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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Petty Troubles of Married Life, Complete
+by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Petty Troubles of Married Life, Complete
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: June 29, 2005 [EBook #16146]
+
+[See also etext #6033 and #6403]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+                    PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+                                 BY
+
+                          HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+
+                             PART FIRST
+
+
+
+                               PREFACE
+
+    IN WHICH EVERY ONE WILL FIND HIS OWN IMPRESSIONS OF MARRIAGE.
+
+  A friend, in speaking to you of a young woman, says: "Good family,
+  well bred, pretty, and three hundred thousand in her own right."
+  You have expressed a desire to meet this charming creature.
+
+  Usually, chance interviews are premeditated. And you speak with
+  this object, who has now become very timid.
+
+  YOU.--"A delightful evening!"
+
+  SHE.--"Oh! yes, sir."
+
+  You are allowed to become the suitor of this young person.
+
+  THE MOTHER-IN-LAW (to the intended groom).--"You can't imagine how
+  susceptible the dear girl is of attachment."
+
+  Meanwhile there is a delicate pecuniary question to be discussed
+  by the two families.
+
+  YOUR FATHER (to the mother-in-law).--"My property is valued at
+  five hundred thousand francs, my dear madame!"
+
+  YOUR FUTURE MOTHER-IN-LAW.--"And our house, my dear sir, is on a
+  corner lot."
+
+  A contract follows, drawn up by two hideous notaries, a small one,
+  and a big one.
+
+  Then the two families judge it necessary to convoy you to the
+  civil magistrate's and to the church, before conducting the bride
+  to her chamber.
+
+  Then what? . . . . . Why, then come a crowd of petty unforeseen
+  troubles, like the following:
+
+
+
+
+
+                    PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+
+
+                      THE UNKINDEST CUT OF ALL.
+
+Is it a petty or a profound trouble? I knew not; it is profound for
+your sons-in-law or daughters-in-law, but exceedingly petty for you.
+
+"Petty! You must be joking; why, a child costs terribly dear!"
+exclaims a ten-times-too-happy husband, at the baptism of his
+eleventh, called the little last newcomer,--a phrase with which women
+beguile their families.
+
+"What trouble is this?" you ask me. Well! this is, like many petty
+troubles of married life, a blessing for some one.
+
+You have, four months since, married off your daughter, whom we will
+call by the sweet name of CAROLINE, and whom we will make the type of
+all wives. Caroline is, like all other young ladies, very charming,
+and you have found for her a husband who is either a lawyer, a
+captain, an engineer, a judge, or perhaps a young viscount. But he is
+more likely to be what sensible families must seek,--the ideal of
+their desires--the only son of a rich landed proprietor. (See the
+_Preface_.)
+
+This phoenix we will call ADOLPHE, whatever may be his position in the
+world, his age, and the color of his hair.
+
+The lawyer, the captain, the engineer, the judge, in short, the
+son-in-law, Adolphe, and his family, have seen in Miss Caroline:
+
+I.--Miss Caroline;
+
+II.--The only daughter of your wife and you.
+
+Here, as in the Chamber of Deputies, we are compelled to call for a
+division of the house:
+
+1.--As to your wife.
+
+Your wife is to inherit the property of a maternal uncle, a gouty old
+fellow whom she humors, nurses, caresses, and muffles up; to say
+nothing of her father's fortune. Caroline has always adored her uncle,
+--her uncle who trotted her on his knee, her uncle who--her uncle
+whom--her uncle, in short,--whose property is estimated at two hundred
+thousand.
+
+Further, your wife is well preserved, though her age has been the
+subject of mature reflection on the part of your son-in-law's
+grandparents and other ancestors. After many skirmishes between the
+mothers-in-law, they have at last confided to each other the little
+secrets peculiar to women of ripe years.
+
+"How is it with you, my dear madame?"
+
+"I, thank heaven, have passed the period; and you?"
+
+"I really hope I have, too!" says your wife.
+
+"You can marry Caroline," says Adolphe's mother to your future
+son-in-law; "Caroline will be the sole heiress of her mother, of her
+uncle, and her grandfather."
+
+2.--As to yourself.
+
+You are also the heir of your maternal grandfather, a good old man
+whose possessions will surely fall to you, for he has grown imbecile,
+and is therefore incapable of making a will.
+
+You are an amiable man, but you have been very dissipated in your
+youth. Besides, you are fifty-nine years old, and your head is bald,
+resembling a bare knee in the middle of a gray wig.
+
+III.--A dowry of three hundred thousand.
+
+IV.--Caroline's only sister, a little dunce of twelve, a sickly child,
+who bids fair to fill an early grave.
+
+V.--Your own fortune, father-in-law (in certain kinds of society they
+say _papa father-in-law_) yielding an income of twenty thousand, and
+which will soon be increased by an inheritance.
+
+VI.--Your wife's fortune, which will be increased by two inheritances
+--from her uncle and her grandfather. In all, thus:
+
+  Three inheritances and interest,      750,000
+  Your fortune,                         250,000
+  Your wife's fortune,                  250,000
+                                      _________
+
+      Total,                          1,250,000
+
+which surely cannot take wing!
+
+Such is the autopsy of all those brilliant marriages that conduct
+their processions of dancers and eaters, in white gloves, flowering at
+the button-hole, with bouquets of orange flowers, furbelows, veils,
+coaches and coach-drivers, from the magistrate's to the church, from
+the church to the banquet, from the banquet to the dance, from the
+dance to the nuptial chamber, to the music of the orchestra and the
+accompaniment of the immemorial pleasantries uttered by relics of
+dandies, for are there not, here and there in society, relics of
+dandies, as there are relics of English horses? To be sure, and such
+is the osteology of the most amorous intent.
+
+The majority of the relatives have had a word to say about this
+marriage.
+
+Those on the side of the bridegroom:
+
+"Adolphe has made a good thing of it."
+
+Those on the side of the bride:
+
+"Caroline has made a splendid match. Adolphe is an only son, and will
+have an income of sixty thousand, _some day or other_!"
+
+Some time afterwards, the happy judge, the happy engineer, the happy
+captain, the happy lawyer, the happy only son of a rich landed
+proprietor, in short Adolphe, comes to dine with you, accompanied by
+his family.
+
+Your daughter Caroline is exceedingly proud of the somewhat rounded
+form of her waist. All women display an innocent artfulness, the first
+time they find themselves facing motherhood. Like a soldier who makes
+a brilliant toilet for his first battle, they love to play the pale,
+the suffering; they rise in a certain manner, and walk with the
+prettiest affectation. While yet flowers, they bear a fruit; they
+enjoy their maternity by anticipation. All those little ways are
+exceedingly charming--the first time.
+
+Your wife, now the mother-in-law of Adolphe, subjects herself to the
+pressure of tight corsets. When her daughter laughs, she weeps; when
+Caroline wishes her happiness public, she tries to conceal hers. After
+dinner, the discerning eye of the co-mother-in-law divines the work of
+darkness.
+
+Your wife also is an expectant mother! The news spreads like
+lightning, and your oldest college friend says to you laughingly: "Ah!
+so you are trying to increase the population again!"
+
+You have some hope in a consultation that is to take place to-morrow.
+You, kind-hearted man that you are, you turn red, you hope it is
+merely the dropsy; but the doctors confirm the arrival of a _little
+last one_!
+
+In such circumstances some timorous husbands go to the country or make
+a journey to Italy. In short, a strange confusion reigns in your
+household; both you and your wife are in a false position.
+
+"Why, you old rogue, you, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!" says a
+friend to you on the Boulevard.
+
+"Well! do as much if you can," is your angry retort.
+
+"It's as bad as being robbed on the highway!" says your son-in-law's
+family. "Robbed on the highway" is a flattering expression for the
+mother-in-law.
+
+The family hopes that the child which divides the expected fortune in
+three parts, will be, like all old men's children, scrofulous, feeble,
+an abortion. Will it be likely to live? The family awaits the delivery
+of your wife with an anxiety like that which agitated the house of
+Orleans during the confinement of the Duchess de Berri: a second son
+would secure the throne to the younger branch without the onerous
+conditions of July; Henry V would easily seize the crown. From that
+moment the house of Orleans was obliged to play double or quits: the
+event gave them the game.
+
+The mother and the daughter are put to bed nine days apart.
+
+Caroline's first child is a pale, cadaverous little girl that will not
+live.
+
+Her mother's last child is a splendid boy, weighing twelve pounds,
+with two teeth and luxuriant hair.
+
+For sixteen years you have desired a son. This conjugal annoyance is
+the only one that makes you beside yourself with joy. For your
+rejuvenated wife has attained what must be called the _Indian Summer_
+of women; she nurses, she has a full breast of milk! Her complexion is
+fresh, her color is pure pink and white. In her forty-second year, she
+affects the young woman, buys little baby stockings, walks about
+followed by a nurse, embroiders caps and tries on the cunningest
+headdresses. Alexandrine has resolved to instruct her daughter by her
+example; she is delightful and happy. And yet this is a trouble, a
+petty one for you, a serious one for your son-in-law. This annoyance
+is of the two sexes, it is common to you and your wife. In short, in
+this instance, your paternity renders you all the more proud from the
+fact that it is incontestable, my dear sir!
+
+
+
+                             REVELATIONS.
+
+Generally speaking, a young woman does not exhibit her true character
+till she has been married two or three years. She hides her faults,
+without intending it, in the midst of her first joys, of her first
+parties of pleasure. She goes into society to dance, she visits her
+relatives to show you off, she journeys on with an escort of love's
+first wiles; she is gradually transformed from girlhood to womanhood.
+Then she becomes mother and nurse, and in this situation, full of
+charming pangs, that leaves neither a word nor a moment for
+observation, such are its multiplied cares, it is impossible to judge
+of a woman. You require, then, three or four years of intimate life
+before you discover an exceedingly melancholy fact, one that gives you
+cause for constant terror.
+
+Your wife, the young lady in whom the first pleasures of life and love
+supplied the place of grace and wit, so arch, so animated, so
+vivacious, whose least movements spoke with delicious eloquence, has
+cast off, slowly, one by one, her natural artifices. At last you
+perceive the truth! You try to disbelieve it, you think yourself
+deceived; but no: Caroline lacks intellect, she is dull, she can
+neither joke nor reason, sometimes she has little tact. You are
+frightened. You find yourself forever obliged to lead this darling
+through the thorny paths, where you must perforce leave your
+self-esteem in tatters.
+
+You have already been annoyed several times by replies that, in
+society, were politely received: people have held their tongues
+instead of smiling; but you were certain that after your departure the
+women looked at each other and said: "Did you hear Madame Adolphe?"
+
+"Your little woman, she is--"
+
+"A regular cabbage-head."
+
+"How could he, who is certainly a man of sense, choose--?"
+
+"He should educate, teach his wife, or make her hold her tongue."
+
+
+
+                               AXIOMS.
+
+Axiom.--In our system of civilization a man is entirely responsible
+for his wife.
+
+
+Axiom.--The husband does not mould the wife.
+
+
+Caroline has one day obstinately maintained, at the house of Madame de
+Fischtaminel, a very distinguished lady, that her little last one
+resembled neither its father nor its mother, but looked like a certain
+friend of the family. She perhaps enlightens Monsieur de Fischtaminel,
+and overthrows the labors of three years, by tearing down the
+scaffolding of Madame de Fischtaminel's assertions, who, after this
+visit, will treat you will coolness, suspecting, as she does, that you
+have been making indiscreet remarks to your wife.
+
+On another occasion, Caroline, after having conversed with a writer
+about his works, counsels the poet, who is already a prolific author,
+to try to write something likely to live. Sometimes she complains of
+the slow attendance at the tables of people who have but one servant
+and have put themselves to great trouble to receive her. Sometimes she
+speaks ill of widows who marry again, before Madame Deschars who has
+married a third time, and on this occasion, an ex-notary,
+Nicolas-Jean-Jerome-Nepomucene-Ange-Marie-Victor-Joseph Deschars, a
+friend of your father's.
+
+In short, you are no longer yourself when you are in society with your
+wife. Like a man who is riding a skittish horse and glares straight
+between the beast's two ears, you are absorbed by the attention with
+which you listen to your Caroline.
+
+In order to compensate herself for the silence to which young ladies
+are condemned, Caroline talks; or rather babbles. She wants to make a
+sensation, and she does make a sensation; nothing stops her. She
+addresses the most eminent men, the most celebrated women. She
+introduces herself, and puts you on the rack. Going into society is
+going to the stake.
+
+She begins to think you are cross-grained, moody. The fact is, you are
+watching her, that's all! In short, you keep her within a small circle
+of friends, for she has already embroiled you with people on whom your
+interests depended.
+
+How many times have you recoiled from the necessity of a remonstrance,
+in the morning, on awakening, when you had put her in a good humor for
+listening! A woman rarely listens. How many times have you recoiled
+from the burthen of your imperious obligations!
+
+The conclusion of your ministerial communication can be no other than:
+"You have no sense." You foresee the effect of your first lesson.
+Caroline will say to herself: "Ah I have no sense! Haven't I though?"
+
+No woman ever takes this in good part. Both of you must draw the sword
+and throw away the scabbard. Six weeks after, Caroline may prove to
+you that she has quite sense enough to _minotaurize_ you without your
+perceiving it.
+
+Frightened at such a prospect, you make use of all the eloquent
+phrases to gild this pill. In short, you find the means of flattering
+Caroline's various self-loves, for:
+
+
+Axiom.--A married woman has several self-loves.
+
+
+You say that you are her best friend, the only one well situated to
+enlighten her; the more careful you are, the more watchful and puzzled
+she is. At this moment she has plenty of sense.
+
+You ask your dear Caroline, whose waist you clasp, how she, who is so
+brilliant when alone with you, who retorts so charmingly (you remind
+her of sallies that she has never made, which you put in her mouth,
+and, which she smilingly accepts), how she can say this, that, and the
+other, in society. She is, doubtless, like many ladies, timid in
+company.
+
+"I know," you say, "many very distinguished men who are just the
+same."
+
+You cite the case of some who are admirable tea-party oracles, but who
+cannot utter half a dozen sentences in the tribune. Caroline should
+keep watch over herself; you vaunt silence as the surest method of
+being witty. In society, a good listener is highly prized.
+
+You have broken the ice, though you have not even scratched its glossy
+surface: you have placed your hand upon the croup of the most
+ferocious and savage, the most wakeful and clear-sighted, the most
+restless, the swiftest, the most jealous, the most ardent and violent,
+the simplest and most elegant, the most unreasonable, the most
+watchful chimera of the moral world--THE VANITY OF A WOMAN!
+
+Caroline clasps you in her arms with a saintly embrace, thanks you for
+your advice, and loves you the more for it; she wishes to be beholden
+to you for everything, even for her intellect; she may be a dunce,
+but, what is better than saying fine things, she knows how to do them!
+But she desires also to be your pride! It is not a question of taste
+in dress, of elegance and beauty; she wishes to make you proud of her
+intelligence. You are the luckiest of men in having successfully
+managed to escape from this first dangerous pass in conjugal life.
+
+"We are going this evening to Madame Deschars', where they never know
+what to do to amuse themselves; they play all sorts of forfeit games
+on account of a troop of young women and girls there; you shall see!"
+she says.
+
+You are so happy at this turn of affairs, that you hum airs and
+carelessly chew bits of straw and thread, while still in your shirt
+and drawers. You are like a hare frisking on a flowering dew-perfumed
+meadow. You leave off your morning gown till the last extremity, when
+breakfast is on the table. During the day, if you meet a friend and he
+happens to speak of women, you defend them; you consider women
+charming, delicious, there is something divine about them.
+
+How often are our opinions dictated to us by the unknown events of our
+life!
+
+You take your wife to Madame Deschars'. Madame Deschars is a mother
+and is exceedingly devout. You never see any newspapers at her house:
+she keeps watch over her daughters by three different husbands, and
+keeps them all the more closely from the fact that she herself has, it
+is said, some little things to reproach herself with during the career
+of her two former lords. At her house, no one dares risk a jest.
+Everything there is white and pink and perfumed with sanctity, as at
+the houses of widows who are approaching the confines of their third
+youth. It seems as if every day were Sunday there.
+
+You, a young husband, join the juvenile society of young women and
+girls, misses and young people, in the chamber of Madame Deschars. The
+serious people, politicians, whist-players, and tea-drinkers, are in
+the parlor.
+
+In Madame Deschars' room they are playing a game which consists in
+hitting upon words with several meanings, to fit the answers that each
+player is to make to the following questions:
+
+How do you like it?
+
+What do you do with it?
+
+Where do you put it?
+
+Your turn comes to guess the word, you go into the parlor, take part
+in a discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They
+have selected a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical
+replies. Everybody knows that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads,
+the best way is to choose a very ordinary word, and to invent phrases
+that will send the parlor Oedipus a thousand leagues from each of his
+previous thoughts.
+
+This game is a poor substitute for lansquenet or dice, but it is not
+very expensive.
+
+The word MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion.
+Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among
+other acceptations, has that of _mal_ [evil], a substantive that
+signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of _mal_ [pain,
+disease, complaint], a substantive that enters into a thousand
+pathological expressions; then _malle_ [a mail-bag], and finally
+_malle_ [a trunk], that box of various forms, covered with all kinds
+of skin, made of every sort of leather, with handles, that journeys
+rapidly, for it serves to carry travelling effects in, as a man of
+Delille's school would say.
+
+For you, a man of some sharpness, the Sphinx displays his wiles; he
+spreads his wings and folds them up again; he shows you his lion's
+paws, his woman's neck, his horse's loins, and his intellectual head;
+he shakes his sacred fillets, he strikes an attitude and runs away, he
+comes and goes, and sweeps the place with his terrible equine tail; he
+shows his shining claws, and draws them in; he smiles, frisks, and
+murmurs. He puts on the looks of a joyous child and those of a matron;
+he is, above all, there to make fun of you.
+
+You ask the group collectively, "How do you like it?"
+
+"I like it for love's sake," says one.
+
+"I like it regular," says another.
+
+"I like it with a long mane."
+
+"I like it with a spring lock."
+
+"I like it unmasked."
+
+"I like it on horseback."
+
+"I like it as coming from God," says Madame Deschars.
+
+"How do you like it?" you say to your wife.
+
+"I like it legitimate."
+
+This response of your wife is not understood, and sends you a journey
+into the constellated fields of the infinite, where the mind, dazzled
+by the multitude of creations, finds it impossible to make a choice.
+
+"Where do you put it?"
+
+"In a carriage."
+
+"In a garret."
+
+"In a steamboat."
+
+"In the closet."
+
+"On a cart."
+
+"In prison."
+
+"In the ears."
+
+"In a shop."
+
+Your wife says to you last of all: "In bed."
+
+You were on the point of guessing it, but you know no word that fits
+this answer, Madame Deschars not being likely to have allowed anything
+improper.
+
+"What do you do with it?"
+
+"I make it my sole happiness," says your wife, after the answers of
+all the rest, who have sent you spinning through a whole world of
+linguistic suppositions.
+
+This response strikes everybody, and you especially; so you persist in
+seeking the meaning of it. You think of the bottle of hot water that
+your wife has put to her feet when it is cold,--of the warming pan,
+above all! Now of her night-cap,--of her handkerchief,--of her curling
+paper,--of the hem of her chemise,--of her embroidery,--of her flannel
+jacket,--of your bandanna,--of the pillow.
+
+In short, as the greatest pleasure of the respondents is to see their
+Oedipus mystified, as each word guessed by you throws them into fits
+of laughter, superior men, perceiving no word that will fit all the
+explanations, will sooner give it up than make three unsuccessful
+attempts. According to the law of this innocent game you are condemned
+to return to the parlor after leaving a forfeit; but you are so
+exceedingly puzzled by your wife's answers, that you ask what the word
+was.
+
+"Mal," exclaims a young miss.
+
+You comprehend everything but your wife's replies: she has not played
+the game. Neither Madame Deschars, nor any one of the young women
+understand. She has cheated. You revolt, there is an insurrection
+among the girls and young women. They seek and are puzzled. You want
+an explanation, and every one participates in your desire.
+
+"In what sense did you understand the word, my dear?" you say to
+Caroline.
+
+"Why, _male_!" [male.]
+
+Madame Deschars bites her lips and manifests the greatest displeasure;
+the young women blush and drop their eyes; the little girls open
+theirs, nudge each other and prick up their ears. Your feet are glued
+to the carpet, and you have so much salt in your throat that you
+believe in a repetition of the event which delivered Lot from his
+wife.
+
+You see an infernal life before you; society is out of the question.
+
+To remain at home with this triumphant stupidity is equivalent to
+condemnation to the state's prison.
+
+
+Axiom.--Moral tortures exceed physical sufferings by all the
+difference which exists between the soul and the body.
+
+
+
+                      THE ATTENTIONS OF A WIFE.
+
+Among the keenest pleasures of bachelor life, every man reckons the
+independence of his getting up. The fancies of the morning compensate
+for the glooms of evening. A bachelor turns over and over in his bed:
+he is free to gape loud enough to justify apprehensions of murder, and
+to scream at a pitch authorizing the suspicion of joys untold. He can
+forget his oaths of the day before, let the fire burn upon the hearth
+and the candle sink to its socket,--in short, go to sleep again in
+spite of pressing work. He can curse the expectant boots which stand
+holding their black mouths open at him and pricking up their ears. He
+can pretend not to see the steel hooks which glitter in a sunbeam
+which has stolen through the curtains, can disregard the sonorous
+summons of the obstinate clock, can bury himself in a soft place,
+saying: "Yes, I was in a hurry, yesterday, but am so no longer to-day.
+Yesterday was a dotard. To-day is a sage: between them stands the
+night which brings wisdom, the night which gives light. I ought to go,
+I ought to do it, I promised I would--I am weak, I know. But how can I
+resist the downy creases of my bed? My feet feel flaccid, I think I
+must be sick, I am too happy just here. I long to see the ethereal
+horizon of my dreams again, those women without claws, those winged
+beings and their obliging ways. In short, I have found the grain of
+salt to put upon the tail of that bird that was always flying away:
+the coquette's feet are caught in the line. I have her now--"
+
+Your servant, meantime, reads your newspaper, half-opens your letters,
+and leaves you to yourself. And you go to sleep again, lulled by the
+rumbling of the morning wagons. Those terrible, vexatious, quivering
+teams, laden with meat, those trucks with big tin teats bursting with
+milk, though they make a clatter most infernal and even crush the
+paving stones, seem to you to glide over cotton, and vaguely remind
+you of the orchestra of Napoleon Musard. Though your house trembles in
+all its timbers and shakes upon its keel, you think yourself a sailor
+cradled by a zephyr.
+
+You alone have the right to bring these joys to an end by throwing
+away your night-cap as you twist up your napkin after dinner, and by
+sitting up in bed. Then you take yourself to task with such reproaches
+as these: "Ah, mercy on me, I must get up!" "Early to bed and early to
+rise, makes a man healthy--!" "Get up, lazy bones!"
+
+All this time you remain perfectly tranquil. You look round your
+chamber, you collect your wits together. Finally, you emerge from the
+bed, spontaneously! Courageously! of your own accord! You go to the
+fireplace, you consult the most obliging of timepieces, you utter
+hopeful sentences thus couched: "Whatshisname is a lazy creature, I
+guess I shall find him in. I'll run. I'll catch him if he's gone. He's
+sure to wait for me. There is a quarter of an hour's grace in all
+appointments, even between debtor and creditor."
+
+You put on your boots with fury, you dress yourself as if you were
+afraid of being caught half-dressed, you have the delight of being in
+a hurry, you call your buttons into action, you finally go out like a
+conqueror, whistling, brandishing your cane, pricking up your ears and
+breaking into a canter.
+
+After all, you say to yourself, you are responsible to no one, you are
+your own master!
+
+But you, poor married man, you were stupid enough to say to your wife,
+"To-morrow, my dear" (sometimes she knows it two days beforehand), "I
+have got to get up early." Unfortunate Adolphe, you have especially
+proved the importance of this appointment: "It's to--and to--and above
+all to--in short to--"
+
+Two hours before dawn, Caroline wakes you up gently and says to you
+softly: "Adolphy dear, Adolphy love!"
+
+"What's the matter? Fire?"
+
+"No, go to sleep again, I've made a mistake; but the hour hand was on
+it, any way! It's only four, you can sleep two hours more."
+
+Is not telling a man, "You've only got two hours to sleep," the same
+thing, on a small scale, as saying to a criminal, "It's five in the
+morning, the ceremony will be performed at half-past seven"? Such
+sleep is troubled by an idea dressed in grey and furnished with wings,
+which comes and flaps, like a bat, upon the windows of your brain.
+
+A woman in a case like this is as exact as a devil coming to claim a
+soul he has purchased. When the clock strikes five, your wife's voice,
+too well known, alas! resounds in your ear; she accompanies the
+stroke, and says with an atrocious calmness, "Adolphe, it's five
+o'clock, get up, dear."
+
+"Ye-e-e-s, ah-h-h-h!"
+
+"Adolphe, you'll be late for your business, you said so yourself."
+
+"Ah-h-h-h, ye-e-e-e-s." You turn over in despair.
+
+"Come, come, love. I got everything ready last night; now you must, my
+dear; do you want to miss him? There, up, I say; it's broad daylight."
+
+Caroline throws off the blankets and gets up: she wants to show you
+that _she_ can rise without making a fuss. She opens the blinds, she
+lets in the sun, the morning air, the noise of the street, and then
+comes back.
+
+"Why, Adolphe, you _must_ get up! Who ever would have supposed you had
+no energy! But it's just like you men! I am only a poor, weak woman,
+but when I say a thing, I do it."
+
+You get up grumbling, execrating the sacrament of marriage. There is
+not the slightest merit in your heroism; it wasn't you, but your wife,
+that got up. Caroline gets you everything you want with provoking
+promptitude; she foresees everything, she gives you a muffler in
+winter, a blue-striped cambric shirt in summer, she treats you like a
+child; you are still asleep, she dresses you and has all the trouble.
+She finally thrusts you out of doors. Without her nothing would go
+straight! She calls you back to give you a paper, a pocketbook, you
+had forgotten. You don't think of anything, she thinks of everything!
+
+You return five hours afterwards to breakfast, between eleven and
+noon. The chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the
+landing, talking with somebody's valet: she runs in on hearing or
+seeing you. Your servant is laying the cloth in a most leisurely
+style, stopping to look out of the window or to lounge, and coming and
+going like a person who knows he has plenty of time. You ask for your
+wife, supposing that she is up and dressed.
+
+"Madame is still in bed," says the maid.
+
+You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep. She had been awake
+all night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is
+quite hungry now.
+
+You are the cause of all these disarrangements. If breakfast is not
+ready, she says it's because you went out. If she is not dressed, and
+if everything is in disorder, it's all your fault. For everything
+which goes awry she has this answer: "Well, you would get up so
+early!" "He would get up so early!" is the universal reason. She makes
+you go to bed early, because you got up early. She can do nothing all
+day, because you would get up so unusually early.
+
+Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, "Without me, you
+would never get up!" To her friends she says, "My husband get up! If
+it weren't for me, he never _would_ get up!"
+
+To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, "A graceful
+compliment to you, madame!" This slightly indelicate comment puts an
+end to her boasts.
+
+This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone
+in the bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no
+confidant but yourself: and it often seems to you a question whether
+the inconveniences of the married state do not exceed its advantages.
+
+
+
+                           SMALL VEXATIONS.
+
+You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the
+bachelor to the heavy andante of the father of a family.
+
+Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the
+polished shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving
+his glistening croup under the quadruple network of the reins and
+ribbons that you so skillfully manage with what grace and elegance the
+Champs Elysees can bear witness--you drive a good solid Norman horse
+with a steady, family gait.
+
+You have learned what paternal patience is, and you let no opportunity
+slip of proving it. Your countenance, therefore, is serious.
+
+By your side is a domestic, evidently for two purposes like the
+carriage. The vehicle is four-wheeled and hung upon English springs:
+it is corpulent and resembles a Rouen scow: it has glass windows, and
+an infinity of economical arrangements. It is a barouche in fine
+weather, and a brougham when it rains. It is apparently light, but,
+when six persons are in it, it is heavy and tires out your only horse.
+
+On the back seat, spread out like flowers, is your young wife in full
+bloom, with her mother, a big marshmallow with a great many leaves.
+These two flowers of the female species twitteringly talk of you,
+though the noise of the wheels and your attention to the horse, joined
+to your fatherly caution, prevent you from hearing what they say.
+
+On the front seat, there is a nice tidy nurse holding a little girl in
+her lap: by her side is a boy in a red plaited shirt, who is
+continually leaning out of the carriage and climbing upon the
+cushions, and who has a thousand times drawn down upon himself those
+declarations of every mother, which he knows to be threats and nothing
+else: "Be a good boy, Adolphe, or else--" "I declare I'll never bring
+you again, so there!"
+
+His mamma is secretly tired to death of this noisy little boy: he has
+provoked her twenty times, and twenty times the face of the little
+girl asleep has calmed her.
+
+"I am his mother," she says to herself. And so she finally manages to
+keep her little Adolphe quiet.
+
+You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into
+execution. You left your home in the morning, all the opposite
+neighbors having come to their windows, envying you the privilege
+which your means give you of going to the country and coming back
+again without undergoing the miseries of a public conveyance. So you
+have dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to Vincennes,
+from Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from
+Charenton opposite some island or other which struck your wife and
+mother-in-law as being prettier than all the landscapes through which
+you had driven them.
+
+"Let's go to Maison's!" somebody exclaims.
+
+So you go to Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of
+the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The
+horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled,
+and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two
+bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened
+by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and
+which, no less than the dust, has made him gummy, sticky and shaggy.
+The horse looks like a wrathy porcupine: you are afraid he will be
+foundered, and you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way
+that he perfectly understands, for he moves his head about like an
+omnibus horse, tired of his deplorable existence.
+
+You think a good deal of this horse; your consider him an excellent
+one and he cost you twelve hundred francs. When a man has the honor of
+being the father of a family, he thinks as much of twelve hundred
+francs as you think of this horse. You see at once the frightful
+amount of your extra expenses, in case Coco should have to lie by. For
+two days you will have to take hackney coaches to go to your business.
+You wife will pout if she can't go out: but she will go out, and take
+a carriage. The horse will cause the purchase of numerous extras,
+which you will find in your coachman's bill,--your only coachman, a
+model coachman, whom you watch as you do a model anybody.
+
+To these thoughts you give expression in the gentle movement of the
+whip as it falls upon the animal's ribs, up to his knees in the black
+dust which lines the road in front of La Verrerie.
+
+At this moment, little Adolphe, who doesn't know what to do in this
+rolling box, has sadly twisted himself up into a corner, and his
+grandmother anxiously asks him, "What is the matter?"
+
+"I'm hungry," says the child.
+
+"He's hungry," says the mother to her daughter.
+
+"And why shouldn't he be hungry? It is half-past five, we are not at
+the barrier, and we started at two!"
+
+"Your husband might have treated us to dinner in the country."
+
+"He'd rather make his horse go a couple of leagues further, and get
+back to the house."
+
+"The cook might have had the day to herself. But Adolphe is right,
+after all: it's cheaper to dine at home," adds the mother-in-law.
+
+"Adolphe," exclaims your wife, stimulated by the word "cheaper," "we
+go so slow that I shall be seasick, and you keep driving right in this
+nasty dust. What are you thinking of? My gown and hat will be ruined!"
+
+"Would you rather ruin the horse?" you ask, with the air of a man who
+can't be answered.
+
+"Oh, no matter for your horse; just think of your son who is dying of
+hunger: he hasn't tasted a thing for seven hours. Whip up your old
+horse! One would really think you cared more for your nag than for
+your child!"
+
+You dare not give your horse a single crack with the whip, for he
+might still have vigor enough left to break into a gallop and run
+away.
+
+"No, Adolphe tries to vex me, he's going slower," says the young wife
+to her mother. "My dear, go as slow as you like. But I know you'll say
+I am extravagant when you see me buying another hat."
+
+Upon this you utter a series of remarks which are lost in the racket
+made by the wheels.
+
+"What's the use of replying with reasons that haven't got an ounce of
+common-sense?" cries Caroline.
+
+You talk, turning your face to the carriage and then turning back to
+the horse, to avoid an accident.
+
+"That's right, run against somebody and tip us over, do, you'll be rid
+of us. Adolphe, your son is dying of hunger. See how pale he is!"
+
+"But Caroline," puts in the mother-in-law, "he's doing the best he
+can."
+
+Nothing annoys you so much as to have your mother-in-law take your
+part. She is a hypocrite and is delighted to see you quarreling with
+her daughter. Gently and with infinite precaution she throws oil on
+the fire.
+
+When you arrive at the barrier, your wife is mute. She says not a
+word, she sits with her arms crossed, and will not look at you. You
+have neither soul, heart, nor sentiment. No one but you could have
+invented such a party of pleasure. If you are unfortunate enough to
+remind Caroline that it was she who insisted on the excursion, that
+morning, for her children's sake, and in behalf of her milk--she
+nurses the baby--you will be overwhelmed by an avalanche of frigid and
+stinging reproaches.
+
+You bear it all so as "not to turn the milk of a nursing mother, for
+whose sake you must overlook some little things," so your atrocious
+mother-in-law whispers in your ear.
+
+All the furies of Orestes are rankling in your heart.
+
+In reply to the sacramental words pronounced by the officer of the
+customs, "Have you anything to declare?" your wife says, "I declare a
+great deal of ill-humor and dust."
+
+She laughs, the officer laughs, and you feel a desire to tip your
+family into the Seine.
+
+Unluckily for you, you suddenly remember the joyous and perverse young
+woman who wore a pink bonnet and who made merry in your tilbury six
+years before, as you passed this spot on your way to the chop-house on
+the river's bank. What a reminiscence! Was Madame Schontz anxious
+about babies, about her bonnet, the lace of which was torn to pieces
+in the bushes? No, she had no care for anything whatever, not even for
+her dignity, for she shocked the rustic police of Vincennes by the
+somewhat daring freedom of her style of dancing.
+
+You return home, you have frantically hurried your Norman horse, and
+have neither prevented an indisposition of the animal, nor an
+indisposition of your wife.
+
+That evening, Caroline has very little milk. If the baby cries and if
+your head is split in consequence, it is all your fault, as you
+preferred the health of your horse to that of your son who was dying
+of hunger, and of your daughter whose supper has disappeared in a
+discussion in which your wife was right, _as she always is_.
