In his popular satirical series The Deceit of Women, Paul Gavarni depicts various acts of trickery committed by women against men. In this print, a husband discovers that his wife has surreptitiously abandoned her motherly duties, leaving their children in the care of another woman while she enjoys a night of freedom. While the series could be read as critical of women, it also subtly questions the rigidity of mid nineteenth–century gender roles. Gavarni highlights the lengths women had to go to navigate their restrictive social circumstances and ridicules men for their obliviousness to these deceptions.