Women, and especially married women, stick ideas into their brain-pan
precisely as they stick pins into a pincushion, and the devil himself,
—do you mind?—could not get them out: they reserve to themselves the
exclusive right of sticking them in, pulling them out, and sticking
them in again.
Caroline is riding home one evening from Madame Foullepointe’s in a
violent state of jealousy and ambition.
Madame Foullepointe, the lioness—but this word requires an explanation.
It is a fashionable neologism, and gives expression to certain rather
meagre ideas relative to our present society: you must use it, if you
want to describe a woman who is all the rage. This lioness rides on
horseback every day, and Caroline has taken it into her head to learn
to ride also.
Observe that in this conjugal phase, Adolphe and Caroline are in the
season which we have denominated _A Household Revolution_, and that
they have had two or three _Last Quarrels_.
“Adolphe,” she says, “do you want to do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“Won’t you refuse?”
“If your request is reasonable, I am willing—”
“Ah, already—that’s a true husband’s word—if—”
“Come, what is it?”
“I want to learn to ride on horseback.”
“Now, is it a possible thing, Caroline?”
Caroline looks out of the window, and tries to wipe away a dry tear.
“Listen,” resumes Adolphe; “I cannot let you go alone to the
riding-school; and I cannot go with you while business gives me the
annoyance it does now. What’s the matter? I think I have given you
unanswerable reasons.”
Adolphe foresees the hiring of a stable, the purchase of a pony, the
introduction of a groom and of a servant’s horse into the
establishment—in short, all the nuisance of female lionization.
When a man gives a woman reasons instead of giving her what she wants
—well, few men have ventured to descend into that small abyss called
the heart, to test the power of the tempest that suddenly bursts forth
there.
“Reasons! If you want reasons, here they are!” exclaims Caroline. “I am
your wife: you don’t seem to care to please me any more. And as to the
expenses, you greatly overrate them, my dear.”
Women have as many inflections of voice to pronounce these words, _My
dear_, as the Italians have to say _Amico_. I have counted twenty-nine
which express only various degrees of hatred.
“Well, you’ll see,” resumes Caroline, “I shall be sick, and you will
pay the apothecary and the doctor as much as the price of a horse. I
shall be walled up here at home, and that’s all you want. I asked the
favor of you, though I was sure of a refusal: I only wanted to know how
you would go to work to give it.”
“But, Caroline—”
“Leave me alone at the riding-school!” she continues without listening.
“Is that a reason? Can’t I go with Madame de Fischtaminel? Madame de
Fischtaminel is learning to ride on horseback, and I don’t imagine that
Monsieur de Fischtaminel goes with her.”
“But, Caroline—”
“I am delighted with your solicitude. You think a great deal of me,
really. Monsieur de Fischtaminel has more confidence in his wife, than
you have in yours. He does not go with her, not he! Perhaps it’s on
account of this confidence that you don’t want me at the school, where
I might see your goings on with the fair Fischtaminel.”
Adolphe tries to hide his vexation at this torrent of words, which
begins when they are still half way from home, and has no sea to empty
into. When Caroline is in her room, she goes on in the same way.
“You see that if reasons could restore my health or prevent me from
desiring a kind of exercise pointed out by nature herself, I should not
be in want of reasons, and that I know all the reasons that there are,
and that I went over with the reasons before I spoke to you.”
This, ladies, may with the more truth be called the prologue to the
conjugal drama, from the fact that it is vigorously delivered,
embellished with a commentary of gestures, ornamented with glances and
all the other vignettes with which you usually illustrate such
masterpieces.
Caroline, when she has once planted in Adolphe’s heart the apprehension
of a scene of constantly reiterated demands, feels her hatred for his
control largely increase. Madame pouts, and she pouts so fiercely, that
Adolphe is forced to notice it, on pain of very disagreeable
consequences, for all is over, be sure of that, between two beings
married by the mayor, or even at Gretna Green, when one of them no
longer notices the sulkings of the other.
Axiom.—A sulk that has struck in is a deadly poison.
It was to prevent this suicide of love that our ingenious France
invented boudoirs. Women could not well have Virgil’s willows in the
economy of our modern dwellings. On the downfall of oratories, these
little cubbies become boudoirs.
This conjugal drama has three acts. The act of the prologue is already
played. Then comes the act of false coquetry: one of those in which
French women have the most success.
Adolphe is walking about the room, divesting himself of his apparel,
and the man thus engaged, divests himself of his strength as well as of
his clothing. To every man of forty, this axiom will appear profoundly
just:
Axiom.—The ideas of a man who has taken his boots and his suspenders
off, are no longer those of a man who is still sporting these two
tyrants of the mind.
Take notice that this is only an axiom in wedded life. In morals, it is
what we call a relative theorem.
Caroline watches, like a jockey on the race course, the moment when she
can distance her adversary. She makes her preparations to be
irresistibly fascinating to Adolphe.
Women possess a power of mimicking pudicity, a knowledge of secrets
which might be those of a frightened dove, a particular register for
singing, like Isabella, in the fourth act of _Robert le Diable: “Grace
pour toi! Grace pour moi!”_ which leave jockeys and horse trainers
whole miles behind. As usual, the _Diable_ succumbs. It is the eternal
history, the grand Christian mystery of the bruised serpent, of the
delivered woman becoming the great social force, as the Fourierists
say. It is especially in this that the difference between the Oriental
slave and the Occidental wife appears.
Upon the conjugal pillow, the second act ends by a number of
onomatopes, all of them favorable to peace. Adolphe, precisely like
children in the presence of a slice of bread and molasses, promises
everything that Caroline wants.