+
+"Well, well," she says, "men are not mothers!"
+
+As you leave the chamber, you hear your mother-in-law consoling her
+daughter by these terrible words: "Come, be calm, Caroline: that's the
+way with them all: they are a selfish lot: your father was just like
+that!"
+
+
+
+                            THE ULTIMATUM.
+
+It is eight o'clock; you make your appearance in the bedroom of your
+wife. There is a brilliant light. The chambermaid and the cook hover
+lightly about. The furniture is covered with dresses and flowers tried
+on and laid aside.
+
+The hair-dresser is there, an artist par excellence, a sovereign
+authority, at once nobody and everything. You hear the other domestics
+going and coming: orders are given and recalled, errands are well or
+ill performed. The disorder is at its height. This chamber is a studio
+from whence to issue a parlor Venus.
+
+Your wife desires to be the fairest at the ball which you are to
+attend. Is it still for your sake, or only for herself, or is it for
+somebody else? Serious questions these.
+
+The idea does not even occur to you.
+
+You are squeezed, hampered, harnessed in your ball accoutrement: you
+count your steps as you walk, you look around, you observe, you
+contemplate talking business on neutral ground with a stock-broker, a
+notary or a banker, to whom you would not like to give an advantage
+over you by calling at their house.
+
+A singular fact which all have probably observed, but the causes of
+which can hardly be determined, is the peculiar repugnance which men
+dressed and ready to go to a party have for discussions or to answer
+questions. At the moment of starting, there are few husbands who are
+not taciturn and profoundly absorbed in reflections which vary with
+their characters. Those who reply give curt and peremptory answers.
+
+But women, at this time, are exceedingly aggravating. They consult
+you, they ask your advice upon the best way of concealing the stem of
+a rose, of giving a graceful fall to a bunch of briar, or a happy turn
+to a scarf. As a neat English expression has it, "they fish for
+compliments," and sometimes for better than compliments.
+
+A boy just out of school would discern the motive concealed behind the
+willows of these pretexts: but your wife is so well known to you, and
+you have so often playfully joked upon her moral and physical
+perfections, that you are harsh enough to give your opinion briefly
+and conscientiously: you thus force Caroline to put that decisive
+question, so cruel to women, even those who have been married twenty
+years:
+
+"So I don't suit you then?"
+
+Drawn upon the true ground by this inquiry, you bestow upon her such
+little compliments as you can spare and which are, as it were, the
+small change, the sous, the liards of your purse.
+
+"The best gown you ever wore!" "I never saw you so well dressed."
+"Blue, pink, yellow, cherry [take your pick], becomes you charmingly."
+"Your head-dress is quite original." "As you go in, every one will
+admire you." "You will not only be the prettiest, but the best
+dressed." "They'll all be mad not to have your taste." "Beauty is a
+natural gift: taste is like intelligence, a thing that we may be proud
+of."
+
+"Do you think so? Are you in earnest, Adolphe?"
+
+Your wife is coquetting with you. She chooses this moment to force
+from you your pretended opinion of one and another of her friends, and
+to insinuate the price of the articles of her dress you so much
+admire. Nothing is too dear to please you. She sends the cook out of
+the room.
+
+"Let's go," you say.
+
+She sends the chambermaid out after having dismissed the hair-dresser,
+and begins to turn round and round before her glass, showing off to
+you her most glorious beauties.
+
+"Let's go," you say.
+
+"You are in a hurry," she returns.
+
+And she goes on exhibiting herself with all her little airs, setting
+herself off like a fine peach magnificently exhibited in a fruiterer's
+window. But since you have dined rather heartily, you kiss her upon
+the forehead merely, not feeling able to countersign your opinions.
+Caroline becomes serious.
+
+The carriage waits. All the household looks at Caroline as she goes
+out: she is the masterpiece to which all have contributed, and
+everybody admires the common work.
+
+Your wife departs highly satisfied with herself, but a good deal
+displeased with you. She proceeds loftily to the ball, just as a
+picture, caressed by the painter and minutely retouched in the studio,
+is sent to the annual exhibition in the vast bazaar of the Louvre.
+Your wife, alas! sees fifty women handsomer than herself: they have
+invented dresses of the most extravagant price, and more or less
+original: and that which happens at the Louvre to the masterpiece,
+happens to the object of feminine labor: your wife's dress seems pale
+by the side of another very much like it, but the livelier color of
+which crushes it. Caroline is nobody, and is hardly noticed. When
+there are sixty handsome women in a room, the sentiment of beauty is
+lost, beauty is no longer appreciated. Your wife becomes a very
+ordinary affair. The petty stratagem of her smile, made perfect by
+practice, has no meaning in the midst of countenances of noble
+expression, of self-possessed women of lofty presence. She is
+completely put down, and no one asks her to dance. She tries to force
+an expression of pretended satisfaction, but, as she is not satisfied,
+she hears people say, "Madame Adolphe is looking very ill to-night."
+Women hypocritically ask her if she is indisposed and "Why don't you
+dance?" They have a whole catalogue of malicious remarks veneered with
+sympathy and electroplated with charity, enough to damn a saint, to
+make a monkey serious, and to give the devil the shudders.
+
+You, who are innocently playing cards or walking backwards and
+forwards, and so have not seen one of the thousand pin-pricks with
+which your wife's self-love has been tattooed, you come and ask her in
+a whisper, "What is the matter?"
+
+"Order _my_ carriage!"
+
+This _my_ is the consummation of marriage. For two years she has said
+"_my husband's_ carriage," "_the_ carriage," "_our_ carriage," and now
+she says "_my_ carriage."
+
+You are in the midst of a game, you say, somebody wants his revenge,
+or you must get your money back.
+
+Here, Adolphe, we allow that you have sufficient strength of mind to
+say yes, to disappear, and _not_ to order the carriage.
+
+You have a friend, you send him to dance with your wife, for you have
+commenced a system of concessions which will ruin you. You already
+dimly perceive the advantage of a friend.
+
+Finally, you order the carriage. You wife gets in with concentrated
+rage, she hurls herself into a corner, covers her face with her hood,
+crosses her arms under her pelisse, and says not a word.
+
+O husbands! Learn this fact; you may, at this fatal moment, repair and
+redeem everything: and never does the impetuosity of lovers who have
+been caressing each other the whole evening with flaming gaze fail to
+do it! Yes, you can bring her home in triumph, she has now nobody but
+you, you have one more chance, that of taking your wife by storm! But
+no, idiot, stupid and indifferent that you are, you ask her, "What is
+the matter?"
+
+
+Axiom.--A husband should always know what is the matter with his wife,
+for she always knows what is not.
+
+
+"I'm cold," she says.
+
+"The ball was splendid."
+
+"Pooh! nobody of distinction! People have the mania, nowadays, to
+invite all Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs:
+their gowns were horribly smashed, and mine is ruined."
+
+"We had a good time."
+
+"Ah, you men, you play and that's the whole of it. Once married, you
+care about as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts."
+
+"How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we
+arrived."
+
+"Oh, you never understand us women. I begged you to go home, and you
+left me there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason. You
+are not without intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I
+don't know what you are thinking about."
+
+Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter. When you give
+your wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman
+of wood: she gives you a "thank you" which puts you in the same rank
+as her servant. You understood your wife no better before than you do
+after the ball: you find it difficult to follow her, for instead of
+going up stairs, she flies up. The rupture is complete.
+
+The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace: she is received with
+blunt No's and Yes's, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows
+with a slanting glance at you. "Monsieur's always doing these things,"
+she mutters.
+
+You alone might have changed Madame's temper. She goes to bed; she has
+her revenge to take: you did not comprehend her. Now she does not
+comprehend you. She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the
+most hostile and offensive posture: she is wrapped up in her chemise,
+in her sack, in her night-cap, like a bale of clocks packed for the
+East Indies. She says neither good-night, nor good-day, nor dear, nor
+Adolphe: you don't exist, you are a bag of wheat.
+
+Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber
+where she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead. Were you
+the Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not
+melt the ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to
+be asleep, and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked.
+Ask her one hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland
+replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.
+
+Nothing is the matter with her: she is tired: she is going to sleep.
+
+The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the
+more she isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise. If you get impatient,
+Caroline begins to dream! You grumble, you are lost.
+
+
+Axiom.--Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their
+strong points, they leave us to guess at their weak ones.
+
+
+Caroline will perhaps also condescend to assure you that she does not
+feel well. But she laughs in her night-cap when you have fallen
+asleep, and hurls imprecations upon your slumbering body.
+
+
+
+                            WOMEN'S LOGIC.
+
+You imagine you have married a creature endowed with reason: you are
+woefully mistaken, my friend.
+
+
+Axiom.--Sensitive beings are not sensible beings.
+
+
+Sentiment is not argument, reason is not pleasure, and pleasure is
+certainly not a reason.
+
+"Oh! sir!" she says.
+
+Reply "Ah! yes! Ah!" You must bring forth this "ah!" from the very
+depths of your thoracic cavern, as you rush in a rage from the house,
+or return, confounded, to your study.
+
+Why? Now? Who has conquered, killed, overthrown you! Your wife's
+logic, which is not the logic of Aristotle, nor that of Ramus, nor
+that of Kant, nor that of Condillac, nor that of Robespierre, nor that
+of Napoleon: but which partakes of the character of all these logics,
+and which we must call the universal logic of women, the logic of
+English women as it is that of Italian women, of the women of Normandy
+and Brittany (ah, these last are unsurpassed!), of the women of Paris,
+in short, that of the women in the moon, if there are women in that
+nocturnal land, with which the women of the earth have an evident
+understanding, angels that they are!
+
+The discussion began after breakfast. Discussions can never take place
+in a household save at this hour. A man could hardly have a discussion
+with his wife in bed, even if he wanted to: she has too many
+advantages over him, and can too easily reduce him to silence. On
+leaving the nuptial chamber with a pretty woman in it, a man is apt to
+be hungry, if he is young. Breakfast is usually a cheerful meal, and
+cheerfulness is not given to argument. In short, you do not open the
+business till you have had your tea or your coffee.
+
+You have taken it into your head, for instance, to send your son to
+school. All fathers are hypocrites and are never willing to confess
+that their own flesh and blood is very troublesome when it walks about
+on two legs, lays its dare-devil hands on everything, and is
+everywhere at once like a frisky pollywog. Your son barks, mews, and
+sings; he breaks, smashes and soils the furniture, and furniture is
+dear; he makes toys of everything, he scatters your papers, and he
+cuts paper dolls out of the morning's newspaper before you have read
+it.
+
+His mother says to him, referring to anything of yours: "Take it!" but
+in reference to anything of hers she says: "Take care!"
+
+She cunningly lets him have your things that she may be left in peace.
+Her bad faith as a good mother seeks shelter behind her child, your
+son is her accomplice. Both are leagued against you like Robert
+Macaire and Bertrand against the subscribers to their joint stock
+company. The boy is an axe with which foraging excursions are
+performed in your domains. He goes either boldly or slyly to maraud in
+your wardrobe: he reappears caparisoned in the drawers you laid aside
+that morning, and brings to the light of day many articles condemned
+to solitary confinement. He brings the elegant Madame Fischtaminel, a
+friend whose good graces you cultivate, your girdle for checking
+corpulency, bits of cosmetic for dyeing your moustache, old waistcoats
+discolored at the arm-holes, stockings slightly soiled at the heels
+and somewhat yellow at the toes. It is quite impossible to remark that
+these stains are caused by the leather!
+
+Your wife looks at your friend and laughs; you dare not be angry, so
+you laugh too, but what a laugh! The unfortunate all know that laugh.
+
+Your son, moreover, gives you a cold sweat, if your razors happen to
+be out of their place. If you are angry, the little rebel laughs and
+shows his two rows of pearls: if you scold him, he cries. His mother
+rushes in! And what a mother she is! A mother who will detest you if
+you don't give him the razor! With women there is no middle ground; a
+man is either a monster or a model.
+
+At certain times you perfectly understand Herod and his famous decrees
+relative to the Massacre of the Innocents, which have only been
+surpassed by those of the good Charles X!
+
+Your wife has returned to her sofa, you walk up and down, and stop,
+and you boldly introduce the subject by this interjectional remark:
+
+"Caroline, we must send Charles to boarding school."
+
+"Charles cannot go to boarding school," she returns in a mild tone.
+
+"Charles is six years old, the age at which a boy's education begins."
+
+"In the first place," she replies, "it begins at seven. The royal
+princes are handed over to their governor by their governess when they
+are seven. That's the law and the prophets. I don't see why you
+shouldn't apply to the children of private people the rule laid down
+for the children of princes. Is your son more forward than theirs? The
+king of Rome--"
+
+"The king of Rome is not a case in point."
+
+"What! Is not the king of Rome the son of the Emperor? [Here she
+changes the subject.] Well, I declare, you accuse the Empress, do you?
+Why, Doctor Dubois himself was present, besides--"
+
+"I said nothing of the kind."
+
+"How you do interrupt, Adolphe."
+
+"I say that the king of Rome [here you begin to raise your voice], the
+king of Rome, who was hardly four years old when he left France, is no
+example for us."
+
+"That doesn't prevent the fact of the Duke de Bordeaux's having been
+placed in the hands of the Duke de Riviere, his tutor, at seven
+years." [Logic.]
+
+"The case of the young Duke of Bordeaux is different."
+
+"Then you confess that a boy can't be sent to school before he is
+seven years old?" she says with emphasis. [More logic.]
+
+"No, my dear, I don't confess that at all. There is a great deal of
+difference between private and public education."
+
+"That's precisely why I don't want to send Charles to school yet. He
+ought to be much stronger than he is, to go there."
+
+"Charles is very strong for his age."
+
+"Charles? That's the way with men! Why, Charles has a very weak
+constitution; he takes after you. [Here she changes from _tu_ to
+_vous_.] But if you are determined to get rid of your son, why put him
+out to board, of course. I have noticed for some time that the dear
+child annoys you."
+
+"Annoys me? The idea! But we are answerable for our children, are we
+not? It is time Charles' education was began: he is getting very bad
+habits here, he obeys no one, he thinks himself perfectly free to do
+as he likes, he hits everybody and nobody dares to hit him back. He
+ought to be placed in the midst of his equals, or he will grow up with
+the most detestable temper."
+
+"Thank you: so I am bringing Charles up badly!"
+
+"I did not say that: but you will always have excellent reasons for
+keeping him at home."
+
+Here the _vous_ becomes reciprocal and the discussion takes a bitter
+turn on both sides. Your wife is very willing to wound you by saying
+_vous_, but she feels cross when it becomes mutual.
+
+"The long and the short of it is that you want to get my child away,
+you find that he is between us, you are jealous of your son, you want
+to tyrannize over me at your ease, and you sacrifice your boy! Oh, I
+am smart enough to see through you!"
+
+"You make me out like Abraham with his knife! One would think there
+were no such things as schools! So the schools are empty; nobody sends
+their children to school!"
+
+"You are trying to make me appear ridiculous," she retorts. "I know
+that there are schools well enough, but people don't send boys of six
+there, and Charles shall not start now."
+
+"Don't get angry, my dear."
+
+"As if I ever get angry! I am a woman and know how to suffer in
+silence."
+
+"Come, let us reason together."
+
+"You have talked nonsense enough."
+
+"It is time that Charles should learn to read and write; later in
+life, he will find difficulties sufficient to disgust him."
+
+Here, you talk for ten minutes without interruption, and you close
+with an appealing "Well?" armed with an intonation which suggests an
+interrogation point of the most crooked kind.
+
+"Well!" she replies, "it is not yet time for Charles to go to school."
+
+You have gained nothing at all.
+
+"But, my dear, Monsieur Deschars certainly sent his little Julius to
+school at six years. Go and examine the schools and you will find lots
+of little boys of six there."
+
+You talk for ten minutes more without the slightest interruption, and
+then you ejaculate another "Well?"
+
+"Little Julius Deschars came home with chilblains," she says.
+
+"But Charles has chilblains here."
+
+"Never," she replies, proudly.
+
+In a quarter of an hour, the main question is blocked by a side
+discussion on this point: "Has Charles had chilblains or not?"
+
+You bandy contradictory allegations; you no longer believe each other;
+you must appeal to a third party.
+
+
+Axiom.--Every household has its Court of Appeals which takes no notice
+of the merits, but judges matters of form only.
+
+
+The nurse is sent for. She comes, and decides in favor of your wife.
+It is fully decided that Charles has never had chilblains.
+
+Caroline glances triumphantly at you and utters these monstrous words:
+"There, you see Charles can't possibly go to school!"
+
+You go out breathless with rage. There is no earthly means of
+convincing your wife that there is not the slightest reason for your
+son's not going to school in the fact that he has never had
+chilblains.
+
+That evening, after dinner, you hear this atrocious creature finishing
+a long conversation with a woman with these words: "He wanted to send
+Charles to school, but I made him see that he would have to wait."
+
+Some husbands, at a conjuncture like this, burst out before everybody;
+their wives take their revenge six weeks later, but the husbands gain
+this by it, that Charles is sent to school the very day he gets into
+any mischief. Other husbands break the crockery, and keep their rage
+to themselves. The knowing ones say nothing and bide their time.
+
+A woman's logic is exhibited in this way upon the slightest occasion,
+about a promenade or the proper place to put a sofa. This logic is
+extremely simple, inasmuch as it consists in never expressing but one
+idea, that which contains the expression of their will. Like
+everything pertaining to female nature, this system may be resolved
+into two algebraic terms--Yes: no. There are also certain little
+movements of the head which mean so much that they may take the place
+of either.
+
+
+
+                       THE JESUITISM OF WOMEN.
+
+The most jesuitical Jesuit of Jesuits is yet a thousand times less
+jesuitical than the least jesuitical woman,--so you may judge what
+Jesuits women are! They are so jesuitical that the cunningest Jesuit
+himself could never guess to what extent of jesuitism a woman may go,
+for there are a thousand ways of being jesuitical, and a woman is such
+an adroit Jesuit, that she has the knack of being a Jesuit without
+having a jesuitical look. You can rarely, though you can sometimes,
+prove to a Jesuit that he is one: but try once to demonstrate to a
+woman that she acts or talks like a Jesuit. She would be cut to pieces
+rather than confess herself one.
+
+She, a Jesuit! The very soul of honor and loyalty! She a Jesuit! What
+do you mean by "Jesuit?" She does not know what a Jesuit is: what is a
+Jesuit? She has never seen or heard of a Jesuit! It's you who are a
+Jesuit! And she proves with jesuitical demonstration that you are a
+subtle Jesuit.
+
+Here is one of the thousand examples of a woman's jesuitism, and this
+example constitutes the most terrible of the petty troubles of married
+life; it is perhaps the most serious.
+
+Induced by a desire the thousandth time expressed by Caroline, who
+complained that she had to go on foot or that she could not buy a new
+hat, a new parasol, a new dress, or any other article of dress, often
+enough:
+
+That she could not dress her baby as a sailor, as a lancer, as an
+artilleryman of the National Guard, as a Highlander with naked legs
+and a cap and feather, in a jacket, in a roundabout, in a velvet sack,
+in boots, in trousers: that she could not buy him toys enough, nor
+mechanical moving mice and Noah's Arks enough:
+
+That she could not return Madame Deschars or Madame de Fischtaminel
+their civilities, a ball, a party, a dinner: nor take a private box at
+the theatre, thus avoiding the necessity of sitting cheek by jowl with
+men who are either too polite or not enough so, and of calling a cab
+at the close of the performance; apropos of which she thus discourses:
+
+"You think it cheaper, but you are mistaken: men are all the same! I
+soil my shoes, I spoil my hat, my shawl gets wet and my silk stockings
+get muddy. You economize twenty francs by not having a carriage,--no
+not twenty, sixteen, for your pay four for the cab--and you lose fifty
+francs' worth of dress, besides being wounded in your pride on seeing
+a faded bonnet on my head: you don't see why it's faded, but it's
+those horrid cabs. I say nothing of the annoyance of being tumbled and
+jostled by a crowd of men, for it seems you don't care for that!"
+
+That she could not buy a piano instead of hiring one, nor keep up with
+the fashions; (there are some women, she says, who have all the new
+styles, but just think what they give in return! She would rather
+throw herself out of the window than imitate them! She loves you too
+much. Here she sheds tears. She does not understand such women). That
+she could not ride in the Champs Elysees, stretched out in her own
+carriage, like Madame de Fischtaminel. (There's a woman who
+understands life: and who has a well-taught, well-disciplined and very
+contented husband: his wife would go through fire and water for him!)
+
+Finally, beaten in a thousand conjugal scenes, beaten by the most
+logical arguments (the late logicians Tripier and Merlin were nothing
+to her, as the preceding chapter has sufficiently shown you), beaten
+by the most tender caresses, by tears, by your own words turned
+against you, for under circumstances like these, a woman lies in wait
+in her house like a jaguar in the jungle; she does not appear to
+listen to you, or to heed you; but if a single word, a wish, a
+gesture, escapes you, she arms herself with it, she whets it to an
+edge, she brings it to bear upon you a hundred times over; beaten by
+such graceful tricks as "If you will do so and so, I will do this and
+that;" for women, in these cases, become greater bargainers than the
+Jews and Greeks (those, I mean, who sell perfumes and little girls),
+than the Arabs (those, I mean, who sell little boys and horses),
+greater higglers than the Swiss and the Genevese, than bankers, and,
+what is worse than all, than the Genoese!
+
+Finally, beaten in a manner which may be called beaten, you determine
+to risk a certain portion of your capital in a business undertaking.
+One evening, at twilight, seated side by side, or some morning on
+awakening, while Caroline, half asleep, a pink bud in her white linen,
+her face smiling in her lace, is beside you, you say to her, "You want
+this, you say, or you want that: you told me this or you told me
+that:" in short, you hastily enumerate the numberless fancies by which
+she has over and over again broken your heart, for there is nothing
+more dreadful than to be unable to satisfy the desires of a beloved
+wife, and you close with these words:
+
+"Well, my dear, an opportunity offers of quintupling a hundred
+thousand francs, and I have decided to make the venture."
+
+She is wide awake now, she sits up in bed, and gives you a kiss, ah!
+this time, a real good one!
+
+"You are a dear boy!" is her first word.
+
+We will not mention her last, for it is an enormous and
+unpronounceable onomatope.
+
+"Now," she says, "tell me all about it."
+
+You try to explain the nature of the affair. But in the first place,
+women do not understand business, and in the next they do not wish to
+seem to understand it. Your dear, delighted Caroline says you were
+wrong to take her desires, her groans, her sighs for new dresses, in
+earnest. She is afraid of your venture, she is frightened at the
+directors, the shares, and above all at the running expenses, and
+doesn't exactly see where the dividend comes in.
+
+
+Axiom.--Women are always afraid of things that have to be divided.
+
+
+In short, Caroline suspects a trap: but she is delighted to know that
+she can have her carriage, her box, the numerous styles of dress for
+her baby, and the rest. While dissuading you from engaging in the
+speculation, she is visibly glad to see you investing your money in
+it.
+
+
+FIRST PERIOD.--"Oh, I am the happiest woman on the face of the earth!
+Adolphe has just gone into the most splendid venture. I am going to
+have a carriage, oh! ever so much handsomer than Madame de
+Fischtaminel's; hers is out of fashion. Mine will have curtains with
+fringes. My horses will be mouse-colored, hers are bay,--they are as
+common as coppers."
+
+"What is this venture, madame?"
+
+"Oh, it's splendid--the stock is going up; he explained it to me
+before he went into it, for Adolphe never does anything without
+consulting me."
+
+"You are very fortunate."
+
+"Marriage would be intolerable without entire confidence, and Adolphe
+tells me everything."
+
+Thus, Adolphe, you are the best husband in Paris, you are adorable,
+you are a man of genius, you are all heart, an angel. You are petted
+to an uncomfortable degree. You bless the marriage tie. Caroline
+extols men, calling them "kings of creation," women were made for
+them, man is naturally generous, and matrimony is a delightful
+institution.
+
+For three, sometimes six, months, Caroline executes the most brilliant
+concertos and solos upon this delicious theme: "I shall be rich! I
+shall have a thousand a month for my dress: I am going to keep my
+carriage!"
+
+If your son is alluded to, it is merely to ask about the school to
+which he shall be sent.
+
+
+SECOND PERIOD.--"Well, dear, how is your business getting on?--What
+has become of it?--How about that speculation which was to give me a
+carriage, and other things?--It is high time that affair should come
+to something.--It is a good while cooking.--When _will_ it begin to
+pay? Is the stock going up?--There's nobody like you for hitting upon
+ventures that never amount to anything."
+
+One day she says to you, "Is there really an affair?"
+
+If you mention it eight or ten months after, she returns:
+
+"Ah! Then there really _is_ an affair!"
+
+This woman, whom you thought dull, begins to show signs of
+extraordinary wit, when her object is to make fun of you. During this
+period, Caroline maintains a compromising silence when people speak of
+you, or else she speaks disparagingly of men in general: "Men are not
+what they seem: to find them out you must try them." "Marriage has its
+good and its bad points." "Men never can finish anything."
+
+
+THIRD PERIOD.--_Catastrophe_.--This magnificent affair which was to
+yield five hundred per cent, in which the most cautious, the best
+informed persons took part--peers, deputies, bankers--all of them
+Knights of the Legion of Honor--this venture has been obliged to
+liquidate! The most sanguine expect to get ten per cent of their
+capital back. You are discouraged.
+
+Caroline has often said to you, "Adolphe, what is the matter? Adolphe,
+there is something wrong."
+
+Finally, you acquaint Caroline with the fatal result: she begins by
+consoling you.
+
+"One hundred thousand francs lost! We shall have to practice the
+strictest economy," you imprudently add.
+
+The jesuitism of woman bursts out at this word "economy." It sets fire
+to the magazine.
+
+"Ah! that's what comes of speculating! How is it that _you, ordinarily
+so prudent_, could go and risk a hundred thousand francs! _You know I
+was against it from the beginning!_ BUT YOU WOULD NOT LISTEN TO ME!"
+
+Upon this, the discussion grows bitter.
+
+You are good for nothing--you have no business capacity; women alone
+take clear views of things. You have risked your children's bread,
+though she tried to dissuade you from it.--You cannot say it was for
+her. Thank God, she has nothing to reproach herself with. A hundred
+times a month she alludes to your disaster: "If my husband had not
+thrown away his money in such and such a scheme, I could have had this
+and that." "The next time you want to go into an affair, perhaps
+you'll consult me!" Adolphe is accused and convicted of having
+foolishly lost one hundred thousand francs, without an object in view,
+like a dolt, and without having consulted his wife. Caroline advises
+her friends not to marry. She complains of the incapacity of men who
+squander the fortunes of their wives. Caroline is vindictive, she
+makes herself generally disagreeable. Pity Adolphe! Lament, ye
+husbands! O bachelors, rejoice and be exceeding glad!
+
+
+
+                        MEMORIES AND REGRETS.
+
+After several years of wedded life, your love has become so placid,
+that Caroline sometimes tries, in the evening, to wake you up by
+various little coquettish phrases. There is about you a certain
+calmness and tranquillity which always exasperates a lawful wife.
+Women see in it a sort of insolence: they look upon the indifference
+of happiness as the fatuity of confidence, for of course they never
+imagine their inestimable equalities can be regarded with disdain:
+their virtue is therefore enraged at being so cordially trusted in.
+
+In this situation, which is what every couple must come to, and which
+both husband and wife must expect, no husband dares confess that the
+constant repetition of the same dish has become wearisome; but his
+appetite certainly requires the condiments of dress, the ideas excited
+by absence, the stimulus of an imaginary rivalry.
+
+In short, at this period, you walk very comfortably with your wife on
+your arm, without pressing hers against your heart with the solicitous
+and watchful cohesion of a miser grasping his treasure. You gaze
+carelessly round upon the curiosities in the street, leading your wife
+in a loose and distracted way, as if you were towing a Norman scow.
+Come now, be frank! If, on passing your wife, an admirer were gently
+to press her, accidentally or purposely, would you have the slightest
+desire to discover his motives? Besides, you say, no woman would seek
+to bring about a quarrel for such a trifle. Confess this, too, that
+the expression "such a trifle" is exceedingly flattering to both of
+you.
+
+You are in this position, but you have as yet proceeded no farther.
+Still, you have a horrible thought which you bury in the depths of
+your heart and conscience: Caroline has not come up to your
+expectations. Caroline has imperfections, which, during the high tides
+of the honey-moon, were concealed under the water, but which the ebb
+of the gall-moon has laid bare. You have several times run against
+these breakers, your hopes have been often shipwrecked upon them, more
+than once your desires--those of a young marrying man--(where, alas,
+is that time!) have seen their richly laden gondolas go to pieces
+there: the flower of the cargo went to the bottom, the ballast of the
+marriage remained. In short, to make use of a colloquial expression,
+as you talk over your marriage with yourself you say, as you look at
+Caroline, "_She is not what I took her to be!_"
+
+Some evening, at a ball, in society, at a friend's house, no matter
+where, you meet a sublime young woman, beautiful, intellectual and
+kind: with a soul, oh! a soul of celestial purity, and of miraculous
+beauty! Yes, there is that unchangeable oval cut of face, those
+features which time will never impair, that graceful and thoughtful
+brow. The unknown is rich, well-educated, of noble birth: she will
+always be what she should be, she knows when to shine, when to remain
+in the background: she appears in all her glory and power, the being
+you have dreamed of, your wife that should have been, she whom you
+feel you could love forever. She would always have flattered your
+little vanities, she would understand and admirably serve your
+interests. She is tender and gay, too, this young lady who reawakens
+all your better feelings, who rekindles your slumbering desires.
+
+You look at Caroline with gloomy despair, and here are the
+phantom-like thoughts which tap, with wings of a bat, the beak of
+a vulture, the body of a death's-head moth, upon the walls of the
+palace in which, enkindled by desire, glows your brain like a lamp
+of gold:
+
+
+FIRST STANZA. Ah, dear me, why did I get married? Fatal idea! I
+allowed myself to be caught by a small amount of cash. And is it
+really over? Cannot I have another wife? Ah, the Turks manage things
+better! It is plain enough that the author of the Koran lived in the
+desert!
+
+SECOND STANZA. My wife is sick, she sometimes coughs in the morning.
+If it is the design of Providence to remove her from the world, let it
+be speedily done for her sake and for mine. The angel has lived long
+enough.
+
+THIRD STANZA. I am a monster! Caroline is the mother of my children!
+
+
+You go home, that night, in a carriage with your wife: you think her
+perfectly horrible: she speaks to you, but you answer in
+monosyllables. She says, "What is the matter?" and you answer,
+"Nothing." She coughs, you advise her to see the doctor in the
+morning. Medicine has its hazards.
+
+
+FOURTH STANZA. I have been told that a physician, poorly paid by the
+heirs of his deceased patient, imprudently exclaimed, "What! they cut
+down my bill, when they owe me forty thousand a year." _I_ would not
+haggle over fees!
+
+
+"Caroline," you say to her aloud, "you must take care of yourself;
+cross your shawl, be prudent, my darling angel."
+
+Your wife is delighted with you since you seem to take such an
+interest in her. While she is preparing to retire, you lie stretched
+out upon the sofa. You contemplate the divine apparition which opens
+to you the ivory portals of your castles in the air. Delicious
+ecstasy! 'Tis the sublime young woman that you see before you! She is
+as white as the sail of the treasure-laden galleon as it enters the
+harbor of Cadiz. Your wife, happy in your admiration, now understands
+your former taciturnity. You still see, with closed eyes, the sublime
+young woman; she is the burden of your thoughts, and you say aloud:
+
+
+FIFTH AND LAST STANZA. Divine! Adorable! Can there be another woman
+like her? Rose of Night! Column of ivory! Celestial maiden! Morning
+and Evening Star!
+
+
+Everyone says his prayers; you have said four.
+
+The next morning, your wife is delightful, she coughs no more, she has
+no need of a doctor; if she dies, it will be of good health; you
+launched four maledictions upon her, in the name of your sublime young
+woman, and four times she blessed you for it. Caroline does not know
+that in the depths of your heart there wriggles a little red fish like
+a crocodile, concealed beneath conjugal love like the other would be
+hid in a basin.
+
+A few days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal
+terms to Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her,
+and Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you
+and says she never was happier.
+
+You rush out in a rage, you are beside yourself, and are glad to meet
+a friend, that you may work off your bile.
+
+"Don't you ever marry, George; it's better to see your heirs carrying
+away your furniture while the death-rattle is in your throat, better
+to go through an agony of two hours without a drop to cool your
+tongue, better to be assassinated by inquiries about your will by a
+nurse like the one in Henry Monnier's terrible picture of a
+'Bachelor's Last Moments!' Never marry under any pretext!"
+
+Fortunately you see the sublime young woman no more. You are saved
+from the tortures to which a criminal passion was leading you. You
+fall back again into the purgatory of your married bliss; but you
+begin to be attentive to Madame de Fischtaminel, with whom you were
+dreadfully in love, without being able to get near her, while you were
+a bachelor.
+
+
+
+                            OBSERVATIONS.
+
+When you have arrived at this point in the latitude or longitude of
+the matrimonial ocean, there appears a slight chronic, intermittent
+affection, not unlike the toothache. Here, I see, you stop me to ask,
+"How are we to find the longitude in this sea? When can a husband be
+sure he has attained this nautical point? And can the danger be
+avoided?"
+
+You may arrive at this point, look you, as easily after ten months as
+ten years of wedlock; it depends upon the speed of the vessel, its
+style of rigging, upon the trade winds, the force of the currents, and
+especially upon the composition of the crew. You have this advantage
+over the mariner, that he has but one method of calculating his
+position, while husbands have at least a thousand of reckoning theirs.
+
+
+EXAMPLE: Caroline, your late darling, your late treasure, who is now
+merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while
+walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to
+take your arm at all;
+
+Or else she notices men, older or younger as the case may be, dressed
+with more or less taste, whereas she formerly saw no one whatever,
+though the sidewalk was black with hats and traveled by more boots
+than slippers;
+
+Or, when you come home, she says, "It's no one but my husband:"
+instead of saying "Ah! 'tis Adolphe!" as she used to say with a
+gesture, a look, an accent which caused her admirers to think, "Well,
+here's a happy woman at last!" This last exclamation of a woman is
+suitable for two eras,--first, while she is sincere; second, while she
+is hypocritical, with her "Ah! 'tis Adolphe!" When she exclaims, "It's
+only my husband," she no longer deigns to play a part.
