Читать книгу Analytical Studies - Honoré de Balzac - Страница 20

XXIX.

The fate of the home depends on the first night.

XXX.

A woman deprived of her free will can never have the credit of making

a sacrifice.

XXXI. In love, putting aside all consideration of the soul, the heart of a woman is like a lyre which does not reveal its secret, excepting to him who is a skillful player.

XXXII. Independently of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all pleasure devoid of passionate feeling.

XXXIII.

The interest of a husband as much as his honor forbids him to indulge

a pleasure which he has not had the skill to make his wife desire.

XXXIV. Pleasure being caused by the union of sensation and sentiment, we can say without fear of contradiction that pleasures are a sort of material ideas.

XXXV.

As ideas are capable of infinite combination, it ought to be the same

with pleasures.

XXXVI.

In the life of man there are no two moments of pleasure exactly alike,

any more than there are two leaves of identical shape upon the same

tree.

XXXVII.

If there are differences between one moment of pleasure and another, a

man can always be happy with the same woman.

XXXVIII. To seize adroitly upon the varieties of pleasure, to develop them, to impart to them a new style, an original expression, constitutes the genius of a husband.

XXXIX. Between two beings who do not love each other this genius is licentiousness; but the caresses over which love presides are always pure.

XL.

The married woman who is the most chaste may be also the most

voluptuous.

XLI.

The most virtuous woman can be forward without knowing it.

XLII. When two human beings are united by pleasure, all social conventionalities are put aside. This situation conceals a reef on which many vessels are wrecked. A husband is lost, if he once forgets there is a modesty which is quite independent of coverings. Conjugal love ought never either to put on or to take away the bandage of its eyes, excepting at the due season.

XLIII.

Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but

in striking true.

XLIV. To call a desire into being, to nourish it, to develop it, to bring it to full growth, to excite it, to satisfy it, is a complete poem of itself.

XLV. The progression of pleasures is from the distich to the quatrain, from the quatrain to the sonnet, from the sonnet to the ballad, from the ballad to the ode, from the ode to the cantata, from the cantata to the dithyramb. The husband who commences with dithyramb is a fool.

XLVI.

Each night ought to have its menu.

XLVII.

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster which devours

everything, that is, familiarity.

XLVIII.

If a man cannot distinguish the difference between the pleasures of

two consecutive nights, he has married too early.

XLIX. It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day, than to say bright things from time to time.

L.

A husband ought never to be the first to go to sleep and the last to

awaken.

LI.

The man who enters his wife's dressing-room is either a philosopher or

an imbecile.

LII.

The husband who leaves nothing to desire is a lost man.

LIII.

The married woman is a slave whom one must know how to set upon a

throne.

LIV.

A man must not flatter himself that he knows his wife, and is making

her happy unless he sees her often at his knees.

It is to the whole ignorant troop of our predestined, of our legions of snivelers, of smokers, of snuff-takers, of old and captious men that Sterne addressed, in Tristram Shandy, the letter written by Walter Shandy to his brother Toby, when this last proposed to marry the widow Wadman.

These celebrated instructions which the most original of English writers has comprised in this letter, suffice with some few exceptions to complete our observations on the manner in which husbands should behave to their wives; and we offer it in its original form to the reflections of the predestined, begging that they will meditate upon it as one of the most solid masterpieces of human wit.