You get up grumbling, execrating the sacrament of marriage.  There is not the slightest merit in your heroism; it wasn’t you, but your wife, that got up.  Caroline gets you everything you want with provoking promptitude; she foresees everything, she gives you a muffler in winter, a blue-striped cambric shirt in summer, she treats you like a child; you are still asleep, she dresses you and has all the trouble.  She finally thrusts you out of doors.  Without her nothing would go straight!  She calls you back to give you a paper, a pocketbook, you had forgotten.  You don’t think of anything, she thinks of everything!

You return five hours afterwards to breakfast, between eleven and noon.  The chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the landing, talking with somebody’s valet:  she runs in on hearing or seeing you.  Your servant is laying the cloth in a most leisurely style, stopping to look out of the window or to lounge, and coming and going like a person who knows he has plenty of time.  You ask for your wife, supposing that she is up and dressed.

“Madame is still in bed,” says the maid.

You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep.  She had been awake all night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is quite hungry now.

You are the cause of all these disarrangements.  If breakfast is not ready, she says it’s because you went out.  If she is not dressed, and if everything is in disorder, it’s all your fault.  For everything which goes awry she has this answer:  “Well, you would get up so early!” “He would get up so early!” is the universal reason.  She makes you go to bed early, because you got up early.  She can do nothing all day, because you would get up so unusually early.

Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, “Without me, you would never get up!” To her friends she says, “My husband get up!  If it weren’t for me, he never would get up!”

To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, “A graceful compliment to you, madame!” This slightly indelicate comment puts an end to her boasts.

This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone in the bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no confidant but yourself:  and it often seems to you a question whether the inconveniences of the married state do not exceed its advantages.

SMALL VEXATIONS.

You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the bachelor to the heavy andante of the father of a family.

Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the polished shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving his glistening croup under the quadruple network of the reins and ribbons that you so skillfully manage with what grace and elegance the Champs Elysees can bear witness—­you drive a good solid Norman horse with a steady, family gait.