+
+Or, if you come home somewhat late--at eleven, or at midnight--you
+find her--snoring! Odious symptom!
+
+Or else she puts on her stockings in your presence. Among English
+couples, this never happens but once in a lady's married life; the
+next day she leaves for the Continent with some captain or other, and
+no longer thinks of putting on her stockings at all.
+
+Or else--but let us stop here.
+
+This is intended for the use of mariners and husbands who are
+weatherwise.
+
+
+
+                       THE MATRIMONIAL GADFLY.
+
+Very well! In this degree of longitude, not far from a tropical sign
+upon the name of which good taste forbids us to make a jest at once
+coarse and unworthy of this thoughtful work, a horrible little
+annoyance appears, ingeniously called the Matrimonial Gadfly, the most
+provoking of all gnats, mosquitoes, blood-suckers, fleas and
+scorpions, for no net was ever yet invented that could keep it off.
+The gadfly does not immediately sting you; it begins by buzzing in
+your ears, and _you do not at first know what it is_.
+
+Thus, apropos of nothing, in the most natural way in the world,
+Caroline says: "Madame Deschars had a lovely dress on, yesterday."
+
+"She is a woman of taste," returns Adolphe, though he is far from
+thinking so.
+
+"Her husband gave it to her," resumes Caroline, with a shrug of her
+shoulders.
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Yes, a four hundred franc dress! It's the very finest quality of
+velvet."
+
+"Four hundred francs!" cries Adolphe, striking the attitude of the
+apostle Thomas.
+
+"But then there are two extra breadths and enough for a high waist!"
+
+"Monsieur Deschars does things on a grand scale," replies Adolphe,
+taking refuge in a jest.
+
+"All men don't pay such attentions to their wives," says Caroline,
+curtly.
+
+"What attentions?"
+
+"Why, Adolphe, thinking of extra breadths and of a waist to make the
+dress good again, when it is no longer fit to be worn low in the
+neck."
+
+Adolphe says to himself, "Caroline wants a dress."
+
+Poor man!
+
+Some time afterward, Monsieur Deschars furnishes his wife's chamber
+anew. Then he has his wife's diamonds set in the prevailing fashion.
+Monsieur Deschars never goes out without his wife, and never allows
+his wife to go out without offering her his arm.
+
+If you bring Caroline anything, no matter what, it is never equal to
+what Monsieur Deschars has done. If you allow yourself the slightest
+gesture or expression a little livelier than usual, if you speak a
+little bit loud, you hear the hissing and viper-like remark:
+
+"You wouldn't see Monsieur Deschars behaving like this! Why don't you
+take Monsieur Deschars for a model?"
+
+In short, this idiotic Monsieur Deschars is forever looming up in your
+household on every conceivable occasion.
+
+The expression--"Do you suppose Monsieur Deschars ever allows himself"
+--is a sword of Damocles, or what is worse, a Damocles pin: and your
+self-love is the cushion into which your wife is constantly sticking
+it, pulling it out, and sticking it in again, under a variety of
+unforeseen pretexts, at the same time employing the most winning terms
+of endearment, and with the most agreeable little ways.
+
+Adolphe, stung till he finds himself tattooed, finally does what is
+done by police authorities, by officers of government, by military
+tacticians. He casts his eye on Madame de Fischtaminel, who is still
+young, elegant and a little bit coquettish, and places her (this had
+been the rascal's intention for some time) like a blister upon
+Caroline's extremely ticklish skin.
+
+O you, who often exclaim, "I don't know what is the matter with my
+wife!" you will kiss this page of transcendent philosophy, for you
+will find in it _the key to every woman's character_! But as to
+knowing women as well as I know them, it will not be knowing them
+much; they don't know themselves! In fact, as you well know, God was
+Himself mistaken in the only one that He attempted to manage and to
+whose manufacture He had given personal attention.
+
+Caroline is very willing to sting Adolphe at all hours, but this
+privilege of letting a wasp off now and then upon one's consort (the
+legal term), is exclusively reserved to the wife. Adolphe is a monster
+if he starts off a single fly at Caroline. On her part, it is a
+delicious joke, a new jest to enliven their married life, and one
+dictated by the purest intentions; while on Adolphe's part, it is a
+piece of cruelty worthy a Carib, a disregard of his wife's heart, and
+a deliberate plan to give her pain. But that is nothing.
+
+"So you are really in love with Madame de Fischtaminel?" Caroline
+asks. "What is there so seductive in the mind or the manners of the
+spider?"
+
+"Why, Caroline--"
+
+"Oh, don't undertake to deny your eccentric taste," she returns,
+checking a negation on Adolphe's lips. "I have long seen that you
+prefer that Maypole [Madame de Fischtaminel is thin] to me. Very well!
+go on; you will soon see the difference."
+
+Do you understand? You cannot suspect Caroline of the slightest
+inclination for Monsieur Deschars, a low, fat, red-faced man, formerly
+a notary, while you are in love with Madame de Fischtaminel! Then
+Caroline, the Caroline whose simplicity caused you such agony,
+Caroline who has become familiar with society, Caroline becomes acute
+and witty: you have two gadflies instead of one.
+
+The next day she asks you, with a charming air of interest, "How are
+you coming on with Madame de Fischtaminel?"
+
+When you go out, she says: "Go and drink something calming, my dear."
+For, in their anger with a rival, all women, duchesses even, will use
+invectives, and even venture into the domain of Billingsgate; they
+make an offensive weapon of anything and everything.
+
+To try to convince Caroline that she is mistaken and that you are
+indifferent to Madame de Fischtaminel, would cost you dear. This is a
+blunder that no sensible man commits; he would lose his power and
+spike his own guns.
+
+Oh! Adolphe, you have arrived unfortunately at that season so
+ingeniously called the _Indian Summer of Marriage_.
+
+You must now--pleasing task!--win your wife, your Caroline, over
+again, seize her by the waist again, and become the best of husbands
+by trying to guess at things to please her, so as to act according to
+her whims instead of according to your will. This is the whole
+question henceforth.
+
+
+
+                             HARD LABOR.
+
+Let us admit this, which, in our opinion, is a truism made as good as
+new:
+
+
+Axiom.--Most men have some of the wit required by a difficult
+position, when they have not the whole of it.
+
+
+As for those husbands who are not up to their situation, it is
+impossible to consider their case here: without any struggle whatever
+they simply enter the numerous class of the _Resigned_.
+
+Adolphe says to himself: "Women are children: offer them a lump of
+sugar, and you will easily get them to dance all the dances that
+greedy children dance; but you must always have a sugar plum in hand,
+hold it up pretty high, and--take care that their fancy for sweetmeats
+does not leave them. Parisian women--and Caroline is one--are very
+vain, and as for their voracity--don't speak of it. Now you cannot
+govern men and make friends of them, unless you work upon them through
+their vices, and flatter their passions: my wife is mine!"
+
+Some days afterward, during which Adolphe has been unusually attentive
+to his wife, he discourses to her as follows:
+
+"Caroline, dear, suppose we have a bit of fun: you'll put on your new
+gown--the one like Madame Deschars!--and we'll go to see a farce at
+the Varieties."
+
+This kind of proposition always puts a wife in the best possible
+humor. So away you go! Adolphe has ordered a dainty little dinner for
+two, at Borrel's _Rocher de Cancale_.
+
+"As we are going to the Varieties, suppose we dine at the tavern,"
+exclaims Adolphe, on the boulevard, with the air of a man suddenly
+struck by a generous idea.
+
+Caroline, delighted with this appearance of good fortune, enters a
+little parlor where she finds the cloth laid and that neat little
+service set, which Borrel places at the disposal of those who are rich
+enough to pay for the quarters intended for the great ones of the
+earth, who make themselves small for an hour.
+
+Women eat little at a formal dinner: their concealed harness hampers
+them, they are laced tightly, and they are in the presence of women
+whose eyes and whose tongues are equally to be dreaded. They prefer
+fancy eating to good eating, then: they will suck a lobster's claw,
+swallow a quail or two, punish a woodcock's wing, beginning with a bit
+of fresh fish, flavored by one of those sauces which are the glory of
+French cooking. France is everywhere sovereign in matters of taste: in
+painting, fashions, and the like. Gravy is the triumph of taste, in
+cookery. So that grisettes, shopkeepers' wives and duchesses are
+delighted with a tasty little dinner washed down with the choicest
+wines, of which, however, they drink but little, the whole concluded
+by fruit such as can only be had at Paris; and especially delighted
+when they go to the theatre to digest the little dinner, and listen,
+in a comfortable box, to the nonsense uttered upon the stage, and to
+that whispered in their ears to explain it. But then the bill of the
+restaurant is one hundred francs, the box costs thirty, the carriage,
+dress, gloves, bouquet, as much more. This gallantry amounts to the
+sum of one hundred and sixty francs, which is hard upon four thousand
+francs a month, if you go often to the Comic, the Italian, or the
+Grand, Opera. Four thousand francs a month is the interest of a
+capital of two millions. But then the honor of being a husband is
+fully worth the price!
+
+Caroline tells her friends things which she thinks exceedingly
+flattering, but which cause a sagacious husband to make a wry face.
+
+"Adolphe has been delightful for some time past. I don't know what I
+have done to deserve so much attention, but he overpowers me. He gives
+value to everything by those delicate ways which have such an effect
+upon us women. After taking me Monday to the _Rocher de Cancale_ to
+dine, he declared that Very was as good a cook as Borrel, and he gave
+me the little party of pleasure that I told you of all over again,
+presenting me at dessert with a ticket for the opera. They sang
+'William Tell,' which, you know, is my craze."
+
+"You are lucky indeed," returns Madame Deschars with evident jealousy.
+
+"Still, a wife who discharges all her duties, deserves such luck, it
+seems to me."
+
+When this terrible sentiment falls from the lips of a married woman,
+it is clear that she _does her duty_, after the manner of school-boys,
+for the reward she expects. At school, a prize is the object: in
+marriage, a shawl or a piece of jewelry. No more love, then!
+
+"As for me,"--Madame Deschars is piqued--"I am reasonable. Deschars
+committed such follies once, but I put a stop to it. You see, my dear,
+we have two children, and I confess that one or two hundred francs are
+quite a consideration for me, as the mother of a family."
+
+"Dear me, madame," says Madame de Fischtaminel, "it's better that our
+husbands should have cosy little times with us than with--"
+
+"Deschars!--" suddenly puts in Madame Deschars, as she gets up and
+says good-bye.
+
+The individual known as Deschars (a man nullified by his wife) does
+not hear the end of the sentence, by which he might have learned that
+a man may spend his money with other women.
+
+Caroline, flattered in every one of her vanities, abandons herself to
+the pleasures of pride and high living, two delicious capital sins.
+Adolphe is gaining ground again, but alas! (this reflection is worth a
+whole sermon in Lent) sin, like all pleasure, contains a spur. Vice is
+like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate
+it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries. With Vice a
+man's course must always be crescendo!--and forever.
+
+
+Axiom.--Vice, Courtiers, Misfortune and Love, care only for the
+PRESENT.
+
+
+At the end of a period of time difficult to determine, Caroline looks
+in the glass, at dessert, and notices two or three pimples blooming
+upon her cheeks, and upon the sides, lately so pure, of her nose. She
+is out of humor at the theatre, and you do not know why, you, so
+proudly striking an attitude in your cravat, you, displaying your
+figure to the best advantage, as a complacent man should.
+
+A few days after, the dressmaker arrives. She tries on a gown, she
+exerts all her strength, but cannot make the hooks and eyes meet. The
+waiting maid is called. After a two horse-power pull, a regular
+thirteenth labor of Hercules, a hiatus of two inches manifests itself.
+The inexorable dressmaker cannot conceal from Caroline the fact that
+her form is altered. Caroline, the aerial Caroline, threatens to
+become like Madame Deschars. In vulgar language, she is getting stout.
+The maid leaves her in a state of consternation.
+
+"What! am I to have, like that fat Madame Deschars, cascades of flesh
+a la Rubens! That Adolphe is an awful scoundrel. Oh, I see, he wants
+to make me an old mother Gigogne, and destroy my powers of
+fascination!"
+
+Thenceforward Caroline is willing to go to the opera, she accepts two
+seats in a box, but she considers it very distingue to eat sparingly,
+and declines the dainty dinners of her husband.
+
+"My dear," she says, "a well-bred woman should not go often to these
+places; you may go once for a joke; but as for making a habitual thing
+of it--fie, for shame!"
+
+Borrel and Very, those masters of the art, lose a thousand francs a
+day by not having a private entrance for carriages. If a coach could
+glide under an archway, and go out by another door, after leaving its
+fair occupants on the threshold of an elegant staircase, how many of
+them would bring the landlord fine, rich, solid old fellows for
+customers!
+
+
+Axiom.--Vanity is the death of good living.
+
+
+Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can
+tell the cause of her disgust. Pray excuse Adolphe! A husband is not
+the devil.
+
+Fully one-third of the women of Paris are bored by the theatre. Many
+of them are tired to death of music, and go to the opera for the
+singers merely, or rather to notice the difference between them in
+point of execution. What supports the theatre is this: the women are a
+spectacle before and after the play. Vanity alone will pay the
+exorbitant price of forty francs for three hours of questionable
+pleasure, in a bad atmosphere and at great expense, without counting
+the colds caught in going out. But to exhibit themselves, to see and
+be seen, to be the observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious
+mouthful! as Rabelais would say.
+
+To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must
+be looked at. Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at.
+Caroline is chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women
+who are _not_ with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short.
+Now, as the very slight return she gets from her efforts, her dresses,
+and her attitudes, does not compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue,
+her display and her weariness, it is very soon the same with the
+theatre as it was with the good cheer; high living made her fat, the
+theatre is making her yellow.
+
+Here Adolphe--or any other man in Adolphe's place--resembles a certain
+Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in
+French, corn,--but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don't
+you think so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into
+the sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, "Devil
+take you! Make me suffer again, will you?"
+
+"Upon my word," says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he
+receives from his wife a refusal, "I should like very much to know
+what would please you!"
+
+Caroline looks loftily down upon her husband, and says, after a pause
+worthy of an actress, "I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!"
+
+"'Tis true, I might lay out four thousand francs a month to better
+effect," returns Adolphe.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"With the quarter of that sum, presented to estimable burglars,
+youthful jail-birds and honorable criminals, I might become somebody,
+a Man in the Blue Cloak on a small scale; and then a young woman is
+proud of her husband," Adolphe replies.
+
+This answer is the grave of love, and Caroline takes it in very bad
+part. An explanation follows. This must be classed among the thousand
+pleasantries of the following chapter, the title of which ought to
+make lovers smile as well as husbands. If there are yellow rays of
+light, why should there not be whole days of this extremely
+matrimonial color?
+
+
+
+                            FORCED SMILES.
+
+On your arrival in this latitude, you enjoy numerous little scenes,
+which, in the grand opera of marriage, represent the intermezzos, and
+of which the following is a type:
+
+You are one evening alone after dinner, and you have been so often
+alone already that you feel a desire to say sharp little things to
+each other, like this, for instance:
+
+"Take care, Caroline," says Adolphe, who has not forgotten his many
+vain efforts to please her. "I think your nose has the impertinence to
+redden at home quite well as at the restaurant."
+
+"This is not one of your amiable days!"
+
+
+General Rule.--No man has ever yet discovered the way to give friendly
+advice to any woman, not even to his own wife.
+
+
+"Perhaps it's because you are laced too tight. Women make themselves
+sick that way."
+
+The moment a man utters these words to a woman, no matter whom, that
+woman,--who knows that stays will bend,--seizes her corset by the
+lower end, and bends it out, saying, with Caroline:
+
+"Look, you can get your hand in! I never lace tight."
+
+"Then it must be your stomach."
+
+"What has the stomach got to do with the nose?"
+
+"The stomach is a centre which communicates with all the organs."
+
+"So the nose is an organ, is it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Your organ is doing you a poor service at this moment." She raises
+her eyes and shrugs her shoulders. "Come, Adolphe, what have I done?"
+
+"Nothing. I'm only joking, and I am unfortunate enough not to please
+you," returns Adolphe, smiling.
+
+"My misfortune is being your wife! Oh, why am I not somebody else's!"
+
+"That's what _I_ say!"
+
+"If I were, and if I had the innocence to say to you, like a coquette
+who wishes to know how far she has got with a man, 'the redness of my
+nose really gives me anxiety,' you would look at me in the glass with
+all the affectations of an ape, and would reply, 'O madame, you do
+yourself an injustice; in the first place, nobody sees it: besides, it
+harmonizes with your complexion; then again we are all so after
+dinner!' and from this you would go on to flatter me. Do I ever tell
+you that you are growing fat, that you are getting the color of a
+stone-cutter, and that I prefer thin and pale men?"
+
+They say in London, "Don't touch the axe!" In France we ought to say,
+"Don't touch a woman's nose."
+
+"And all this about a little extra natural vermilion!" exclaims
+Adolphe. "Complain about it to Providence, whose office it is to put a
+little more color in one place than another, not to me, who loves you,
+who desires you to be perfect, and who merely says to you, take care!"
+
+"You love me too much, then, for you've been trying, for some time
+past, to find disagreeable things to say to me. You want to run me
+down under the pretext of making me perfect--people said I _was_
+perfect, five years ago."
+
+"I think you are better than perfect, you are stunning!"
+
+"With too much vermilion?"
+
+Adolphe, who sees the atmosphere of the north pole upon his wife's
+face, sits down upon a chair by her side. Caroline, unable decently to
+go away, gives her gown a sort of flip on one side, as if to produce a
+separation. This motion is performed by some women with a provoking
+impertinence: but it has two significations; it is, as whist players
+would say, either a signal _for trumps_ or a _renounce_. At this time,
+Caroline renounces.
+
+"What is the matter?" says Adolphe.
+
+"Will you have a glass of sugar and water?" asks Caroline, busying
+herself about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.
+
+"What for?"
+
+"You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain. Perhaps you
+would like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water? The doctor spoke
+of it as an excellent remedy."
+
+"How anxious you are about my stomach!"
+
+"It's a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act
+upon your heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue."
+
+Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects
+upon the acuteness which his wife is acquiring: he sees her daily
+gaining in strength and in acrimony: she is getting to display an art
+in vexation and a military capacity for disputation which reminds him
+of Charles XII and the Russians. Caroline, during this time, is busy
+with an alarming piece of mimicry: she looks as if she were going to
+faint.
+
+"Are you sick?" asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place
+where women always have us.
+
+"It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back
+and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it's just like you:
+you are always in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men
+are more or less cracked."
+
+Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there
+pensive: marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with
+its crop of nettles and mullen stalks.
+
+"What, are you pouting?" asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour's
+observation of her husband's countenance.
+
+"No, I am meditating," replied Adolphe.
+
+"Oh, what an infernal temper you've got!" she returns, with a shrug of
+the shoulders. "Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape
+and your digestion? Don't you see that I was only paying you back for
+your vermilion? You'll make me think that men are as vain as women.
+[Adolphe remains frigid.] It is really quite kind in you to take our
+qualities. [Profound silence.] I made a joke and you got angry [she
+looks at Adolphe], for you are angry. I am not like you: I cannot bear
+the idea of having given you pain! Nevertheless, it's an idea that a
+man never would have had, that of attributing your impertinence to
+something wrong in your digestion. It's not my Dolph, it's his stomach
+that was bold enough to speak. I did not know you were a
+ventriloquist, that's all."
+
+Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles: Adolphe is as stiff as if he
+were glued.
+
+"No, he won't laugh! And, in your jargon, you call this having
+character. Oh, how much better we are!"
+
+She goes and sits down in Adolphe's lap, and Adolphe cannot help
+smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has
+been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon of it.
+
+"Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong," she says. "Why pout?
+Dear me, I like you just as you are: in my eyes you are as slender as
+when I married you, and slenderer perhaps."
+
+"Caroline, when people get to deceive themselves in these little
+matters, where one makes concessions and the other does not get angry,
+do you know what it means?"
+
+"What does it mean?" asks Caroline, alarmed at Adolphe's dramatic
+attitude.
+
+"That they love each other less."
+
+"Oh! you monster, I understand you: you were angry so as to make me
+believe you loved me!"
+
+Alas! let us confess it, Adolphe tells the truth in the only way he
+can--by a laugh.
+
+"Why give me pain?" she says. "If I am wrong in anything, isn't it
+better to tell me of it kindly, than brutally to say [here she raises
+her voice], 'Your nose is getting red!' No, that is not right! To
+please you, I will use an expression of the fair Fischtaminel, 'It's
+not the act of a gentleman!'"
+
+Adolphe laughs and pays the expenses of the reconciliation; but
+instead of discovering therein what will please Caroline and what will
+attach her to him, he finds out what attaches him to her.
+
+
+
+                       NOSOGRAPHY OF THE VILLA.
+
+Is it advantageous for a man not to know what will please his wife
+after their marriage? Some women (this still occurs in the country)
+are innocent enough to tell promptly what they want and what they
+like. But in Paris, nearly every woman feels a kind of enjoyment in
+seeing a man wistfully obedient to her heart, her desires, her
+caprices--three expressions for the same thing!--and anxiously going
+round and round, half crazy and desperate, like a dog that has lost
+his master.
+
+They call this _being loved_, poor things! And a good many of them say
+to themselves, as did Caroline, "How will he manage?"
+
+Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and
+excellent Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the
+couple known as Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife
+inaugurate a delightful country house. It is an opportunity that the
+Deschars have seized upon, the folly of a man of letters, a charming
+villa upon which he lavished one hundred thousand francs and which has
+been sold at auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a new dress to
+air, or a hat with a weeping willow plume--things which a tilbury will
+set off to a charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother. The
+servants have a holiday. The youthful pair start beneath the smile of
+a blue sky, flecked with milk-while clouds merely to heighten the
+effect. They breathe the pure air, through which trots the heavy
+Norman horse, animated by the influence of spring. They soon reach
+Marnes, beyond Ville d'Avray, where the Deschars are spreading
+themselves in a villa copied from one at Florence, and surrounded by
+Swiss meadows, though without all the objectionable features of the
+Alps.
+
+"Dear me! what a delightful thing a country house like this must be!"
+exclaims Caroline, as she walks in the admirable wood that skirts
+Marnes and Ville d'Avray. "It makes your eyes as happy as if they had
+a heart in them."
+
+Caroline, having no one to take but Adolphe, takes Adolphe, who
+becomes her Adolphe again. And then you should see her run about like
+a fawn, and act once more the sweet, pretty, innocent, adorable
+school-girl that she was! Her braids come down! She takes off her
+bonnet, and holds it by the strings! She is young, pink and white
+again. Her eyes smile, her mouth is a pomegranate endowed with
+sensibility, with a sensibility which seems quite fresh.
+
+"So a country house would please you very much, would it, darling?"
+says Adolphe, clasping Caroline round the waist, and noticing that she
+leans upon him as if to show the flexibility of her form.
+
+"What, will you be such a love as to buy me one? But remember, no
+extravagance! Seize an opportunity like the Deschars."
+
+"To please you and to find out what is likely to give you pleasure,
+such is the constant study of your own Dolph."
+
+They are alone, at liberty to call each other their little names of
+endearment, and run over the whole list of their secret caresses.
+
+"Does he really want to please his little girly?" says Caroline,
+resting her head on the shoulder of Adolphe, who kisses her forehead,
+saying to himself, "Gad! I've got her now!"
+
+
+Axiom.--When a husband and a wife have got each other, the devil only
+knows which has got the other.
+
+
+The young couple are captivating, whereupon the stout Madame Deschars
+gives utterance to a remark somewhat equivocal for her, usually so
+stern, prudish and devout.
+
+"Country air has one excellent property: it makes husbands very
+amiable."
+
+M. Deschars points out an opportunity for Adolphe to seize. A house is
+to be sold at Ville d'Avray, for a song, of course. Now, the country
+house is a weakness peculiar to the inhabitant of Paris. This
+weakness, or disease, has its course and its cure. Adolphe is a
+husband, but not a doctor. He buys the house and takes possession with
+Caroline, who has become once more his Caroline, his Carola, his fawn,
+his treasure, his girly girl.
+
+The following alarming symptoms now succeed each other with frightful
+rapidity: a cup of milk, baptized, costs five sous; when it is
+anhydrous, as the chemists say, ten sous. Meat costs more at Sevres
+than at Paris, if you carefully examine the qualities. Fruit cannot be
+had at any price. A fine pear costs more in the country than in the
+(anhydrous!) garden that blooms in Chevet's window.
+
+Before being able to raise fruit for oneself, from a Swiss meadow
+measuring two square yards, surrounded by a few green trees which look
+as if they were borrowed from the scenic illusions of a theatre, the
+most rural authorities, being consulted on the point, declare that you
+must spend a great deal of money, and--wait five years! Vegetables
+dash out of the husbandman's garden to reappear at the city market.
+Madame Deschars, who possesses a gate-keeper that is at the same time
+a gardener, confesses that the vegetables raised on her land, beneath
+her glass frames, by dint of compost and top-soil, cost her twice as
+much as those she used to buy at Paris, of a woman who had rent and
+taxes to pay, and whose husband was an elector. Despite the efforts
+and pledges of the gate-keeper-gardener, early peas and things at
+Paris are a month in advance of those in the country.
+
+From eight in the evening to eleven our couple don't know what to do,
+on account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and
+the questions of self-love which arise out of the merest trifles.
+
+Monsieur Deschars remarks, with that profound knowledge of figures
+which distinguishes the ex-notary, that the cost of going to Paris and
+back, added to the interest of the cost of his villa, to the taxes,
+wages of the gate-keeper and his wife, are equal to a rent of three
+thousand francs a year. He does not see how he, an ex-notary, allowed
+himself to be so caught! For he has often drawn up leases of chateaux
+with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a year.
+
+It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a
+country house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated
+nuisance.
+
+"I don't see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has
+to be watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it," says
+Caroline.
+
+"The way to get along in the country," replies a little retired
+grocer, "is to stay there, to live there, to become country-folks, and
+then everything changes."
+
+On going home, Caroline says to her poor Adolphe, "What an idea that
+was of yours, to buy a country house! The best way to do about the
+country is to go there on visits to other people."
+
+Adolphe remembers an English proverb, which says, "Don't have a
+newspaper or a country seat of your own: there are plenty of idiots
+who will have them for you."
+
+"Bah!" returns Adolph, who was enlightened once for all upon women's
+logic by the Matrimonial Gadfly, "you are right: but then you know the
+baby is in splendid health, here."
+
+Though Adolphe has become prudent, this reply awakens Caroline's
+susceptibilities. A mother is very willing to think exclusively of her
+child, but she does not want him to be preferred to herself. She is
+silent; the next day, she is tired to death of the country. Adolphe
+being absent on business, she waits for him from five o'clock to
+seven, and goes alone with little Charles to the coach office. She
+talks for three-quarters of an hour of her anxieties. She was afraid
+to go from the house to the office. Is it proper for a young woman to
+be left alone, so? She cannot support such an existence.
+
+The country house now creates a very peculiar phase; one which
+deserves a chapter to itself.
+
+
+
+                       TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE.
+
+Axiom.--There are parentheses in worry.
+
+
+EXAMPLE--A great deal of evil has been said of the stitch in the side;
+but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the
+pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving,
+like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant,
+which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife's
+timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once
+devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season has its
+peculiar vexation.
+
+Caroline, after a week spent in taking note of her husband's absences,
+perceives that he passes seven hours a day away from her. At last,
+Adolphe, who comes home as gay as an actor who has been applauded,
+observes a slight coating of hoar frost upon Caroline's visage. After
+making sure that the coldness of her manner has been observed,
+Caroline puts on a counterfeit air of interest,--the well-known
+expression of which possesses the gift of making a man inwardly
+swear,--and says: "You must have had a good deal of business to-day,
+dear?"
+
+"Oh, lots!"
+
+"Did you take many cabs?"
+
+"I took seven francs' worth."
+
+"Did you find everybody in?"
+
+"Yes, those with whom I had appointments."
+
+"When did you make appointments with them? The ink in your inkstand is
+dried up; it's like glue; I wanted to write, and spent a whole hour in
+moistening it, and even then only produced a thick mud fit to mark
+bundles with for the East Indies."
+
+Here any and every husband looks suspiciously at his better half.
+
+"It is probable that I wrote them at Paris--"
+
+"What business was it, Adolphe?"
+
+"Why, I thought you knew. Shall I run over the list? First, there's
+Chaumontel's affair--"
+
+"I thought Monsieur Chaumontel was in Switzerland--"
+
+"Yes, but he has representatives, a lawyer--"
+
+"Didn't you do anything else but business?" asks Caroline,
+interrupting Adolphe.
+
+Here she gives him a direct, piercing look, by which she plunges into
+her husband's eyes when he least expects it: a sword in a heart.
+
+"What could I have done? Made a little counterfeit money, run into
+debt, or embroidered a sampler?"
+
+"Oh, dear, I don't know. And I can't even guess. I am too dull, you've
+told me so a hundred times."
+
+"There you go, and take an expression of endearment in bad part. How
+like a woman that is!"
+
+"Have you concluded anything?" she asks, pretending to take an
+interest in business.
+
+"No, nothing,"
+
+"How many persons have you seen?"
+
+"Eleven, without counting those who were walking in the streets."
+
+"How you answer me!"
+
+"Yes, and how you question me! As if you'd been following the trade of
+an examining judge for the last ten years!"
+
+"Come, tell me all you've done to-day, it will amuse me. You ought to
+try to please me while you are here! I'm dull enough when you leave me
+alone all day long."
+
+"You want me to amuse you by telling you about business?"
+
+"Formerly, you told me everything--"
+
+This friendly little reproach disguises the certitude that Caroline
+wishes to enjoy respecting the serious matters which Adolphe wishes to
+conceal. Adolphe then undertakes to narrate how he has spent the day.
+Caroline affects a sort of distraction sufficiently well played to
+induce the belief that she is not listening.
+
+"But you said just now," she exclaims, at the moment when Adolphe is
+getting into a snarl, "that you had paid seven francs for cabs, and
+you now talk of a hack! You took it by the hour, I suppose? Did you do
+your business in a hack?" she asks, railingly.
+
+"Why should hacks be interdicted?" inquires Adolphe, resuming his
+narrative.
+
+"Haven't you been to Madame de Fischtaminel's?" she asks in the middle
+of an exceedingly involved explanation, insolently taking the words
+out of your mouth.
+
+"Why should I have been there?"
+
+"It would have given me pleasure: I wanted to know whether her parlor
+is done."
+
+"It is."
+
+"Ah! then you _have_ been there?"
+
+"No, her upholsterer told me."
+
+"Do you know her upholsterer?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Who is it?"
+
+"Braschon."
+
+"So you met the upholsterer?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You said you only went in carriages."
+
+"Yes, my dear, but to get carriages, you have to go and--"
+
+"Pooh! I dare say Braschon was in the carriage, or the parlor was--one
+or the other is equally probable."
+
+"You won't listen," exclaims Adolphe, who thinks that a long story
+will lull Caroline's suspicions.
+
+"I've listened too much already. You've been lying for the last hour,
+worse than a drummer."
+
+"Well, I'll say nothing more."
+
+"I know enough. I know all I wanted to know. You say you've seen
+lawyers, notaries, bankers: now you haven't seen one of them! Suppose
+I were to go to-morrow to see Madame de Fischtaminel, do you know what
+she would say?"
+
+Here, Caroline watches Adolphe closely: but Adolphe affects a delusive
+calmness, in the middle of which Caroline throws out her line to fish
+up a clue.
+
+"Why, she would say that she had had the pleasure of seeing you! How
+wretched we poor creatures are! We never know what you are doing: here
+we are stuck, chained at home, while you are off at your business!
+Fine business, truly! If I were in your place, I would invent business
+a little bit better put together than yours! Ah, you set us a worthy
+example! They say women are perverse. Who perverted them?"
+
+Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the
+torrent of words. Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up
+by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of
+Rossini's codas:
+
+"Yes, it's a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so
+that you may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause
+of your passion for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in
+the trap! You are right, sir, a villa is very convenient: it serves
+two objects. But the wife can get along with it as well as the
+husband. You may take Paris and its hacks! I'll take the woods and
+their shady groves! Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so let's say
+no more about it."
+
+Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.
+
+"Have you done, dear?" he asks, profiting by an instant in which she
+tosses her head after a pointed interrogation.
+
+Then Caroline concludes thus: "I've had enough of the villa, and I'll
+never set foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you'll keep
+it, probably, and leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least
+amuse myself, while you go with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods.
+What is a _Villa Adolphini_ where you get nauseated if you go six
+times round the lawn? where they've planted chair-legs and
+broom-sticks on the pretext of producing shade? It's like a furnace:
+the walls are six inches thick! and my gentleman is absent seven hours
+a day! That's what a country seat means!"
+
+"Listen to me, Caroline."
+
+"I wouldn't so much mind, if you would only confess what you did
+to-day. You don't know me yet: come, tell me, I won't scold you. I
+pardon you beforehand for all that you've done."
+
+Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make
+one to his wife, replies--"Well, I'll tell you."
+
+"That's a good fellow--I shall love you better."
+
+"I was three hours--"
+
+"I was sure of it--at Madame de Fischtaminel's!"
+
+"No, at our notary's, as he had got me a purchaser; but we could not
+come to terms: he wanted our villa furnished. When I left there, I
+went to Braschon's, to see how much we owed him--"
+
+"You made up this romance while I was talking to you! Look me in the
+face! I'll go to see Braschon to-morrow."
+
+Adolphe cannot restrain a nervous shudder.
+
+"You can't help laughing, you monster!"
+
+"I laugh at your obstinacy."
+
+"I'll go to-morrow to Madame de Fischtaminel's."
+
+"Oh, go wherever you like!"
+
+"What brutality!" says Caroline, rising and going away with her
+handkerchief at her eyes.
+
+The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become
+a diabolical invention of Adolphe's, a trap into which the fawn has
+fallen.
+
+Since Adolphe's discovery that it is impossible to reason with
+Caroline, he lets her say whatever she pleases.
+
+Two months after, he sells the villa which cost him twenty-two
+thousand francs for seven thousand! But he gains this by the
+adventure--he finds out that the country is not the thing that
+Caroline wants.
+
+The question is becoming serious. Nature, with its woods, its forests,
+its valleys, the Switzerland of the environs of Paris, the artificial
+rivers, have amused Caroline for barely six months. Adolphe is tempted
+to abdicate and take Caroline's part himself.
