woman is at once the
accomplice and the victim? Unless you were a divine being it would
be impossible for you to escape the fascination with which nature and
society have surrounded you. Is not a snare set in everything which
surrounds you on the outside and influences you within? For in order to
be happy, is it not necessary to control the impetuous desires of your
senses? Where is the powerful barrier to restrain her, raised by the
light hand of a woman whom you wish to please, because you do not
possess? Moreover, you have caused your troops to parade and march by,
when there was no one at the window; you have discharged your fireworks
whose framework alone was left, when your guest arrived to see them.
Your wife, before the pledges of marriage, was like a Mohican at
the Opera: the teacher becomes listless, when the savage begins to
understand.

LVI.
In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each
other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once it
is passed.

This first entrance into life of two persons, during which a woman is
encouraged by the hope of happiness, by the still fresh sentiment of her
married duty, by the wish to please, by the sense of virtue which begins
to be so attractive as soon as it shows love to be in harmony with duty,
is called the honeymoon. How can it last long between two beings who are
united for their whole life, unless they know each other perfectly? If
there is one thing which ought to cause astonishment it is this, that
the deplorable absurdities which our manners heap up around the nuptial
couch give birth to so few hatreds! But that the life of the wise man
is a calm current, and that of the prodigal a cataract; that the child,
whose thoughtless hands have stripped the leaves from every rose upon
his pathway, finds nothing but thorns on his return, that the man who
in his wild youth has squandered a million, will never enjoy, during his
life, the income of forty thousand francs, which this million would have
provided--are trite commonplaces, if one thinks of the moral theory of
life; but new discoveries, if we consider the conduct of most men. You
may see here a true image of all honeymoons; this is their history, this
is the plain fact and not the cause that underlies it.

But that men endowed with a certain power of thought by a privileged
education, and accustomed to think deliberately, in o