She will study your character in order to find weapons against you.  Such a study, which love would hold in horror, reveals itself in the thousand little traps which she lays purposely to make you scold her; when a woman has no excuse for minotaurizing her husband she sets to work to make one.

She will perhaps begin dinner without waiting for you.

If you drive through the middle of the town, she will point out certain objects which escaped your notice; she will sing before you without feeling afraid; she will interrupt you, sometimes vouchsafe no reply to you, and will prove to you, in a thousand different ways, that she is enjoying at your side the use of all her faculties and exercising her private judgment.

She will try to abolish entirely your influence in the management of the house and to become sole mistress of your fortune.  At first this struggle will serve as a distraction for her soul, whether it be empty or in too violent commotion; next, she will find in your opposition a new motive for ridicule.  Slang expressions will not fail her, and in France we are so quickly vanquished by the ironical smile of another!

At other times headaches and nervous attacks make their appearance; but these symptoms furnish matter for a whole future Meditation.  In the world she will speak of you without blushing, and will gaze at you with assurance.  She will begin to blame your least actions because they are at variance with her ideas, or her secret intentions.  She will take no care of what pertains to you, she will not even know whether you have all you need.  You are no longer her paragon.

In imitation of Louis XIV, who carried to his mistresses the bouquets of orange blossoms which the head gardener of Versailles put on his table every morning, M. de Vivonne used almost every day to give his wife choice flowers during the early period of his marriage.  One morning he found the bouquet lying on the side table without having been placed, as usual, in a vase of water.

“Oh!  Oh!” said he, “if I am not a cuckold, I shall very soon be one.”

You go on a journey for eight days and you receive no letters, or you receive one, three pages of which are blank.—­Symptom.

You come home mounted on a valuable horse which you like very much, and between her kisses your wife shows her uneasiness about the horse and his fodder.—­Symptom.

To these features of the case, you will be able to add others.  We shall endeavor in the present volume always to paint things in bold fresco style and leave the miniatures to you.  According to the characters concerned, the indications which we are describing, veiled under the incidents of ordinary life, are of infinite variety.  One man may discover a symptom in the way a shawl is put on, while another needs to receive a fillip to his intellect, in order to notice the indifference of his mate.