+
+
+
+                       A HOUSEHOLD REVOLUTION.
+
+One morning, Adolphe is seized by the triumphant idea of letting
+Caroline find out for herself what she wants. He gives up to her the
+control of the house, saying, "Do as you like." He substitutes the
+constitutional system for the autocratic system, a responsible
+ministry for an absolute conjugal monarchy. This proof of confidence
+--the object of much secret envy--is, to women, a field-marshal's
+baton. Women are then, so to speak, mistresses at home.
+
+After this, nothing, not even the memory of the honey-moon, can be
+compared to Adolphe's happiness for several days. A woman, under such
+circumstances, is all sugar. She is too sweet: she would invent the
+art of petting and cosseting and of coining tender little names, if
+this matrimonial sugar-plummery had not existed ever since the
+Terrestrial Paradise. At the end of the month, Adolphe's condition is
+like that of children towards the close of New Year's week. So
+Caroline is beginning to say, not in words, but in acts, in manner, in
+mimetic expressions: "It's difficult to tell _what_ to do to please a
+man!"
+
+Giving up the helm of the boat to one's wife, is an exceedingly
+ordinary idea, and would hardly deserve the qualification of
+"triumphant," which we have given it at the commencement of this
+chapter, if it were not accompanied by that of taking it back again.
+Adolphe was seduced by a wish, which invariably seizes persons who are
+the prey of misfortune, to know how far an evil will go!--to try how
+much damage fire will do when left to itself, the individual
+possessing, or thinking he possesses, the power to arrest it. This
+curiosity pursues us from the cradle to the grave. Then, after his
+plethora of conjugal felicity, Adolphe, who is treating himself to a
+farce in his own house, goes through the following phases:
+
+
+FIRST EPOCH. Things go on altogether too well. Caroline buys little
+account books to keep a list of her expenses in, she buys a nice
+little piece of furniture to store her money in, she feeds Adolphe
+superbly, she is happy in his approbation, she discovers that very
+many articles are needed in the house. It is her ambition to be an
+incomparable housekeeper. Adolphe, who arrogates to himself the right
+of censorship, no longer finds the slightest suggestion to make.
+
+When he dresses himself, everything is ready to his hands. Not even in
+Armide's garden was more ingenious tenderness displayed than that of
+Caroline. For her phoenix husband, she renews the wax upon his razor
+strap, she substitutes new suspenders for old ones. None of his
+button-holes are ever widowed. His linen is as well cared for as that
+of the confessor of the devotee, all whose sins are venial. His
+stockings are free from holes. At table, his tastes, his caprices
+even, are studied, consulted: he is getting fat! There is ink in his
+inkstand, and the sponge is always moist. He never has occasion to
+say, like Louis XIV, "I came near having to wait!" In short, he hears
+himself continually called _a love of a man_. He is obliged to
+reproach Caroline for neglecting herself: she does not pay sufficient
+attention to her own needs. Of this gentle reproach Caroline takes
+note.
+
+
+SECOND EPOCH. The scene changes, at table. Everything is exceedingly
+dear. Vegetables are beyond one's means. Wood sells as if it came from
+Campeche. Fruit? Oh! as to fruit, princes, bankers and great lords
+alone can eat it. Dessert is a cause of ruin. Adolphe often hears
+Caroline say to Madame Deschars: "How do you manage?" Conferences are
+held in your presence upon the proper way to keep cooks under the
+thumb.
+
+A cook who entered your service without effects, without clothes, and
+without talent, has come to get her wages in a blue merino gown, set
+off by an embroidered neckerchief, her ears embellished with a pair of
+ear-rings enriched with small pearls, her feet clothed in comfortable
+shoes which give you a glimpse of neat cotton stockings. She has two
+trunks full of property, and keeps an account at the savings bank.
+
+Upon this Caroline complains of the bad morals of the lower classes:
+she complains of the education and the knowledge of figures which
+distinguish domestics. From time to time she utters little axioms like
+the following: There are some mistakes you _must_ make!--It's only
+those who do nothing who do everything well.--She has the anxieties
+that belong to power.--Ah! men are fortunate in not having a house to
+keep.--Women bear the burden of the innumerable details.
+
+
+THIRD EPOCH. Caroline, absorbed in the idea that you should eat merely
+to live, treats Adolphe to the delights of a cenobitic table.
+
+Adolphe's stockings are either full of holes or else rough with the
+lichen of hasty mendings, for the day is not long enough for all that
+his wife has to do. He wears suspenders blackened by use. His linen is
+old and gapes like a door-keeper, or like the door itself. At a time
+when Adolphe is in haste to conclude a matter of business, it takes
+him an hour to dress: he has to pick out his garments one by one,
+opening many an article before finding one fit to wear. But Caroline
+is charmingly dressed. She has pretty bonnets, velvet boots,
+mantillas. She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration
+in virtue of this principle: Charity well understood begins at home.
+When Adolphe complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken
+wardrobe and Caroline's splendor, she says, "Why, you reproached me
+with buying nothing for myself!"
+
+The husband and the wife here begin to bandy jests more or less
+acrimonious. One evening Caroline makes herself very agreeable, in
+order to insinuate an avowal of a rather large deficit, just as the
+ministry begins to eulogize the tax-payers, and boast of the wealth of
+the country, when it is preparing to bring forth a bill for an
+additional appropriation. There is this further similitude that both
+are done in the chamber, whether in administration or in housekeeping.
+From this springs the profound truth that the constitutional system is
+infinitely dearer than the monarchical system. For a nation as for a
+household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity,
+of chicanery.
+
+Adolphe, enlightened by his past annoyances, waits for an opportunity
+to explode, and Caroline slumbers in a delusive security.
+
+What starts the quarrel? Do we ever know what electric current
+precipitates the avalanche or decides a revolution? It may result from
+anything or nothing. But finally, Adolphe, after a period to be
+determined in each case by the circumstances of the couple, utters
+this fatal phrase, in the midst of a discussion: "Ah! when I was a
+bachelor!"
+
+Her husband's bachelor life is to a woman what the phrase, "My dear
+deceased," is to a widow's second husband. These two stings produce
+wounds which are never completely healed.
+
+Then Adolphe goes on like General Bonaparte haranguing the Five
+Hundred: "We are on a volcano!--The house no longer has a head, the
+time to come to an understanding has arrived.--You talk of happiness,
+Caroline, but you have compromised, imperiled it by your exactions,
+you have violated the civil code: you have mixed yourself up in the
+discussions of business, and you have invaded the conjugal authority.
+--We must reform our internal affairs."
+
+Caroline does not shout, like the Five Hundred, "Down with the
+dictator!" For people never shout a man down, when they feel that they
+can put him down.
+
+"When I was a bachelor I had none but new stockings! I had a clean
+napkin every day on my plate. The restaurateur only fleeced me of a
+determinate sum. I have given up to you my beloved liberty! What have
+you done with it?"
+
+"Am I then so very wrong, Adolphe, to have sought to spare you
+numerous cares?" says Caroline, taking an attitude before her husband.
+"Take the key of the money-box back,--but do you know what will
+happen? I am ashamed, but you will compel me to go on to the stage to
+get the merest necessaries of life. Is this what you want? Degrade
+your wife, or bring in conflict two contrary, hostile interests--"
+
+Such, for three quarters of the French people is an exact definition
+of marriage.
+
+"Be perfectly easy, dear," resumes Caroline, seating herself in her
+chair like Marius on the ruins of Carthage, "I will never ask you for
+anything. I am not a beggar! I know what I'll do--you don't know me
+yet."
+
+"Well, what will you do?" asks Adolphe; "it seems impossible to joke
+or have an explanation with you women. What will you do?"
+
+"It doesn't concern you at all."
+
+"Excuse me, madame, quite the contrary. Dignity, honor--"
+
+"Oh, have no fear of that, sir. For your sake more than for my own, I
+will keep it a dead secret."
+
+"Come, Caroline, my own Carola, what do you mean to do?"
+
+Caroline darts a viper-like glance at Adolphe, who recoils and
+proceeds to walk up and down the room.
+
+"There now, tell me, what will you do?" he repeats after much too
+prolonged a silence.
+
+"I shall go to work, sir!"
+
+At this sublime declaration, Adolphe executes a movement in retreat,
+detecting a bitter exasperation, and feeling the sharpness of a north
+wind which had never before blown in the matrimonial chamber.
+
+
+
+                      THE ART OF BEING A VICTIM.
+
+On and after the Revolution, our vanquished Caroline adopts an
+infernal system, the effect of which is to make you regret your
+victory every hour. She becomes the opposition! Should Adolphe have
+one more such triumph, he would appear before the Court of Assizes,
+accused of having smothered his wife between two mattresses, like
+Shakespeare's Othello. Caroline puts on the air of a martyr; her
+submission is positively killing. On every occasion she assassinates
+Adolphe with a "Just as you like!" uttered in tones whose sweetness is
+something fearful. No elegiac poet could compete with Caroline, who
+utters elegy upon elegy: elegy in action, elegy in speech: her smile
+is elegiac, her silence is elegiac, her gestures are elegiac. Here are
+a few examples, wherein every household will find some of its
+impressions recorded:
+
+
+AFTER BREAKFAST. "Caroline, we go to-night to the Deschars' grand ball
+you know."
+
+"Yes, love."
+
+AFTER DINNER. "What, not dressed yet, Caroline?" exclaims Adolphe, who
+has just made his appearance, magnificently equipped.
+
+He finds Caroline arrayed in a gown fit for an elderly lady of strong
+conversational powers, a black moire with an old-fashioned fan-waist.
+Flowers, too badly imitated to deserve the name of artificial, give a
+gloomy aspect to a head of hair which the chambermaid has carelessly
+arranged. Caroline's gloves have already seen wear and tear.
+
+"I am ready, my dear."
+
+"What, in that dress?"
+
+"I have no other. A new dress would have cost three hundred francs."
+
+"Why did you not tell me?"
+
+"I, ask you for anything, after what has happened!"
+
+"I'll go alone," says Adolphe, unwilling to be humiliated in his wife.
+
+"I dare say you are very glad to," returns Caroline, in a captious
+tone, "it's plain enough from the way you are got up."
+
+
+Eleven persons are in the parlor, all invited to dinner by Adolphe.
+Caroline is there, looking as if her husband had invited her too. She
+is waiting for dinner to be served.
+
+"Sir," says the parlor servant in a whisper to his master, "the cook
+doesn't know what on earth to do!"
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"You said nothing to her, sir: and she has only two side-dishes, the
+beef, a chicken, a salad and vegetables."
+
+"Caroline, didn't you give the necessary orders?"
+
+"How did I know that you had company, and besides I can't take it upon
+myself to give orders here! You delivered me from all care on that
+point, and I thank heaven for it every day of my life."
+
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel has called to pay Madame Caroline a visit. She
+finds her coughing feebly and nearly bent double over her embroidery.
+
+"Ah, so you are working those slippers for your dear Adolphe?"
+
+Adolphe is standing before the fire-place as complacently as may be.
+
+"No, madame, it's for a tradesman who pays me for them: like the
+convicts, my labor enables me to treat myself to some little
+comforts."
+
+Adolphe reddens; he can't very well beat his wife, and Madame de
+Fischtaminel looks at him as much as to say, "What does this mean?"
+
+"You cough a good deal, my darling," says Madame de Fischtaminel.
+
+"Oh!" returns Caroline, "what is life to me?"
+
+
+Caroline is seated, conversing with a lady of your acquaintance, whose
+good opinion you are exceedingly anxious to retain. From the depths of
+the embrasure where you are talking with some friends, you gather,
+from the mere motion of her lips, these words: "My husband would have
+it so!" uttered with the air of a young Roman matron going to the
+circus to be devoured. You are profoundly wounded in your several
+vanities, and wish to attend to this conversation while listening to
+your guests: you thus make replies which bring you back such inquiries
+as: "Why, what are you thinking of?" For you have lost the thread of
+the discourse, and you fidget nervously with your feet, thinking to
+yourself, "What is she telling her about me?"
+
+
+Adolphe is dining with the Deschars: twelve persons are at table, and
+Caroline is seated next to a nice young man named Ferdinand, Adolphe's
+cousin. Between the first and second course, conjugal happiness is the
+subject of conversation.
+
+"There is nothing easier than for a woman to be happy," says Caroline
+in reply to a woman who complains of her husband.
+
+"Tell us your secret, madame," says M. de Fischtaminel agreeably.
+
+"A woman has nothing to do but to meddle with nothing to consider
+herself as the first servant in the house or as a slave that the
+master takes care of, to have no will of her own, and never to make an
+observation: thus all goes well."
+
+This, delivered in a bitter tone and with tears in her voice, alarms
+Adolphe, who looks fixedly at his wife.
+
+"You forget, madame, the happiness of telling about one's happiness,"
+he returns, darting at her a glance worthy of the tyrant in a
+melodrama.
+
+Quite satisfied with having shown herself assassinated or on the point
+of being so, Caroline turns her head aside, furtively wipes away a
+tear, and says:
+
+"Happiness cannot be described!"
+
+This incident, as they say at the Chamber, leads to nothing, but
+Ferdinand looks upon his cousin as an angel about to be offered up.
+
+
+Some one alludes to the frightful prevalence of inflammation of the
+stomach, or to the nameless diseases of which young women die.
+
+"Ah, too happy they!" exclaims Caroline, as if she were foretelling
+the manner of her death.
+
+
+Adolphe's mother-in-law comes to see her daughter. Caroline says, "My
+husband's parlor:" "Your master's chamber." Everything in the house
+belongs to "My husband."
+
+"Why, what's the matter, children?" asks the mother-in-law; "you seem
+to be at swords' points."
+
+"Oh, dear me," says Adolphe, "nothing but that Caroline has had the
+management of the house and didn't manage it right, that's all."
+
+"She got into debt, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, dearest mamma."
+
+"Look here, Adolphe," says the mother-in-law, after having waited to
+be left alone with her son, "would you prefer to have my daughter
+magnificently dressed, to have everything go on smoothly, _without its
+costing you anything_?"
+
+Imagine, if you can, the expression of Adolphe's physiognomy, as he
+hears _this declaration of woman's rights_!
+
+
+Caroline abandons her shabby dress and appears in a splendid one. She
+is at the Deschars': every one compliments her upon her taste, upon
+the richness of her materials, upon her lace, her jewels.
+
+"Ah! you have a charming husband!" says Madame Deschars. Adolphe
+tosses his head proudly, and looks at Caroline.
+
+"My husband, madame! I cost that gentleman nothing, thank heaven! All
+I have was given me by my mother."
+
+Adolphe turns suddenly about and goes to talk with Madame de
+Fischtaminel.
+
+
+After a year of absolute monarchy, Caroline says very mildly one
+morning:
+
+"How much have you spent this year, dear?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Examine your accounts."
+
+Adolphe discovers that he has spent a third more than during
+Caroline's worst year.
+
+"And I've cost you nothing for my dress," she adds.
+
+
+Caroline is playing Schubert's melodies. Adolphe takes great pleasure
+in hearing these compositions well-executed: he gets up and
+compliments Caroline. She bursts into tears.
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"Nothing, I'm nervous."
+
+"I didn't know you were subject to that."
+
+"O Adolphe, you won't see anything! Look, my rings come off my
+fingers: you don't love me any more--I'm a burden to you--"
+
+She weeps, she won't listen, she weeps afresh at every word Adolphe
+utters.
+
+"Suppose you take the management of the house back again?"
+
+"Ah!" she exclaims, rising sharply to her feet, like a spring figure
+in a box, "now that you've had enough of your experience! Thank you!
+Do you suppose it's money that I want? Singular method, yours, of
+pouring balm upon a wounded heart. No, go away."
+
+"Very well, just as you like, Caroline."
+
+This "just as you like" is the first expression of indifference
+towards a wife: and Caroline sees before her an abyss towards which
+she had been walking of her own free will.
+
+
+
+                         THE FRENCH CAMPAIGN.
+
+The disasters of 1814 afflict every species of existence. After
+brilliant days of conquest, after the period during which obstacles
+change to triumphs, and the slightest check becomes a piece of good
+fortune, there comes a time when the happiest ideas turn out blunders,
+when courage leads to destruction, and when your very fortifications
+are a stumbling-block. Conjugal love, which, according to authors, is
+a peculiar phase of love, has, more than anything else, its French
+Campaign, its fatal 1814. The devil especially loves to dangle his
+tail in the affairs of poor desolate women, and to this Caroline has
+come.
+
+Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband
+back. She spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her
+imagination works. She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands
+pensively at the window, looking at the street and seeing nothing, her
+face glued to the panes, and feeling as if in a desert, in the midst
+of her friends, in the bosom of her luxuriously furnished apartments.
+
+Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed
+between a court and a garden, all life is double. At every story, a
+family sees another family in the opposite house. Everybody plunges
+his gaze at will into his neighbor's domains. There is a necessity for
+mutual observation, a common right of search from which none can
+escape. At a given time, in the morning, you get up early, the servant
+opposite is dusting the parlor, she has left the windows open and has
+put the rugs on the railing; you divine a multitude of things, and
+vice-versa. Thus, in a given time, you are acquainted with the habits
+of the pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman
+opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old
+bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair
+front. Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination.
+At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself--too
+late, like the chaste Susanne,--the prey of the delighted lorgnette of
+an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who
+becomes criminal gratis. On the other hand, a handsome young
+gentleman, who, for the present, works without wages, and is only
+nineteen years old, appears before the sight of a pious old lady, in
+the simple apparel of a man engaged in shaving. The watch thus kept up
+is never relaxed, while prudence, on the contrary, has its moments of
+forgetfulness. Curtains are not always let down in time. A woman, just
+before dark, approaches the window to thread her needle, and the
+married man opposite may then admire a head that Raphael might have
+painted, and one that he considers worthy of himself--a National Guard
+truly imposing when under arms. Oh, sacred private life, where art
+thou! Paris is a city ever ready to exhibit itself half naked, a city
+essentially libertine and devoid of modesty. For a person's life to be
+decorous in it, the said person should have a hundred thousand a year.
+Virtues are dearer than vices in Paris.
+
+Caroline, whose gaze sometimes steals between the protecting muslins
+which hide her domestic life from the five stories opposite, at last
+discovers a young couple plunged in the delights of the honey-moon,
+and newly established in the first story directly in view of her
+window. She spends her time in the most exciting observations. The
+blinds are closed early, and opened late. One day, Caroline, who has
+arisen at eight o'clock notices, by accident, of course, the maid
+preparing a bath or a morning dress, a delicious deshabille. Caroline
+sighs. She lies in ambush like a hunter at the cover; she surprises
+the young woman, her face actually illuminated with happiness.
+Finally, by dint of watching the charming couple, she sees the
+gentleman and lady open the window, and lean gently one against the
+other, as, supported by the railing, they breathe the evening air.
+Caroline gives herself a nervous headache, by endeavoring to interpret
+the phantasmagorias, some of them having an explanation and others
+not, made by the shadows of these two young people on the curtains,
+one night when they have forgotten to close the shutters. The young
+woman is often seated, melancholy and pensive, waiting for her absent
+husband; she hears the tread of a horse, or the rumble of a cab at the
+street corner; she starts from the sofa, and from her movements, it is
+easy for Caroline to see that she exclaims: "'Tis he!"
+
+"How they love each other!" says Caroline to herself.
+
+By dint of nervous headache, Caroline conceives an exceedingly
+ingenious plan: this plan consists in using the conjugal bliss of the
+opposite neighbors as a tonic to stimulate Adolphe. The idea is not
+without depravity, but then Caroline's intention sanctifies the means!
+
+"Adolphe," she says, "we have a neighbor opposite, the loveliest
+woman, a brunette--"
+
+"Oh, yes," returns Adolphe, "I know her. She is a friend of Madame de
+Fischtaminel's: Madame Foullepointe, the wife of a broker, a charming
+man and a good fellow, very fond of his wife: he's crazy about her.
+His office and rooms are here, in the court, while those on the street
+are madame's. I know of no happier household. Foullepointe talks about
+his happiness everywhere, even at the Exchange; he's really quite
+tiresome."
+
+"Well, then, be good enough to present Monsieur and Madame
+Foullepointe to me. I should be delighted to learn how she manages to
+make her husband love her so much: have they been married long?"
+
+"Five years, just like us."
+
+"O Adolphe, dear, I am dying to know her: make us intimately
+acquainted. Am I as pretty as she?"
+
+"Well, if I were to meet you at an opera ball, and if you weren't my
+wife, I declare, I shouldn't know which--"
+
+"You are real sweet to-day. Don't forget to invite them to dinner
+Saturday."
+
+"I'll do it to-night. Foullepointe and I often meet on 'Change."
+
+"Now," says Caroline, "this young woman will doubtless tell me what
+her method of action is."
+
+Caroline resumes her post of observation. At about three she looks
+through the flowers which form as it were a bower at the window, and
+exclaims, "Two perfect doves!"
+
+For the Saturday in question, Caroline invites Monsieur and Madame
+Deschars, the worthy Monsieur Fischtaminel, in short, the most
+virtuous couples of her society. She has brought out all her
+resources: she has ordered the most sumptuous dinner, she has taken
+the silver out of the chest: she means to do all honor to the model of
+wives.
+
+"My dear, you will see to-night," she says to Madame Deschars, at the
+moment when all the women are looking at each other in silence, "the
+most admirable young couple in the world, our opposite neighbors: a
+young man of fair complexion, so graceful and with _such_ manners! His
+head is like Lord Byron's, and he's a real Don Juan, only faithful:
+he's discovered the secret of making love eternal: I shall perhaps
+obtain a second crop of it from her example. Adolphe, when he sees
+them, will blush at his conduct, and--"
+
+The servant announces: "Monsieur and Madame Foullepointe."
+
+Madame Foullepointe, a pretty brunette, a genuine Parisian, slight and
+erect in form, the brilliant light of her eye quenched by her long
+lashes, charmingly dressed, sits down upon the sofa. Caroline bows to
+a fat gentleman with thin gray hair, who follows this Paris
+Andalusian, and who exhibits a face and paunch fit for Silenus, a
+butter-colored pate, a deceitful, libertine smile upon his big, heavy
+lips,--in short, a philosopher! Caroline looks upon this individual
+with astonishment.
+
+"Monsieur Foullepointe, my dear," says Adolphe, presenting the worthy
+quinquagenarian.
+
+"I am delighted, madame," says Caroline, good-naturedly, "that you
+have brought your father-in-law [profound sensation], but we shall
+soon see your husband, I trust--"
+
+"Madame--!"
+
+Everybody listens and looks. Adolphe becomes the object of every one's
+attention; he is literally dumb with amazement: if he could, he would
+whisk Caroline off through a trap, as at the theatre.
+
+"This is Monsieur Foullepointe, my husband," says Madame Foullepointe.
+
+Caroline turns scarlet as she sees her ridiculous blunder, and Adolphe
+scathes her with a look of thirty-six candlepower.
+
+"You said he was young and fair," whispers Madame Deschars. Madame
+Foullepointe,--knowing lady that she is,--boldly stares at the
+ceiling.
+
+A month after, Madame Foullepointe and Caroline become intimate.
+Adolphe, who is taken up with Madame de Fischtaminel, pays no
+attention to this dangerous friendship, a friendship which will bear
+its fruits, for--pray learn this--
+
+
+Axiom.--Women have corrupted more women than men have ever loved.
+
+
+
+                        A SOLO ON THE HEARSE.
+
+After a period, the length of which depends on the strength of
+Caroline's principles, she appears to be languishing; and when
+Adolphe, anxious for decorum's sake, as he sees her stretched out upon
+the sofa like a snake in the sun, asks her, "What is the matter, love?
+What do you want?"
+
+"I wish I was dead!" she replies.
+
+"Quite a merry and agreeable wish!"
+
+"It isn't death that frightens me, it's suffering."
+
+"I suppose that means that I don't make you happy! That's the way with
+women!"
+
+Adolphe strides about the room, talking incoherently: but he is
+brought to a dead halt by seeing Caroline dry her tears, which are
+really flowing artistically, in an embroidered handkerchief.
+
+"Do you feel sick?"
+
+"I don't feel well. [Silence.] I only hope that I shall live long
+enough to see my daughter married, for I know the meaning, now, of the
+expression so little understood by the young--_the choice of a
+husband_! Go to your amusements, Adolphe: a woman who thinks of the
+future, a woman who suffers, is not at all diverting: come, go and
+have a good time."
+
+"Where do you feel bad?"
+
+"I don't feel bad, dear: I never was better. I don't feel anything.
+No, really, I am better. There, leave me to myself."
+
+This time, being the first, Adolphe goes away almost sad.
+
+A week passes, during which Caroline orders all the servants to
+conceal from her husband her deplorable situation: she languishes, she
+rings when she feels she is going off, she uses a great deal of ether.
+The domestics finally acquaint their master with madame's conjugal
+heroism, and Adolphe remains at home one evening after dinner, and
+sees his wife passionately kissing her little Marie.
+
+"Poor child! I regret the future only for your sake! What is life, I
+should like to know?"
+
+"Come, my dear," says Adolphe, "don't take on so."
+
+"I'm not taking on. Death doesn't frighten me--I saw a funeral this
+morning, and I thought how happy the body was! How comes it that I
+think of nothing but death? Is it a disease? I have an idea that I
+shall die by my own hand."
+
+The more Adolphe tries to divert Caroline, the more closely she wraps
+herself up in the crape of her hopeless melancholy. This second time,
+Adolphe stays at home and is wearied to death. At the third attack of
+forced tears, he goes out without the slightest compunction. He
+finally gets accustomed to these everlasting murmurs, to these dying
+postures, these crocodile tears. So he says:
+
+"If you are sick, Caroline, you'd better have a doctor."
+
+"Just as you like! It will end quicker, so. But bring a famous one, if
+you bring any."
+
+At the end of a month, Adolphe, worn out by hearing the funereal air
+that Caroline plays him on every possible key, brings home a famous
+doctor. At Paris, doctors are all men of discernment, and are
+admirably versed in conjugal nosography.
+
+"Well, madame," says the great physician, "how happens it that so
+pretty a woman allows herself to be sick?"
+
+"Ah! sir, like the nose of old father Aubry, I aspire to the tomb--"
+
+Caroline, out of consideration for Adolphe, makes a feeble effort to
+smile.
+
+"Tut, tut! But your eyes are clear: they don't seem to need our
+infernal drugs."
+
+"Look again, doctor, I am eaten up with fever, a slow, imperceptible
+fever--"
+
+And she fastens her most roguish glance upon the illustrious doctor,
+who says to himself, "What eyes!"
+
+"Now, let me see your tongue."
+
+Caroline puts out her taper tongue between two rows of teeth as white
+as those of a dog.
+
+"It is a little bit furred at the root: but you have breakfasted--"
+observes the great physician, turning toward Adolphe.
+
+"Oh, a mere nothing," returns Caroline; "two cups of tea--"
+
+Adolphe and the illustrious leech look at each other, for the doctor
+wonders whether it is the husband or the wife that is trifling with
+him.
+
+"What do you feel?" gravely inquires the physician.
+
+"I don't sleep."
+
+"Good!"
+
+"I have no appetite."
+
+"Well!"
+
+"I have a pain, here."
+
+The doctor examines the part indicated.
+
+"Very good, we'll look at that by and by."
+
+"Now and then a shudder passes over me--"
+
+"Very good!"
+
+"I have melancholy fits, I am always thinking of death, I feel
+promptings of suicide--"
+
+"Dear me! Really!"
+
+"I have rushes of heat to the face: look, there's a constant trembling
+in my eyelid."
+
+"Capital! We call that a trismus."
+
+The doctor goes into an explanation, which lasts a quarter of an hour,
+of the trismus, employing the most scientific terms. From this it
+appears that the trismus is the trismus: but he observes with the
+greatest modesty that if science knows that the trismus is the
+trismus, it is entirely ignorant of the cause of this nervous
+affection, which comes and goes, appears and disappears--"and," he
+adds, "we have decided that it is altogether nervous."
+
+"Is it very dangerous?" asks Caroline, anxiously.
+
+"Not at all. How do you lie at night?"
+
+"Doubled up in a heap."
+
+"Good. On which side?"
+
+"The left."
+
+"Very well. How many mattresses are there on your bed?"
+
+"Three."
+
+"Good. Is there a spring bed?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What is the spring bed stuffed with?"
+
+"Horse hair."
+
+"Capital. Let me see you walk. No, no, naturally, and as if we weren't
+looking at you."
+
+Caroline walks like Fanny Elssler, communicating the most Andalusian
+little motions to her tournure.
+
+"Do you feel a sensation of heaviness in your knees?"
+
+"Well, no--" she returns to her place. "Ah, no that I think of it, it
+seems to me that I do."
+
+"Good. Have you been in the house a good deal lately?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir, a great deal too much--and alone."
+
+"Good. I thought so. What do you wear on your head at night?"
+
+"An embroidered night-cap, and sometimes a handkerchief over it."
+
+"Don't you feel a heat there, a slight perspiration?"
+
+"How can I, when I'm asleep?"
+
+"Don't you find your night-cap moist on your forehead, when you wake
+up?"
+
+"Sometimes."
+
+"Capital. Give me your hand."
+
+The doctor takes out his watch.
+
+"Did I tell you that I have a vertigo?" asks Caroline.
+
+"Hush!" says the doctor, counting the pulse. "In the evening?"
+
+"No, in the morning."
+
+"Ah, bless me, a vertigo in the morning," says the doctor, looking at
+Adolphe.
+
+"The Duke of G. has not gone to London," says the great physician,
+while examining Caroline's skin, "and there's a good deal to be said
+about it in the Faubourg St. Germain."
+
+"Have you patients there?" asks Caroline.
+
+"Nearly all my patients are there. Dear me, yes; I've got seven to see
+this morning; some of them are in danger."
+
+"What do you think of me, sir?" says Caroline.
+
+"Madame, you need attention, a great deal of attention, you must take
+quieting liquors, plenty of syrup of gum, a mild diet, white meat, and
+a good deal of exercise."
+
+"There go twenty francs," says Adolphe to himself with a smile.
+
+The great physician takes Adolphe by the arm, and draws him out with
+him, as he takes his leave: Caroline follows them on tiptoe.
+
+"My dear sir," says the great physician, "I have just prescribed very
+insufficiently for your wife. I did not wish to frighten her: this
+affair concerns you more nearly than you imagine. Don't neglect her;
+she has a powerful temperament, and enjoys violent health; all this
+reacts upon her. Nature has its laws, which, when disregarded, compel
+obedience. She may get into a morbid state, which would cause you
+bitterly to repent having neglected her. If you love her, why, love
+her: but if you don't love her, and nevertheless desire to preserve
+the mother of your children, the resolution to come to is a matter of
+hygiene, but it can only proceed from you!"
+
+"How well he understand me!" says Caroline to herself. She opens the
+door and says: "Doctor, you did not write down the doses!"
+
+The great physician smiles, bows and slips the twenty franc piece into
+his pocket; he then leaves Adolphe to his wife, who takes him and
+says:
+
+"What is the fact about my condition? Must I prepare for death?"
+
+"Bah! He says you're too healthy!" cries Adolphe, impatiently.
+
+Caroline retires to her sofa to weep.
+
+"What is it, now?"
+
+"So I am to live a long time--I am in the way--you don't love me any
+more--I won't consult that doctor again--I don't know why Madame
+Foullepointe advised me to see him, he told me nothing but trash--I
+know better than he what I need!"
+
+"What do you need?"
+
+"Can you ask, ungrateful man?" and Caroline leans her head on
+Adolphe's shoulder.
+
+Adolphe, very much alarmed, says to himself: "The doctor's right, she
+may get to be morbidly exacting, and then what will become of me? Here
+I am compelled to choose between Caroline's physical extravagance, or
+some young cousin or other."
+
+Meanwhile Caroline sits down and sings one of Schubert's melodies with
+all the agitation of a hypochondriac.
+
+
+
+
+                             PART SECOND
+
+
+
+                               PREFACE
+
+  If, reader, you have grasped the intent of this book,--and
+  infinite honor is done you by the supposition: the profoundest
+  author does not always comprehend, I may say never comprehends,
+  the different meanings of his book, nor its bearing, nor the good
+  nor the harm it may do--if, then, you have bestowed some attention
+  upon these little scenes of married life, you have perhaps noticed
+  their color--
+
+  "What color?" some grocer will doubtless ask; "books are bound in
+  yellow, blue, green, pearl-gray, white--"
+
+  Alas! books possess another color, they are dyed by the author,
+  and certain writers borrow their dye. Some books let their color
+  come off on to others. More than this. Books are dark or fair,
+  light brown or red. They have a sex, too! I know of male books,
+  and female books, of books which, sad to say, have no sex, which
+  we hope is not the case with this one, supposing that you do this
+  collection of nosographic sketches the honor of calling it a book.
+
+  Thus far, the troubles we have described have been exclusively
+  inflicted by the wife upon the husband. You have therefore seen
+  only the masculine side of the book. And if the author really has
+  the sense of hearing for which we give him credit, he has already
+  caught more than one indignant exclamation or remonstrance:
+
+  "He tells us of nothing but vexations suffered by our husbands, as
+  if we didn't have our petty troubles, too!"
+
+  Oh, women! You have been heard, for if you do not always make
+  yourselves understood, you are always sure to make yourselves
+  heard.
+
+  It would therefore be signally unjust to lay upon you alone the
+  reproaches that every being brought under the yoke (_conjugium_)
+  has the right to heap upon that necessary, sacred, useful,
+  eminently conservative institution,--one, however, that is often
+  somewhat of an encumbrance, and tight about the joints, though
+  sometimes it is also too loose there.
+
+  I will go further! Such partiality would be a piece of idiocy.
+
+  A man,--not a writer, for in a writer there are many men,--an
+  author, rather, should resemble Janus, see behind and before,
+  become a spy, examine an idea in all its phases, delve alternately
+  into the soul of Alceste and into that of Philaenete, know
+  everything though he does not tell it, never be tiresome, and--
+
+  We will not conclude this programme, for we should tell the whole,
+  and that would be frightful for those who reflect upon the present
+  condition of literature.
+
+  Furthermore, an author who speaks for himself in the middle of his
+  book, resembles the old fellow in "The Speaking Picture," when he
+  puts his face in the hole cut in the painting. The author does not
+  forget that in the Chamber, no one can take the floor _between two
+  votes_. Enough, therefore!
+
+  Here follows the female portion of the book: for, to resemble
+  marriage perfectly, it ought to be more or less hermaphroditic.
