This was why Champier the physician compiled expressly for Suzanne de Bourbon—that peerless flower among noble maidens—a little treatise quite foreign in its nature to what is in these days called “literature for young people.” Yet it must be confessed that this treatise, frankly physiological as it is, constituted the best imaginable safeguard against being swept away on a flood-tide of passion and folly. Champier lays down, as rigorously as though stating an astronomical law, various rules for his lady’s guidance in the most intimate relations of wedded life; prudence, moderation, and regularity are his text, and he gives point to his precepts by setting against them a menacing array of human ills—gout, anæmia, dyspepsia, enfeeblement of the sight.[37] Prosing preachers of this sort, let us add, addressed themselves chiefly to the women, and their exhortations were felt to be necessary and moral in the extreme. Marriage being a partnership to perpetuate a stock and beget children, the wife was naturally expected to accept without wincing the consequences of the contract—consequences it was as unreasonable to decry as to extol. All around her she saw reminders of the high sacredness and dignity of her vocation: genealogical trees spread their vast ramifications over the walls, and, while invoking the past, gravely, almost solemnly shaped for her that gigantic note of interrogation in regard to the future which distinguishes man from the brutes: the whole taking deeper significance and impressiveness from the emblematic figures of Wisdom, Honour, Reason, with which some artist had illustrated them. “Marriage is a holy and religious bond; and the pleasure a man hath of it should be a moderate, staid, and serious pleasure, and blent somewhat with severity.”[38] To attach oneself to this pleasure, to make it the axis of one’s world, would have seemed beneath contempt. By the favour of Heaven, a wife could still retain her self-respect and become a moral and religious soul. On these lines the straight path was marked out: in regard to circumstances, neither revolt nor rapture; between the two partners, neither love nor hate, but an amicable understanding, a little stiff perhaps, and wholly practical. To stray from this path was only to fall into difficulties and mistakes.