OF CONJUGAL PEACE.

My imagination has followed marriage through all the phases of its fantastic life in so fraternal a spirit, that I seem to have grown old with the house I made my home so early in life at the commencement of this work.

After experiencing in thought the ardor of man’s first passion; and outlining, in however imperfect a way, the principal incidents of married life; after struggling against so many wives that did not belong to me, exhausting myself in conflict with so many personages called up from nothingness, and joining so many battles, I feel an intellectual lassitude, which makes me see everything in life hang, as it were, in mournful crape.  I seem to have a catarrh, to look at everything through green spectacles, I feel as if my hands trembled, as if I must needs employ the second half of my existence and of my book in apologizing for the follies of the first half.

I see myself surrounded by tall children of whom I am not the father, and seated beside a wife I never married.  I think I can feel wrinkles furrowing my brow.  The fire before which I am placed crackles, as if in derision, the room is ancient in its furniture; I shudder with sudden fright as I lay my hand upon my heart, and ask myself:  “Is that, too, withered?”

I am like an old attorney, unswayed by any sentiment whatever.  I never accept any statement unless it be confirmed, according to the poetic maxim of Lord Byron, by the testimony of at least two false witnesses.  No face can delude me.  I am melancholy and overcast with gloom.  I know the world and it has no more illusions for me.  My closest friends have proved traitors.  My wife and myself exchange glances of profound meaning and the slightest word either of us utters is a dagger which pierces the heart of the other through and through.  I stagnate in a dreary calm.  This then is the tranquillity of old age!  The old man possesses in himself the cemetery which shall soon possess him.  He is growing accustomed to the chill of the tomb.  Man, according to philosophers, dies in detail; at the same time he may be said even to cheat death; for that which his withered hand has laid hold upon, can it be called life?

Oh, to die young and throbbing with life!  ’Tis a destiny enviable indeed!  For is not this, as a delightful poet has said, “to take away with one all one’s illusions, to be buried like an Eastern king, with all one’s jewels and treasures, with all that makes the fortune of humanity!”

How many thank-offerings ought we to make to the kind and beneficent spirit that breathes in all things here below!  Indeed, the care which nature takes to strip us piece by piece of our raiment, to unclothe the soul by enfeebling gradually our hearing, sight, and sense of touch, in making slower the circulation of our blood, and congealing our humors so as to make us as insensible to the approach of death as we were to the beginnings of life, this maternal care which