It matters very little to your happiness or marriage whether lightning or inducted current has electrified you, but sympathy ought to exist between the man and the woman. For charity’s sake, for the love of God, do not forget this; do not believe in the common proverb, which has made so many victims: _Marry if all considerations of income and of age agree. Love will come after._ No! love will not come after, except by chance, and in exceedingly rare cases. There will come to you, on the contrary, reciprocal antipathy, adultery, a lie in the very surname of your children; there will come all those lively intrigues through which our fine and virtuous modern society moves. If, in the first choice of love, the man and woman do not approach each other with a tremor of holy fear; if their hands do not meet each other intoxicated with the touch; if the first kiss be not a passion, the first embrace a delirium, renounce forever the sweet and fond blessedness of the dual life. ⁂ The physical sympathy between a man and woman is a road which may lead to paradise, but how often may one lose one’s self on the road before entering the field of affection and thought. The only logical people in the world are those savages who, before giving themselves forever, make a trial on both sides, and separate or marry, according to the result of the experience. But such moral and modest people as we are, must content ourselves with guessing; and woe to us if we make a mistake. Fortunately, the sympathy which is awakened by a mere study of the woman’s outward form nearly always agrees with that deeper one which arises from the agreement of the temperaments, by reason of the solidity which unites the different offices of an organism. But it happens only too often that the interior is different from the exterior, and a man of ice has taken for his own a woman of fire, or _vice versa_. In many codes of law incompatibility of temper is a sufficient cause for divorce, but is not incompatibility of temperament a more prolific cause for domestic discord? Legislators and theologians have for some time raised this last veil which hides the shrine of love, but in their verdict or the clauses of their laws, have they contributed or not to the happiness of matrimony? I believe not, for in modern codes the duties and genital rights of two married people are only confined to the preservation of the race. Beyond that they say nothing, and they do well. But of that other unwritten code which guides our individual conduct, do they say nothing, do they teach us nothing? They do not even give us a guide-book, or even only time-tables of fifteen centuries, like those of the railway. After having studied man and woman for nearly half a century, after having dared to raise every veil, to sound every cavity, to feel every pulse that beats, every nerve that vibrates, as physician, anthropologist, and psychologist, this is all I have learnt. ⁂