woman who is loved, has gone through the petty
annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion, whether just or unjust,
engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of
all.

Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves her
rather too often upon a matter of business, that eternal Chaumontel's
affair, which never comes to an end.

Axiom.--Every household has its Chaumontel's affair. (See TROUBLE WITHIN
TROUBLE.)

In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business than
publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and authors. The
moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has rendered him
even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he has hurried
away to some easy conquest. In this respect, women endow men with
superhuman faculties. Fear magnifies everything, it dilates the eyes and
the heart: it makes a woman mad.

"Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left
me? Why did he not take me with him?"

These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass
of suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these
frightful tempests which ravage a woman's heart springs an ignoble,
unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the
shopkeeper's wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker's lady, the
angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate,
at once puts into execution. They imitate the government, every one
of them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the
public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in the
interest of their love. This fatal woman's curiosity reduces them to
the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in this
situation, has not lost her self-respect,--a situation in which her
jealousy will not permit her to respect anything: neither your little
boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of your
desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with private
compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling dressing-case, nor
your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way that her husband
dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your india-rubber
girdles--her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman trusts, is her
maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and approves her.

In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and