ese tricks of modernity pale before the genius of
antiquity, before nervous attacks which are violent, before the
Pyrrhic dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are
there in the vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of
those glances, in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in
contortion! It is then that a woman is carried away like an impetuous
wind, darts forth like the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a
movement like a billow which glides over the white pebbles. She is
overcome with excess of love, she sees the future, she is the seer who
prophesies, but above all, she sees the present moment and tramples on
her husband, and impresses him with a sort of terror.

The sight of his wife flinging off vigorous men as if they were so
many feathers, is often enough to deter a man from ever striving to
wrong her. He will be like the child who, having pulled the trigger of
some terrific engine, has ever afterwards an incredible respect for
the smallest spring. I have known a man, gentle and amiable in his
ways, whose eyes were fixed upon those of his wife, exactly as if he
had been put into a lion's cage, and some one had said to him that he
must not irritate the beast, if he would escape with his life.

Nervous attacks of this kind are very fatiguing and become every day
more rare. Romanticism, however, has maintained its ground.

Sometimes, we meet with phlegmatic husbands, those men whose love is
long enduring, because they store up their emotions, whose genius gets
the upper hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these
sublime creatures are rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St.
Thomas, who wished to put his finger into the wound, they are endowed
with an incredulity worthy of an atheist. Imperturbable in the midst
of all these fraudulent headaches and all these traps set by neurosis,
they concentrate their attention on the comedy which is being played
before them, they examine the actress, they search for one of the
springs that sets her going; and when they have discovered the
mechanism of this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight
impulse to the puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either
of the reality of the disease or the artifices of these conjugal
mummeries.

But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband
escapes all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to
women, he will beyond doubt be overcome