Marriage is a science” (aphorism XXVII of the Méditation I). For this reason, I wondered if it was worthwhile to take the path traced by Honoré de Balzac, almost two hundred years ago, when he had so defined marriage in his famous Physiologie du mariage (Méditations de philosophie éclectique sur le bonheur et le malheur conjugal), published for the first time in Paris in 1829.