yestes between your wife and this Nestor--guardian of
your gate. This gate is the Alpha and Omega of an intrigue. May not all
intrigues in love be confined in these words--entering and leaving?

Your house will be of no use to you if it does not stand between a
court and a garden, and so constructed as to be detached from all other
buildings. You must abolish all recesses in your apartments. A cupboard,
if it contain but six pots of preserves, should be walled in. You are
preparing yourself for war, and the first thought of a general is to cut
his enemy off from supplies. Moreover, all the walls must be smooth, in
order to present to the eye lines which may be taken in at a glance,
and permit the immediate recognition of the least strange object. If you
consult the remains of antique monuments you will see that the beauty of
Greek and Roman apartments sprang principally from the purity of their
lines, the clear sweep of their walls and scantiness of furniture. The
Greeks would have smiled in pity, if they had seen the gaps which our
closets make in our drawing-rooms.

This magnificent system of defence should above all be put in active
operation in the apartment of your wife; never let her curtain her bed
in such a way that one can walk round it amid a maze of hangings; be
inexorable in the matter of connecting passages, and let her chamber be
at the bottom of your reception-rooms, so as to show at a glance those
who come and go.

_The Marriage of Figaro_ will no doubt have taught you to put your
wife's chamber at a great height from the ground. All celibates are
Cherubins.

Your means, doubtless, will permit your wife to have a dressing-room,
a bath-room, and a room for her chambermaid. Think then on Susanne,
and never commit the fault of arranging this little room below that of
madame's, but place it always above, and do not shrink from disfiguring
your mansion by hideous divisions in the windows.

If, by ill luck, you see that this dangerous apartment communicates with
that of your wife by a back staircase, earnestly consult your architect;
let his genius exhaust itself in rendering this dangerous staircase as
innocent as the primitive garret ladder; we conjure you let not this
staircase have appended to it any treacherous lurking-place; its stiff
and angular steps must not be arranged with that tempting curve which
Faublas and Justine found so useful when they waited for the exit of
the Marquis de B-----. Archi