marry an heiress as rich as yourself, eighty thousand francs a year
for two is not the same thing as forty thousand francs a year for one,
because the two are soon three or four when the children come. You
haven't surely any love for that silly race of Manerville which would
only hamper you? Are you ignorant of what a father and mother have to
be? Marriage, my old Paul, is the silliest of all the social
immolations; our children alone profit by it, and don't know its price
until their horses are nibbling the flowers on our grave. Do you
regret your father, that old tyrant who made your first years
wretched? How can you be sure that your children will love you? The
very care you take of their education, your precautions for their
happiness, your necessary sternness will lessen their affection.
Children love a weak or a prodigal father, whom they will despise in
after years. You'll live betwixt fear and contempt. No man is a good
head of a family merely because he wants to be. Look round on all our
friends and name to me one whom you would like to have for a son. We
have known a good many who dishonor their names. Children, my dear
Paul, are the most difficult kind of merchandise to take care of.
Yours, you think, will be angels; well, so be it! Have you ever
sounded the gulf which lies between the lives of a bachelor and a
married man? Listen. As a bachelor you can say to yourself: 'I shall
never exhibit more than a certain amount of the ridiculous; the public
will think of me what I choose it to think.' Married, you'll drop into
the infinitude of the ridiculous! Bachelor, you can make your own
happiness; you enjoy some to-day, you do without it to-morrow;
married, you must take it as it comes; and the day you want it you
will have to go without it. Marry, and you'll grow a blockhead; you'll
calculate dowries; you'll talk morality, public and religious; you'll
think young men immoral and dangerous; in short, you'll become a
social academician. It's pitiable! The old bachelor whose property the
heirs are waiting for, who fights to his last breath with his nurse
for a spoonful of drink, is blest in comparison with a married man.
I'm not speaking of all that will happen to annoy, bore, irritate,
coerce, oppose, tyrannize, narcotize, paralyze, and idiotize a man in
marriage, in that struggle of two beings always in one another's
presence, bound forever, who have coupled each other under the strange
impression that they were suited. No, to tell you those things would
be merely a repetition of Boileau, and we know him by heart. Still,
I'll forgive your absurd idea if you will promise me to marry "en
grand seigneur"; to entail your property; to have two legitimate
children, to give your wife a house and household absolutely distinct
from yours; to meet her only in society, and never to return from a
journey without sending her a courier to announce it. Two hundred
thousand francs a year will suffice for such a life and your
antecedents will enable you to marry some rich English woman hungry
for a title. That's an aristocratic life which seems to me thoroughly
French; the only life in which we can retain the respect and
friendship of a woman; the only life which distinguishes a man from
the present crowd,--in short, the only life for which a young man
should even think of resigning his bachelor blessings. Thus
established, the Comte de Manerville may advise his epoch, place
himself above the world, and be nothing less than a minister or an
ambassador. Ridicule can never touch him; he has gained the social
advantages of marriage while keeping all the privileges of a
bachelor."

"But, my good friend, I am not de Marsay; I am plainly, as you
yourself do me the honor to say, Paul de Manerville, worthy father and
husband, deputy of the Centre, possibly peer of France,--a destiny
extremely commonplace; but I am modest and I resign myself."

"Yes, but your wife," said the pitiless de Marsay, "will she resign
herself?"

"My wife, my dear fellow, will do as I wish."

"Ah! my poor friend, is that where you are? Adieu, Paul. Henceforth, I
refuse to respect you. One word more, however, for I cannot agree
coldly to your abdication. Look and see in what the strength of our
position lies. A bachelor with only six thousand francs a year
remaining to him has at least his reputation for elegance and the
memory of success. Well, even that fantastic shadow has enormous value
in it. Life still offers many chances to the unmarried man. Yes, he
can aim at anything. But marriage, Paul, is the social 'Thus far shalt
thou go and no farther.' Once married you can never be anything but
what you then are--unless your wife should deign to care for you."

"But," said Paul, "you are crushing me down with exceptional theories.
I am tired of living for others; of having horses merely to exhibit
them; of doing all things for the sake of what may be said of them; of
wasting my substance to keep fools from crying out: 'Dear, dear! Paul
is still driving the same carriage. What has he done with his fortune?
Does he squander it? Does he gamble at the Bourse? No, he's a
millionaire. Madame such a one is mad about him. He sent to England
for a harness which is certainly the handsomest in all Paris. The
four-horse equipages of Messieurs de Marsay and de Manerville were
much noticed at Longchamps; the harness was perfect'--in short, the
thousand silly things with which a crowd of idiots lead us by the
nose. Believe me, my dear Henri, I admire your power, but I don't envy
it. You know how to judge of life; you think and act as a statesman;
you are able to place yourself above all ordinary laws, received
ideas, adopted conventions, and acknowledged prejudices; in short, you
can grasp the profits of a situation in which I should find nothing
but ill-luck. Your cool, systematic, possibly true deductions are, to
the eyes of the masses, shockingly immoral. I belong to the masses. I
must play my game of life according to the rules of the society in
which I am forced to live. While putting yourself above all human
things on peaks of ice, you still have feelings; but as for me, I
should freeze to death. The life of that great majority, to which I
belong in my commonplace way, is made up of emotions of which I now
have need. Often a man coquets with a dozen women and obtains none.
Then, whatever be his strength, his cleverness, his knowledge of the
world, he undergoes convulsions, in which he is crushed as between two
gates. For my part, I like the peaceful chances and changes of life; I
want that wholesome existence in which we find a woman always at our
side."

