The quart d’heure de Rabelais in the affairs of love, and the exclamation of the Trappists who at table say to their brethren: Remember we must all die, are the waiters who, entering the guest chamber, present the bill to the gay and thoughtless merry-makers. But in matrimony the accounts must be made out before, and drawn up seriously, calmly, and inexorably.
There is only one man in whose case I could overlook a want of this prudence, and it is he who feels that he has the strength to fight for and the energy to gain a position, and to the man who strikes his forehead and exclaims, Numen adest. What does it matter if such a man has no fortune, nor even a dowry with her whom he loves? He has faith in himself founded not upon pride, but upon the consciousness of knowledge and power; and this is more than a patrimony, for neither phylloxera, bank failures, nor shipwreck can assail it. It will last as long as life itself, and its results still longer.
But how many such men are there? With the experience of more than half a century I recommend all others to use such foresight as is near akin to fear. The whole history of Italian finance, and the whole chronology of our innumerable ministers of finance, teach us that the balance of expenditure is always greater than that of the income. Just fancy when these are added up by that maddest of treasury ministers whose name is Love!
The following words must have been repeated more than a thousand times between a kiss and a sigh, A cottage and your heart!
But common sense has succeeded in throwing so much cold water on the phrase as to render it ridiculous, and to relegate it to the museum of comic virtues. However, notwithstanding the many years I have lived, I still have the ingenuous good nature to believe this phrase when it comes warmly and spontaneously from two loving hearts, and when those two hearts live in two organisms superior in intelligence and sentiment it may yet be true; the cottage may soon become a house, perhaps even a palace.
But how many such are there?
The rest no longer say, A cottage and your heart; but, A palace even without your heart. A hundred thousand francs income, with or without the heart.
In the first pages of this book we have seen how and why the economic consideration dominates marriage in civilised society with all the rigour of a tyrant, how it commands everything, and is the “to be or not to be” of a family.
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