+
+
+
+
+
+                    PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+
+
+                   HUSBANDS DURING THE SECOND MONTH.
+
+Two young married women, Caroline and Stephanie, who had been early
+friends at M'lle Machefer's boarding school, one of the most
+celebrated educational institutions in the Faubourg St. Honore, met at
+a ball given by Madame de Fischtaminel, and the following conversation
+took place in a window-seat in the boudoir.
+
+It was so hot that a man had acted upon the idea of going to breathe
+the fresh night air, some time before the two young women. He had
+placed himself in the angle of the balcony, and, as there were many
+flowers before the window, the two friends thought themselves alone.
+This man was the author's best friend.
+
+One of the two ladies, standing at the corner of the embrasure, kept
+watch by looking at the boudoir and the parlors. The other had so
+placed herself as not to be in the draft, which was nevertheless
+tempered by the muslin and silk curtains.
+
+The boudoir was empty, the ball was just beginning, the gaming-tables
+were open, offering their green cloths and their packs of cards still
+compressed in the frail case placed upon them by the customs office.
+The second quadrille was in progress.
+
+All who go to balls will remember that phase of large parties when the
+guests are not yet all arrived, but when the rooms are already filled
+--a moment which gives the mistress of the house a transitory pang of
+terror. This moment is, other points of comparison apart, like that
+which decides a victory or the loss of a battle.
+
+You will understand, therefore, how what was meant to be a secret now
+obtains the honors of publicity.
+
+"Well, Caroline?"
+
+"Well, Stephanie?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+A double sigh.
+
+"Have you forgotten our agreement?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Why haven't you been to see me, then?"
+
+"I am never left alone. Even here we shall hardly have time to talk."
+
+"Ah! if Adolphe were to get into such habits as that!" exclaimed
+Caroline.
+
+"You saw us, Armand and me, when he paid me what is called, I don't
+know why, his court."
+
+"Yes, I admired him, I thought you very happy, you had found your
+ideal, a fine, good-sized man, always well dressed, with yellow
+gloves, his beard well shaven, patent leather boots, a clean shirt,
+exquisitely neat, and so attentive--"
+
+"Yes, yes, go on."
+
+"In short, quite an elegant man: his voice was femininely sweet, and
+then such gentleness! And his promises of happiness and liberty! His
+sentences were veneered with rosewood. He stocked his conversation
+with shawls and laces. In his smallest expression you heard the
+rumbling of a coach and four. Your wedding presents were magnificent.
+Armand seemed to me like a husband of velvet, of a robe of birds'
+feathers in which you were to be wrapped."
+
+"Caroline, my husband uses tobacco."
+
+"So does mine; that is, he smokes."
+
+"But mine, dear, uses it as they say Napoleon did: in short, he chews,
+and I hold tobacco in horror. The monster found it out, and went
+without out it for seven months."
+
+"All men have their habits. They absolutely must use something."
+
+"You have no idea of the tortures I endure. At night I am awakened
+with a start by one of my own sneezes. As I go to sleep my motions
+bring the grains of snuff scattered over the pillow under my nose, I
+inhale, and explode like a mine. It seems that Armand, the wretch, is
+used to these _surprises_, and doesn't wake up. I find tobacco
+everywhere, and I certainly didn't marry the customs office."
+
+"But, my dear child, what does this trifling inconvenience amount to,
+if your husband is kind and possesses a good disposition?"
+
+"He is as cold as marble, as particular as an old bachelor, as
+communicative as a sentinel; and he's one of those men who say yes to
+everything, but who never do anything but what they want to."
+
+"Deny him, once."
+
+"I've tried it."
+
+"What came of it?"
+
+"He threatened to reduce my allowance, and to keep back a sum big
+enough for him to get along without me."
+
+"Poor Stephanie! He's not a man, he's a monster."
+
+"A calm and methodical monster, who wears a scratch, and who, every
+night--"
+
+"Well, every night--"
+
+"Wait a minute!--who takes a tumbler every night, and puts seven false
+teeth in it."
+
+"What a trap your marriage was! At any rate, Armand is rich."
+
+"Who knows?"
+
+"Good heavens! Why, you seem to me on the point of becoming very
+unhappy--or very happy."
+
+"Well, dear, how is it with you?"
+
+"Oh, as for me, I have nothing as yet but a pin that pricks me: but it
+is intolerable."
+
+"Poor creature! You don't know your own happiness: come, what is it?"
+
+Here the young woman whispered in the other's ear, so that it was
+impossible to catch a single word. The conversation recommenced, or
+rather finished by a sort of inference.
+
+"So, your Adolphe is jealous?"
+
+"Jealous of whom? We never leave each other, and that, in itself, is
+an annoyance. I can't stand it. I don't dare to gape. I am expected to
+be forever enacting the woman in love. It's fatiguing."
+
+"Caroline?"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"Resign myself. What are you?
+
+"Fight the customs office."
+
+This little trouble tends to prove that in the matter of personal
+deception, the two sexes can well cry quits.
+
+
+
+                        DISAPPOINTED AMBITION.
+
+
+                      I. CHODOREILLE THE GREAT.
+
+A young man has forsaken his natal city in the depths of one of the
+departments, rather clearly marked by M. Charles Dupin. He felt that
+glory of some sort awaited him: suppose that of a painter, a novelist,
+a journalist, a poet, a great statesman.
+
+Young Adolphe de Chodoreille--that we may be perfectly understood
+--wished to be talked about, to become celebrated, to be somebody.
+This, therefore, is addressed to the mass of aspiring individuals
+brought to Paris by all sorts of vehicles, whether moral or material,
+and who rush upon the city one fine morning with the hydrophobic
+purpose of overturning everybody's reputation, and of building
+themselves a pedestal with the ruins they are to make,--until
+disenchantment follows. As our intention is to specify this
+peculiarity so characteristic of our epoch, let us take from among
+the various personages the one whom the author has elsewhere called
+_A Distinguished Provencal_.
+
+Adolphe has discovered that the most admirable trade is that which
+consists in buying a bottle of ink, a bunch of quills, and a ream of
+paper, at a stationer's for twelve francs and a half, and in selling
+the two thousand sheets in the ream over again, for something like
+fifty thousand francs, after having, of course, written upon each leaf
+fifty lines replete with style and imagination.
+
+This problem,--twelve francs and a half metamorphosed into fifty
+thousand francs, at the rate of five sous a line--urges numerous
+families who might advantageously employ their members in the
+retirement of the provinces, to thrust them into the vortex of Paris.
+
+The young man who is the object of this exportation, invariably passes
+in his natal town for a man of as much imagination as the most famous
+author. He has always studied well, he writes very nice poetry, he is
+considered a fellow of parts: he is besides often guilty of a charming
+tale published in the local paper, which obtains the admiration of the
+department.
+
+His poor parents will never know what their son has come to Paris to
+learn at great cost, namely: That it is difficult to be a writer and
+to understand the French language short of a dozen years of heculean
+labor: That a man must have explored every sphere of social life, to
+become a genuine novelist, inasmuch as the novel is the private
+history of nations: That the great story-tellers, Aesop, Lucian,
+Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, La Fontaine, Lesage, Sterne,
+Voltaire, Walter Scott, the unknown Arabians of the _Thousand and One
+Nights_, were all men of genius as well as giants of erudition.
+
+Their Adolphe serves his literary apprenticeship in two or three
+coffee-houses, becomes a member of the Society of Men of Letters,
+attacks, with or without reason, men of talent who don't read his
+articles, assumes a milder tone on seeing the powerlessness of his
+criticisms, offers novelettes to the papers which toss them from one
+to the other as if they were shuttlecocks: and, after five or six
+years of exercises more or less fatiguing, of dreadful privations
+which seriously tax his parents, he attains a certain position.
+
+This position may be described as follows: Thanks to a sort of
+reciprocal support extended to each other, and which an ingenious
+writer has called "Mutual Admiration," Adolphe often sees his name
+cited among the names of celebrities, either in the prospectuses of
+the book-trade, or in the lists of newspapers about to appear.
+Publishers print the title of one of his works under the deceitful
+heading "IN PRESS," which might be called the typographical menagerie
+of bears.[*] Chodoreille is sometimes mentioned among the promising
+young men of the literary world.
+
+[*] A bear (_ours_) is a play which has been refused by a multitude of
+    theatres, but which is finally represented at a time when some
+    manager or other feels the need of one. The word has necessarily
+    passed from the language of the stage into the jargon of
+    journalism, and is applied to novels which wander the streets in
+    search of a publisher.
+
+For eleven years Adolphe Chodoreille remains in the ranks of the
+promising young men: he finally obtains a free entrance to the
+theatres, thanks to some dirty work or certain articles of dramatic
+criticism: he tries to pass for a good fellow; and as he loses his
+illusions respecting glory and the world of Paris, he gets into debt
+and his years begin to tell upon him.
+
+A paper which finds itself in a tight place asks him for one of his
+bears revised by his friends. This has been retouched and revamped
+every five years, so that it smells of the pomatum of each prevailing
+and then forgotten fashion. To Adolphe it becomes what the famous cap,
+which he was constantly staking, was to Corporal Trim, for during five
+years "Anything for a Woman" (the title decided upon) "will be one of
+the most entertaining productions of our epoch."
+
+After eleven years, Chodoreille is regarded as having written some
+respectable things, five or six tales published in the dismal
+magazines, in ladies' newspapers, or in works intended for children of
+tender age.
+
+As he is a bachelor, and possesses a coat and a pair of black
+cassimere trousers, and when he pleases may thus assume the appearance
+of an elegant diplomat, and as he is not without a certain intelligent
+air, he is admitted to several more or less literary salons: he bows
+to the five or six academicians who possess genius, influence or
+talent, he visits two or three of our great poets, he allows himself,
+in coffee-rooms, to call the two or three justly celebrated women of
+our epoch by their Christian names; he is on the best of terms with
+the blue stockings of the second grade,--who ought to be called
+_socks_,--and he shakes hands and takes glasses of absinthe with the
+stars of the smaller newspapers.
+
+Such is the history of every species of ordinary men--men who have
+been denied what they call good luck. This good luck is nothing less
+than unyielding will, incessant labor, contempt for an easily won
+celebrity, immense learning, and that patience which, according to
+Buffon, is the whole of genius, but which certainly is the half of it.
+
+You do not yet see any indication of a petty trouble for Caroline. You
+imagine that this history of five hundred young men engaged at this
+moment in wearing smooth the paving stones of Paris, was written as a
+sort of warning to the families of the eighty-six departments of
+France: but read these two letters which lately passed between two
+girls differently married, and you will see that it was as necessary
+as the narrative by which every true melodrama was until lately
+expected to open. You will divine the skillful manoeuvres of the
+Parisian peacock spreading his tail in the recesses of his native
+village, and polishing up, for matrimonial purposes, the rays of his
+glory, which, like those of the sun, are only warm and brilliant at a
+distance.
+
+
+From Madame Claire de la Roulandiere, nee Jugault, to Madame Adolphe
+de Chodoreille, nee Heurtaut.
+
+"VIVIERS.
+
+"You have not yet written to me, and it's real unkind in you. Don't
+you remember that the happier was to write first and to console her
+who remained in the country?
+
+"Since your departure for Paris, I have married Monsieur de la
+Roulandiere, the president of the tribunal. You know him, and you can
+judge whether I am happy or not, with my heart _saturated_, as it is,
+with our ideas. I was not ignorant what my lot would be: I live with
+the ex-president, my husband's uncle, and with my mother-in-law, who
+has preserved nothing of the ancient parliamentary society of Aix but
+its pride and its severity of manners. I am seldom alone, I never go
+out unless accompanied by my mother-in-law or my husband. We receive
+the heavy people of the city in the evening. They play whist at two
+sous a point, and I listen to conversations of this nature:
+
+"'Monsieur Vitremont is dead, and leaves two hundred and eighty
+thousand francs,' says the associate judge, a young man of
+forty-seven, who is as entertaining as a northwest wind.
+
+"'Are you quite sure of that?'
+
+"The _that_ refers to the two hundred and eighty thousand francs. A
+little judge then holds forth, he runs over the investments, the
+others discuss their value, and it is definitely settled that if he
+has not left two hundred and eighty thousand, he left something near
+it.
+
+"Then comes a universal concert of eulogy heaped upon the dead man's
+body, for having kept his bread under lock and key, for having
+shrewdly invested his little savings accumulated sou by sou, in order,
+probably, that the whole city and those who expect legacies may
+applaud and exclaim in admiration, 'He leaves two hundred and eighty
+thousand francs!' Now everybody has rich relations of whom they say
+'Will he leave anything like it?' and thus they discuss the quick as
+they have discussed the dead.
+
+"They talk of nothing but the prospects of fortune, the prospects of a
+vacancy in office, the prospects of the harvest.
+
+"When we were children, and used to look at those pretty little white
+mice, in the cobbler's window in the rue St. Maclou, that turned and
+turned the circular cage in which they were imprisoned, how far I was
+from thinking that they would one day be a faithful image of my life!
+
+"Think of it, my being in this condition!--I who fluttered my wings so
+much more than you, I whose imagination was so vagabond! My sins have
+been greater than yours, and I am the more severely punished. I have
+bidden farewell to my dreams: I am _Madame la Presidente_ in all my
+glory, and I resign myself to giving my arm for forty years to my big
+awkward Roulandiere, to living meanly in every way, and to having
+forever before me two heavy brows and two wall-eyes pierced in a
+yellow face, which is destined never to know what it is to smile.
+
+"But you, Caroline dear, you who, between ourselves, were admitted
+among the big girls while I still gamboled among the little ones, you
+whose only sin was pride, you,--at the age of twenty-seven, and with a
+dowry of two hundred thousand francs,--capture and captivate a truly
+great man, one of the wittiest men in Paris, one of the two talented
+men that our village has produced.--What luck!
+
+"You now circulate in the most brilliant society of Paris. Thanks to
+the sublime privileges of genius. You may appear in all the salons of
+the Faubourg St. Germain, and be cordially received. You have the
+exquisite enjoyment of the company of the two or three celebrated
+women of our age, where so many good things are said, where the happy
+speeches which arrive out here like Congreve rockets, are first fired
+off. You go to the Baron Schinner's of whom Adolphe so often spoke to
+us, whom all the great artists and foreigners of celebrity visit. In
+short, before long, you will be one of the queens of Paris, if you
+wish. You can receive, too, and have at your house the lions of
+literature, fashion and finance, whether male or female, for Adolphe
+spoke in such terms about his illustrious friendships and his intimacy
+with the favorites of the hour, that I imagine you giving and
+receiving honors.
+
+"With your ten thousand francs a year, and the legacy from your Aunt
+Carabas, added to the twenty thousand francs that your husband earns,
+you must keep a carriage; and since you go to all the theatres without
+paying, since journalists are the heroes of all the inaugurations so
+ruinous for those who keep up with the movement of Paris, and since
+they are constantly invited to dinner, you live as if you had an
+income of sixty thousand francs a year! Happy Caroline! I don't wonder
+you forget me!
+
+"I can understand how it is that you have not a moment to yourself.
+Your bliss is the cause of your silence, so I pardon you. Still, if,
+fatigued with so many pleasures, you one day, upon the summit of your
+grandeur, think of your poor Claire, write to me, tell me what a
+marriage with a great man is, describe those great Parisian ladies,
+especially those who write. Oh! I should _so_ much like to know what
+they are made of! Finally don't forget anything, unless you forget
+that you are loved, as ever, by your poor
+
+"CLAIRE JUGAULT."
+
+
+From Madame Adolphe de Chodoreille to Madame la Presidente de la
+Roulandiere, at Viviers.
+
+"PARIS.
+
+"Ah! my poor Claire, could you have known how many wretched little
+griefs your innocent letter would awaken, you never would have written
+it. Certainly no friend, and not even an enemy, on seeing a woman with
+a thousand mosquito-bites and a plaster over them, would amuse herself
+by tearing it off and counting the stings.
+
+"I will begin by telling you that for a woman of twenty-seven, with a
+face still passable, but with a form a little too much like that of
+the Emperor Nicholas for the humble part I play, I am happy! Let me
+tell you why: Adolphe, rejoicing in the deceptions which have fallen
+upon me like a hail-storm, smoothes over the wounds in my self-love by
+so much affection, so many attentions, and such charming things, that,
+in good truth, women--so far as they are simply women--would be glad
+to find in the man they marry defects so advantageous. But all men of
+letters (Adolphe, alas! is barely a man of letters), who are beings
+not a bit less irritable, nervous, fickle and eccentric than women,
+are far from possessing such solid qualities as those of Adolphe, and
+I hope they have not all been as unfortunate as he.
+
+"Ah! Claire, we love each other well enough for me to tell you the
+simple truth. I have saved my husband, dear, from profound but
+skillfully concealed poverty. Far from receiving twenty thousand
+francs a year, he has not earned that sum in the entire fifteen years
+that he has been at Paris. We occupy a third story in the rue Joubert,
+and pay twelve hundred francs for it; we have some eighty-five hundred
+francs left, with which I endeavor to keep house honorably.
+
+"I have brought Adolphe luck; for since our marriage, he has obtained
+the control of a feuilleton which is worth four hundred francs a month
+to him, though it takes but a small portion of his time. He owes this
+situation to an investment. We employed the seventy thousand francs
+left me by my Aunt Carabas in giving security for a newspaper; on this
+we get nine per cent, and we have stock besides. Since this
+transaction, which was concluded some ten months ago, our income has
+doubled, and we now possess a competence, I can complain of my
+marriage in a pecuniary point of view no more than as regards my
+affections. My vanity alone has suffered, and my ambition has been
+swamped. You will understand the various petty troubles which have
+assailed me, by a single specimen.
+
+"Adolphe, you remember, appeared to us on intimate terms with the
+famous Baroness Schinner, so renowned for her wit, her influence, her
+wealth and her connection with celebrated men. I supposed that he was
+welcomed at her house as a friend: my husband presented me, and I was
+coldly received. I saw that her rooms were furnished with extravagant
+luxury; and instead of Madame Schinner's returning my call, I received
+a card, twenty days afterward, and at an insolently improper hour.
+
+"On arriving at Paris, I went to walk upon the boulevard, proud of my
+anonymous great man. He nudged me with his elbow, and said, pointing
+out a fat little ill-dressed man, 'There's so and so!' He mentioned
+one of the seven or eight illustrious men in France. I got ready my
+look of admiration, and I saw Adolphe rapturously doffing his hat to
+the truly great man, who replied by the curt little nod that you
+vouchsafe a person with whom you have doubtless exchanged hardly four
+words in ten years. Adolphe had begged a look for my sake. 'Doesn't he
+know you?' I said to my husband. 'Oh, yes, but he probably took me for
+somebody else,' replied he.
+
+"And so of poets, so of celebrated musicians, so of statesmen. But, as
+a compensation, we stop and talk for ten minutes in front of some
+arcade or other, with Messieurs Armand du Cantal, George Beaunoir,
+Felix Verdoret, of whom you have never heard. Mesdames Constantine
+Ramachard, Anais Crottat, and Lucienne Vouillon threaten me with their
+_blue_ friendship. We dine editors totally unknown in our province.
+Finally I have had the painful happiness of seeing Adolphe decline an
+invitation to an evening party to which I was not bidden.
+
+"Oh! Claire dear, talent is still the rare flower of spontaneous
+growth, that no greenhouse culture can produce. I do not deceive
+myself: Adolphe is an ordinary man, known, estimated as such: he has
+no other chance, as he himself says, than to take his place among the
+_utilities_ of literature. He was not without wit at Viviers: but to
+be a man of wit at Paris, you must possess every kind of wit in
+formidable doses.
+
+"I esteem Adolphe: for, after some few fibs, he frankly confessed his
+position, and, without humiliating himself too deeply, he promised
+that I should be happy. He hopes, like numerous other ordinary men, to
+obtain some place, that of an assistant librarian, for instance, or
+the pecuniary management of a newspaper. Who knows but we may get him
+elected deputy for Viviers, in the course of time?
+
+"We live in obscurity; we have five or six friends of either sex whom
+we like, and such is the brilliant style of life which your letter
+gilded with all the social splendors.
+
+"From time to time I am caught in a squall, or am the butt of some
+malicious tongue. Thus, yesterday, at the opera, I heard one of our
+most ill-natured wits, Leon de Lora, say to one of our most famous
+critics, 'It takes Chodoreille to discover the Caroline poplar on the
+banks of the Rhone!' They had heard my husband call me by my Christian
+name. At Viviers I was considered handsome. I am tall, well made, and
+fat enough to satisfy Adolphe! In this way I learn that the beauty of
+women from the country is, at Paris, precisely like the wit of country
+gentleman.
+
+"In short, I am absolutely nobody, if that is what you wish to know:
+but if you desire to learn how far my philosophy goes, understand that
+I am really happy in having found an ordinary man in my pretended
+great one.
+
+"Farewell, dear Claire! It is still I, you see, who, in spite of my
+delusions and the petty troubles of my life, am the most favorably
+situated: for Adolphe is young, and a charming fellow.
+
+"CAROLINE HEURTAUT."
+
+
+Claire's reply contained, among other passages, the following: "I hope
+that the indescribable happiness which you enjoy, will continue,
+thanks to your philosophy." Claire, as any intimate female friend
+would have done, consoled herself for her president by insinuations
+respecting Adolphe's prospects and future conduct.
+
+
+                  II. ANOTHER GLANCE AT CHODOREILLE.
+
+(Letter discovered one day in a casket, while she was making me wait a
+long time and trying to get rid of a hanger-on who could not be made
+to understand hidden meanings. I caught cold--but I got hold of this
+letter.)
+
+This fatuous note was found on a paper which the notary's clerks had
+thought of no importance in the inventory of the estate of M.
+Ferdinand de Bourgarel, who was mourned of late by politics, arts and
+amours, and in whom is ended the great Provencal house of Borgarelli;
+for as is generally known the name Bourgarel is a corruption of
+Borgarelli just as the French Girardin is the Florentine Gherardini.
+
+An intelligent reader will find little difficulty in placing this
+letter in its proper epoch in the lives of Adolphe and Caroline.
+
+
+"My dear Friend:
+
+"I thought myself lucky indeed to marry an artist as superior in his
+talent as in his personal attributes, equally great in soul and mind,
+worldly-wise, and likely to rise by following the public road without
+being obliged to wander along crooked, doubtful by-paths. However, you
+knew Adolphe; you appreciated his worth. I am loved, he is a father, I
+idolize our children. Adolphe is kindness itself to me; I admire and
+love him. But, my dear, in this complete happiness lurks a thorn. The
+roses upon which I recline have more than one fold. In the heart of a
+woman, folds speedily turn to wounds. These wounds soon bleed, the
+evil spreads, we suffer, the suffering awakens thoughts, the thoughts
+swell and change the course of sentiment.
+
+"Ah, my dear, you shall know all about it, though it is a cruel thing
+to say--but we live as much by vanity as by love. To live by love
+alone, one must dwell somewhere else than in Paris. What difference
+would it make to us whether we had only one white percale gown, if the
+man we love did not see other women dressed differently, more
+elegantly than we--women who inspire ideas by their ways, by a
+multitude of little things which really go to make up great passions?
+Vanity, my dear, is cousin-german to jealousy, to that beautiful and
+noble jealousy which consists in not allowing one's empire to be
+invaded, in reigning undisturbed in a soul, and passing one's life
+happily in a heart.
+
+"Ah, well, my woman's vanity is on the rack. Though some troubles may
+seem petty indeed, I have learned, unfortunately, that in the home
+there are no petty troubles. For everything there is magnified by
+incessant contact with sensations, with desires, with ideas. Such then
+is the secret of that sadness which you have surprised in me and which
+I did not care to explain. It is one of those things in which words go
+too far, and where writing holds at least the thought within bounds by
+establishing it. The effects of a moral perspective differ so
+radically between what is said and what is written! All is so solemn,
+so serious on paper! One cannot commit any more imprudences. Is it not
+this fact which makes a treasure out of a letter where one gives one's
+self over to one's thoughts?
+
+"You doubtless thought me wretched, but I am only wounded. You
+discovered me sitting alone by the fire, and no Adolphe. I had just
+finished putting the children to bed; they were asleep. Adolphe for
+the tenth time had been invited out to a house where I do not go,
+where they want Adolphe without his wife. There are drawing-rooms
+where he goes without me, just at there are many pleasures in which he
+alone is the guest. If he were M. de Navarreins and I a d'Espard,
+society would never think of separating us; it would want us always
+together. His habits are formed; he does not suspect the humiliation
+which weighs upon my heart. Indeed, if he had the slightest inkling of
+this small sorrow which I am ashamed to own, he would drop society, he
+would become more of a prig than the people who come between us. But
+he would hamper his progress, he would make enemies, he would raise up
+obstacles by imposing me upon the salons where I would be subject to a
+thousand slights. That is why I prefer my sufferings to what would
+happen were they discovered.
+
+"Adolphe will succeed! He carries my revenge in his beautiful head,
+does this man of genius. One day the world shall pay for all these
+slights. But when? Perhaps I shall be forty-five. My beautiful youth
+will have passed in my chimney-corner, and with this thought: Adolphe
+smiles, he is enjoying the society of fair women, he is playing the
+devoted to them, while none of these attentions come my way.
+
+"It may be that these will finally take him from me!
+
+"No one undergoes slight without feeling it, and I feel that I am
+slighted, though young, beautiful and virtuous. Now, can I keep from
+thinking this way? Can I control my anger at the thought that Adolphe
+is dining in the city without me? I take no part in his triumphs; I do
+not hear the witty or profound remarks made to others! I could no
+longer be content with bourgeois receptions whence he rescued me, upon
+finding me _distinguee_, wealthy, young, beautiful and witty. There
+lies the evil, and it is irremediable.
+
+"In a word, for some cause, it is only since I cannot go to a certain
+salon that I want to go there. Nothing is more natural of the ways of
+a human heart. The ancients were wise in having their _gyneceums_. The
+collisions between the pride of the women, caused by these gatherings,
+though it dates back only four centuries, has cost our own day much
+disaffection and numerous bitter debates.
+
+"Be that as it may, my dear, Adolphe is always warmly welcomed when he
+comes back home. Still, no nature is strong enough to await always
+with the same ardor. What a morrow that will be, following the evening
+when his welcome is less warm!
+
+"Now do you see the depth of the fold which I mentioned? A fold in the
+heart is an abyss, like a crevasse in the Alps--a profundity whose
+depth and extent we have never been able to calculate. Thus it is
+between two beings, no matter how near they may be drawn to each
+other. One never realizes the weight of suffering which oppresses his
+friend. This seems such a little thing, yet one's life is affected by
+it in all its length, in all its breadth. I have thus argued with
+myself; but the more I have argued, the more thoroughly have I
+realized the extent of this hidden sorrow. And I can only let the
+current carry me whither it will.
+
+"Two voices struggle for supremacy when--by a rarely fortunate chance
+--I am alone in my armchair waiting for Adolphe. One, I would wager,
+comes from Eugene Delacroix's _Faust_ which I have on my table.
+Mephistopheles speaks, that terrible aide who guides the swords so
+dexterously. He leaves the engraving, and places himself diabolically
+before me, grinning through the hole which the great artist has placed
+under his nose, and gazing at me with that eye whence fall rubies,
+diamonds, carriages, jewels, laces, silks, and a thousand luxuries to
+feed the burning desire within me.
+
+"'Are you not fit for society?' he asks. 'You are the equal of the
+fairest duchesses. Your voice is like a siren's, your hands command
+respect and love. Ah! that arm!--place bracelets upon it, and how
+pleasingly it would rest upon the velvet of a robe! Your locks are
+chains which would fetter all men. And you could lay all your triumphs
+at Adolphe's feet, show him your power and never use it. Then he would
+fear, where now he lives in insolent certainty. Come! To action!
+Inhale a few mouthfuls of disdain and you will exhale clouds of
+incense. Dare to reign! Are you not next to nothing here in your
+chimney-corner? Sooner or later the pretty spouse, the beloved wife
+will die, if you continue like this, in a dressing-gown. Come, and you
+shall perpetuate your sway through the arts of coquetry! Show yourself
+in salons, and your pretty foot shall trample down the love of your
+rivals.'
+
+"The other voice comes from my white marble mantel, which rustles like
+a garment. I think I see a veritable goddess crowned with white roses,
+and bearing a palm-branch in her hand. Two blue eyes smile down on me.
+This simple image of virtue says to me:
+
+"'Be content! Remain good always, and make this man happy. That is the
+whole of your mission. The sweetness of angels triumphs over all pain.
+Faith in themselves has enabled the martyrs to obtain solace even on
+the brasiers of their tormentors. Suffer a moment; you shall be happy
+in the end.'
+
+"Sometimes Adolphe enters at that moment and I am content. But, my
+dear, I have less patience than love. I almost wish to tear in pieces
+the woman who can go everywhere, and whose society is sought out by
+men and women alike. What profound thought lies in the line of
+Moliere:
+
+  "'The world, dear Agnes, is a curious thing!'
+
+"You know nothing of this petty trouble, you fortunate Mathilde! You
+are well born. You can do a great deal for me. Just think! I can write
+you things that I dared not speak about. Your visits mean so much;
+come often to see your poor
+
+        "Caroline."
+
+
+"Well," said I to the notary's clerk, "do you know what was the nature
+of this letter to the late Bourgarel?"
+
+"No."
+
+"A note of exchange."
+
+Neither clerk nor notary understood my meaning. Do you?
+
+
+
+                       THE PANGS OF INNOCENCE.
+
+"Yes, dear, in the married state, many things will happen to you which
+you are far from expecting: but then others will happen which you
+expect still less. For instance--"
+
+The author (may we say the ingenious author?) _qui castigat ridendo
+mores_, and who has undertaken the _Petty Troubles of Married Life_,
+hardly needs to remark, that, for prudence' sake, he here allows a
+lady of high distinction to speak, and that he does not assume the
+responsibility of her language, though he professes the most sincere
+admiration for the charming person to whom he owes his acquaintance
+with this petty trouble.
+
+"For instance--" she says.
+
+He nevertheless thinks proper to avow that this person is neither
+Madame Foullepointe, nor Madame de Fischtaminel, nor Madame Deschars.
+
+Madame Deschars is too prudish, Madame Foullepointe too absolute in
+her household, and she knows it; indeed, what doesn't she know? She is
+good-natured, she sees good society, she wishes to have the best:
+people overlook the vivacity of her witticisms, as, under louis XIV,
+they overlooked the remarks of Madame Cornuel. They overlook a good
+many things in her; there are some women who are the spoiled children
+of public opinion.
+
+As to Madame de Fischtaminel, who is, in fact, connected with the
+affair, as you shall see, she, being unable to recriminate, abstains
+from words and recriminates in acts.
+
+We give permission to all to think that the speaker is Caroline
+herself, not the silly little Caroline of tender years. But Caroline
+when she has become a woman of thirty.
+
+"For instance," she remarks to a young woman whom she is edifying,
+"you will have children, God willing."
+
+"Madame," I say, "don't let us mix the deity up in this, unless it is
+an allusion--"
+
+"You are impertinent," she replies, "you shouldn't interrupt a
+woman--"
+
+"When she is busy with children, I know: but, madame, you ought not to
+trifle with the innocence of young ladies. Mademoiselle is going to be
+married, and if she were led to count upon the intervention of the
+Supreme Being in this affair, she would fall into serious errors. We
+should not deceive the young. Mademoiselle is beyond the age when
+girls are informed that their little brother was found under a
+cabbage."
+
+"You evidently want to get me confused," she replies, smiling and
+showing the loveliest teeth in the world. "I am not strong enough to
+argue with you, so I beg you to let me go on with Josephine. What was
+I saying?"
+
+"That if I get married, I shall have children," returns the young
+lady.
+
+"Very well. I will not represent things to you worse than they are,
+but it is extremely probable that each child will cost you a tooth.
+With every baby I have lost a tooth."
+
+"Happily," I remark at this, "this trouble was with you less than
+petty, it was positively nothing."--They were side teeth.--"But take
+notice, miss, that this vexation has no absolute, unvarying character
+as such. The annoyance depends upon the condition of the tooth. If the
+baby causes the loss of a decayed tooth, you are fortunate to have a
+baby the more and a bad tooth the less. Don't let us confound
+blessings with bothers. Ah! if you were to lose one of your
+magnificent front teeth, that would be another thing! And yet there is
+many a woman that would give the best tooth in her head for a fine,
+healthy boy!"
+
+"Well," resumes Caroline, with animation, "at the risk of destroying
+your illusions, poor child, I'll just show you a petty trouble that
+counts! Ah, it's atrocious! And I won't leave the subject of dress
+which this gentleman considers the only subject we women are equal
+to."
+
+I protest by a gesture.
+
+"I had been married about two years," continues Caroline, "and I loved
+my husband. I have got over it since and acted differently for his
+happiness and mine. I can boast of having one of the happiest homes in
+Paris. In short, my dear, I loved the monster, and, even when out in
+society, saw no one but him. My husband had already said to me several
+times, 'My dear, young women never dress well; your mother liked to
+have you look like a stick,--she had her reasons for it. If you care
+for my advice, take Madame de Fischtaminel for a model: she is a lady
+of taste.' I, unsuspecting creature that I was, saw no perfidy in the
+recommendation.
+
+"One evening as we returned from a party, he said, 'Did you notice how
+Madame de Fischtaminel was dressed!' 'Yes, very neatly.' And I said to
+myself, 'He's always talking about Madame de Fischtaminel; I must
+really dress just like her.' I had noticed the stuff and the make of
+the dress, and the style of the trimmings. I was as happy as could be,
+as I went trotting about town, doing everything I could to obtain the
+same articles. I sent for the very same dressmaker.
+
+"'You work for Madame de Fischtaminel,' I said.
+
+"'Yes, madame.'
+
+"'Well, I will employ you as my dressmaker, but on one condition: you
+see I have procured the stuff of which her gown is made, and I want
+you to make me one exactly like it.'
+
+"I confess that I did not at first pay any attention to a rather
+shrewd smile of the dressmaker, though I saw it and afterwards
+accounted for it. 'So like it,' I added, 'that you can't tell them
+apart.'
+
+"Oh," says Caroline, interrupting herself and looking at me, "you men
+teach us to live like spiders in the depths of their webs, to see
+everything without seeming to look at it, to investigate the meaning
+and spirit of words, movements, looks. You say, 'How cunning women
+are!' But you should say, 'How deceitful men are!'
