cks which are violent, before the Pyrrhic
dance of married life! Oh! how many hopes for a lover are there in the
vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances,
in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in contortion! It is then
that a woman is carried away like an impetuous wind, darts forth like
the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a movement like a billow which
glides over the white pebbles. She is overcome with excess of love, she
sees the future, she is the seer who prophesies, but above all, she sees
the present moment and tramples on her husband, and impresses him with a
sort of terror.

The sight of his wife flinging off vigorous men as if they were so many
feathers, is often enough to deter a man from ever striving to wrong
her. He will be like the child who, having pulled the trigger of some
terrific engine, has ever afterwards an incredible respect for the
smallest spring. I have known a man, gentle and amiable in his ways,
whose eyes were fixed upon those of his wife, exactly as if he had been
put into a lion's cage, and some one had said to him that he must not
irritate the beast, if he would escape with his life.

Nervous attacks of this kind are very fatiguing and become every day
more rare. Romanticism, however, has maintained its ground.

Sometimes, we meet with phlegmatic husbands, those men whose love is
long enduring, because they store up their emotions, whose genius gets
the upper hand of these headaches and nervous attacks; but these sublime
creatures are rare. Faithful disciples of the blessed St. Thomas,
who wished to put his finger into the wound, they are endowed with an
incredulity worthy of an atheist. Imperturbable in the midst of all
these fraudulent headaches and all these traps set by neurosis, they
concentrate their attention on the comedy which is being played before
them, they examine the actress, they search for one of the springs that
sets her going; and when they have discovered the mechanism of
this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight impulse to the
puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either of the reality of
the disease or the artifices of these conjugal mummeries.

But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband
escapes all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to
women, he will beyond doubt be overcome by the employment of a terrible
weapon, the last which a woman would resort to, f