And would you be simple enough to believe that the manners, the
sentiments of a man like you, who usually dress and undress before
your wife, can counterbalance the influence of these books and
outshine the glory of their fictitious lovers, in whose garments the
fair reader sees neither hole nor stain?--Poor fool! too late, alas!
for her happiness and for yours, your wife will find out that the
_heroes_ of poetry are as rare in real life as the _Apollos_ of
sculpture!

Very many husbands will find themselves embarrassed in trying to
prevent their wives from reading, yet there are certain people who
allege that reading has this advantage, that men know what their wives
are about when they have a book in hand. In the first place you will
see, in the next Meditation, what a tendency the sedentary life has to
make a woman quarrelsome; but have you never met those beings without
poetry, who succeed in petrifying their unhappy companions by reducing
life to its most mechanical elements? Study great men in their
conversation and learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they
condemn poetry and the pleasures of imagination.

But if, after all your efforts, your wife persists in wishing to read,
put at her disposal at once all possible books from the A B C of her
little boy to _Rene_, a book more dangerous to you when in her hands
than _Therese Philosophe_. You might create in her an utter disgust
for reading by giving her tedious books; and plunge her into utter
idiocy with _Marie Alacoque_, _The Brosse de Penitence_, or with the
chansons which were so fashionable in the time of Louis XV; but later
on you will find, in the present volume, the means of so thoroughly
employing your wife's time, that any kind of reading will be quite out