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.
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