“Do not tear your hair and stab yourself because you have a rival.  You say that your mistress deceives you for another; it is your pride that suffers; but change the words, say that it is for you that she deceives him, and behold, you are happy!

“Do not make a rule of conduct, and do not say that you wish to be loved exclusively, for in saying that, as you are a man and inconstant yourself, you are forced to add tacitly:  ‘As far as possible.’

“Take time as it comes, the wind as it blows, woman as she is.  The Spaniards, first among women, love faithfully; their hearts are sincere and violent, but they wear a dagger just above them.  Italian women are lascivious.  The English are exalted and melancholy, cold and unnatural.  The German women are tender and sweet, but colorless and monotonous.  The French are spirituelle, elegant, and voluptuous, but are false at heart.

“Above all, do not accuse women of being what they are; we have made them thus, undoing the work of nature.

“Nature, who thinks of everything, made the virgin for love; but with the first child her bosom loses form, her beauty its freshness.  Woman is made for motherhood.  Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the loss of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps.  Behold the family, the human law; everything that departs from this law is monstrous.

“Civilization thwarts the ends of nature.  In our cities, according to our customs, the virgin destined by nature for the open air, made to run in the sunlight; to admire the nude wrestlers, as in Lacedemonia, to choose and to love, is shut up in close confinement and bolted in.  Meanwhile she hides romance under her cross; pale and idle, she fades away and loses, in the silence of the nights, that beauty which oppresses her and needs the open air.  Then she is suddenly snatched from this solitude, knowing nothing, loving nothing, desiring everything; an old woman instructs her, a mysterious word is whispered in her ear, and she is thrown into the arms of a stranger.  There you have marriage, that is to say, the civilized family.

“A child is born.  This poor creature has lost her beauty and she has never loved.  The child is brought to her with the words:  ’You are a mother.’  She replies:  ’I am not a mother; take that child to some woman who can nurse it.  I can not.’  Her husband tells her that she is right, that her child would be disgusted with her.  She receives careful attention and is soon cured of the disease of maternity.  A month later she may be seen at the Tuileries, at the ball, at the opera; her child is at Chaillot, at Auxerre; her husband with another woman.  Then young men speak to her of love, of devotion, of sympathy, of all that is in the heart.  She takes one, draws him to her bosom; he dishonors her and returns to the Bourse.  She cries all night, but discovers that tears make her eyes red.  She takes a consoler, for the loss of whom another consoles her; thus up to the age of thirty or more.  Then, blase and corrupted, with no human sentiment, not even disgust, she meets a fine youth with raven locks, ardent eye and hopeful heart; she recalls her own youth, she remembers what she has suffered, and telling him the story of her life, she teaches him to eschew love.