uns
the risk of becoming, for his wife, a sort of responsible editor.

"And why!" will exclaim certain good but small-minded people, whose
horizon is limited to the tip of their nose, "why is it necessary to
take so much pains in order to love, and why is it necessary to go to
school beforehand, in order to be happy in your own home? Does the
government intend to institute a professional chair of love, just as
it has instituted a chair of law?"

This is our answer:

These multiplied rules, so difficult to deduce, these minute
observations, these ideas which vary so as to suit different
temperaments, are innate, so to speak, in the heart of those who are
born for love; just as his feeling of taste and his indescribable
felicity in combining ideas are natural to the soul of the poet, the
painter or the musician. The men who would experience any fatigue in
putting into practice the instructions given in this Meditation are
naturally predestined, just as he who cannot perceive the connection
which exists between two different ideas is an imbecile. As a matter
of fact, love has its great men although they be unrecognized, as war
has its Napoleons, poetry its Andre Cheniers and philosophy its
Descartes.

This last observation contains the germ of a true answer to the
question which men from time immemorial have been asking: Why are
happy marriages so very rare?

This phenomenon of the moral world is rarely met with for the reason
that people of genius are rarely met with. A passion which lasts is a
sublime drama acted by two performers of equal talent, a drama in
which sentiments form the catastrophe, where desires are incidents and
the lightest thought brings a change of scene. Now how is it possible,
in this herd of bimana which we call a nation, to meet, on any but
rare occasions, a man and a woman who possess in the same degree the
genius of love, when men of talent are so thinly sown and so rare in
all other sciences, in the pursuit of which the artist needs only to
understand himself, in order to attain success?

Up to the present moment, we have been confronted with making a
forecast of the difficulties, to some degree physical, which two
married people have to overcome, in order to be happy; but what a task
would be ours if it were necessary to unfold the startling array of
moral obligations which spring from their differences in character?
Let us cry halt! The man who is skillful enough to guide the
temperam