exhibit herself to her husband in the most disadvantageous
situation that can possibly be imagined.

It is by means of this rigorous system that she will try to banish
you from the conjugal bed. Mrs. Shandy may be taken to mean us harm in
bidding the father of Tristram wind up the clock; so long as your wife
is not blamed for the pleasure she takes in interrupting you by the most
imperative questions. Where there formerly was movement and life is now
lethargy and death. An act of love becomes a transaction long discussed
and almost, as it were, settled by notarial seal. But we have in another
place shown that we never refuse to seize upon the comic element in a
matrimonial crisis, although here we may be permitted to disdain the
diversion which the muse of Verville and of Marshall have found in the
treachery of feminine manoeuvres, the insulting audacity of their talk,
amid the cold-blooded cynicism which they exhibit in certain situations.
It is too sad to laugh at, and too funny to mourn over. When a woman
resorts to such extreme measures, worlds at once separate her from her
husband. Nevertheless, there are some women to whom Heaven has given the
gift of being charming under all circumstances, who know how to put a
certain witty and comic grace into these performances, and who have
such smooth tongues, to use the expression of Sully, that they obtain
forgiveness for their caprices and their mockeries, and never estrange
the hearts of their husbands.

What soul is so robust, what man so violently in love as to persist
in his passion, after ten years of marriage, in presence of a wife who
loves him no longer, who gives him proofs of this every moment, who
repulses him, who deliberately shows herself bitter, caustic, sickly and
capricious, and who will abjure her vows of elegance and cleanliness,
rather than not see her husband turn away from her; in presence of a
wife who will stake the success of her schemes upon the horror caused by
her indecency?

All this, my dear sir, is so much more horrible because--

XCII.
LOVERS IGNORE MODESTY.

We have now arrived at the last infernal circle in the Divine Comedy
of Marriage. We are at the very bottom of Hell. There is something
inexpressibly terrible in the situation of a married woman at the moment
when unlawful love turns her away from her duties as mother and wife. As
Diderot has very well put it, "infidelit