_The Touch and Go Mouse-Trap._ THE WIFE.--Why did you go away so early this evening? THE HUSBAND. (mysteriously)--Ah! It is a sad business, and all the more so because I don’t know how I can settle it. THE WIFE.--What is it all about, Adolph? You are a wretch if you do not tell me what you are going to do! THE HUSBAND.--My dear, that ass of a Prosper Magnan is fighting a duel with M. de Fontanges, on account of an Opera singer.--But what is the matter with you? THE WIFE.--Nothing.--It is very warm in this room and I don’t know what ails me, for the whole day I have been suffering from sudden flushing of the face. THE HUSBAND. (aside)--She is in love with M. de Fontanges. (Aloud.) Celestine! (He shouts out still louder.) Celestine! Come quick, madame is ill! You will understand that a clever husband will discover a thousand ways of setting these three kinds of traps. 2. OF CORRESPONDENCE. To write a letter, and to have it posted; to get an answer, to read it and burn it; there we have correspondence stated in the simplest terms. Yet consider what immense resources are given by civilization, by our manners and by our love to the women who wish to conceal these material actions from the scrutiny of a husband. The inexorable box which keeps its mouth open to all comers receives its epistolary provender from all hands. There is also the fatal invention of the General Delivery. A lover finds in the world a hundred charitable persons, male and female, who, for a slight consideration, will slip the billets-doux into the amorous and intelligent hand of his fair mistress. A correspondence is a variable as Proteus. There are sympathetic inks. A young celibate has told us in confidence that he has written a letter on the fly-leaf of a new book, which, when the husband asked for it of the bookseller, reached the hands of his mistress, who had been prepared the evening before for this charming article. A woman in love, who fears her husband’s jealousy, will write and read billets-doux during the time consecrated to those mysterious occupations during which the most tyrannical husband must leave her alone. Moreover, all lovers have the art of arranging a special code of signals, whose arbitrary import it is difficult to understand. At a ball, a flower placed in some odd way in the hair; at the theatre, a pocket handkerchief unfolded on the front of the box; rubbing the nose, wearing a belt of a particular color, putting the hat on one side, wearing one dress oftener than another, singing a certain song in a concert or touching certain notes on the piano; fixing the eyes on a point agreed; everything, in fact, from the hurdy-gurdy which passes your windows and goes away if you open the shutter, to the newspaper announcement of a horse for sale--all may be reckoned as correspondence.