FIRST STYLE. Caroline adores Adolphe, she thinks him handsome, she
thinks him superb, especially in his National Guard uniform. She starts
when a sentinel presents arms to him, she considers him moulded like a
model, she regards him as a man of wit, everything he does is right,
nobody has better taste than he, in short, she is crazy about Adolphe.
It’s the old story of Cupid’s bandage. This is washed every ten years,
and newly embroidered by the altered manners of the period, but it has
been the same old bandage since the days of Greece.
Caroline is at a ball with one of her young friends. A man well known
for his bluntness, whose acquaintance she is to make later in life, but
whom she now sees for the first time, Monsieur Foullepointe, has
commenced a conversation with Caroline’s friend. According to the
custom of society, Caroline listens to this conversation without
mingling in it.
“Pray tell me, madame,” says Monsieur Foullepointe, “who is that queer
man who has been talking about the Court of Assizes before a gentleman
whose acquittal lately created such a sensation: he is all the while
blundering, like an ox in a bog, against everybody’s sore spot. A lady
burst into tears at hearing him tell of the death of a child, as she
lost her own two months ago.”
“Who do you mean?”
“Why, that fat man, dressed like a waiter in a cafe, frizzled like a
barber’s apprentice, there, he’s trying now to make himself agreeable
to Madame de Fischtaminel.”
“Hush,” whispers the lady quite alarmed, “it’s the husband of the
little woman next to me!”
“Ah, it’s your husband?” says Monsieur Foullepointe. “I am delighted,
madame, he’s a charming man, so vivacious, gay and witty. I am going to
make his acquaintance immediately.”
And Foullepointe executes his retreat, leaving a bitter suspicion in
Caroline’s soul, as to the question whether her husband is really as
handsome as she thinks him.
SECOND STYLE. Caroline, annoyed by the reputation of Madame Schinner,
who is credited with the possession of epistolary talents, and styled
the “Sevigne of the note”, tired of hearing about Madame de
Fischtaminel, who has ventured to write a little 32mo book on the
education of the young, in which she has boldly reprinted Fenelon,
without the style:—Caroline has been working for six months upon a tale
tenfold poorer than those of Berquin, nauseatingly moral, and
flamboyant in style.
After numerous intrigues such as women are skillful in managing in the
interest of their vanity, and the tenacity and perfection of which
would lead you to believe that they have a third sex in their head,
this tale, entitled “The Lotus,” appears in three installments in a
leading daily paper. It is signed Samuel Crux.
When Adolphe takes up the paper at breakfast, Caroline’s heart beats up
in her very throat: she blushes, turns pale, looks away and stares at
the ceiling. When Adolphe’s eyes settle upon the feuilleton, she can
bear it no longer: she gets up, goes out, comes back, having
replenished her stock of audacity, no one knows where.
“Is there a feuilleton this morning?” she asks with an air that she
thinks indifferent, but which would disturb a husband still jealous of
his wife.
“Yes, one by a beginner, Samuel Crux. The name is a disguise, clearly:
the tale is insignificant enough to drive an insect to despair, if he
could read: and vulgar, too: the style is muddy, but then it’s—”
Caroline breathes again. “It’s—” she suggests.
“It’s incomprehensible,” resumes Adolphe. “Somebody must have paid
Chodoreille five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it’s the
production of a blue-stocking in high society who has promised to
invite Madame Chodoreille to her house; or perhaps it’s the work of a
woman in whom the editor is personally interested. Such a piece of
stupidity cannot be explained any other way. Imagine, Caroline, that
it’s all about a little flower picked on the edge of a wood in a
sentimental walk, which a gentleman of the Werther school has sworn to
keep, which he has had framed, and which the lady claims again eleven
years after (the poor man has had time to change his lodgings three
times). It’s quite new, about as old as Sterne or Gessner. What makes
me think it’s a woman, is that the first literary idea of the whole sex
is to take vengeance on some one.”
Adolphe might go on pulling “The Lotus” to pieces; Caroline’s ears are
full of the tinkling of bells. She is like the woman who threw herself
over the Pont des Arts, and tried to find her way ten feet below the
level of the Seine.
ANOTHER STYLE. Caroline, in her paroxysms of jealousy, has discovered a
hiding place used by Adolphe, who, as he can’t trust his wife, and as
he knows she opens his letters and rummages in his drawers, has
endeavored to save his correspondence with Hector from the hooked
fingers of the conjugal police.
