Women are either chaste—or vain—or simply proud. They are therefore all
subject to the following petty trouble:
Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a
woman to themselves,—a possession exclusively due to the legal
ceremony,—that they dread the public’s making a mistake, and they
hasten to brand their consort, as lumber-dealers brand their logs while
floating down stream, or as the Berry stock-raisers brand their sheep.
They bestow names of endearment, right before people, upon their wives:
names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella), from the animal
kingdom, as: my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or, choosing from the
vegetable kingdom, they call them: my cabbage, my fig (this only in
Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia). Never: —My flower! Pray note
this discretion.
Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:—Bobonne,
—mother,—daughter,—good woman,—old lady: this last when she is very
young.
Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as: Mon bichon, ma
niniche, Tronquette!
We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for
his ugliness, call his wife, _Moumoutte_!
“I would rather he would strike me,” said this unfortunate to her
neighbor.
“Poor little woman, she is really unhappy,” resumed the neighbor,
looking at me when Moumoutte had gone: “when she is in company with her
husband she is upon pins and needles, and keeps out of his way. One
evening, he actually seized her by the neck and said: ‘Come fatty,
let’s go home!’”
It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning
with arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions
like these that the wife had to bear in society. This husband used to
give the woman he had won at the point of the Code, public little taps
on her shoulder, he would startle her by a resounding kiss, he
dishonored her by a conspicuous tenderness, seasoned by those
impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French
savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners are
very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction. It
was, it is said, this shocking situation,—one perfectly appreciated by
a discerning jury,—which won the prisoner a verdict softened by the
extenuating circumstances.
The jurymen said to themselves:
“For a wife to murder her husband for these conjugal offences, is
certainly going rather far; but then a woman is very excusable, when
she is so harassed!”
We deeply regret, in the interest of elegant manners, that these
arguments are not more generally known. Heaven grant, therefore, that
our book may have an immense success, as women will obtain this
advantage from it, that they will be treated as they deserve, that is,
as queens.
In this respect, love is much superior to marriage, it is proud of
indiscreet sayings and doings. There are some women that seek them,
fish for them, and woe to the man who does not now and then commit one!
What passion lies in an accidental _thou_!
Out in the country I heard a husband call his wife: “Ma berline!” She
was delighted with it, and saw nothing ridiculous in it: she called her
husband, “Mon fiston!” This delicious couple were ignorant of the
existence of such things as petty troubles.
It was in observing this happy pair that the author discovered this
axiom:
Axiom:—In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of
genius married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a
chance which is not as common as might be supposed, you must both of
you be exceedingly stupid.
The too celebrated history of the cure of a wounded self-love by
arsenic, proves that, properly speaking, there are no petty troubles
for women in married life.
Axiom.—Woman exists by sentiment where man exists by action.
Now, sentiment can at any moment render a petty trouble either a great
misfortune, or a wasted life, or an eternal misery. Should Caroline
begin, in her ignorance of life and the world, by inflicting upon her
husband the vexations of her stupidity (re-read REVELATIONS), Adolphe,
like any other man, may find a compensation in social excitement: he
goes out, comes back, goes here and there, has business. But for
Caroline, the question everywhere is, To love or not to love, to be or
not to be loved.
Indiscretions are in harmony with the character of the individuals,
with times and places. Two examples will suffice.
Here is the first. A man is by nature dirty and ugly: he is ill-made
and repulsive. There are men, and often rich ones, too, who, by a sort
of unobserved constitution, soil a new suit of clothes in twenty-four
hours. They were born disgusting. It is so disgraceful for a women to
be anything more than just simply a wife to this sort of Adolphe, that
a certain Caroline had long ago insisted upon the suppression of the
modern _thee_ and _thou_ and all other insignia of the wifely dignity.
Society had been for five or six years accustomed to this sort of
thing, and supposed Madame and Monsieur completely separated, and all
the more so as it had noticed the accession of a Ferdinand II.
One evening, in the presence of a dozen persons, this man said to his
wife: “Caroline, hand me the tongs, there’s a love.” It is nothing, and
yet everything. It was a domestic revelation.
Monsieur de Lustrac, the Universal Amadis, hurried to Madame de
Fischtaminel’s, narrated this little scene with all the spirit at his
command, and Madame de Fischtaminel put on an air something like
Celimene’s and said: “Poor creature, what an extremity she must be in!”