A husband, in accordance with the principles comprised in our
Meditation on _Police_, will expressly forbid his wife to receive the
visits of a celibate whom he suspects of being her lover, and whom she
has promised never again to see. Some minor scenes of the domestic
interior we leave for matrimonial imaginations to conjure up; a
husband can delineate them much better than we can; he will betake
himself in thought back to those days when delightful longings invited
sincere confidences and when the workings of his policy put into
motion certain adroitly handled machinery.
Let us suppose, in order to make more interesting the natural scene to
which I refer, that you who read are a husband, whose carefully
organized police has made the discovery that your wife, profiting by
the hours devoted by you to a ministerial banquet, to which she
probably procured you an invitation, received at your house M. A----z.
Here we find all the conditions necessary to bring about the finest
possible of conjugal catastrophes.
You return home just in time to find your arrival has coincided with
that of M. A----z, for we would not advise you to have the interval
between acts too long. But in what mood should you enter? Certainly
not in accordance with the rules of the previous Meditation.
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