ll lessen their affection.
Children love a weak or a prodigal father, whom they will despise in
after years. You'll live betwixt fear and contempt. No man is a good
head of a family merely because he wants to be. Look round on all our
friends and name to me one whom you would like to have for a son. We
have known a good many who dishonor their names. Children, my dear Paul,
are the most difficult kind of merchandise to take care of. Yours, you
think, will be angels; well, so be it! Have you ever sounded the gulf
which lies between the lives of a bachelor and a married man? Listen. As
a bachelor you can say to yourself: 'I shall never exhibit more than
a certain amount of the ridiculous; the public will think of me what
I choose it to think.' Married, you'll drop into the infinitude of the
ridiculous! Bachelor, you can make your own happiness; you enjoy some
to-day, you do without it to-morrow; married, you must take it as it
comes; and the day you want it you will have to go without it. Marry,
and you'll grow a blockhead; you'll calculate dowries; you'll talk
morality, public and religious; you'll think young men immoral and
dangerous; in short, you'll become a social academician. It's pitiable!
The old bachelor whose property the heirs are waiting for, who fights
to his last breath with his nurse for a spoonful of drink, is blest in
comparison with a married man. I'm not speaking of all that will
happen to annoy, bore, irritate, coerce, oppose, tyrannize, narcotize,
paralyze, and idiotize a man in marriage, in that struggle of two beings
always in one another's presence, bound forever, who have coupled each
other under the strange impression that they were suited. No, to tell
you those things would be merely a repetition of Boileau, and we know
him by heart. Still, I'll forgive your absurd idea if you will promise
me to marry "en grand seigneur"; to entail your property; to have two
legitimate children, to give your wife a house and household absolutely
distinct from yours; to meet her only in society, and never to return
from a journey without sending her a courier to announce it. Two hundred
thousand francs a year will suffice for such a life and your antecedents
will enable you to marry some rich English woman hungry for a title.
That's an aristocratic life which seems to me thoroughly French; the
only life in which we can retain the respect and friendship of a woman;
the only life which distinguishes a man from the p