THIRD ACT. As the curtain rises, the stage represents a chamber in a
state of extreme disorder. Adolphe, in his dressing gown, tries to go
out furtively and without waking Caroline, who is sleeping profoundly,
and finally does go out.
Caroline, exceedingly happy, gets up, consults her mirror, and makes
inquiries about breakfast. An hour afterward, when she is ready she
learns that breakfast is served.
“Tell monsieur.”
“Madame, he is in the little parlor.”
“What a nice man he is,” she says, going up to Adolphe, and talking the
babyish, caressing language of the honey-moon.
“What for, pray?”
“Why, to let his little Liline ride the horsey.”
OBSERVATION. During the honey-moon, some few married couples,—very
young ones,—make use of languages, which, in ancient days, Aristotle
classified and defined. (See his Pedagogy.) Thus they are perpetually
using such terminations as _lala_, _nana_, _coachy-poachy_, just as
mothers and nurses use them to babies. This is one of the secret
reasons, discussed and recognized in big quartos by the Germans, which
determined the Cabires, the creators of the Greek mythology, to
represent Love as a child. There are other reasons very well known to
women, the principal of which is, that, in their opinion, love in men
is always _small_.
“Where did you get that idea, my sweet? You must have dreamed it!”
“What!”
Caroline stands stark still: she opens wide her eyes which are already
considerably widened by amazement. Being inwardly epileptic, she says
not a word: she merely gazes at Adolphe. Under the satanic fires of
their gaze, Adolphe turns half way round toward the dining-room; but he
asks himself whether it would not be well to let Caroline take one
lesson, and to tip the wink to the riding-master, to disgust her with
equestrianism by the harshness of his style of instruction.
There is nothing so terrible as an actress who reckons upon a success,
and who _fait four_.
In the language of the stage, to _faire four_ is to play to a
wretchedly thin house, or to obtain not the slightest applause. It is
taking great pains for nothing, in short a _signal failure_.
This petty trouble—it is very petty—is reproduced in a thousand ways in
married life, when the honey-moon is over, and when the wife has no
personal fortune.
In spite of the author’s repugnance to inserting anecdotes in an
exclusively aphoristic work, the tissue of which will bear nothing but
the most delicate and subtle observations,—from the nature of the
subject at least,—it seems to him necessary to illustrate this page by
an incident narrated by one of our first physicians. This repetition of
the subject involves a rule of conduct very much in use with the
doctors of Paris.
A certain husband was in our Adolphe’s situation. His Caroline, having
once made a signal failure, was determined to conquer, for Caroline
often does conquer! (See _The Physiology of Marriage_, Meditation XXVI,
Paragraph _Nerves_.) She had been lying about on the sofas for two
months, getting up at noon, taking no part in the amusements of the
city. She would not go to the theatre,—oh, the disgusting
atmosphere!—the lights, above all, the lights! Then the bustle, coming
out, going in, the music,—it might be fatal, it’s so terribly exciting!
She would not go on excursions to the country, oh, certainly it was her
desire to do so!—but she would like (desiderata) a carriage of her own,
horses of her own—her husband would not give her an equipage. And as to
going in hacks, in hired conveyances, the bare thought gave her a
rising at the stomach!
She would not have any cooking—the smell of the meats produced a sudden
nausea. She drank innumerable drugs that her maid never saw her take.
In short, she expended large amounts of time and money in attitudes,
privations, effects, pearl-white to give her the pallor of a corpse,
machinery, and the like, precisely as when the manager of a theatre
spreads rumors about a piece gotten up in a style of Oriental
magnificence, without regard to expense!
This couple had got so far as to believe that even a journey to the
springs, to Ems, to Hombourg, to Carlsbad, would hardly cure the
invalid: but madame would not budge, unless she could go in her own
carriage. Always that carriage!
Adolphe held out, and would not yield.
Caroline, who was a woman of great sagacity, admitted that her husband
was right.
“Adolphe is right,” she said to her friends, “it is I who am
unreasonable: he can not, he ought not, have a carriage yet: men know
better than we do the situation of their business.”
At times Adolphe was perfectly furious! Women have ways about them that
demand the justice of Tophet itself. Finally, during the third month,
he met one of his school friends, a lieutenant in the corps of
physicians, modest as all young doctors are: he had had his epaulettes
one day only, and could give the order to fire!
“For a young woman, a young doctor,” said our Adolphe to himself.
And he proposed to the future Bianchon to visit his wife and tell him
the truth about her condition.
“My dear, it is time that you should have a physician,” said Adolphe
that evening to his wife, “and here is the best for a pretty woman.”
The novice makes a conscientious examination, questions madame, feels
her pulse discreetly, inquires into the slightest symptoms, and, at the
end, while conversing, allows a smile, an expression, which, if not
ironical, are extremely incredulous, to play involuntarily upon his
lips, and his lips are quite in sympathy with his eyes. He prescribes
some insignificant remedy, and insists upon its importance, promising
to call again to observe its effect. In the ante-chamber, thinking
himself alone with his school-mate, he indulges in an inexpressible
shrug of the shoulders.
“There’s nothing the matter with your wife, my boy,” he says: “she is
trifling with both you and me.”
“Well, I thought so.”
“But if she continues the joke, she will make herself sick in earnest:
I am too sincerely your friend to enter into such a speculation, for I
am determined that there shall be an honest man beneath the physician,
in me—”
“My wife wants a carriage.”
As in the _Solo on the Hearse_, this Caroline listened at the door.
Even at the present day, the young doctor is obliged to clear his path
of the calumnies which this charming woman is continually throwing into
it: and for the sake of a quiet life, he has been obliged to confess
his little error—a young man’s error—and to mention his enemy by name,
in order to close her lips.