man's voice
through walls and doors, that your eyes are awake to everything, and
that your young spirit busies itself in divining all, even the meaning
of a word spoken in the air, even the meaning of your mother's slightest
gesture?

There is something of gratitude, something in fact instinctive, in the
predilection of fathers for their daughters and mothers for their sons.

But the act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere
dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of
the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and
who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words, "You
are not very successful in breaking them."

The Marshal de Saxe did not give much consolation to his Popeliniere
when they discovered in company that famous revolving chimney, invented
by the Duc de Richelieu.

"That is the finest piece of horn work that I have ever seen!" cried the
victor of Fontenoy.

Let us hope that your espionage will not give you so troublesome a
lesson. Such misfortunes are the fruits of the civil war and we do not
live in that age.

4. THE INDEX.

The Pope puts books only on the Index; you will mark with a stigma of
reprobation men and things.

It is forbidden to madame to go into a bath except in her own house.

It is forbidden to madame to receive into her house him whom you suspect
of being her lover, and all those who are the accomplices of their love.

It is forbidden to madame to take a walk without you.

But the peculiarities which in each household originate from the
diversity of characters, the numberless incidents of passion, and the
habits of the married people give to this black book so many variations,
the lines in it are multiplied or erased with such rapidity that a
friend of the author has called this Index _The History of Changes in
the Marital Church_.

There are only two things which can be controlled or prescribed in
accordance with definite rules; the first is the country, the second is
the promenade.

A husband ought never to take his wife to the country nor permit her to
go there. Have a country home if you like, live there, entertain there
nobody excepting ladies or old men, but never leave your wife alone
there. But to take her, for even half a day, to the house of another man
is to show yourself as stupid as an ostrich.

To keep guard over a wife in the country is a task