y dear creature, for not having told me that
I was to love you for two. Hereafter every other day I shall love you
for the gentleman yonder, and all other days for myself."

This adventure is regarded in England as one of the best returns home
that were ever known. It is true it consisted in uniting, with
singular felicity, eloquence of deed to that of word.

But the art of re-entering your home, principles of which are nothing
else but natural deductions from the system of politeness and
dissimulation which have been commended in preceding Meditations, is
after all merely to be studied in preparation for the conjugal
catastrophes which we will now consider.

MEDITATION XXII.

OF CATASTROPHES.

The word _Catastrophe_ is a term of literature which signifies the
final climax of a play.

To bring about a catastrophe in the drama which you are playing is a
method of defence which is as easy to undertake as it is certain to
succeed. In advising to employ it, we would not conceal from you its
perils.

The conjugal catastrophe may be compared to one of those high fevers
which either carry off a predisposed subject or completely restore his
health. Thus, when the catastrophe succeeds, it keeps a woman for
years in the prudent realms of virtue.

Moreover, this method is the last of all those which science has been
able to discover up to this present moment.

The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Sicilian Vespers, the death of
Lucretia, the two embarkations of Napoleon at Frejus are examples of
political catastrophe. It will not be in your power to act on such a
large scale; nevertheless, within their own area, your dramatic
climaxes in conjugal life will not be less effective than these.

But since the art of creating a situation and of transforming it, by
the introduction of natural incidents, constitutes genius; since the
return to virtue of a woman, whose foot has already left some tracks
upon the sweet and gilded sand which mark the pathway of vice, is the
most difficult to bring about of all denouements, and since genius
neither knows it nor teaches it, the practitioner in conjugal laws
feels compelled to confess at the outset that he is incapable of
reducing to definite principles a science which is as changeable as
circumstances, as delusive as opportunity, and as indefinable as
instinct.

If we may use an expression which neither Diderot, d'Alembert n