Women are constantly the dupes or the victims of excessive sensibility;
but we have already demonstrated that with the greater number of them
this delicacy of soul must needs, almost without their knowing it,
receive many rude blows, from the very fact of their marriage. (See
Meditations entitled _The Predestined_ and _Of the Honeymoon_.) Most of
the means of defence instinctively employed by husbands are nothing but
traps set for the liveliness of feminine affections.
Now the moment comes when the wife, during the Civil War, traces by a
single act of thought the history of her moral life, and is irritated
on perceiving the prodigious way in which you have taken advantage of
her sensibility. It is very rarely that women, moved either by an
innate feeling for revenge, which they themselves can never explain, or
by their instinct of domination, fail to discover that this quality in
their natural machinery, when brought into play against the man, is
inferior to no other instrument for obtaining ascendancy over him.
With admirable cleverness, they proceed to find out what chords in the
hearts of their husbands are most easily touched; and when once they
discover this secret, they eagerly proceed to put it into practice;
then, like a child with a mechanical toy, whose spring excites their
curiosity, they go on employing it, carelessly calling into play the
movements of the instrument, and satisfied simply with their success in
doing so. If they kill you, they will mourn over you with the best
grace in the world, as the most virtuous, the most excellent, the most
sensible of men.
In this way your wife will first arm herself with that generous
sentiment which leads us to respect those who are in pain. The man most
disposed to quarrel with a woman full of life and health becomes
helpless before a woman who is weak and feeble. If your wife has not
attained the end of her secret designs, by means of those various
methods already described, she will quickly seize this all-powerful
weapon. In virtue of this new strategic method, you will see the young
girl, so strong in life and beauty, whom you had wedded in her flower,
metamorphosing herself into a pale and sickly woman.
Now headache is an affection which affords infinite resources to a
woman. This malady, which is the easiest of all to feign, for it is
destitute of any apparent symptom, merely obliges her to say: “I have a
headache.” A woman trifles with you and there is no one in the world
who can contradict her skull, whose impenetrable bones defy touch or
ocular test. Moreover, headache is, in our opinion, the queen of
maladies, the pleasantest and the most terrible weapon employed by
wives against their husbands. There are some coarse and violent men who
have been taught the tricks of women by their mistresses, in the happy
hours of their celibacy, and so flatter themselves that they are never
to be caught by this vulgar trap. But all their efforts, all their
arguments end by being vanquished before the magic of these words: “I
have a headache.” If a husband complains, or ventures on a reproach, if
he tries to resist the power of this _Il buondo cani_ of marriage, he
is lost.
Imagine a young woman, voluptuously lying on a divan, her head softly
supported by a cushion, one hand hanging down; on a small table close
at hand is her glass of lime-water. Now place by her side a burly
husband. He has made five or six turns round the room; but each time he
has turned on his heels to begin his walk all over again, the little
invalid has made a slight movement of her eyebrows in a vain attempt to
remind him that the slightest noise fatigues her. At last he musters
all his courage and utters a protest against her pretended malady, in
the bold phrase:
“And have you really a headache?”
At these words the young woman slightly raises her languid head, lifts
an arm, which feebly falls back again upon her divan, raises her eyes
to the ceiling, raises all that she has power to raise; then darting at
you a leaden glance, she says in a voice of remarkable feebleness:
“Oh! What can be the matter with me? I suffer the agonies of death! And
this is all the comfort you give me! Ah! you men, it is plainly seen
that nature has not given you the task of bringing children into the
world. What egoists and tyrants you are! You take us in all the beauty
of our youth, fresh, rosy, with tapering waist, and then all is well!
When your pleasures have ruined the blooming gifts which we received
from nature, you never forgive us for having forfeited them to you!
That was all understood. You will allow us to have neither the virtues
nor the sufferings of our condition. You must needs have children, and
we pass many nights in taking care of them. But child-bearing has
ruined our health, and left behind the germs of serious maladies.—Oh,
what pain I suffer! There are few women who are not subject to
headaches; but your wife must be an exception. You even laugh at our
sufferings; that is generosity!—please don’t walk about —I should not
have expected this of you!—Stop the clock; the click of the pendulum
rings in my head. Thanks! Oh, what an unfortunate creature I am! Have
you a scent-bottle with you? Yes, oh! for pity’s sake, allow me to
suffer in peace, and go away; for this scent splits my head!”
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.”
O headache, protectress of love, tariff of married life, buckler
against which all married desires expire! O mighty headache! Can it be
possible that lovers have never sung thy praises, personified thee, or
raised thee to the skies? O magic headache, O delusive headache, blest
be the brain that first invented thee! Shame on the doctor who shall
find out thy preventive! Yes, thou art the only ill that women bless,
doubtless through gratitude for the good things thou dispensest to
them, O deceitful headache! O magic headache!