But the author of the book considers that the English society has given too much importance to this preliminary question. There exists in fact quite as many reasons for being a _Rossinist_ as for being a _Solidist_ in the matter of beds, and the author acknowledges that it is either beneath or above him to solve this difficulty. He thinks with Laurence Sterne that it is a disgrace to European civilization that there exist so few physiological observations on callipedy, and he refuses to state the results of his Meditations on this subject, because it would be difficult to formulate them in terms of prudery, and they would be but little understood, and misinterpreted. Such reserve produces an hiatus in this part of the book; but the author has the pleasant satisfaction of leaving a fourth work to be accomplished by the next century, to which he bequeaths the legacy of all that he has not accomplished, a negative munificence which may well be followed by all those who may be troubled by an overplus of ideas. The theory of the bed presents questions much more important than those put forth by our neighbors with regard to castors and the murmurs of criminal conversation. We know only three ways in which a bed (in the general sense of this term) may be arranged among civilized nations, and particularly among the privileged classes to whom this book is addressed. These three ways are as follows: 1. TWIN BEDS. 2. SEPARATE ROOMS. 3. ONE BED FOR BOTH. Before applying ourselves to the examination of these three methods of living together, which must necessarily have different influences upon the happiness of husbands and wives, we must take a rapid survey of the practical object served by the bed and the part it plays in the political economy of human existence. The most incontrovertible principle which can be laid down in this matter is, _that the bed was made to sleep upon_. It would be easy to prove that the practice of sleeping together was established between married people but recently, in comparison with the antiquity of marriage. By what reasonings has man arrived at that point in which he brought in vogue a practice so fatal to happiness, to health, even to _amour-propre_? Here we have a subject which it would be curious to investigate. If you knew one of your rivals who had discovered a method of placing you in a position of extreme absurdity before the eyes of those who were dearest to you—for instance, while you had your mouth crooked like that of a theatrical mask, or while your eloquent lips, like the copper faucet of a scanty fountain, dripped pure water—you would probably stab him. This rival is sleep. Is there a man in the world who knows how he appears to others, and what he does when he is asleep? In sleep we are living corpses, we are the prey of an unknown power which seizes us in spite of ourselves, and shows itself in the oddest shapes; some have a sleep which is intellectual, while the sleep of others is mere stupor.