Page:Sexology.djvu/116

 verb expresses: 'Marriage is the tomb' that is to say, the emancipation, 'of love.' The people, whose language is always concrete, have intended here by love the violence of desire, the fire of the blood; it is this entirely physical love which, according to the proverb, is extinguished in marriage. The world, in its native chastity and its infinite delicacy, has not wished to reveal the secret of the nuptial couch; it has left to the wisdom of each one the care of penetrating the mystery, and of profiting by the instruction. It knows, however, that veritable love begins with this death; that it is a necessary effect of marriage that gallantry shall change into worship; that every husband, whatever he may pretend, is at the bottom of his soul idolatrous; that if there is an ostensible conspiracy among men to shake off the yoke of the sex, there is a tacit agreement to adore it; that only the weakness of woman obliges man to resume the empire from time to time; that with these rare exceptions the woman is sovereign, and that therein is the principle of conjugal tenderness and harmony."

Love in marriage is not only a state of domestic happiness, which every one should seek in preference to all the other elements which ordinarily enter into matrimonial combinations; it is, as we have already shown, one of the most powerful influences which bear upon the qualities of the progeny. The children of the most natural and happy marriages, that is, marriages of inclination, are, other things being equal, those who exhibit physical and mental qualities in their greatest perfection.

Marriage, then, properly regulated, exerts a powerfully beneficent influence upon the individual, and consequently upon private manners. Unlike the bachelor, whose leading characteristics are selfishness, narrowness of views,