed in trying to
prevent their wives from reading, yet there are certain people who
allege that reading has this advantage, that men know what their wives
are about when they have a book in hand. In the first place you will see,
in the next Meditation, what a tendency the sedentary life has to make a
woman quarrelsome; but have you never met those beings without
poetry, who succeed in petrifying their unhappy companions by
reducing life to its most mechanical elements? Study great men in their
conversation and learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they
condemn poetry and the pleasures of imagination.
But if, after all your efforts, your wife persists in wishing to read, put at
her disposal at once all possible books from the A B C of her little boy
to /Rene/, a book more dangerous to you when in her hands than
/Therese Philosophe/. You might create in her an utter disgust for
reading by giving her tedious books; and plunge her into utter idiocy
with /Marie Alacoque/, /The Brosse de Penitence/, or with the chansons
which were so fashionable in the time of Louis XV; but later on you
will find, in the present volume, the means of so thoroughly employing
your wife's time, that any kind of reading will be quite out of the
question.
And first of all, consider the immense resources which the education of
women has prepared for you in your efforts to turn your wife from her
fleeting taste for science. Just see with what admirable stupidity girls

lend themselves to reap the benefit of the education which is imposed
upon them in France; we give them in charge to nursery maids, to
companions, to governesses who teach them twenty tricks of coquetry
and false modesty, for every single noble and true idea which they
impart to them. Girls are brought up as slaves, and are accustomed to
the idea that they are sent into the world to imitate their grandmothers,
to breed canary birds, to make herbals, to water little Bengal
rose-bushes, to fill in worsted work, or to put on collars. Moreover, if a
little girl in her tenth year has more refinement than a boy of twenty,
she is timid and awkward. She is frightened at a spider, chatters
nonsense, thinks of dress, talks about the fashions and has not the
courage to be either a watchful mother or a chaste wife.
Notice what progress she had made; she has been shown how to paint
roses, and to embroider ties in such a way as to earn eight sous a day.
She has learned the history of France in /Ragois/ and chronology in the
/Tables du Citoyen Chantreau/, and her young imagination has been set
free in the realm of geography; all without any aim, excepting that of
keeping away all that might be dangerous to her heart; but at the same
time her mother and her teachers repeat with unwearied voice the
lesson, that the whole science of a woman lies in knowing how to
arrange the fig leaf which our Mother Eve wore. "She does not hear for
fifteen years," says Diderot, "anything else but 'my daughter, your fig
leaf is on badly; my daughter, your fig leaf is on well; my daughter,
would it not look better so?'"
Keep your wife then within this fine and noble circle of knowledge. If
by chance your wife wishes to have a library, buy for her Florian,
Malte-Brun, /The Cabinet des Fees/, /The Arabian Nights/, Redoute's
/Roses/, /The Customs of China/, /The Pigeons/, by Madame Knip, the
great work on Egypt, etc. Carry out, in short, the clever suggestion of
that princess who, when she was told of a riot occasioned by the
dearness of bread, said, "Why don't they eat cake?"
Perhaps, one evening, your wife will reproach you for being sullen and
not speaking to her; perhaps she will say that you are ridiculous, when
you have just made a pun; but this is one of the slight annoyances
incident to our system; and, moreover, what does it matter to you that
the education of women in France is the most pleasant of absurdities,
and that your marital obscurantism has brought a doll to your arms? As

you have not sufficient courage to undertake a fairer task, would it not
be better to lead your wife along the beaten track of married life in
safety, than to run the risk of making her scale the steep precipices of
love? She is likely to be a mother: you must not exactly expect to have
Gracchi for sons, but to be really /pater quem nuptiae demonstrant/;
now, in order to aid you in reaching this consummation, we must