t 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, "infidelity in a woman is like
unbelief in a priest, the last extreme of human failure; for her it is
the greatest of social crimes, since it implies in her every other
crime besides, and indeed either a wife profanes her lawless love by
continuing to belong to her husband, or she breaks all the ties which
attach her to her family, by giving herself over altogether to her
lover. She ought to choose between the two courses, for her sole
possible excuse lies in the intensity of her love."

She lives then between the claims of two obligations. It is a dilemma;
she will work either the unhappiness of her lover, if he is sincere in
his passion, or that of her husband, if she is still beloved by him.

It is to this frightful dilemma of feminine life that all the strange
inconsistencies of women's conduct is to be attributed. In this lies
the origin of all their lies, all their perfidies; here is the secret
of all their mysteries. It is something to make one shudder. Moreover,
even as simply based upon cold-blooded calculations, the conduct of a
woman who accepts the unhappiness which attends virtue and scorns the
bliss which is bought by crime, is a hundred times more