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.