Perhaps you hope to find no difficulty in preventing
your wife from seeing her school friends? What folly! She will meet
them at the ball, at the theatre, out walking and in the world at
large; and how many services two friends can render each other! But we
will meditate upon this new subject of alarm in its proper place and
order.
Nor is this all; if your mother-in-law sent her daughter to a boarding
school, do you believe that this was out of solicitude for her
daughter? A girl of twelve or fifteen is a terrible Argus; and if your
mother-in-law did not wish to have an Argus in her house I should be
inclined to suspect that your mother-in-law belonged undoubtedly to
the most shady section of our honest women. She will, therefore, prove
for her daughter on every occasion either a deadly example or a
dangerous adviser.
Let us stop here!--The mother-in-law requires a whole Meditation for
herself.
So that, whichever way you turn, the bed of marriage, in this
connection, is equally full of thorns.
Before the Revolution, several aristocratic families used to send
their daughters to the convent. This example was followed by a number
of people who imagined that in sending their daughters to a school
where the daughters of some great noblemen were sent, they would
assume the tone and manners of aristocrats. This delusion of pride
was, from the first, fatal to domestic happiness; for the convents had
all the disadvantages of other boarding schools.
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