The husband must create the wife. Much of the book is taken up with the precepts by which this new birth of the woman is to be brought about, M. Michelet's "entire affection" hateth those "nicer hands" winch would refuse any, even the humblest offices. The husband should be at once nurse and physician. He should regulate the food of the body, and measure out the doses of mental nourishment. All this is kind and good and affectionate; but there is just a suspicion excited that Madame might become slightly ennuyée, if she were subjected to this minute surveillance over her physical and spiritual hygiene. Everything must depend on individual tendencies and aptitudes; we have known husbands that were born for nurses,—and others, not less affectionate, that worried more than they helped in that capacity.
We cannot follow M. Michelet through his study of the reaction of the characters of the husband and wife upon each other, of the influence of maternity on conjugal relations, of the languishing of love and its rejuvenescence. Still less can we do more than remotely allude to those chapters in which his model woman is represented as ready on the slightest occasion to prove the name of her sex synonymous with frailty. We really do not know what to make of such things. The cool calculations of temptation as certain, and failure as probable,—the serious advice not to strike a wife under any circumstances,—such words have literally no meaning to most of our own American readers. Our women are educated to self-reliance,—and our men are, at least, too busy for the trade of tempters.
In a word, this book was written for French people, and is adjusted to the meridian of Paris. We must remember this always in reading it, and also remember that a Frenchman does not think English any more than he talks it. We sometimes flatter ourselves with the idea that we as a people are original in our tendency to extravagance of thought and language. It is a conceit of ours. Remember Sterne's perruquier.
"'You may immerge it,' replied he, 'into the ocean, and it will stand.'
"'What a great scale is everything upon, in this city!' thought I. 'The utmost stretch of an English periwig-maker's ideas could have gone no farther than to have dipped it into a pail of water.'"
How much such experiences as the following amount to we must leave to the ecclesiastical bodies to settle.
"The Church is openly against her, [woman,] owing her a grudge for the sin of Eve."
"It is very easy for us, educated in the religion of the indulgent God of Nature, to look our common destiny in the face. But she, impressed with the dogma of eternal punishment, though she may have received other ideas from you, still, in her suffering and debility, has painful foreshadowings of the future state."
But here are physiological statements which we take the liberty to question on our own responsibility.