“Your sex is the more exposed to suffer, because it is always in dependence: be neither angry nor ashamed of this dependence on a husband, nor of any of those which are in the order of Providence.
“Let your husband be your best friend and your only confidant.
“Do not hope that your union will procure you perfect peace: the best marriages are those where with softness and patience they bear by turns with each other; there are none without some contradiction and disagreement.
“Do not expect the same degree of friendship that you feel: men are in general less tender than women; and you will be unhappy if you are too delicate in friendship.
“Beg of God to guard your heart from jealousy: do not hope to bring back a husband by complaints, ill humor, and reproaches. The only means which promise success, are patience and softness: impatience sours and alienates hearts; softness leads them back to their duty.
“In sacrificing your own will, pretend to no right over that of a husband: men are more attached to theirs than women, because educated with less constraint.
“They are naturally tyrannical; they will have pleasures and liberty, yet insist that women renounce both: do not examine whether their rights are well founded; let it suffice to you, that they are established; they are masters, we have only to suffer and obey with a good grace.”
Thus far Madame De Maintenon, who must be allowed to have known the heart of man, since, after having been above twenty years a widow, she enflamed, even to the degree of bringing him to marry her, that of a great monarch, younger than herself, surrounded by beauties, habituated to flattery, in the plenitude of power, and covered with glory; and retained him in her chains to the last moment of his life.
Do not, however, my dear, be alarmed at the picture she has drawn of marriage; nor fancy with her, that women are only born to suffer and to obey.
That we are generally tyrannical, I am obliged to own; but such of us as know how to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master, for the more tender and endearing one of friend; men of sense abhor those customs which treat your sex as if created meerly for the happiness of the other; a supposition injurious to the Deity, though flattering to our tyranny and self-love; and wish only to bind you in the soft chains of affection.