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!”