many marital misfortunes.

Midnight is approaching as a young woman is putting on her curl papers
and yawning as she did so. I do not know whether her melancholy
proceeded from a headache, seated in the right or left lobe of her
brain, or whether she was passing through one of those seasons of
weariness during which all things appear black to us; but to see her
negligently putting up her hair for the night, to see her languidly
raising her leg to take off her garter, it seemed to me that she would
prefer to be drowned rather than to be denied the relief of plunging
her draggled life into the slumber that might restore it. At this
instant, I know not to what degree from the North Pole she stands,
whether at Spitzberg or in Greenland. Cold and indifferent she goes to
bed thinking, as Mistress Walter Shandy might have thought, that the
morrow would be a day of sickness, that her husband is coming home
very late, that the beaten eggs which she has just eaten were not
sufficiently sweetened, that she owes more than five hundred francs to
her dressmaker; in fine, thinking about everything which you may
suppose would occupy the mind of a tired woman. In the meanwhile
arrives her great lout of a husband, who, after some business meeting,
has drunk punch, with a consequent elation. He takes off his boots,
leaves his stockings on a lounge, his bootjack lies before the
fireplace; and wrapping his head up in a red silk handkerchief,
without giving himself the trouble to tuck in the corners, he fires
off at his wife certain interjectory phrases, those little marital
endearments, which form almost the whole conversation at those
twilight hours, where drowsy reason is no longer shining in this
mechanism of ours. "What, in bed already! It was devilish cold this
evening! Why don't you speak, my pet? You've already rolled yourself
up in bed, then! Ah! you are in the dumps and pretend to be asleep!"