If a woman has received a man's education, she possesses in very truth
the most brilliant and most fertile sources of happiness both to
herself and to her husband; but this kind of woman is as rare as
happiness itself; and if you do not possess her for your wife, your
best course is to confine the one you do possess, for the sake of your
common felicity, to the region of ideas she was born in, for you must
not forget that one moment of pride in her might destroy you, by
setting on the throne a slave who would immediately be tempted to
abuse her power.

After all, by following the system prescribed in this Meditation, a
man of superiority will be relieved from the necessity of putting his
thoughts into small change, when he wishes to be understood by his
wife, if indeed this man of superiority has been guilty of the folly
of marrying one of those poor creatures who cannot understand him,
instead of choosing for his wife a young girl whose mind and heart he
has tested and studied for a considerable time.

Our aim in this last matrimonial observation has not been to advise
all men of superiority to seek for women of superiority and we do not
wish each one to expound our principles after the manner of Madame de
Stael, who attempted in the most indelicate manner to effect a union
between herself and Napoleon. These two beings would have been very
unhappy in their domestic life; and Josephine was a wife accomplished
in a very different sense from this virago of the nineteenth century.

And, indeed, when we praise those undiscoverable girls so happily
educated by chance, so well endowed by nature, whose delicate souls
endure so well the rude contact of the great soul of him we call _a
man_, we mean to speak of those rare and noble creatures of whom