with their success
in doing so. If they kill you, they will mourn over you 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 f