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.