anks! Oh, what an unfortunate
creature I am! Have you a scent-bottle with you? Yes, oh! for pity's
sake, allow me to suffer in peace, and go away; for this scent splits
my head!"

What can you say in reply? Do you not hear within you a voice which
cries, "And what if she is actually suffering?" Moreover, almost all
husbands evacuate the field of battle very quietly, while their wives
watch them from the corner of their eyes, marching off on tip-toe and
closing the door quietly on the chamber henceforth to be considered
sacred by them.

Such is the headache, true or false, which is patronized at your home.
Then the headache begins to play a regular role in the bosom of your
family. It is a theme on which a woman can play many admirable
variations. She sets it forth in every key. With the aid of the
headache alone a wife can make a husband desperate. A headache seizes
madame when she chooses, where she chooses, and as much as she
chooses. There are headaches of five days, of ten minutes, periodic or
intermittent headaches.

You sometimes find your wife in bed, in pain, helpless, and the blinds
of her room are closed. The headache has imposed silence on every one,
from the regions of the porter's lodge, where he is cutting wood, even
to the garret of your groom, from which he is throwing down innocent
bundles of straw. Believing in this headache, you leave the house, but
on your return you find that madame has decamped! Soon madame returns,
fresh and ruddy:

"The doctor came," she says, "and advised me to take exercise, and I
find myself much better!"

Another day you wish to enter madame's room.

"Oh, sir," says the maid, showing the most profound astonishment,
"madame has her usual headache, and I have never seen her in such
pain! The doctor has been sent for."

"You are a happy man," said Marshal Augereau to General R-----, "to
have such a pretty wife!"

"To have!" replied the other. "If I have my wife ten days in the year,
that is about all. These confounded women have always either the
headache or some other thing!"

The headache in France takes the place of the sandals, which, in
Spain, the Confessor leaves at the door of the chamber in which he is
with his penitent.

If your wife, foreseeing some hostile intentions on your part, wishes
to make herself as inviolable as the charter, she immediately gets up
a little headache performance. She goes to bed in a most deliberate
fashion, she utters shrieks wh