"Anyone who told my Colonel or Ch... that they no longer have women since their marriage would get a very poor reception.
"Some years ago a woman of this country, in a fit of religious fervour, told her husband, a gentleman of the Court of Brunswick, that she had deceived him for six years together. The husband, as big a fool as his wife, went to tell the news to the Duke; the gallant was obliged to resign all his employments and to leave the country in twenty-four hours, under a threat from the Duke to put the laws in motion. "
"Halberstadt, July 7th, 1807.
"Husbands are not deceived here, 'tis true—but ye gods, what women! Statues, masses scarcely organic! Before marriage they are exceedingly attractive, graceful as gazelles, with quick tender eyes that always understand the least hint of love. The reason is that they are on the look out for a husband. So soon as the husband is found, they become absolutely nothing but getters of children, in a state of perpetual adoration before the begetter. In a family of four or five children there must always be one of them ill, since half the children die before seven, and in this country, immediately one of the babies is ill, the mother goes out no more. I can see that they find an indescribable pleasure in being caressed by their children. Little by little they lose all their ideas. It is the same at Philadelphia. There girls of the wildest and most innocent gaiety become, in less than a year, the most boring of women. To have done with the marriages of Protestant Germany—a wife's dowry is almost nil because of the fiefs. Mademoiselle de Diesdorff, daughter of a man with an income of forty thousand francs, will have a dowry of perhaps two thousand crowns (seven thousand five hundred francs).
"M. de Mermann got four thousand crowns with his wife.
"The rest of the dowry is payable in vanity at the Court. 'One could find among the middle class,' Mermann told me, 'matches with a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand crowns (six hundred thousand francs instead of fifteen). But one could no longer be presented at Court; one would be barred all society in which a prince or princess appeared: it's terrible.' These were his words, and they came from the heart.
"A German woman with the soul of Phi..., her intellect, her noble and sensitive face, the fire she must have had at eighteen (she is now twenty-seven), a woman such as this country produces, with her virtue, naturalness and no more than a useful little dose of religion—such a woman would no doubt make her husband very happy. But how flatter oneself that one would remain true to such insipid matrons?
"'But he was married,' she answered me this morning when I blamed the four years'silence of Corinne's lover, Lord Oswald. She sat up till three o'clock to read Corinne. The novel gave her profound emotion, and now she answers me with touching candour: 'But he was married.'
"Phi... is so natural, with so naive a sensibility, that even in this land of the natural, she seems a prude to the petty heads that govern petty hearts; their witticisms make her sick, and she in no way hides it.
"When she is in good company, she laughs like mad at the most lively jokes. It was she who told me the story of the young princess of sixteen, later on so well known. who often managed to make the officer on guard at her door come up into her rooms. "