"Adultery is like a commercial failure, with this difference," says
Chamfort, "that it is the innocent party who has been ruined and who
bears the disgrace."


In France the laws that relate to adultery and those that relate to
bankruptcy require great modifications. Are they too indulgent? Do
they sin on the score of bad principles? _Caveant consules_!

Come now, courageous athlete, who have taken as your task that which
is expressed in the little apostrophe which our first Meditation
addresses to people who have the charge of a wife, what are you going
to say about it? We hope that this rapid review of the question does
not make you tremble, that you are not one of those men whose nervous
fluid congeals at the sight of a precipice or a boa constrictor! Well!
my friend, he who owns soil has war and toil. The men who want your
gold are more numerous than those who want your wife.

After all, husbands are free to take these trifles for arithmetical
estimates, or arithmetical estimates for trifles. The illusions of
life are the best things in life; that which is most respectable in
life is our futile credulity. Do there not exist many people whose
principles are merely prejudices, and who not having the force of
character to form their own ideas of happiness and virtue accept what
is ready made for them by the hand of legislators? Nor do we address
those Manfreds who having taken off too many garments wish to raise
all the curtains, that is, in moments when they are tortured by a sort
of moral spleen. By them, however, the question is boldly stated and
we know the extent of the evil.