f the Minotaur! You must agree with
the doctor that many a love blindly entered upon perishes under the
treatment of hygiene or dies away, thanks to marital policy. Yes [what
a consoling mistake!] many a lover will be driven away by personal
efforts, many a husband will learn how to conceal under an impenetrable
veil the machinery of his machiavelism, and many a man will have better
success than the old philosopher who cried: _Nolo coronari!_

But we are here compelled to acknowledge a mournful truth. Despotism has
its moments of secure tranquillity. Her reign seems like the hour which
precedes the tempest, and whose silence enables the traveler, stretched
upon the faded grass, to hear at a mile's distance, the song of the
cicada. Some fine morning an honest woman, who will be imitated by a
great portion of our own women, discerns with an eagle eye the clever
manoeuvres which have rendered her the victim of an infernal policy.
She is at first quite furious at having for so long a time preserved her
virtue. At what age, in what day, does this terrible revolution occur?
This question of chronology depends entirely upon the genius of each
husband; for it is not the vocation of all to put in practice with the
same talent the precepts of our conjugal gospel.

"A man must have very little love," the mystified wife will exclaim, "to
enter upon such calculations as these! What! From the first day I have
been to him perpetually an object of suspicion! It is monstrous, even a
woman would be incapable of such artful and cruel treachery!"

This is the question. Each husband will be able to understand the
variations of this complaint which will be made in accordance with the
character of the young Fury, of whom he has made a companion.

A woman by no means loses her head under these circumstances; she holds
her tongue and dissembles. Her vengeance will be concealed. Only you
will have some symptoms of hesitation to contend with on the arrival of
the crisis, which we presume you to have reached on the expiration of
the honeymoon; but you will also have to contend against a resolution.
She has determined to revenge herself. From that day, so far as regards
you, her mask, like her heart, has turned to bronze. Formerly you were
an object of indifference to her; you are becoming by degrees absolutely
insupportable. The Civil War commences only at the moment in which, like
the drop of water which makes the full glass overflow, some inci