y rude blows, from the very fact of their
marriage. (See Meditations entitled _The Predestined_ and _Of the
Honeymoon_.) Most of the means of defence instinctively employed by
husbands are nothing but traps set for the liveliness of feminine
affections.

Now the moment comes when the wife, during the Civil War, traces by a
single act of thought the history of her moral life, and is irritated
on perceiving the prodigious way in which you have taken advantage of
her sensibility. It is very rarely that women, moved either by an
innate feeling for revenge, which they themselves can never explain,
or by their instinct of domination, fail to discover that this quality
in their natural machinery, when brought into play against the man, is
inferior to no other instrument for obtaining ascendancy over him.

With admirable cleverness, they proceed to find out what chords in the
hearts of their husbands are most easily touched; and when once they
discover this secret, they eagerly proceed to put it into practice;
then, like a child with a mechanical toy, whose spring excites their
curiosity, they go on employing it, carelessly calling into play the
movements of the instrument, and satisfied simply 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 b