Hector is an old schoolmate, who has married in the Loire Inferieure.
Adolphe lifts up the cloth of his writing desk, a cloth the border of
which has been embroidered by Caroline, the ground being blue, black or
red velvet,—the color, as you see, is perfectly immaterial,—and he
slips his unfinished letters to Madame de Fischtaminel, to his friend
Hector, between the table and the cloth.
The thickness of a sheet of paper is almost nothing, velvet is a downy,
discreet material, but, no matter, these precautions are in vain. The
male devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet will furnish
them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her side, the demon
who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with his ironic finger
points out the hiding place of keys—the secret of secrets.
Caroline has noticed the thickness of a letter sheet between this
velvet and this table: she hits upon a letter to Hector instead of
hitting upon one to Madame de Fischtaminel, who has gone to Plombieres
Springs, and reads the following:
“My dear Hector:
“I pity you, but you have acted wisely in entrusting me with a
knowledge of the difficulties in which you have voluntarily involved
yourself. You never would see the difference between the country woman
and the woman of Paris. In the country, my dear boy, you are always
face to face with your wife, and, owing to the ennui which impels you,
you rush headforemost into the enjoyment of your bliss. This is a great
error: happiness is an abyss, and when you have once reached the
bottom, you never get back again, in wedlock.
“I will show you why. Let me take, for your wife’s sake, the shortest
path—the parable.
“I remember having made a journey from Paris to Ville-Parisis, in that
vehicle called a ’bus: distance, twenty miles: ’bus, lumbering: horse,
lame. Nothing amuses me more than to draw from people, by the aid of
that gimlet called the interrogation, and to obtain, by means of an
attentive air, the sum of information, anecdotes and learning that
everybody is anxious to part with: and all men have such a sum, the
peasant as well as the banker, the corporal as well as the marshal of
France.
“I have often noticed how ready these casks, overflowing with wit, are
to open their sluices while being transported by diligence or ’bus, or
by any vehicle drawn by horses, for nobody talks in a railway car.
“At the rate of our exit from Paris, the journey would take full seven
hours: so I got an old corporal to talk, for my diversion. He could
neither read nor write: he was entirely illiterate. Yet the journey
seemed short. The corporal had been through all the campaigns, he told
me of things perfectly unheard of, that historians never trouble
themselves about.
“Ah! Hector, how superior is practice to theory! Among other things,
and in reply to a question relative to the infantry, whose courage is
much more tried by marching than by fighting, he said this, which I
give you free from circumlocution:
“‘Sir, when Parisians were brought to our 45th, which Napoleon called
The Terrible (I am speaking of the early days of the Empire, when the
infantry had legs of steel, and when they needed them), I had a way of
telling beforehand which of them would remain in the 45th. They marched
without hurrying, they did their little six leagues a day, neither more
nor less, and they pitched camp in condition to begin again on the
morrow. The plucky fellows who did ten leagues and wanted to run to the
victory, stopped half way at the hospital.’
“The worthy corporal was talking of marriage while he thought he was
talking of war, and you have stopped half way, Hector, at the hospital.
“Remember the sympathetic condolence of Madame de Sevigne counting out
three hundred thousand francs to Monsieur de Grignan, to induce him to
marry one of the prettiest girls in France! ‘Why,’ said she to herself,
‘he will have to marry her every day, as long as she lives! Decidedly,
I don’t think three hundred francs too much.’ Is it not enough to make
the bravest tremble?
“My dear fellow, conjugal happiness is founded, like that of nations,
upon ignorance. It is a felicity full of negative conditions.
“If I am happy with my little Caroline, it is due to the strictest
observance of that salutary principle so strongly insisted upon in the
_Physiology of Marriage_. I have resolved to lead my wife through paths
beaten in the snow, until the happy day when infidelity will be
difficult.
“In the situation in which you have placed yourself, and which
resembles that of Duprez, who, on his first appearance at Paris, went
to singing with all the voice his lungs would yield, instead of
imitating Nourrit, who gave the audience just enough to enchant them,
the following, I think, is your proper course to—”
The letter broke off here: Caroline returned it to its place, at the
same time wondering how she would make her dear Adolphe expiate his
obedience to the execrable precepts of the _Physiology of Marriage_.