It is not for you that the Physiology of Marriage is addressed, for you are not married and may you never be married.  You herd of bigots, snails, hypocrites, dotards, lechers, booted for pilgrimage to Rome, disguised and marked, as it were, to deceive the world.  Go back, you scoundrels, out of my sight!  Gallows birds are ye all—­now in the devil’s name will you not begone?  There are none left now but the good souls who love to laugh; not the snivelers who burst into tears in prose or verse, whatever their subject be, who make people sick with their odes, their sonnets, their meditation; none of these dreamers, but certain old-fashioned pantagruellists who don’t think twice about it when they are invited to join a banquet or provoked to make a repartee, who can take pleasure in a book like Pease and the Lard with commentary of Rabelais, or in the one entitled The Dignity of Breeches, and who esteem highly the fair books of high degree, a quarry hard to run down and redoubtable to wrestle with.

It no longer does to laugh at a government, my friend, since it has invented means to raise fifteen hundred millions by taxation.  High ecclesiastics, monks and nuns are no longer so rich that we can drink with them; but let St. Michael come, he who chased the devil from heaven, and we shall perhaps see the good time come back again!  There is only one thing in France at the present moment which remains a laughing matter, and that is marriage.  Disciples of Panurge, ye are the only readers I desire.  You know how seasonably to take up and lay down a book, how to get the most pleasure out of it, to understand the hint in a half word—­how to suck nourishment from a marrow-bone.

The men of the microscope who see nothing but a speck, the census-mongers—­have they reviewed the whole matter?  Have they pronounced without appeal that it is as impossible to write a book on marriage as to make new again a broken pot?

Yes, master fool.  If you begin to squeeze the marriage question you squirt out nothing but fun for the bachelors and weariness for the married men.  It is everlasting morality.  A million printed pages would have no other matter in them.

In spite of this, here is my first proposition:  marriage is a fight to the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven, because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in the hands of the cleverer of the two.

Undoubtedly.  But do you see in this a fresh idea?

Well, I address myself to the married men of yesterday and of to-day; to those who on leaving the Church or the registration office indulge the hope of keeping their wives for themselves alone; to those whom some form or other of egotism or some indefinable sentiment induces to say when they see the marital troubles of another, “This will never happen to me.”