+
+"I can't tell you how much care, how many days, how many manoeuvres,
+it cost me to become Madame de Fischtaminel's duplicate! But these are
+our battles, child," she adds, returning to Josephine. "I could not
+find a certain little embroidered neckerchief, a very marvel! I
+finally learned that it was made to order. I unearthed the
+embroideress, and ordered a kerchief like Madame de Fischtaminel's.
+The price was a mere trifle, one hundred and fifty francs! It had been
+ordered by a gentleman who had made a present of it to Madame de
+Fischtaminel. All my savings were absorbed by it. Now we women of
+Paris are all of us very much restricted in the article of dress.
+There is not a man worth a hundred thousand francs a year, that loses
+ten thousand a winter at whist, who does not consider his wife
+extravagant, and is not alarmed at her bills for what he calls 'rags'!
+'Let my savings go,' I said. And they went. I had the modest pride of
+a woman in love: I would not speak a word to Adolphe of my dress; I
+wanted it to be a surprise, goose that I was! Oh, how brutally you men
+take away our blessed ignorance!"
+
+This remark is meant for me, for me who had taken nothing from the
+lady, neither tooth, nor anything whatever of the things with a name
+and without a name that may be taken from a woman.
+
+"I must tell you that my husband took me to Madame de Fischtaminel's,
+where I dined quite often. I heard her say to him, 'Why, your wife
+looks very well!' She had a patronizing way with me that I put up
+with: Adolphe wished that I could have her wit and preponderance in
+society. In short, this phoenix of women was my model. I studied and
+copied her, I took immense pains not to be myself--oh!--it was a poem
+that no one but us women can understand! Finally, the day of my
+triumph dawned. My heart beat for joy, as if I were a child, as if I
+were what we all are at twenty-two. My husband was going to call for
+me for a walk in the Tuileries: he came in, I looked at him radiant
+with joy, but he took no notice. Well, I can confess it now, it was
+one of those frightful disasters--but I will say nothing about it
+--this gentleman here would make fun of me."
+
+I protest by another movement.
+
+"It was," she goes on, for a woman never stops till she has told the
+whole of a thing, "as if I had seen an edifice built by a fairy
+crumble into ruins. Adolphe manifested not the slightest surprise. We
+got into the carriage. Adolphe noticed my sadness, and asked me what
+the matter was: I replied as we always do when our hearts are wrung by
+these petty vexations, 'Oh, nothing!' Then he took his eye-glass, and
+stared at the promenaders on the Champs Elysees, for we were to go the
+rounds of the Champs Elysees, before taking our walk at the Tuileries.
+Finally, a fit of impatience seized me. I felt a slight attack of
+fever, and when I got home, I composed myself to smile. 'You haven't
+said a word about my dress!' I muttered. 'Ah, yes, your gown is
+somewhat like Madame de Fischtaminel's.' He turned on his heel and
+went away.
+
+"The next day I pouted a little, as you may readily imagine. Just as
+we were finishing breakfast by the fire in my room--I shall never
+forget it--the embroideress called to get her money for the
+neckerchief. I paid her. She bowed to my husband as if she knew him. I
+ran after her on pretext of getting her to receipt the bill, and said:
+'You didn't ask _him_ so much for Madame de Fischtaminel's kerchief!'
+'I assure you, madame, it's the same price, the gentleman did not beat
+me down a mite.' I returned to my room where I found my husband
+looking as foolish as--"
+
+She hesitates and then resumes: "As a miller just made a bishop. 'I
+understand, love, now, that I shall never be anything more than
+_somewhat like_ Madame de Fischtaminel.' 'You refer to her
+neckerchief, I suppose: well, I _did_ give it to her,--it was for her
+birthday. You see, we were formerly--' 'Ah, you were formerly more
+intimate than you are now!' Without replying to this, he added, '_But
+it's altogether moral._'
+
+"He took his hat and went out, leaving me with this fine declaration
+of the Rights of Man. He did not return and came home late at night. I
+remained in my chamber and wept like a Magdalen, in the
+chimney-corner. You may laugh at me, if you will," she adds, looking
+at me, "but I shed tears over my youthful illusions, and I wept, too,
+for spite, at having been taken for a dupe. I remembered the
+dressmaker's smile! Ah, that smile reminded me of the smiles of a
+number of women, who laughed at seeing me so innocent and unsuspecting
+at Madame de Fischtaminel's! I wept sincerely. Until now I had a right
+to give my husband credit for many things which he did not possess, but
+in the existence of which young married women pertinaciously believe.
+
+"How many great troubles are included in this petty one! You men are a
+vulgar set. There is not a woman who does not carry her delicacy so
+far as to embroider her past life with the most delightful fibs, while
+you--but I have had my revenge."
+
+"Madame," I say, "you are giving this young lady too much
+information."
+
+"True," she returns, "I will tell you the sequel some other time."
+
+"Thus, you see, mademoiselle," I say, "you imagine you are buying a
+neckerchief and you find a _petty trouble_ round your neck: if you get
+it given to you--"
+
+"It's a _great_ trouble," retorts the woman of distinction. "Let us
+stop here."
+
+The moral of this fable is that you must wear your neckerchief without
+thinking too much about it. The ancient prophets called this world,
+even in their time, a valley of woe. Now, at that period, the
+Orientals had, with the permission of the constituted authorities, a
+swarm of comely slaves, besides their wives! What shall we call the
+valley of the Seine between Calvary and Charenton, where the law
+allows but one lawful wife.
+
+
+
+                        THE UNIVERSAL AMADIS.
+
+You will understand at once that I began to gnaw the head of my cane,
+to consult the ceiling, to gaze at the fire, to examine Caroline's
+foot, and I thus held out till the marriageable young lady was gone.
+
+"You must excuse me," I said, "if I have remained behind, perhaps in
+spite of you: but your vengeance would lose by being recounted by and
+by, and if it constituted a petty trouble for your husband, I have the
+greatest interest in hearing it, and you shall know why."
+
+"Ah," she returned, "that expression, '_it's altogether moral,_' which
+he gave as an excuse, shocked me to the last degree. It was a great
+consolation, truly, to me, to know that I held the place, in his
+household, of a piece of furniture, a block; that my kingdom lay among
+the kitchen utensils, the accessories of my toilet, and the
+physicians' prescriptions; that our conjugal love had been assimilated
+to dinner pills, to veal soup and white mustard; that Madame de
+Fischtaminel possessed my husband's soul, his admiration, and that she
+charmed and satisfied his intellect, while I was a kind of purely
+physical necessity! What do you think of a woman's being degraded to
+the situation of a soup or a plate of boiled beef, and without
+parsley, at that! Oh, I composed a catilinic, that evening--"
+
+"Philippic is better."
+
+"Well, either. I'll say anything you like, for I was perfectly
+furious, and I don't remember what I screamed in the desert of my
+bedroom. Do you suppose that this opinion that husbands have of their
+wives, the parts they give them, is not a singular vexation for us?
+Our petty troubles are always pregnant with greater ones. My Adolphe
+needed a lesson. You know the Vicomte de Lustrac, a desperate amateur
+of women and music, an epicure, one of those ex-beaux of the Empire,
+who live upon their earlier successes, and who cultivate themselves
+with excessive care, in order to secure a second crop?"
+
+"Yes," I said, "one of those laced, braced, corseted old fellows of
+sixty, who work such wonders by the grace of their forms, and who
+might give a lesson to the youngest dandies among us."
+
+"Monsieur de Lustrac is as selfish as a king, but gallant and
+pretentious, spite of his jet black wig."
+
+"As to his whiskers, he dyes them."
+
+"He goes to ten parties in an evening: he's a butterfly."
+
+"He gives capital dinners and concerts, and patronizes inexperienced
+songstresses."
+
+"He takes bustle for pleasure."
+
+"Yes, but he makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune
+occurs. Are you in mourning, he avoids you. Are you confined, he
+awaits your churching before he visits you. He possesses a mundane
+frankness and a social intrepidity which challenge admiration."
+
+"But does it not require courage to appear to be what one really is?"
+I asked.
+
+"Well," she resumed, after we had exchanged our observations on this
+point, "this young old man, this universal Amadis, whom we call among
+ourselves Chevalier _Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore_, became the object of
+my admiration. I made him a few of those advances which never
+compromise a woman; I spoke of the good taste exhibited in his latest
+waistcoats and in his canes, and he thought me a lady of extreme
+amiability. I thought him a chevalier of extreme youth; he called upon
+me; I put on a number of little airs, and pretended to be unhappy at
+home, and to have deep sorrows. You know what a woman means when she
+talks of her sorrows, and complains that she is not understood. The
+old ape replied much better than a young man would, and I had the
+greatest difficulty in keeping a straight face while I listened to
+him.
+
+"'Ah, that's the way with husbands, they pursue the very worst polity,
+they respect their wives, and, sooner or later, every woman is enraged
+at finding herself respected, and divines the secret education to
+which she is entitled. Once married, you ought not to live like a
+little school-girl, etc.'
+
+"As he spoke, he leaned over me, he squirmed, he was horrible to see.
+He looked like a wooden Nuremberg doll, he stuck out his chin, he
+stuck out his chair, he stuck out his hand--in short, after a variety
+of marches and countermarches, of declarations that were perfectly
+angelic--"
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes. _Petit-Bon-Homme-vil-encore_ had abandoned the classicism of his
+youth for the romanticism now in fashion: he spoke of the soul, of
+angels, of adoration, of submission, he became ethereal, and of the
+darkest blue. He took me to the opera, and handed me to my carriage.
+This old young man went when I went, his waistcoats multiplied, he
+compressed his waist, he excited his horse to a gallop in order to
+catch and accompany my carriage to the promenade: he compromised me
+with the grace of a young collegian, and was considered madly in love
+with me. I was steadfastly cruel, but accepted his arm and his
+bouquets. We were talked about. I was delighted, and managed before
+long to be surprised by my husband, with the viscount on the sofa in
+my boudoir, holding my hands in his, while I listened in a sort of
+external ecstasy. It is incredible how much a desire for vengeance
+will induce us to put up with! I appeared vexed at the entrance of my
+husband, who made a scene on the viscount's departure: 'I assure you,
+sir,' said I, after having listened to his reproaches, 'that _it's
+altogether moral_.' My husband saw the point and went no more to
+Madame de Fischtaminel's. I received Monsieur de Lustrac no more,
+either."
+
+"But," I interrupted, "this Lustrac that you, like many others, take
+for a bachelor, is a widower, and childless."
+
+"Really!"
+
+"No man ever buried his wife deeper than he buried his: she will
+hardly be found at the day of judgment. He married before the
+Revolution, and your _altogether moral_ reminds me of a speech of his
+that I shall have to repeat for your benefit. Napoleon appointed
+Lustrac to an important office, in a conquered province. Madame de
+Lustrac, abandoned for governmental duties, took a private secretary
+for her private affairs, though it was altogether moral: but she was
+wrong in selecting him without informing her husband. Lustrac met this
+secretary in a state of some excitement, in consequence of a lively
+discussion in his wife's chamber, and at an exceedingly early hour in
+the morning. The city desired nothing better than to laugh at its
+governor, and this adventure made such a sensation that Lustrac
+himself begged the Emperor to recall him. Napoleon desired his
+representatives to be men of morality, and he held that such disasters
+as this must inevitably take from a man's consideration. You know that
+among the Emperor's unhappy passions, was that of reforming his court
+and his government. Lustrac's request was granted, therefore, but
+without compensation. When he returned to Paris, he reappeared at his
+mansion, with his wife; he took her into society--a step which is
+certainly conformable to the most refined habits of the aristocracy
+--but then there are always people who want to find out about it.
+They inquired the reason of this chivalrous championship. 'So you are
+reconciled, you and Madame de Lustrac,' some one said to him in the
+lobby of the Emperor's theatre, 'you have pardoned her, have you? So
+much the better.' 'Oh,' replied he, with a satisfied air, 'I became
+convinced--' 'Ah, that she was innocent, very good.' 'No, I became
+convinced that it was altogether physical.'"
+
+Caroline smiled.
+
+"The opinion of your admirer reduced this weighty trouble to what is,
+in this case as in yours, a very petty one."
+
+"A petty trouble!" she exclaimed, "and pray for what do you take the
+fatigue of coquetting with a de Lustrac, of whom I have made an enemy!
+Ah, women often pay dearly enough for the bouquets they receive and
+the attentions they accept. Monsieur de Lustrac said of me to Monsieur
+de Bourgarel, 'I would not advise you to pay court to that woman; she
+is too dear.'"
+
+
+
+                        WITHOUT AN OCCUPATION.
+
+
+"PARIS, 183-
+
+"You ask me, dear mother, whether I am happy with my husband.
+Certainly Monsieur de Fischtaminel was not the ideal of my dreams. I
+submitted to your will, as you know. His fortune, that supreme
+consideration, spoke, indeed, sufficiently loud. With these arguments,
+--a marriage, without stooping, with the Count de Fischtaminel, his
+having thirty thousand a year, and a home at Paris--you were strongly
+armed against your poor daughter. Besides, Monsieur de Fischtaminel is
+good looking for a man of thirty-six years; he received the cross of
+the Legion of Honor from Napoleon upon the field of battle, he is an
+ex-colonel, and had it not been for the Restoration, which put him
+upon half-pay, he would be a general. These are certainly extenuating
+circumstances.
+
+"Many women consider that I have made a good match, and I am bound to
+confess that there is every appearance of happiness,--for the public,
+that is. But you will acknowledge that if you had known of the return
+of my Uncle Cyrus and of his intention to leave me his money, you
+would have given me the privilege of choosing for myself.
+
+"I have nothing to say against Monsieur de Fischtaminel: he does not
+gamble, he is indifferent to women, he doesn't like wine, and he has
+no expensive fancies: he possesses, as you said, all the negative
+qualities which make husbands passable. Then, what is the matter with
+him? Well, mother, he has nothing to do. We are together the whole
+blessed day! Would you believe that it is during the night, when we
+are the most closely united, that I am the most alone? His sleep is my
+asylum, my liberty begins when he slumbers. This state of siege will
+yet make me sick: I am never alone. If Monsieur de Fischtaminel were
+jealous, I should have a resource. There would then be a struggle, a
+comedy: but how could the aconite of jealousy have taken root in his
+soul? He has never left me since our marriage. He feels no shame in
+stretching himself out upon a sofa and remaining there for hours
+together.
+
+"Two felons pinioned to the same chain do not find time hang heavy:
+for they have their escape to think of. But we have no subject of
+conversation; we have long since talked ourselves out. A little while
+ago he was so far reduced as to talk politics. But even politics are
+exhausted, Napoleon, unfortunately for me, having died at St. Helena,
+as is well known.
+
+"Monsieur de Fischtaminel abhors reading. If he sees me with a book,
+he comes and says a dozen times an hour--'Nina, dear, haven't you
+finished yet?'
+
+"I endeavored to persuade this innocent persecutor to ride out every
+day on horseback, and I alleged a consideration usually conclusive
+with men of forty years,--his health! But he said that after having
+been twelve years on horseback, he felt the need of repose.
+
+"My husband, dear mother, is a man who absorbs you, he uses up the
+vital fluid of his neighbor, his ennui is gluttonous: he likes to be
+amused by those who call upon us, and, after five years of wedlock, no
+one ever comes: none visit us but those whose intentions are evidently
+dishonorable for him, and who endeavor, unsuccessfully, to amuse him,
+in order to earn the right to weary his wife.
+
+"Monsieur de Fischtaminel, mother, opens the door of my chamber, or of
+the room to which I have flown for refuge, five or six times an hour,
+and comes up to me in an excited way, and says, 'Well, what are you
+doing, my belle?' (the expression in fashion during the Empire)
+without perceiving that he is constantly repeating the same phrase,
+which is to me like the one pint too much that the executioner
+formerly poured into the torture by water.
+
+"Then there's another bore! We can't go to walk any more. A promenade
+without conversation, without interest, is impossible. My husband
+walks with me for the walk, as if he were alone. I have the fatigue
+without the pleasure.
+
+"The interval between getting up and breakfast is employed in my
+toilet, in my household duties; and I manage to get through with this
+part of the day. But between breakfast and dinner, there is a whole
+desert to plough, a waste to traverse. My husband's want of occupation
+does not leave me a moment of repose, he overpowers me by his
+uselessness; his idle life positively wears me out. His two eyes
+always open and gazing at mine compel me to keep them lowered. Then
+his monotonous remarks:
+
+"'What o'clock is it, love? What are you doing now? What are you
+thinking of? What do you mean to do? Where shall we go this evening?
+Anything new? What weather! I don't feel well, etc., etc.'
+
+"All these variations upon the same theme--the interrogation point
+--which compose Fischtaminel's repertory, will drive me mad. Add to
+these leaden arrows everlastingly shot off at me, one last trait which
+will complete the description of my happiness, and you will understand
+my life.
+
+"Monsieur de Fischtaminel, who went away in 1809, with the rank of
+sub-lieutenant, at the age of eighteen, has had no other education
+than that due to discipline, to the natural sense of honor of a noble
+and a soldier: but though he possesses tact, the sentiment of probity,
+and a proper subordination, his ignorance is gross, he knows
+absolutely nothing, and he has a horror of learning anything. Oh, dear
+mother, what an accomplished door-keeper this colonel would have made,
+had he been born in indigence! I don't think a bit the better of him
+for his bravery, for he did not fight against the Russians, the
+Austrians, or the Prussians: he fought against ennui. When he rushed
+upon the enemy, Captain Fischtaminel's purpose was to get away from
+himself. He married because he had nothing else to do.
+
+"We have another slight difficulty to content with: my husband
+harasses the servants to such a degree that we change them every six
+months.
+
+"I so ardently desire, dear mother, to remain a virtuous woman, that I
+am going to try the effect of traveling for half the year. During the
+winter, I shall go every evening to the Italian or the French opera,
+or to parties: but I don't know whether our fortune will permit such
+an expenditure. Uncle Cyrus ought to come to Paris--I would take care
+of him as I would of an inheritance.
+
+"If you discover a cure for my woes, let your daughter know of it
+--your daughter who loves you as much as she deplores her misfortunes,
+and who would have been glad to call herself by some other name than
+that of
+
+        "NINA FISCHTAMINEL."
+
+
+Besides the necessity of describing this petty trouble, which could
+only be described by the pen of a woman,--and what a woman she was!
+--it was necessary to make you acquainted with a character whom you
+saw only in profile in the first half of this book, the queen of the
+particular set in which Caroline lived,--a woman both envied and
+adroit, who succeeded in conciliating, at an early date, what she owed
+to the world with the requirements of the heart. This letter is her
+absolution.
+
+
+
+                            INDISCRETIONS.
+
+Women are either chaste--or vain--or simply proud. They are therefore
+all subject to the following petty trouble:
+
+Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a
+woman to themselves,--a possession exclusively due to the legal
+ceremony,--that they dread the public's making a mistake, and they
+hasten to brand their consort, as lumber-dealers brand their logs
+while floating down stream, or as the Berry stock-raisers brand their
+sheep. They bestow names of endearment, right before people, upon
+their wives: names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella), from
+the animal kingdom, as: my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or,
+choosing from the vegetable kingdom, they call them: my cabbage, my
+fig (this only in Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia). Never:
+--My flower! Pray note this discretion.
+
+Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:--Bobonne,
+--mother,--daughter,--good woman,--old lady: this last when she is
+very young.
+
+Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as: Mon bichon, ma
+niniche, Tronquette!
+
+We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for
+his ugliness, call his wife, _Moumoutte_!
+
+"I would rather he would strike me," said this unfortunate to her
+neighbor.
+
+"Poor little woman, she is really unhappy," resumed the neighbor,
+looking at me when Moumoutte had gone: "when she is in company with
+her husband she is upon pins and needles, and keeps out of his way.
+One evening, he actually seized her by the neck and said: 'Come fatty,
+let's go home!'"
+
+It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning
+with arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions
+like these that the wife had to bear in society. This husband used to
+give the woman he had won at the point of the Code, public little taps
+on her shoulder, he would startle her by a resounding kiss, he
+dishonored her by a conspicuous tenderness, seasoned by those
+impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French
+savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners
+are very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction.
+It was, it is said, this shocking situation,--one perfectly
+appreciated by a discerning jury,--which won the prisoner a verdict
+softened by the extenuating circumstances.
+
+The jurymen said to themselves:
+
+"For a wife to murder her husband for these conjugal offences, is
+certainly going rather far; but then a woman is very excusable, when
+she is so harassed!"
+
+We deeply regret, in the interest of elegant manners, that these
+arguments are not more generally known. Heaven grant, therefore, that
+our book may have an immense success, as women will obtain this
+advantage from it, that they will be treated as they deserve, that is,
+as queens.
+
+In this respect, love is much superior to marriage, it is proud of
+indiscreet sayings and doings. There are some women that seek them,
+fish for them, and woe to the man who does not now and then commit
+one!
+
+What passion lies in an accidental _thou_!
+
+Out in the country I heard a husband call his wife: "Ma berline!" She
+was delighted with it, and saw nothing ridiculous in it: she called
+her husband, "Mon fiston!" This delicious couple were ignorant of the
+existence of such things as petty troubles.
+
+It was in observing this happy pair that the author discovered this
+axiom:
+
+
+Axiom:--In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of
+genius married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a
+chance which is not as common as might be supposed, you must both of
+you be exceedingly stupid.
+
+
+The too celebrated history of the cure of a wounded self-love by
+arsenic, proves that, properly speaking, there are no petty troubles
+for women in married life.
+
+
+Axiom.--Woman exists by sentiment where man exists by action.
+
+
+Now, sentiment can at any moment render a petty trouble either a great
+misfortune, or a wasted life, or an eternal misery. Should Caroline
+begin, in her ignorance of life and the world, by inflicting upon her
+husband the vexations of her stupidity (re-read REVELATIONS), Adolphe,
+like any other man, may find a compensation in social excitement: he
+goes out, comes back, goes here and there, has business. But for
+Caroline, the question everywhere is, To love or not to love, to be or
+not to be loved.
+
+Indiscretions are in harmony with the character of the individuals,
+with times and places. Two examples will suffice.
+
+
+Here is the first. A man is by nature dirty and ugly: he is ill-made
+and repulsive. There are men, and often rich ones, too, who, by a sort
+of unobserved constitution, soil a new suit of clothes in twenty-four
+hours. They were born disgusting. It is so disgraceful for a women to
+be anything more than just simply a wife to this sort of Adolphe, that
+a certain Caroline had long ago insisted upon the suppression of the
+modern _thee_ and _thou_ and all other insignia of the wifely dignity.
+Society had been for five or six years accustomed to this sort of
+thing, and supposed Madame and Monsieur completely separated, and all
+the more so as it had noticed the accession of a Ferdinand II.
+
+One evening, in the presence of a dozen persons, this man said to his
+wife: "Caroline, hand me the tongs, there's a love." It is nothing,
+and yet everything. It was a domestic revelation.
+
+Monsieur de Lustrac, the Universal Amadis, hurried to Madame de
+Fischtaminel's, narrated this little scene with all the spirit at his
+command, and Madame de Fischtaminel put on an air something like
+Celimene's and said: "Poor creature, what an extremity she must be
+in!"
+
+I say nothing of Caroline's confusion,--you have already divined it.
+
+
+Here is the second. Think of the frightful situation in which a lady
+of great refinement was lately placed: she was conversing agreeably at
+her country seat near Paris, when her husband's servant came and
+whispered in her ear, "Monsieur has come, madame."
+
+"Very well, Benoit."
+
+Everybody had heard the rumblings of the vehicle. It was known that
+the husband had been at Paris since Monday, and this took place on
+Saturday, at four in the afternoon.
+
+"He's got something important to say to you, madame."
+
+Though this dialogue was held in a whisper, it was perfectly
+understood, and all the more so from the fact that the lady of the
+house turned from the pale hue of the Bengal rose to the brilliant
+crimson of the wheatfield poppy. She nodded and went on with the
+conversation, and managed to leave her company on the pretext of
+learning whether her husband had succeeded in an important undertaking
+or not: but she seemed plainly vexed at Adolphe's want of
+consideration for the company who were visiting her.
+
+During their youth, women want to be treated as divinities, they love
+the ideal; they cannot bear the idea of being what nature intended
+them to be.
+
+Some husbands, on retiring to the country, after a week in town, are
+worse than this: they bow to the company, put their arm round their
+wife's waist, take a little walk with her, appear to be talking
+confidentially, disappear in a clump of trees, get lost, and reappear
+half an hour afterward.
+
+This, ladies, is a genuine petty trouble for a young woman, but for a
+woman beyond forty, this sort of indiscretion is so delightful, that
+the greatest prudes are flattered by it, for, be it known:
+
+That women of a certain age, women on the shady side, want to be
+treated as mortals, they love the actual; they cannot bear the idea of
+no longer being what nature intended them to be.
+
+
+Axiom.--Modesty is a relative virtue; there is the modesty of the
+woman of twenty, the woman of thirty, the woman of forty-five.
+
+
+Thus the author said to a lady who told him to guess at her age:
+"Madame, yours is the age of indiscretion."
+
+This charming woman of thirty-nine was making a Ferdinand much too
+conspicuous, while her daughter was trying to conceal her Ferdinand I.
+
+
+
+                         BRUTAL DISCLOSURES.
+
+
+FIRST STYLE. Caroline adores Adolphe, she thinks him handsome, she
+thinks him superb, especially in his National Guard uniform. She
+starts when a sentinel presents arms to him, she considers him moulded
+like a model, she regards him as a man of wit, everything he does is
+right, nobody has better taste than he, in short, she is crazy about
+Adolphe.
+
+It's the old story of Cupid's bandage. This is washed every ten years,
+and newly embroidered by the altered manners of the period, but it has
+been the same old bandage since the days of Greece.
+
+Caroline is at a ball with one of her young friends. A man well known
+for his bluntness, whose acquaintance she is to make later in life,
+but whom she now sees for the first time, Monsieur Foullepointe, has
+commenced a conversation with Caroline's friend. According to the
+custom of society, Caroline listens to this conversation without
+mingling in it.
+
+"Pray tell me, madame," says Monsieur Foullepointe, "who is that queer
+man who has been talking about the Court of Assizes before a gentleman
+whose acquittal lately created such a sensation: he is all the while
+blundering, like an ox in a bog, against everybody's sore spot. A lady
+burst into tears at hearing him tell of the death of a child, as she
+lost her own two months ago."
+
+"Who do you mean?"
+
+"Why, that fat man, dressed like a waiter in a cafe, frizzled like a
+barber's apprentice, there, he's trying now to make himself agreeable
+to Madame de Fischtaminel."
+
+"Hush," whispers the lady quite alarmed, "it's the husband of the
+little woman next to me!"
+
+"Ah, it's your husband?" says Monsieur Foullepointe. "I am delighted,
+madame, he's a charming man, so vivacious, gay and witty. I am going
+to make his acquaintance immediately."
+
+And Foullepointe executes his retreat, leaving a bitter suspicion in
+Caroline's soul, as to the question whether her husband is really as
+handsome as she thinks him.
+
+
+SECOND STYLE. Caroline, annoyed by the reputation of Madame Schinner,
+who is credited with the possession of epistolary talents, and styled
+the "Sevigne of the note", tired of hearing about Madame de
+Fischtaminel, who has ventured to write a little 32mo book on the
+education of the young, in which she has boldly reprinted Fenelon,
+without the style:--Caroline has been working for six months upon a
+tale tenfold poorer than those of Berquin, nauseatingly moral, and
+flamboyant in style.
+
+After numerous intrigues such as women are skillful in managing in the
+interest of their vanity, and the tenacity and perfection of which
+would lead you to believe that they have a third sex in their head,
+this tale, entitled "The Lotus," appears in three installments in a
+leading daily paper. It is signed Samuel Crux.
+
+When Adolphe takes up the paper at breakfast, Caroline's heart beats
+up in her very throat: she blushes, turns pale, looks away and stares
+at the ceiling. When Adolphe's eyes settle upon the feuilleton, she
+can bear it no longer: she gets up, goes out, comes back, having
+replenished her stock of audacity, no one knows where.
+
+"Is there a feuilleton this morning?" she asks with an air that she
+thinks indifferent, but which would disturb a husband still jealous of
+his wife.
+
+"Yes, one by a beginner, Samuel Crux. The name is a disguise, clearly:
+the tale is insignificant enough to drive an insect to despair, if he
+could read: and vulgar, too: the style is muddy, but then it's--"
+
+Caroline breathes again. "It's--" she suggests.
+
+"It's incomprehensible," resumes Adolphe. "Somebody must have paid
+Chodoreille five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it's the
+production of a blue-stocking in high society who has promised to
+invite Madame Chodoreille to her house; or perhaps it's the work of a
+woman in whom the editor is personally interested. Such a piece of
+stupidity cannot be explained any other way. Imagine, Caroline, that
+it's all about a little flower picked on the edge of a wood in a
+sentimental walk, which a gentleman of the Werther school has sworn to
+keep, which he has had framed, and which the lady claims again eleven
+years after (the poor man has had time to change his lodgings three
+times). It's quite new, about as old as Sterne or Gessner. What makes
+me think it's a woman, is that the first literary idea of the whole
+sex is to take vengeance on some one."
+
+Adolphe might go on pulling "The Lotus" to pieces; Caroline's ears are
+full of the tinkling of bells. She is like the woman who threw herself
+over the Pont des Arts, and tried to find her way ten feet below the
+level of the Seine.
+
+
+ANOTHER STYLE. Caroline, in her paroxysms of jealousy, has discovered
+a hiding place used by Adolphe, who, as he can't trust his wife, and
+as he knows she opens his letters and rummages in his drawers, has
+endeavored to save his correspondence with Hector from the hooked
+fingers of the conjugal police.
+
+Hector is an old schoolmate, who has married in the Loire Inferieure.
+
+Adolphe lifts up the cloth of his writing desk, a cloth the border of
+which has been embroidered by Caroline, the ground being blue, black
+or red velvet,--the color, as you see, is perfectly immaterial,--and
+he slips his unfinished letters to Madame de Fischtaminel, to his
+friend Hector, between the table and the cloth.
+
+The thickness of a sheet of paper is almost nothing, velvet is a
+downy, discreet material, but, no matter, these precautions are in
+vain. The male devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet
+will furnish them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her
+side, the demon who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with
+his ironic finger points out the hiding place of keys--the secret of
+secrets.
+
+Caroline has noticed the thickness of a letter sheet between this
+velvet and this table: she hits upon a letter to Hector instead of
+hitting upon one to Madame de Fischtaminel, who has gone to Plombieres
+Springs, and reads the following:
+
+
+"My dear Hector:
+
+"I pity you, but you have acted wisely in entrusting me with a
+knowledge of the difficulties in which you have voluntarily involved
+yourself. You never would see the difference between the country woman
+and the woman of Paris. In the country, my dear boy, you are always
+face to face with your wife, and, owing to the ennui which impels you,
+you rush headforemost into the enjoyment of your bliss. This is a
+great error: happiness is an abyss, and when you have once reached the
+bottom, you never get back again, in wedlock.
+
+"I will show you why. Let me take, for your wife's sake, the shortest
+path--the parable.
+
+"I remember having made a journey from Paris to Ville-Parisis, in that
+vehicle called a 'bus: distance, twenty miles: 'bus, lumbering: horse,
+lame. Nothing amuses me more than to draw from people, by the aid of
+that gimlet called the interrogation, and to obtain, by means of an
+attentive air, the sum of information, anecdotes and learning that
+everybody is anxious to part with: and all men have such a sum, the
+peasant as well as the banker, the corporal as well as the marshal of
+France.
+
+"I have often noticed how ready these casks, overflowing with wit, are
+to open their sluices while being transported by diligence or 'bus, or
+by any vehicle drawn by horses, for nobody talks in a railway car.
+
+"At the rate of our exit from Paris, the journey would take full seven
+hours: so I got an old corporal to talk, for my diversion. He could
+neither read nor write: he was entirely illiterate. Yet the journey
+seemed short. The corporal had been through all the campaigns, he told
+me of things perfectly unheard of, that historians never trouble
+themselves about.
+
+"Ah! Hector, how superior is practice to theory! Among other things,
+and in reply to a question relative to the infantry, whose courage is
+much more tried by marching than by fighting, he said this, which I
+give you free from circumlocution:
+
+"'Sir, when Parisians were brought to our 45th, which Napoleon called
+The Terrible (I am speaking of the early days of the Empire, when the
+infantry had legs of steel, and when they needed them), I had a way of
+telling beforehand which of them would remain in the 45th. They
+marched without hurrying, they did their little six leagues a day,
+neither more nor less, and they pitched camp in condition to begin
+again on the morrow. The plucky fellows who did ten leagues and wanted
+to run to the victory, stopped half way at the hospital.'
+
+"The worthy corporal was talking of marriage while he thought he was
+talking of war, and you have stopped half way, Hector, at the
+hospital.
+
+"Remember the sympathetic condolence of Madame de Sevigne counting out
+three hundred thousand francs to Monsieur de Grignan, to induce him to
+marry one of the prettiest girls in France! 'Why,' said she to
+herself, 'he will have to marry her every day, as long as she lives!
+Decidedly, I don't think three hundred francs too much.' Is it not
+enough to make the bravest tremble?
+
+"My dear fellow, conjugal happiness is founded, like that of nations,
+upon ignorance. It is a felicity full of negative conditions.
+
+"If I am happy with my little Caroline, it is due to the strictest
+observance of that salutary principle so strongly insisted upon in the
+_Physiology of Marriage_. I have resolved to lead my wife through
+paths beaten in the snow, until the happy day when infidelity will be
+difficult.
+
+"In the situation in which you have placed yourself, and which
+resembles that of Duprez, who, on his first appearance at Paris, went
+to singing with all the voice his lungs would yield, instead of
+imitating Nourrit, who gave the audience just enough to enchant them,
+the following, I think, is your proper course to--"
+
+
+The letter broke off here: Caroline returned it to its place, at the
+same time wondering how she would make her dear Adolphe expiate his
+obedience to the execrable precepts of the _Physiology of Marriage_.
+
+
+
+                               A TRUCE.
+
+This trouble doubtless occurs sufficiently often and in different ways
+enough in the existence of married women, for this personal incident
+to become the type of the genus.
+
+The Caroline in question here is very pious, she loves her husband
+very much, her husband asserts that she loves him too much, even: but
+this is a piece of marital conceit, if, indeed, it is not a
+provocation, as he only complains to his wife's young lady friends.
