soul to themselves alone up to their thirtieth or
thirty-fifth year; but these exceptions cause a sort of scandal and
alarm. The phenomenon scarcely ever is met with excepting in the
country, where life is transparent and people live in glass houses and
the husband wields immense power. 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. By the
aid of the police a man can guide his wife to her fortieth year pure
from any fault.

We will divide this treatise on Police into five captions:

1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS.
2. OF CORRESPONDENCE.
3. OF SPIES.
4. THE INDEX.
5. OF THE BUDGET.

1. OF MOUSE-TRAPS.

In spite of the grave crisis which the husband has reached, we do not
suppose that the lover has completely acquired the freedom of the city
in the marital establishment. Many husbands often suspect that their
wives have a lover, and yet they do not know upon which of the five or
six chosen ones of whom we have spoken their suspicions ought to fall.
This hesitation doubtless springs from some moral infirmity, to whose
assistance the professor must come.

Fouche had in Paris three or four houses resorted to by people of the
highest distinction; the mistresses of these dwellings were devoted to
him