the pastoral staff.

What is it that produces this wonderful characteristic of humanity?
Ignorance; ignorance is the sole support of despotism, which lives on
darkness and silence. Now happiness in the domestic establishment as
in a political state is a negative happiness. The affection of a
people for a king, in an absolute monarchy, is perhaps less contrary
to nature than the fidelity of a wife towards her husband, when love
between them no longer exists. Now we know that, in your house, love
at this moment has one foot on the window-sill. It is necessary for
you, therefore, to put into practice that salutary rigor by which M.
de Metternich prolongs his _statu quo_; but we would advise you to do
so with more tact and with still more tenderness; for your wife is
more crafty than all the Germans put together, and as voluptuous as
the Italians.

You should, therefore, try to put off as long as possible the fatal
moment when your wife asks you for a book. This will be easy. You will
first of all pronounce in a tone of disdain the phrase "Blue
stocking;" and, on her request being repeated, you will tell her what
ridicule attaches, among the neighbors, to pedantic women.

You will then repeat to her, very frequently, that the most lovable
and the wittiest women in the world are found at Paris, where women
never read;

That women are like people of quality who, according to Mascarillo,
know everything without having learned anything; that a woman while
she is dancing, or while she is playing cards, without even having the
appearance of listening, ought to know how to pick up from the