"A trifle indecorous, your marriage!" exclaimed de Marsay.

Paul was not to be put out of countenance, and continued: "Laugh if
you like; I shall feel myself a happy man when my valet enters my room
in the morning and says: 'Madame is awaiting monsieur for breakfast';
happier still at night, when I return to find a heart--"

"Altogether indecorous, my dear Paul. You are not yet moral enough to
marry."

"--a heart in which to confide my interests and my secrets. I wish to
live in such close union with a woman that our affection shall not
depend upon a yes or a no, or be open to the disillusions of love. In
short, I have the necessary courage to become, as you say, a worthy
husband and father. I feel myself fitted for family joys; I wish to
put myself under the conditions prescribed by society; I desire to
have a wife and children."

"You remind me of a hive of honey-bees! But go your way, you'll be a
dupe all your life. Ha, ha! you wish to marry to have a wife! In other
words, you wish to solve satisfactorily to your own profit the most
difficult problem invented by those bourgeois morals which were
created by the French Revolution; and, what is more, you mean to begin
your attempt by a life of retirement. Do you think your wife won't
crave the life you say you despise? Will SHE be disgusted with it, as
you are? If you won't accept the noble conjugality just formulated for
your benefit by your friend de Marsay, listen, at any rate, to his
final advice. Remain a bachelor for the next thirteen years; amuse
yourself like a lost soul; then, at forty, on your first attack of
gout, marry a widow of thirty-six. Then you may possibly be happy. If
you now take a young girl to wife, you'll die a madman."

"Ah ca! tell me why!" cried Paul, somewhat piqued.

"My dear fellow," replied de Marsay, "Boileau's satire against women
is a tissue of poetical commonplaces. Why shouldn't women have
defects? Why condemn them for having the most obvious thing in human
nature? To my mind, the problem of marriage is not at all at the point
where Boileau puts it. Do you suppose that marriage is the same thing
as love, and that being a man suffices to make a wife love you? Have
you gathered nothing in your boudoir experience but pleasant memories?
I tell you that everything in our bachelor life leads to fatal errors
in the married man unless he is a profound observer of the human
heart. In the happy days of his youth a man, by the caprice of our
customs, is always lucky; he triumphs over women who are all ready to
be triumphed over and who obey their own desires. One thing after
another--the obstacles created by the laws, the sentiments and natural
defences of women--all engender a mutuality of sensations which
deceives superficial persons as to their future relations in marriage,
where obstacles no longer exist, where the wife submits to love
instead of permitting it, and frequently repulses pleasure instead of
desiring it. Then, the whole aspect of a man's life changes. The
bachelor, who is free and without a care, need never fear repulsion;
in marriage, repulsion is almost certain and irreparable. It may be
possible for a lover to make a woman reverse an unfavorable decision,
but such a change, my dear Paul, is the Waterloo of husbands. Like
Napoleon, the husband is thenceforth condemned to victories which, in
spite of their number, do not prevent the first defeat from crushing
him. The woman, so flattered by the perseverance, so delighted with
the ardor of a lover, calls the same things brutality in a husband.
You, who talk of marrying, and who will marry, have you ever meditated
on the Civil Code? I myself have never muddied my feet in that hovel
of commentators, that garret of gossip, called the Law-school. I have
never so much as opened the Code; but I see its application on the
vitals of society. The Code, my dear Paul, makes woman a ward; it
considers her a child, a minor. Now how must we govern children? By
fear. In that one word, Paul, is the curb of the beast. Now, feel your
own pulse! Have you the strength to play the tyrant,--you, so gentle,
so kind a friend, so confiding; you, at whom I have laughed, but whom
I love, and love enough to reveal to you my science? For this is
science. Yes, it proceeds from a science which the Germans are already
calling Anthropology. Ah! if I had not already solved the mystery of
life by pleasure, if I had not a profound antipathy for those who
think instead of act, if I did not despise the ninnies who are silly
enough to believe in the truth of a book, when the sands of the
African deserts are made of the ashes of I know not how many unknown
and pulverized Londons, Romes, Venices, and Parises, I would write a
book on modern marriages made under the influence of the Christian
system, and I'd stick a lantern on that heap of sharp stones among
which lie the votaries of the social 'multiplicamini.' But the
question is, Does humanity require even an hour of my time? And
besides, isn't the more reasonable use of ink that of snaring hearts
by writing love-letters?--Well, shall you bring the Comtesse de
Manerville here, and let us see her?"

"Perhaps," said Paul.

"We shall still be friends," said de Marsay.

"If--" replied Paul.

"Don't be uneasy; we will treat you politely, as Maison-Rouge treated
the English at Fontenoy."