t matter. Remember that under the pretext of education you have
been stuffed, my dear sisters. You have been varnished too soon, like
those pictures painted for sales, which crack all over six months after
purchase. Your disposition has not been properly directed; you are not
cultivated; you have been stifled, pruned; you have been shaped like
those yew-trees at Versailles which represent goblets and birds. Still,
you are women at the bottom, though you no longer look it.

You are handed over to us men swaddled, distorted, stuffed with
prejudices and principles, heavy as paving-stones; all of which are the
more difficult to dislodge since you look upon them as sacred; you are
started on the matrimonial journey with so much luggage reckoned as
indispensable; and at the first station your husband, who is not an
angel, loses his temper amidst all these encumbrances, sends it all to
the devil under some pretext or other, lets you go on alone, and gets
into another carriage. I do not require, mark me, that you should be
allowed to grow up uncared for, that good or evil instincts should be
suffered to spring up in you anyhow: but it were better that they should
not treat your poor mind like the foot of a well-born Chinese girl--that
they should not enclose it in a porcelain slipper.

A marriageable young lady is a product of maternal industry, which takes
ten years to fructify, and needs from five to six more years of study on
the part of the husband to purify, strip, and restore to its real shape.
In other words, it takes ten years to make a bride and six years at
least to turn this bride into a woman again. Admit frankly that this is
time lost as regards happiness, but try to make it up if your husband
will permit you to do so.

The sole guaranty of fidelity between husband and wife is love. One
remains side by side with a fellow-traveller only so long as one
experiences pleasure and happiness in his company. Laws, decrees, oaths,
may prevent faithlessness, or at least punish it, but they can neither
hinder nor punish intention. But as regards love, intention and deed are
the same.

Is it not true, my dear sisters, that you are of this opinion? Do
not you thoroughly understand that if love is absent from marriage it
should, on the contrary, be its real pivot? To make one's self lovable
is the main thing. Believe my white hairs that it is so, and let me give
you some more advice.

Yes, I favor marriage--I do not conceal