INDISCRETIONS.

Women are either chaste--or vain--or simply proud. They are therefore
all subject to the following petty trouble:

Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a
woman to themselves,--a possession exclusively due to the legal
ceremony,--that they dread the public's making a mistake, and they
hasten to brand their consort, as lumber-dealers brand their logs
while floating down stream, or as the Berry stock-raisers brand their
sheep. They bestow names of endearment, right before people, upon
their wives: names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella), from
the animal kingdom, as: my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or,
choosing from the vegetable kingdom, they call them: my cabbage, my
fig (this only in Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia). Never:
--My flower! Pray note this discretion.

Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:--Bobonne,
--mother,--daughter,--good woman,--old lady: this last when she is
very young.

Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as: Mon bichon, ma
niniche, Tronquette!

We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for
his ugliness, call his wife, _Moumoutte_!

"I would rather he would strike me," said this unfortunate to her
neighbor.

"Poor little woman, she is really unhappy," resumed the neighbor,
looking at me when Moumoutte had gone: "when she is in company with
her husband she is upon pins and needles, and keeps out of his way.
One evening, he actually seized her by the neck and said: 'Come fatty,
let's go home!'"

It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning
with arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions
like these that the wife had to bear in society. This husband used to
give the woman he had won at the point of the Code, public little taps
on her shoulder, he would startle her by a resounding kiss, he
dishonored her by a conspicuous tenderness, seasoned by those
impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French
savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners
are very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction.
It was, it is said, this shocking situation,--one perfectly
appreciated by a discerning jury,--which won the prisoner a verdict
softened by the extenuating circumstances.

The jurymen said to themselves:

"For a wife to murder her husband for these conjug