his pledge on his wedding-day and is
able to keep it conscientiously.

In giving your wife unrestrained liberty to write and to receive
letters, you will be enabled to discern the moment she begins to
correspond with a lover.

But suppose your wife distrusts you and covers with impenetrable clouds
the means she takes to conceal from you her correspondence. Is it not
then time to display that intellectual power with which we armed you in
our Meditation entitled _Of the Custom House_? The man who does not see
when his wife writes to her lover, and when she receives an answer, is a
failure as a husband.

The proposed study which you ought to bestow upon the movements,
the actions, the gestures, the looks of your wife, will be perhaps
troublesome and wearying, but it will not last long; the only point is
to discover when your wife and her lover correspond and in what way.

We cannot believe that a husband, even of moderate intelligence, will
fail to see through this feminine manoeuvre, when once he suspects its
existence.

Meanwhile, you can judge from a single incident what means of police and
of restraint remain to you in the event of such a correspondence.

A young lawyer, whose ardent passion exemplified certain of the
principles dwelt upon in this important part of our work, had married a
young person whose love for him was but slight; yet this circumstance
he looked upon as an exceedingly happy one; but at the end of his first
year of marriage he perceived that his dear Anna [for Anna was her name]
had fallen in love with the head clerk of a stock-broker.

Adolph was a young man of about twenty-five, handsome in face and
as fond of amusement as any other celibate. He was frugal, discreet,
possessed of an excellent heart, rode well, talked well, had fine black
hair always curled, and dressed with taste. In short, he would have done
honor and credit to a duchess. The advocate was ugly, short, stumpy,
square-shouldered, mean-looking, and, moreover, a husband. Anna, tall
and pretty, had almond eyes, white skin and refined features. She
was all love; and passion lighted up her glance with a bewitching
expression. While her family was poor, Maitre Lebrun had an income of
twelve thousand francs. That explains all.

One evening Lebrun got home looking extremely chop-fallen. He went into
his study to work; but he soon came back shivering to his wife, for he
had caught a fever and hurriedly went to bed. There he lay gr