e principles, you
will be in perfect safety, even if there are niches enough there to
contain all the saints of Paradise. You will be able, every evening,
with the assistance of your porter, to strike the balance between the
entrances and exits of visitors; and, in order to obtain accurate
results, there is nothing to prevent your teaching him to keep a book
of visitors, in double entry.

If you have a garden, cultivate a taste for dogs, and always keep at
large one of these incorruptible guardians under your windows; you
will thus gain the respect of the Minotaur, especially if you accustom
your four-footed friend to take nothing substantial excepting from the
hand of your porter, so that hard-hearted celibates may not succeed in
poisoning him.

But all these precautions must be taken as a natural thing so that
they may not arouse suspicions. If husbands are so imprudent as to
neglect precautions from the moment they are married, they ought at
once to sell their house and buy another one, or, under the pretext of
repairs, alter their present house in the way prescribed.

You will without scruple banish from your apartment all sofas,
ottomans, lounges, sedan chairs and the like. In the first place, this
is the kind of furniture that adorns the homes of grocers, where they
are universally found, as they are in those of barbers; but they are
essentially the furniture of perdition; I can never see them without
alarm. It has always seemed to me that there the devil himself is
lurking with his horns and cloven foot.

After all, nothing is so dangerous as a chair, and it is extremely
unfortunate that women cannot be shut up within the four walls of a
bare room! What husband is there, who on sitting down on a rickety
chair is not always forced to believe that this chair has received
some of the lessons taught by the _Sofa_ of Crebillion junior? But
happily we have arranged your apartment on such a system of prevention
that nothing so fatal can happen, or, at any rate, not without your
contributory negligence.

One fault which you must contract, and which you must never correct,
will consist in a sort of heedless curiosity, which will make you
examine unceasingly all the boxes, and turn upside down the contents
of all dressing-cases and work-baskets. You must proceed to this
domiciliary visit in a humorous mood, and gracefully, so that each
time you will obtain pardon by exciting the amusement of your wife.

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