“In reading your very friendly and acceptable letter,...  I was, as you may well suppose, not less delighted than surprised to meet the plain American words, ‘my wife.’  A wife!  Well, my dear Marquis, I can hardly refrain from smiling to find you are caught at last.  I saw, by the eulogium you often made on the happiness of domestic life in America, that you had swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be taken, one day or another, as that you were a philosopher and a soldier.  So your day has at length come.  I am glad of it, with all my heart and soul.  It is quite good enough for you.  Now you are well served for coming to fight in favor of the American rebels, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion—­domestic felicity—­which same, like the small pox or the plague, a man can have only once in his life; because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America—­I don’t know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole life time.  And yet after all the maledictions you so richly merit on the subject, the worst wish which I can find in my heart to make against Madame de Chastellux and yourself is, that you may neither of you ever get the better of this same domestic felicity during the entire course of your mortal existence.”

Furthermore, he wrote to an old friend, whose wife stubbornly refused to sign a deed, “I think, any Gentleman, possessed of but a very moderate degree of influence with his wife, might, in the course of five or six years (for I think it is at least that time) have prevailed upon her to do an act of justice, in fulfiling his Bargains and complying with his wishes, if he had been really in earnest in requesting the matter of her; especially, as the inducement which you thought would have a powerful operation on Mrs. Alexander, namely the birth of a child, has been doubled, and tripled.”

However well Washington thought of “the honorable state,” he was no match-maker, and when asked to give advice to the widow of Jack Custis, replied, “I never did, nor do I believe I ever shall, give advice to a woman, who is setting out on a matrimonial voyage; first, because I never could advise one to marry without her own consent; and, secondly because I know it is to no purpose to advise her to refrain, when she has obtained it.  A woman very rarely asks an opinion or requires advice on such an occasion, till her resolution is formed; and then it is with the hope and expectation of obtaining a sanction, not that she means to be governed by your disapprobation, that she applies.  In a word the plain English of the application may be summed up in these words:  ’I wish you to think as I do; but, if unhappily you differ from me in opinion, my heart, I must confess, is fixed, and I have gone too far now to retract.’” Again he wrote: