r
should be permitted to see the slightest mystery of her toilette,
is delighted to 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