Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part II by Honoré De Balzac

Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and yet economically -- a house, too, not easy to manage -- who, from morality and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no other study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to express all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment _to the sentiment of her duties_. This underlined circumlocution is the paraphrase of the word love in the language of prudes.

Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel's, that he was very fond of mushrooms _a l'Italienne_.