believes in matters of business
than publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and
authors. The moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has
rendered him even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he
has hurried away to some easy conquest. In this respect, women endow
men with superhuman faculties. Fear magnifies everything, it dilates
the eyes and the heart: it makes a woman mad.

"Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left
me? Why did he not take me with him?"

These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of
suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these
frightful tempests which ravage a woman's heart springs an ignoble,
unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the
shopkeeper's wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker's lady, the
angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate,
at once puts into execution. They imitate the government, every one of
them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the
public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in
the interest of their love. This fatal woman's curiosity reduces them
to the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in
this situation, has not lost her self-respect,--a situation in which
her jealousy will not permit her to respect anything: neither your
little boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of
your desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with
private compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling
dressing-case, nor your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way
that her husband dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your
india-rubber girdles--her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman
trusts, is her maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and
approves her.

In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman
makes no calculations, takes no observations. She simply wishes to
know the whole truth.

And Justine is delighted: she sees her mistress compromising herself
with her, and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her
suspicions, with terrible friendship. Justine and Caroline hold
councils and have secret interviews. All espionage involves such
relationships. In this pass, a maid becomes the arbitress of the fate
of the married couple. Example: Lord Byron.

"M