ur hands full with the
people whom you married with your wife. Satan alone could have thought
of placing a girl's boarding school in the middle of a large town!
Madame Campan had at least the wisdom to set up her famous institution
at Ecouen. This sensible precaution proved that she was no ordinary
woman. There, her young ladies did not gaze upon the picture gallery of
the streets, the huge and grotesque figures and the obscene words drawn
by some evil-spirited pencil. They had not perpetually before their eyes
the spectacle of human infirmities exhibited at every barrier in France,
and treacherous book-stalls did not vomit out upon them in secret the
poison of books which taught evil and set passion on fire. This wise
school-mistress, moreover, could only at Ecouen preserve a young lady
for you spotless and pure, if, even there, that were possible. Perhaps
you hope to find no difficulty in preventing your wife from seeing
her school friends? What folly! She will meet them at the ball, at the
theatre, out walking and in the world at large; and how many services
two friends can render each other! But we will meditate upon this new
subject of alarm in its proper place and order.

Nor is this all; if your mother-in-law sent her daughter to a boarding
school, do you believe that this was out of solicitude for her
daughter? A girl of twelve or fifteen is a terrible Argus; and if your
mother-in-law did not wish to have an Argus in her house I should be
inclined to suspect that your mother-in-law belonged undoubtedly to the
most shady section of our honest women. She will, therefore, prove for
her daughter on every occasion either a deadly example or a dangerous
adviser.

Let us stop here!--The mother-in-law requires a whole Meditation for
herself.

So that, whichever way you turn, the bed of marriage, in this
connection, is equally full of thorns.

Before the Revolution, several aristocratic families used to send their
daughters to the convent. This example was followed by a number of
people who imagined that in sending their daughters to a school where
the daughters of some great noblemen were sent, they would assume the
tone and manners of aristocrats. This delusion of pride was, from
the first, fatal to domestic happiness; for the convents had all the
disadvantages of other boarding schools. The idleness that prevailed
there was more terrible. The cloister bars inflame the imagination.
Solitude is a condition very fav