"How wisely, monseigneur, you have advised women to interest themselves in business matters and other serious subjects, even studying agriculture. My own observation confirms your opinion. At present, while my son is in the service, and I am separated from all my family, living in the country, and almost always in _tête-à-tête_, what would become of me if my mother had not given me the habit, from childhood, of interesting myself in every thing about me? Agriculture, with its obstacles and its progress, affords an inexhaustible source of conversation with one's husband, with cures, village notaries, farmers, country neighbors, and _petits bourgeois_. It is a less inflammatory subject than politics, and one that adapts itself to every understanding. My husband does not disdain to discuss crops and manuring with me--I have my own theories upon drainage, beets, [Footnote 32] and cabbages, [Footnote 33] and he finds me very progressive in my ideas, perhaps too much so; he, however, never builds a stable without consulting me, and before a lease is signed, I must hear it read several times. I believe it to be very important to themselves and to their children that women should understand business, the investment of funds, the management of property. They should not _decide_, but listen and advise. Husbands, generally, ask nothing better than to talk openly of these things, because such subjects interest them more than any others; but usually no one listens. When a man meets with yawning inattention, all is over; he has recourse to silence, adopts the habit of managing everything for himself, of following his own bent. In the beginning, a young husband is full of confiding openness; later, he becomes more suspicious of control which wounds him in proportion as it is needed. Capacity and earnestness are indispensable to a woman." [Footnote 32: La bette rave, the kind of beet from which sugar is made, and therefore an important subject to theorize upon. Berthollet is said to have lost his place by failing to answer satisfactorily a question suddenly put to him by Napoleon, concerning la bette rave.] [Footnote 33: Colza, a cabbage used for making oil, and a topic almost as engrossing as beets.] {223}