mechanism of this display, they arm themselves by giving a slight
impulse to the puppet-valve, and thus easily assure themselves either
of the reality of the disease or the artifices of these conjugal
mummeries.

But if by study which is almost superhuman in its intensity a husband
escapes all the artifices which lawless and untamable love suggests to
women, he will beyond doubt be overcome by the employment of a
terrible weapon, the last which a woman would resort to, for she never
destroys with her own hands her empire over her husband without some
sort of repugnance. But this is a poisoned weapon as powerful as the
fatal knife of the executioner. This reflection brings us to the last
paragraph of the present Meditation.


3. OF MODESTY, IN ITS CONNECTION WITH MARRIAGE.

Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary
to inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman
but well understood coquetry? Is it anything but a sentiment that
claims the right, on a woman's part, to dispose of her own body as she
chooses, as one may well believe, when we consider that half the women
in the world go almost naked? Is it anything but a social chimera, as
Diderot supposed, reminding us that this sentiment always gives way
before sickness and before misery?

Justice may be done to all these questions.

An ingenious author has recently put forth the view that men are much
more modest than women. He supports this contention by a great mass of