"Monsieur Josse, you are a jeweler and you
sell your jewels with a readiness which is not equaled by the
readiness of your debtors to pay for them. The countess owes you
thirty thousand francs. If you wish to be paid to-morrow [tradesmen
should always be visited at the end of the month] come to her at noon;
her husband will be in the chamber. Do not attend to any sign which
she may make to impose silence upon you--speak out boldly. I will pay
all."
So that the catastrophe in the science of marriage is what figures are
in arithmetic.
All the principles of higher conjugal philosophy, on which are based
the means of defence outlined in this second part of our book, are
derived from the nature of human sentiments, and we have found them in
different places in the great book of the world. Just as persons of
intellect instinctively apply the laws of taste whose principles they
would find difficulty in formulating, so we have seen numberless
people of deep feeling employing with singular felicity the precepts
which we are about to unfold, yet none of them consciously acted on a
definite system. The sentiments which this situation inspired only
revealed to them incomplete fragments of a vast system; just as the
scientific men of the sixteenth century found that their imperfect
microscopes did not enable them to see all the living organisms, whose
existence had yet been proved to them by the logic of their patient
genius.
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