initial commit of ebook 6033HEADmain

2 files changed, 3910 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/petty10.txt b/old/petty10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..33b7a8a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/petty10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3910 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Petty Troubles of Married Life, by Honore de Balzac
+(#100 in our series by Honore de Balzac)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Petty Troubles of Married Life
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6033]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 23, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE, FIRST PART
+By Honore de Balzac
+
+Etext prepared by Dagny, dagnypg@yahoo.com
+              and John Bickers, jbickers@ihug.co.nz
+
+
+
+                    PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE
+
+                              FIRST PART
+
+                                  BY
+
+                          HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+                               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.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PETTY TROUBLES OF MARRIED LIFE ***
+
+This file should be named petty10.txt or petty10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, petty11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, petty10a.txt
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext04 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04
+
+Or /etext03, 02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/petty10.zip b/old/petty10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..446101c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/petty10.zip