As long as we deny the young woman a free and wise education so that she may choose well; as long as we deny her the same right of selection as man possesses, we never will be able to elevate matrimony. The common consciousness in two creatures that they have chosen each other freely and that they love each other without any bond of interest, any pressure of authority, of prejudice, of ambition, is the sacred corner-stone on which the most splendid temples of conjugal happiness are erected, and it has sufficient power to preserve that happiness amidst the greatest domestic storms.
Neither do I believe in sudden and irresistible loves, nor in the future happiness of a married couple who, without straw to weave the nest, in the open country, amid the frosts of misery, wish to erect a temple to Love. No; matrimony is love and should be nothing except love. But love is nude and wants to be clothed; love is delicate, and wants to be nourished and protected from the winds and the frosts; love is fruitful, and should have bread and wine to keep alive the little angels that will bloom in its garden. All this should be known by our young girls; our authority should go no further than temporizing; we should never impose anything on lovers except patience; and this in itself is sufficient to cause many transient desires to vanish, while it invigorates true loves. But in any case, and always, selection should be free, and to prepare for it the education of our daughters should be more sincere, more frank, less hypocritical, less false. Teach your child modesty and personal dignity, and you will see that with such sentiments the fortress you wish to guard will very rarely capitulate. Perpetual diffidence rouses many false alarms, stirs up in many frivolous and touchy natures the desire for spite and revenge. Diffidence always in arms gives one a pessimistic idea of the virtues of mothers; perhaps they remember how weakly they resisted temptation and they try by every art to avoid it, instead of strengthening the forces that should defend virtue.
The free selection of woman is much more important in our society, because she is not ignorant of the fact that in marriage she will find an immense liberty; perhaps she also divines that, even though she should not love the official spouse, she can still love and be loved. When a society is entirely saturated with adultery and hypocrisy, even the chaste and ingenuous maiden is dimly prescient of certain things which she dares not acknowledge to herself. Without leaving the domestic nest, she may perhaps know with what infamy a family may become sullied; she has, perhaps, more than once repeated to herself: "I will not sin, but—I, too, could sin with impunity."
Free selection is the best guarantee of faith; it is the only touchstone by which the true natural rights of mutual fidelity are tried. No one has the right to cast the first stone at the adulteress if she, ignorant, was dragged to the altar; no wife can be condemned if she was forced to sign the compact like a victim and a slave instead of as a woman and a lover.
All these reforms which must elevate matrimony will be but slowly secured through the progress of education and customs, through morality strengthened by science and not by fear, through greater respect for the liberty of woman, who must be raised from the low level where modern society has still left her.
THE END