36 good reasons not to marry you!

What a strange book. Balzac We know that we are accustomed to touch every genre, but here it really is a registry where you least expect it, namely a kind of comic catalog like a Manuel De Savoir Use live in Des Rustres And The Malpolis or superfluous Dictionary for use by the elite and wealthy. And the worst is that Balzac is very good in this register and knows us laugh.
This book is organized symmetrically, two prefaces the author, 36 chapters describing the various pettiness, 18 misery for man, portrayed in the guise of any Adolphe, the archetype of big bourgeois uninteresting and without finesse of view, 18 harassment for his wife Caroline, matron symbolizing Machiavellian interested in all that glitters. The first part (about man) is more comic, more caustic than the second, more "analytical", although this term scientific enough these days, which is not the case here. So by this pseudo symmetry construction, Balzac does not make her less clearly go well misogynistic little message "to live happy, live without a woman." Nevertheless, one can not help but recognize that there is some accuracy in the situations described and we can blame many things to Balzac, but certainly not not be a sharpened observer of the customs of his time, and even, let's be crazy, a real human ethologist. The burden of being female, he said, rather the heaviness of her husband through other less glorious. Balzac emphasizes the successive disappointments protagonist vis-à-vis his spouse as time passes in the couple.
A so much fun, light and funny book makes small short chapters describing the thousand disappointments that await the bride or groom.