t might restore it. At this instant,
I know not to what degree from the North Pole she stands, whether
at Spitzberg or in Greenland. Cold and indifferent she goes to bed
thinking, as Mistress Walter Shandy might have thought, that the morrow
would be a day of sickness, that her husband is coming home very late,
that the beaten eggs which she has just eaten were not sufficiently
sweetened, that she owes more than five hundred francs to her
dressmaker; in fine, thinking about everything which you may suppose
would occupy the mind of a tired woman. In the meanwhile arrives her
great lout of a husband, who, after some business meeting, has drunk
punch, with a consequent elation. He takes off his boots, leaves his
stockings on a lounge, his bootjack lies before the fireplace; and
wrapping his head up in a red silk handkerchief, without giving himself
the trouble to tuck in the corners, he fires off at his wife certain
interjectory phrases, those little marital endearments, which form
almost the whole conversation at those twilight hours, where drowsy
reason is no longer shining in this mechanism of ours. "What, in bed
already! It was devilish cold this evening! Why don't you speak, my pet?
You've already rolled yourself up in bed, then! Ah! you are in the dumps
and pretend to be asleep!" These exclamations are mingled with yawns;
and after numberless little incidents which according to the usage of
each home vary this preface of the night, our friend flings himself into
his own bed with a heavy thud.

Alas! before a woman who is cold, how mad a man must appear when desire
renders him alternately angry and tender, insolent and abject, biting as
an epigram and soothing as a madrigal; when he enacts with more or less
sprightliness the scene where, in _Venice Preserved_, the genius of
Orway has represented the senator Antonio, repeating a hundred times
over at the feet of Aquilina: "Aquilina, Quilina, Lina, Aqui, Nacki!"
without winning from her aught save the stroke of her whip, inasmuch
as he has undertaken to fawn upon her like a dog. In the eyes of every
woman, even of a lawful wife, the more a man shows eager passion under
these circumstances, the more silly he appears. He is odious when he
commands, he is minotaurized if he abuses his power. On this point I
would remind you of certain aphorisms in the marriage catechism from
which you will see that you are violating its most sacred precepts.
Whether a woman yields, or does