Physiology of Marriage

   is either an insignificant compilation or the work of a fool written for other fools; old priests have taken their balances of gold and have weighed the most trifling scruples of the marriage consciences; old lawyers have put on their spectacles and have distinguished between every kind of married transgression; old doctors have seized the scalpel and drawn it over all the wounds of the subject; old judges have mounted to the bench and have decided all the cases of marriage dissolution; whole generations have passed unuttered cries of joy or of grief on the subject, each age has cast its vote into the urn; the Holy Spirit, poets and writers have recounted everything from the days of Eve to the Trojan war, from Helen to Madame de Maintenon, from the mistress of Louis XIV to the woman of their own day.

   Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?

   Shall I say that you intend to publish pictures more or less skillfully drawn, for the purpose of convincing us that a man marries:

   From ambition—that is well known;

   From kindness, in order to deliver a girl from the tyranny of her mother;

   From rage, in order to disinherit his relations;

   From scorn of a faithless mistress;

   From weariness of a pleasant bachelor life;

   From folly, for each man always commits one;

   In consequence of a wager, which was the case with Lord Byron;

   From interest, which is almost always the case;

   From youthfulness on leaving college, like a blockhead;

   From ugliness,—fear of some day failing to secure a wife;

   Through Machiavelism, in order to be the heir of some old woman at an early date;

   From necessity, in order to secure the standing to

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