Little Travels and Roadside Sketches by William Makepeace Thackeray

It is, my dear, the happy privilege of your sex in England to quit the / dinner-table after the wine-bottles have once or twice gone round it, / and you are thereby saved (though, to be sure, I can't tell what the / ladies do up stairs) -- you are saved two or three hours' excessive / dulness, which the men are obliged to go through.

I ask any gentleman who reads this -- the letters to my Juliana being / written with an eye to publication -- to remember especially how many / times, how many hundred times, how many thousand times, in his hearing, / the battle of Waterloo has been discussed after dinner, and to call to / mind how cruelly he has been bored by the discussion. "Ah, it was lucky / for us that the Prussians came up! " says one little gentleman, looking / particularly wise and ominous. "Hang the Prussians! " (or, perhaps, / something stronger "the Prussians! ") says a stout old major on half-pay. / "We beat the French without them, sir, as beaten them we always have! / We were thundering down the hill of Belle Alliance, sir, at the backs / of them, and the French were crying 'Sauve qui peut' long before the / Prussians ever touched them! " And so the battle opens, and for many / mortal hours, amid rounds of claret, rages over and over again.