s develops in the young girl whom you make your
wife a curiosity which is naturally excessive; but as mothers in
France pique themselves on exposing their girls every day to the fire
which they do not allow to scorch them, this curiosity has no limit.

Her profound ignorance of the mysteries of marriage conceals from this
creature, who is as innocent as she is crafty, a clear view of the
dangers by which marriage is followed; and as marriage is incessantly
described to her as an epoch in which tyranny and liberty equally
prevail, and in which enjoyment and supremacy are to be indulged in,
her desires are intensified by all her interest in an existence as yet
unfulfilled; for her to marry is to be called up from nothingness into
life!

If she has a disposition for happiness, for religion, for morality,
the voices of the law and of her mother have repeated to her that this
happiness can only come to her from you.

Obedience if it is not virtue, is at least a necessary thing with her;
for she expects everything from you. In the first place, society
sanctions the slavery of a wife, but she does not conceive even the
wish to be free, for she feels herself weak, timid and ignorant.

Of course she tries to please you, unless a chance error is committed,
or she is seized by a repugnance which it would be unpardonable in you
not to divine. She tries to please because she does not know you.

In a word, in order to complete your triumph, you take her at a moment
when nature demands, often with some violence, the pleasure of which
you are the dispenser. Like St. Peter you hold the keys of Paradise.

I would ask of any reasonable creature, would a demon marshal round
the angel whose ruin he had vowed all the elements of disaster with
more solicitude than that with which good morals conspire against the
happiness of a husband? Are you not a king surrounded by flatterers?

This young girl, with all her ignorance and all her desires, committed
to the mercy of a man who, even though he be in love, cannot know her
shrinking and secret emotions, will submit to him with a certain sense
of shame, and will be obedient and complaisant so long as her young
imagination persuades her to expect the pleasure or the happiness of
that morrow which never dawns.

In this unnatural situation social laws and the laws of nature are in
conflict, but the young girl obediently abandons herself to it, and,
from motives of self-interest, suffers in si