The worst feature of this business of matrimony was that it was so entirely at the mercy of chance, which made almost a lottery of it, and it would have been much more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to yield to a childish infatuation. The man knew nothing of the girl he was espousing, either physically or morally. He merely assumed some likelihood of her resembling her parents, with the result that he devoted special attention to his prospective mother-in-law; she was the woman he was wedding. A young woman without relatives to serve as samples and guarantees was at a discount in the matrimonial market. At the best, it is always a leap in the dark, something like a step into death; it is the burial of the past, the first sacrifice of one’s life for the preservation of the race; the Stoic, says Cardan, knows whereabouts he is at his marriage and his death. A man’s best course is to take comfort beforehand, to fix his eyes on the object he aims at, to reflect that the reason, the mind has no great part in it, and that children are not the offspring of a woman’s brain. Moralists had put themselves to much trouble to cheer men along this difficult road, and to provide them with a series of test questions as an aid to matrimony. They assured a man that he might be quite easy in mind if he simply verified eight particulars in regard to the girl he proposed to marry: physically, her age, health, maternal aptitudes, beauty; generally, her intelligence, education, family, and dower. Unhappily, this verification was not easy. Physically, he could verify nothing but the young lady’s age; for the rest, the physicians advised him to look to her figure and in general to choose the best-grown girl; but no one can fail to see how vague and fallacious was any presumption based on that! True, there were the attractions of her features to judge by; but those were precisely what the same moralists urged him to distrust: a serious man, they said, would never build on that sand. In married life striking beauty is apt to pall, you come to loathe it, and a pretty woman is rarely clever enough to bring grist to her husband’s mill—except maybe in trade, when she serves as a signboard or a trade-mark. Sensible men preferred plainness; it was only widowers or wealthy dotards who gave themselves as a last resource the luxury of marrying a pretty woman. Poor souls! they would do better to think of their rheumatism, their indigestion, the dreadful draughts! Such a match was that of Madame Dixhomme, a very sprightly young woman well known in society, who bore the name of an old husband, a shining light of the Parisian bar, who might have been her father! There is no help for it. These good patriarchs will listen to no advice, and always count on coming off well. The world is content to smile, and to look on their attitude as courageous, not to say heroic.[30]