What can you say in reply?  Do you not hear within you a voice which cries, “And what if she is actually suffering?” Moreover, almost all husbands evacuate the field of battle very quietly, while their wives watch them from the corner of their eyes, marching off on tip-toe and closing the door quietly on the chamber henceforth to be considered sacred by them.

Such is the headache, true or false, which is patronized at your home.  Then the headache begins to play a regular role in the bosom of your family.  It is a theme on which a woman can play many admirable variations.  She sets it forth in every key.  With the aid of the headache alone a wife can make a husband desperate.  A headache seizes madame when she chooses, where she chooses, and as much as she chooses.  There are headaches of five days, of ten minutes, periodic or intermittent headaches.

You sometimes find your wife in bed, in pain, helpless, and the blinds of her room are closed.  The headache has imposed silence on every one, from the regions of the porter’s lodge, where he is cutting wood, even to the garret of your groom, from which he is throwing down innocent bundles of straw.  Believing in this headache, you leave the house, but on your return you find that madame has decamped!  Soon madame returns, fresh and ruddy: 

“The doctor came,” she says, “and advised me to take exercise, and I find myself much better!”

Another day you wish to enter madame’s room.

“Oh, sir,” says the maid, showing the most profound astonishment, “madame has her usual headache, and I have never seen her in such pain!  The doctor has been sent for.”

“You are a happy man,” said Marshal Augereau to General R-----, “to
have such a pretty wife!”

“To have!” replied the other.  “If I have my wife ten days in the year, that is about all.  These confounded women have always either the headache or some other thing!”

The headache in France takes the place of the sandals, which, in Spain, the Confessor leaves at the door of the chamber in which he is with his penitent.

If your wife, foreseeing some hostile intentions on your part, wishes to make herself as inviolable as the charter, she immediately gets up a little headache performance.  She goes to bed in a most deliberate fashion, she utters shrieks which rend the heart of the hearer.  She goes gracefully through a series of gesticulations so cleverly executed that you might think her a professional contortionist.  Now what man is there so inconsiderate as to dare to speak to a suffering woman about desires which, in him, prove the most perfect health?  Politeness alone demands of him perfect silence.  A woman knows under these circumstances that by means of this all-powerful headache, she can at her will paste on her bed the placard which sends back home the amateurs who have been allured by the announcement of the Comedie Francaise, when they read the words:  “Closed through the sudden indisposition of Mademoiselle Mars.”