Sublime beings and elect souls are always exceptional, and if, in the innumerable crowd of husbands and wives, they have reached the _yes_ by the way of desire of the flesh, they soon find that the game was not worth the candle, and that the muddy swamp of weariness and animal familiarity of sex follows upon the first outburst of voluptuousness. The woman sometimes succeeds in fanning and reviving it with inexhaustible coquetry, but one gets scorched, and the distaste may become even more obstinate the more ingenious are the remedies used to oppose it. A marriage inspired only by the desires of the flesh, maintained only by the bread of lust, is a very poor and abject thing, that can very rarely give peace to the mind, and much less happiness. Even in the most vulgar and sensual natures, there is something that rebels against the permanent animal, and raises its voice in demand for a more human form of food. Man, like the swine, wallows in the mud, but with this difference: he likes to wash himself, and to look up to the heavens from the trough. It must be added that in marriage the dignities of father and mother only increase the responsibility of the two consorts to animate and enlarge the human nut at the expense of the animal pulp. The spirituality of the family impresses itself upon the coarsest nature and the most obtuse nerves, by warming the atmosphere and revealing a streak of blue in the heaven above. Woe to the man who, in solitary and sad contemplation of his wife, says to himself: _My companion is only a female!_ Much worse is it, and woe to that woman who, in the night watches, looking at her husband as he snores, says in a low, fretful voice: _My husband is only a male!_ ⁂ There is hardly a man who would confess to his friends, or even to himself, that he married a woman to possess her. Even if it were true, modesty and pride fight against the confession, and with one of those clever self-deceptions with which we know how to embellish and deceive our own consciences, we exclaim in a decided and convinced tone, _I love her!_ If it be so difficult a thing to distinguish between gold and its alloy, true and false diamonds, eastern and Roman pearls, imagine whether it is easy to distinguish between the desire of the flesh and true love. Yet this is just one of those most dangerous and hidden pitfalls which bring death to happiness in the battle waged in our minds between the to be or not to be, when we have to decide whether or no we ought to give the holy name of wife to the woman we desire. In other books of mine I have ventured to give some advice to those aspiring to matrimony to enable them to distinguish between true love and carnal excitement, which only affects one organ. As I believe, however, that we have here before our eyes one of the gravest and most vital questions in the art of taking a wife, I may be allowed to enter more minutely into particulars.