ould I be the longest liver, the matter in my opinion, is hardly less
certain; for while I retain the faculty of reasoning, I shall never marry
a girl; and it is not probable that I should have children by a woman of
an age suitable to my own, should I be disposed to enter into a second
marriage." And in a less personal sense he wrote to Chastellux,--

"In reading your very friendly and acceptable letter,... I was, as you
may well suppose, not less delighted than surprised to meet the plain
American words, 'my wife.' A wife! Well, my dear Marquis, I can hardly
refrain from smiling to find you are caught at last. I saw, by the
eulogium you often made on the happiness of domestic life in America, that
you had swallowed the bait, and that you would as surely be taken, one day
or another, as that you were a philosopher and a soldier. So your day has
at length come. I am glad of it, with all my heart and soul. It is quite
good enough for you. Now you are well served for coming to fight in favor
of the American rebels, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching
that terrible contagion--domestic felicity--which same, like the small pox
or the plague, a man can have only once in his life; because it commonly
lasts him (at least with us in America--I don't know how you manage these
matters in France) for his whole life time. And yet after all the
maledictions you so richly merit on the subject, the worst wish which I
can find in my heart to make against Madame de Chastellux and yourself is,
that you may neither of you ever get the better of this same domestic
felicity during the entire course of your mortal existence."

Furthermore, he wrote to an old friend, whose wife stubbornly refused to
sign a deed, "I think, any Gentleman, possessed of but a very moderate
degree of influence with his wife, might, in the course of five or six
years (for I think it is at least that time) have prevailed upon her to do
an act of justice, in fulfiling his Bargains and complying with his
wishes, if he had been really in earnest in requesting the matter of her;
especially, as the inducement which you thought would have a powerful
operation on Mrs. Alexander, namely the birth of a child, has been
doubled, and tripled."

However well Washington thought of "the honorable state," he was
no match-maker, and when asked to give advice to the widow of Jack Custis,
replied, "I never did, nor do I believe I ever shall, give advice to a
woman,