of romantic neurosis; to one belongs the
empire gained by nerves, to the other the empire gained by vapors.

Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in tears.

"What is the matter, my darling?"

"It is nothing."

"But you are in tears!"

"I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the clouds,
and those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some disaster--I
think I must be going to die."

Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead
uncle, of her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all
these mournful shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses, she
is attacked with all the pains they felt, she feels her heart palpitate
with excessive violence, she feels her spleen swelling. You say to
yourself, with a self-satisfied air:

"I know exactly what this is all about!"

And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns like
an open box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew, who
implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful memories.
She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own funeral, is
buried, plants over her tomb the green canopy of a weeping willow, and
at the very time when you would like to raise a joyful epithalamium,
you find an epitaph to greet you all in black. Your wish to console her
melts away in the cloud of Ixion.

There are women of undoubted fidelity who in this way extort from their
feeling husbands cashmere shawls, diamonds, the payment of their debts,
or the rent of a box at the theatre; but almost always vapors are
employed as decisive weapons in Civil War.

On the plea of her spinal affection or of her weak chest, a woman
takes pains to seek out some distraction or other; you see her dressing
herself in soft fabrics like an invalid with all the symptoms of spleen;
she never goes out because an intimate friend, her mother or her sister,
has tried to tear her away from that divan which monopolizes her and
on which she spends her life in improvising elegies. Madame is going to
spend a fortnight in the country because the doctor orders it. In short,
she goes where she likes and does what she likes. Is it possible that
there can be a husband so brutal as to oppose such desires, by hindering
a wife from going to seek a cure for her cruel sufferings? For it
has been established after many long discussions that in the nerves
originate the most fearful t