many soldiers to Prussia."

The king expressed here, by a single phrase, the principal
disadvantage which results from the constant living together of
married people. Although it may be permitted to Napoleon and to
Frederick to estimate the value of a woman more or less according to
the number of her children, yet a husband of talent ought, according
to the maxims of the thirteenth Meditation, to consider
child-begetting merely as a means of defence, and it is for him to
know to what extent it may take place.

The observation leads into mysteries from which the physiological Muse
recoils. She has been quite willing to enter the nuptial chambers
while they are occupied, but she is a virgin and a prude, and there
are occasions on which she retires. For, since it is at this passage
in my book that the Muse is inclined to put her white hands before her
eyes so as to see nothing, like the young girl looking through the
interstices of her tapering fingers, she will take advantage of this
attack of modesty, to administer a reprimand to our manners. In
England the nuptial chamber is a sacred place. The married couple
alone have the privilege of entering it, and more than one lady, we
are told, makes her bed herself. Of all the crazes which reign beyond
the sea, why should the only one which we despise be precisely that,
whose grace and mystery ought undoubtedly to meet the approval of all
tender souls on this continent? Refined women condemn the immodesty
with which strangers are introduced into the sanctuary of marriage. As
for us, who have energetically anathematized women who walk abroad at
the time when they expect soon to be confined, our opinion cannot be
doubted. If we wish the celibate to respect marriage, married people
ought to have some regard for the inflammability of bachelors.

To sleep every night with one's wife may seem, we confess, an act of
the most insolent folly.

Many husbands are inclined to ask how a man, who desires to bring
marriage to perfection, dare prescribe to a husband a rule of conduct
which would be fatal in a lover.

Nevertheless, such is the decision of a doctor of arts and sciences
conjugal.

In the first place, without making a resolution never to sleep by
himself, this is the only course left to a husband, since we have
demonstrated the dangers of the preceding systems. We must now try to
prove that this last method yields more advantage and less
disadvantage than the two preceding