ges of
eccentrics--Their wives either protect them or attempt to reform them.

Isolated as you are, by the very superiority of your culture, from the
ignorant provincial world around you, I cannot but believe that marriage
is essential to your intellectual health and welfare. If you married
some cultivated woman, bred in the cultivated society of a great
capital, that companionship would give you an independence of
surrounding influences which nothing else can give. You fancy that by
shutting yourself up in a country house you are uninfluenced by the
world around you. It is a great error. You know that you are isolated,
that you are looked upon and probably ridiculed as an eccentric, and
this knowledge, which it is impossible to banish from your mind,
deprives your thinking of elasticity and grace. You urgently need the
support of an intellectual friendship quite near to you, under your own
roof. Bachelors in great cities feel this necessity less.

Still remember, that whoever has arranged his life independently of
custom runs a peculiar risk in marriage. Women are by nature far more
subservient to custom than we are, more than we can easily conceive. The
danger of marriage, for a person of your tastes, is that a woman
entering your house might enter it as the representative of that
minutely-interfering authority which you continually ignore. And let us
never forget that a perfect obedience to custom requires great
sacrifices of time and money that you might not be disposed to make, and
which certainly would interfere with study. You value and enjoy your
solitude, well knowing how great a thing it is to be master of all your
hours. It is difficult to conciliate solitude, or even a wise and
suitable selection of acquaintances, with the semi-publicity of
marriage. Heads of families receive many persons in their houses whom
they would never have invited, and from whose society they derive little
pleasure and no profit. De Senancour had plans of studious retirement,
and hoped that the "_douce intimite_" of marriage might be compatible
with these cherished projects. But marriage, he found, drew him into the
circle of ordinary provincial life, and he always suffered from its
influences.

You are necessarily an eccentric. In the neighborhood where you live it
is an eccentricity to study, for nobody but you studies anything. A man
so situated is fortunate when this feeling of eccentricity is
alleviated, and unfortunate whe