tal war break out?
You do not believe that your wife will call out regiments and sound
the trumpet, do you? She will, perhaps, have a commanding officer, but
that is all. And this feeble army corps will be sufficient to destroy
the peace of your establishment.

"You forbid me to see the people that I like!" is an exordium which
has served for a manifesto in most homes. This phrase, with all the
ideas that are concomitant, is oftenest employed by vain and
artificial women.

The most usual manifesto is that which is proclaimed in the conjugal
bed, the principal theatre of war. This subject will be treated in
detail in the Meditation entitled: _Of Various Weapons_, in the
paragraph, _Of Modesty in its Connection with Marriage_.

Certain women of a lymphatic temperament will pretend to have the
spleen and will even feign death, if they can only gain thereby the
benefit of a secret divorce.

But most of them owe their independence to the execution of a plan,
whose effect upon the majority of husbands is unfailing and whose
perfidies we will now reveal.

One of the greatest of human errors springs from the belief that our
honor and our reputation are founded upon our actions, or result from
the approbation which the general conscience bestows upon on conduct.
A man who lives in the world is born to be a slave to public opinion.
Now a private man in France has less opportunity of influencing the
world than his wife, although he has ample occasion for ridiculing it.
Women possess to a marvelous degree the art of giving color by
specious arguments to the recriminations in which they indulge. They
never set up any defence, excepting when they are in the wrong, and in
this proceeding they are pre-eminent, knowing how to oppose arguments
by precedents, proofs by assertions, and thus they very often obtain
victory in minor matters of detail. They see and know with admirable
penetration, when one of them presents to another a weapon which she
herself is forbidden to whet. It is thus that they sometimes lose a
husband without intending it. They apply the match and long afterwards
are terror-stricken at the conflagration.

As a general thing, all women league themselves against a married man
who is accused of tyranny; for a secret tie unites them all, as it
unites all priests of the same religion. They hate each other, yet
shield each other. You can never gain over more than one of them; and
yet this act of seduction would be a