After the wife's wretched plight is made evident, the younger
wedding-guests urge her to leave her sot of a husband and divert herself
with them. They offer her their arms and lead her away. Gradually she
yields, becomes animated, and runs about, now with one, now with
another, behaving in a scandalous way: a new moral lesson--the husband's
misconduct incites and causes misconduct on the part of his wife.

The _païen_ thereupon awakes from his drunken stupor; he looks about for
his companion, provides himself with a rope and a stick, and runs after
her. They lead him a long chase, they hide from him, they pass the woman
from one to another, they try to keep her amused, and to deceive her
jealous mate. His _friends_ try hard to intoxicate him. At last, he
overtakes his faithless spouse and attempts to beat her. The most
realistic, shrewdest touch in this parody of the miseries of conjugal
life, is that the jealous husband never attacks those who take his wife
away from him. He is very polite and prudent with them, he does not
choose to vent his wrath on any one but the guilty wife, because she is
supposed to be unable to resist him.

But just as he raises his stick and prepares his rope to bind the
culprit, all the men in the wedding-party interpose and throw themselves
between the two. _Don't strike her! never strike your wife_! is the
formula that is repeated to satiety in these scenes. They disarm the
husband, they force him to pardon his wife and embrace her, and soon he
pretends to love her more dearly than ever. He walks about arm-in-arm
with her, singing and dancing, until a fresh attack of intoxication
sends him headlong to the ground once more: and with that his wife's
lamentations recommence, her discouragement, her pretended misconduct,
the husband's jealousy, the intervention of the bystanders, and the