I know very well that the most hateful and disagreeable problem of matrimony is the economic, but we cannot avoid nor solve it by shutting our eyes and disregarding it. To love and be loved, to feel that our life is doubled and the horizons of the future enlarged, to drink from the eyes of a woman who is a perfect fountain of delight, to feel the doors of paradise opened to us by her lips; and then all at once to be obliged to speak of _income_ and _dowry_ amidst such intoxicating pleasures; then to remember between one kiss and another that to harbour all this paradise we do not possess, I cannot say a house, but not even the most modest of rooms! It is hard, cruel, abominable, but it is necessary! The _quart d’heure de Rabelais_ in the affairs of love, and the exclamation of the Trappists who at table say to their brethren: _Remember we must all die_, are the waiters who, entering the guest chamber, present the _bill_ to the gay and thoughtless merry-makers. But in matrimony the accounts must be made out before, and drawn up seriously, calmly, and inexorably. There is only one man in whose case I could overlook a want of this prudence, and it is he who feels that he has the strength to fight for and the energy to gain a position, and to the man who strikes his forehead and exclaims, _Numen adest_. What does it matter if such a man has no fortune, nor even a dowry with her whom he loves? He has faith in himself founded not upon pride, but upon the consciousness of knowledge and power; and this is more than a patrimony, for neither phylloxera, bank failures, nor shipwreck can assail it. It will last as long as life itself, and its results still longer. But how many such men are there? With the experience of more than half a century I recommend all others to use such foresight as is near akin to fear. The whole history of Italian finance, and the whole chronology of our innumerable ministers of finance, teach us that the balance of expenditure is always greater than that of the income. Just fancy when these are added up by that maddest of treasury ministers whose name is Love! The following words must have been repeated more than a thousand times between a kiss and a sigh, _A cottage and your heart_! But common sense has succeeded in throwing so much cold water on the phrase as to render it ridiculous, and to relegate it to the museum of comic virtues. However, notwithstanding the many years I have lived, I still have the ingenuous good nature to believe this phrase when it comes warmly and spontaneously from two loving hearts, and when those two hearts live in two organisms superior in intelligence and sentiment it may yet be true; the cottage may soon become a house, perhaps even a palace. But how many such are there? The rest no longer say, _A cottage and your heart_; but, _A palace even without your heart. A hundred thousand francs income, with or without the heart._