se.

And would you be simple enough to believe that the manners, the
sentiments of a man like you, who usually dress and undress before your
wife, can counterbalance the influence of these books and outshine the
glory of their fictitious lovers, in whose garments the fair reader sees
neither hole nor stain?--Poor fool! too late, alas! for her happiness
and for yours, your wife will find out that the _heroes_ of poetry are
as rare in real life as the _Apollos_ of sculpture!

Very many husbands will find themselves embarrassed in trying to prevent
their wives from reading, yet there are certain people who allege that
reading has this advantage, that men know what their wives are about
when they have a book in hand. In the first place you will see, in the
next Meditation, what a tendency the sedentary life has to make a woman
quarrelsome; but have you never met those beings without poetry, who
succeed in petrifying their unhappy companions by reducing life to its
most mechanical elements? Study great men in their conversation and
learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they condemn poetry and
the pleasures of imagination.

But if, after all your efforts, your wife persists in wishing to read,
put at her disposal at once all possible books from the A B C of her
little boy to _Rene_, a book more dangerous to you when in her hands
than _Therese Philosophe_. You might create in her an utter disgust for
reading by giving her tedious books; and plunge her into utter idiocy
with _Marie Alacoque_, _The Brosse de Penitence_, or with the chansons
which were so fashionable in the time of Louis XV; but later on you will
find, in the present volume, the means of so thoroughly employing your
wife's time, that any kind of reading will be quite out of the question.

And first of all, consider the immense resources which the education of
women has prepared for you in your efforts to turn your wife from her
fleeting taste for science. Just see with what admirable stupidity girls
lend themselves to reap the benefit of the education which is imposed
upon them in France; we give them in charge to nursery maids, to
companions, to governesses who teach them twenty tricks of coquetry and
false modesty, for every single noble and true idea which they impart
to them. Girls are brought up as slaves, and are accustomed to the idea
that they are sent into the world to imitate their grandmothers, to
breed canary birds, to make herbals, to wa