Woman is an invalid.  This is the first axiom, out of which flow the precepts of care, bodily and mental, of tenderness, of consideration, with which the book abounds.  To show this, M. Michelet has recourse to the investigations of the physiologists who during the present century have studied the special conditions which according to the old axiom make woman what she is.  As nothing short of this can by any possibility enable us to understand the feminine nature, we must not find fault with some details not commonly thought adapted to the general reader.  They are given delicately, but they are given, and suggest a certain reserve in introducing the book to the reading classes.  Not only is woman an invalid, but the rhythmic character of her life, “as if scanned by Nature,” is an element not to be neglected without total failure to read her in health and in disease.  There is a great deal relating to this matter, some of it seeming fanciful and overwrought, but not more so than the natures of many women.  For woman herself is an hyperbole, and the plainest statement of her condition is a figure of speech.  Some of those chapters that are written, as we might say, in hysteric paragraphs, only more fitly express the extravagances which belong to the nervous movements of the woman’s nature.

The husband must create the wife.  Much of the book is taken up with the precepts by which this new birth of the woman is to be brought about, M. Michelet’s “entire affection” hateth those “nicer hands” winch would refuse any, even the humblest offices.  The husband should be at once nurse and physician.  He should regulate the food of the body, and measure out the doses of mental nourishment.  All this is kind and good and affectionate; but there is just a suspicion excited that Madame might become slightly ennuyee, if she were subjected to this minute surveillance over her physical and spiritual hygiene.  Everything must depend on individual tendencies and aptitudes; we have known husbands that were born for nurses,—­and others, not less affectionate, that worried more than they helped in that capacity.

We cannot follow M. Michelet through his study of the reaction of the characters of the husband and wife upon each other, of the influence of maternity on conjugal relations, of the languishing of love and its rejuvenescence.  Still less can we do more than remotely allude to those chapters in which his model woman is represented as ready on the slightest occasion to prove the name of her sex synonymous with frailty.  We really do not know what to make of such things.  The cool calculations of temptation as certain, and failure as probable,—­the serious advice not to strike a wife under any circumstances,—­such words have literally no meaning to most of our own American readers.  Our women are educated to self-reliance,—­and our men are, at least, too busy for the trade of tempters.

In a word, this book was written for French people, and is adjusted to the meridian of Paris.  We must remember this always in reading it, and also remember that a Frenchman does not think English any more than he talks it.  We sometimes flatter ourselves with the idea that we as a people are original in our tendency to extravagance of thought and language.  It is a conceit of ours.  Remember Sterne’s perruquier.