orable to the devil; and one can
scarcely imagine what ravages the most ordinary phenomena of life are
able to leave in the soul of these young girls, dreamy, ignorant and
unoccupied.

Some of them, by reason of their having indulged idle fancies, are led
into curious blunders. Others, having indulged in exaggerated ideas of
married life, say to themselves, as soon as they have taken a husband,
"What! Is this all?" In every way, the imperfect instruction, which is
given to girls educated in common, has in it all the danger of ignorance
and all the unhappiness of science.

A young girl brought up at home by her mother or by her virtuous,
bigoted, amiable or cross-grained old aunt; a young girl, whose steps
have never crossed the home threshold without being surrounded by
chaperons, whose laborious childhood has been wearied by tasks, albeit
they were profitless, to whom in short everything is a mystery, even the
Seraphin puppet show, is one of those treasures which are met with, here
and there in the world, like woodland flowers surrounded by brambles so
thick that mortal eye cannot discern them. The man who owns a flower
so sweet and pure as this, and leaves it to be cultivated by others,
deserves his unhappiness a thousand times over. He is either a monster
or a fool.

And if in the preceding Meditation we have succeeded in proving to
you that by far the greater number of men live in the most absolute
indifference to their personal honor, in the matter of marriage, is
it reasonable to believe that any considerable number of them are
sufficiently rich, sufficiently intellectual, sufficiently penetrating
to waste, like Burchell in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, one or two years in
studying and watching the girls whom they mean to make their wives, when
they pay so little attention to them after conjugal possession during
that period of time which the English call the honeymoon, and whose
influence we shall shortly discuss?

Since, however, we have spent some time in reflecting upon this
important matter, we would observe that there are many methods of
choosing more or less successfully, even though the choice be promptly
made.

It is, for example, beyond doubt that the probabilities will be in your
favor:

I. If you have chosen a young lady whose temperament resembles that of
the women of Louisiana or the Carolinas.

To obtain reliable information concerning the temperament of a young
person, it is necessary to put