“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