This difference at first sight seems singular, but is easily accounted
for.

The average age at which women are married is twenty years and at
forty they cease to belong to the world of love.

Now a young bachelor of seventeen is apt to make deep cuts with his
penknife in the parchment of contracts, as the chronicles of scandal
will tell you.

On the other hand, a man at fifty-two is more formidable than at any
other age. It is at this fair epoch of life that he enjoys an
experience dearly bought, and probably all the fortune that he will
ever require. The passions by which his course is directed being the
last under whose scourge he will move, he is unpitying and determined,
like the man carried away by a current who snatches at a green and
pliant branch of willow, the young nursling of the year.


XIV.
Physically a man is a man much longer than a woman is a woman.


With regard to marriage, the difference in duration of the life of
love with a man and with a woman is fifteen years. This period is
equal to three-fourths of the time during which the infidelities of
the woman can bring unhappiness to her husband. Nevertheless, the
remainder in our subtraction from the sum of men only differs by a
sixth or so from that which results in our subtraction from the sum of
women.