make
this book an arsenal from which each one, in accordance with his wife's
character and his own, may choose weapons fit to employ against the
terrible genius of evil, which is always ready to rise up in the soul of
a wife; and since it may fairly be considered that the ignorant are the
most cruel opponents of feminine education, this Meditation will serve
as a breviary for the majority of husbands.

If a woman has received a man's education, she possesses in very truth
the most brilliant and most fertile sources of happiness both to herself
and to her husband; but this kind of woman is as rare as happiness
itself; and if you do not possess her for your wife, your best course is
to confine the one you do possess, for the sake of your common felicity,
to the region of ideas she was born in, for you must not forget that
one moment of pride in her might destroy you, by setting on the throne a
slave who would immediately be tempted to abuse her power.

After all, by following the system prescribed in this Meditation, a
man of superiority will be relieved from the necessity of putting his
thoughts into small change, when he wishes to be understood by his
wife, if indeed this man of superiority has been guilty of the folly of
marrying one of those poor creatures who cannot understand him, instead
of choosing for his wife a young girl whose mind and heart he has tested
and studied for a considerable time.

Our aim in this last matrimonial observation has not been to advise all
men of superiority to seek for women of superiority and we do not wish
each one to expound our principles after the manner of Madame de Stael,
who attempted in the most indelicate manner to effect a union between
herself and Napoleon. These two beings would have been very unhappy in
their domestic life; and Josephine was a wife accomplished in a very
different sense from this virago of the nineteenth century.

And, indeed, when we praise those undiscoverable girls so happily
educated by chance, so well endowed by nature, whose delicate souls
endure so well the rude contact of the great soul of him we call _a
man_, we mean to speak of those rare and noble creatures of whom Goethe
has given us a model in his Claire of _Egmont_; we are thinking of those
women who seek no other glory than that of playing their part well; who
adapt themselves with amazing pliancy to the will and pleasure of those
whom nature has given them for masters; soaring at one ti