In any case, if you have your weak side inquire about the public and private virtues of the first husband, and put the results into the balance which must weigh the pros and cons of the marriage.
A widow and a widower may both have children, or one only may have them. The dangers in these cases are very different.
It is better for the wife to have them, for if the husband really loves her he will also love her children; and besides, being a man, he is less at home, and paternity is always an episode in his life and not the whole life, as maternity is with the woman. Then if the man has the good fortune not to have children he will often end by loving his wife’s as much as though they were his own.
In the case of there being children on both sides the balance may prove of advantage, because it is equal in weight and measure, and the two married people have cause to reproach themselves and to suffer for the same things.
The worst case is that of a widower with children to whose number the new wife adds; he must be an angel, his wife and children angels also, if no civil war breaks out in his house. Think of it well, think a hundred times. Do not complicate the marriage, already fraught with so many dangers, by imprudence and temerity.
In marriages between a widow and a widower the greatest danger arises from the children, who fear or see their future threatened, and who in their love for their lost parent believe the new marriage to be an outrage to the memory of the dear one.
It is in these cases that we see all that a man has of venom and baseness come up and soil and cover everything with defilement and poison; all the brutal possibilities of human egotism covered, it may be, with varnish but still the skeleton underlying every thought and feeling.
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Only one of the engaged persons may be widow or widower, and it is greatly to the honour of women that more men marry a second time than women. Man often finds more happiness in marriage than she does, while she is more faithful to the memory of the departed, and thinks more of her children than herself.
How many women I have known who, being left widows quite young, have sacrificed themselves, together with the need of loving and being loved, to their children, often to one alone; proud of their sacrifice, unconquerable against all temptations and against all the power of the most legitimate passions.