strip
of muslin round the neck. Civilization is come. It has shut up a
million of men within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled
them in streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet
square; after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like
the tubes of a telescope.

From this cause and from many others, such as thrift, fear, and
ill-concealed jealousy, has sprung the custom of the sleeping together
of the married couple; and this custom has given rise to punctuality
and simultaneity in rising and retiring.

And here you find the most capricious thing in the world, the feeling
most pre-eminently fickle, the thing which is worthless without its
own spontaneous inspiration, which takes all its charm from the
suddenness of its desires, which owes its attractions to the
genuineness of its outbursts--this thing we call love, subjugated to a
monastic rule, to that law of geometry which belongs to the Board of
Longitude!

If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the
clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and
wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so.
It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human
sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what
love means when it is bound to a fixed hour!

Only the Author of everything can make the sun rise and set, morn and
eve, with a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here
below, if we may be permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste
Rousseau, can play the role of the sun.

From these preliminary observations, we conclude that it is not
natural for two to lie under the canopy in the same bed;

That a man is almost always ridiculous when he is asleep;

And that this constant living together threatens the husband with
inevitable dangers.

We are going to try, therefore, to find out a method which will bring
our customs in harmony with the laws of nature, and to combine custom
and nature in a way that will enable a husband to find in the mahogany
of his bed a useful ally, and an aid in defending himself.

1. TWIN BEDS.

If the most brilliant, the best-looking, the cleverest of husbands
wishes to find himself minotaurized just as the first year of his
married life ends, he will infallibly attain that end if he is unwise
enough to place two beds side by side, under the voluptuous