Next, _La Femme de Quarante Ans_, a capital tale, full of exquisite fun and sparkling satire: La femme de quarante ans has a husband and _three_ lovers; all of whom find out their mutual connection one starry night; for the lady of forty is of a romantic poetical turn, and has given her three admirers _a star apiece_, saying to one and the other, ‘Alphonse, when yon pale orb rises in heaven, think of me;’ ‘Isidore, when that bright planet sparkles in the sky, remember your Caroline,’ etc. _Un Acte de Vertu_, from which we have taken Dambergeac’s history, contains him, the husband--a wife--and a brace of lovers; and a great deal of fun takes place in the manner in which one lover supplants the other. Pretty morals truly! If we examine an author who rejoices in the aristocratic name of Le Comte Horace de Viel-Castel, we find, though with infinitely less wit, exactly the same intrigues going on. A noble Count lives in the Faubourg St. Honoré, and has a noble Duchess for a mistress: he introduces her Grace to the Countess, his wife. The Countess, his wife, in order to _ramener_ her lord to his conjugal duties, is counselled, by a friend, _to pretend to take a lover_: one is found, who, poor fellow! takes the affair in earnest: climax--duel, death, despair, and what not! In the _Faubourg St. Germain_, another novel by the same writer, which professes to describe the very pink of that society which Napoleon dreaded more than Russia, Prussia, and Austria, there is an old husband, of course; a sentimental young German nobleman, that falls in love with his wife; and the moral of the piece lies in the showing up of the conduct of the lady, who is reprehended--not for deceiving her husband (poor devil!)--but for being a flirt, _and taking a second lover_, to the utter despair, confusion, and annihilation of the first. Why, ye gods, do Frenchmen marry at all? Had Père Enfantin (who, it is said, has shaved his ambrosial beard, and is now a clerk in a banking-house) been allowed to carry out his chaste, just, dignified, social scheme, what a deal of marital discomfort might have been avoided:--would it not be advisable that a great reformer and lawgiver of our own, Mr. Robert Owen, should be presented at the Tuileries, and there propound his scheme for the regeneration of France?