ms:
A husband should sleep as lightly as a watch-dog, so as never to
be caught with his eyes shut.
A man should accustom himself from childhood to go to bed
bareheaded.
Certain poets discern in modesty, in the alleged mysteries of love, some
reason why the married couple should share the same bed; but the fact
must be recognized that if primitive men sought the shade of caverns,
the mossy couch of deep ravines, the flinty roof of grottoes to protect
his pleasure, it was because the delight of love left him without
defence against his enemies. No, it is not more natural to lay two heads
upon the same pillow, than it is reasonable to tie a strip of muslin
round the neck. Civilization is come. It has shut up a million of men
within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled them in streets,
houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet square; after a
time it will make them shut up one upon another like the tubes of a
telescope.
From this cause and from many others, such as thrift, fear, and
ill-concealed jealousy, has sprung the custom of the sleeping together
of the married couple; and this custom has given rise to punctuality and
simultaneity in rising and retiring.
And here you find the most capricious thing in the world, the feeling
most pre-eminently fickle, the thing which is worthless without its own
spontaneous inspiration, which takes all its charm from the suddenness
of its desires, which owes its attractions to the genuineness of its
outbursts--this thing we call love, subjugated to a monastic rule, to
that law of geometry which belongs to the Board of Longitude!
If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock,
had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me
good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in
this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment
becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means
when it is bound to a fixed hour!
Only the Author of everything can make the sun rise and set, morn and
eve, with a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here
below, if we may be permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste
Rousseau, can play the role of the sun.
From these preliminary observations, we conclude that it is not natural
for two to lie under the canopy in the same bed;
That a man is almost always ridiculous when he is asleep;
And
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