The Physiology of Marriage, Part 2 by Honoré de Balzac
page 82 of 152 (53%)
page 82 of 152 (53%)
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From this cause and from many others, such as thrift, fear, and
ill-concealed jealousy, has sprung the custom of the sleeping together of the married couple; and this custom has given rise to punctuality and simultaneity in rising and retiring. And here you find the most capricious thing in the world, the feeling most pre-eminently fickle, the thing which is worthless without its own spontaneous inspiration, which takes all its charm from the suddenness of its desires, which owes its attractions to the genuineness of its outbursts--this thing we call love, subjugated to a monastic rule, to that law of geometry which belongs to the Board of Longitude! If I were a father I should hate the child, who, punctual as the clock, had every morning and evening an explosion of tenderness and wished me good-day and good-evening, because he was ordered to do so. It is in this way that all that is generous and spontaneous in human sentiment becomes strangled at its birth. You may judge from this what love means when it is bound to a fixed hour! Only the Author of everything can make the sun rise and set, morn and eve, with a pomp invariably brilliant and always new, and no one here below, if we may be permitted to use the hyperbole of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, can play the role of the sun. From these preliminary observations, we conclude that it is not natural for two to lie under the canopy in the same bed; That a man is almost always ridiculous when he is asleep; |
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