f classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman,
with white skin, is the genius of romantic neurosis; to one belongs
the empire gained by nerves, to the other the empire gained by vapors.

Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in
tears.

"What is the matter, my darling?"

"It is nothing."

"But you are in tears!"

"I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the
clouds, and those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some
disaster--I think I must be going to die."

Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead
uncle, of her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all
these mournful shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses,
she is attacked with all the pains they felt, she feels her heart
palpitate with excessive violence, she feels her spleen swelling. You
say to yourself, with a self-satisfied air:

"I know exactly what this is all about!"

And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns
like an open box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew,
who implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful
memories. She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own
funeral, is buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping
willow, and at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful
epithalamium, you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish
to console her melts away in the cloud of Ixion.

There are women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from
their feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their
debts, or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors
are employed as decisive weapons in Civil War.

On the plea of her spinal affection or of her weak chest, a woman
takes pains to seek out some distraction or other; you see her
dressing herself in soft fabrics like an invalid with all the symptoms
of spleen; she never goes out because an intimate friend, her mother
or her sister, has tried to tear her away from that divan which
monopolizes her and on which she spends her life in improvising
elegies. Madame is going to spend a fortnight in the country because
the doctor orders it. In short, she goes where she likes and does what
she likes. Is it possible that there can be a husband so brutal as to
oppose such desires, by hindering a wife from going to seek a cure for
her cruel sufferings? For it has been establi