Talk about calamities, of petty troubles!  This, do you see, is, to a woman’s heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of eight. Ab uno disce omnes:  which means, “There’s one of them:  find the rest in your memory.”  For we have taken this culinary description as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently loved women.

SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.

A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer’s fancy.  This feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry.  A woman’s confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and disappears in a trice like a shooting star.

With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from any marshy country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for the superabundant powers of their imaginations and their nerves.

Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who is really loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do her the justice to say that her first idea is to enjoy it.  All who possess treasures are in dread of thieves, but they do not, like women, lend wings and feet to their golden stores.

The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to abandon it.

Axiom.—­A woman is never deserted without a reason.

This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman.  Hence the rage of a woman deserted.

Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love:  we live in a calculating epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may:  for, of all wives or women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least expensive.  Now, every woman who is loved, has gone through the petty annoyance of suspicion.  This suspicion, whether just or unjust, engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of all.

Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves her rather too often upon a matter of business, that eternal Chaumontel’s affair, which never comes to an end.

Axiom.—­Every household has its Chaumontel’s affair. (See TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE.)

In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business than publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and authors.  The moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has rendered him even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he has hurried away to some easy conquest.  In this respect, women endow men with superhuman faculties.  Fear magnifies everything, it dilates the eyes and the heart:  it makes a woman mad.

“Where is my husband going?  What is my husband doing?  Why has he left me?  Why did he not take me with him?”