You should even put into practice the rigors prescribed in the
third part, by maintaining an active surveillance, a paternal
solicitude at all hours, for the very day after your marriage, perhaps
on the evening of your wedding day, there is danger in the house.
I mean to say that you should call to mind the secret and profound
instruction which the pupils have acquired _de natura rerum_,--of the
nature of things. Did Lapeyrouse, Cook or Captain Peary ever show so
much ardor in navigating the ocean towards the Poles as the scholars
of the Lycee do in approaching forbidden tracts in the ocean of
pleasure? Since girls are more cunning, cleverer and more curious than
boys, their secret meetings and their conversations, which all the art
of their teachers cannot check, are necessarily presided over by a
genius a thousand times more informal than that of college boys. What
man has ever heard the moral reflections and the corrupting
confidences of these young girls? They alone know the sports at which
honor is lost in advance, those essays in pleasure, those promptings
in voluptuousness, those imitations of bliss, which may be compared to
the thefts made by greedy children from a dessert which is locked up.
A girl may come forth from her boarding school a virgin, but never
chaste.
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