“Do you, for instance, regret your father, the tyrant who wrecked your young life? How do you propose to make your children love you? Your plans for their education, your care for their advantage, your severity, however necessary, will alienate their affection. Children love a lavish or weak father, but later they will despise him. You are stranded between aversion and contempt. You cannot be a good father for the wishing.
“Look round on our friends, and name one you would like for a son. We have known some who were a disgrace to their name. Children, my dear boy, are a commodity very difficult to keep sweet.—Yours will be angels! No doubt!
“But have you ever measured the gulf that parts the life of a single man from that of a married one? Listen.—As you are, you can say: ‘I will never be ridiculous beyond a certain point; the public shall never think of me excepting as I choose that it should think.’ Married, you will fall into depths of the ridiculous!—Unmarried, you make your own happiness; you want it today, you do without tomorrow: married, you take it as it comes, and the day you seek it you have to do without it. Married, you are an ass; you calculate marriage portions, you talk about public and religious morality, you look upon young men as immoral and dangerous; in short, you are socially Academical. I have nothing but pity for you! An old bachelor, whose relations are waiting for his money, and who struggles with his latest breath to make an old nurse give him something to drink, is in paradise compared with a married man. I say nothing of all the annoying, irritating, provoking, aggravating, stultifying, worrying things that may come to hypnotize and paralyze your mind, and tyrannize over your life, in the course of the petty warfare of two human beings always together, united forever, who have bound themselves, vainly believing that they will agree; no, that would be to repeat Boileau’s satire, and we know it by heart.
“I would forgive you the absurd notion if you would promise to marry like a grandee, to settle your fortune on your eldest son, to take advantage of the honeymoon stage to have two legitimate children, to give your wife a completely separate establishment, to meet her only in society, and never come home from a journey without announcing your return. Two hundred thousand francs a year are enough to do it on, and your antecedents allow of your achieving this by finding some rich English woman hungering for a title. That aristocratic way of life is the only one that seems to me truly French; the only handsome one, commanding a wife’s respect and regard; the only life that distinguishes us from the common herd; in short, the only one for which a young man should ever give up his single blessedness. In such an attitude the Comte de Manerville is an example to his age, he is superior to the general, and must be nothing less than a Minister or an Ambassador. He can never be ridiculous; he conquers the social advantages of a married man, and preserves the privileges of a bachelor.”
“But, my good friend, I am not a de Marsay; I am, as you yourself do me the honor to express it, Paul de Manerville, neither more nor less, a good husband and father, Deputy of the Centre, and perhaps some day a peer of the Upper House—altogether a very humble destiny. But I am diffident—and resigned.”
“And your wife?” said the merciless de Marsay, “will she be resigned?”
“My wife, my dear fellow, will do what I wish.”
“Oh! my poor friend, have you not got beyond that point?—Goodbye, Paul. Henceforth you have forfeited my esteem. Still, one word more, for I cannot subscribe to your abdication in cold blood. Consider what is the strength of our position. If a single man had no more than six thousand francs a year, if his whole fortune lay in his reputation for elegance and the memory of his successes, well, even this fantastic ghost has considerable value. Life still affords some chances for the bachelor ‘off color.’ Yes, he may still aspire to anything. But marriage! Paul, it is the ‘Thus far and no further’ of social existence. Once married, you can never more be anything but what you are—unless your wife condescends to take you in hand.”
“But you are always crushing me under your exceptional theories!” cried Paul. “I am tired of living for the benefit of others—of keeping horses for display, of doing everything with a view to ‘what people will say,’ of ruining myself for fear that idiots should remark: ‘Why, Paul has the same old carriage!—What has he done with his money? Does he squander it? Gamble on the Bourse?—Not at all; he is a millionaire. Madame So-and-So is madly in love with him.—He has just had a team of horses from England, the handsomest in Paris.—At Longchamps, everyone remarked the four-horse chaises of Monsieur de Marsay and Monsieur de Manerville; the cattle were magnificent.’—In short, the thousand idiotic remarks by which the mob of fools drives us.
“I am beginning to see that this life, in which we are simply rolled along by others instead of walking on our feet, wears us out and makes us old. Believe me, my dear Henri, I admire your powers, but I do not envy you. You are capable of judging everything; you can act and
