, for it contains
the most odious of falsehoods. If this season is presented to us as a
nymph crowned with fresh flowers, caressing as a siren, it is because in
it is unhappiness personified and unhappiness generally comes during the
indulgence of folly.

The married couple who intend to love each other during their whole life
have no notion of a honeymoon; for them it has no existence, or rather
its existence is perennial; they are like the immortals who do not
understand death. But the consideration of this happiness is not germane
to our book; and for our readers marriage is under the influence of two
moons, the honeymoon and the Red-moon. This last terminates its course
by a revolution, which changes it to a crescent; and when once it rises
upon a home its light there is eternal.

How can the honeymoon rise upon two beings who cannot possibly love each
other?

How can it set, when once it has risen?

Have all marriages their honeymoon?

Let us proceed to answer these questions in order.

It is in this connection that the admirable education which we give to
girls, and the wise provisions made by the law under which men marry,
bear all their fruit. Let us examine the circumstances which precede and
attend those marriages which are least disastrous.

The tone of our morals 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 f