to a personage who had not yet studied the
world's ledger, nor deciphered the heart of a single woman.

That personage was myself. If I had then the desire to dance with
those fair women, it was simply because I knew a secret which
emboldened my timidity.

"So after all, madame, you have your cross?" I said to her first.

"Well, I fairly won it!" she replied, with a smile hard to describe.

"How is this! no ear-rings?" I remarked to the wife of my friend.

"Ah!" she replied, "I have enjoyed possession of them during a whole
luncheon time, but you see that I have ended by converting Alexander."

"He allowed himself to be easily convinced?"

She answered with a look of triumph.

Eight years afterwards, this scene suddenly rose to my memory, though
I had long since forgotten it, and in the light of the candles I
distinctly discerned the moral of it. Yes, a woman has a horror of
being convinced of anything; when you try to persuade her she
immediately submits to being led astray and continues to play the role
which nature gave her. In her view, to allow herself to be won over is
to grant a favor, but exact arguments irritate and confound her; in
order to guide her you must employ the power which she herself so
frequently employs and which lies in an appeal to sensibility. It is
therefore in his wife, and not in himself, that a husband can find the
instruments of his despotism; as diamond cuts diamond so must the
woman be made to tyrannize over herself. To know how to offer the
ear-rings in such a way that they will be returned, is a secret whose
application embraces the slightest details of life. And now let us
pass to the second observation.

"He who can manage property of one toman, can manage one of an hundred
thousand," says an Indian proverb; and I, for my part, will enlarge
upon this Asiatic adage and declare, that he who can govern one woman
can govern a nation, and indeed there is very much similarity between
these two governments. Must not the policy of husbands be very nearly
the same as the policy of kings? Do not we see kings trying to amuse
the people in order to deprive them of their liberty; throwing food at
their heads for one day, in order to make them forget the misery of a
whole year; preaching to them not to steal and at the same time
stripping them of everything; and saying to them: "It seems to me that
if I were the people I should be virtuous"? It is from England that we
obtain the preceden