But most of them owe their independence to the execution of a plan, whose effect upon the majority of husbands is unfailing and whose perfidies we will now reveal.

One of the greatest of human errors springs from the belief that our honor and our reputation are founded upon our actions, or result from the approbation which the general conscience bestows upon on conduct.  A man who lives in the world is born to be a slave to public opinion.  Now a private man in France has less opportunity of influencing the world than his wife, although he has ample occasion for ridiculing it.  Women possess to a marvelous degree the art of giving color by specious arguments to the recriminations in which they indulge.  They never set up any defence, excepting when they are in the wrong, and in this proceeding they are pre-eminent, knowing how to oppose arguments by precedents, proofs by assertions, and thus they very often obtain victory in minor matters of detail.  They see and know with admirable penetration, when one of them presents to another a weapon which she herself is forbidden to whet.  It is thus that they sometimes lose a husband without intending it.  They apply the match and long afterwards are terror-stricken at the conflagration.

As a general thing, all women league themselves against a married man who is accused of tyranny; for a secret tie unites them all, as it unites all priests of the same religion.  They hate each other, yet shield each other.  You can never gain over more than one of them; and yet this act of seduction would be a triumph for your wife.

You are, therefore, outlawed from the feminine kingdom.  You see ironical smiles on every lip, you meet an epigram in every answer.  These clever creatures force their daggers and amuse themselves by sculpturing the handle before dealing you a graceful blow.

The treacherous art of reservation, the tricks of silence, the malice of suppositions, the pretended good nature of an inquiry, all these arts are employed against you.  A man who undertakes to subjugate his wife is an example too dangerous to escape destruction from them, for will not his conduct call up against them the satire of every husband?  Moreover, all of them will attack you, either by bitter witticisms, or by serious arguments, or by the hackneyed maxims of gallantry.  A swarm of celibates will support all their sallies and you will be assailed and persecuted as an original, a tyrant, a bad bed-fellow, an eccentric man, a man not to be trusted.

Your wife will defend you like the bear in the fable of La Fontaine; she will throw paving stones at your head to drive away the flies that alight on it.  She will tell you in the evening all the things that have been said about you, and will ask an explanation of acts which you never committed, and of words which you never said.  She professes to have justified you for faults of which you are innocent; she has boasted of a liberty which she does not possess, in