Well, I address myself to the married men of yesterday and of to-day;
to those who on leaving the Church or the registration office indulge
the hope of keeping their wives for themselves alone; to those whom
some form or other of egotism or some indefinable sentiment induces to
say when they see the marital troubles of another, "This will never
happen to me."

I address myself to those sailors who after witnessing the foundering
of other ships still put to sea; to those bachelors who after
witnessing the shipwreck of virtue in a marriage of another venture
upon wedlock. And this is my subject, eternally now, yet eternally
old!

A young man, or it may be an old one, in love or not in love, has
obtained possession by a contract duly recorded at the registration
office in heaven and on the rolls of the nation, of a young girl with
long hair, with black liquid eyes, with small feet, with dainty
tapering fingers, with red lips, with teeth of ivory, finely formed,
trembling with life, tempting and plump, white as a lily, loaded with
the most charming wealth of beauty. Her drooping eyelashes seem like
the points of the iron crown; her skin, which is as fresh as the calyx
of a white camelia, is streaked with the purple of the red camelia;
over her virginal complexion one seems to see the bloom of young fruit
and the delicate down of a young peach; the azure veins spread a
kindling warmth over this transparent surface; she asks for life and
she gives it; she is all joy and love, all tenderness and candor; she
loves her husband, or at least believes she loves him.

The husband who is in love says in the bottom of his heart: "Those