? Have they
pronounced without appeal that it is as impossible to write a book on
marriage as to make new again a broken pot?

Yes, master fool. If you begin to squeeze the marriage question you
squirt out nothing but fun for the bachelors and weariness for the
married men. It is everlasting morality. A million printed pages would
have no other matter in them.

In spite of this, here is my first proposition: marriage is a fight to
the death, before which the wedded couple ask a blessing from heaven,
because it is the rashest of all undertakings to swear eternal love; the
fight at once commences and victory, that is to say liberty, remains in
the hands of the cleverer of the two.

Undoubtedly. But do you see in this a fresh idea?

Well, I address myself to the married men of yesterday and of to-day; to
those who on leaving the Church or the registration office indulge the
hope of keeping their wives for themselves alone; to those whom some
form or other of egotism or some indefinable sentiment induces to say
when they see the marital troubles of another, "This will never happen
to me."

I address myself to those sailors who after witnessing the foundering
of other ships still put to sea; to those bachelors who after witnessing
the shipwreck of virtue in a marriage of another venture upon wedlock.
And this is my subject, eternally now, yet eternally old!

A young man, or it may be an old one, in love or not in love, has
obtained possession by a contract duly recorded at the registration
office in heaven and on the rolls of the nation, of a young girl with
long hair, with black liquid eyes, with small feet, with dainty tapering
fingers, with red lips, with teeth of ivory, finely formed, trembling
with life, tempting and plump, white as a lily, loaded with the most
charming wealth of beauty. Her drooping eyelashes seem like the points
of the iron crown; her skin, which is as fresh as the calyx of a white
camelia, is streaked with the purple of the red camelia; over her
virginal complexion one seems to see the bloom of young fruit and the
delicate down of a young peach; the azure veins spread a kindling warmth
over this transparent surface; she asks for life and she gives it; she
is all joy and love, all tenderness and candor; she loves her husband,
or at least believes she loves him.

The husband who is in love says in the bottom of his heart: "Those eyes
will see no one but me, that mouth will tremble with love for