MEDITATION XIII.

OF PERSONAL MEASURES.

Perhaps the preceding Meditations will prove more likely to develop
general principles of conduct, than to repel force by force. They
furnish, however, the pharmacopoeia of medicine and not the practice
of medicine. Now consider the personal means which nature has put into
your hands for self-defence; for Providence has forgotten no one; if
to the sepia (that fish of the Adriatic) has been given the black dye
by which he produces a cloud in which he disappears from his enemy,
you should believe that a husband has not been left without a weapon;
and now the time has come for you to draw yours.

You ought to have stipulated before you married that your wife should
nurse her own children; in this case, as long as she is occupied in
bearing children or in nursing them you will avoid the danger from one
or two quarters. The wife who is engaged in bringing into the world
and nursing a baby has not really the time to bother with a lover, not
to speak of the fact that before and after her confinement she cannot
show herself in the world. In short, how can the most bold of the
distinguished women who are the subject of this work show herself
under these circumstances in public? O Lord Byron, thou didst not wish
to see women even eat!

Six months after her confinement, and when the child is on the eve of
being weaned, a woman just begins to feel that she can enjoy her
restoration and her liberty.

If your wife has not nursed her first child, you have too much sense