+
+When a person's conscience is involved, the least thing becomes
+exceedingly serious. Madame de ----- has told her young friend, Madame
+de Fischtaminel, that she had been compelled to make an extraordinary
+confession to her spiritual director, and to perform penance, the
+director having decided that she was in a state of mortal sin. This
+lady, who goes to mass every morning, is a woman of thirty-six years,
+thin and slightly pimpled. She has large soft black eyes, her upper
+lip is strongly shaded: still her voice is sweet, her manners gentle,
+her gait noble--she is a woman of quality.
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel, whom Madame de ----- has made her friend
+(nearly all pious women patronize a woman who is considered worldly,
+on the pretext of converting her),--Madame de Fischtaminel asserts
+that these qualities, in this Caroline of the Pious Sort, are a
+victory of religion over a rather violent natural temper.
+
+These details are necessary to describe the trouble in all its horror.
+
+This lady's Adolphe had been compelled to leave his wife for two
+months, in April, immediately after the forty days' fast that Caroline
+scrupulously observes. Early in June, therefore, madame expected her
+husband, she expected him day by day. From one hope to another,
+
+  "Conceived every morn and deferred every eve."
+
+She got along as far as Sunday, the day when her presentiments, which
+had now reached a state of paroxysm, told her that the longed-for
+husband would arrive at an early hour.
+
+When a pious woman expects her husband, and that husband has been
+absent from home nearly four months, she takes much more pains with
+her toilet than a young girl does, though waiting for her first
+betrothed.
+
+This virtuous Caroline was so completely absorbed in exclusively
+personal preparations, that she forgot to go to eight o'clock mass.
+She proposed to hear a low mass, but she was afraid of losing the
+delight of her dear Adolphe's first glance, in case he arrived at
+early dawn. Her chambermaid--who respectfully left her mistress alone
+in the dressing-room where pious and pimpled ladies let no one enter,
+not even their husbands, especially if they are thin--her chambermaid
+heard her exclaim several times, "If it's your master, let me know!"
+
+The rumbling of a vehicle having made the furniture rattle, Caroline
+assumed a mild tone to conceal the violence of her legitimate
+emotions.
+
+"Oh! 'tis he! Run, Justine: tell him I am waiting for him here."
+Caroline trembled so that she dropped into an arm-chair.
+
+The vehicle was a butcher's wagon.
+
+It was in anxieties like this that the eight o'clock mass slipped by,
+like an eel in his slime. Madame's toilet operations were resumed, for
+she was engaged in dressing. The chambermaid's nose had already been
+the recipient of a superb muslin chemise, with a simple hem, which
+Caroline had thrown at her from the dressing-room, though she had
+given her the same kind for the last three months.
+
+"What are you thinking of, Justine? I told you to choose from the
+chemises that are not numbered."
+
+The unnumbered chemises were only seven or eight, in the most
+magnificent trousseau. They are chemises gotten up and embroidered
+with the greatest care: a woman must be a queen, a young queen, to
+have a dozen. Each one of Caroline's was trimmed with valenciennes
+round the bottom, and still more coquettishly garnished about the
+neck. This feature of our manners will perhaps serve to suggest a
+suspicion, in the masculine world, of the domestic drama revealed by
+this exceptional chemise.
+
+Caroline had put on a pair of Scotch thread stockings, little prunella
+buskins, and her most deceptive corsets. She had her hair dressed in
+the fashion that most became her, and embellished it with a cap of the
+most elegant form. It is unnecessary to speak of her morning gown. A
+pious lady who lives at Paris and who loves her husband, knows as well
+as a coquette how to choose those pretty little striped patterns, have
+them cut with an open waist, and fastened by loops to buttons in a way
+which compels her to refasten them two or three times in an hour, with
+little airs more or less charming, as the case may be.
+
+The nine o'clock mass, the ten o'clock mass, every mass, went by in
+these preparations, which, for women in love, are one of their twelve
+labors of Hercules.
+
+Pious women rarely go to church in a carriage, and they are right.
+Except in the case of a pouring shower, or intolerably bad weather, a
+person ought not to appear haughty in the place where it is becoming
+to be humble. Caroline was afraid to compromise the freshness of her
+dress and the purity of her thread stockings. Alas! these pretexts
+concealed a reason.
+
+"If I am at church when Adolphe comes, I shall lose the pleasure of
+his first glance: and he will think I prefer high mass to him."
+
+She made this sacrifice to her husband in a desire to please him--a
+fearfully worldly consideration. Prefer the creature to the Creator! A
+husband to heaven! Go and hear a sermon and you will learn what such
+an offence will cost you.
+
+"After all," says Caroline, quoting her confessor, "society is founded
+upon marriage, which the Church has included among its sacraments."
+
+And this is the way in which religious instruction may be put aside in
+favor of a blind though legitimate love. Madame refused breakfast, and
+ordered the meal to be kept hot, just as she kept herself ready, at a
+moment's notice, to welcome the precious absentee.
+
+Now these little things may easily excite a laugh: but in the first
+place they are continually occurring with couples who love each other,
+or where one of them loves the other: besides, in a woman so
+strait-laced, so reserved, so worthy, as this lady, these
+acknowledgments of affection went beyond the limits imposed upon her
+feelings by the lofty self-respect which true piety induces. When
+Madame de Fischtaminel narrated this little scene in a devotee's life,
+dressing it up with choice by-play, acted out as ladies of the world
+know how to act out their anecdotes, I took the liberty of saying that
+it was the Canticle of canticles in action.
+
+"If her husband doesn't come," said Justine to the cook, "what will
+become of us? She has already thrown her chemise in my face."
+
+At last, Caroline heard the crack of a postilion's whip, the
+well-known rumbling of a traveling carriage, the racket made by the
+hoofs of post-horses, and the jingling of their bells! Oh, she could
+doubt no longer, the bells made her burst forth, as thus:
+
+"The door! Open the door! 'Tis he, my husband! Will you never go to
+the door!" And the pious woman stamped her foot and broke the
+bell-rope.
+
+"Why, madame," said Justine, with the vivacity of a servant doing her
+duty, "it's some people going away."
+
+"Upon my word," replied Caroline, half ashamed, to herself, "I will
+never let Adolphe go traveling again without me."
+
+A Marseilles poet--it is not known whether it was Mery or Barthelemy
+--acknowledged that if his best fried did not arrive punctually at the
+dinner hour, he waited patiently five minutes: at the tenth minute, he
+felt a desire to throw the napkin in his face: at the twelfth he hoped
+some great calamity would befall him: at the fifteenth, he would not
+be able to restrain himself from stabbing him several times with a
+dirk.
+
+All women, when expecting somebody, are Marseilles poets, if, indeed,
+we may compare the vulgar throes of hunger to the sublime Canticle of
+canticles of a pious wife, who is hoping for the joys of a husband's
+first glance after a three months' absence. Let all those who love and
+who have met again after an absence ten thousand times accursed, be
+good enough to recall their first glance: it says so many things that
+the lovers, if in the presence of a third party, are fain to lower
+their eyes! This poem, in which every man is as great as Homer, in
+which he seems a god to the woman who loves him, is, for a pious, thin
+and pimpled lady, all the more immense, from the fact that she has
+not, like Madame de Fischtaminel, the resource of having several
+copies of it. In her case, her husband is all she's got!
+
+So you will not be surprised to learn that Caroline missed every mass
+and had no breakfast. This hunger and thirst for Adolphe gave her a
+violent cramp in the stomach. She did not think of religion once
+during the hours of mass, nor during those of vespers. She was not
+comfortable when she sat, and she was very uncomfortable when she
+stood: Justine advised her to go to bed. Caroline, quite overcome,
+retired at about half past five in the evening, after having taken a
+light soup: but she ordered a dainty supper at ten.
+
+"I shall doubtless sup with my husband," she said.
+
+This speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally
+fulminated. She had reached the Marseilles poet's several stabs with a
+dirk. So she spoke in a tone that was really terrible. At three in the
+morning Caroline was in a profound sleep: Adolphe arrived without her
+hearing either carriage, or horse, or bell, or opening door!
+
+Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the
+spare room. When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two
+tears issued from her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the
+slightest preparatory toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the
+threshold, informed her that her husband, having traveled two hundred
+leagues and been two nights without sleep, requested that he might not
+be awakened: he was exceedingly tired.
+
+Caroline--pious woman that she was--opened the door violently without
+being able to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and
+then hastened to church to listen to a thanksgiving mass.
+
+As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in
+reply to an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid's finesse:
+
+"Why, madame, your husband's got back!"
+
+"He has only got back to Paris," returned the pious Caroline.
+
+
+
+                            USELESS CARE.
+
+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_.
+
+If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good,
+great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there
+is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing
+his favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upon which
+the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all his
+pleasures, big and little. Love animates everything in life, and
+conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial
+details.
+
+Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how
+the Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells
+her that at Biffi's, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn
+how the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain
+some Milanese mushrooms. Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini,
+and resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.
+
+Caroline's cook goes to Biffi's, comes back from Biffi's, and exhibits
+to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman's ears.
+
+"Very good," she says, "did he explain to you how to cook them?"
+
+"Oh, for us cooks, them's a mere nothing," replies the cook.
+
+As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except
+how a cook may feather his nest.
+
+At evening, during the second course, all Caroline's fibres quiver
+with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain
+suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had
+waited for her husband.
+
+But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure,
+there is, to the souls of the elect--and everybody will include a
+woman who adores her husband among the elect--there is, between these
+two worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine
+night and a fine day.
+
+The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges
+his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline's extreme
+emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers
+who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for
+some kind of shell-fish.
+
+"Well, Adolphe?"
+
+"Well, dear."
+
+"Don't you recognize them?"
+
+"Recognize what?"
+
+"Your mushrooms _a l'Italienne_?"
+
+"These mushrooms! I thought they were--well, yes, they _are_
+mushrooms!"
+
+"Yes, and _a l'Italienne_, too."
+
+"Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, _a la milanaise_. I abominate
+them!"
+
+"What kind is it you like, then?"
+
+"_Fungi trifolati_."
+
+Let us observe--to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels
+everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this
+moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects,
+giving them all the termination _us_, so that a _Silbermanus_ is the
+same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a
+butterfly's legs with pincers--that we still want a nomenclature for
+the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to
+produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed
+that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been
+adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were
+desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen
+Latin.
+
+"My dear," resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face
+of his chaste Caroline, "in France the dish in question is called
+Mushrooms _a l'Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise_. The
+mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names
+I have forgotten. You add a taste of garlic, I believe--"
+
+Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a
+woman's heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of
+eight. _Ab uno disce omnes_: which means, "There's one of them: find
+the rest in your memory." For we have taken this culinary description
+as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently
+loved women.
+
+
+
+                         SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.
+
+A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer's fancy. This
+feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman's
+confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and
+disappears in a trice like a shooting star.
+
+With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from
+any marshy country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for
+the superabundant powers of their imaginations and their nerves.
+
+Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who
+is really loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do
+her the justice to say that her first idea is to enjoy it. All who
+possess treasures are in dread of thieves, but they do not, like
+women, lend wings and feet to their golden stores.
+
+The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the
+heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to
+abandon it.
+
+
+Axiom.--A woman is never deserted without a reason.
+
+
+This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman. Hence the
+rage of a woman deserted.
+
+Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love: we live in a
+calculating epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may:
+for, of all wives or women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least
+expensive. Now, every woman who is loved, has gone through the petty
+annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion, whether just or unjust,
+engenders a multitude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of
+all.
+
+Caroline is one day led to notice that her cherished Adolphe leaves
+her rather too often upon a matter of business, that eternal
+Chaumontel's affair, which never comes to an end.
+
+
+Axiom.--Every household has its Chaumontel's affair. (See TROUBLE
+WITHIN TROUBLE.)
+
+
+In the first place, a woman no more believes in matters of business
+than publishers and managers do in the illness of actresses and
+authors. The moment a beloved creature absents himself, though she has
+rendered him even too happy, every woman straightway imagines that he
+has hurried away to some easy conquest. In this respect, women endow
+men with superhuman faculties. Fear magnifies everything, it dilates
+the eyes and the heart: it makes a woman mad.
+
+"Where is my husband going? What is my husband doing? Why has he left
+me? Why did he not take me with him?"
+
+These four questions are the four cardinal points of the compass of
+suspicion, and govern the stormy sea of soliloquies. From these
+frightful tempests which ravage a woman's heart springs an ignoble,
+unworthy resolution, one which every woman, the duchess as well as the
+shopkeeper's wife, the baroness as well as the stockbroker's lady, the
+angel as well as the shrew, the indifferent as well as the passionate,
+at once puts into execution. They imitate the government, every one of
+them; they resort to espionage. What the State has invented in the
+public interest, they consider legal, legitimate and permissible, in
+the interest of their love. This fatal woman's curiosity reduces them
+to the necessity of having agents, and the agent of any woman who, in
+this situation, has not lost her self-respect,--a situation in which
+her jealousy will not permit her to respect anything: neither your
+little boxes, nor your clothes, nor the drawers of your treasury, of
+your desk, of your table, of your bureau, nor your pocketbook with
+private compartments, nor your papers, nor your traveling
+dressing-case, nor your toilet articles (a woman discovers in this way
+that her husband dyed his moustache when he was a bachelor), nor your
+india-rubber girdles--her agent, I say, the only one in whom a woman
+trusts, is her maid, for her maid understands her, excuses her, and
+approves her.
+
+In the paroxysm of excited curiosity, passion and jealousy, a woman
+makes no calculations, takes no observations. She simply wishes to
+know the whole truth.
+
+And Justine is delighted: she sees her mistress compromising herself
+with her, and she espouses her passion, her dread, her fears and her
+suspicions, with terrible friendship. Justine and Caroline hold
+councils and have secret interviews. All espionage involves such
+relationships. In this pass, a maid becomes the arbitress of the fate
+of the married couple. Example: Lord Byron.
+
+"Madame," Justine one day observes, "monsieur really _does_ go out to
+see a woman."
+
+Caroline turns pale.
+
+"But don't be alarmed, madame, it's an old woman."
+
+"Ah, Justine, to some men no women are old: men are inexplicable."
+
+"But, madame, it isn't a lady, it's a woman, quite a common woman."
+
+"Ah, Justine, Lord Byron loved a fish-wife at Venice, Madame de
+Fischtaminel told me so."
+
+And Caroline bursts into tears.
+
+"I've been pumping Benoit."
+
+"What is Benoit's opinion?"
+
+"Benoit thinks that the woman is a go-between, for monsieur keeps his
+secret from everybody, even from Benoit."
+
+For a week Caroline lives the life of the damned; all her savings go
+to pay spies and to purchase reports.
+
+Finally, Justine goes to see the woman, whose name is Madame Mahuchet;
+she bribes her and learns at last that her master has preserved a
+witness of his youthful follies, a nice little boy that looks very
+much like him, and that this woman is his nurse, the second-hand
+mother who has charge of little Frederick, who pays his quarterly
+school-bills, and through whose hands pass the twelve hundred or two
+thousand francs which Adolphe is supposed annually to lose at cards.
+
+"What of the mother?" exclaims Caroline.
+
+To end the matter, Justine, Caroline's good genius, proves to her that
+M'lle Suzanne Beauminet, formerly a grisette and somewhat later Madame
+Sainte-Suzanne, died at the hospital, or else that she has made her
+fortune, or else, again, that her place in society is so low there is
+no danger of madame's ever meeting her.
+
+Caroline breathes again: the dirk has been drawn from her heart, she
+is quite happy; but she had no children but daughters, and would like
+a boy. This little drama of unjust suspicions, this comedy of the
+conjectures to which Mother Mahuchet gives rise, these phases of a
+causeless jealousy, are laid down here as the type of a situation, the
+varieties of which are as innumerable as characters, grades and sorts.
+
+This source of petty troubles is pointed out here, in order that women
+seated upon the river's bank may contemplate in it the course of their
+own married life, following its ascent or descent, recalling their own
+adventures to mind, their untold disasters, the foibles which caused
+their errors, and the peculiar fatalities to which were due an instant
+of frenzy, a moment of unnecessary despair, or sufferings which they
+might have spared themselves, happy in their self-delusions.
+
+This vexation has a corollary in the following, one which is much more
+serious and often without remedy, especially when its root lies among
+vices of another kind, and which do not concern us, for, in this work,
+women are invariably esteemed honest--until the end.
+
+
+
+                         THE DOMESTIC TYRANT.
+
+"My dear Caroline," says Adolphe one day to his wife, "are you
+satisfied with Justine?"
+
+"Yes, dear, quite so."
+
+"Don't you think she speaks to you rather impertinently?"
+
+"Do you suppose I would notice a maid? But it seems _you_ notice her!"
+
+"What do you say?" asks Adolphe in an indignant way that is always
+delightful to women.
+
+Justine is a genuine maid for an actress, a woman of thirty stamped by
+the small-pox with innumerable dimples, in which the loves are far
+from sporting: she is as brown as opium, has a good deal of leg and
+not much body, gummy eyes, and a tournure to match. She would like to
+have Benoit marry her, but at this unexpected suggestion, Benoit asked
+for his discharge. Such is the portrait of the domestic tyrant
+enthroned by Caroline's jealousy.
+
+Justine takes her coffee in the morning, in bed, and manages to have
+it as good as, not to say better than, that of her mistress. Justine
+sometimes goes out without asking leave, dressed like the wife of a
+second-class banker. She sports a pink hat, one of her mistress' old
+gowns made over, an elegant shawl, shoes of bronze kid, and jewelry of
+doubtful character.
+
+Justine is sometimes in a bad humor, and makes her mistress feel that
+she too is a woman like herself, though she is not married. She has
+her whims, her fits of melancholy, her caprices. She even dares to
+have her nerves! She replies curtly, she makes herself insupportable
+to the other servants, and, to conclude, her wages have been
+considerably increased.
+
+"My dear, this girl is getting more intolerable every day," says
+Adolphe one morning to his wife, on noticing Justine listening at the
+key-hole, "and if you don't send her away, I will!"
+
+Caroline, greatly alarmed, is obliged to give Justine a talking to,
+while her husband is out.
+
+"Justine, you take advantage of my kindness to you: you have high
+wages, here, you have perquisites, presents: try to keep your place,
+for my husband wants to send you away."
+
+The maid humbles herself to the earth, she sheds tears: she is so
+attached to madame! Ah! she would rush into the fire for her: she
+would let herself be chopped into mince-meat: she is ready for
+anything.
+
+"If you had anything to conceal, madame, I would take it on myself and
+say it was me!"
+
+"Very well, Justine, very good, my girl," says Caroline, terrified:
+"but that's not the point: just try to keep in your place."
+
+"Ah, ha!" says Justine to herself, "monsieur wants to send me away,
+does he? Wait and see the deuce of a life I'll lead you, you old
+curmudgeon!"
+
+A week after, Justine, who is dressing her mistress' hair, looks in
+the glass to make sure that Caroline can see all the grimaces of her
+countenance: and Caroline very soon inquires, "Why, what's the matter,
+Justine?"
+
+"I would tell you, readily, madame, but then, madame, you are so weak
+with monsieur!"
+
+"Come, go on, what is it?"
+
+"I know now, madame, why master wanted to show me the door: he has
+confidence in nobody but Benoit, and Benoit is playing the mum with
+me."
+
+"Well, what does that prove? Has anything been discovered?"
+
+"I'm sure that between the two they are plotting something against you
+madame," returns the maid with authority.
+
+Caroline, whom Justine watches in the glass, turns pale: all the
+tortures of the previous petty trouble return, and Justine sees that
+she has become as indispensable to her mistress as spies are to the
+government when a conspiracy is discovered. Still, Caroline's friends
+do not understand why she keeps so disagreeable a servant girl, one
+who wears a hat, whose manners are impertinent, and who gives herself
+the airs of a lady.
+
+This stupid domination is talked of at Madame Deschars', at Madame de
+Fischtaminel's, and the company consider it funny. A few ladies think
+they can see certain monstrous reasons for it, reasons which
+compromise Caroline's honor.
+
+
+Axiom.--In society, people can put cloaks on every kind of truth, even
+the prettiest.
+
+
+In short the _aria della calumnia_ is executed precisely as if
+Bartholo were singing it.
+
+It is averred that Caroline cannot discharge her maid.
+
+Society devotes itself desperately to discovering the secret of this
+enigma. Madame de Fischtaminel makes fun of Adolphe who goes home in a
+rage, has a scene with Caroline and discharges Justine.
+
+This produces such an effect upon Justine, that she falls sick, and
+takes to her bed. Caroline observes to her husband, that it would be
+awkward to turn a girl in Justine's condition into the street, a girl
+who is so much attached to them, too, and who has been with them sine
+their marriage.
+
+"Let her go then as soon as she is well!" says Adolphe.
+
+Caroline, reassured in regard to Adolphe, and indecently swindled by
+Justine, at last comes to desire to get rid of her: she applies a
+violent remedy to the disease, and makes up her mind to go under the
+Caudine Forks of another petty trouble, as follows:
+
+
+
+                             THE AVOWAL.
+
+One morning, Adolphe is petted in a very unusual manner. The too happy
+husband wonders what may be the cause of this development of
+affection, and he hears Caroline, in her most winning tones, utter the
+word: "Adolphe?"
+
+"Well?" he replies, in alarm at the internal agitation betrayed by
+Caroline's voice.
+
+"Promise not to be angry."
+
+"Well."
+
+"Not to be vexed with me."
+
+"Never. Go on."
+
+"To forgive me and never say anything about it."
+
+"But tell me what it is!"
+
+"Besides, you are the one that's in the wrong--"
+
+"Speak, or I'll go away."
+
+"There's no one but you that can get me out of the scrape--and it was
+you that got me into it."
+
+"Come, come."
+
+"It's about--"
+
+"About--"
+
+"About Justine!"
+
+"Don't speak of her, she's discharged. I won't see her again, her
+style of conduct exposes your reputation--"
+
+"What can people say--what have they said?"
+
+The scene changes, the result of which is a secondary explanation
+which makes Caroline blush, as she sees the bearing of the
+suppositions of her best friends.
+
+"Well, now, Adolphe, it's to you I owe all this. Why didn't you tell
+me about Frederick?"
+
+"Frederick the Great? The King of Prussia?"
+
+"What creatures men are! Hypocrite, do you want to make me believe
+that you have forgotten your son so soon, M'lle Suzanne Beauminet's
+son?"
+
+"Then you know--?"
+
+"The whole thing! And old other Mahuchet, and your absences from home
+to give him a good dinner on holidays."
+
+"How like moles you pious women can be if you try!" exclaims Adolphe,
+in his terror.
+
+"It was Justine that found it out."
+
+"Ah! Now I understand the reason of her insolence."
+
+"Oh, your Caroline has been very wretched, dear, and this spying
+system, which was produced by my love for you, for I do love you, and
+madly too,--if you deceived me, I would fly to the extremity of
+creation,--well, as I was going to say, this unfounded jealousy has
+put me in Justine's power, so, my precious, get me out of it the best
+way you can!"
+
+"Let this teach you, my angel, never to make use of your servants, if
+you want them to be of use to you. It is the lowest of tyrannies, this
+being at the mercy of one's people."
+
+Adolphe takes advantage of this circumstance to alarm Caroline, he
+thinks of future Chaumontel's affairs, and would be glad to have no
+more espionage.
+
+Justine is sent for, Adolphe peremptorily dismisses her without
+waiting to hear her explanation. Caroline imagines her vexations at an
+end. She gets another maid.
+
+Justine, whose twelve or fifteen thousand francs have attracted the
+notice of a water carrier, becomes Madame Chavagnac, and goes into the
+apple business. Ten months after, in Adolphe's absence, Caroline
+receives a letter written upon school-boy paper, in strides which
+would require orthopedic treatment for three months, and thus
+conceived:
+
+
+"Madam!
+
+"Yu ar shaimphoolly diseeved bi yure huzban fur mame Deux
+fischtaminelle, hee goze their evry eavning, yu ar az blynde az a
+Batt. Your gott wott yu dizzurv, and I am Glad ovit, and I have thee
+honur ov prezenting yu the assurunz ov Mi moaste ds Sting guischt
+respecks."
+
+
+Caroline starts like a lion who has been stung by a bumble-bee; she
+places herself once more, and of her own accord, upon the griddle of
+suspicion, and begins her struggle with the unknown all over again.
+
+When she has discovered the injustice of her suspicions, there comes
+another letter with an offer to furnish her with details relative to a
+Chaumontel's affair which Justine has unearthed.
+
+The petty trouble of avowals, ladies, is often more serious than this,
+as you perhaps have occasion to remember.
+
+
+
+                            HUMILIATIONS.
+
+To the glory of women, let it be said, they care for their husbands
+even when their husbands care no more for them, not only because there
+are more ties, socially speaking, between a married woman and a man,
+than between the man and the wife; but also because woman has more
+delicacy and honor than man, the chief conjugal question apart, as a
+matter of course.
+
+
+Axiom.--In a husband, there is only a man; in a married woman, there
+is a man, a father, a mother and a woman.
+
+
+A married woman has sensibility enough for four, or for five even, if
+you look closely.
+
+Now, it is not improper to observe in this place, that, in a woman's
+eyes, love is a general absolution: the man who is a good lover may
+commit crimes, if he will, he is always as pure as snow in the eyes of
+her who loves him, if he truly loves her. As to a married woman, loved
+or not, she feels so deeply that the honor and consideration of her
+husband are the fortune of her children, that she acts like the woman
+in love,--so active is the sense of community of interest.
+
+This profound sentiment engenders, for certain Carolines, petty
+troubles which, unfortunately for this book, have their dismal side.
+
+Adolphe is compromised. We will not enumerate all the methods of
+compromising oneself, for we might become personal. Let us take, as an
+example, the social error which our epoch excuses, permits,
+understands and commits the most of any--the case of an honest
+robbery, of skillfully concealed corruption in office, or of some
+misrepresentation that becomes excusable when it has succeeded, as,
+for instance, having an understanding with parties in power, for the
+sale of property at the highest possible price to a city, or a
+country.
+
+Thus, in a bankruptcy, Adolphe, in order to protect himself (this
+means to recover his claims), has become mixed up in certain unlawful
+doings which may bring a man to the necessity of testifying before the
+Court of Assizes. In fact, it is not known that the daring creditor
+will not be considered a party.
+
+Take notice that in all cases of bankruptcy, protecting oneself is
+regarded as the most sacred of duties, even by the most respectable
+houses: the thing is to keep the bad side of the protection out of
+sight, as they do in prudish England.
+
+Adolphe does not know what to do, as his counsel has told him not to
+appear in the matter: so he has recourse to Caroline. He gives her a
+lesson, he coaches her, he teaches her the Code, he examines her
+dress, he equips her as a brig sent on a voyage, and despatches her to
+the office of some judge, or some syndic. The judge is apparently a
+man of severe morality, but in reality a libertine: he retains his
+serious expression on seeing a pretty woman enter, and makes sundry
+very uncomplimentary remarks about Adolphe.
+
+"I pity you, madame, you belong to a man who may involve you in
+numerous unpleasant affairs: a few more matters like this, and he will
+be quite disgraced. Have you any children? Excuse my asking; you are
+so young, it is perfectly natural." And the judge comes as near to
+Caroline as possible.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Ah, great heavens! what a prospect is yours! My first thought was for
+the woman, but now I pity you doubly, I think of the mother. Ah, how
+you must have suffered in coming here! Poor, poor woman!"
+
+"Ah, sir, you take an interest in me, do you not?"
+
+"Alas, what can I do?" says the judge, darting a glance sidewise at
+Caroline. "What you ask of me is a dereliction of duty, and I am a
+magistrate before I am a man."
+
+"Oh, sir, only be a man--"
+
+"Are you aware of the full bearing of that request, fair creature?" At
+this point the magistrate tremblingly takes Caroline's hand.
+
+Caroline, who remembers that the honor of her husband and children is
+at stake, says to herself that this is not the time to play the prude.
+She abandons her hand, making just resistance enough for the old man
+(happily he is an old man) to consider it a favor.
+
+"Come, come, my beauty," resumes the judge, "I should be loath to
+cause so lovely a woman to shed tears; we'll see about it. You shall
+come to-morrow evening and tell me the whole affair. We must look at
+the papers, we will examine them together--"
+
+"Sir--"
+
+"It's indispensable."
+
+"But, sir--"
+
+"Don't be alarmed, my dear, a judge is likely to know how to grant
+what is due to justice and--" he puts on a shrewd look here--"to
+beauty."
+
+"But, sir--"
+
+"Be quite at your ease," he adds, holding her hand closely in his,
+"and we'll try to reduce this great crime down to a peccadillo." And
+he goes to the door with Caroline, who is frightened to death at an
+appointment thus proposed.
+
+The syndic is a lively young man, and he receives Madame Adolphe with
+a smile. He smiles at everything, and he smiles as he takes her round
+the waist with an agility which leaves Caroline no time to resist,
+especially as she says to herself, "Adolphe particularly recommended
+me not to vex the syndic."
+
+Nevertheless Caroline escapes, in the interest of the syndic himself,
+and again pronounces the "Sir!" which she had said three times to the
+judge.
+
+"Don't be angry with me, you are irresistible, you are an angel, and
+your husband is a monster: for what does he mean by sending a siren to
+a young man whom he knows to be inflammable!"
+
+"Sir, my husband could not come himself; he is in bed, very sick, and
+you threatened him so terribly that the urgency of the matter--"
+
+"Hasn't he got a lawyer, an attorney?"
+
+Caroline is terrified by this remark which reveals Adolphe's profound
+rascality.
+
+"He supposed, sir, that you would have pity upon the mother of a
+family, upon her children--"
+
+"Ta, ta, ta," returns the syndic. "You have come to influence my
+independence, my conscience, you want me to give the creditors up to
+you: well, I'll do more, I give you up my heart, my fortune! Your
+husband wants to save _his_ honor, _my_ honor is at your disposal!"
+
+"Sir," cries Caroline, as she tries to raise the syndic who has thrown
+himself at her feet. "You alarm me!"
+
+She plays the terrified female and thus reaches the door, getting out
+of a delicate situation as women know how to do it, that is, without
+compromising anything or anybody.
+
+"I will come again," she says smiling, "when you behave better."
+
+"You leave me thus! Take care! Your husband may yet find himself
+seated at the bar of the Court of Assizes: he is accessory to a
+fraudulent bankruptcy, and we know several things about him that are
+not by any means honorable. It is not his first departure from
+rectitude; he has done a good many dirty things, he has been mixed up
+in disgraceful intrigues, and you are singularly careful of the honor
+of a man who cares as little for his own honor as he does for yours."
+
+Caroline, alarmed by these words, lets go the door, shuts it and comes
+back.
+
+"What do you mean, sir?" she exclaims, furious at this outrageous
+broadside.
+
+"Why, this affair--"
+
+"Chaumontel's affair?"
+
+"No, his speculations in houses that he had built by people that were
+insolvent."
+
+Caroline remembers the enterprise undertaken by Adolphe to double his
+income: (See _The Jesuitism of Women_) she trembles. Her curiosity is
+in the syndic's favor.
+
+"Sit down here. There, at this distance, I will behave well, but I can
+look at you."
+
+And he narrates, at length, the conception due to du Tillet the
+banker, interrupting himself to say: "Oh, what a pretty, cunning,
+little foot; no one but you could have such a foot as that--_Du
+Tillet, therefore, compromised._ What an ear, too! You have been
+doubtless told that you had a delicious ear--_And du Tillet was
+right, for judgment had already been given_--I love small ears, but
+let me have a model of yours, and I will do anything you like--_du
+Tillet profited by this to throw the whole loss on your idiotic
+husband_: oh, what a charming silk, you are divinely dressed!"
+
+"Where were we, sir?"
+
+"How can I remember while admiring your Raphaelistic head?"
+
+At the twenty-seventh compliment, Caroline considers the syndic a man
+of wit: she makes him a polite speech, and goes away without learning
+much more of the enterprise which, not long before had swallowed up
+three hundred thousand francs.
+
+There are many huge variations of this petty trouble.
+
+
+EXAMPLE. Adolphe is brave and susceptible: he is walking on the Champs
+Elysees, where there is a crowd of people; in this crowd are several
+ill-mannered young men who indulge in jokes of doubtful propriety:
+Caroline puts up with them and pretends not to hear them, in order to
+keep her husband out of a duel.
+
+
+ANOTHER EXAMPLE. A child belonging to the genus Terrible, exclaims in
+the presence of everybody:
+
+"Mamma, would you let Justine hit me?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Why do you ask, my little man?" inquires Madame Foullepointe.
+
+"Because she just gave father a big slap, and he's ever so much
+stronger than me."
+
+Madame Foullepointe laughs, and Adolphe, who intended to pay court to
+her, is cruelly joked by her, after having had a first last quarrel
+with Caroline.
+
+
+
+                          THE LAST QUARREL.
+
+In every household, husbands and wives must one day hear the striking
+of a fatal hour. It is a knell, the death and end of jealousy, a
+great, noble and charming passion, the only true symptom of love, if
+it is not even its double. When a woman is no longer jealous of her
+husband, all is over, she loves him no more. So, conjugal love expires
+in the last quarrel that a woman gives herself the trouble to raise.
+
+
+Axiom.--When a woman ceases to quarrel with her husband, the Minotaur
+has seated himself in a corner arm-chair, tapping his boots with his
+cane.
+
+
+Every woman must remember her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble
+which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some
+occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof. This cruel farewell
+to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree
+as capricious as life itself. Like life it varies in every house.
+
+Here, the author ought perhaps to search out all the varieties of
+quarrels, if he desires to be precise.
+
+Thus, Caroline may have discovered that the judicial robe of the
+syndic in Chaumontel's affair, hides a robe of infinitely softer
+stuff, of an agreeable, silky color: that Chaumontel's hair, in short,
+is fair, and that his eyes are blue.
+
+Or else Caroline, who arose before Adolphe, may have seen his
+greatcoat thrown wrong side out across a chair; the edge of a little
+perfumed paper, just peeping out of the side-pocket, may have
+attracted her by its whiteness, like a ray of the sun entering a dark
+room through a crack in the window: or else, while taking Adolphe in
+her arms and feeling his pocket, she may have caused the note to
+crackle: or else she may have been informed of the state of things by
+a foreign odor that she has long noticed upon him, and may have read
+these lines:
+
+
+"Ungraitfull wun, wot du yu supoz I no About Hipolite. Kum, and yu
+shal se whether I Love yu."
