triumph for your wife.

You are, therefore, outlawed from the feminine kingdom. You see
ironical smiles on every lip, you meet an epigram in every answer.
These clever creatures force their daggers and amuse themselves by
sculpturing the handle before dealing you a graceful blow.

The treacherous art of reservation, the tricks of silence, the malice
of suppositions, the pretended good nature of an inquiry, all these
arts are employed against you. A man who undertakes to subjugate his
wife is an example too dangerous to escape destruction from them, for
will not his conduct call up against them the satire of every husband?
Moreover, all of them will attack you, either by bitter witticisms, or
by serious arguments, or by the hackneyed maxims of gallantry. A swarm
of celibates will support all their sallies and you will be assailed
and persecuted as an original, a tyrant, a bad bed-fellow, an
eccentric man, a man not to be trusted.

Your wife will defend you like the bear in the fable of La Fontaine;
she will throw paving stones at your head to drive away the flies that
alight on it. She will tell you in the evening all the things that
have been said about you, and will ask an explanation of acts which
you never committed, and of words which you never said. She professes
to have justified you for faults of which you are innocent; she has
boasted of a liberty which she does not possess, in order to clear you
of the wrong which you have done in denying that liberty. The
deafening rattle which your wife shakes will follow you everywhere
with its obtrusive din. Your darling will stun you, will torture you,
meanwhile arming herself by making you feel only the thorns of married
life. She will greet you with a radiant smile in public, and will be
sullen at home. She will be dull when you are merry, and will make you
detest her merriment when you are moody. Your two faces will present a
perpetual contrast.

Very few men have sufficient force of mind not to succumb to this
preliminary comedy, which is always cleverly played, and resembles the
_hourra_ raised by the Cossacks, as they advance to battle. Many
husbands become irritated and fall into irreparable mistakes. Others
abandon their wives. And, indeed, even those of superior intelligence
do not know how to get hold of the enchanted ring, by which to dispel
this feminine phantasmagoria.

Two-thirds of such women are enabled to win their independence by this
single manoeu