You should therefore stand before her, putting on an air whose affected calmness betrays the profoundest emotion; then you must choose from among the following topics, which we have rhetorically amplified, and which are most congenial to your feelings:  “Madame,” you must say, “I will speak to you neither of your vows, nor of my love; for you have too much sense and I have too much pride to make it possible that I should overwhelm you with those execrations, which all husbands have a right to utter under these circumstances; for the least of the mistakes that I should make, if I did so, is that I would be fully justified.  I will not now, even if I could, indulge either in wrath or resentment.  It is not I who have been outraged; for I have too much heart to be frightened by that public opinion which almost always treats with ridicule and condemnation a husband whose wife has misbehaved.  When I examine my life, I see nothing there that makes this treachery deserved by me, as it is deserved by many others.  I still love you.  I have never been false, I will not say to my duty, for I have found nothing onerous in adoring you, but not even to those welcome obligations which sincere feeling imposes upon us both.  You have had all my confidence and you have also had the administration of my fortune.  I have refused you nothing.  And now this is the first time that I have turned to you a face, I will not say stern, but which is yet reproachful.  But let us drop this subject, for it is of no use for me to defend myself at a moment when you have proved to me with such energy that there is something lacking in me, and that I am not intended by nature to accomplish the difficult task of rendering you happy.  But I would ask you, as a friend speaking to a friend, how could you have the heart to imperil at the same time the lives of three human creatures:  that of the mother of my children, who will always be sacred to me; that of the head of the family; and finally of him—­who loves—­[she perhaps at these words will throw herself at your feet; you must not permit her to do so; she is unworthy of kneeling there].  For you no longer love me, Eliza.  Well, my poor child [you must not call her my poor child excepting when the crime has not been committed]—­why deceive ourselves?  Why do you not answer me?  If love is extinguished between a married couple, cannot friendship and confidence still survive?  Are we not two companions united in making the same journey?  Can it be said that during the journey the one must never hold out his hand to the other to raise up a comrade or to prevent a comrade’s fall?  But I have perhaps said too much and I am wounding your pride—­Eliza!  Eliza!”

Now what the deuce would you expect a woman to answer?  Why a catastrophe naturally follows, without a single word.

In a hundred women there may be found at least a good half dozen of feeble creatures who under this violent shock return to their husbands never perhaps again to leave them, like scorched cats that dread the fire.  But this scene is a veritable alexipharmaca, the doses of which should be measured out by prudent hands.