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?