answer, without hesitation,  'I married you for
that, monsieur, and for nothing else.'   If I take
her there, she will discover, as soon as she has
crossed the threshold, that she is not so well
dressed as Madame So-and-so.  She will not
perhaps insist on my giving her as many
diamonds as she beholds sparkling on other
ladies; but, by way of compensation, she will
require to be got up by the most fashionable
dressmaker going.  Do you know the average
cost of a ball to the husband of the most
reasonable wife?  Three hundred francs!
Manage that with an income of two thousand
francs per month.  I say nothing about children;
with only one son, we should be in poverty.  And
he, poor little wretch!  What should we have to
leave him, except our debts?  In the country,
respectable people almost always save; because, in
the country, they live for themselves.  In Paris,
honest people almost all run into debt, because
they are obliged to live for others.  I am not
talking of the single man, who has the right to
be a philosopher; but the married man is the
slave of a slave.  He belongs to his wife, who
belongs to vanity."

"Monsieur," said Vigneron, warmly
protesting against so sweeping an accusation, "there
are sensible women to be found even in Paris."

The gentleman smiled politely, and
condescendingly replied, "Yes, monsieur; I am
acquainted with more than one.  I even believe
that in general women are more reasonable than
men.  In the first place, they are more temperate,
and abstain from the poisons which trouble the
brain.  You will find sensible women amongst the
common people— innocent victims of the public-
house; amongst the small shopkeepers, who
lay aside sou by sou, to meet a bill or pay their
rent. You will find them in a higher sphere
amongst all women of a certain age, who have
passed five-and-forty, and who own it.  These
latter have received a more solid education than
the animated dolls manufactured now; they
have had time for reading, and have acquired
the habit of thinking.  They dwell on a moral
elevation, in which the riot of the Boulevards,
the bottles broken at ' la Marche,' and the
chansons of Mademoiselle Thérèse, awake no
echo."

"Ah!" murmured Vigneron, with increasing
interest.  —"The folly which I blame only rages
in a special medium, within a sort of ring fence,
in which several thousand women of unequal
rank, fortune, and beauty, are perpetually
striving to eclipse each other.  This medium, in
which our lot unfortunately is cast, is what is
called, par excellence, 'the world.'  The girls
who danced here to-night are girls of the world;
and marry on the sole condition of becoming
women of the world.  Now the obligation to
find lodgings, carriages, dress, and ornaments
for a woman of the world, hot in the pursuit of
worldly steeple-chases, entails at present such
an amount of outlay that an intelligent bachelor
will look twice before he incurs it."

"But, monsieur," pleaded Vigneron, "there
is no pleasure without pain. Happiness costs a
little dearer in Paris than it does in the
provinces; but it is consequently all the more
highly relished."

At this, another speaker, a man of forty,
went off like a rocket.  "Happiness!" he
shouted.  "Of what sort of happiness are you
speaking, if you please?  I am a widower, and
I give you my solemn promise that you won't
catch me at that phase of happiness again.  I
did not regard money in the least.  My fortune
is only too considerable, for all the good I ever
got out of it. From all quarters I had offers of
marriage portions. I  said, No.  Since I have
the means of marrying the woman who pleases
me, I will take a poor one, and she will thank
me for it.  I therefore married a parvenue. I
raised to my own position one of those poor
desolate creatures who hawk about a forced
smile, a melancholy bait at which nobody bites.
I did bite.  There was a family.  I provided
for the family."

"Doubtless you had your reward."

"They proved to me, figures in hand, that to
produce mademoiselle and bring her forth into
the light of day, they had got into debt a
hundred thousand francs.  I paid it.  I had then
only to pocket my happiness, and walk away
with it.  A pretty joke! My wife, so long as
she was not my wife, agreed with me on every
point.  The day after the wedding, she drew up
her head as stiff as a rattlesnake.  She unmasked
a whole battery of stupidities, old and new,
ready to fire at my poor common sense.  She
had a creed of her own, principles of her own, a
confessor of her own, a literature and a
pharmacopœa of her own, with a whole battalion of
female friends of her own, which never, thank
Heaven, have been mine.  My tastes are simple;
hers were quite the contrary.  My father left
me a name of which I am proud, and a title for
which I do not care a straw.  One belongs to
one's epoch  my wife belonged to hers.  The
right to call herself 'marquise' was too much
for her poor weak head.  She dragged my coat
of arms out of its retreat, to stick it on the
panels of my carriage, on my plate, linen, carpets,
furniture.  I only wonder she did not clap it on
my back.  She was born Dupont in the male
line, and Mathieu in the female.  Take care,
therefore, how you marry a 'bourgeoise' out of
love for simplicity!  After two years of the
most disunited union that ever fettered a well-
meaning man, I was neither master nor servant
in my own house.  My wife, backed by half a
dozen dear friends, had usurped everything.
They gave slander-parties at my expense, at
home and abroad.  Every Saturday, seven
Christian mouths confessed my iniquities to a
worthy Jesuit.  Thoroughly worn out, I escaped
by the door; and I ask you, Monsieur the
Moralist, what you would have done in my
place?  My wife was not a woman, but
something hollow, endowed with locomotion, warm,
restless, and overstocked with nerves; a
fountain of tears, an orchestra of cries, a catapult of
convulsions, a galvanic pile. And all her friends
(I have only reckoned six, but they might be a