If you, with your white hairs, have the courage to marry a young woman, study her character most of all. If she be a thorough lady in education she will be less likely to betray you than if you were young; for she is proud of herself and would not willingly commit a sin toward which the world would be so indulgent; for women also like difficult things, heroic undertakings; because they like to say in their own hearts or throw in the face of their seducer the sublime motto: noblesse oblige.
⁂
Then in conclusion:
If, with your white hairs, you have the courage to bind your life to blond or brown tresses fragrant with youthfulness, place yourself naked before the mirror in your chamber and look at yourself for some time. Then for a longer time put yourself before that other mirror of conscience which reflects us so inexorably; and, having balanced the accounts of your physical I and your moral and intellectual me, see if you are still a possible man, a handsome and strong man; and if you find yourself a young woman who is more an angel than a woman, more woman than female, offer her your hand without too many scruples or false reticences, and who knows but that when you die, you may then be able to say: “The last years of my life have been my happiest. In my youth I knew a hundred women, in my old age I have only known one; and she alone was worth the other hundred. Woman is the benediction of life.”
⁂
A young man and old woman:
Amongst the discordances of age between husband and wife, none astonish us so much, or I ought to say disgust us more, than when an old woman marries a young man.
There is the kernel of a great truth at the root of this scorn, which springs from the very heart of nature.
A man may be a man even at eighty years of age; and I cannot resist smiling when I remember a lady who complained of the exactions of her companion, a man over seventy. We all remember Fontenelle and the Duke of Richelieu, in whom virility was only extinguished with life: in the first case the life lasting for a century, in the second for more than eighty years.
A woman, on the contrary, after forty-five, or at the most after fifty years of age, is no longer a woman, and the reproductive faculty is entirely destroyed. Hence the marriage of a young man and old woman is more contrary to the laws of nature than that of an old man and a young woman. The one may be fruitful, the other never. Add to the æsthetic exigencies of the man the rapid decadence of the woman after the change of life, and you will understand that the union we are discussing is one of the most repugnant and repulsive. The motives which bring such a man and such a woman together are nearly always the most abject, and amongst those that offend the moral sense the most. On one side carnal gratification; on the other the thirst for gold; hence, prostitution on the part of the man, the most filthy and disgusting in the commerce of love. The man sells his youth, his virility, in exchange for money; and the woman who no longer has a right to love, buys it as a merchandise, and is satisfied with the voluptuousness given her by one whom she ought to be the first to despise! A market of lasciviousness and vileness, gold gathered from the mud—a mud, however, which cannot be washed off, and which soils hand, conscience, everything it touches.