INDISCRETIONS.

Women are either chaste—­or vain—­or simply proud.  They are therefore all subject to the following petty trouble: 

Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a woman to themselves,—­a possession exclusively due to the legal ceremony,—­that they dread the public’s making a mistake, and they hasten to brand their consort, as lumber-dealers brand their logs while floating down stream, or as the Berry stock-raisers brand their sheep.  They bestow names of endearment, right before people, upon their wives:  names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella), from the animal kingdom, as:  my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or, choosing from the vegetable kingdom, they call them:  my cabbage, my fig (this only in Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia).  Never:  —­My flower!  Pray note this discretion.

Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:—­Bobonne, —­mother,—­daughter,—­good woman,—­old lady:  this last when she is very young.

Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as:  Mon bichon, ma niniche, Tronquette!

We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for his ugliness, call his wife, Moumoutte!

“I would rather he would strike me,” said this unfortunate to her neighbor.

“Poor little woman, she is really unhappy,” resumed the neighbor, looking at me when Moumoutte had gone:  “when she is in company with her husband she is upon pins and needles, and keeps out of his way.  One evening, he actually seized her by the neck and said:  ’Come fatty, let’s go home!’”

It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning with arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions like these that the wife had to bear in society.  This husband used to give the woman he had won at the point of the Code, public little taps on her shoulder, he would startle her by a resounding kiss, he dishonored her by a conspicuous tenderness, seasoned by those impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners are very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction.  It was, it is said, this shocking situation,—­one perfectly appreciated by a discerning jury,—­which won the prisoner a verdict softened by the extenuating circumstances.

The jurymen said to themselves: 

“For a wife to murder her husband for these conjugal offences, is certainly going rather far; but then a woman is very excusable, when she is so harassed!”

We deeply regret, in the interest of elegant manners, that these arguments are not more generally known.  Heaven grant, therefore, that our book may have an immense success, as women will obtain this advantage from it, that they will be treated as they deserve, that is, as queens.

In this respect, love is much superior to marriage, it is proud of indiscreet sayings and doings.  There are some women that seek them, fish for them, and woe to the man who does not now and then commit one!