with the best
grace in the world, as the most virtuous, the most excellent, the most
sensible of men.

In this way your wife will first arm herself with that generous
sentiment which leads us to respect those who are in pain. The man
most disposed to quarrel with a woman full of life and health becomes
helpless before a woman who is weak and feeble. If your wife has not
attained the end of her secret designs, by means of those various
methods already described, she will quickly seize this all-powerful
weapon. In virtue of this new strategic method, you will see the young
girl, so strong in life and beauty, whom you had wedded in her flower,
metamorphosing herself into a pale and sickly woman.

Now headache is an affection which affords infinite resources to a
woman. This malady, which is the easiest of all to feign, for it is
destitute of any apparent symptom, merely obliges her to say: "I have a
headache." A woman trifles with you and there is no one in the world who
can contradict her skull, whose impenetrable bones defy touch or ocular
test. Moreover, headache is, in our opinion, the queen of maladies, the
pleasantest and the most terrible weapon employed by wives against their
husbands. There are some coarse and violent men who have been taught
the tricks of women by their mistresses, in the happy hours of their
celibacy, and so flatter themselves that they are never to be caught
by this vulgar trap. But all their efforts, all their arguments end by
being vanquished before the magic of these words: "I have a headache."
If a husband complains, or ventures on a reproach, if he tries to resist
the power of this _Il buondo cani_ of marriage, he is lost.

Imagine a young woman, voluptuously lying on a divan, her head softly
supported by a cushion, one hand hanging down; on a small table close at
hand is her glass of lime-water. Now place by her side a burly husband.
He has made five or six turns round the room; but each time he has
turned on his heels to begin his walk all over again, the little invalid
has made a slight movement of her eyebrows in a vain attempt to remind
him that the slightest noise fatigues her. At last he musters all his
courage and utters a protest against her pretended malady, in the bold
phrase:

"And have you really a headache?"

At these words the young woman slightly raises her languid head, lifts
an arm, which feebly falls back again upon her divan, raises her eyes to
the ceiling, raise