When instead of this it is the man who accepts the riches from the woman, without balancing them by great genius or by a very high social position, he always renounces that manly dignity which ought to be his nobility; he stands degraded before his wife, lowered, and at the least collision with vanity or passion he may be struck full in the face by an insult which ought to sink into his very heart. I know several cases in which a very rich woman fell desperately in love with a handsome, cultivated, but poor young man, and he to save his own dignity fled from her love. And the lady followed and conquered him, trusting courageously to the proverb, _Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut!_ They were married, and he loved her, working constantly with his pen, brush, or chisel, having sworn to himself and to her that he would only live by his work. Noble and touching struggles for personal dignity, of love and pride, which one but seldom sees, but which console our sight, daily saddened by so many simonies of luxuries, so many pretences of heroism, so many individual, social, and political lies, which darken the air so heavily that it is difficult for the sun to penetrate the cloud. Whoever makes a business of marriage will laugh cordially at me, and at my sentimental fantasies. Let him laugh! I do not pretend to teach him how to make marriage a paradise on earth. He will continue to seek a golden dowry, and if he has a great coat of arms and an empty purse he will put the first up at auction in order to fill the second; and if the game should succeed he will carry his wife’s money to the gaming table, the turf, or to the cabinet of the cocotte, and feel himself happy to have gained in one day that which others cannot obtain with all the hard work of a laborious and pure life. Lying on a Turkish divan, smoking a perfumed Havana, he will raise to himself a monument of admiration and acknowledgment amidst the blue fumes of his cigar. And is he happy? Happy, perhaps, but never enviable; for I know no true and durable happiness which degrades dignity, which hides itself in the depths of the soul, which can silence itself with the gag of sophism and the accommodation of conscience, but that, like a steel spring, it will burst and spring from its bonds the more unexpectedly the greater the repression. A man who in the inexorable soliloquies of his own conscience has something on which he dare not think, or has a room in his house which he can never visit without a shudder or remorse, is never happy.