+
+
+Or this:
+
+"Yesterday, love, you made me wait for you: what will it be
+to-morrow?"
+
+
+Or this:
+
+"The women who love you, my dear sir, are very unhappy in hating you
+so, when you are not with them: take care, for the hatred which exists
+during your absence, may possibly encroach upon the hours you spend in
+their company."
+
+
+Or this:
+
+"You traitorous Chodoreille, what were you doing yesterday on the
+boulevard with a woman hanging on your arm? If it was your wife,
+accept my compliments of condolence upon her absent charms: she has
+doubtless deposited them at the pawnbroker's, and the ticket to redeem
+them with is lost."
+
+
+Four notes emanating from the grisette, the lady, the pretentious
+woman in middle life, and the actress, among whom Adolphe has chosen
+his _belle_ (according to the Fischtaminellian vocabulary).
+
+Or else Caroline, taken veiled by Ferdinand to Ranelagh Garden, sees
+with her own eyes Adolphe abandoning himself furiously to the polka,
+holding one of the ladies of honor to Queen Pomare in his arms; or
+else, again, Adolphe has for the seventh time, made a mistake in the
+name, and called his wife Juliette, Charlotte or Lisa: or, a grocer or
+restaurateur sends to the house, during Adolphe's absence, certain
+damning bills which fall into Caroline's hands.
+
+
+PAPERS RELATING TO CHAUMONTEL'S AFFAIR.
+
+(Private Tables Served.)
+
+M. Adolphe to Perrault,
+
+To 1 Pate de Foie Gras delivered at Madame
+     Schontz's, the 6th of January,                 fr.    22.50
+Six bottle of assorted wines,                              70.00
+To one special breakfast delivered at Congress
+     Hotel, the 11th of February, at No. 21----
+     Stipulated price,                                    100.00
+                                                          ______
+
+          Total,                                Francs,   192.50
+
+
+Caroline examines the dates and remembers them as appointments made
+for business connected with Chaumontel's affair. Adolphe had
+designated the sixth of January as the day fixed for a meeting at
+which the creditors in Chaumontel's affair were to receive the sums
+due them. On the eleventh of February he had an appointment with the
+notary, in order to sign a receipt relative to Chaumontel's affair.
+
+Or else--but an attempt to mention all the chances of discovery would
+be the undertaking of a madman.
+
+Every woman will remember to herself how the bandage with which her
+eyes were bound fell off: how, after many doubts, and agonies of
+heart, she made up her mind to have a final quarrel for the simple
+purpose of finishing the romance, putting the seal to the book,
+stipulating for her independence, or beginning life over again.
+
+Some women are fortunate enough to have anticipated their husbands,
+and they then have the quarrel as a sort of justification.
+
+Nervous women give way to a burst of passion and commit acts of
+violence.
+
+Women of mild temper assume a decided tone which appalls the most
+intrepid husbands. Those who have no vengeance ready shed a great many
+tears.
+
+Those who love you forgive you. Ah, they conceive so readily, like the
+woman called "Ma berline," that their Adolphe must be loved by the
+women of France, that they are rejoiced to possess, legally, a man
+about whom everybody goes crazy.
+
+Certain women with lips tight shut like a vise, with a muddy
+complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure
+of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and
+contradiction: they question him (see _Troubles within Troubles_),
+like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful
+enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive
+moment. Generally, in this supreme scene of conjugal life, the fair
+sex is the executioner, while, in the contrary case, man is the
+assassin.
+
+This is the way of it: This last quarrel (you shall know why the
+author has called it the _last_), is always terminated by a solemn,
+sacred promise, made by scrupulous, noble, or simply intelligent women
+(that is to say, by all women), and which we give here in its grandest
+form.
+
+"Enough, Adolphe! We love each other no more; you have deceived me,
+and I shall never forget it. I may forgive it, but I can never forget
+it."
+
+Women represent themselves as implacable only to render their
+forgiveness charming: they have anticipated God.
+
+"We have now to live in common like two friends," continues Caroline.
+"Well, let us live like two comrades, two brothers, I do not wish to
+make your life intolerable, and I never again will speak to you of
+what has happened--"
+
+Adolphe gives Caroline his hand: she takes it, and shakes it in the
+English style. Adolphe thanks Caroline, and catches a glimpse of
+bliss: he has converted his wife into a sister, and hopes to be a
+bachelor again.
+
+The next day Caroline indulges in a very witty allusion (Adolphe
+cannot help laughing at it) to Chaumontel's affair. In society she
+makes general remarks which, to Adolphe, are very particular remarks,
+about their last quarrel.
+
+At the end of a fortnight a day never passes without Caroline's
+recalling their last quarrel by saying: "It was the day when I found
+Chaumontel's bill in your pocket:" or "it happened since our last
+quarrel:" or, "it was the day when, for the first time, I had a clear
+idea of life," etc. She assassinates Adolphe, she martyrizes him! In
+society she gives utterance to terrible things.
+
+"We are happy, my dear [to a lady], when we love each other no longer:
+it's then that we learn how to make ourselves beloved," and she looks
+at Ferdinand.
+
+In short, the last quarrel never comes to an end, and from this fact
+flows the following axiom:
+
+
+Axiom.--Putting yourself in the wrong with your lawful wife, is
+solving the problem of Perpetual Motion.
+
+
+
+                          A SIGNAL FAILURE.
+
+Women, and especially married women, stick ideas into their brain-pan
+precisely as they stick pins into a pincushion, and the devil himself,
+--do you mind?--could not get them out: they reserve to themselves the
+exclusive right of sticking them in, pulling them out, and sticking
+them in again.
+
+Caroline is riding home one evening from Madame Foullepointe's in a
+violent state of jealousy and ambition.
+
+Madame Foullepointe, the lioness--but this word requires an
+explanation. It is a fashionable neologism, and gives expression to
+certain rather meagre ideas relative to our present society: you must
+use it, if you want to describe a woman who is all the rage. This
+lioness rides on horseback every day, and Caroline has taken it into
+her head to learn to ride also.
+
+Observe that in this conjugal phase, Adolphe and Caroline are in the
+season which we have denominated _A Household Revolution_, and that
+they have had two or three _Last Quarrels_.
+
+"Adolphe," she says, "do you want to do me a favor?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Won't you refuse?"
+
+"If your request is reasonable, I am willing--"
+
+"Ah, already--that's a true husband's word--if--"
+
+"Come, what is it?"
+
+"I want to learn to ride on horseback."
+
+"Now, is it a possible thing, Caroline?"
+
+Caroline looks out of the window, and tries to wipe away a dry tear.
+
+"Listen," resumes Adolphe; "I cannot let you go alone to the
+riding-school; and I cannot go with you while business gives me the
+annoyance it does now. What's the matter? I think I have given you
+unanswerable reasons."
+
+Adolphe foresees the hiring of a stable, the purchase of a pony, the
+introduction of a groom and of a servant's horse into the
+establishment--in short, all the nuisance of female lionization.
+
+When a man gives a woman reasons instead of giving her what she wants
+--well, few men have ventured to descend into that small abyss called
+the heart, to test the power of the tempest that suddenly bursts forth
+there.
+
+"Reasons! If you want reasons, here they are!" exclaims Caroline. "I
+am your wife: you don't seem to care to please me any more. And as to
+the expenses, you greatly overrate them, my dear."
+
+Women have as many inflections of voice to pronounce these words, _My
+dear_, as the Italians have to say _Amico_. I have counted twenty-nine
+which express only various degrees of hatred.
+
+"Well, you'll see," resumes Caroline, "I shall be sick, and you will
+pay the apothecary and the doctor as much as the price of a horse. I
+shall be walled up here at home, and that's all you want. I asked the
+favor of you, though I was sure of a refusal: I only wanted to know
+how you would go to work to give it."
+
+"But, Caroline--"
+
+"Leave me alone at the riding-school!" she continues without
+listening. "Is that a reason? Can't I go with Madame de Fischtaminel?
+Madame de Fischtaminel is learning to ride on horseback, and I don't
+imagine that Monsieur de Fischtaminel goes with her."
+
+"But, Caroline--"
+
+"I am delighted with your solicitude. You think a great deal of me,
+really. Monsieur de Fischtaminel has more confidence in his wife, than
+you have in yours. He does not go with her, not he! Perhaps it's on
+account of this confidence that you don't want me at the school, where
+I might see your goings on with the fair Fischtaminel."
+
+Adolphe tries to hide his vexation at this torrent of words, which
+begins when they are still half way from home, and has no sea to empty
+into. When Caroline is in her room, she goes on in the same way.
+
+"You see that if reasons could restore my health or prevent me from
+desiring a kind of exercise pointed out by nature herself, I should
+not be in want of reasons, and that I know all the reasons that there
+are, and that I went over with the reasons before I spoke to you."
+
+This, ladies, may with the more truth be called the prologue to the
+conjugal drama, from the fact that it is vigorously delivered,
+embellished with a commentary of gestures, ornamented with glances and
+all the other vignettes with which you usually illustrate such
+masterpieces.
+
+Caroline, when she has once planted in Adolphe's heart the
+apprehension of a scene of constantly reiterated demands, feels her
+hatred for his control largely increase. Madame pouts, and she pouts
+so fiercely, that Adolphe is forced to notice it, on pain of very
+disagreeable consequences, for all is over, be sure of that, between
+two beings married by the mayor, or even at Gretna Green, when one of
+them no longer notices the sulkings of the other.
+
+
+Axiom.--A sulk that has struck in is a deadly poison.
+
+
+It was to prevent this suicide of love that our ingenious France
+invented boudoirs. Women could not well have Virgil's willows in the
+economy of our modern dwellings. On the downfall of oratories, these
+little cubbies become boudoirs.
+
+This conjugal drama has three acts. The act of the prologue is already
+played. Then comes the act of false coquetry: one of those in which
+French women have the most success.
+
+Adolphe is walking about the room, divesting himself of his apparel,
+and the man thus engaged, divests himself of his strength as well as
+of his clothing. To every man of forty, this axiom will appear
+profoundly just:
+
+
+Axiom.--The ideas of a man who has taken his boots and his suspenders
+off, are no longer those of a man who is still sporting these two
+tyrants of the mind.
+
+
+Take notice that this is only an axiom in wedded life. In morals, it
+is what we call a relative theorem.
+
+Caroline watches, like a jockey on the race course, the moment when
+she can distance her adversary. She makes her preparations to be
+irresistibly fascinating to Adolphe.
+
+Women possess a power of mimicking pudicity, a knowledge of secrets
+which might be those of a frightened dove, a particular register for
+singing, like Isabella, in the fourth act of _Robert le Diable: "Grace
+pour toi! Grace pour moi!"_ which leave jockeys and horse trainers
+whole miles behind. As usual, the _Diable_ succumbs. It is the eternal
+history, the grand Christian mystery of the bruised serpent, of the
+delivered woman becoming the great social force, as the Fourierists
+say. It is especially in this that the difference between the Oriental
+slave and the Occidental wife appears.
+
+Upon the conjugal pillow, the second act ends by a number of
+onomatopes, all of them favorable to peace. Adolphe, precisely like
+children in the presence of a slice of bread and molasses, promises
+everything that Caroline wants.
+
+
+THIRD ACT. As the curtain rises, the stage represents a chamber in a
+state of extreme disorder. Adolphe, in his dressing gown, tries to go
+out furtively and without waking Caroline, who is sleeping profoundly,
+and finally does go out.
+
+Caroline, exceedingly happy, gets up, consults her mirror, and makes
+inquiries about breakfast. An hour afterward, when she is ready she
+learns that breakfast is served.
+
+"Tell monsieur."
+
+"Madame, he is in the little parlor."
+
+"What a nice man he is," she says, going up to Adolphe, and talking
+the babyish, caressing language of the honey-moon.
+
+"What for, pray?"
+
+"Why, to let his little Liline ride the horsey."
+
+
+OBSERVATION. During the honey-moon, some few married couples,--very
+young ones,--make use of languages, which, in ancient days, Aristotle
+classified and defined. (See his Pedagogy.) Thus they are perpetually
+using such terminations as _lala_, _nana_, _coachy-poachy_, just as
+mothers and nurses use them to babies. This is one of the secret
+reasons, discussed and recognized in big quartos by the Germans, which
+determined the Cabires, the creators of the Greek mythology, to
+represent Love as a child. There are other reasons very well known to
+women, the principal of which is, that, in their opinion, love in men
+is always _small_.
+
+
+"Where did you get that idea, my sweet? You must have dreamed it!"
+
+"What!"
+
+Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already
+considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says
+not a word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of
+their gaze, Adolphe turns half way round toward the dining-room; but
+he asks himself whether it would not be well to let Caroline take one
+lesson, and to tip the wink to the riding-master, to disgust her with
+equestrianism by the harshness of his style of instruction.
+
+There is nothing so terrible as an actress who reckons upon a success,
+and who _fait four_.
+
+In the language of the stage, to _faire four_ is to play to a
+wretchedly thin house, or to obtain not the slightest applause. It is
+taking great pains for nothing, in short a _signal failure_.
+
+This petty trouble--it is very petty--is reproduced in a thousand ways
+in married life, when the honey-moon is over, and when the wife has no
+personal fortune.
+
+In spite of the author's repugnance to inserting anecdotes in an
+exclusively aphoristic work, the tissue of which will bear nothing but
+the most delicate and subtle observations,--from the nature of the
+subject at least,--it seems to him necessary to illustrate this page
+by an incident narrated by one of our first physicians. This
+repetition of the subject involves a rule of conduct very much in use
+with the doctors of Paris.
+
+A certain husband was in our Adolphe's situation. His Caroline, having
+once made a signal failure, was determined to conquer, for Caroline
+often does conquer! (See _The Physiology of Marriage_, Meditation
+XXVI, Paragraph _Nerves_.) She had been lying about on the sofas for
+two months, getting up at noon, taking no part in the amusements of
+the city. She would not go to the theatre,--oh, the disgusting
+atmosphere!--the lights, above all, the lights! Then the bustle,
+coming out, going in, the music,--it might be fatal, it's so terribly
+exciting!
+
+She would not go on excursions to the country, oh, certainly it was
+her desire to do so!--but she would like (desiderata) a carriage of
+her own, horses of her own--her husband would not give her an
+equipage. And as to going in hacks, in hired conveyances, the bare
+thought gave her a rising at the stomach!
+
+She would not have any cooking--the smell of the meats produced a
+sudden nausea. She drank innumerable drugs that her maid never saw her
+take.
+
+In short, she expended large amounts of time and money in attitudes,
+privations, effects, pearl-white to give her the pallor of a corpse,
+machinery, and the like, precisely as when the manager of a theatre
+spreads rumors about a piece gotten up in a style of Oriental
+magnificence, without regard to expense!
+
+This couple had got so far as to believe that even a journey to the
+springs, to Ems, to Hombourg, to Carlsbad, would hardly cure the
+invalid: but madame would not budge, unless she could go in her own
+carriage. Always that carriage!
+
+Adolphe held out, and would not yield.
+
+Caroline, who was a woman of great sagacity, admitted that her husband
+was right.
+
+"Adolphe is right," she said to her friends, "it is I who am
+unreasonable: he can not, he ought not, have a carriage yet: men know
+better than we do the situation of their business."
+
+At times Adolphe was perfectly furious! Women have ways about them
+that demand the justice of Tophet itself. Finally, during the third
+month, he met one of his school friends, a lieutenant in the corps of
+physicians, modest as all young doctors are: he had had his epaulettes
+one day only, and could give the order to fire!
+
+"For a young woman, a young doctor," said our Adolphe to himself.
+
+And he proposed to the future Bianchon to visit his wife and tell him
+the truth about her condition.
+
+"My dear, it is time that you should have a physician," said Adolphe
+that evening to his wife, "and here is the best for a pretty woman."
+
+The novice makes a conscientious examination, questions madame, feels
+her pulse discreetly, inquires into the slightest symptoms, and, at
+the end, while conversing, allows a smile, an expression, which, if
+not ironical, are extremely incredulous, to play involuntarily upon
+his lips, and his lips are quite in sympathy with his eyes. He
+prescribes some insignificant remedy, and insists upon its importance,
+promising to call again to observe its effect. In the ante-chamber,
+thinking himself alone with his school-mate, he indulges in an
+inexpressible shrug of the shoulders.
+
+"There's nothing the matter with your wife, my boy," he says: "she is
+trifling with both you and me."
+
+"Well, I thought so."
+
+"But if she continues the joke, she will make herself sick in earnest:
+I am too sincerely your friend to enter into such a speculation, for I
+am determined that there shall be an honest man beneath the physician,
+in me--"
+
+"My wife wants a carriage."
+
+As in the _Solo on the Hearse_, this Caroline listened at the door.
+
+Even at the present day, the young doctor is obliged to clear his path
+of the calumnies which this charming woman is continually throwing
+into it: and for the sake of a quiet life, he has been obliged to
+confess his little error--a young man's error--and to mention his
+enemy by name, in order to close her lips.
+
+
+
+                      THE CHESTNUTS IN THE FIRE.
+
+No one can tell how many shades and gradations there are in
+misfortune, for everything depends upon the character of the
+individual, upon the force of the imagination, upon the strength of
+the nerves. If it is impossible to catch these so variable shades, we
+may at least point out the most striking colors, and the principal
+attendant incidents. The author has therefore reserved this petty
+trouble for the last, for it is the only one that is at once comic and
+disastrous.
+
+The author flatters himself that he has mentioned the principal
+examples. Thus, women who have arrived safely at the haven, the happy
+age of forty, the period when they are delivered from scandal,
+calumny, suspicion, when their liberty begins: these women will
+certainly do him the justice to state that all the critical situations
+of a family are pointed out or represented in this book.
+
+Caroline has her Chaumontel's affair. She has learned how to induce
+Adolphe to go out unexpectedly, and has an understanding with Madame
+de Fischtaminel.
+
+In every household, within a given time, ladies like Madame de
+Fischtaminel become Caroline's main resource.
+
+Caroline pets Madame de Fischtaminel with all the tenderness that the
+African army is now bestowing upon Abd-el-Kader: she is as solicitous
+in her behalf as a physician is anxious to avoid curing a rich
+hypochondriac. Between the two, Caroline and Madame de Fischtaminel
+invent occupations for dear Adolphe, when neither of them desire the
+presence of that demigod among their penates. Madame de Fischtaminel
+and Caroline, who have become, through the efforts of Madame
+Foullepointe, the best friends in the world, have even gone so far as
+to learn and employ that feminine free-masonry, the rites of which
+cannot be made familiar by any possible initiation.
+
+If Caroline writes the following little note to Madame de
+Fischtaminel:
+
+
+"Dearest Angel:
+
+"You will probably see Adolphe to-morrow, but do not keep him too
+long, for I want to go to ride with him at five: but if you are
+desirous of taking him to ride yourself, do so and I will take him up.
+You ought to teach me your secret for entertaining used-up people as
+you do."
+
+
+Madame de Fischtaminel says to herself: "Gracious! So I shall have
+that fellow on my hands to-morrow from twelve o'clock to five."
+
+
+Axiom.--Men do not always know a woman's positive request when they
+see it; but another woman never mistakes it: she does the contrary.
+
+
+Those sweet little beings called women, and especially Parisian women,
+are the prettiest jewels that social industry has invented. Those who
+do not adore them, those who do not feel a constant jubilation at
+seeing them laying their plots while braiding their hair, creating
+special idioms for themselves and constructing with their slender
+fingers machines strong enough to destroy the most powerful fortunes,
+must be wanting in a positive sense.
+
+On one occasion Caroline takes the most minute precautions. She writes
+the day before to Madame Foullepointe to go to St. Maur with Adolphe,
+to look at a piece of property for sale there. Adolphe would go to
+breakfast with her. She aids Adolphe in dressing. She twits him with
+the care he bestows upon his toilet, and asks absurd questions about
+Madame Foullepointe.
+
+"She's real nice, and I think she is quite tired of Charles: you'll
+inscribe her yet upon your catalogue, you old Don Juan: but you won't
+have any further need of Chaumontel's affair; I'm no longer jealous,
+you've got a passport. Do you like that better than being adored?
+Monster, observe how considerate I am."
+
+So soon as her husband has gone, Caroline, who had not omitted, the
+previous evening, to write to Ferdinand to come to breakfast with her,
+equips herself in a costume which, in that charming eighteenth century
+so calumniated by republicans, humanitarians and idiots, women of
+quality called their fighting-dress.
+
+Caroline has taken care of everything. Love is the first house servant
+in the world, so the table is set with positively diabolic coquetry.
+There is the white damask cloth, the little blue service, the silver
+gilt urn, the chiseled milk pitcher, and flowers all round!
+
+If it is winter, she has got some grapes, and has rummaged the cellar
+for the very best old wine. The rolls are from the most famous
+baker's. The succulent dishes, the _pate de foie gras_, the whole of
+this elegant entertainment, would have made the author of the
+Glutton's Almanac neigh with impatience: it would make a note-shaver
+smile, and tell a professor of the old University what the matter in
+hand is.
+
+Everything is prepared. Caroline has been ready since the night
+before: she contemplates her work. Justine sighs and arranges the
+furniture. Caroline picks off the yellow leaves of the plants in the
+windows. A woman, in these cases, disguises what we may call the
+prancings of the heart, by those meaningless occupations in which the
+fingers have all the grip of pincers, when the pink nails burn, and
+when this unspoken exclamation rasps the throat: "He hasn't come yet!"
+
+What a blow is this announcement by Justine: "Madame, here's a
+letter!"
+
+A letter in place of Ferdinand! How does she ever open it? What ages
+of life slip by as she unfolds it! Women know this by experience! As
+to men, when they are in such maddening passes, they murder their
+shirt-frills.
+
+"Justine, Monsieur Ferdinand is ill!" exclaims Caroline. "Send for a
+carriage."
+
+As Justine goes down stairs, Adolphe comes up.
+
+"My poor mistress!" observes Justine. "I guess she won't want the
+carriage now."
+
+"Oh my! Where have you come from?" cries Caroline, on seeing Adolphe
+standing in ecstasy before her voluptuous breakfast.
+
+Adolphe, whose wife long since gave up treating _him_ to such charming
+banquets, does not answer. But he guesses what it all means, as he
+sees the cloth inscribed with the delightful ideas which Madame de
+Fischtaminel or the syndic of Chaumontel's affair have often inscribed
+for him upon tables quite as elegant.
+
+"Whom are you expecting?" he asks in his turn.
+
+"Who could it be, except Ferdinand?" replies Caroline.
+
+"And is he keeping you waiting?"
+
+"He is sick, poor fellow."
+
+A quizzical idea enters Adolphe's head, and he replies, winking with
+one eye only: "I have just seen him."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"In front of the Cafe de Paris, with some friends."
+
+"But why have you come back?" says Caroline, trying to conceal her
+murderous fury.
+
+"Madame Foullepointe, who was tired of Charles, you said, has been
+with him at Ville d'Avray since yesterday."
+
+Adolphe sits down, saying: "This has happened very appropriately, for
+I'm as hungry as two bears."
+
+Caroline sits down, too, and looks at Adolphe stealthily: she weeps
+internally: but she very soon asks, in a tone of voice that she
+manages to render indifferent, "Who was Ferdinand with?"
+
+"With some fellows who lead him into bad company. The young man is
+getting spoiled: he goes to Madame Schontz's. You ought to write to
+your uncle. It was probably some breakfast or other, the result of a
+bet made at M'lle Malaga's." He looks slyly at Caroline, who drops her
+eyes to conceal her tears. "How beautiful you have made yourself this
+morning," Adolphe resumes. "Ah, you are a fair match for your
+breakfast. I don't think Ferdinand will make as good a meal as I
+shall," etc., etc.
+
+Adolphe manages the joke so cleverly that he inspires his wife with
+the idea of punishing Ferdinand. Adolphe, who claims to be as hungry
+as two bears, causes Caroline to forget that a carriage waits for her
+at the door.
+
+The female that tends the gate at the house Ferdinand lives in,
+arrives at about two o'clock, while Adolphe is asleep on a sofa. That
+Iris of bachelors comes to say to Caroline that Monsieur Ferdinand is
+very much in need of some one.
+
+"He's drunk, I suppose," says Caroline in a rage.
+
+"He fought a duel this morning, madame."
+
+Caroline swoons, gets up and rushes to Ferdinand, wishing Adolphe at
+the bottom of the sea.
+
+When women are the victims of these little inventions, which are quite
+as adroit as their own, they are sure to exclaim, "What abominable
+monsters men are!"
+
+
+
+                            ULTIMA RATIO.
+
+We have come to our last observation. Doubtless this work is beginning
+to tire you quite as much as its subject does, if you are married.
+
+This work, which, according to the author, is to the _Physiology of
+Marriage_ what Fact is to Theory, or History to Philosophy, has its
+logic, as life, viewed as a whole, has its logic, also.
+
+This logic--fatal, terrible--is as follows. At the close of the first
+part of the book--a book filled with serious pleasantry--Adolphe has
+reached, as you must have noticed, a point of complete indifference in
+matrimonial matters.
+
+He has read novels in which the writers advise troublesome husbands to
+embark for the other world, or to live in peace with the fathers of
+their children, to pet and adore them: for if literature is the
+reflection of manners, we must admit that our manners recognize the
+defects pointed out by the _Physiology of Marriage_ in this
+fundamental institution. More than one great genius has dealt this
+social basis terrible blows, without shaking it.
+
+Adolphe has especially read his wife too closely, and disguises his
+indifference by this profound word: indulgence. He is indulgent with
+Caroline, he sees in her nothing but the mother of his children, a
+good companion, a sure friend, a brother.
+
+When the petty troubles of the wife cease, Caroline, who is more
+clever than her husband, has come to profit by this advantageous
+indulgence: but she does not give her dear Adolphe up. It is woman's
+nature never to yield any of her rights. DIEU ET MON DROIT--CONJUGAL!
+is, as is well known, the motto of England, and is especially so
+to-day.
+
+Women have such a love of domination that we will relate an anecdote,
+not ten years old, in point. It is a very young anecdote.
+
+One of the grand dignitaries of the Chamber of Peers had a Caroline,
+as lax as Carolines usually are. The name is an auspicious one for
+women. This dignitary, extremely old at the time, was on one side of
+the fireplace, and Caroline on the other. Caroline was hard upon the
+lustrum when women no longer tell their age. A friend came in to
+inform them of the marriage of a general who had lately been intimate
+in their house.
+
+Caroline at once had a fit of despair, with genuine tears; she
+screamed and made the grand dignitary's head ache to such a degree,
+that he tried to console her. In the midst of his condolences, the
+count forgot himself so far as to say--"What can you expect, my dear,
+he really could not marry you!"
+
+And this was one of the highest functionaries of the state, but a
+friend of Louis XVIII, and necessarily a little bit Pompadour.
+
+The whole difference, then, between the situation of Adolphe and that
+of Caroline, consists in this: though he no longer cares about her,
+she retains the right to care about him.
+
+Now, let us listen to "What _they_ say," the theme of the concluding
+chapter of this work.
+
+
+
+                             COMMENTARY.
+
+            IN WHICH IS EXPLAINED LA FELICITA OF FINALES.
+
+Who has not heard an Italian opera in the course of his life? You must
+then have noticed the musical abuse of the word _felicita_, so
+lavishly used by the librettist and the chorus at the moment when
+everybody is deserting his box or leaving the house.
+
+Frightful image of life. We quit it just when we hear _la felicita_.
+
+Have you reflected upon the profound truth conveyed by this finale, at
+the instant when the composer delivers his last note and the author
+his last line, when the orchestra gives the last pull at the
+fiddle-bow and the last puff at the bassoon, when the principal singers
+say "Let's go to supper!" and the chorus people exclaim "How lucky, it
+doesn't rain!" Well, in every condition in life, as in an Italian
+opera, there comes a time when the joke is over, when the trick is
+done, when people must make up their minds to one thing or the other,
+when everybody is singing his own _felicita_ for himself. After having
+gone through with all the duos, the solos, the stretti, the codas, the
+concerted pieces, the duettos, the nocturnes, the phases which these
+few scenes, chosen from the ocean of married life, exhibit you, and
+which are themes whose variations have doubtless been divined by
+persons with brains as well as by the shallow--for so far as suffering
+is concerned, we are all equal--the greater part of Parisian
+households reach, without a given time, the following final chorus:
+
+THE WIFE, _to a young woman in the conjugal Indian Summer_. My dear, I
+am the happiest woman in the world. Adolphe is the model of husbands,
+kind, obliging, not a bit of a tease. Isn't he, Ferdinand?
+
+Caroline addresses Adolphe's cousin, a young man with a nice cravat,
+glistening hair and patent leather boots: his coat is cut in the most
+elegant fashion: he has a crush hat, kid gloves, something very choice
+in the way of a waistcoat, the very best style of moustaches,
+whiskers, and a goatee a la Mazarin; he is also endowed with a
+profound, mute, attentive admiration of Caroline.
+
+FERDINAND. Adolphe is happy to have a wife like you! What does he
+want? Nothing.
+
+THE WIFE. In the beginning, we were always vexing each other: but now
+we get along marvelously. Adolphe no longer does anything but what he
+likes, he never puts himself out: I never ask him where he is going
+nor what he has seen. Indulgence, my dear, is the great secret of
+happiness. You, doubtless, are still in the period of petty troubles,
+causeless jealousies, cross-purposes, and all sorts of little
+botherations. What is the good of all this? We women have but a short
+life, at the best. How much? Ten good years! Why should we fill them
+with vexation? I was like you. But, one fine morning, I made the
+acquaintance of Madame de Fischtaminel, a charming woman, who taught
+me how to make a husband happy. Since then, Adolphe has changed
+radically; he has become perfectly delightful. He is the first to say
+to me, with anxiety, with alarm, even, when I am going to the theatre,
+and he and I are still alone at seven o'clock: "Ferdinand is coming
+for you, isn't he?" Doesn't he, Ferdinand?
+
+FERDINAND. We are the best cousins in the world.
+
+THE INDIAN SUMMER WIFE, _very much affected_. Shall I ever come to
+that?
+
+THE HUSBAND, _on the Italian Boulevard_. My dear boy [he has
+button-holed Monsieur de Fischtaminel], you still believe that marriage
+is based upon passion. Let me tell you that the best way, in conjugal
+life, is to have a plenary indulgence, one for the other, on condition
+that appearances be preserved. I am the happiest husband in the world.
+Caroline is a devoted friend, she would sacrifice everything for me,
+even my cousin Ferdinand, if it were necessary: oh, you may laugh, but
+she is ready to do anything. You entangle yourself in your laughable
+ideas of dignity, honor, virtue, social order. We can't have our life
+over again, so we must cram it full of pleasure. Not the smallest
+bitter word has been exchanged between Caroline and me for two years
+past. I have, in Caroline, a friend to whom I can tell everything, and
+who would be amply able to console me in a great emergency. There is
+not the slightest deceit between us, and we know perfectly well what
+the state of things is. We have thus changed our duties into
+pleasures. We are often happier, thus, than in that insipid season
+called the honey-moon. She says to me, sometimes, "I'm out of humor,
+go away." The storm then falls upon my cousin. Caroline never puts on
+her airs of a victim, now, but speaks in the kindest manner of me to
+the whole world. In short, she is happy in my pleasures. And as she is
+a scrupulously honest woman, she is conscientious to the last degree
+in her use of our fortune. My house is well kept. My wife leaves me
+the right to dispose of my reserve without the slightest control on
+her part. That's the way of it. We have oiled our wheels and cogs,
+while you, my dear Fischtaminel, have put gravel in yours.
+
+CHORUS, _in a parlor during a ball_. Madame Caroline is a charming
+woman.
+
+A WOMAN IN A TURBAN. Yes, she is very proper, very dignified.
+
+A WOMAN WHO HAS SEVEN CHILDREN. Ah! she learned early how to manage
+her husband.
+
+ONE OF FERDINAND'S FRIENDS. But she loves her husband exceedingly.
+Besides, Adolphe is a man of great distinction and experience.
+
+ONE OF MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL'S FRIENDS. He adores his wife. There's
+no fuss at their house, everybody is at home there.
+
+MONSIEUR FOULLEPOINTE. Yes, it's a very agreeable house.
+
+A WOMAN ABOUT WHOM THERE IS A GOOD DEAL OF SCANDAL. Caroline is kind
+and obliging, and never talks scandal of anybody.
+
+A YOUNG LADY, _returning to her place after a dance_. Don't you
+remember how tiresome she was when she visited the Deschars?
+
+MADAME DE FISCHTAMINEL. Oh! She and her husband were two bundles of
+briars--continually quarreling. [She goes away.]
+
+AN ARTIST. I hear that the individual known as Deschars is getting
+dissipated: he goes round town--
+
+A WOMAN, _alarmed at the turn the conversation is taking, as her
+daughter can hear_. Madame de Fischtaminel is charming, this evening.
+
+A WOMAN OF FORTY, _without employment_. Monsieur Adolphe appears to be
+as happy as his wife.
+
+A YOUNG LADY. Oh! what a sweet man Monsieur Ferdinand is! [Her mother
+reproves her by a sharp nudge with her foot.] What's the matter,
+mamma?
+
+HER MOTHER, _looking at her fixedly_. A young woman should not speak
+so, my dear, of any one but her betrothed, and Monsieur Ferdinand is
+not a marrying man.
+
+A LADY DRESSED RATHER LOW IN THE NECK, _to another lady dressed
+equally low, in a whisper_. The fact is, my dear, the moral of all
+this is that there are no happy couples but couples of four.
+
+A FRIEND, _whom the author was so imprudent as to consult_. Those last
+words are false.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Do you think so?
+
+THE FRIEND, _who has just been married_. You all of you use your ink
+in depreciating social life, on the pretext of enlightening us! Why,
+there are couples a hundred, a thousand times happier than your
+boasted couples of four.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Well, shall I deceive the marrying class of the
+population, and scratch the passage out?
+
+THE FRIEND. No, it will be taken merely as the point of a song in a
+vaudeville.
+
+THE AUTHOR. Yes, a method of passing truths off upon society.
+
+THE FRIEND, _who sticks to his opinion_. Such truths as are destined
+to be passed off upon it.
+
+THE AUTHOR, _who wants to have the last word_. Who and what is there
+that does not pass off, or become passe? When your wife is twenty
+years older, we will resume this conversation.
+
+THE FRIEND. You revenge yourself cruelly for your inability to write
+the history of happy homes.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Petty Troubles of Married Life,
+Complete, by Honore de Balzac
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