m airs and
carelessly chew bits of straw and thread, while still in your shirt
and drawers. You are like a hare frisking on a flowering dew-perfumed
meadow. You leave off your morning gown till the last extremity, when
breakfast is on the table. During the day, if you meet a friend and he
happens to speak of women, you defend them; you consider women charming,
delicious, there is something divine about them.

How often are our opinions dictated to us by the unknown events of our
life!

You take your wife to Madame Deschars'. Madame Deschars is a mother and
is exceedingly devout. You never see any newspapers at her house: she
keeps watch over her daughters by three different husbands, and keeps
them all the more closely from the fact that she herself has, it is
said, some little things to reproach herself with during the career of
her two former lords. At her house, no one dares risk a jest. Everything
there is white and pink and perfumed with sanctity, as at the houses of
widows who are approaching the confines of their third youth. It seems
as if every day were Sunday there.

You, a young husband, join the juvenile society of young women and
girls, misses and young people, in the chamber of Madame Deschars. The
serious people, politicians, whist-players, and tea-drinkers, are in the
parlor.

In Madame Deschars' room they are playing a game which consists in
hitting upon words with several meanings, to fit the answers that each
player is to make to the following questions:

How do you like it?

What do you do with it?

Where do you put it?

Your turn comes to guess the word, you go into the parlor, take part in
a discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They have
selected a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical replies.
Everybody knows that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads, the best
way is to choose a very ordinary word, and to invent phrases that will
send the parlor Oedipus a thousand leagues from each of his previous
thoughts.

This game is a poor substitute for lansquenet or dice, but it is not
very expensive.

The word MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion.
Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other
acceptations, has that of _mal_ [evil], a substantive that signifies, in
aesthetics, the opposite of good; of _mal_ [pain, disease, complaint],
a substantive that enters into a thousand pathological expressions; then
_ma