the second part of this book. You should even put into
practice the rigors prescribed in the third part, by maintaining an
active surveillance, a paternal solicitude at all hours, for the very
day after your marriage, perhaps on the evening of your wedding day,
there is danger in the house.

I mean to say that you should call to mind the secret and profound
instruction which the pupils have acquired _de natura rerum_,--of the
nature of things. Did Lapeyrouse, Cook or Captain Peary ever show so
much ardor in navigating the ocean towards the Poles as the scholars of
the Lycee do in approaching forbidden tracts in the ocean of pleasure?
Since girls are more cunning, cleverer and more curious than boys, their
secret meetings and their conversations, which all the art of their
teachers cannot check, are necessarily presided over by a genius a
thousand times more informal than that of college boys. What man has
ever heard the moral reflections and the corrupting confidences of
these young girls? They alone know the sports at which honor is lost in
advance, those essays in pleasure, those promptings in voluptuousness,
those imitations of bliss, which may be compared to the thefts made by
greedy children from a dessert which is locked up. A girl may come
forth from her boarding school a virgin, but never chaste. She will
have discussed, time and time again at secret meetings, the important
question of lovers, and corruption will necessarily have overcome her
heart or her spirit.

Nevertheless, we will admit that your wife has not participated in these
virginal delights, in these premature deviltries. Is she any better
because she has never had any voice in the secret councils of grown-up
girls? No! She will, in any case, have contracted a friendship with
other young ladies, and our computation will be modest, if we attribute
to her no more than two or three intimate friends. Are you certain that
after your wife has left boarding school, her young friends have not
there been admitted to those confidences, in which an attempt is made to
learn in advance, at least by analogy, the pastimes of doves? And then
her friends will marry; you will have four women to watch instead of
one, four characters to divine, and you will be at the mercy of four
husbands and a dozen celibates, of whose life, principles and habits you
are quite ignorant, at a time when our meditations have revealed to
you certain coming of a day when you will have yo