r was happier.

You rush out in a rage, you are beside yourself, and are glad to meet
a friend, that you may work off your bile.

"Don't you ever marry, George; it's better to see your heirs carrying
away your furniture while the death-rattle is in your throat, better
to go through an agony of two hours without a drop to cool your
tongue, better to be assassinated by inquiries about your will by a
nurse like the one in Henry Monnier's terrible picture of a
'Bachelor's Last Moments!' Never marry under any pretext!"

Fortunately you see the sublime young woman no more. You are saved
from the tortures to which a criminal passion was leading you. You
fall back again into the purgatory of your married bliss; but you
begin to be attentive to Madame de Fischtaminel, with whom you were
dreadfully in love, without being able to get near her, while you were
a bachelor.

OBSERVATIONS.

When you have arrived at this point in the latitude or longitude of
the matrimonial ocean, there appears a slight chronic, intermittent
affection, not unlike the toothache. Here, I see, you stop me to ask,
"How are we to find the longitude in this sea? When can a husband be
sure he has attained this nautical point? And can the danger be
avoided?"

You may arrive at this point, look you, as easily after ten months as
ten years of wedlock; it depends upon the speed of the vessel, its
style of rigging, upon the trade winds, the force of the currents, and
especially upon the composition of the crew. You have this advantage
over the mariner, that he has but one method of calculating his
position, while husbands have at least a thousand of reckoning theirs.

EXAMPLE: Caroline, your late darling, your late treasure, who is now
merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while
walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to
take your arm at all;

Or else she notices men, older or younger as the case may be, dressed
with more or less taste, whereas she formerly saw no one whatever,
though the sidewalk was black with hats and traveled by more boots
than slippers;

Or, when you come home, she says, "It's no one but my husband:"
instead of saying "Ah! 'tis Adolphe!" as she used to say with a
gesture, a look, an accent which caused her admirers to think, "Well,
here's a happy woman at last!" This last exclamation of a woman is
suitable for two eras,--first, while she is sincer