The miraculous assistance which men
and things thus give to a husband always vanishes in the midst of a
city whose population reaches to two hundred and fifty thousand.
It would therefore almost appear to be demonstrated that thirty is the
age of virtue. At that critical period, a woman becomes so difficult
to guard, that in order successfully to enchain her within the
conjugal Paradise, resort must be had to those last means of defence
which remain to be described, and which we will reveal in the _Essay
on Police_, the _Art of Returning Home_, and _Catastrophes_.
MEDITATION XX.
ESSAY ON POLICE.
The police of marriage consist of all those means which are given you
by law, manners, force, and stratagem for preventing your wife in her
attempt to accomplish those three acts which in some sort make up the
life of love: writing, seeing and speaking.
The police combine in greater or less proportion the means of defence
put forth in the preceding Meditations. Instinct alone can teach in
what proportions and on what occasions these compounded elements are
to be employed. The whole system is elastic; a clever husband will
easily discern how it must be bent, stretched or retrenched.
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