Certain incidents will, of course, be met with which diversify more or
less the typical example which we have given, but the march of the
drama is almost always the same. Moreover a husband ought always to
distrust the woman friends of his wife. The subtle artifices of these
lying creatures rarely fail of their effect, for they are seconded by
two enemies, who always keep close to a man--and these are vanity and
desire.
4. OF THE LOVER'S ALLIES.
The man who hastens to tell another man that he has dropped a thousand
franc bill from his pocket-book, or even that the handkerchief is
coming out of his pocket, would think it a mean thing to warn him that
some one was carrying off his wife. There is certainly something
extremely odd in this moral inconsistency, but after all it admits of
explanation. Since the law cannot exercise any interference with
matrimonial rights, the citizens have even less right to constitute
themselves a conjugal police; and when one restores a thousand franc
bill to him who has lost it, he acts under a certain kind of
obligation, founded on the principle which says, "Do unto others as ye
would they should do unto you!"
But by what reasoning can justification be found for the help which
one celibate never asks in vain, but always receives from another
celibate in deceiving a husband, and how shall we qualify the
rendering of such help? A man who is incapable of assisting a gendarme
in discovering an assassin, has no scruple in taking a husband to a
theatre, to a concert or even to a questionable house, in order to
help a comrade, whom he would not hesitate to kill in a duel
to-morrow, in keeping an assignation, the result of which is to
introduce into a family a spurious child, and to rob two brothers of a
portion of their fortune by giving them a co-heir whom they never
perhaps would otherwise have had; or to effect the misery of three
human beings.
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