ies, it will be of good health; you
launched four maledictions upon her, in the name of your sublime young
woman, and four times she blessed you for it. Caroline does not know
that in the depths of your heart there wriggles a little red fish like
a crocodile, concealed beneath conjugal love like the other would be hid
in a basin.

A few days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal terms
to Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her, and
Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you and
says she never was happier.

You rush out in a rage, you are beside yourself, and are glad to meet a
friend, that you may work off your bile.

"Don't you ever marry, George; it's better to see your heirs carrying
away your furniture while the death-rattle is in your throat, better
to go through an agony of two hours without a drop to cool your tongue,
better to be assassinated by inquiries about your will by a nurse
like the one in Henry Monnier's terrible picture of a 'Bachelor's Last
Moments!' Never marry under any pretext!"

Fortunately you see the sublime young woman no more. You are saved from
the tortures to which a criminal passion was leading you. You fall back
again into the purgatory of your married bliss; but you begin to be
attentive to Madame de Fischtaminel, with whom you were dreadfully in
love, without being able to get near her, while you were a bachelor.

OBSERVATIONS.

When you have arrived at this point in the latitude or longitude of
the matrimonial ocean, there appears a slight chronic, intermittent
affection, not unlike the toothache. Here, I see, you stop me to ask,
"How are we to find the longitude in this sea? When can a husband
be sure he has attained this nautical point? And can the danger be
avoided?"

You may arrive at this point, look you, as easily after ten months as
ten years of wedlock; it depends upon the speed of the vessel, its
style of rigging, upon the trade winds, the force of the currents, and
especially upon the composition of the crew. You have this advantage
over the mariner, that he has but one method of calculating his
position, while husbands have at least a thousand of reckoning theirs.

EXAMPLE: Caroline, your late darling, your late treasure, who is now
merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while
walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to
take your arm at all;

Or